Everyday Semiotics

Code switching

2010-01-16T16:31:00.000-08:00

Very thoughtful discussion the other day on Tell Me More about "code switching," i.e., the ability or propensity to change the way one talks depending on one's audience. This came up in the context of Sen. Harry Reid's remarks about Barack Obama's relationship with the "Negro dialect."

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes: "code-switching is the standard M.O. for any African American with middle-class aspirations."

Quoth Obama: "There's a certain black idiom that it's hard not to slip into when you're talking to a black audience." Implying, of course, that there is a different idiom, or lack thereof, whose use is dictated by the fact of running for president.

In my line of work there's a form of code switching that comes naturally. The newsroom cant, laced with smarm and profanity, is set aside whenever the reporter picks up the phone to have a polite conversation with a source.

Transposition

2010-01-07T20:52:00.000-08:00

So someone has translated "The Big Lebowski" into iambic pentameter and retitled it "Two Gentlemen of Lebowski" (after Shakespeare's "Two Gentlemen of Verona").

DONALD
Wherefore thou playest not at ninepins on Saturday, Sir Walter?

WALTER
On our most holy Sabbath I am sworn
To keep tradition, form and ceremony.
The seventh and the last day rests the Jew;
I labour not, nor ride in chariot,
Nor handle gold, nor even play the cook,
And sure as Providence I do not roll.
Hath not a Jew rights? Hath not a Jew hands,
Organs, bowling-balls, Pomeranians?
If you schedule us, must you not do right?
If we step o’er the line, do we not mark it nought?
The Sabbath; I’ll roll not, God-a-mercy.

Which reminded me of such adaptations as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

The recycling of old material to make new art is not new; and neither is the production of new art that resembles old art. This type of "mashup" is both of these things and something more. It is recycling and mimicry for comic effect yet done with estimable skill that reveres both of its sources while rendering both ridiculous.

Shakespeare certainly could have written a Lebowski story in his day. And Jane Austen, if she were writing today in the shadow of Stephenie Meyer, would no doubt be tempted to throw in a dash of the supernatural.

Collaboration

2010-01-05T05:37:00.000-08:00

Re: news aggregation, this snip from PBS's MediaShift:

Craig Kanalley, founder of Breaking Tweets and now with the Huffington Post: "My media wish for 2010 is for news companies of all kinds to put aside differences of the past, egotism and self interests to work together. News organizations in 2010 should link to each other (yes, the competition)..."

MassLive has already started doing this. The site affiliated with the Springfield Republican now routinely offers "AM News Links" and "PM News Links," leading predominantly to traditional media organizations' web sites, some blogs, and always a Twitter search of #westernma.

Frequently the links point to GazetteNET, which is surprising, because the Gazette is the Republican's main competition in Hampshire County. Both papers covered the recent arson fires extensively; but the Gazette, with more reporting staff to bring to bear in the city, simply published more about the incidents.

MassLive loses nothing by linking to the competition. It's created a recurring feature in a digest of news from outside sources, which probably increases its own web traffic. And it benefits the sites to which it points.

It may even be a boon for GazetteNET, which keeps most of its content behind a paywall. Who knows, maybe someone will be interested enough in a headline from MassLive to buy a $1.99 weeklong GazetteNET subscription, the next best thing to making a micropayment.

More likely, they'll surf somewhere else.

Small town terror

2010-01-04T10:07:00.000-08:00

It would be either crass or overwrought to liken the arson fires in Northampton to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Which is why no one has done it yet. Allow me.

Granted, no terrorist organization has claimed responsibility yet for setting fire or attempting to set fire to more than a dozen homes and vehicles around the city Dec. 27, 2009.

But there are plenty of similarities to be found in the reactions of anger, helplessness and a community uniting in both instances.

Uneasy speculation is another reaction to the fires. "Everybody's a suspect" is heard a lot in conversation and on the Facebook group.

The fires were an act of terror; their message still vague. They may well be the act of a compulsive personality, a prank by a thoughtless teenager or any number of other things.

Tapeworms

2010-01-03T09:47:00.000-08:00

From an Ars Technica report on the Dec. 1-2, 2009, Federal Trade Commission summit:

Danny Sullivan of blog Search Engine Land "came close to making the larger point that even 'real' journalists are parasites, relying almost totally on unpaid sources who contribute information to the 'aggregator' (the reporter), who eventually earns a paycheck based on information gleaned freely from elsewhere."

