Salvation Is Just Words

Yemen

2008-08-03T15:13:00.000-07:00

The internet really is really great.

Did you know that there are, right now, in Yemen, numerous seven-story buildings clustered tightly together, like in Manhattan dude, that are made out of mud and that have been standing for 500 years?

Neither did I, but now I do, thanks to the internet and some idle moments on an early August Sunday afternoon, my belly swollen with pudding.

Hat tip should go to Whimsley.

Going After McCain

2008-08-01T15:47:00.001-07:00

A lot of people on the left want Barack Obama to go after John McCain in the spirit of Josh Marshall's "Bitchslap Theory of American Politics."

I'm among them -- I wish he'd go after him in a substantive way, but aggressively. McCain is a terrible candidate and would be a terrible president and there's no reason Obama or his surrogates shouldn't point this out.

I was wondering why I feel this way, however. I think the answers is that there are SO MANY OPENINGS AT WHICH TO GO AFTER MCCAIN.

The dude just leaves himself open to this stuff.

Scary

2008-08-01T07:13:00.000-07:00

So the governator is slashing payroll. This is a foretaste of the cuts in actual funding he's eager to make.

My impression is that we're all sort of living our lives in California, rolling with the punches, distantly aware of a budget crisis, not sure what it all means, but the effects of actions like these are going to start pressing in on us in the near term, especially if the governor gets his way.

I don't think very many people understand how sharply they're going to press, how badly our education system is going to suffer, how badly our infrastructure will suffer, how much the poor will suffer, how much the ill will suffer, how much law enforcement will suffer.

And I don't blame the governor -- I expect he would raise taxes if he could; he's hinted at it and it makes sense -- but the Republican party in our state, like a bunch of automatons, mindlessly addicted to a dead idea, are holding the budget process and the administration of the state hostage.

Given those circumstances, what the governor is doing is something like honorable. It seems to me that we are on the path to rehabilitating the publics understanding of taxes. There's this meme out there that taxes go to nothing but waste. People seem to really believe that no good can come of raising taxes. At the very least that's an talking point the right uses fairly often.

"Do you think the government knows how to spend this money better than the taxpayer?"

But until we start experiencing firsthand the real meaning of tax cuts and revenue shortfalls, we won't understand that taxes serve a legitimate and pragmatic purpose.

You want fire stations? You pay taxes. There's just no way to get around this.

If we can get through these tough times with the result being a mandate to sensibly fund the government, we'll have gone a long way toward discrediting the supply siders and the reactionary libertarians for a good long time.

And that's the optimistic take on a situation that could take a turn for the tragic.

Urgh.

2008-07-30T16:48:00.001-07:00

I find this -- a poll showing that the public prefers John McCain to Obama on foreign policy completely frustrating. Do people not recognize what an absolute disaster it would be in terms of foreign policy if John McCain were elected?

If you take a few moments to reflect on the stuff he's said during the campaign, the real and appreciable lack of knowledge he's demonstrated about the middle east, the advisors on his team -- Norman Podhoretz, Randy Scheunemon -- you've basically got an administration for whom war with Iran is a real priority and a Commander in Chief without the competence to manage the consequences of such an obscenely stupid action.

Obama is a young candidate, and, in the most literal sense, inexperienced in executive management of foreign policy, but he is at least, at least, as expert in foreign policy as we should expect a president to be. John McCain has not demonstrated that he's even close to meeting that qualification.

The Faces Behind the Voices

2008-07-26T13:05:00.000-07:00

A Mother Jones photo essay on phone sex operators. I wish the written statements were less brief, but still -- hearing what phone sex operators have to say about their work, and seeing the faces behind the voices is really interesting. There is of course, the always striking moment of seeing the reality behind an object of fantasy -- I'm reminded of the sad episode in Robert Altman's Short Cuts (based on the work of Raymond Carver) -- but, in particular, I'm impressed with how thoughtful these folks are, how philosophical, about their work.

Candor

2008-07-26T12:56:00.000-07:00

I can't help it. I just fucking like Barack. Sometimes he gets policy wrong for the wrong reasons -- Cass Sunstein, for instance, needs to go -- but, I guess, I believe in him. I believe that he wants to do good for the country just as much as he wants to be president.

This exchange with David Cameron, which was picked up by a mic Obama didn't realize was on, reinforces that for me in an indirect way -- there's something very disarming about a super charismatic presidential candidate engaging in some earnest small talk when he doesn't know the press is listening.

What the Heck World Do I Inhabit?

2008-07-26T11:28:00.001-07:00

So -- I was at the bookstore today and I'd picked out a novel to buy and read and I started looking at the non-fiction. I was looking for The Dark Side, by Jane Meyer, which is a book that tells the story of how the U.S. state came to torture and kill any number of men classified as detainees, suspects, enemy combatants. I didn't find it. But I did come across a book whose title I don't remember at the moment. The book purported to tell the story of a conspiracy to elect Ted Kennedy president. There's a distinct frisson that comes with the idea. Ted Kennedy has been a senator for decades, he last ran for the democratic nomination for president in, I think, 1980, hasn't been talked of as a potential candidate in ages, not even a potential VP, and he was recently diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor.

His story, in other words, has mostly been told. It's not as if his life involved significant historical events which have gone unexplained. He was elected and he legislated. That's pretty much it. I suppose this doesn't make it impossible that there was a conspiracy to make him president, but his life has been so straight forward that it seems to me impossible for such a conspiracy to actually be interesting. It's a pretty bland conspiracy, in other words, that would result in events so inconspicuous that they have not even registered on the public imagination.

Most popular conspiracy theories have been imagined in order to explain events that actually happened. People like to explain the lunary landing as a conspiracy to delude the public. People like to explain John F. Kennedy's assassination as any number of things -- a coworker just yesterday told me it was the mob getting back at him for bucking their directives after they gave him the election in Chicago.

Ted Kennedy was never finagled into the office of the presidency through deceit and political maneuvering. So I just can't understand what would motivate the author of this book to write it.

I flipped through a few pages, trying to get a taste for the style of the book. Was it sober? Was it hysterical?

It wasn't hysterical -- the prose was intelligent and smooth. There weren't any explanation points, but it wasn't quite sober.

I read a sentence along the lines of the following: "With Watergate unfolding, the Kennedy's smelled blood in the water."

That's a little nuts. Whenever a narrative starts representing a group of people's state of mind in figurative terms, that narrative loses a great deal of my confidence. The sentence requires you to accept that the Kennedy family was as focused on dethroning Richard Nixon as a shark is focused on its prey. Now -- maybe the preceding parts of the book were filled with mountains of evidence that they were sending letters to one another detailing how they were going to get Nixon impeached -- but whether they were or not, lots of people wanted to impeach Nixon, once the facts about Watergate came out. I'm sure any number of Kennedies wanted Nixon to stop being president. Not only were they politically opposed to him, he broke the law, he cheated, he was a vicious political campaigner. To contend that their desire to content with Nixon politically and gain power for themselves is some sort of grave transgression doesn't make a lot of sense.

So the book was silly. I glanced at the back cover to learn about the author. He looked sober, kind of like a professor from the 1950s. He had a fair number of impressive sounding credentials in his bio, credentials that didn't seem to jib with the tone of the book.

I flipped through a few more pages. There was some commentary about John Dean and some other member of the Nixon administration. I don't remember the exact language, but the author's affection for these guys was obvious.

The narrative and its assumptions about the rightness and wrongness of the people and the events of that time period were so seamless that they didn't even admit the possibility of contradiction.

"What's that, you say?" the author might say if you were to suggest that the Kennedy's were not so much a dark and sinister cabal as your standard powerful political family. "I've never heard of such a thing. Sounds zany if you ask me."

I asked myself how a person could have such a different view of things from me and from what I understand as the historical record. I don't know the answer but the fact that it's so disturbs me for a number of reasons. One is that this guy represents some percentage of the population that is opposed to progress and which is very hard to talk to.

The other is that the mindset of this book is so deluded and so unconsciously confident of its assumptions that it brings into question the possibility of truthful understanding itself. I don't mean the sort of black and white truth and certainty that everyone knows is a pipe dream but the kind of established and qualified representations of history and facts based on evidence that you might share with a really good journalist, or professor of history, or a scientist.

I mean if this dude can right a whole book that demonstrates he's cleary living in lala land and he doesn 't have clue one that he's not living in factville, what the heck world do I inhabit?

Michael Berube is Feeling the World's Pain Too

2008-07-25T12:57:00.000-07:00

EARTH, July 25, 2008 -- The entire world drafted an open letter to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) today, asking him to drop out of the U.S. presidential race and concede the presidency to Senator Barack Obama (D-Illinois).

Those Poor Europeans

2008-07-25T11:30:00.001-07:00

Imagine how disappointed they'll be if Barack doesn't win! They just had this whole wonderful taste of what it would be like to have him being president -- and they loved it, rightly so. Their minds must have been dancing with visions of a mature, cooperative, communicative, and productive relationship with an extremely powerful and influential nation. My god, they must be thinking, we might actually get something done. We might actually meaningfully improve the state of the world.

I have the same hopes myself, over on this side of the pond.

Do you -- does anyone -- think that such things would be possible with a McCain presidency?

Great Speech, Great Post

2008-07-24T22:00:00.000-07:00

I've always understood the technical definition of dramatic irony -- ie when an audience knows something the characters, in whatever narrative, do not -- but I've never grokked it so well as I do now, after reading Isn't It Ironic by publius from Obsidian Wings.

The post is worth reading for the explication of dramatic irony on it's own, but it also contains some really sharp insight into Obama's nearly transcendent appeal as an orator.

Counting a Whole Lot of Chickens

2008-07-24T14:29:00.000-07:00

I keep having to mentally correct the unconscious assumption that next January Barack Obama will be sworn in as president. I notice myself thinking things, like, "When Obama's in office..."

I feel like it's a good sign. But who knows?

Paul Krugman's feeling it too, apparently.

Why do we refer to ourselves as Americans?

2008-07-24T09:02:00.000-07:00

So -- I understand the objections to the practice of referring to U.S. citizens as Americans and the United States as America. I also feel like it's no big deal, since it's just an established practice and more of a crime of verbal inspecificity than pure chauvinism.

One significantly mitigating factor in this usage, though, which doesn't receive that much attention, is that there isn't an easy way to refer to the state of being a U.S. citizen. What do you use in place of American in the sentence, "He's American"?

Actually -- it occurs to me extemporaneously that there are probably folks out there promoting alternatives. Usian or something. (Although in that, you have the immediate sense that the phrasing contains the assumption that everyone else is Themian, which seems at least as problematic as the assumption that the U.S. = the American continent.)

Maybe I'll have to look into what's out there. I bet there are some good ideas -- and some really ridiculous ones.

