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Monday, February 28, 2005
I NEVER: Lists of Ten Things You've Done That Your Readers Probably Haven't! Camassia: sold popcorn to Peter Coyote Terry Teachout: stunt reviewing (eighth item) Keep 'em coming! R.R. RENO: "Now I am a member of the Catholic Church. I changed--I made a change. I do not think I changed my mind about theology or ecclesiology or the fate of Christianity in the modern world. I suppose that, in the end, I changed my mind about myself." (here) RISING EXPECTATIONS-WATCH: Jackson Diehl in Washington Post: "As thousands of Arabs demonstrated for freedom and democracy in Beirut and Cairo last week, and the desperate dictators of Syria and Egypt squirmed under domestic and international pressure, it was hard not to wonder whether the regional transformation that the Bush administration hoped would be touched off by its invasion of Iraq is, however tentatively, beginning to happen." (more) Via The Corner. "PRIVATE HEALTH CARE IN JAILS CAN BE A DEATH SENTENCE": NYTimes article. Suggests that the best care has come from outside non-profit groups--neither govt nor business--but that really isn't the focus of the article. Anyway, excerpts: ...In these two harrowing deaths, state investigators concluded, the culprit was a for-profit corporation, Prison Health Services, that had moved aggressively into New York State in the last decade, winning jail contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars with an enticing sales pitch: Take the messy and expensive job of providing medical care from overmatched government officials, and give it to an experienced nationwide outfit that could recruit doctors, battle lawsuits and keep costs down. more Via The Corner. Sunday, February 27, 2005
FOUR-COLOR HEART: Second installment of things I love about comics. 26 through 50. Again, in no order. 26- Edward Gorey. Just get an Amphigorey and dive right in. 27- "With the inevitable forward march of progress come new ways of hiding things, and new things to hide." A killer line, the best thing in Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. 28- TITLE BOUT. Oh, TITLE BOUT, I miss you! Title Bout on cloning: "If you want to create another human being, they have this thing called F---ING that I hear works too." Title Bout on leadership: "With Great Power comes nothing ever being good enough." Title Bout on Archie, rats, punks, and corpse-mishandling... well, just go here and search for "archie." Complete craziness, bizarre locutions, Ninth Circuit jokes.... Wow. (Warning: filthy words and thoughts.) 29- the movie section: stuff I loved about the "Daredevil" movie: Jon Favreau as Foggy Nelson. Michael Clarke Duncan as Wilson Fisk, the Kingpin. The rich colors. The water-walled office (and its role in the plot). The amazingly over-the-top angsty music. The way the movie found the good, basic elements of the Daredevil story. Admittedly, the extended flashback was painful, the plot often made no sense, and the movie itself seemed to have been stupidized somewhere in the process... but still, hmm, Jennifer Garner is much prettier here than in those bus posters for "Alias." 30- stuff I loved about the "Hulk" movie: Okay, actually the only thing I loved about the "Hulk" movie was the underexploited technical weirdness. The whole "making movies look like comics" thing. That rocked! Too bad the movie was so awful! ...I saw it twice. 31- Silent Bob. I think Silent Bob counts in the movie section, given that I think those movies are... based on comics? Or did the comics come later? Anyway, I love the silent mugging. My favorite moment of "Animal House" is the bit where John Belushi breaks a bottle over his head and then does jazz hands. 32- Jim Henley's list reminded me that I never finished reading Spiders!!! YOU MUST READ THIS. "Distributed warfare" sci-fi, and it looks great. 33- The Pulse. Still petting this comic. 34- "In a way I'll miss that second head! It was almost like having...a twin sister!" 35- Minisinoo (X-Men fanfiction) 36- in a similar vein, "Nameless"--lovely little piece about the relationship between language and world. 37- Jim Henley on The Filth. 38- PowerPuff Girls comics. Not because I read them myself, but because they are the most popular thing for kids we have at the pregnancy center. We move as many of those as we do of the annoying teen-y "study Bibles." 39- This post on reading manga. 40- Alias: the necklace of speech balloons; the exploding brick wall of interrogation scenese; the muddied, punchy, beautiful-loser expressions on Jessica Jones's face. 41- "Some Angels Falling" and "The Prime of Miss Emma Frost" (New X-Men) 42- "Calvin & Hobbes"--Cubist Calvin; the amazing use of blank space and outside-the-frame space in strips like this one; and really just how fun and sweet and perfect this strip was, at its best. 43- from Doom Patrol: the weird, unpredictable, memorable art (I was not so much into the story); also, the very creepy Scissormen. "The door flew open, in he ran, The great, long, red-legged scissorman." Eeeeeesh. 44- Astro City: Confession. I mean, I'd prefer a comic about sublimation, but in its absence a comic about repression is a useful antidote to the usual "follow your bliss!" nonsense. ...I liked the art in The Tarnished Angel better though. 45- the sound effects in Gyo: gashunk! shaaaaaaaa! How can a comic use sound so effectively? 46- the spirals appearing in the schoolgirl's hair in Uzumaki 47- the ideas behind "Ghost World." The execution left me oddly cold--most people loved the comic and movie, but I was not enthralled--but the ideas behind it make me suspect I have to recommend this to everyone, because the fault is probably mine. Themes of best-friendship and what it means to have a hometown. 48- I mentioned ElfQuest before, but I think I should say why: This is a quest story where the loss of innocence is real, heartfelt, no cheating. (The death of Nightrunner is the best symbolic representation of this loss. The whole sequence inside Blue Mountain is an incredible representation of what loss of innocence feels like. And the Leetah vs. One-Eye subplot is a heartbreaking account of what loss of innocence looks like.) And yet Book IV ends in joy ("Shade and Sweet Water") and reconciliation. This is a truly compassionate comic, where every emotion is earned. 