Without having been there it's hard to envision how someone could have "come close" to making this point. But that's irrelevant because the point is quite true, regardless of who uttered it. With the exception of the compensated confessional interview (which, for example, Tiger Woods must inevitably give) or the cash-lubricated exclusive a la State of Play, the bulk of hard news reporting relies on the free exchange of information.

Sometimes there is a non-monetary quid pro quo, where the source gains something (perhaps notoriety, perhaps revenge) by providing information. This may be the analog to a blogger linking to the original reportage. The unspecified, hoped for, contingent compensation there is web traffic.

Pynchonian names in real life

2010-01-02T15:13:00.000-08:00

Here's a list I've been compiling over the last year of real people's names that could have been found in The Crying of Lot 49.

Mort Fallick, 1950s-era film producer/director/editor
Brian Crummy, founder of flowerpetal.com
Peter Elbow, UMass English professor and viola player
Suzanne M. Bump, secretary of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development
Tertia Downer, lawsuit defendant
Morton Manus, author of How to Play Ukulele
Joe Panik, St. John's University infielder
Jodi Weed, charged with giving her daughter marijuana in Albuquerque, N.M.
Special Harris, tormented middle schooler in Tampa, Fla.
Ho Suk Kim, prostitute in Tampa, Fla.
Robyn Thunderchild, resident of Worthington, Mass.
Gordon Yell, Daily Hampshire Gazette reader
Grantly Dick-Read, English obstetrician
Steve Butt, Swindon (UK) Advertiser sports reporter
Farhat Nazi, Amherst resident
John Lepper, Massachusetts state rep. (R-Attleboro)
Heather Lusty, Joycean, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, author of “Caught in the Act!: Sexual Transgressions in the Social Sphere as Political Exposition in Barnes and Joyce”
Augusta 'Gusty' Hornblower, state rep. from Groton, Mass. (d. 1994)
Master Sgt. Reggie Godbolt, Westover Air Force reservist
William Sink, resident of Ware, Mass.
Bucky Sparkle, yoga instructor

Another repository of funny names, most of them made up: Funny Names.

2009 in sum

2010-01-01T07:32:00.000-08:00

Books I read
- Sterling, The Caryatids
- Gaiman, Neverwhere
- Asimov, Foundation trilogy
- Moore/Gibbons, Watchmen
- Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (for the 2nd time)
- Shakespeare, Henry IV, part 1 (2nd time)
- Strugatsky bros., Roadside Picnic
- Pynchon, Inherent Vice
- Hosseni, The Kite Runner (on tape)
- Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
- Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
- C. Doctorow, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (on tape)
- Sawyer, Teutonic Legends
- Sadowski, Supermen!
- Keith, The Vegetarian Myth

Movies I saw
- Slumdog Millionaire
- Let the Right One In
- The Last King of Scotland
- V for Vendetta
- Super Troopers
- District 9
- The Postman Always Rings Twice
- Sicko
- Into the Wild
- Team America: World Police
- The Party
- Milk

Live music I saw
- Pioneer Valley Symphony, Feb. 28, Debussy's "Danses sacree et profane"
- Carrie Ferguson's pre-CD-release party, May 2
- Span of Sunshine @ PACE, Sept. 12
- Springfield Symphony, Oct. 3, Liszt's "Faust Symphony" and "Mephisto Waltz"
- Bunny's a Swine CD release party, Dec. 17
- Velvety Visions @ the Voo, Dec. 18

Recorded music I added to my collection
- Field Music, self titled; Tones of Town; Write Your Own History
- The Week that Was
- Bunny's a Swine, Nothing Bad Will Happen
- Daniel Hales and the Frost Heaves, Frost Heaves; Frost Haven
- Span of Sunshine, Piece Together Peace Together
- Moving Pictures, Age of Reason; When Ears Ring in Tune

Preadolescent maternity

2009-08-23T07:52:00.000-07:00

Bebe Gloton
Bebe Gloton on "Fox & Friends"

(With thanks to Erin, who did most of the brainwork.)

As long as they've been marketed to little girls, baby dolls have come with formula bottles. Now there's a doll to simulate breastfeeding. Fox News is incredulous; but I'd argue this isn't such a wacky idea after all.

Why should Fox be shocked? Probably because to give a young girl a doll that simulates breastfeeding would be to suggest the young girl has breasts.

Breasts are first of all sexualized. In a culture where many parents do prefer formula over breastmilk, the utility of breasts is not frequently seen or reinforced. (In some states, public nursing is illegal; and even where it's not prohibited by law, nursing mothers are often asked to stop or cover up.)

