Broshaq

2009-04-17T06:59:00.002-05:00

If Cheney agrees to undergo any of these procedures, then I promise I will never mention the proper-name "Bush" ever again. Warning: the level of acknowledged hypocrisy in the above link is breathtaking. Read Glenn Greenwald for complete info on the newly released torture memos.

Googlebombing Amazon

2009-04-13T11:19:00.002-05:00

Amazon.com has decided to de-list the rankings of "adult books". Problem is, they've included books featuring gay characters under the adult category even if they don't have any actual sexual content. So repost the following, we'll googlebomb Amazon, they'll realize their mistake, blah blah blah:

Amazon Rank

2009-03-22T00:47:00.002-05:00

Here's a very enjoyable interview with the travel writer Rick Steves, whom I have always liked.

Wait, is this for real?

2009-03-10T22:23:00.005-05:00

[Chuck] Norris claims that, "Thousands of cell groups will be united around the country in solidarity over the concerns for our nation.” The right wing cells will meet during a live telecast, "We Surround Them," on Friday March 13 at 5 p.m."

2009-02-28T08:45:00.002-05:00

Haven't been on much, I know. Terribly hectic time and will be for the next 3 months or so, I'm afraid.

Here's Keith Richards singing "All I Have to Do is Dream".

2009-02-13T17:12:00.000-05:00

A rose by any other name...

2009-02-03T20:44:00.001-05:00

Oh, give me a break.

2009-02-01T22:47:00.003-05:00

It's not often that I use the term lol, but this video of baseball great George Brett is the funniest thing I've seen in a year. Warning: this is extremely juvenile.

2009-02-01T15:31:00.002-05:00

The new Prime minister of Iceland is the "modern world's first openly gay leader".

2009-01-22T08:26:00.002-05:00

Steven Pinker on the "Gotcha Gang" of self-identified 'Grammar Nazis'. That, along with self-identifying as a 'perfectionist' or a 'nerd' is one of my biggest turn-offs...

Refreshing...

2009-01-21T09:00:00.002-05:00

Regardless of your opinions about Obama, it is a great relief to no longer have a stupid, criminal thug in charge of the government.

2009-01-19T02:24:00.013-05:00

I've always thought that George Plimpton was the poor man's Gore Vidal, but after watching this little interview with Plimpton I think that Plimpton is instead Gore Vidal without the mammoth self-regard. Doesn't make Gore Vidal the lesser writer, of course, but I think I'd rather have gone for drinks with George Plimpton than with Vidal. The latter is still possible, but given Vidal's current Vonnegutian state of repeating himself over and over again I think any meeting would be disappointing.

The interviewer in the little piece linked to above is not extremely, but noticeably, awkward, and this reminded me of what makes the interviewers that I like really good. You never want to feel that an interviewer is uncomfortable; you want them to be honest when they are at a loss, but you expect a certain decorum and more importantly capability at all times. This is what, in my opinion, makes the Charlie Rose show so consistently fun to watch and this is the kind of interviewer Tavis Smiley has grown into over the years. Here's Charlie Rose's interview w/Plimpton (skip to about 7 or 8 minutes in). If the role of the interviewer is the ideal stand-in interlocutor for oneself--she's read up on the recent work and life of the subject etc. and is not overawed by speaking with the subject--then I pick Charlie or Tavis. (I should point out that on political issues Charlie Rose often falls short, whereas Tavis Smiley is somewhat better.)

2009-01-19T00:08:00.003-05:00

I'm sure some of you have tried this before, but I've found that an extremely fun little game one can play by oneself is to imagine being "abducted" (there must be a better word that doesn't have the negative connotations) by aliens and attempting to communicate with them (this is in a non-Star Trek-universe without the universal language capabilities that show implies). I'd start from pronouns, I guess, indicating the 1st, 2nd and 3rd persons singular and plural, then moving to verbs. Their physiology might affect your illustration--what if they don't "walk", for instance? Fun, fun. Quine spent lots of time doing this or something like it. You could, and in practice (!) almost certainly would have to take it to the non-verbal level, which is something Carl Sagan was interested in, but the verbal version is pretty good on its own.

A few things...

2009-01-18T17:49:00.003-05:00

Here's a brief and, to me at least, oddly optimistic recent interview with Finkelstein. A great song I somehow only just discovered: Waterloo Sunset (you can disregard the video--a silly montage of pics and album covers). A renewed recommendation of the Independent and the Guardian (see sidebar), this time for their reporting on Israel/Gaza.

Reading of Martial and Aeschylus continues unabated, or at worst only somewhat abated. Cincinnati is cold and was colder. I am more enthused right now about the day off tomorrow than I am about the inauguration the day after that.

Double Standards

2009-01-08T15:58:00.005-05:00

When a police officer kills someone for no reason, we are all expected to show understanding and give him the benefit of the doubt, but when a police officer is in the midst of a crowd of people who may or may not be dangerous, he is not obliged to show us the benefit of the doubt. The media will always side with the police officer:

"The protests began peacefully about 3:30 p.m. with about 500 people gathering at the Fruitvale station where the shooting occurred last week, Thomason said.

Soon, a group of about 150 protesters surrounded a police officer. Fearing for his safety, Thomason said, 'the decision was made to use chemical agents to protect that police officer.'

The crowd calmed down, but then a contingent of protesters turned violent again, smashing windows and setting cars on fire, he said. Police tried to disperse the crowd and warned five times that anyone who didn't leave would be arrested."

So, if a group of citizens were surrounded by police officers and decided to preemptively attack them even though the police officers were peaceful, would CNN report on it the same way? Oh wait, we would be the "rioters" referred to in the article. A fascist is a fascist...

2009-01-04T14:09:00.001-05:00

Some more sanity in re of Israel's assault on Gaza, this time from Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com.

Spending time...