49- Everyone has mentioned Watchmen, but very few people have mentioned two of the things I liked best about the comic: the lovely women (especially, the lovely women's legs) and the dead-on advertisements. Alan Moore on advertising is always worth your time. He's not condescending; he knows that ads play on the same deep longings that true art plays on. 50- Ultimate Spider-Man. Dude, I can't stand Spider-Man. I don't know why. He just seems so... normal. And yet I must acknowledge that USM is funny and sweet and basically, unless you hate Spider-Man as much as I do, you should get this. (Why couldn't it be about... Scott Summers? Or, I don't care, Lois Lane? Or anybody?) 11. HUNG ON TO MY EGO. So there's this thing, making the rounds of the rounds that I make, in which you list ten things you've done that your readers probably haven't. I'm loving these lists. I want you people to do these lists! So here is mine. Email me if you've done any of these things. In no order: 1- learned to sing "Frere Jacques" in Swahili (I have forgotten it now) 2- asked Newt Gingrich why he's a capitalist ("Because it works") 3- gotten in trouble for polling my middle-school grade to find out our religions (approx. 3/4 Jewish; I'm pretty sure I said "atheist") 4- written an essay that led my advisor to mistake Maggie Gallagher for Kierkegaard 5- failed every failable portion of the DC driver's exam (there are three) 6- played "Pin the Beard on Mordecai" 7- had the same surgery as the Pope! w00t! 8- submitted something for an essay prize only to have it win a poetry prize instead 9- howled at wolves, had them howl back (in a recording-of-your-voice-will-be-played-in-the-woods situation, not a throwing-a-baby-out-of-the-sleigh-on-the-steppes situation) 10- helped write a song about Heidegger (and yes, I know SRD has also done this because he was my co-author, so I am preemptively saying he cannot write in and challenge me on my uniqueness on this point) SO MANY STEPS TO DEATH. "I'm in favour of continuing to feed Terri because the law seems to have used a simple, cold balance-of-probabilities analysis to determine her presumptive wishes. There's no written living will; the only evidence we have is oral, and it comes from one source. The chance that she would regard her feeding tube as an instrument of rape is being treated with more respect than it deserves, since the decision to withdraw her food and water is irreversible. I think the standard's got to be much higher than that before you starve somebody to death. And while I'm not qualified to comment on the possibility raised recently that her husband is engaged in destroying evidence of spousal abuse, that's a possibility in principle with all these cases--which is one good reason death shouldn't be treated as having claims equal to those of life." (Via Colby Cosh, who wrote the above.) Contacts who can help Terri. Prov 24:11-12: "Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, 'Behold, we did not know this,' does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not requite man according to his work?" (contacts link and Biblical citation via the Old Oligarch.) One, you lock the target; Two, you bait the line; Three, you slowly watch the blog, And four, you catch the man... GetReligion quotes Cardinal Arinze kicking ass: "The answer is clear. If a person says I am in favour of killing unborn babies whether they be four thousand or five thousand, I have been in favour of killing them. I will be in favour of killing them tomorrow and next week and next year. So, unborn babies, too bad for you. I am in favour that you should be killed, then the person turn around and [says] I want to receive Holy Communion. Do you need any Cardinal from the Vatican to answer that?" Honestly. The cardinal's exasperation really comes through here. If the Church is accurately describing abortion, "personally opposed" is craven. This isn't rocket science; from the Didache to the dole age, there really isn't a lot of wiggle room, and trying to create wiggle room can't help but look disingenuous. [This post edited slightly, but point is the same.] Hit & Run: Rising expectations. Locks and Keys: Personal account of mental illness. Liked the list of Things I've Learned, though I disagree that anger is always, or even typically, rooted in fear. Anyway, this is a really interesting site. Via Camassia, who has moved--for good? I'm not sure. Unqualified Offerings: Interrogation reality show. Like him, I'm intrigued; but I really don't know what this show could possibly tell us about actual existing interrogation practices. I mean, people volunteer for sex all the time, and that tells you less than nothing about rape. (This is what I have thought every time some shmo brings up how his frat initiation was "lots worse than Abu Ghraib" or what-freakin'-ever, and I'm surprised, really, that more people don't point out the problem: You volunteered, you knew you could get out of it because you lived under a legal regime in which "getting out of it" would be supported, and the people who messed with you didn't think you were terrorist scum... so I think it's not really a good analogy, sugarplum.) Anyway, I liked this line: "But then our torture apologists will say anything. There's an irony there somewhere, now that I think about it." Relapsed Catholic: Toronto Right-Wing Movie Night report. "Attempts to bribe your way into the next one will be met with success if they are particularly clever or appealing." The Outbreak: Sean Collins is (mostly-)music-blogging!!!! ...Via Johnny Bacardi. I love the world, and if I have to sue for custody, I will sue for custody: As a follow-up to all the '80s music posts, I'd like to know if other people agree with me that They Might Be Giants follows an intriguingly '80s-top-40-like strategy of smuggling in lyrics of disappointment and alienation under cover of fun, hooky, geeky music. TMBG tends to move geeky types toward reconciliation with the disappointing world, I think, whereas most '80s music doesn't get as far as reconciliation. Your comments encouraged. More on TMBG in a moment. Thursday, February 24, 2005