So: we don't have a problem with the idea of a child nourishing a baby. We do have a problem with the idea of a child nourishing a baby with her body, which is sexualized by default.

It's non-controversial to give a girl a standard baby doll because holding such an object does not necessarily imply motherhood. Anyone can hold a baby. But if the girl instead of imaginary formula offers the infant an imaginary mammary gland, all bets are off. Not only is she playing-pretend with a sexualized body part; the implication that she has been sexually active stalks at the edges of the game.

Inherent Vice

2009-08-11T15:13:00.000-07:00

Just finished the new Thomas Pynchon joint, "Inherent Vice."

Fascinated as always by Pynchon's ear for dialogue. In this book most of the characters have fallen into the habit of redundantly using the word "is," as in "The thing about that is, is you're wrong." (Not "It depends on what the meaning of the words 'is' is.)

Also prevalent is the use of a question mark at the end of a statement -- connoting either the speaker's hesitance to commit to that statement or the speaker's request for acknowledgment from the listener.

These two verbal phenomena collide on page 339, when Sauncho Smilax opines, "See, my theory is, is it's like one of those educational channels?"

Bloomsday 2009 addendum

2009-06-20T10:24:00.001-07:00

Now consider: what if Stephen Dedalus had had an iPhone. Would his already encyclopaedic mind be augmented in any way by the ability to Google anything, anywhere? Or would this just make him lazy?

We know he would have been inclined to text messaging or Twittering. He may as well have used these means as a telegram to tell Buck Mulligan, "A sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done."

Bloomsday 2009

2009-06-16T15:20:00.000-07:00

The closing credits of Sean Walsh's 2004 film adaptation of "Ulysses" are accompanied by images of Leopold Bloom wandering around a Dublin 100 years older than the one he would have known.

Imagine if Poldy had an iPod. What would "Ulysses" be like if his interior monologue was drowned out by the Black Eyed Peas?

Perfect storm

2009-05-17T18:29:00.000-07:00

A friend pointed me to this very smart analysis of the X-Men character Storm. An exerpt:

Storm is what black women want, or are constantly informed by the media that they should want, but are also told that they never will achieve. To be loved and to be beautiful. To be free. To be special.

Star Trek's fathers

2009-05-16T20:23:00.000-07:00

Paternity is what the new "Star Trek" movie is all about.

The tagline, "This is not your father's Star Trek" seemingly is more interested in attracting a new audience than placating the old. Yet fathers, and their offsprings' indebtedness to them, run throughout and around the film.

To reinvent the “Star Trek” franchise is to acknowledge the "anxiety of influence" (see Harold Bloom) engendered by the original TV series and its spinoffs. Producer/director J.J. Abrams and co. recognized deficiencies in what came before, and evidently felt the need to rectify those deficiencies for a new generation. But at the same time they had to pay due respect to the source material, especially the "vision" of the father of it all, Gene Rodenberry.

Sadly, this reinvention and modernization must give in to the demands of Hollywood, a patriarchy in its own right which today demands tie-ins and product placement.

It is certainly true that handheld communicator of the original television series contributed its genetic material to today's cell phones. The movie reverses this lineage with the clearly-labeled Nokia system in the dashboard of Kirk's stolen Corvette. And just as the 40-year-old TV show conjures up nostalgia, the movie reflexively experiences its own nostalgia in the form of the hotrod and the "Budweiser Classic" enjoyed by Starfleet cadets in the movie.

(To properly understand the Mustang's place in the film we must not only recognize its nostalgia factor and utility in demonstrating Kirk's rebelliousness. Hijacked from the stepfather and driven off a cliff, it is also Rodenberry's franchise, ruined by Berman and Braga, and discarded by Abrams. Note that Kirk is next seen riding a motorcycle, which he abandons beneath the nascent U.S.S. Enterprise.)

Until now, “Star Trek” had no Nokia, no Budweiser, no Chevrolet. In fact, the Trek universe had no such thing as money -- meaning brands would have been irrelevant. Conceived at the dawn of consumerism, Rodenberry's 23rd-century society seemed already to have moved past corporations and advertising -- leaving, one could argue, a paternalistic, socialist monoculture instead.

Before, Kirk was a father, not a son. He had always been the pater familias of the Enterprise family; in “The Wrath of Khan” and thereafter, he grappled with literal fatherhood. Now he is the son of the late George Kirk, whose figure looms large because he died heroically. Nestor to his Telemachus, Capt. Pike tells James T., “I dare you to do better.” No pressure.