2009-01-04T11:43:00.007-05:00

Well, maybe that's a too-kind way to put it, but OK, I've been spending a lot of time at the website of music critic Robert Christgau recently. I most certainly don't agree with him all the time (read the reviews of Tom Waits e.g.), but his capsule reviews are like candy or Frito Lay chips--you can't read just one. And when he does unequivocally rave about something, you can be pretty sure it's at least worth a listen. Christgau's review of Eminem's Marshall Mathers LP (he gets it) is exemplary.

(I should point out that Christgau uses the Graduate School grading system on his website: i.e. the worst you can even reasonably get is a B-, and anything lower means you shouldn't even be trying.)

2009-01-02T17:33:00.004-05:00

Activist and author Ali Abunimah hits the nail on the head about the double standards of American liberals when it comes to Israel.

This article from the Independent that Abunimah links to also gives a vivid illustration of the breathtaking disingenuousness of the media and Western governments on this issue.

On a personal note, I went to an ostensibly very progressive liberal arts college in the Midwest, and I remember my visceral disgust at hearing a nearby diner in the cafeteria earnestly voice his regret over the peace process (which was then seeming to some revivified by the unilateral withdrawal of the IDF from Gaza): "Now I won't ever have the chance to kill any Palestinians."

More discouraging Obama news...

2009-01-02T16:16:00.000-05:00

Hard to see how this isn't a move towards the militarization of space.

2009-01-01T01:15:00.005-05:00

'The Blue Mask' by Lou Reed is, I only just realized, one of the best rock albums I've ever heard.

5 other albums I fell in love with this past year:

Rain Dogs by Tom Waits
Maggot Brain by Funkadelic
Adventure by Television
The Modern Dance by Pere Ubu
The Rich Man's 8-Track Tape by Big Black

When I was twelve or thirteen, I took guitar lessons from a guy named Bryce Janey. I would go to what I thought of as his house (this was before I realized that people lived in apartments normally) and he would show me blues licks. One day when we were playing, a woman came to the door. Bryce put the song Gloria (of Van Morrison and Patti Smith fame) on his stereo, told me to play along to it, and went to talk to her. It took me ten years to realize how formative that experience was.

2008-12-29T09:13:00.003-05:00

It seems dishonest to me to report simply, as the major news outlets are doing, that Israel's current attacks are "retaliatory". Certainly even the major media have the obligation to consider the disjunction between this claim and the fact that 1) the attacks have been in planning for 6 months and 2) the attacks are coming just prior to Israeli elections. These considerations don't necessarily render "retaliation" an impossible motive, but they certainly complicate what are by now well-worn media tropes--the "unbreakable cycle of violence" and the "tragic situation of Israel and the Palestinians".* The BBC article--the second of those linked to above--is a very odd piece of reporting, in that it repeatedly refers to views of "the Palestinians" without any attempt at attribution, and what is more, it makes reference to the notion that Obama is or is seen as more friendly to the Palestinian cause than is Bush, an idea which in light of Obama's campaign planks, advisors, and public comments since his election seems totally baseless.

*I would point out that these tropes make journalism on the conflict that much easier--if none of the events have their own particular history, then all a reporter has to do is modify the dates on the same potted article and then punch in the names of current world political figures next to their quotations (which seem always to be substantially the same).

Final Scene of The Incredible Hulk

2008-12-27T16:55:00.002-05:00

In keeping with the Nick Nolte theme established below, I give to you the outstanding final scene of the horrible Ang Lee version of The Incredible Hulk. Things get good at about 2:39.

Home Alone - Final Scene

2008-12-27T16:50:00.001-05:00

As George Costanza said after watching this movie: "The old man got to me!"

Returns

2008-12-26T11:02:00.002-05:00

Sorry for the long hiatus; UC is on winter break right now, and I've been taking the opportunity to get some academic and house work as well as traveling done. I'm working my way through Martial, some Greek epigrams and the tragedies of Aeschylus and trying to get a conference paper whipped into shape for April while I have the time. The house was a disaster area, but I managed at least to make it orderly again. I went to Chicago for what turned out to be a long weekend, as my bus was intercepted by the swath of awful weather that hit the Midwest and Northeast on Tuesday. I'm thinking of writing a post burning Megabus, not because they could have done anything about the weather, but because the earliest they could re-book was the day after Christmas. As it happened, I managed to get on a Greyhound for Cincinnati in time to spend a very pleasant Christmas here. Hope you all had/are having safe holidays unimpeded by the weather. I'll try and get back to regular posting...

2008-12-18T03:17:00.001-05:00

You guys will find this tendency in other bands, but something I most love about Zappa and the Feelies is the ability to leave a great hook alone.

Is it just me or

2008-12-16T16:09:00.003-05:00

does anyone else stop listening when someone starts a sentence with the words, "Moving forward..."?

Night and Day...

2008-12-15T19:37:00.004-05:00

There are journalists, and then there are journalists. The second guy has hereby done more for the causes of peace and justice than many Nobel prize-winners.

Nick Nolte: Totally Bananas

2008-12-06T09:09:00.001-05:00

I think Nick Nolte watched Lorenzo's Oil a few too many times. This and the end of Ang Lee's The Hulk pretty much confirm him as absolutely insane.

"He's taking a baby aspirin, to prevent heart disease."

Responsibility

2008-11-30T10:07:00.001-05:00

In certain other countries, there's still a quaint notion that politicians should actually be expected to do their jobs properly or else face consequences.

2008-11-30T00:55:00.000-05:00

This is a great and wide-ranging interview with the guitarist Robert Quine.

Pere Ubu

2008-11-30T00:31:00.002-05:00

A musical night... David Thomas's gesticulations are great.

Talking Heads - The Big Country

2008-11-29T23:23:00.001-05:00

Recommendations abound...

Recommendation

2008-11-29T23:12:00.003-05:00

Most of you will know Television because of their fundamental album Marquee Moon. I just want to say that the second of their two albums, Adventure, makes for great listening as well.