More on Josh

2008-07-24T08:57:00.000-07:00

You know -- any number of players have gone from the NBA to Europe, American born and foreign born alike. I'm wondering what it is that sets Josh Childress apart from those others. I think the thing with him is that his decision utterly falsifies the assumption that all things being equal, and perhaps even if he'd get paid less in the NBA, an American-born player would prefer to stay here.

Globalization Realization

2008-07-23T10:50:00.000-07:00

So, after years in which the NBA siphoned off the best european players, the first high profile, high quality NBA player has chosen to head east and play in Greece.

There's some ridiculous part of me that was sort of distressed by this -- not sure exactly why -- but after a small amount of thought, it's actually kind of exciting to think of where this trend is headed: a network of basketball leagues with players, nations, and teams overlapping the way they do in soccer.

In addition to the raw variety this will produce, the thing that makes it exciting is the unpredictability we'll start to see in the basketball tournaments. In the NBA, you kind of know which teams are best, or at least which four, with some measure of consistency. When teams are playing in separate leagues, you won't know with the same level of certainty who the top teams are. Teams will come from nowhere and surprise everyone.

Also -- the sheer number of teams and players competing will make victories that much more meaningful. Maybe we're on our way to a World Cup of basketball.

Majestic

2008-07-22T21:12:00.001-07:00

This is from a film called Sizzle about global warming.

We're . . . Undeveloping?

2008-07-21T22:53:00.000-07:00

US slips in development indicies.

Are we cooked? Can Barack turn us around? Only time will tell.

Fucking Luxembourg. Fucking Norway.

The piece is full of stunners like:

"Some Americans are living anywhere from 30 to 50 years behind others when it comes to issues we all care about: health, education and standard of living.

"For example, the state human development index shows that people in last-ranked Mississippi are living 30 years behind those in first-ranked Connecticut."

Conservative probably think this is awesome. Those fuckers. They owe us liberals big time. They've been riding on capital we built up over decades.

I like science

2008-07-21T21:08:00.000-07:00

This is funny.

Is This What False Consciousness Means?

2008-07-21T12:25:00.000-07:00

A dubious concept, false consciousness, in my opinion, or at least much abused, but after reading this, from Juan Cole, in which he states the following:

Despite all the talk about Iraq being "calm," I'd like to point out that the month just before the last visit Barack Obama made to Iraq (he went in January, 2006), there were 537 civilian and ISF Iraqi casualties. In June of this year, 2008, there were 554 according to AP. These are official statistics gathered passively that probably only capture about 10 percent of the true toll.

I find myself wondering if I shouldn't assume the phenomenon isn't more prevalent than I generally imaging. Here's why:

I keep myself relatively informed about politics and the state of the world, but a lot of the time I'm just tracking the narrative. I recognize that what I'm reading for reasons both cultural and practical is just a small sliver of what's actually happening. (This is so obvious, given the scale of the universe, when you say it explicitly, but we seem in our doings to assume something different.) So -- if you take my Iraq post from yesterday as a small sample of how a relatively well informed person saw things yesterday and then you read that Juan Cole quote just above, it's hard not to be struck anew by the size of the gap between what we represent as the state of things and the state of things.

I think it makes the point I was making yesterday about the unacknowledged cost of the war even more pressing.

Calculated Risk is a National Treasure

2008-07-20T22:34:00.000-07:00

This post, Dueling Discourses of Debt, by Tanta at Calculated Risk should be presented whenever some idiot barks about blogging being some kind of lesser medium.

I never thought I'd enjoy reading so much concentrated argument, observation, and discussion on the subject of finance and credit, but I do. In fact, it occurs to me that my skepticism -- the idea that the deep lore of finance and credit are dry as dust, insignificant in relation to the real stuff of life, sex, love, art, politics, etc -- is misplaced. Maybe the sense I have that I'm understanding something important about the society I live in when I read a blog that mostly talks about real estate and the ways in which people make money off of money is not at all unwaranted.

Policy, Politics, Personality, and Good Data

2008-07-19T13:26:00.000-07:00

I was as upset as anyone -- well actually maybe not quite -- about his FISA reversal, but this reminded me of why I like Barack Obama and why I think he'll be a terrific president.

After the FISA thing, I was trying to figure out why one still has a good feeling about Obama, despite some of his irrationally centrist positions. What do we need from a president besides good policy? The answer, I think, has to do with how he thinks and how he influences our sense of ourselves as Americans. Obama in this case is showing a preference for good data. It's a small thing, I suppose, but better data means better government and better government means more confidence in government and more confidence in government means more opportunity for implementing good initiatives.

PSD

2008-07-18T22:51:00.001-07:00

Lots of democrats/liberals were in favor of the Iraq war when it started -- Howard Dean ran for the democratic primary as the antiwar candidate and people responded to him as if his ideas about the war were unserious, fringey, even perverse.

But now it's five years later and we find ourselves persuaded by all the IEDs and the sectarian violence that the war was a mistake. More recently its been quieter and you can feel the national media starting to wonder whether it should shift back to "pro-war".

What this says to me is that the only one which journalists (or perhaps I should say editors and television news producers and execs) seem comfortable using as a basis for judging the validity of the war seems to be the frequency of explosions and massacres. If stuff is getting blown up a lot and there is documentary evidence of slaughter, we tell ourselves, we can safely assert that it's going badly. If not, we owe the architects of this war some respect.

This is crazy. Even if the suicide bombings, the sectarian violence, and the IEDs never again resurfaced -- and they will, all of them, before and after we are gone -- the story of this war has already inflicted itself on the people of Iraq and the people of the United States. We will not escape that history.

The knowledge of those who died -- whether gained through abstraction or experience -- the wounded citizens, the dead soldiers, the destroyed infrastructure, the emotional trauma that the violence and the prospect of violence will have inflicted on the citizens of that country and ours -- these phenomena affect everyone and they affect everyone lastingly and acutely.

We have lost 4000 soldiers by violence in Iraq. Many more have been physically wounded. Some large percentage of all the soldiers will experience post traumatic stress disorder.

That's a clinical name for a collection of experiences and memories that to my mind to some extent defines the meaning of this catastrophe. It was stressful. It was traumatic. And the effects will linger -- in ways we are completely unaware of -- long after the last shot has been fired. We will never escape the history of this war.

Navel Gazing

2008-07-18T17:51:00.000-07:00

Matthew Yglesias referenced this blog post while asking the question, "Is it possible that the writing scene in New York could possibly be as terrible as it sounds?"

I read the post. It's about a girl, an aspiring writer, who went to a party with literary types and found the people she met there sort of creepy and disappointing. She described the party a little bit. There were people in a house drinking, having stupid conversations, which isn't really any different from a lot of parties.

Anyway, she was sad. She thought they were all jerks. I was like yup, literature, novels, just one more damn thing. You can't be religious about it, but you can enjoy it's textures, the same way you can enjoy the textures of anything else.

.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..

2008-04-03T21:41:00.000-07:00

The canvas resists because it resists this kind of physics. But you hit it enough, blunt repetition, it gets the message, it breaks.

Um -- speech -- what the?

2008-03-18T18:20:00.000-07:00

Okay -- that was a really, really good speech.

People walk around in need of something, some sort of articulation of emotions they feel, emotions which don't find expression in the discourse that rules America's conversation about itself.

They want -- and they say they want -- something smarter and better than what's available. Something that isn't cheap. Something that isn't just a sound bite.

Obama gave them that today.

And what amazes me, what bludgeons my sense of hope into a feeling of bewilderment, is that people don't seem to see it. While on the one hand, pundits, reporters beg for something authentic, they can't see it when it's right in front of them. The political coverage, to me, seems akin to the tabloid coverage of actresses with eating disorders. They do not see that the ugliness they want to judge and condemn is something they create.

It's heartbreaking.

Working the Refs is Not a Strategy

2008-03-01T09:01:00.000-08:00

Almost all of my misgivings about Hillary's Clinton's candidacy have stemmed not from my sense of who she is but from where she seems to me to come from, by which I mean the elite political/media culture in DC. I don't actually know the history of her staff, but they seem extremely over-invested in influencing the media narrative. I expect this is the product of a too professional and insular consulting class. Perhaps they got the idea form Karl Rove, but their attempts to do so have been too clever by half.

The significant example of this is their lie low strategy (which still has the potential to work, I think, should the delegate waters get murky enough), where instead of contesting primaries, they attempt to get the media to treat those primaries as insignificant.

And now, laughably, they're trying to set Obama's bar for success in Texas and Ohio ridiculously high .

Conversely, they're setting the bar for their own campaign incredibly low -- anything less than total, inarguable defeat is a momentum-swinging triumph. I understand that this is something they have to do, I guess, but it's sort of a sad statement.

I'm not saying that victory is inevitable for Obama in Texas and Ohio. It's just that it would be a his defeat in Texas that would spawn the Hillary's Not Finished Yet headlines, not these lame memos Mark Penn or whoever is sending around. The fact that her campaign is so invested in influencing the media narrative at the expense of actual campaigning is totally lame.

Language Log has to be one of my favorite blogs

2008-02-27T14:14:00.001-08:00

Language Log has long been among my favorite blogs. The linguists who contribute to it are radical dudes with an extremely healthy attitude towards prescriptivism -- they despise it.

I do too. I think "correct" grammar is good and fine and I appreciate a graceful sentence, but I have encountered few people who are demonstrative about their horror at grammatical and linguistic "error" and who don't, at the same time, give me the sense that their interest in that subject is way of asserting their superiority to others, especially when the sentiment is couched in decline-of-civilization terms.

I would guess, furthermore, that for most of us, the sense of inherent linguistic conventions we've internalized is relatively stable once we reach adulthood. If that's correct, it's possible to think of an assertion of grammatical superiority as an assertion of superior education, which is one step away from an assertion of superiority based on class. I'm not saying that this is always the case, just that it behooves us to take the complexity of the issue into account before crapping on about what morons people are who can't distinguish between a restrictive and non-restrictive clauses.

The impossibility of political satisfaction

2008-02-25T15:54:00.001-08:00

It occurs to me that one of the reasons no leader will ever provide the level of political inspiration which seems to, at times, serve as the unspoken standard of a politician who deserves our approval is that the public is to diverse for its instincts and interests to be satisfied by any one vision.

Ideology, war, people

2008-02-10T23:12:00.000-08:00

Here's something which is probably obvious but which also struck me with new force as I stepped, completely naked, out of the shower this evening:

Disagreement over ideology is displaced tribalism. The self-image of "civilized" parts of the world has evolved to the point where it is unacceptable to seek conflict with other cultures based solely on naked difference. As a result, we, s0me of us, seek to identify profound moral flaws in the political systems of other cultures in order to justify our desire to attack/fear them.

In a weird way, I can see how this makes me a believer in realpolitik.

More doubts

2008-02-03T17:03:00.000-08:00

So, via the Reality-Based Community, I saw a musicalized version of Barack's stump speech. And while I am loathe to disparage its message, I worried that what I was watching was not a plea for change, but a commercial for a plea for change.