Where Kirk succeeds, Abrams fails. For all the hype about the new movie being “not your father's Star Trek,” its greatest improvement upon the tradition seems to be the replacement of the aged original cast with younger, sexier actors. The gender imbalance, technobabble, and evil planet-destroying badguy motif have all survived intact.

Projects like former Trek producer Ronald D. Moore's re-imagined “Battlestar Galactica” and the fan-produced series “Star Trek: Hidden Frontier” have more constructive things to do with their forebears' raw material. One strove for greater realism and continuity; the other broke with heteronormativity to explore frontiers of human relationships and sexuality to which the official Star Trek canon has barely even paid lip service.

Draws the eye

2009-04-07T16:15:00.001-07:00

This ubiquitous Web advertisement doubtless has produced a tidal wave of rollovers.

Alas, once one has clicked through, one won't find any more photos of this fetching young lass and her cleavage, er, white teeth.

I've seen this ad many times before, and snorted. Today it managed to distract me from a story on the Press & Sun-Bulletin site about the Binghamton massacre. Very inappropriate juxtaposition indeed. Once I finished the story, I clicked through to investigate.

It links to a thinly disguised product review site dominated by Crest schwag. At the bottom is a special note to the ladies:

"Aside from your eyes, which first impression characteristic do people usually remember about you? Think about it! A whiter, brighter smile equals youth and friendliness!" (emphasis in original)

Speaking purely for myself -- male chauvinist that I am -- I would have to say that as far as Crest girl here is concerned, the hierarchy of remembrable "first impression characteristics" is clearly as follows:
1) cleavage
2) tie for teeth and bared shoulder
3) hair
4) eyes

UPDATE 8/23: The image file linked to above appears to have been cropped! There is now barely any hint of cleavage.

What IS it all about?

2009-02-11T18:39:00.000-08:00

Who knew? The Hokey Pokey, before it became a preschool sensation, was a coded invective against Catholicism.

From the Daily Telegraph:

Critics claim that Puritans composed the song in the 18th century in an attempt to mock the actions and language of priests leading the Latin mass.
Now politicians have urged police to arrest anyone using the song to "taunt" Catholics under legislation designed to prevent incitement to religious hatred.
[...]
According to the church, the song's title derives from the words "hocus pocus".
The phrase is said to be a Puritan parody of the Latin "hoc est enim corpus meum" or "this is my body" used by Catholic priests to accompany the transubstantiation during mass.
Several years ago, a canon from Wakefield Cathedral said the dance came from the days when priests celebrated mass with their backs to the congregation and whispered the Latin words of consecration with many hand movements.

Fascinating stuff. One question, though: How did the dance become known as the hokey-cokey in Britain while in America as the hokey-pokey it confroms more closely to its alleged hocus-pocus seme?

The Oxford English Dictionary buys the "hocus pocus" origin but discredits the "hoc est enim corpus meum" theory. Wikipedia gives top billing the Al Tabor theory, which has nothing to do with hocus pocus or the eucarist but an New Zealand ice cream variety consisting of vanilla with tofee.

Prurient economics

2009-02-10T19:03:00.000-08:00

Dominating the news this week is Barack Obama's enormous package.

That is, the president's -- ahem -- $7 million economic stimulus package, approved today by the Senate.

It may just be the eternal fifth-grader in me, but I can't restrain the chortles whenever I read or hear about this package, its size and the stimulation it promises.

"Economic stimulus package" is shorthand for what the White House officially calls the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

William Safire chronicles the administration's movement from "stimulus" to "jolt" to "recovery" here. Yet in the media, "stimulus" stuck. Which makes sense: it's the most jargony of the bunch (and we know journalists like jargon). "Package" then clove to "stimulus." Alas, Safire hasn't yet examined "package."

Perhaps it takes a child of the '90s to appreciate the genital connotation of the term, which is only amplified when coupled with words like "stimulus" and "enormous." See an interesting meditation on the origins of the "package's" vulgar meaning here.

Hair aboard Galactica

2009-02-06T06:40:00.000-08:00

Clever little essay on the metamorphoses of Battlestar Galactica characters' facial hair.

Couldn't resist

2009-01-25T19:29:00.000-08:00

NYT larks about funny place-names.

"If you’re smirking at this sign, you’re mispronouncing the town’s name. It’s PENNIS-tun."

The article avoids the coarser options out there, such as Twatt, Shetland, and Shitterton, Dorset, both in the U.K.

In Massachusetts, they might have visited Belchertown and Felchville (part of Natick).

And not until Sept. 3, 2009, did I learn of Fucking, Austria.