The Jam - That's Entertainment

2008-11-28T15:48:00.001-05:00

2008-11-26T08:59:00.001-05:00

I am unable to understand the meaning of this article.

Erinnerung an die Marie A.

2008-11-25T23:30:00.006-05:00

1
An jenem Tag im blauen Mond September
Still unter einem jungen Pflaumenbaum
Da hielt ich sie, die stille bleiche Liebe
In meinem Arm wie einen holden Traum.
Und über uns im schönen Sommerhimmel
War eine Wolke, die ich lange sah
Sie war sehr weiß und ungeheuer oben
Und als ich aufsah, war sie nimmer da.

2
Seit jenem Tag sind viele, viele Monde
Geschwommen still hinunter und vorbei
Die Pflaumenbäume sind wohl abgehauen
Und fragst du mich, was mit der Liebe sei?
So sag ich dir: Ich kann mich nicht erinnern.
Und doch, gewiß, ich weiß schon, was du meinst
Doch ihr Gesicht, das weiß ich wirklich nimmer
Ich weiß nur mehr: Ich küsste es dereinst.

3
Und auch den Kuss, ich hätt' ihn längst vergessen
Wenn nicht die Wolke da gewesen wär
Die weiß ich noch und werd ich immer wissen
Sie war sehr weiß und kam von oben her.
Die Pflaumenbäume blühn vielleicht noch immer
Und jene Frau hat jetzt vielleicht das siebte Kind
Doch jene Wolke blühte nur Minuten
Und als ich aufsah, schwand sie schon im Wind.

~Bertolt Brecht, 1920

---

This poem is used to great effect in the movie Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others). I'll try and track down a good translation since I can't do it justice myself.

Brecht manages to evoke very precisely how ephemeral, and finally how forgettable moments of true joy always seem to be, while emphasizing the very beauty and fragility of one of these moments in the form of a poem. This is one of those poems that actually derives a great deal of its force by calling attention to its own status as an artifact: the moment is as ephemeral as a cloud disappearing into the wind, but the poem itself is durable and captures a certain image and moment in such a way that we can reflect upon it. Moments like the one the poem describes are fraught with a feeling of anxiety precisely because one knows they are going to come to an end and one does not have the luxury of contemplation; Brecht's poem captures that moment at the same time as it frees us from that anxiety.

Condescension

2008-11-22T21:42:00.004-05:00

I don't hear this much anymore, but remember how every now and then back in high school someone would take your arm and say "I'll pray for you"? And don't you get sick of hearing people say they "tolerate" people who don't share their beliefs? Well, this just brought back that sick sensation of disgust that I used to have in place of the utter lack of interest that I have eased into over the past several years.

2008-11-22T11:21:00.001-05:00

A collection of photos from the city of Prypiat, which was abandoned after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

Political theatre...

2008-11-21T20:09:00.002-05:00

I was reading a functionalist account of ritual yesterday (yeah), and realized that if you consider one of the effects of civic ritual to be the creation of "solidarity without consensus", then Barack Obama's campaign and election are a textbook example of civic ritual/political theatre in action. His recent cabinet choices only confirm my view on this...

Progress

2008-11-10T07:44:00.000-05:00

This is pretty cool.

2008-11-09T23:17:00.002-05:00

Stomach-turning:

2008-11-08T19:06:00.002-05:00

The more I read by and about Thomas Friedman, the less able I am to understand how anyone can possibly think anything he says is in any way worthwhile.

2008-11-07T00:40:00.001-05:00

Goodbye politics of hate. (No, this is not 1992.)

I shaved! and voted!

2008-11-04T08:03:00.008-05:00

Well, as this not-very-high-quality image shows, I have shaved off my beard (again). Also, the indistinct red blob on my shirt that I'm pointing to is a sticker attesting that I indeed voted this morning. There was no line at all, which was convenient for me. At first the ladies didn't want to let me vote because they didn't like my id, but an election worker came by and straightened everything out and since I was on the books they let me through. Just as I got there an Obama campaign worker who looked like he knew what he was doing showed up to monitor everything at my precinct. As lackluster as the Democratic party is, it's hard not to feel a little bit excited by the prospect of the US not being the laughing stock/bete noire of the world anymore!

Mr. Show - The Roar of the Lion

2008-11-01T20:48:00.001-05:00

Devastating.

The 2 Cultures

2008-10-27T06:59:00.003-05:00

A rare science-related post today: the Guardian has an audio discussion of the famous and fascinating "Antikythera" device.

You feel inadequate

2008-10-26T00:17:00.005-05:00

Hearing and watching Robert Pinsky recite some of his poems at UC this past week was truly inspiring and at the same time reminded me of how much there is to know/do/work on that any of one's waking hours could be devoted to. He ended with his beautiful translation of the end of Dante's Paradiso and began with his somewhat Pound-like Samurai Song. By the way, Pinsky's enunciation when he reads is wonderfully expressive. Also, he aggressively engaged the audience, made jokes, told stories, explained the psychological background to some of his poems and did it all in way that seemed natural in spite of the fact that he is obviously a practiced speaker.

Oh Yoko!

2008-10-25T22:35:00.001-05:00

Everly Brothers - All I have to do is dream + Cathy's Clown

2008-10-24T02:24:00.002-05:00

This is everything. I should also point out that Keith Richards' version of this song is simply excellent.

There should be more people...

2008-10-20T23:41:00.005-05:00

... like Manu Chao.

Prostitution and Art

2008-10-20T18:05:00.036-05:00

Yeah, I thought that title would grab you. A few months ago I had an argument (when I say argument I don't mean the angry kind of argument, but the dialectic kind): A friend of mine who is an artist mentioned that a close friend of hers was using a sexual relationship with the editor of a magazine as a way of getting his work published/noticed. I said that I thought that if one did that it would be difficult to respect oneself or one's work--whether one ended up achieving success or not--since one wouldn't have gotten where one got on the strength of one's work.