THIS QUOTE MAKES UP FOR THE STUPID FOOL LOUSINESS OF MY WEEK THUS FAR: "I was wasted as a human. I should have been born a stoat." Flow morphia slow, let the blog and watch come streaming into my life... Family Scholars: Two posts on children of sperm donors. Comments very much worth your time. Johnny Bacardi reads Blankets. The art--all that snow, all those trees, Raina in her Eskimo coat--really is fantastic, and I'll get behind the Eisner-influence claim. It's the baggy curviness, or curvaceous bagginess, of the thick confident black lines. My less-positive and very personal review is here. Jim Henley's even less positive one is here. Also, I don't buy this whole "soulmate" idea; the end of the relationship with Raina made a lot of sense given that these people are in, you know, high school. Will be adding Syria Comment and Across the Bay to the blogroll, per Hit & Run's recommendation. Wednesday, February 23, 2005
TERRI SCHIAVO. BooksGalore on "persistent vegetative state." (And what a grim example of how language shapes our perceptions of other people.) Via Amy Welborn. Much more here, here, and here. Darkness must go down the blogwatch of night's dreaming... Colby Cosh: "And, as a result of all this, the wounded-to-killed ratio for American forces in the Second Gulf War (and the Afghanistan conflict) hasn't been three or four to one. It's more like ten to one. To put it another way, the United States has arguably made more progress in saving the lives of wounded soldiers since 1991 than the human species did in all history before that date. ... "On the other hand, American society is now being flooded with maimed veterans whose injuries would been unsurvivable in earlier ages. VA hospitals are already feeling the pinch. Economically, war will now become more costly, and there will be more disfigured vets to chastise the public conscience with their presence. One wonders which effect--fewer dead, or more crippled--will prove psychologically stronger in the end." (more) Dave Tepper: "Personally, I think 80s music works because it's essentially two-faced and ironic." "'Precious' Suffering." Via Dappled Things. "John Paul's personal Calvary." Sunday, February 20, 2005
PUNGENT. So let's say you have an iPod. And let's say you want a cover for that iPod--an iPod cosy, if you like. And let's say you have a ... thing ... about squid. Don't you want a CephaliPod? (I forget where I found this.) Friday, February 18, 2005
All I want is a blog somewhere, Far away from the cold watch air... Bastiat's Window: Yes, a whole blog devoted to the Broken Window Fallacy ("breaking windows is good for the economy because you have to buy more windows") and other Bastiatic economic stuff. Via Positive Liberty. Blogodoxy: A bunch of Eastern Orthodox (what do you call a group of Eastern Orthodox?) and Catholics (a surplice of Catholics?). I know I have quite a few of both in my readership, and this looks to be an interesting site. Colby Cosh: "Do we lament John Paul II's illness because it makes him uncomfortable, or because it makes us uncomfortable? I'm afraid I believe the answer to be embarrassingly self-evident." GetReligion has moved. JonathanRauch.com. Via Independent Gay Forum, I think. Otto-da-Fe: Ichabod! Puppies Behind Bars. Via The Rat. "A Chicago judge has ruled that a husband and wife will be allowed to proceed with a wrongful death suit against a fertility clinic that allegedly inadvertently discarded their fertilized egg." (Probably via How Appealing.) 100 ROOMS. My (belated) contribution to the "100 things I love about comics" thing. I'm tired, so I'm only doing 25, at least for now--more later I hope. And I'm only doing stuff Jim Henley and Johnny Bacardi didn't list, but my interpretation of "didn't" may become slightly creative w/r/t, say, Los Bros. Hernandez. In no order: 1- Lynda Barry's Come Over, Come Over and My Perfect Life: Sometimes (and a lot of the time, for the past few years) she slips, but when she's on, she has an incredible ear not necessarily for how kids actually sound but for this awkward, exaggerated, off-kilter speech that is even better than verisimilitude. These are early volumes where Maybonne, Marlys and crew are at their best. 2- Alex Maleev's pigeons (in Daredevil) 3- Stan Lee's total, complete, shameless wigginess, on display in '60s X-Men 4- Grant Morrison's dialogue for Beast 5- A Small Killing 6- ElfQuest, vols 1-4 7- those awesome squares and rectangles and stuff, in Sleeper 8- the guys who work at Beyond Comics in Georgetown, because they have always been awesome, and they made me get Alias the first time I went in. 9- the fact that there is a character called MATTER EATER LAD 10- journalists!!!! When I am not broke, I am absolutely getting one of them J. Jonah Jameson action figures--"with desk-pounding action"! 11- that guy on fire at beginning of Marvels 12- Planetes, but you knew that.... 13- Asterix the Gaul! 14- "It's Ant-Man, all right? Ant-Man." Awww.... 15- Oooh... pretty. 16- Foggy Nelson 17- Charlie Brown. 18- "The Coyote Gospel" 19- Gone and Forgotten 20- The Wisdom of The Tick 21- "People send me stuff. One girl sends me weird stuff--in a good way. Last time she sent me emu feathers. Somebody sent me an eggshell. ...I'm starting to think soon I'll be able to build an emu from parts." (Carla Speed McNeil.) 