Be seeing you

2009-01-14T16:10:00.000-08:00

Sad news today that Patrick McGoohan died. Read the AP obit here and a great story in Wired here. See my past writings on "The Prisoner" here and here.

Belated Xmas

2009-01-12T19:06:00.000-08:00

for a baby to come tippin' those Toledos at 7 pounds 8 ounces thinkin' he's gonna redeem it, why, he oughta have his head examined....

My Christmas present to myself was small, and it arrived today, 18 days late. Exciting nonetheless. Little dabs of Pynchonalia, captured in nickle-sized buttons. Two early photographs of the reclusive author, two book covers, and, of course, the Trystero.

The brown paper package was postmarked 23/12/2008, Correo Argentino. The mailer -- could it have been Squalidozzi, repatriated? -- had written out my address by hand, and apparently paid as much to post it overseas as I had to purchase the trinkets it contained, $8US. What a WASTE, yuk yuk!

Year in review

2009-01-02T06:26:00.000-08:00

Here's how I did on my resolutions for 2008.

Part I -- General
- go to New Hampshire more often
- break diet less frequently than in 2006 and 2007
- maybe get a new laptop, one with an "n" key and working CD reader/writer and that doesn't sound like a 747 getting ready to take off (now a proud Mac owner)
- start Gravity's Rainbow reading group after Ulysses group wraps up
- new glasses
- read more than last year
(6 of 25)

Part II -- Books to read that are already on my self
- Goethe, Faust, parts One and Two
- LeGuin, The Disposessed (again)
- Hirsch, Cultural Literacy
+ Stoker, Dracula
+ Boudreau, Packing Inferno
+ Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (again)
+ Ghosh, Sea of Poppies
(3 of 25, with 4 new acquisitions)

Part III -- books not on my shelf
- Dick, The Man in the High Castle
- LeGuinn, The Lathe of Heaven
- Lem, Solaris
- Essential X-Men vols. 4-6
- Russ, The Female Man
- Zemyatin, We
- Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Boccaccio, The Decameron
- Pullman, The Golden Compass
- Sacher-Massoch, Venus in Furs
+ Gilgamesh (on tape)
+ Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (on tape)
+ Pullman, The Subtle Knife
+ Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
+ Beowolf (on tape)
+ Lovecraft, "Call of Cthulu"
+ Lem, The Futurological Congress
+ McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (on tape)
+ More, Utopia
+ Lem, The Star Diaries
+ Pynchon, Slow Learner
+ Goethe, The Sorrows of Werther
+ Lem, Memiors of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy
(9.5 of 25, with 13 additions)

Part IV -- movies
- Solaris (Tarkovsky)
- Casino Royale
- Borat
- The Goonies
- Sixteen Candles
- The Lost Boys
- Harold & Maude
- No Country for Old Men
- Galaxy Quest
- Wall-E
- The Dark Knight
(11 of 25)

Part V -- music
- Springfield Symphony Orchestra (Nov. 8; Bolero and Rachmoninov's "Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini")
- Who Killed Amanda Palmer
- Liars
- Les Savy Fav, Let's Stay Friends
- The Streets, Everything is Borrowed
(5 of 11)

Sea of Poppies

2008-12-23T17:40:00.000-08:00

Just through with reading "Sea of Poppies," the eighth novel by Indian-American writer Amitav Ghosh. I can't think of the last time I read a contemporary book; but my interest was well piqued after hearing about "Sea of Poppies" twice on NPR, here and here.

Specifically what interested me was the book's multicultural and multilinguistic texture.

This is best and most delightfully captured in the dialog of James Doughty, an English river pilot who's absorbed and adapted some native verbiage into his speech:

Now there was a lordly nigger if ever you saw one! Best kind of native -- kept himself busy with his shrub and his nautch-girls and his tumashers. Wasn't a man in town who could put on a burra-khana like he did. Sheeshmull blazig with shammers and candles. Paltans of bearers and khidmutgars. Demijohns of French loll-shrub and carboys of iced simkin. And the karibat! In the old days the Rascally bobachee-connah was the best in the city. No fear of pishpash and cobbily-mash at the Rascally table. The dumbpokes and pillaus were good enough, but we old hands, we'd wait for the curry of cockup and the chitchky of pollock-saug. Oh he sat a rankin table I can tell you -- and mind you, supper was just the start: the real tumasher came later, in the nautch-connah. Now there was another chuckmuck sight for you! Rows of cursies for the sahibs and mems to sit on. Sittringies and tuckiers for the natives. The baboos puffing at their hubble-bubbles and the sahibs lighting their Sumatra buncuses. Chunchunees whirling and tickytaw boys beating their tobblers. Oh, that old loocher knew how to put on a nautch all right!