My friend, who maintained that she was not being serious and was just making the case for the sake of argument, said that she would not have a problem--in principle--with using her sexuality to achieve greater exposure for her work. At first, I vehemently disagreed with her on the grounds that such an attitude would destroy any idea of serious aesthetic standards and replace them with a sordid quid pro quo. But the more we talked about what was at stake in the discussion, the more I realized that I was disagreeing with her from personal bias and prudery than anything else.

Let me explain what I mean: for most of recorded history artistic "success" has meant, in material terms, the financial patronage of the wealthy. There have always been loads of artisans/artists around and there are quite a few exceptions to the general rule, but the ones whose names get remembered (at least up to the 20th century) are most often the ones who have drawn the attention of really elite patrons. Even in the 20th century this model has held for the vast majority of "recognized" artists (any of the Pop artists make a great example). The models are different depending on the way the art is distributed (so the novelist will have to find a publisher rather than collector, e.g.) but mutatis mutandis the situation, I would venture, is similar across the board. The point is, if we wanted to be really rigorous about analyzing the way certain art and certain artists are promoted, and we were hoping to reach some kind of pure aesthetic meritocracy, our major point of departure would not be some kind of personal incident like a painter sleeping with a collector, but rather the general conditions of consumption and dissemination of works of art (we don't have time to go all Marxist on that just now). Even a thorough-going philosophical Marxist like Trotsky agreed that aesthetic value cannot be reduced to the equations of class-struggle. For my part, as a classicist, I am constantly confronted with great works of art whose ideological presumptions are, by 20th century standards, quite repulsive, and yet I am able to recognize their aesthetic value as somehow transcending the particular socio-historical situation that produced the work.

So here's where prudery comes in: great art can be and very often is made in conditions which privilege the interests and aesthetic sensibilities of the ruling class, but an artist in such a situation must in some sense engage in a kind of witting or unwitting ideological prostitution. The important thing however is that even if his or her work is in some way conditioned by the fact of ideological compromise, it is not reducible to it. The Aeneid is not just a piece of Augustan propaganda. But if ideological prostitution can be countenanced, why not physical prostitution? The former necessarily affects the work of art itself, while the latter can simply be a vehicle to gain a wider audience for one's art. The different responses that the two provoke can only be due, I think, to the fact that physical prostitution strikes most of us as so debasing and shameful that we cannot, or more likely, are unwilling, to concede that a person "successful" by any reasonable standard could at the same time engage in such an activity.

Now, this last is not necessarily wrong: certainly it would be profoundly reactionary to suggest that a woman sleeping her way up the corporate food-chain is an example of "success". But in the art world, things are somewhat different: male artists who have used their sexuality to further their careers are more numerous than their corporate counterparts, I would suggest, precisely because women have exercised power in the art world for much longer and to a much greater degree than in the corporate world. Picasso's sexual charisma was, without a doubt, an integral part of his advancement as an artist. If you've read the "Andy Warhol Diaries" (which you should do) you'll see the weird kind of quasi-sexual infatuation the ridiculously rich and famous had with an almost avowedly asexual artist who presented them with exactly the image they desired (Warhol's 80's work provides a strange affirmation of the ideal that "all art has value", in that it shows in distinct relief the decadence of the US and Europe in the 1980s). The famous collector Peggy Guggenheim, who carried on affairs with many of the artists she patronized, is a good modern example of the interplay of sex and art; I'm sure the art historians out there can come up with lots of collectors who had similar relationships with their clients. The point is, however, that Peggy Guggenheim's collection is one of the best in the world. Sure, the artists she slept with might not have done it had she not been a fabulously wealthy patroness, but by the same token she wouldn't have slept with them had they not been, at least in her opinion, great artists.

Ultimately, my point is definitely not that prostitution is a legitimate way for anyone to advance his or her career. The reason I bring it up is that when I got into this argument with my friend, my opinion was at first very firm. What I finally realized was that it stemmed on the one hand from a certain level of prudery, and on the other from a very visceral, personal feeling that regardless of any abstract argument, I did not want my friend to engage in what she was theoretically defending. So, no conclusion really, except that that transcendent aesthetic meritocracy does not, and will never exist, and to allow yourself to imagine that anything like it does, could, or even should exist is deeply misguided. If you made it through all that, then I hope you at least found some food for thought.

***A footnote to this entire post could read:
cp. Plato's Symposium.

Poets Laureate I've Seen...

2008-10-20T17:49:00.005-05:00

Well, right now, none, and though the Bush administration has made any such post seem increasingly distasteful,* I'm thrilled that on Wednesday I'll get to put one notch on the wall above my bed representing--confusingly--not a romantic conquest but a (former) poet laureate of the US that I've seen read his work. Robert Pinsky is visiting UC this week for a reading/signing/Q&A. As the UC press release noted, he's the only poet laureate to have been in an episode of the Simpsons. I'm excited.

*The president doesn't actually appoint the PL or anything (it would be interesting if he did), but even so...

Addendum...

2008-10-17T08:32:00.000-05:00

Maybe I was obscure in my post below: for the record, I wasn't comparing myself the elderly woman in either of the poems. I am not like an elderly woman. Don't worry.

"This is all we get, you know?"

2008-10-15T07:26:00.010-05:00

The above was said to me once about youth, and the importance of not squandering it. While no one will say that youth ought to be squandered, what constitutes squandering or savoring youth is a perennial topic of argument, and it was in the course of such an argument that I was told, "this is all we get, you know?"