22- the Love and Rockets entry... featuring the inky inky blacks of Chester Square; "Flies on the Ceiling: The True Story of Isabel in Mexico" and "Human Diastrophism," two of the scariest comics I've ever read; all the weird stuff, like Chepan and Penny Century and prosolar mechanics; Letty in Wigwam Bam; Poison River; Carmen and Heraclio; the biography of Frida Kahlo; "Hey, Maggot! Where you at?"; the tattoo on the bicep of that Twitch City guy, the one that said, "YOU LIVE INSIDE A BOTTLE AND PRETEND YOU'RE IN A CAN." And, pretty much... everything else. 23- the fact that every time I say "Daredevil," Ratty thinks I'm about to say "Derrida." He's the Philosopher Without Fear. 24- comics are just really, really out there, willing to do crazy stuff, in a way that most contemporary fiction isn't (because it's self-conscious and worried that the popular kids will look at it funny) and most genre fiction isn't (because the genre tropes have mostly become tics). I just love how you never know what you're going to get in comics; even the most predictable superhero titles can have awesome, experimental layouts, and bizarre "greatness... or madness?" ideas. The kind of ideas you come up with when no one else is looking. 25- And the biggest reason I love comics right now, a totally selfish one: I'm pretty sure they sparked my return to writing fiction. Finding a whole new form to obsess over, in which to work out the ways that form and content interact; wondering about whether I could replicate some of those effects in fiction; regaining the willingness to wig out in public, to do those unpredictable collisions I just talked about: That got me writing again. You may not care about that, but I really, really do. (And I hope to start posting a new piece this weekend!) PUTTIN' ON THE RITZ.: Yet more '80s music theorizing. Scott Thompson notes that Men at Work were at least four-hit wonders--he lists Who Can It Be Now?, Down Under (I completely forgot this was by the same group!), It's a Mistake, Be Good Johnny, Overkill. I only remember the first two. MLY: "[Eve wrote] 'The '90s top-40 is pathetic. There are brilliant bands (Huggy Bear, PJ Harvey, obviously my lady Cat Power) but there aren't one-hit wonders . . . .' "I suspect there were quite a few one-hit wonders in Hip Hop and Rap (fewer in R&B). Whoop there it is? Who let the dogs out? The Humpty Dance? (Note, however, that the man who called himself 'Humpty Hump' is not a one-hitter insofar as he gets credit for also being 'Shock G,' the star producer who discovered Tupac. Humpty Hump was just another of the man’s alter egos. Unfortunately, I can't remember his given name.)" Eve replies: Uhhhh, I'm not even going near any theory involving praise for "Who Let the Dogs Out?". I'll give you "one-hit," but "wonder"? Lentis: "I think that there's something to your nouveau riche hypothesis. The 80s really did embody new money and the displays of conspicuous (but not always tasteful) consumption that went along with it. But I think that it was all very superficial. Under the surface of the upturned Izod collars, designers jeans, designer sun glasses, and designer water lay the oozing pustule that is the legacy of the 70s -- which I think was acknowledged more honestly in the 90s by the way. Add to this, I think that there also was a real underling angst. The Cold War seemed colder in the 80s than it did in the 70s -- and then there's AIDS. "One thing, you talk about using bouncy music to de-emphasize alienation in lyrics but didn't even mention The Smiths! -- the undisputed masters of that style. Then again they didn't really produce the type of wonder hits that you're talking about--not even How Soon is Now." Mansfield Fox wants his MTV. Monday, February 14, 2005
BLEG: If any of you all have tips on 1) pre-marriage counseling in the DC area (Christian but not necessarily Catholic)--I mean counseling for couples who are considering marriage but aren't sure--or 2) DC groups that work with fathers to help them build strong relationships with their children, could you please drop me a line? THANKS. MAN OF SILK: "The assassination of former Lebanese prime minister and reconstruction mastermind Hariri, by a car bomb on the very waterfront he rebuilt after the country's 16-year civil war, is the worst news out of the Middle East in the last two years. It's the worst news out of Lebanon in at least ten." (more) SOMEBODY'S WATCHING ME: Replies to the '80s music post so far: Both Mansfield Fox and the SoDakMonk point out that Culture Club was a several-hit wonder. This is true. (And given how much I love the Violent Femmes' cover of "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?", I should have remembered that.) So, in the previous post, replace the mention of "Karma Chameleon" with the song in the title of this post. ...The Monk also suggests an alternative, techie explanation. Unfogged suggests: Coke Is It. Father Shawn O'Neal (and how is it that a post about '80s music brought me mail from two priests?) writes: Loads of '80s pop did not have the punk sound, but it had the punk mentality of "Don't waste time recording junk." More theories? Keep 'em coming.... Sunday, February 13, 2005
THE DAY THE WORLD TURNED DAY-GLO: Why is '80s music just better? I mean, look: I could listen to Nirvana all day long. Their "Unplugged" album is fantastic. But that's not the point. The '90s top-40 is pathetic. There are brilliant bands (Huggy Bear, PJ Harvey, obviously my lady Cat Power) but there aren't one-hit wonders. And one-hit wonders (a.k.a., the zeitgeist) practically define '80s music. "Mexican Radio"; "Land Down Under"; "Safety Dance"; "Karma Chameleon" (on the CD player just now); "Sunglasses at Night." So stupid--yet so good! Why did it all go so right? My disorganized theories: '80s music is defiantly nouveau riche. And it doesn't want to look needy. Topics with potential for angst ("99 Luftballons," "Der Kommissar," and, in fact, "Mexican Radio") are instead drenched in synth-glamour. "The Metro." "Video Killed the Radio Star." There's no percentage in being angsty for its own sake. You're supposed to be glossy and neon and futuristic and fun. You're supposed to be, if not Morning in America, at least Happy Hour in America. It's a weirdly alienated style: In trying to use the music to de-emphasize the alienation in the lyrics ("Cruel Summer") ("Who Can It Be Now?") ("One Night in Bangkok") it ends up conveying alienation much more