Where for Doughty Hindusthani seems to take the place of every noun and adjective, for the much higher-stationed Mrs Burnham the language becomes a sidestreet for the discussion of things taboo to English tongues. Convinced a girl in her charge is pregnant, she reformulates the "bun in the oven" metaphor: "Puggly, tell me the truth, I conjure you: there isn't a rootie in the choola, is there?"

Writing a bit of postcolonial literature, Ghosh is able to evoke jaw-dropping expressions of imperialism that today ring absurd; yet these scenes never teeter over into something like satire or comedy. One gets the sense that British sahibs did in fact utter such nonsense circa 1838. Take for example this paraphrase of Justice Kendalbushe as he sentences Raja Neel Rattan Halder for forgery:

... since it was said, and rightly, that a parent who failed to chasten a child was thereby guilty of shirking the responsibilities of guardianship, then might it not also be said, in the same spirit, that in the affairs of men, there was a similar obligation, imposed by the Almighty himself, on those whom he had chosen to burden with the welfare of such races as were still in the infancy of civilisation? Could it not equally be said that the nations that had been appointed to this divine mission would be guilty of neglecting their sacred trust, were they to be insufficiently rigorous in the chastisement of such people as were incapable of the proper conduct of their own affairs?

Another delight of the book: At the very end of the book is a glossary, useful especially for parsing Doughty's cant. It is not called a glossary, though, but rather a "chrestomathy" (from the Greek khrestos, useful, and mathein, to know).

Hateful names

2008-12-16T21:24:00.000-08:00

There's a father in New Jersey who is apparently having a laugh with the media.

Reporters have no doubt descended like locusts upon Heath Campbell of Holland Township, ever since word got out that a supermarket wouldn't make a birthday cake for his son, named Adolph Hitler Campbell.

Ancillary to the furor (or should I say Führer?) over the cake is Heath Campbell's yarn that Nazism is water under the bridge and how he's not really a bigot.

The Express-Times of Easton, Pa., seems to have the most thorough story so far (NYT hasn't touched it). The paper's reporter got a tour of the homestead, which has a swastika in every room. Heath and his wife, Deborah Campbell, both opine about how the symbol -- like the names of their 3-year-old son and two younger girls, JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell -- doesn't mean what everyone thinks it means.

"It doesn't mean hatred to me," he said. Deborah Campbell said a swastika "doesn't really have a meaning. It's just a symbol."

Indeed the bent cross has its own long semantic chain that certainly doesn't always stand for slaughter. See Wikipedia.

But seriously. Do the Campbells really expect reporters and their readers to believe they named their children after Hitler and Himmler simply because the names were interesting? In diligent fairness, the reporters take down their quotes and call it a day, leaving it to the editorial writers to cut through the bullshit.

Chronologism

2008-12-08T15:43:00.000-08:00

Bruce Sterling sez:

Since we need a new word for neologism, I've decided to make one up. A word like "Eamespunk" is a "chronologism." It's not exactly cant, lingo or jargon, but it was designed with a short semiotic shelf-life. Some neologisms survive, most rapidly become archaeologisms, but a "chronologism" is *recyclable, 100% organic* neologism meant to decay gracefully and enrich the cultural compost.

We need a new word for neologism? e.g. a neologism for "neologism"? News to me.

The use of "semiotic" above is a bit imprecise; Bruce, God bless him, means either connotative or denotative. Eamespunk is the hipsterization of the work of 1950s kitsch furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames, btw.

"Archeologism" doesn't mean what the author means either; rather, it is the exhuming of past practices, antiquarianism, even reversion to primitivism.

But I am intrigued by the idea of "chronologism."

Voices for radio

2008-12-04T08:39:00.000-08:00

The disembodied voices we hear on the radio sometimes take on, in our minds, bodies of their own. Or if not bodies, then at least some sort of aura that either coalesces or blows away when we see a photograph of the speaker in question.

Long ago and much to my chagrin I learned that Terry Gross, despite her intriguing voice, is not at all sexy looking. Diane Rehm, believe it or not, is way hotter.

About the time of the Sichuan earthquake, I logged on to npr.org to keep up with "All Things Considered," whose anchors happened to be right there. Somehow, Robert Siegel and Melissa Block looked exactly how I thought they should look.