I'm not such an open book that I'm going to explain the precise circumstances and details of the argument that got me thinking of the following poems; instead, I attach them for your consideration:

Edna St. Vincent Millay
Sonnet XLIII

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply;
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands a lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet know its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

~~~~~

And another one, from Horace, on a very similar theme but written from a different point of view. Horace is usually good for observations about the irrevocability of past time and savoring the moment and all that. I'll attach a decidedly semi-poetic translation of my own for the non-Latined:

Horace
Odes 1.25

Parcius iunctas quatiunt fenestras*
iactibus crebris iuvenes protervi,
nec tibi somnos adimunt, amatque
ianua limen,

quae prius multum facilis movebat
cardines. Audis minus et minus iam:
"Me tuo longas pereunte noctes
Lydia dormis?"

Invicem moechos anus arrogantis
flebis in solo levis angiportu,
Thracio bacchante magis sub inter-
lunia vento,

cum tibi flagrans amor et libido,
quae solet matres furiare equorum,
saeviet circa iecur ulcerosum,
non sine questu

laeta quod pubes hedera virenti
gaudeat pulla magis atque myrto,
aridas frondes hiemis sodali
dedicet Euro.

Less often now do bold young men
with constant pounding strike your door,
nor are you now deprived of sleep;
your door which once swung

easily open, loves its frame. Less and less
do you now hear, "Lydia, will you sleep
while through long nights I languish,
I who am yours?"

A slight old woman you in turn shall cry
over haughty lovers in some lonely alleyway
when the moon is not yet new
and the wind gusts violently.

When burning longing and desire,
which causes mares in heat to rave,
rage around your wounded heart,
then you will lament

that happy youth rejoices more
in virid ivy and dark myrtle,
and to the East Wind--Winter's friend--
offers up the withered leaves.

*fenestras, of course, are windows, but we don't really knock on windows and the more contemporary image of throwing pebbles at the window would be anachronistic for Horace, ridiculous, and difficult to fit into such a short stanza.

Go Home!

2008-10-13T17:35:00.002-05:00

I'm not very impressed with people who come into school or work when they are very ill. You've probably seen this person around, coughing like John Keats and processing several cubic feet of phlegm through his or her nose per hour.

Some points:
1) It's extremely inconsiderate of the people in your workplace. They run a greater risk of catching what you've got and your disgusting noise-making disrupts their work.
2) It's detrimental to your own health: you should be in bed with a bowl of soup and a glass of orange juice.
3) It's pointless: we have Xerox machines, telephones, e-mail and internet resources which mean that our ties to any particular physical place are considerably smaller than they were in the past. If you're an academic, is it really that hard to take an hour, photocopy or print out articles and check out the books you need and then politely retire to your own house?
4) It's positively stupid: when you're sick, you're working at decreased productivity, and if you come into work rather than taking care of yourself, you're prolonging that state of reduced productivity, yielding at best a net gain of zero.

So GO HOME, or, failing that, get away from me. I do the same for you when I get sick. Quite simply, not imposing yourself on the world when you're in that state is part of being a functioning adult. And if you're a self-identified "workaholic", then don't even get me started.

big black - kerosene

2008-10-10T18:55:00.001-05:00

Since we were getting all sappy yesterday, here's an antidote.

The Muppet Show: When I Grow Too Old To Dream

2008-10-09T21:30:00.001-05:00

More sentimentality.

Back to the Future - Earth Angel

2008-10-09T21:18:00.002-05:00

One of my favorite movie scenes.

If you haven't seen Back to the Future, then this won't make much sense. But if you haven't seen Back to the Future, then you have serious problems.

A great song...

2008-10-09T21:08:00.003-05:00

Here's Kermit the Frog and Linda Ronstadt singing the famous song All I Have to do is Dream. Just so you know: the link will take you directly to an mp3, which should load without trouble on any decently up-to-date computer, but if you're on a dial-up, forget about it. And no, there isn't supposed to be any video.

A pretty good point, actually:

2008-10-09T17:59:00.003-05:00

Now that the IMF is talking about stepping in to help ease the financial crisis, will they enforce their usual rules on the governments they help out?:

"We were just talking about that this morning on the floor," said Congressman Edwin Castro, who heads the leftist Sandinista congressional bloc in Nicaragua. "We think the Bush administration should follow the same policies that they and the International Monetary Fund have always told us to follow when we have economic problems — a structural adjustment that requires cutting government spending and reducing the role of government."

Today's Picture

2008-10-07T22:03:00.007-05:00

Note the intense concentration. And the burly shoulders. If you click the image, you'll see a full-color quasi-daguerreotype version.

Innerspace

2008-10-07T17:19:00.001-05:00

In the same spirit as the post below, but the inverse: Deepest ever living fish on film.

13 billion years ago...

2008-10-07T07:09:00.003-05:00

... the universe looked like this. Note the exposure time on that image: 11.3 days.

McCain's only chance...

2008-10-06T19:25:00.002-05:00

... would seem to be to wait until about Oct. 25th or so, then flood the airwaves with ads featuring Rev. Wright. It could happen...

Album art...

2008-10-05T09:57:00.005-05:00

Brian Eno
Here Come the Warm Jets

Great cover, great album. Turn your speakers way up and click here.

The Debate

2008-10-03T08:09:00.002-05:00

I was hoping for more of Sarah Palin's trademark moments of incoherence, but even failing that Biden mopped the floor with her. Like him or not (and I really don't like him) he's an intelligent guy who obviously has a good grasp on a wide range of policy issues. She's a nobody from Alaska who's never been curious about any of this stuff until a month ago. It's at least comforting to know that after Nov. 4 we will never have to see or hear from her ever again.

Fall

2008-10-02T08:49:00.002-05:00

Because I first read it in October of my freshman year of college, this time of year always reminds me of Joyce's Dubliners. Quite a pleasant association, actually.

John McCain is a really mean guy

2008-10-01T08:18:00.003-05:00

Here's a video of John McCain getting all poopy-pants when the editor of the Des Moines Register calls him out for the obscene number of outright lies he's been telling recently. McCain and his campaign are a joke. Stick a fork in him.

Pass This On - The Knife

2008-10-01T08:14:00.001-05:00

A great music video for a great song.

Analogies...

2008-10-01T00:21:00.004-05:00

So, it seems that the economy is essentially doing what I did when I was in a really bad mood last summer: i.e. lying on my futon drinking beer and listening to Big Black albums.