effectively. Other theories are more than welcome. Spin me right round, baby, right round. PAPER FIRES: Comics reviews. Two of 'em. Y: The Last Man, v.1: Unmanned: So you probably know the premise already. A mysterious disease kills all the men and male beasties in the world, with the exception of this one dude and his pet monkey. Very nice concept: simple and effective. The first volume is fun, working down various rivulets of this idea (a nun alone in St. Peter's, Republican wives staging a coup on behalf of their late husbands, former models hauling male corpses). I don't know that it's more than fun, though. Maybe I'm not the target audience simply because I spend my daggone working life thinking about guys vs dolls, so this comic isn't wildly likely to tell me anything new. I don't know. It's competent and I enjoyed reading it, but did I take anything away from it, on a question with which I'm deeply personally concerned? No, I didn't. I'll be looking to see if the DC library system (which definitely has at least one volume from this series) has the sequels. But I won't be buying more until I'm making more money. So hey. I liked the Israeli lady. In the Shadow of No Towers: Again, you probably already know the point of this comic: Art Spiegelman's response to 9/11. And again, it's kind of what I expected. There are incredibly poignant moments--esp. the page where he's looking for his daughter at a school very near the World Trade Center. And there is dumb lefty ranting. And there are very, very brief moments of collusion between the two. This you know. I was, in the end, convinced that the weird format of the book (thick gigantic pages--very hard to pack in one's carryon backpack, not that reading about 9/11 on a cross-continent flight is the world's greatest idea in the first place) was worth it: art's necessity, rather than the artist's self-indulgence. The big pages add a lot. I was less convinced of the need for the other conceit, the use of turn-of-the-century cartoon characters from the first moments of newspaper comics. I think that ended up being less powerful for readers (...or at least for me) than it was for Spiegelman as a creator. To sum up: Try to score a free copy of Y: The Last Man. In the Shadow of No Towers is more important right now, but, perversely, less necessary to actually read; flip through it in your local comicopia. Read the page at the daughter's school, seriously; also the page about the crazy anti-Semitic lady. "WHARTON FEARS A COUP": So, I have become addicted, not to "The Apprentice" itself (sigh of relief) but to its recaps at Television Without Pity. I don't actually want to watch the show, at all--it's hard to imagine something less fun than watching real people really fight and bitch and crack under pressure--but one of my many, many obsessions (and possibly the one least satisfied by contemporary literature and pop culture) is team leadership. That's why I like the X-Men. That's one reason I really love DVD commentaries, and by far the biggest reason I love "making-of" documentaries. And if you remove the crass materialism, team leadership is what "The Apprentice" is about. Reading these recaps has made me laugh out loud in recognition (some of the contestants' fights replicate, almost word-for-word, fights I've seen) and notice personality types (like The Guy Who Leads Through Sports Metaphors--actually, these guys tend to be good leaders, because they usually bounce back really fast when they're knocked down). It's made me think hard about the moments where my own leadership has been signally lacking. I let myself cave to peer pressure way too often, and I still need to work on taking criticism as a judgment of my performance in a specific instance rather than a personal attack; I especially need to work on taking criticism rationally when it's unaccompanied by praise and reassurance. I'm fascinated by the different ways of handling postmortems; by the fact that some people just don't get that you have to have fun in order to sell/persuade; by the examples of appropriate vs. inappropriate ways of seeking comfort when you feel low. (Appropriate = go to your closest friends, or to someone who has specifically offered a shoulder to lean on. Inappropriate = demand that everyone, or most people, or the leaders, or anyone who hasn't specifically taken on this role with you, deal with your personal heartaches and problems.) "You don't have to be asked. To do a job, you really don't have to be asked." --Donald Trump, and yeah, I can't believe I'm quoting this dude any more than you can. STOP ME BEFORE I KISS AGAIN: Last night I was thrown a candy heart that read, "FAX ME." Now, that is pretty bad; but what I thought it actually said was the far, far better "FIX ME." This is one candy heart my world truly needs. In other partygoing news, this exchange: "Yeah, I heard that [The Talented Mr. X-ley] was interviewing at that one publisher... what's their name... Ragnarok?" OMNES: "Regnery." Happy Valentine's Day from the vast right-wing conspiracy. Baby, I got your blogwatch, don't you worry... Agenda Bender: "'Eventually the Cockettes will use up the past and the future and have to rely on the present for their material.'" Amarji: "A Heretic's Blog." Only, not in the bad way. This is the blog of the awesome Syrian liberal profiled in this week's New York Times Magazine. Kickin'. Via Hit & Run. Unqualified Offerings: "Self-defense is about as basic a right as one can conceive. The argument for abridging it via gun control was pragmatic--gun controllers promised that restricting effective self-defense by limiting civilian gun ownership would increase public safety. It doesn't. It's not enough that it doesn't measurably decrease public safety, because gun control is itself a harm in principle. If it provided a compelling practical benefit we could have an interesting debate over whether principle or praxis should tell. But it doesn't even have the excuse of working." Watchmania! ...and an Annotated Watchmen site. Both via Motime Like the Present. Theology of the Body in Laurel, Maryland. Thus adding "Catholic theology of sex" to my previous "really awesome thrift-store-of-doom" associations with Laurel. Via... uh, I forget. Saturday, February 12, 2005