The other day I found the directory of NPR personalities and clicked on the names of each host or reporter whose voice stands out for me. I can't say I had clear pictures of what I thought or wanted these people to look like; but each in real life is not what I expected.

Read the names, recall the voices, then click through. It's kind of a fun game. On the other hand, it's a little disappointing to have these larger-than-life voices suddenly embodied.

Tom Ashbrook (On Point): I like him more for his nimble thinking/summarizing/moderating style than for the quality or distinctiveness of his voice, but nonetheless...

Corey Flintoff (Iraq correspondent): He's got this unintentionally arrogant voice. Years ago whenever my dad and I would be listening in the car, we'd hear the signoff, "I'm Corey Flintoff," and my dad would add: "and you're not."

Michel Martin (Tell Me More): She's usually the first voice I hear when I get up, go about my morning routine, and head to work.

Michele Norris (All Things Considered): I would say she has the sexiest voice. The day after Thanksgiving she had the show all to herself, and the broadcast coincided for me with a long drive home. I was in heaven.

Ofeibea Quist-Arcton (Africa correspondent): Amazing name and amazing accent, especially when she says "Dakar."

Kai Ryssdal (Marketplace): He sounds so slick I simultaneously hate him and want him to be my friend.

To conclude, here's the Dresden Dolls with a pained paean to a former NPR idol.

What's the message?

2008-12-03T07:21:00.000-08:00

Neal Conan on "Talk of the Nation" yesterday kept asking what message terrorists were trying to send by attacking Mumbai.

That's the type of question to prick up my ears, but thinking back on it hours later, I can't seem to recall any of the answers guests and callers may have supplied. And I can't supply a good answer myself.

The semiotician in me has always understood terrorism as a form of communication. An extreme one. A political tract or philosophical renunciation that is compressed and enunciated in unexpected, forceful action.

The thing about "26/11" (as some Indian media seem to be calling the attacks, which began Nov. 26 -- not as catchy or multilayered at 9/11) is that it just went on and on. As in the rambling babble of the radio program, whatever message there could have been lost cohesion.

The lasting imagery and resonance of 9/11, I think, is thanks to the abruptness of everything that happened that day. A plane hit a tower, then another plane hit another tower, then a plane hit the Pentagon, then one tower fell, then a fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania, then the other tower fell. Six distinct events that fit together like the wedges in a Trivial Pursuit game to form a single statement.

Of course, that statement is still being interpreted. But we can be assured it is singular and brief.

The one Mumbai terrorist captured by police reportedly said his aim was simply to kill as many people as possible. The 10 attackers focused their efforts on the multicultural city's tourist traps and international institutions.

The knee-jerk reaction to terror is to call it senseless violence. This ignores, for better or worse, the semiotic value of such extreme communication, attempts to render invalid, not worth discussing, the message the terrorist tries to convey. But here I'm hard pressed the suss out that message, or to believe in fact that there was one. I'll have to keep thinking on it.

Inside my accordion

2008-12-02T00:50:00.000-08:00

My sweet squeezebox has a chromatic right-hand manual and a standard Stradello left-hand bass system. Nothing too fancy: just one register switch on each side. It's a Moreschi, made in Italy, serial No. 7701.

No idea when it was made or what it's worth. My only clue is in the maroon velvet-lined case, which has a tag indicating a 1931 patent. I bought it for $20 at a Salvation Army in 2003.

The high C# key hasn't been working properly, so Sunday I opened it up to see if I could fix the problem. I undid a number of screws that I didn't need to, losing track of one in the end. Turns out all I needed to do to check out the reeds was pull out six pins connecting the keyboard to the bellows.

The culprit seems to have been a tiny piece of cotton fluff, which I pulled out with tweezers. Certain reeds activate when you pull on the bellows, others work when you push. Thus, the key sounded in one direction but not the other.

After I'd closed everything up, one of the others keys started doing the same thing. Opening it again was no trouble. There was no fluff, but the reed seemed to be caught somewhat in its housing, so I just massaged it a little.

After closing up, it happened a third time to a third key. This time I just pulled real hard on the bellows, and that was that.

Cockney neck

2008-12-01T05:59:00.000-08:00

The latest series of my favorite Britcom, The IT Crowd, is off to a brilliant start. Episode two riffed on the linguistics and the friendship effect of football fandom (though fandom of any type has its own vocabulary and brio, which comrades and poseurs inevitably must enunciate).

Watch from 1:09 to 1:59, and from 3:45 to 7:03.

The gag confirms something I've long suspected, that people become well-versed in the statistics and other minutiae of sport specifically for the purpose of making conversation. It's just one of many pathetic defenses against loneliness, one variation on something we all do, in various contexts.