Macworld Boston 1997-The Microsoft Deal

2008-09-29T20:53:00.003-05:00

I ran across this old gem from back in the days when I was still a serious Mac enthusiast. (Although I still use a Mac, I couldn't care less anymore, just for the record.) This is from the annual Mac Expo in 1997 when Steve Jobs announced that Microsoft would basically be bailing the company out of an impossible financial position. I post it because, honestly, how many annual conventions held by companies feature thunderous booing? Certainly a fine piece of 1990's nostalgia.

On a related note, here's an interesting web-based emulation of the old MacOS: my-old-macintosh.de

A thought for the day...

2008-09-29T10:29:00.001-05:00

"A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have an emotion without paying for it." -- Oscar Wilde

When white people break the law...

2008-09-29T10:07:00.000-05:00

Somehow I think that if Reverend Wright's church were involved in a farce like "Pulpit Freedom Sunday" the IRS wouldn't be quite as lenient as it is sure to be in the case of white, mostly southern evangelical churches.

Is this the U.S. Congress or the Board of Directors at Goldman Sachs! Dennis Kucinich

2008-09-29T10:05:00.001-05:00

I think that the most reasonable voices I've yet heard regarding the current financial situation have been those of Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader. I guess I forgot: for some reason neither of them is considered "serious".

Sick day

2008-09-29T09:44:00.003-05:00

I'm out sick today, so I'm cooking up some soup and preparing to hunker down with Aeschylus and Pliny the Younger for ther est of the day. I had a thought as I was going to the store earlier get provisions: why is it that commentators sometimes point to the increase in number of cars and decrease in number of bikes on China's roads as a sign of progress? I heard this a number of times from correspondents covering the Beijing Olympics. In precisely what sense is the widespread adoption of an environmentally deleterious mode of transportation that is on its tardy way out a sign of progress? Is it just that the industrialized West views emulation of its own history on the part of the developing world as the only feasible model of progress? Anyway, time to convalesce.

I'm Alan Partridge S2E1 Pt.1

2008-09-28T22:27:00.001-05:00

How is it that I was unaware of Steve Coogan until just a couple of months ago?

Facts of questionable utility...

2008-09-28T15:41:00.003-05:00

Mathematicians have just discovered a new prime number that is about 13 million digits in length. Aside from the obvious curiosity factor that makes such things intrinsically interesting, can anyone tell me what the point is in finding new prime numbers?

Ahh, you don't understand what words mean...

2008-09-25T22:15:00.005-05:00

I've been bemused the past several days by various politicians warning, well, all of us I guess, against "politicizing" the current economic crisis. Isn't this sort of thing a big part of what politics is all about?

As a side note, is it somewhat odd that JP Morgan/Chase is the default buyer of any finance outfit seized by the federal government (Bear Stearns and WaMu so far)? Is it that they're the only solid bank left out there, or is it that they're carrying on the great legacy of JP Morgan himself by profiting while the entire economy goes down the tubes?

I'm as surprised as you are...

2008-09-24T20:18:00.002-05:00

I just got back from a run.

I just got back from a run.

The K-5 "Market"

2008-09-23T17:14:00.006-05:00

Funny how long it sometimes takes to become aware of certain ideas which, once you've heard about them, seem totally obvious. For instance, banning all advertising aimed at children. Young children never have a source of income--allowance from the 'rents ain't buying any of the toys or cereals featured in children's commercials, and paper routes are for older kids. If they don't have the money, the only possible reason for the advertising is--it doesn't take a genius--to exercise against parents the sometimes devastating leverage that only a whining child really can possess.

Lowering Expectations...

2008-09-23T12:33:00.005-05:00

You know the large scale infrastructure spending that Obama has been saying he will undertake to get the economy working again? Don't hold your breath.

Also, Henry Paulson is A) a Bush appointee, not an elected official, and B) a former banker with Goldman Sachs. So, my question is, why should anybody believe that he is acting for the good of anyone but the super-rich? I think that this is in no way an unwarranted or immature question at this point. It seems like the very same people who would say that individuals don't deserve any help in their lives from the state are now saying that private institutions do deserve the same kind of help. They are too big to fail, and they want to take away the safety net of those of us who are "small enough" to fail in order to pay for it.

Bailout

2008-09-21T16:14:00.006-05:00

I have to say that I don't understand the ins and outs of the so-called "bailout" of the financial sector that is being pushed through congress right now with seemingly as little resistance as transparency. That notwithstanding, the whole thing brings to mind Chomsky's old saying that America is governed by a single business party with a liberal and a conservative wing. If you've read any of Paulson's statements forestalling judicial oversight over what he might do in the course of addressing the crisis, you can't help but be concerned that this will turn out to be another ill-conceived Bush administration debacle that will at best help a tiny segment of the population.

Matthew Dickman

2008-09-21T14:04:00.006-05:00

Usually poems grab me first by the way the poet handles meter and creates an engaging rhythm, then by the way that rhythm interweaves with the movement of the ideas evoked by individual words, lines, then stanzas. This is one of the reasons I usually don't go for "prosy"-poets like Billy Collins, to pick a really commercial example. So, I was a little surprised at how a poem by Matthew Dickman called "Trouble" started to grow on me after several readings. There is no regular meter so far as I can tell, nor is there much rhythm in the words themselves, but Dickman establishes a kind of rhythm of ideas by juxtaposing brief accounts of famous suicides with banal observations about trivial things. The banalities are all enjambed, so that you're left hanging for a moment in a kind of weird suspense that isn't suspense. The intervals between these jarring juxtapositions are varied, too, so that you get a kind of lilting "rhythm" in the thought, rather than in the words themselves.

I'd print the poem on the blog itself, but I wonder if there aren't some kind of copyright rules about that sort of thing. Not a big deal since the New Yorker's archives are free online. I've found that they often carry good new poetry.

The Subtext of Babar

2008-09-21T10:07:00.005-05:00

When I was a kid, the Babar books held a privileged place alongside first Dr. Seuss, then later Shel Silverstein, Berenstain Bears (remember when people you knew would pronounce that name as if the bears were a Jewish family?), and a very few other books. This week's New Yorker carries a well-illustrated piece discussing the elephant's possible political subtexts. It may be needless to say that I, at least, was not politically or historically astute enough as a child to pick up on the books' colonialist angle.