THE DAY JOB: "All of which has led me, through a painkiller-induced haze, to thinking about the differences between category fiction (what is often incorrectly called 'genre fiction'--primarily speculative fiction, mysteries, and political thrillers) and the so-called 'mainstream' (including both 'general' and 'literary' fiction). The day job is a significant difference. The subject matter and 'weight' of category fiction tends to revolve around the day jobs of the characters. Cops and private eyes solve mysteries for a living, and are so depicted in fiction. Starship captains captain starships; they are seldom engaged in long journeys of self-discovery after leaving the office for the day. Conversely, the subject matter and 'weight' of mainstream fiction tends to happen after office hours--the long-smoldering affairs with the babysitter, the agonized boredom of the housewife, and so on. Of course, there is significant crossover in the better books, and significant exceptions." (more) Friday, February 11, 2005
READING MANGA VS READING WESTERN COMICS--fun with page layouts and panel borders and whatnot. Really neat. RIGHT NOW, AT MARRIAGEDEBATE: Bisexuality at Yale, boars replacing babies in Italy, "the Bible too is a living word, just as the Constitution," what does it mean to say marriage "creates kin"?, and much much more. Everything from legal strategery to how to get a date at BYU. (Note, I only plug my day job here when I think there are some posts up that would be especially interesting to readers who don't check in on MD.com all the time.) OFFERINGS!: Lots of good stuff at Jim Henley's site right now. (Not that this is weird or anything.) Some highlights: farm dole; an introduction to the twelve newcomers to his blogroll (mostly libertarians), who look really interesting--I will be clicking through at some point when I am less catastrophically behind on everything; and a much-needed new word: "depiphany." MAILBAG: BOOKS AND BIRDS.Jendi Reiter writes: If you're obsessed with "betrayal-for-the-good/man without a country/adherence to a moral code over and against all one's personal loyalties and all one's sense of self; attempting to maintain a sense of self after that choice" Clio writes: Failure: almost anything by Ruth Rendell could be said to be about failure. But especially good on that subject are A Fatal Inversion; The House of Stairs; and A Dark-Adapted Eye, all of which concern the effects of long-ago crimes or sins and how they wreak havoc (and bring failure) on all concerned in them. [Eve adds: Ooh, this "out of the past" theme is also a huge obsession of mine. Will definitely check out Rendell.] [Eve adds: No need to explain! I also love re-reading and am constantly recommending the same books over and over.] Mark R. writes: In regards to vultures, you are not too far away from buzzards, hawks, falcons and the occasional kestrel in northern Gaithersburg, MD. Now and then I see a beautiful fox...it sneaks into my brother's neighborhood at dusk to steal dogfood from outside bowls, I think. There are plenty of deer as well. Often one sees a family dining out late at night in semi-secluded areas. Steve Sparrow (apt name!) has an owl story--I am reminded of the fun Farley Mowat book Owls in the Family: About fifteen years ago I was on my way out of town to measure a job and was going pretty fast on our little northern motorway (Christchurch NZ) when out of the corner of my eye I spotted an injured bird on the roadside so I braked and reversed--yes I know it's illegal world wide--got out of the car and looked down at this pathetic creature glaring up at me. It was a small owl so I put it in a brown paper bag and continued on to do the measure up. Later back in town I took the owl into a pharmicist friend who I knew had an interest in such things. Marg said it looked pretty crook, it had a bung eye, a bung wing and a bung leg. She weighed it out at 130 grams and mixed an appropriate amount of penicillin for a daily dose and said to also give it a few drops of brandy or sherry each day AND IT MUST HAVE A MOUSE TWICE A WEEK. Back home we (me and boy children) put Anthea in a large old disused drawer with a hinged wire front and kept her upstairs in the boys room where most of her day was spent roosting (I think). She nearly died several times in the first ten days but then began to improve gradually. Every second day on the way home from work I would call at a pet shop, never the same one two days running--they might have smelled a rat (terrible pun I know). Me: Do you have any mice? Pet shop person: Yes, what would you like? A boy mouse or a girl mouse? What colour? What size? Me: (mumbling almost incoherently) I'm not too fussed. I hand over sixty cents and PSP puts mouse in paper bag and I hurry away, drive home and run upstairs and 'liberate' mouse inside Anthea's enclosure. Nothing happens for a few minutes until mouse begins with rustling sounds to explore the environment. Anthea on her perch comes to life looks down and immediately swells about twice her size and then drops down on prey and grabs with talons then spreading wings to hide what she's caught glares out at me. I learned eating prey is a very private matter and was never done under the gaze of anyone. After half an hour I could return to find Anthea back on perch looking full and with mouse tail extending down out of the corner of her mouth. This went on for seven weeks until Anthea was fully recovered and had nearly doubled her weight whereupon much to my wife's relief we released her (I mean Anthea) back into the wild. One day while I was buying a mouse the PSP ( a stern Dutch lady) asked if I already had a mouse at home and I in all innocence (and truth) said no. Well PSP immediately withdrew her hand from mouse cage and frostily informed me that she would not sell one mouse on its own since it would only die of lonelyness and cold. Who was I to argue so I had to buy two and look after one of the stinkers for another two days before feeding it to Anthea. Well there's my story and with certain embellishments to it I could make women at parties almost choke on their cocktails while the events were related, so now Eve it's your turn. Thanks so much to everyone who wrote in! Thursday, February 10, 2005