I still think I'm going to vote for Obama, but I like his healthcare plan less than ever. (This post, and particularly the comments, on Crooked Timber has the best analysis I've seen -- although there's also Krugman, reporting on a study that illustrates the difference between plans with and without mandates based on various metrics.

Obama's domestic policy is so much less progressive than his rhetoric, which is truly inspiring. That worries me. The sorts of things that he makes us think he's about -- unity, fairness, reconciliation, equality -- are incredibly important. It would be a shame if, collectively, we're willing to be satisfied by a telling ourselves a story about progress when the facts on the ground show that we're not doing as much for our fellow citizens as we could and should be doing.

Man oh man

2008-02-01T17:34:00.000-08:00

I really like Barack Obama's style and I think he has the charisma and intelligence to be a good leader for the country.

But I have real doubts about the use to which he'd put that leadership capability. I know a lot of people see the mandate-no-mandate conversation as quibbling over details, but it really bothers me that Barack is pushing this point so hard when there's no really good argument for it.

People say that Krugman is overreacting to this particular issue, but what does it say about a candidate that his campaign is so fixated on this issue when there's no good argument for it. Sure, you might believe that no mandate is better than a mandate, but Barack is using this particular difference between his plan and Hillary's as a point of attack, when as far as I've seen the main argument for excluding a mandate from Barack's plan is that mandates are scary. This is understandable, but a mandate seems like good policy, and, given Barack's lauded communication skills, he should be able to explain, to convince folks, that the mandated insurance will also be subsidized and, therefore, made affordable -- so the government is not going to break anyone's bank.

Instead, and in light of the New Harry and Loise, it looks very much he's using it to score political points against Hillary.

I mean what the heck is the point of winning if the policy you win a mandate for is watered down? Shouldn't enacting good policy be the objective? And if policy is not the objective, what is?

In some ways, I can construe/rationalize this as a good thing. The ability and willingness to exploit an issue of relative inconsequence -- he still has a healthcare plan after all, thanks to John Edwards -- to wound his opponents could help him beat John McCain and then get legislation passed. And I'm still planning to vote for him in the primary. And I believe that his rhetorical approach, it's mellowness, is important and might be more effective in bringing around the other side. (Contra Krugman, I believe you can get good results by recapitulating the other sides points to show you've been listening.) But I'm sure as hell not going to buy the idea that Barack Obama truly represents a new kind of politics.

(Lastly -- I expect that this thing is going to backfire on him. And that makes me worry about his ability to read the landscape and know what's going to play well, especially given all the momentum he has right now.)

Burma, Way After the Fact

2008-01-30T12:22:00.000-08:00

I've been reading the New York Review of Books article on the Human Rights Watch report about the crimes committed by the Burmese government against Burmese citizens.

I knew at the time that something extremely bad was happening in Burma. I knew that there were protests and that the military government was repressing them violently, but I didn't know the details.

(Much of what happens in the world I experience like this, as a vague set of images and curt, inaccurate narratives.)

Now that I know the details I am angry and astounded. It's sort of a strange way to react in that the world is full of badness which varies in degree but derives from the same essence, whereby the will and desire of the population is ignored and dissent is punished, in some cases with violence.

But whenever you consider any of these cases, as I've done with the incidents in Burma, and you bracket out the fact that they're not novel, it arouses a tremendous amount of astonishment.

I mean -- people, normal fucking people, gathered in the streets to protest some policy changes. And the government decided to get them to stop by shooting them. They shot students, they shot priests. Paramilitaries ran people over in the street.

How is that human beings arrive at the conclusion that these sorts of actions are a good idea? I realize that's a simplification. There are reasons that people do these things; in fact I think they're obvious. It's just that none of them are any good. There just isn't a case to be made that the benefit of shooting protesters in this sort of situation is worth the cost. (I realize that it's obviously wrong, I'm just trying to point out how there's no way to keep the justifications that government offered for their actions afloat -- the gov't could only offer a cost/benefit justification, since a moral justifications is pretty much a non-starter.)

But my point is that almost nothing, personally or collectively, is worth doing this sort of horrible shit to people -- using machines like guns to tear their bodies apart, to extinguish living beings. That's an obvious statement, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be repeated. In fact, given that it's so easy to be silent about something which is apparent to everyone, it's obviousness might even be a reason to be vigilant about repeating it.

Moral Hazard? Is that the word?

2008-01-30T10:47:00.000-08:00

So -- the internet, to me, has largely been an indirect education in economics. There are a lot of economic bloggers, delong, dean baker, paul krugman, greg mankiw, tyler cowen, calculated risk out there, and political blogs, and even pop culture blogs, are sodden with economic concepts and figures.

One of the things I've learned about is how economists view recessions. There is a certain hard-line attitude that conservative (and some liberal) economists take toward recessions. In this attitude, the recession is viewed as a sort of cleansing -- people got too excited, investment went where it shouldn't have, and those who invested poorly must reap the consequences of their stupidity. It's a typical republican/conservative belief.

But the counter argument, which I find convincing, is that the suffering that results from recession is neither necessary nor truly instructional. Brad Delong gives a really good treatment of why this is the case, but I'm too lazy to look it up.

One way to think about the argument and counter argument about recessions is through the lens of the differing responses to the depression made by the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations.

Hoover said the government couldn't do anything and the market just had to sort itself out. Roosevelt felt otherwise.

My own feeling is that this idea that the people who suffer in recessions deserve to suffer is entirely repellent.

But . . . there is something about the disclosure, in extremely stark terms, by various investment companies, Merryl Lynch, UBC, that French company blaming half its losses on a rogue trader, of tremendous losses satisfying. I don't find it satisfying out of schaedenfreude. I find it satisfying because public language about the economy during a bubble is so profoundly opaque and evasive. I consider myself reasonably well informed and reasonably cynical, but when people, even flaks, even morons, argue points in public vigorously, they muddy the waters such that maintaining clarity about the state of the world is difficult. That's my experience anyway.

So when you have these almost confessional reports of huge losses, there's something of the triumph of reality over spin in that.

Even though this by no means calls for us not to act in the face of recession, I think it's good for our souls to have the ugly truth so nakedly thrust into the public sphere.

What's going on with Hillary?

2008-01-25T17:43:00.000-08:00

Just to add my own perspective on the turn the democratic primary has lately taken.

I'm disturbed by it. I was never as engaged in a primary as I am in this one, so I don't have a sense of how it compares, but Bill Clinton's attacks on Obama, vis a vis Las Vegas, and Hillary Clinton's dissimulation about what Barack Obama said about Reagan, and, finally, this strange move over delegates in Michigan and Florida, I find deeply disturbing. Maybe it's normal, but I hate it. It seems almost as if the Clinton's being smart people have seen what Karl Rove/Swift Boat Veterans for truth did, what the republican party did in Florida in 2000 and said to themselves, we understand that . . . and we can do it too.

I maybe didn't even realize it until I started writing here, but, in truth, I find it deeply demoralizing. I'm in tune with Clinton's platform, and I will vote for her against which ever Republican wins their nomination, but one of the most important aspects of replacing George W. Bush with a democrat has to be that it would represent a collective refutation of his politics above all else approach to governance. If the democratic nominee wins the general election with the same tactics Hillary is using in the democratic primary, we will have a better president and generally more just policies, but we won't have extracted ourselves from this postmodern, cable-tv-addled mindset that the present administration has pressed onto the national consciousness.

I don't think Barack Obama is any kind of transcendent figure and I have serious doubts arising from his occasional incoherence, but to the extent that he seems to me now to be more reasonablethan the Clintons, I'm leaning more strongly toward him than I have toward any of the other candidates so far in this race.

I'm actually deeply curious about the degree to which the present direction of the Clinton campaign will penetrate the non-internet-grounded political junkie segment of voting democrats. I wonder how other people are feeling.

My drop in the ocean

2008-01-24T08:19:00.000-08:00

Dear Senator Reid,

I'm writing to express the depth of my dissappointment in your willingness to move forward with legislation that offers retroactive immunity to telecom companies that helped the Bush administration spy on citizens.

I understand that compromise is an important part of getting things done in politics, but this sacrifices too much. Why do we have laws if the president's word can immunize citizens and corporations who commit crimes?

Secondly, the Democratic majority has failed to produce the results that voters expected following the 2006 elections. Why do you let Republicans filibuster good legislation without paying any political price? You need to stand up to them.

I raise the above point because my enthusiasm for your leadership, which was once high, is close to broken, now that I read you're going to apply to Christopher Dodd measures that you should have been applying to Republican filibusters in the past.

I just don't understand why you're doing the things you're doing.

Respectfully,
Tim

Tim Sullivan
San Francisco, California

I am taking care of a baby and watching TV and my back hurts and I have the following observation to make

2008-01-23T17:11:00.000-08:00

Star Trek: Voyager is like The Office except some of the people are aliens and it's not trying to be funny.

There was a guy on an episode today named Chull. If I have another kid maybe I will name it Chull. Maybe Chull will be Gwen's new nickname.

Some thoughts about three people I do not know

2007-11-05T10:33:00.000-08:00

I rode the bus today listening to these kids talk to each other about nothing. They were out of college and working I think yet I felt vastly older than them. They were innocent and I did not envy them. They talked about televisions.

One of the young men was blond; he was intelligent and kind and stupid about emotions. The girl expressed anxiety about a test. The tall young man, who was black and thin and seemed to be separate from the other two and wiser but also still innocent, said, “Always believe in yourself.”

He was imitating the easy support of the blond one but it was insincere. I believe he believed her anxieties were well founded not because he knew her but because he trusted her assessment of herself. Of the three of them, I respected him the most.

The girl was cagey but a fool. There was a line of pain in her voice. And she was not telling them what she really felt.

Hedge funds are starting to operate like venture capital outfits I read. Do you find that the firms you audit are doing that?

The tall one mumbled something. He didn’t want to contradict his companion.

And the girl was thinking something like, I need them—I think she was thinking about the white guy—even though they are rubbish, even though I want to be somewhere else besides here, not living, I hope, curled up somewhere, lazy and warm; this is too much for me and I do not want it.

I looked up from the print I was looking at but not reading and I saw her eyes and we looked at each other and I thought, No, that’s wrong; you will learn too late that you do want it.

Television

2007-10-21T09:42:00.000-07:00

Here's a thing. I'm beginning to suspect there are a million amazing shows on TV. I like watching The Wire. I like watching Deadwood. I like putting shit in italics. When I watch those shows they blow me away. They blow me out of the water and into bits. I feel all the TV pleasure a person can hope to obtain, but I also feel mature. I feel like I'm learning something, about people or the world or some crap like that.

There's also the Sopranos, which, who knows about these things, but if I were participating in one of those online betting markets, I would guess, based on my internal future guessing heuristics, will be remembered as the defining cultural marker of the early twenty first century.