History Today

2008-09-18T16:22:00.001-05:00

Devastatingly funny.

2008-09-18T15:40:00.001-05:00

The web edition of the Times Literary Supplement carries an interesting essay about W.H. Auden.

2008-09-17T19:55:00.007-05:00

So I've been looking for sites that function as "cultural combines" tying lots of different threads together in one place: www.Bookforum.com is one such site.

2008-09-16T23:26:00.003-05:00

Here's a really great Charlie Rose interview with the late David Foster Wallace. Wallace comes off as such an articulate, intelligent and genuinely nice man. I bet he would have been really fun to hang out with, and watching the video made me all the more sorry about his recent death.

2008-09-16T21:49:00.008-05:00

I've been thinking a lot recently about how we explain things to one another. That sounds hopelessly vague, so here's the specific problem that got me thinking about such a broad category:

I study Classical literature under the auspices of a humanistic discipline sometimes referred to as "Classical Philology", "Classical Studies" or just "Classics" for short. It is very rare to meet someone who knows to what bodies of literature the term "Classics" properly refers, or what a "philologist does", unless perhaps they were among the small group who had taken a Classics course in college. As a result, I am very often obliged to explain in very basic terms what it is that I do in general and in particular. I actually enjoy this inquiry and relish formulating a response each time. Usually I come away from the discussion having realized something about the field of Classics that I hadn't thought of before.

I think this is because, surprisingly often, I'm not even sure exactly what it is that I'm doing--why I'm asking a particular question or trying to make a certain point. The study of the Classics (Ancient Greek and Latin Language and Literature) was the foundation of the modern humanities, and the history of scholarship on an author like, say, Sophocles, is so long and complex that even a specialist could only master it with difficulty. The ramifications of scholarship written in Latin, French, German, Italian, and English, with a smattering of Dutch and Spanish here and there, are so diffuse as to defy the control of any individual. One unfortunate outcome of the forest of scholarship on virtually any given subject is the fossilization of certain "questions"--i.e. lines of inquiry. If I cannot master the scholarship on an author, I can at least master the scholarship on a particular "question" regarding that author. So, rather than reading everything ever written about Catullus, I can read everything ever written on the "question" of what kind of vessel the phaselus in Catullus 4 is supposed to be.*

Now, some questions are of course timeless. A good example of timeless lines of inquiry which have a certain intrinsic importance is the complex of questions that go by the shorthand name "The Homeric Question"--was there one single poetic genius who can be called the "author" of the poems? did he write both the Iliad and the Odyssey? was he literate? and so on. Other questions--like the half-serious Catullus example given above--are often relics of past scholarship and its interests, which were determined by historically specific factors. My point, simply put, is that there are a lot of questions that aren't worth asking any more, because their answer would lead, at best, to an intellectual dead-end, and Classics, being as old a field as it is, has a surfeit of these scholarly fossils still kicking around in its library stacks and scholarly journals.

These old lines of inquiry persist, I think, because many scholars--myself included--are too timid to say, "look, this is the question that I want to answer about this work, and I don't particularly care if the question-hood of my question has not been recognized by at least 50 years of (preferably German) scholarship.

This sounds a little bit anti-intellectual, so I should probably make clear the kinds of questions I think are worth asking. Obviously the questions asked by people with no expertise in the field will have a certain refreshing quality to them--they can cause a specialist to step back and see the forest instead of the particular twig on the branch of a particular tree that he's been examining the past two years. But "outsider-questions" like this do not have value independent of the ability of the hypothetical specialist to step back and synthesize the minute knowledge he has into a kind of "high resolution" big picture. It is when the specialist is obliged to step back, however, that he remembers a way of explaining things to others that must necessarily sweep away the determinants imposed on his thinking by the massive weight of the history of scholarship and its mass of fossilized questions. In order to really explain what he does, he must articulate his daily work as a series of decisions that he makes organically about what he should think about, notice, and remark on. If these decisions really are organic, the only obstacles to the listener understanding what the specialist does will be deficiencies in the data set that the listener has at his disposal. If I don't know who Martial was or what an epigram is, I will not be able to understand a specialist on Martial explaining his work however eloquent he may be. Luckily the kinds of non-hermeneutic questions required to correct those deficiencies of data will usually be obvious even to an uninspired listener.

To get back to the general idea of explaining things, I've decided recently that scholarly inquiry is probably of very little value whose impetus and scope cannot be explained in a series of brief sentences (though these can be strung together at length) in such a way as to be comprehensible--in a concrete way--to a listener provided that deficiencies in that listener's data-deficiencies can be overcome. What's more, the picture that the scholar should be able to give can be of higher or lower "resolution" depending on the types of data the listener can be expected to have. Obviously I will talk to a student or professor of English literature about Classics in a very different way from how I will talk to someone who hasn't read any literature since high school. But both groups are outsiders, and both will lack any familiarity with the intricacies of scholarly activity in my field, and my explanation of the work I do will have to take this into account. I think this is a point that many academics--especially in the humanities--often forget: even if I study something very difficult and esoteric, like, say, Lacan, that doesn't mean I am off the hook when an otherwise intelligent, educated, layman asks me what it is that I study. This kind of basic question usually elicits one of two responses. The questioner may be met with a flood of highly specific technical jargon followed by quick exasperation when he tries to find out what all the particular terms mean. Otherwise, and this is probably more common, the specialist will simply assume that since this questioner has not read Author X, he is obviously unqualified to ask me anything about what I do.