No one can move me the way that you do; Nothing erases this blogwatch between me and you... Nunblogging! (Via Dappled Things.) Church of the Masses: Hee! St. Peter of Damaskos' list of the virtues and the passions. Worth meditating on. Via Dappled Things, again. And: "A baby born weighing less than a soda can and believed to be the smallest ever to survive went home Tuesday after nearly six months in the hospital." Via the Old Oligarch. "The essence of the totalitarian mentality, whether it is religious or political, is the false promise of a system of all-explaining consistency: a worldview that accounts for everything and answers all questions. Some of us, by contrast, expect our views to be contradictory or at least to contain contradiction, and welcome the opportunity for further reflection and experiment this affords." --Christopher Hitchens, foreword to Choice: The Best of Reason. See now, I think this gets things exactly backwards. If you think your worldview should be consistent, you have much more reason to try to figure out the places where it appears to be contradictory. You have much more thinking and exploring to do than the person who accepts contradiction and can therefore relax and say, "Hey, I'm large, dude, I contain multitudes. What's for lunch?" I do think there are questions that aren't meant to be answered so much as lived through, accepted, or entered into: questions that are really mysteries. The sort of thing Thomas Aquinas meant when he said, "I have seen things that make all my writings as straw." But those mysteries are precisely the place where "experiment" ends and "reflection" begins to look very unlike ordinary point-by-point reasoning. Tuesday, February 08, 2005
ACLU CALLS FOR INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION INTO TORTURE CLAIMS: I don't endorse the other stuff in this press release, since I have not followed the whole Michael Chertoff thing at all. But this I can get behind: "The ACLU has called for a special counsel to investigate and prosecute any criminal acts by civilians in the torture or abuse of detainees by the U.S. government, saying that doing so is the only way to fairly, and independently, get to the bottom of the issue." Via How Appealing. THE FARM DOLE: 1. "Bush Is Said to Seek Sharp Cuts in Subsidy Payments to Farmers." Hardcore. 2. He fights for it: here. 3. Resistance; emphasis added: Statement of Charles Kruse, President of Missouri Farm Bureau, on farm spending reductions in President Bush's Budget "While we are still in the process of learning more about what reductions President Bush is proposing for agriculture in next year's budget, we are concerned about the impact of reduced federal funding on Missouri's farms and rural communities," said Charles Kruse, president of Missouri Farm Bureau. "In the past, there have been years in which government support payments were absolutely critical to the health of our state's agricultural economy. For example, in 2002 government payments comprised 71 percent of Missouri's net farm income. This underscores the importance of the current Farm Bill to farmers and rural America," said Kruse. "We believe the current Farm Bill has worked well to hold the line on costs, with government outlays for agriculture being below budget for the last three years." "On this day that we in Farm Bureau call Food Check Out Day, we are reminded of the affordable food supply the American farmer provides consumers, thanks in part to the economic stability provided by farm programs. It only takes the average American consumer 37 days to earn enough income to pay for their annual food supply, which translates into America spending the lowest percentage on food of any country in the world," said Kruse. "Missouri Farm Bureau will be working with our Congressional delegation in the months ahead as they write a new budget for 2006. We will find ways to keep American agriculture strong and capable of competing in the world economy. We will also remind the American public that thanks to efficiency and productivity of America's farmers and ranchers, we have the most abundant, safe and affordable food supply in the world," Kruse concluded. 4. Resistance and rebuttal: Ramesh Ponnuru lays the smack down on a subsidy defender. (Defender states the case for subsidies well, too, so it's a twofer.) Ramesh doesn't add three things I would say: a. One of the major reasons we've valued the cultural benefits of family farms is their independence. Subsidies kill that independence. b. (He gestures at this but doesn't close the deal:) Raising food prices is regressive, hurting the poor first and most. c. The government has no business picking winners and losers in economic interplays between e.g. farmers and food consumers. The government isn't good at it and shouldn't do it even if it did possess competence in this area. Read more of my growling at the Farm Dole blog--although for some reason I can't update that anymore. Still, if you putter around in the archives you will find good links and some arguments and...stuff. 'TIS NO SIN FOR A MAN TO LABOR IN HIS OBSESSION: Erika Singer writes with recommendations based on my post below. I did really like The Power and the Glory, although for whatever reason it didn't compel me as much as The Comedians and the beginning and end (but not the slack middle) of Brighton Rock.... You know, I'm thinking I should have added the figure of the "comedian" as another obsession. I always wished someone would do that post on humor and joking in Watchmen that I never did....: On the desire for greatness, self-understanding or lack thereof, and not being able to make your mind shut up, Kay Jamison's memoir An Unquiet Mind is good, and so is the movie Pi. CAN YOU FEEL THE LOVE TONIGHT: The Rat writes: "On your list of 'Magnificent Obsessions,' you forgot to include, making lists!" It's a fair cop. Monday, February 07, 2005