There have been a fair number of articles written about this. How HBO discovered some sort of market for quality and catalyzed a golden age of television. I buy it. Those shows are good. They are as good as the best novels. (And better than the best films?)

But what I'm noticing lately is that these shows seem to be everywhere. A dime a dozen.

Note these lines from Nancy Franklin's New Yorker piece on Friday Night Lights:

I took a wait-and-not-see approach to “Friday Night Lights” last year, until an unlikely friend recommended it—a young filmmaker who had grown up in Manhattan in a literary and theatrical milieu and had no interest in sports. We were in the Museum of Natural History when we had this conversation, and when she told me that she and her husband were “addicted” to the show, even the animals in the dioramas were so stunned that they froze in their tracks. The following week, I watched an episode, and went from ignorance to bliss.

It’s hard to say what’s great about “Friday Night Lights” without feeling that you’re emphasizing the wrong thing, because although the show’s particulars are distinctive and special, it seems not to be made up of parts at all—to just be an organic whole. In short, it feels like life. The show isn’t merely set in the world of West Texas football; it is that world. Watching it, you have a feeling of total immersion—in the (fictional) town of Dillon, in the lives of the football players and their parents, and in all the elements that determine people’s fates in that dry, desolate, and depressed part of the country. This sensation is triggered in part by filmmaking technique and in part by the writing and the acting; but much of it is simply alchemical and wonderfully indefinable.

Sounds pretty good, eh?

What interests me is the discovery of the show, as Franklin describes it, nearly perfectly describes my experience of the discovery of all the other shows I mentioned . I hear about it, I'm skeptical, I watch it, I don't get it, then I get it, then I'm addicted, I'm smitten, amazed, full of respect. I bet this is exactly what would happen if I were to start watching Friday Night Lights. I bet this is exactly what would happen if I were to start watching Dexter. I bet this is exactly what would happen if I started watching Mad Men.

We've noticed the quality of dramatic television shows, but have we noticed that there is a glut of them?

There was a time that quality was scarce to nonexistent. Now? It's everywhere. I turned on fucking Bionic Woman and it was riveting. It wasn't good. It was silly. But for the ten minutes I didn't know the details and two people were in trouble and they were communicating with each other in a sort of deeply practical--almost technocratic--way, it was riveting. It did something to me. And that makes me wonder whether there has been some tipping point in the evolution of the relationship between dramaturgy in television writing and technique in production whereby the former is just accelerated and magnified and enhanced by the latter.

What the fuck is going on? What does it mean?

I want to see how this looks in this context

2007-09-09T20:35:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday he ate chicken that he had fried in a pan, strictly adhering to a recipe he’d first encountered in beautiful ink printed with real care and taste onto the white paper of a book that smelled like glue and, mildly, of mildew. The book he found lying open on a table in the kitchen of he’d been sent to help demolish and rebuild. It was the property of a woman in her sixties or seventies who sat at the kitchen table smoking cigarettes even though the kitchen was pretty much gutted and men were working in it. She didn’t seem to notice any of it.

“May I take this to the library to photocopy it?” said William.

“Sure,” she said.

He left the building and went to the library and smoothed the pages of the book with his thumbs and photocopied a few recipes.

“My you're young,” said the woman when he brought the book back.

“I’m twenty seven,” said William.

“Ach,” said the woman. She died a few weeks later while the job was still unfinished. They left her little spot as it was for a few days after they’d heard the news, but then they put it all a way, her teacup, her ashtray, and everything else.

Growing the reach of such touching

2007-09-08T11:17:00.000-07:00

Francis Fukuyama's ideas about globalization, capitalism, and the 21st century have been, much like (if you take James Wood's word for it) Jonathan Franzen's attempts to match the insanity and grandeur of the culture, shunted aside by 9/11 cathexis. But maybe if more people watched America's Test Kitchen, Fukuyama's theories might hold greater sway. Because what's good about democracy? The extent to which it enables things like America's Test Kitchen to exist.

On America's Test Kitchen they do experiments about how to make food that tastes good. They try different techniques, they compare results, and they are very happy. And they have a large following . Words from founder and editor in chief Christopher Kimball:

There's a huge demand, an appetite, for understanding process in America right now. We have 640,000 paid readers [of Cook's Illustrated], and all of them seem to be really keen on why. And that's a shock to me. I would think that most people wouldn't care, but they do care. And that makes a good cook.

(Source: Powells.com interview to promote Baking Illustrated.)

Would such an observation be possible in an autocratic state?

I have no idea, but it's possible in a democracy. That's good. It's so good, I don't even really care about the why, I'm just glad that it's there.

What does it feel like to be Chris Kimball? I bet it feels good.

I've gotten past the point in my life and my psychology were I relentless idealize the lives of others for their simplicity and their general superiority to my own. We all have medical problems and insecurities and regrets. But Chris Kimball pulls me out of my wisdom and makes me think that he is wise, that he has figured out something important.

I imagine him leaving his house in the Boston area to go to work. Is it early in the morning? Is it summer? Is there a breeze blowing through the leaves of the trees that line the street? Is it going to be a scorcher?

Or is it winter and he's scraping the frost off the car or drinking a cup of coffee in his kitchen looking out the window over his sink at the trees in the backyard that have no leaves and the dead grass and his back fence and wondering why his kid put a hula hoop over one of the fence posts?

And what of those of us, even those of us belonging to those billions condemned to work for the entirety of our lives, who have the breathing room to watch his peaceful television show on a saturday morning, soaked in--basted!--in appreciation of the nuances of comparative kitchen spoon quality?

Are our lives not touched by or at least brushed by the feathers of a leisure and a peace that approaches the holy?

We are touched by such a thing. There are costs, to be sure, the whole world is built on blood, but we are touched by such a thing.

Growing the reach of such touching should be the priority of civilization.

Fred Thompson

2007-09-07T11:52:00.001-07:00

Man, I almost hope that dude becomes president. It would herald the dawn of a radically new/insane era in world history. He would be like some crazy dude in a high school student body election running on a "beer vending machine in the cafeteria" platform. Except it would be awful. People would die and suffer as a result of his being a moron. And the moral history of the country would be not necessarily brought to its nadir so much as, like, blasted into atoms, leaving only a tingling sense of postmodern nullity. That's the sort of state my brain goes into just contemplating the stable of republican nominees. Every single one of them is insane. Every single on of them babbles incoherently. McCain babbles incoherently. Romney babbles incoherently. Guiliani strings together statements whose relation to one another can only be guessed at. I wonder to myself . . . could it happen? Could one of them win? What would it be mean? Could Jack Nicholson be elected president? Who couldn't be elected president? A cat? Doctor Dre?

If social existence weren't just a latticework

2007-08-31T14:55:00.001-07:00

of paranoid taboos, and you had some way to ascertain the proper amount of enthusiasm in your potential partner, would you have sex with a tiger?

This is just a question I've been asking myself lately.

Sometimes

2007-08-31T11:58:00.000-07:00

I just fucking adore the universe.

Thank you

2007-08-31T11:45:00.000-07:00

Tonya for your kind words about my shirts.

I never knew my shirts were so spectacular. Now I'm thinking about them a lot. I noticed my collar in the bathroom mirror. One side was flat/deflated. The other side had a weird fold. I tried to fix it and then I thought, "What the fuck am I doing?"

After that, I decided to just act natural, and left the bathroom.

Drugs--and why I'm looking forward to caring for my daughter

2007-08-16T21:27:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I think taking drugs, which I don't do, except for alcohol and advil, is--if you bracket out the tragedy of true addiction--a really important part of human experience. Other times I don't. Other times I think you should be like the eagle that knows only the sun.

Anyway--this is one reason I'm looking forward to my baby. She's kind of drugs and eagle at the same time. She'll be stinking of poo and she'll have really bad manners but simultaneously it'll just be a three of us, in a little relatively uncomplicated cocoon, within whose fibers Nadia and spend our time and attention attending to her needs. What better use to put our life skills to?

No running away from life. Making the quotidian miraculous. Kind of like sex, except with diapers and no orgasms.

In that post about Stardust

2007-08-16T20:28:00.000-07:00

Where I was bitching about adolescent hero fantasies?

This is the sort of shit I was thinking about.

I was thinking of this whole chunk of hero narrative psychology I like to bitch about in terms of the shift for which Byron's transition from romantic to ironic is sort of emblematic

But then I'm like--Tristran the shop boy or Manfred the idealist?

They're not in the same league motherfuckers. They're just fucking not.

And another goddamn thing while I'm feeling misanthropic

2007-08-16T20:15:00.000-07:00

Murdering people? Totally horrible! Why do you murderers do it? What the hell are you thinking? You're just adding to the garbage. It's like this murderers. Say you're going up the sidewalk and you step in some dog shit that someone didn't scoop. Well that's the shit you're pulling on everyone except vastly more severely. Stop it.

I shouldn't even make light of it and I'm not sure I am. I just . . . try to think about it simply.

Also--institutional crime. I think I blogged about below. Why? Why can't we a) be more self conscious about the possibility that the systems we set up can have injust consequences for people who don't deserve to be injustly treated?

In England they're giving people degrees in yacht crewing.

I guess this is okay--it's not like they're majoring in english, right--but it also kind of sucks. People's instinctive inclinations toward one craft or another are sound compass I think for life decisons, but somehow I wish these english cats were getting degrees in business.

I went to the french laundry once. It was fine until we started talking about our policies vis a vis giving money to the homeless.

Why did that happen to me? How did I get here?

(I love you, donkey--it's just that everything can't be perfect.)

Whatever. Like I said, I'm an eagle. None of this shit really bothers me.

I am a fucking Eagle

2007-08-16T20:10:00.000-07:00

And I'm soaring over all this humanity bullshit and I just dipped my sinewy wings into the ocean, freeing them of lice.

The only thing I know is the sun and the rumbling in my eagle tummy.

Watchout fish.

I'll fight the osprey and fucking hunt in his territory. And I'm different from the osprey. I'm a fucking glutton.

If you're lucky you'll know to hide in the kelp. I hate that shit. It stinks too much of life, like when I ate that snail. I cracked that fucker open with my beak and all this fucking rubber shit oozed out.

I prefer mammal meat. I eat the tenderest parts and leave the rest for the turkey vultures.

Some birds don't dig the turkey vultures, but they're all right with me.

Fuck this shit. I'm going to fly into a cloud.

Stardust

2007-08-11T09:53:00.000-07:00

What are stories? It's an old question but Stardust, which I saw last night, has me speculating. The reason is that it's utter hackwork yet the audience I saw it with was rapturous, especially the girl sitting next to me, who kept repeating lines of dialogue, mimicking emphatic gestures, and saying to her companion, "I love this movie."

That's great stuff. That's what stories, as far as solaas goes, are supposed to do.