To sum up, I guess one of the main difficulties of being a specialist and at the same time keeping your inquiry organic and concrete and explicable and useful to someone who is not a specialist (i.e. 99.9% of all other human beings), is to find the equilibrium point between your audience's level of knowledge and the "DPI" ("dots per inch") of the picture that you're trying to give them. A listener with a relatively small knowledge base will probably only be able to handle a "lo-res" picture. If you can do this, the "what is it that you study" conversation can end with your listener having learned something new about an unfamiliar subject, and you having gotten the chance to reflect on that subject as it fits into the broader world where everyone else lives and where ultimately your scholarly activity has to find its place and its relevance.**

*I should point out that "question"--"quaestio" in Latin--is practically a technical term in the field: thus we have phrases like status quaestionis "the state of the inquiry" and individual "questions" will get a Latin moniker (e.g. the quaestio Loboniana to choose a random and egregious example).

**There is a school of thought, embodied particularly by the great A.E. Housman, which would hold that the "relevance" of scholarly inquiry is beside the point: all that matters is that the scholar adds to the sum total of truth or light in the world and subtracts from the falsehood or darkness in it. I, obviously, am not of this school of thought.

2008-09-15T01:01:00.003-05:00

I think this is a very interesting video in that it captures Bill Clinton at his most charismatic and appealing while at the same time underlining in retrospect the ways the policies that he wound up implementing as president proved virtually the opposite of what he says here.

2008-09-14T20:29:00.002-05:00

For some unknown reason, traffic on my blog has skyrocketed over the past 9 days. I'm not sure to what this is due, since I didn't even post on the day when the upswing really started. In any case, it's good to know that people read, and it's a great impetus to post more often!

2008-09-13T11:01:00.001-05:00

2008-09-13T03:22:00.005-05:00

I realized I had not yet put on my blog a link to my sister Maggie's excellent website where she talks about and sells her handmade books and letter-press works. I have remedied this. I have also remedied the lack of a link to my other sister (these are my two sisters!!) Willa's excellent endeavor to use performance art as a means to manifest the absurdism of our politics.

2008-09-13T02:06:00.006-05:00

The greatest literary hero of the English language of the previous generation (I include Gore Vidal, John Updike and Philip Roth) speaks to us near the end of his life: "Pinter has found himself both lambasted and lampooned. But, since the conferring of the Nobel, and since the fiasco of the current Iraq war has borne out some of Pinter’s dire warnings, the tabloid teasing has diminished, though not Pinter’s attitude toward it. “Fuck the press,” he told me, leaning slowly forward. “That is exactly what I felt then, even more so what I feel now.” He paused. “They can just go fuck themselves,” he said."

For their complicity in the deaths of hundreds of thousands within the past six years, I must say, with Pinter, Fuck the Press, they can just go fuck themselves.

2008-09-12T09:19:00.004-05:00

So, if a resident of, say, Cincinnati, obtains 5 grams of crack cocaine and is caught, they will automatically be liable to a five year prison sentence, but if Cindy McCain starts a medical charity, then uses a doctor employed by that charity to write prescriptions for painkillers in the names of several other employees of the charity without their knowing, and then picks up the prescriptions herself in spite of her name not being on them, and then travels around the country with these prescription drugs, all the while developing a fairly serious addiction, then subsequently fires one of the employees in whose name she had been getting prescriptions when she knew that he knew what was going on, then gets a high-priced lawyer once the matter becomes known to authorities, then after it has gone through litigation and prosecutors are about to make their report public, she steps forward saying that she wanted to help others avoid drug addiction, then lies to newspapers about having undergone a drug treatment program, then lies about the cause of her drug addiction: back pain incurred while carrying her infant daughter on her back in 1989 (her daughter was born two years later); I guess that would be classified under "inspirational journey of redemption" or "private family matter that should not be politicized".

The Chapelle sketch where he inverts the treatment of white and black suspects by the police/judiciary and penal system springs to mind--the police break into the white guy's house and shoot his dog and then drag him down to jail; they call up the black guy and ask him if he wouldn't mind coming by to answer some questions at his convenience.

2008-08-26T22:58:00.002-05:00

Speeches like this are one of the reasons I sometimes call myself a "Kucinich Democrat".

The major networks didn't cover our boy, but here's a write-up in a local Denver paper. The local media out there seem to have this quaint idea that when a big political event occurs, you shouldn't treat it like the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. For instance, a news outlet out there managed to enter the so-called "Guantanamo on the Platte", a facility built to store people arrested during the convention. The facility was a secret until, gasp, the press actually broke the story, at which point the city was obliged to offer the public access.

2008-08-25T22:59:00.002-05:00

Here's a nice, rather long, article by Matthew Taibbi, a guy I've admired for quite a while.

My favorite part:

"... despite all the talk about "change," we're once again stuck in the same dumb flashback that has been prodigiously wasting our time for the last four or five decades — the seemingly endless quest to crush the mythical leftist revolution, which for some reason has spent most of the last half-century cleverly disguised as a bunch of ineffectual bourgeois New Yorkers sitting around watching Stanley Kubrick movies and eating whole foods while conservatives took over the world."

and,

"... Then as now, the crime of the Obama class in the eyes of a wronged veteran like McCain wasn't that they caused these wartime sufferings; it was that they didn't cheer them as righteous and necessary, and unhesitatingly support the sending of more soldiers to the same fate."

2008-08-21T10:10:00.003-05:00

Scary McCain "Reagan" moments. I'm not trying to be age-ist here, but some of this stuff is fairly troubling.

* EDIT - Fixed the above link.

2008-08-21T10:02:00.003-05:00

Nice, this dude at a town hall meeting asks John McCain, "Did you really call your wife a 'cunt'?"

If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's the backstory.

2008-07-28T15:41:00.001-05:00

If you use one objective standard of freedom--namely the percentage of the population that is in prison and has thus been literally deprived of its freedom--the US is decidedly the least free country in the world. Russia looks to be in second place.