MAGNIFICENT OBSESSIONS: Lately I'm more likely to read mediocre books that hit on one or more of my obsessions than great books that don't. This is anything but a hard-and-fast rule--especially since great works remake our obsessions--but it's a noticeable shift, and not one of which I approve. I find myself engaging in a lot more of the author's misprision, a lot less of the reader's openness. Maybe that's what happens when you write a lot yourself. If so, okay, I will vulture others' writing for my own purposes. Still, I have a very hard time now with books that don't in some way slot themselves into my pre-existing fixations. So I thought it might be fun to list those fixations. I would greatly appreciate recommendations of books, movies, comics, etc. that touch on these subjects. In precisely no order: failure, and coping with failure complicity journalism people who can't make their minds shut up irrevocable acts self-image; preferring one's sense of oneself to any and all morality or (esp) comfort betrayal-for-the-good/man without a country/adherence to a moral code over and against all one's personal loyalties and all one's sense of self; attempting to maintain a sense of self after that choice. justice without mercy (desert); mercy evilescence clash between different sets of expectations: one character is shocked at what another takes for granted by any means necessary and its failures and discontents the desire for greatness; "and he had the idea to fly" I want, I want, I want unrequited, unfulfilled, rejected and refused (no matter how much desired) humiliation bright college years, with pleasure rife/the shortest, gladdest years of life sex that's really about self-image an effervescent homage to the subjunctive tense (e.g. self-fulfilling prophecies) he's so tired now Better extraordinarily late than extraordinarily never. friendship meta- as fiction realistic parenting faut de mieux repentance indomitability; but only if combined with repentance and ambition, not if there has been no fall from grace. inability to understand oneself I'VE GOT AN UNCONTROLLABLE URGE: Thought it might be fun--and perhaps useful for me as a writer--to list the things I keep doing, over and over, in stories. 1. overuse of words: I don't think I've written a story without using "pale" or (especially!) "blank" at least once. I blame Harold Bloom for the latter--go read his chapter on Emily Dickinson in The Western Canon, right now! I know one of the reasons I like "Grosse Pointe Blank" is that last word in the title. I do think I've gotten a handle on my overuse of "attenuated" though. 2. I associate generosity, especially material generosity, with lying. The two characters who do this most obviously are Jamie Cantalamessa and Justin Harlowe, but I know in my mental templates of characters I make this connection frequently. I think it has something to do with attempting to meet others' needs and expectations. I note that Jamie and Justin are both youngest children (as am I); Ratty (also a youngest child) at one point speculated that youngest children are more likely to be instinctive liars, and I think that's right. She suggested it might be because we entered into a family world, a political structure if you like (cf. SRD's comment that you need to have at least three children, "so there can be factionalism"), which we had no part in creating and which it was easier to work around than to reshape. I'd welcome other thoughts on this stuff, as birth order is one of my (many...) obsessions. 3. None of my characters ever drink gin. That's because I can't help tasting any food or drink I describe, and I really hate the taste of gin. ("Gin! gin! a glass of gin!/And all the demons therewithin!") 4. For some reason, I've twice written the "Sorry I'm late"/"You're not late--I'm early" exchange. And the early person is always the villain of the piece. This is one of those things that make me suspect I really don't understand how my own mind works. 5. I write about the sea, or large bodies of water, all the time--weirdly often, given that D.C. is, like, landlocked. The sea is almost always bad: It's generally somehow linked to relativism, or to abdication of responsibility. "Kissable Pictures" is an exception, as is a story I haven't posted, "Nicorette," in which Rehoboth Beach plays a supporting role. FORTY WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR LENT. Via Dappled Things. Will definitely be doing some of these--most likely #2, some variant on #s 6 and 8, #10, #14, #16 (will also be watching "The Mission"), #18, #25 (desperately needed--I have NO skill at making my mind shut up), and #34. Also hope to do those items on the list that you should be doing anyway! WILD KINGDOM: So after Noli Irritare Leones posted on the continuing vulture crisis, I dreamt about those wonderful carrion birds. I dreamt that a full-grown vulturiffic beastie made its way to a small tree outside the Chevy Chase Library. It ate another, smaller bird (which I'm not sure if they do?), and was then joined by an incredibly cute vulture chick, the Nermal to its Garfield. Awwww. (Admit it: You could have predicted that I would have a thing for vultures. I think they're super cool.) Other animals I like: wolves; squid, especially giant squid; crows (which convinced the priest who did my RCIA, a.k.a. "Special K," that I needed an exorcisin'); cats of all sizes, from lion to tabby; birds of prey generally, owls and hawks (saw a hawk at Yale that had captured a squirrel! so exciting!) and whatnot. Not so much: dolphins (think they're better than us); dogs. My debating society has a theory that cats are the libertarian animal, dogs the traditionalist animal. I report, you decide.... mood: random, obviously. Sunday, February 06, 2005
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