(Presuming we're not cultural theorists or scientists, in which case you can frame the idea of what stories are "supposed to do" in vastly more rigorous terms. Of course, I do believe in a qualified way some of the ontological claims you can derive from the chaos of conventional human lore. I find them vastly more reliable as a compass for understanding myself than I do cultural theory, though cultural theory has its good points too in this respect.)

But I did not find myself rapturously transported. I felt, as I watched, that we were going through the motions, that neither Neil Gaiman nor the collective producers of this film, excepting the actors to an extent, had put anything in this movie that was not formulaic.

Formulaic is sort of a pop-critical term and one that's often expressed without supporting argument, but it applies to Stardust.

Story teller voice over performed in the first person plural? Formulaic.
Young boy with limited prospects hoping to win the love of a popular girl? Formulaic.
Romance between two people thrust together by circumstance and initially loathing each other? Formulaic.
Princes competing to become king given an impossible task to determine the heir? Formulaic.
Helicopter shots rotating around people riding on horseback over grass-covered ridges with mountains in the distance? Maybe not formulaic, but at least derivative. You've seen it in more than one film since Lord of the Rings.

The movie is rife with examples like this, but there's one which is particularly telling:he cameo by Ricky Gervais, who plays a merchant with whom all three of the plot's contending parties, the witch, the evil prince, and the hero/heroine, barter for one thing or another. He's dressed in a sort of bizarre costume and he's got long hair, but it's basically a reprise of the character Gervais improvises in the office. It was, to me, reminiscent of the scene from Man on the Moon where the college students are chanting at Andy Kaufman to do some famous routine., maybe the mighty mouse thing, I don't quite recall.

In this case, because it was a character and an actor imported without elaboration from some other work, and because that character/actor is so much a part of the present cultural moment, it stood out particularly as a crib, but to me the film, as I elaborated above, was full of such thefts.

Which would not in most cases doom a film, but in Stardust, there's a near total absence of enthusiasm for the material in the production work. For instance, the primary villain, a witch played by Michelle Pfeiffer, starts of the movie riding around in a cart pulled by two goats. To me, this is one of the few opportunities the narrative provides to do something weird and original. They could have made the goats look menacing or something. But they just made a cart pulled by two goats. And then that's what she traveled around in for a while. That's it.

There are other instances of a failure of imagination. The market town that stands as a sort of transit point between the film's two worlds, ordinary England and mystical Stormhold, is supposed to be a sort of hotbed of orientalist exoticism, but its wierdly sterile. There's a tiny two-headed elephant in a cage and a jar full of eyeballs that actually look at things, but otherwise, it's just a bunch of cages and buildings and a few undistressed curtains slapped together. No real detail.

But the worst thing about the film is the fascism.

That's hyperbole, obviously, but there's this weird innocence about the pleasures the film seems intended to provoke.

It starts with the protagonist's name. It's Tristran. I hate this name. It's just a few steps short of Prince Valiant. And its a variant on a name that's used throughout fantasy novels. I don't have examples, so you'll have to take my word for it. But it's the sort of name given to the sort of strapping but mildly effeminate name given to the sorts heroes that movies like Shrek seek to pillory. Because its the convention, he starts off bumbling and earnest, but by the end of the film, he's got beautiful hair a great outfit and is a master swordsman.

This is the guy were supposed to identify with. Think about the Pirates of the Caribbean films and how there's this sort of id/superego battle in the film's consciousness between the Orlando Bloom character, who is noble and chased, and Captain Sparrow (a much more evocative name than Tristran, btw), who is lecherous, androgynous, unreliable, self-interested, and vastly more interesting. And that franchise, at least in the second film, acknowledges the appeal of the antihero, when the Keira Knightly character makes out with Jack Sparrow and then, almost in an act of homage, betrays him. However psychosexually unhealthy you might deem this, it was mature and knowing. Stardust is neither of those things. In it, every infantile fantasy is fulfilled. The hero defeats everyone and he doesn't just get the girl, he gets to become king, he gets his mom back, and he gets the opportunity to live forever. It's all gold and castles and immortality.

This just isn't material I can wrap my heart around.

The audience I saw it with was entirely in love. And it ives me pause that what produced this response was a combination of deeply formulaic plot construction and some naive and uninhibited wish fulfillment. It makes me wonder about why I respond the way I do to better work than this.

2007-08-08T11:51:00.000-07:00

From "Why Are So Many Americans in Prison" by Glen Loury in the Boston Review:

We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined work forces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.

This country is as rife with institutional and moral crime as it imagines it is with criminals, conventionally understood. Obviously, it's a complicated issue, but the magnitude of the phenomenon and its connection to race should trouble us greatly. I can't help but think of Madness and Civilization and wonder if we are just adding the concept of minorities to the series that, Foucault posited, started with lepers and moved on to insane, thus deepening our own madness.

750 Words

2007-07-29T19:20:00.000-07:00

He fucked a cat. Then he fucked another cat. Then a cat came along and he fucked it. Then he fucked the first cat again. Then the cat fucked him. Then he and the cats fucked a dog. Then the dog fucked the cats. Then he fucked the dog alone. Then he went to the store, the grocery store and fucked everyone in it, including his grandma and his grandpa. He started in the milk aisle. He didn’t fuck the toddlers and the grade schoolers but starting at age fifteen he fucked everyone. Then he went out of the grocery store and into the parking lot and let the dogs and the cats from before out of his pickup truck and he fucked each one of them again. They were used it, so they just stood in a peaceful obedient line. Then he fucked the pickup truck. It hurt a little bit but he mostly liked it because everybody likes fucking everything to some extent. He went to the police station and fucked all the cops. The cops were like what the fuck but he fucked them all anyway. Then he went to the gazebo in the park. Nearby, there was a large bird on a wire, a pheasant, and he went up to the top of the wire, and hung from the wire without touching any of the other wires because he knew that would get him electrocuted, and then he grabbed the pheasant, who could talk and was like, “oh shit, it’s that guy again,” and he fucked the pheasant in the air hanging from the telephone wire. Then he let go and landed in a ninja crouch. These ninjas saw it and they jumped out and guess what happened? The ninja crouch was just a ruse and he fucked one of the ninjas who was like, “yeah, actually that’s not bad, that’s pretty good,” and he walked away and turned the corner, and the left-out ninjas were like, “whoa,” and then he reappeared and fucked all the ninjas because when he left he was just fucking with them. He rested for a week because occasionally you have to rest.

Then he went to Washington and developed a theme system where he’d organize his fucking patterns by theme, like only fucking certain nationalities, like all swedes one month. Or another pattern slash theme would be fucking people without them knowing it, or just blowjobs, which he felt sort of dissatisfied about and went back and fucked those people again. These are the little games you have to come up with to keep yourself motivated when you’re trying to accomplish something special.

Then it was the national badminton championships and during halftime he fucked eighteen people and then a security guard, Jane Fonda, Elijah Wood, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, yet another Alpaca, your dad, you, your mom, your sister, you uncle Craig, Pat Sajack, the skeleton of Abraham Lincoln, then he did that thing where you stretch your penis around and fuck your own self up the ass, and then he fucked Philip Roth, who LOVED it, and then he fucked Shamu 7 and Jessica Tandy at the same time. Then he cyber-fucked that exact list of people over the internet.

Then he went on this wilderness jag where, as a result, he eventually fucked every moose in Canada, all of which he filmed. That catalyzed another theme month, where he went around with a video of him fucking mooses and wolverines and shit in Canada and showed it to people and fucked all the people that were aroused by the video. That was a really cool month, he thought. He was pleased. Then his appendage fell off and he had to have it surgically reattached and he fucked the surgeon. Then he went to the oval office and the people he found there were the first ones he couldn’t bring himself to fuck.

Then, to purify himself, he went to New York and made achingly sweet love to Michiko Kakutani in her drab apartment. He felt they shared something important because she was so beautiful even when she complained about how you can’t do things justice in 750 words.

The Diminishing Returns of Critical Self Consciousness

2007-07-16T16:07:00.000-07:00

It's probably impossible to establish a perfect justification for a particular critical method for approaching a work of literature.

Would an acceptance of this impossibility and a willingness to conduct criticism in a less formal way make it more interesting?

I've always sort of felt that the self-conscious pursuit of a perfectly virtuous and unimpeachably correct political perspective is an impediment to justice, or at least justice in this place/time/greater historical era. Literary criticism and other veins of thought, say philosophy, aren't, as systems, as dynamic and complex as physical/social/political reality, so they would seem a good field in which to spend time establishing a better foundation for the arguments and narratives they support, but there's a limit to the value we derive from examining and/or restating the context and history of our ideas.

I have no idea what that limit might be.

Picking their spots

2007-07-04T21:39:00.000-07:00

I was at a fourth of July party today talking with someone about the MSM's weakness for the false equivalence trap. Blogger's complain about this all the time. They complain that instead of researching the facts, interpreting them rigorously, and then defending or amending them as necessary, a lot of journalists who cover politics simply repeat a talking point and then quote someone they perceive as being in opposition to the party producing the talking point and consider their job done.

Journalists who fail to do more with their reporting then a smattering of he-said, she-said are bad for the nation.

But reporters sometimes do abandon false equivalwilling to represent as fact or consensus understanding what are in truth ill-considered opinions. This was tragic in the case of the Iraq war when television reporters--there is blood on their hands whether they know it or not--didn't bother to have their producers do any research into the quality of evidence vis a vis Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. As long as enough people in Washington or New York say something is true, the case, in the minds of these reporters, seems to be closed.

However, there are exceptions to this rule and the one I've most recently encountered is pretty infuriating. Read the passage below from "Clintons Adjust to Her Turn in His Old Role" by Patrick Healy (the article is labeled "A Political Memo") and ask yourself why it was that this report chose to abandon the he-said, she said protocol :

No matter how much he tries to blend in, Mr. Clinton is one Oscar-worthy supporting actor who can sometimes upstage his leading lady simply by breathing. The Clintons’ political stagecraft — and their goal of shifting the spotlight to her — has been a work in progress since her presidential campaign began in January. This week, her husband’s first campaign jaunt on her behalf showed him in stages of adjustment — relaxed and jokey at times, a bit unpolished at others.

Oscar worthy. Actor. Leading Lady.

This language is full of scorn and it's not a good way to talk about politicians. Not because it's necessarily inaccurate and not because they're actually extremely noble people, but because it's an extremely subjective judgment. And even if you grant it, the sort of acting that Bill Clinton does when he's campaigning cannot be distinguished from the kind of acting that all other politicians do when they are campaigning. It is also something that politicians must do.

Therefore, reporters, if they want to do something with their work besides draw a paycheck, should do their best to identify the traits and characteristics that will govern a politician's policies and decision making in whatever office they happen to be seeking.

If Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton is performing more than another politician does that mean that we can't believe what they say? Does the reporter have information that suggests Hillary Clinton would push policy or ideology radically at odds with the policies she's pushing as a campaigner? This is the kind of "acting" by a politician that might be worth a front page (on the internet anyway) article. But that's not what we're getting in this lazy material from Patrick Healy. What we're getting is a record of one journalists gossamer impressions of the Clintons on the campaign trail tied in with some vaguely attributed gossip. And it's not as if they're insightful. Take this passage for instance:

He plays good cop and, deftly, bad cop as he tries to elevate Mrs. Clinton by praising her rivals for the Democratic nomination while at the same time putting some of them down. For instance, he has described second-tier opponents like Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico in more generous terms than her immediate foes like Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.

So Clinton criticizes Hillary's chief rivals and praises the presumptive also rans? What a scoop!

These are the insights and judgments that the New York Times sees fit to meet the public eye without the fig leaf of false equivalence. No counter quote from a Clinton admirer who says, "actually he looks me in the eye and I know he cares about what I'm saying."

Why? I can only imagine it's because they are arrogant enough to believe that when the story is about the personal and when they themselves are their sources, they have the expertise (because all humans make shallow judgments about one another) and the authority (because they know they are not deceiving us about their shallow judgments) to tell the story without defending it or qualifying it or justifying it.

They're wrong.

Journalists have a responsibility to write stories that, to the best of their knowledge are true, even when the story is about nonsense like the one quoted above.

They also have a responsibility to prioritize the material they cover.

So I don't know. Maybe Patrick Healy and his editors at the New York Times think this stuff is significant enough to outweigh other news about the Clintons, or the presidential candidates.

If that's the case, my own personal subjective assessment is that their work falls does not deserve the level of prestige that adheres to it based on their paper's illustrious name. It deserves our contempt.

Statement describing a small change in my own personal sentiment toward something

2007-06-28T22:17:00.001-07:00

So there's a post below--which I think I might have written while drunk off a glass or glass and a half of wine--about a small passage of fiction I wrote and which I felt good about:

A line from the novel

Well, guess what?

(I just prefer that phrase as an interrogative, okay.)

I don't like it anymore. Maybe that bit at the end about her wasting away is good. And the rhythm is nice, but otherwise I diagnose that it does not, as I had previously supposed, manage to transcend the limitations of its genre. I deleted it from the pages of my novel in progress weeks ago.

Giuliani is just a dick

2007-06-28T20:35:00.000-07:00

Bracketing out the randomness of the universe and the effect of events on the political landscape, I don't fear Guiliani in the general election. Given his troubles in the primary, he won't generate any fervor with the republican base, whose evangelical component--to grab one example out of the air--seems to be showing signs of disillusionment/fatigue with their adventures in politics, regardless of the ideology of the republican candidate.

Hillary and Obama, except in terms of rhetoric on the war, haven't made any sort of committed leftward swing, so should be ably to nimbly make the classic push toward the center in the general election. And then it seems to me that Guiliani's centrism, which he'll have to emphasize to court persuadables, will make the democratic candidate more palatable in the eyes of republicans and independants. It's not that an immoderate republican would actually vote for a dem, but that they'd be much less motivated to vote against one. Sort of like all those moron democrats who saw little difference between Gore and Bush.

More important than the above considerations, though, I would say that Rudy's primary campaign slide has less to do with his ideology and a lot to do with what people are learning about both who he is and his track record. A candidate's nature is obscured in the general election by the white noise of so many media representations, but Rudy's gaffes and his checkered past seem to me to have a flavor that punches through that veil. The rhythm of his speech is part of this. W, based on some sort of primitive instinct I think, is much cagier about not ever letting a real emotion come out. Guiliani, on the other hand, seems much more prone to feeling justified in his borishness in a way that a) he can't control and b) is personal in a way that transcends ideology.

Compared to a campaigner as blandly conservative (in approach) as Hillary Clinton, I think it would be difficult for Rudy not to come off as an erratic and generally disagreeable figure.

A line from the novel

2007-06-05T21:47:00.000-07:00

Amy went all the way out the door and lit a cigarette and started smoking. The smoke of the burning tobacco smelled cheap and there was a thrill for her in not caring about hastening her own death in exchange for a cheap thing, like she, whatever she was, was dissipating as quickly as the smoke into the atmosphere, like she was as thin and temporary as that, but also as weightless.

Self-conscious commentary (not in the novel): Cigarette scenes as a concept, but not necessarily in the execution, frequently strike me as the result of impulses felt by inexperienced writers. It's the same thing as why teenagers smoke--there's some truly significance romance attached to it, a sign signifying something you know does not exist once you've emerged from the state of massive ignorance we, many of us anyway, and I certainly, occupy in adolescence. Another way it's a tic common too teenagers and writers just starting out is that both often don't know what they want to do with their time and feel the act of smoking a cigarette gives purpose to a moment that is, in truth, purposeless. I'm not sure that's not what's happening here, except that it does say something about Amy's character. And also I write purposeless scenes all the time, or used to back when I was writing more and sucked more, but I like this one.

Test image

2007-05-25T10:09:00.001-07:00

Here is a test image. It's a three and a half megabyte jpeg.

Venal Beyond Words

2007-05-04T09:52:00.000-07:00

While reading this analysis of Adam Cohen’s NYT piece on Debra Wong Yang, and the role Harriet Myers played in her firing, it occurred to me that this pattern of populating government posts with people who will do the administrations bidding without consideration for the law, professionalism, or precedent (or common decency) explains better than anything else the laughable and politically damaging nomination of Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court. You can imagine them asking themselves, “Why not give it a try? If she gets in there, we can do anything.”

Given that the president seems so blatantly to have been using his power to get his friends off the hook for offenses of naked political corruption and is willing to drag important and noble institutions into the mud and slime in order to accomplish his childish and narrow-minded goals—I mean we’re not even talking about pushing a conservative agenda—the only just legacy for this administration (if you bracket out the tragedy of Iraq) would be universal contempt, scorn, a reputation for giving new meaning to venality.

Also, I would love to see a TPM piece speculating about what happens legally if enough evidence emerges that the administration did what they so obviously did. Say some documents emerge that the president consciously ordered the replacement of US attorneys to prevent corruption prosecutions? He’d have to be impeached, no?

If you go Clementine, a restaurant in San Francisco, you totally owe it to yourself to get the french toast

2007-04-30T19:28:00.000-07:00

That's really all there is to say.

What saddens me

2007-04-30T10:33:00.000-07:00

What saddens me about the attorney purge scandal is that it wasn't until Bush administration efforts to establish loyalty to republican party operatives (as distinct from republican party traditions say) as the sole criteria for evaluating people and adherence to republican party priorities the sole criteria for evaluating a theory, idea, or policy within the Justice Department that they came up against any forceful resistance.

Neither the media nor the military nor the congress resisted them. With the exception of McLatchy and a few marginalized congressmen and senators and some parts of the state department, these institutions allowed the administration and the republican party the last word on everything, WMDs, troop levels, in the run-up to the Iraq war. When Katrina happened and commentators were presented with the easiest judgement to make--that the gov't had failed in every way--they did not say so.

Only the justice department asserted loyalty to something (anything) other than the administration when the time came.

There's an irony in this, in that there's this sort of meme out there that beuracracy is terrible in a sort of metaphysical, "kafka-esque" sense, yet it was only the strength of the justice department as an institution that repelled the efforts of an administration whose political power was to some extent achieved by professing an ideology whose core tenents include the idea that government and government professionalism are almost always bad, and certainly inferior to some extent to the commen sense of ordinary citizens (forgetting for the moment that republican party leaders in the bush mold are anything but ordinary citizens).

It was the speech and actions of Republican prosecutors that brought to the fore a standard for political action that transcends even the soft-politicization of everything behind which many mindless conservative commentators are trying, or were trying, to obscure the Stalinesque abuses of political power perpetrated by the most corrupt administration in the history of the United States.

Test

2006-12-29T11:03:00.000-08:00

Test for work.

I am chauvinist

2006-09-02T09:37:00.000-07:00

Interesting.

I've learned that Elif Batuman is a woman. I had assumed, as the post below makes clear, that she was male.

This is not the first time I've done this. A few years ago, I spent a lot of time on the craigslist writers forum and found out that one of the people there I had assumed was male was actually female.

What do the two share? Obviously formidable intelligence. And a certain forcefulness of style.

Interesting.

Two passages

2006-08-09T13:46:00.001-07:00

from James Woods's review of Terrorist:

1.Ahmad "is the product of a red-haired American mother, Irish by extraction, and an Egyptian exchange student whose ancestors had been baked since the time of the Pharaohs in the hot muddy fields of the overflowing Nile." (Ah, those Egyptians. This lofty genealogy is an extraordinary example of airy Orientalism, which, because the sentence combines baking and mud, clumsily manages to imply that the ancestors were somehow baked in mud. Egyptian bog people! Does Updike reread his own prose?)

2.This is preposterous, of course--Jack Levy smells of Jewishness!--but more interesting than its preposterousness is the inept way, again, in that last sentence, that Updike surrenders any pretense that he is capturing Ahmad's own manner of thinking, and just sails off, pleasing himself, wreathed in familiar silks.

Later in the review, Woods quotes some dialogue spoken by the Ahmad, the central character and it's awful. Or at least, I thought it was. Strange speech that's distractingly inhuman. Here, I'll reproduce it:

"I think recently my mother has suffered one of her romantic sorrows, for the other night she produced a flurry of interest in me, as if remembering that I was still there. But this mood of hers will pass. We have never communicated much. My father's absence stood between us, and then my faith, which I adopted before entering my teen years. She is a warm-natured woman, and were I a hospital patient I would gladly entrust myself to her care, but I think she has as little talent for motherhood as a cat. Cats let the kittens suckle for a time and then treat them as enemies. I am not yet quite grown enough to be my mother's enemy, but I am mature enough to be an object of indifference."

The posture of the first passage I quote above is that the clumsiness of Updike's writing here is obvious and indisputable. I don't think that's the case. The rhythms of the sentence are such that its easy to miss the slipperiness of meaning in the conditions in which Ahmad's ancestors were "baked." I suspect that Woods is being deliberately literal-minded here in order to feel superior to a much venerated figure. If a reviewer was generally sympathetic toward a novel, would he or she say, "Well, yes, as lovely as this book is, there are a number of distracting slip ups such as..." I suppose its possible, but I doubt it. We are quick to ignore flaws of little significance in our allies and to emphasize them in our enemies. The orientalism is the better point and it should stand on its own. Of course, Updike is more-than-seventy-year old American, so I, personally, forgive him for succumbing to an imperfect, outmoded, and racist trope when it takes as subtle and understated and literary a form as it does here.

The posture of the second passage is that ineptitude is not a relative designation that has to be elaborated and/or argued for. My feeling is that it does. I mean, I think Woods is right to say that Updike is writing over his character, but I have no trouble living with a non-impressionist translation of Ahmad's thinking. If we grant that my comfort with this technique or manner of writing is universally applicable, it hardly seems fair to characterize this moment in Updike's writing as inept. Even if we don't grant that, I think Woods would be disengenuous if he were to say that he was using the word in a narrow, literal way and withheld judgment with respect to the surrounding text. He must know that in a review, the sentence, especially when it contains a bold and confident and distinct judgment, will stand for the book, and to some extent the man.

I feel better about Woods drawing our attention to the quoted dialogue above. In that passage, someone reading the review will have a much better sense of the feeling we'll have while reading the book. In my mind, I imagine a certain detachment and lack of pizazz, a dry earnestness of purpose.

Can you not be more specific?

2006-08-06T17:04:00.000-07:00

To an extent, I call bullshit on Elif Batuman, who, in the pages of N + 1 (I know of no better literary journal by the way), bitches at great length about various stylistic commonalities of contemporary short stories--this seen through the lens of 2005's America's Best Short Stories. Bullshit because he never really gets past a few non extensive examples in support of his generalizatoins. Although I shouldn't say bullshit. I should say something more moderate. But that's what I thought as I was reading.

Anyway, Batuman's--I have no idea who he is, but it's a really good essay, however much I disagree with the points it makes--complaints are that contemporary american short stories are so consistenly full of specificity. I have a problem with this conclusion. The problem is that specificity is, yes, ubiquitous and sort of compulsory, but that doesn't mean its worthless. I can't really speak for anyone but myself, but for whatever miniscule meaning it has, I derive consistent pleasure when a carefully chosen name in a story pricks my imagination into a non-routine mode of narrative consumption. I suppose you can fill a story with unconventional abstractions or generalities, but it would be a different beast from the sorts of short stories--short stories that tell stories--that Batuman praises in the essay. As for conventional abstractions, man, child, sadness, family, doctor, my mind just glides over them, filling in the most conventional images and meanings available in the library of television and newspaper tropes. (It's actually an interesting game to activate one's imagination in response to an abstraction, and flesh out the image on your own; of course, it's more fun when the author meets you half way.)

On the other hand, I acknowledge that the prevelance of the "specificity" technique likely drowns out its effect. Back to the original hand, though, you've got a grotesquely severe baby/bathwater problem when you bring the issue up at length in an essay whose second and third sentences are these:

And yet I think the American short story is dead form, unnaturally perpetuated, as Lukacs once wrote of the chivalric romanc, "by purely formal means, after the transcendental conditions for its existence have already been condemned by the historico-philosophical dialectic." Having exhausted the conditions for its existence, the short story continues to be propogated in America by a purely formal apparatus: by the big magazines, which, if they print fiction at all, sandwich one short story per issue between feature sand reviews; and by workshop-based programs and their attendant lilterary journals.

The essay delves in its second half into the psychology that renders the contemporary literary scene , as Batuman sees it, less good and suggests that a fear that the authentic is uninteresting leads authors to hitch their character's lives in primary, first order ways to history, as opposed, I guess you could say, history seen from television or via a pink slip. I think this is true, but isn't it inconsistent with the claim that stories should contain more of the general and less of the local then is the case?

While I'm not sure that contemporary novelists are as ashamed of their profession as Batuman suggests, I am entirely in agreement with his admonition to authors to "write with dignity, not in guilt."

In fact, its greatly encouraging to read such encouragement. But it pissed me of that the essay starts with a Seinfeldian riff on literary pet peeves that Batuman mistakes for an important part of a real problem.

*I should say also that I'm not sure this little blog post was worth writing. The act of putting together a short assesment like Batuman's pretty much guarantess that someone will have problems with it that are not unlike the problems he has with choosing Nissan over "sedan." Of course, it would be foolish to give up on the conversation for such a reason.

Excerpted from novel in progress

2006-07-23T16:15:00.000-07:00

I know what I am and it terrifies me. My skin is a bark around my subdermal layers, a bark through which light passes and burns me. I am full of water. I am aging. My age is passing through me. The light and the air are burning me. I cannot believe in my own happiness, my happiness is as the bony branches of the oak tree scraping the window when the wind blows and I can talk about none of this. Or can I? Am I just afraid to?

My mother has rested on the toilet and shat four times today. She is ill. She is eating too many harsh foods, too many cheeses—I hear the sound of her shitting echoing through the house.

David’s dog was eating a corpse yesterday, over on Buckburn Terrace.

In the woods, in the summer, the light, everything you see, is the same for miles. I walked for four hours and the whole time the air smelled the same.

When I visited Will, when I was very young, when my skin and the organs beneath it were not as marked by the sun, we walked down a finger of land—it was more like an arm—that stretched out into the Pacific ocean for seven miles and was famous, or relatively famous, so Will’s guidebook said, for the two herds of a rare breed of Elk that lived on it, and I noticed, it was impossible not to notice, that within every one hundred yards you walked, you passed close to what must have been the average per ten feet of bits of scat—coyote? Fox?—rabbits, crows, falcons, enormous beetles, sand, strange and gnarled bushes. That might have been my first ever desolate moment. The world is full of wondrous things, but we are punished with anxiousness by our incapacity to honor its wonder, to have to speak not of what we see, but of love, and redemption, and honor, and goodness.

And the hipsters promised me nothing

2006-07-14T10:06:00.000-07:00

I dreamt I was outside last night, on a field, in the middle of the night, during some sort of festival. There were pools of light. There were clusters of people and the air was full of smoke, shouting, laughter, distant music, and the smell of alcohol. The people were foreign to me (in a metaphysical sense--I don't know what country this was) , and rough, and I was scared. And someone a noticed me, a very tall, ugly, young man, with a jean jacket, a slight mullet, and a toady, a shorter, skinnier, version of himself. He noticed me and he accosted me. He punched me. He threatened to beat the shit out of me. I evaded him, but he pursued me. It was not a direct chase. I went from place to place and my pursuer would not embarrass himself to the point that he would actually be seen exerting himself in pursuit, but I could feel him keeping his eye out, for me. I never felt safe.

Finally, I approached a gentle, grassy slope, a log cabin outside of which had gathered a small crowd of San Francisco hipsters. San Francisco, I thought. We are of the same tribe. I'm saved.

Or something like that.

I approached them and they welcomed me in a friendly way and we made reciprocal gestures of appreciation. Then I told them about my problem. I had already noticed the tall man in the distance.

And the hipsters promised me nothing. Our bonds did not go very deep.

Oh this old thing?

2006-07-13T20:30:00.000-07:00

I was cleaning up and peeling through an old notebook and found this poem or perhaps embryonic song lyrics that I wrote in a fit of stylistic honesty--exposing my adolescent soul and taste in order to get a thought out fluidly and unconstructedly--and found it amusing. The one bit that embarasses me is the word parlay, but I remember sort of following the rhyme and thinking, who cares anyway, if its nonsense...

Strip all language
From before your eyes
Because all you have
Is time and life
And who wants to deny
How much they press
In on you from every side
When all you have to do
Is say yes, I guess
I have to die some day
And all that's left
Is to play
With as much wit, fancy, and delight,
as you can parlay
Or perhaps
Lie down and admit
That what you see has
Lost its luster
Whatever choice you make
Will provoke no answer from above
Or inside

Coldstalgia

2006-07-13T19:44:00.000-07:00

I was thinking on my bus ride home about how when I was a teenager or even in college my favorite thing was to walk into some warm human place out of a cold night in which I had been walking by myself. Friends inside, or maybe my parents, or a girlfriend. Nostrils numb. Woodsmell.

I do miss that.

Obviously

2006-07-10T16:09:00.000-07:00

Obviously, the Coulter comparison texts are up. I am ambivalent. My first impression is that she was obviously drawing from the sources in question. Did she cite them? If not, she's in the wrong. But I'm not going to dig any deeper right now. If she's guilty, I imagine the blogosphere will catch fire. I realize this is sort of an inane post on a momentary thought flickering through my mind. I've created it solely to answer the one below.

Ann Coulter

2006-07-06T19:11:00.000-07:00

What's strange about this developing Ann Coulter Plagiarizm story (besides the fact that no disputed quotations have surfaced alongside the text they copy, which, come on now, is a very basic and standard convention of the public-figure-plagiarized genre) is that her books are full of what by any reasonable standard, hell by almost any standard, except possibly I'm An Absurb Bastard Drunk Out of My Mind on Opposite Day standards, and even then I'm not sure, we could with an entirely clear confidence and ringing conviction call lies.

I guess the truth is that there's something less contestable and more read-handed about plagiarizm, the context being so easily established, but still . . . come fucking on.

Misanthrope?

2006-06-21T14:18:00.000-07:00

Through the window of the small building he lives in, he sees a blue sky and Mediterranean trees growing from a hill strewn with white rocks. The trees are sinewy, wind-battered things .

By his bed there is a dresser with a candle and a bowl of oatmeal. He regards the oatmeal.

He tried for a while to eat it with a stick, but the spoon was better.

He chuckles, his hands in his lap. He is thinking about the fool who thought of the fool who had chosen the stick, this second fool who brooded over the choice of the stick.

Why, the second fool had plaintively thought, as he lay awake at night on his straw mattress, tickled by the night breeze, can one not see at the first that a spoon is the better choice? Why does one dally with a stick, with oatmeal full of wood fiber and bits of bark and the petty irritation of an inflamed tongue?

It is a shame, he’d thought. So much time wasted on an inelegant method of eating.

Pens, paper, religion

2006-06-19T11:22:00.000-07:00

So I was commutting to work today and reading Mishima's Thirst for Love and thinking that it was really an astoundingly wonderful book. A rich, living, vibrant novel. I think of my brain as increasingly inert, but this book, which I've read at least twice before, animates it.

I find nature beautiful and many paintings beautiful, but nothing makes me feel whole the way a well-written novel does. I'm reminded of one the aspect of the world I most value, which is the existence of things-in-themselves (apologies if this sounds philosophical or if I'm abusing a philosophical concept). This is why I love trees. They are such strange and absorbing things when you clean out all the language in your mind and let them expose their nature to you, through your eyes. What pleases me about this is that there's nothing transcendent about that perception. When I encounter something artificed in this sort of frame of mind and it manages to be--perhaps its an illusion, perhapse not--as strange and unique as a tree or a city or a mountain or water, I'm filled with a white light of joy. The feeling is never so strong as it is with novels. I think that's because novels are so quotidian. They encourage us to pour out our sense of the ordinary, of unvarnished, prosaic reality, in a way that poetry, or music, which are much more about their own form, do not. This impulse to catalogue the banal is a burden, I think, to many novelists, but when it works, when something important and true, but nonetheless ordinary, is represented in a novel in a convincing fashion, there's a powerful thrill to it.

And this is what I felt on the train this morning. As I was feeling it, I glanced over to my left and there was a man, maybe in his late thirties, scribbling away in a small notebook. He had almost used the thing up. His notebook rested on another book, which was sitting in his lap.

He's obviously a serious writer, I thought. Funny that there would be two of us on the same train so devoted to consuming texts and making new ones.

I went back to Thirst for Love. When we reached my stop, I looked over at the man and saw that the book he had been responding to in his notes was some version of the bible.

My opinion changed. He was now, to me, a totemist, a babbler, somebody hysterically pouring himself into communion with something whose meaning is ultimately sterile, somebody speaking in tongues, but on a page, with a pen.

Of course, it occurred to me that our textual impulses, his to commune with a religious text, mine to feel more real and alive by crafting something sharp and seamless out of the flotsam of my existence, were perhaps the same thing at bottom. The objects with which we had chosen to fullfil our impulses might have been different, but the difference was arbitrary. Anything will make you rapturous if you believe it should.

Crazy Talk

2006-05-16T20:35:00.000-07:00

michaelberube.com is being guest blogged at the moment and, in a long post about writerly categories and Kurt Vonnegut, guest blogger Lance Mannion quotes from a book called A Scream Goes Through the House by Arnold Weinstein and lets it pass with a minimum of objection. Here's the quote:

"My view of art is quite at odds also with the electronic network that stamps our age, because the Internet culture, however capacious it might be, is also largely soulless and solipsistic---informational rathar than experiential---when contrastred with our engagement with art."

This strikes me as shortsighted crazy talk. It's logically shortsighted because the web is a changing thing, so even if it was, at present, perfectly, unarguably soulless, it would be foolish to assume it couldn't gain a soul, whatever that might mean. That's a minor point about inaccuracy.

My instinct tells me Mr. Weinstein is exhibiting an inclination to dislike something that is new and unfamiliar and from which he feels excluded. This is wild and unfair speculation, I know. But his words do seem clueless. They strike me as the equivalent of saying there's no good literature being made in the world when you only read English. But that's another logical point. I guess my real objection is that the difference between a story published on the Internet and a story printed in a book is not one that should be understood as limiting the beauty or meaning of the online version.

In place of the blanket dismissal, I would be much more interested in a discussion of the limits and possibilities of experience and human interaction mediated entirely by means of abstraction, ie words and photos on the Internet.

You could title the discussion, Did You Really Break Up If You Broke Up On Myspace?

I imagine there are teenagers out there who have sketched out the protocols pretty thoroughly.

But the quote above strikes a nerve with me because I'm interested in the implications of its anti-web sentiment in terms of literature. There's an endless amount of thinking a person could do on that subject, but I'll offer a small observation that I think casts some light on what the meaning of online literature. My sense is that the increasing aesthetic quality of web publishing will go along way towards enabling greater degrees of poetic experience to take place in the conduit running between our glowing screens and our fleshy illuminated heads.

Slate's Pathologically Moronic Take on Preference

2006-05-15T17:01:00.000-07:00

This article in Slate argues that lamentations about the death of the independent books are misplaced because the only difference between independents and megastores is that independents have more cachet among uneexceptional people who, nonetheless, want to feel literary. Here's a lengthy quote:

Our attachment to independent bookshops is, in part, affectation—a self-conscious desire to belong a particular community (or to seem to). Patronizing indies helps us think we are more literary or more offbeat than is often the case. There are similar phenomena in the world of indie music fans ("Top 40 has to be bad") and indie cinema, which rebels against stars and big-budget special effects. In each case the indie label is a deliberate marketing ploy to segregate, often artificially, one part of the market from the rest. But when it comes to providing simple access to the products you want, the superstores often do a better job of it than the small stores do: Borders and Barnes & Noble negotiate bigger discounts from publishers and have superior computer-driven inventory systems.

I take issue with the idea that someone's expressed attachment to an independent bookshop is affectation, especially as the writer defines it. I realize Slate's style is "breezy/intellectual" but the writer is essentially calling people who say something along the lines of "I like independents more than I like chains" liars without offering any evidence for it. I could just as easily say that people who write articles positing that a preference for independent bookstores do so only to indicate to others that they belong to a certain tribe do so only to themselves indicate that they belong to the tribe of populist truthtellers who see things as they really are and aren't afraid to do away with sacred cows.

What the author is indirectly doing is calling into question the nature of appeal, but instead of exploring that issue, ie whether the verb "like" means something along the lines of its most common meaning and, if not, what it actually does mean, he presents us with an answer that appears to have been pulled out of thin air.

Politics, journalism, the world wide web

2006-05-15T13:36:00.000-07:00

The conflict between the netroots and DLC progressives, which parallels the tension between blog-based and traditional journalism, is too often cast as a conflict between messy upstarts and gray eminences. What nobody comments on is that a reasonable percentage of web-based political action and journalism is that it's in many ways superior to traditional forms of the same.

The medium is superior. Via the web, you have the capacity for meaningful audience feedback, instant access to the record, and the opportunity for any internet-enabled person to contribute.

The reporters are better. Internet journalism is often undertaken, as in the case of Dr. Delong, or Juan Cole, by experts in a given field. While their knowledge is not absolute, they are intimately familiar with the state of play in a given field and are much less likely to fall prey to thoroughly debunked theories and talking points. In addition to the skepticism that reporters are supposed to cherish as their most powerful weapon, bloggers bring to bear a mindset informed by academic rigour.

Web-based reporting is more free of conflicting interests. While bloggers do depend on information that comes free-of-cost from newspapers, they are not in any way beholden to them, to advertisers, or to the institional interests of a given publication. Nor does their livelihood depend on what they say or how they say it.

Internet-based political action is far more transparent than establishment versions. Members of political parties have had far less capacity to influence their party. You could become an activist/professionalize your political involvement, you could write letters, and you could vote.

Web-based debate is, counter-intuitively perhaps, given the stereotypes about angry bloggers, more measured, more thorough, less exclusive, less resource intensive, and more responsive than op-ed debate. It's sort of a low-cost, fast-reacting, and wildly participatory form of peer review. Look at TPM cafe for an example.

So what's really interesting about articles like this from the NY Times is how far out of the loop they are. At the level of his article, he doesn't realize how quickly its shortcomings will be illustrated to millions (?) of readers and, therefore, how easily its message is discredited, which actually increases the message's inaccuracy. Because the message is less potent, it can't go as far as it might have in the past to perpetuate the meme of a "troubled directionless democratic party."

He's also missing the boat at the level of the wider political landscape. Because of the web and its capacity for dissemining information and argument, establishment members of the democratic party are going to be less label to practice politics-as-usual. Simultaneously, the party is more likely to gain political power, in that the Republican party is equally hampered. It is far less able than it has been in the past decade to influence the messages moving back and forth through the national discourse.

The future is by no means certain, but at the very least, there are more reasons than there have been in a while to expect that progressive politics will be both more succesful and more effective than they have been during the time when the myth of the dems-in-disarray was the dominant meme.

Only people with outdated ways of getting information might fail to see it.

2006-05-14T09:58:00.000-07:00

I like sports, and love basketball, but this bothers me:

Lebron James lifted the young boy, kissed his head and pulled the tiny child close. Cradling the 1-year-old in his rippling arms, Cleveland's star carried his son off the court. It was LeBron Jr.'s turn for a ride.

Daddy already gave one to the Cavaliers.

James scored 15 points in the fourth quarter and posted the second triple-double of his first visit to the NBA playoffs, leading Cleveland to an 86-77 win over Detroit on Saturday that cut the Pistons' lead to 2-1 in their second-round series.

Lebron James is a great player. He may well end up being the best pound-for-pound basketball player to we've seen so far. And, one of the reasons I like him most, even though he's one of the most athletic players on the court, he plays in a way that would be effective for anyone, regardless of their speed, strength, etc. He anticipates plays, moves the ball away from pressure, and attacks at the right moment.

But the weird daddy-worship in the AP opening does turn the stomach. Does anyone think that what happened on the court was at all similar to the opening paragraph description of James picking up his kid?

Does he feed Zydrunas Ilgauskas from a bottle?

I can't imagine he does.

So, why the daddy metaphor? Because the writer desires it.

Novels I have finished since March

2006-05-07T20:50:00.000-07:00

Miguel Street byVS Naipul
Snow by Orhan Pamuk
The Best People in The World by Justin Tussing

My grandmother, her condominium, connecticut, winter

2006-05-05T16:46:00.000-07:00

I admire my grandmother. She went to Smith college and majored in Latin and she has a very refined way of speaking and she can converse about anything.

She spends most of her time at one end of a couch in her condominium in Ridgefield, Connecticut, which is where I grew up.

She moved there, along with my grandfather, when I was about ten or so. I remember the night they moved. I sat on the carpeted stairs and ate take-out fried chicken out of a bag.

I remember enjoying my life, loving it deeply when I was a child. Whatever that was, it was a beautiful emotion, and very different from the color of the emotions one experiences in adulthood.

The night they moved, the condominium was full of boxes and the odor of boxes and maybe the lights didn't work because we were doing things in the dark, or the halflight.

I don't remember where my grandfather was. Everyone else was coming up and down the stairs--from the entry way to the first floor, from the first floor to the second.

My grandfather died when I was fifteen and it was a blow to our family. We seem to have been diminishing since them.

I moved to California and that disconnected us further. I am happy here, but not without regret.

The condominium is once again full of boxes. My uncle, who lives with my grandmother, collects books and sells them on the internet. He's been doing it for at least five years and the house is now crammed with boxes full of books.

Everyone receives books from him for Christmas. They seem boring at first, but if you look at them for a while, and think about why he chose them, you notice how beautiful they are.

I would like to move back to the east coast and look at the barren trees and all the other sparse brutalities of winter through a large window.

People say they have dreams, by which I think they mean difficult-to-fulfill desires, and I have long thought myself to be free of them, but I'm not. My dream is to consume time in a particular kind of room in connecticut in winter, a quiet place with bookshelves, and books, a carpet, and a tall window. I would be alone much of the time, but my wife and my family would drop in often.

Appreciating What The World Provides

2006-04-27T15:02:00.000-07:00

People should converse more about how food tastes differently depending on how you eat it. I don't mean that people don't talk about this, just that they don't talk about it enough.

Critics from England are not interchangeable

2006-04-27T13:21:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I get James Wood and Anthony Lane confused, perhaps because they are graceful writers and perhaps because they are singular figures.

I remember reading something David Thompson wrote about Anthony Lane being the most talented film critic on the scene, but a disappointment, in that Lane did not properly venerate the art he writes about. That, at least, was what I thought David Thompson was saying.

To my mind, its more heroic to write about films as if watching a film (and writing about watching a film) were no different from drinking a glass of water, or having a conversation with a stranger at the grocery store, or gossipping with someone, provided a certain degree of energy and talent is devoted to the task. If Anthony Lane, in other words, wrote about film the way James Wood writes about literature, Thompson would have nothing to complain about, but I might.

(Thompson's anxieties about Lane, however, have less to do with the philosophies behind Lane's criticism, than with envy of the veneer of effortlessness that abides in Lane's wit.)

I'm glad James Wood exists, though, and does what he does, because he shows us how important novels are, and how much they can mean.