Here I especially like that the heroes are working from a script, which is provided for them by a website tailored to people looking to bluff their way into a football coterie. Even those who haven't read the script follow it unknowingly.

Black Friday

2008-11-30T08:37:00.001-08:00

I felt sick to my stomach the whole ride home the day after Thanksgiving -- partially from the news from India, but mainly because of the travesty on Long Island, where a Wal-Mart employee, Jdimytai Damour, 34, was trampled to death by shoppers.

I started thinking about what should happen to the people responsible. Shameful enough they couldn't file into the store patiently like civilized humans, their eagerness resulted in a death. Could they, or should they, be charged with something like manslaughter? Nassau County police are reviewing surveillance tapes, so we'll see.

From NYT:

It was a tragedy, yet it did not feel like an accident. All those people were there, lined up in the cold and darkness, because of sophisticated marketing forces that have produced this day now called Black Friday. They were engaging in early-morning shopping as contact sport. American business has long excelled at creating a sense of shortage amid abundance, an anxiety that one must act now or miss out.

Later the author goes so far as to say we've been programmed to consume. I wonder, though, really, how sophisticated this marketing is; how much programming goes into the mob mentality that overtakes so many of us on Black Friday. You ask me, the mob are always more accountable as individuals.

The Long Island Wal-Mart is open again, and shoppers interviewed there voice the obligatory shock over Damour's death, then get back to shopping. Damour is reduced to collateral damage. It's disgusting.

And still another reason I need to learn German

2008-10-14T21:06:00.000-07:00

Only this short snippet of the 1960 German film adaptation of Goethe's Faust is subtitled on YouTube. Unsubtitled below:

Mephistopheles the academician
Mephisto advises a student

Reading Faust / Part One (trans. Philip Wayne, 1949), I was constantly picturing how the poem would look as a relatively big-budget movie. (The above is how it would look if I blew my whole budget to hire Gustaf Gründgens.)

It would center around a theater stage, but the backstage and the lighting overhead would be visible to the camera. The invisible choruses of spirits would be actors in black standing in the wings. Faust's soliloquy in the woods would take place on a stage in an actual forest. When Faust flies on Mephisto's cloak to Auerbach's cellar in Leipzig, the ropes suspending him would be visible, leading up into the catwalk over the stage -- except there is no catwalk, just the sky.

These head-pictures, I like to think, were so vivid because of Goethe's precocious postmodernism. He begins, after all, with a director, a poet and a comedian discussing how they'll stage a play. Later, Faust watches a variant of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" atop the Brocken.

The action of Faust always seems to take place on a stage that has beyond it vast realms of space (Cf. F and M climbing the Brocken, and the mountaintop view of the war at the end of Act IV in Part Two). But that space isn't, like in theater proper, where it is visible to the cast and invisible to the audience. The action on the stage constantly spills out of it. The stage is always bigger than itself.

'allarming news about the artic melting' (sic)

2008-08-21T16:39:00.000-07:00

Northampton Media posts this rant sent by a rather militant Doubting Thomas to a climatologist:

i have checked out your allarming news about the artic melting away, and became very concerned for your health, i,m convinced that you and your colleges are sniffing the wrong glue and may have allready done massive damage to your very small brains, its obviously clear that your all fucked in the head and should seek some type of thearapy, i suggest you all start by BEATING YOUR HEADS AGAINST A GOOD SOLID OBJECT for as long as you can keep doing it. then go back to smokin pot, like you must have done for most of your mentaly retarded cariers. then if that doesnt work try puttin a gun to your head. you and all your tree huggin buddies can fuck offf with your global warming shit.

I'll spare you the full text; it gets a little redundant.

I'm puzzled that someone actually took the time to sit down and write this. Much like I was puzzled by the eagerness of anonymous posters to duke it out on the T&G's website (now 96 comments on the transgender janitor story -- evidently many were nixed by the webmaster as there were over 250 this afternoon).

Here again are unique environments giving way to unique forms of discourse, er, rants. (Cf. the lockerroom tirade, the press conference equivocation.)

What gives rise to the written rant and the anonymous bulletin board post as recurring, established genres of discourse? From whence does the individual author of such discourse derive satisfaction?

What's needed, I think, is an investigation of apostrophe (that is, the form of rhetoric in which the speaker addresses an absent person, not the punctuation mark). More later.

The latest reason I need to learn German

2008-08-19T16:10:00.000-07:00

Who knew German public television made a miniseries of The Star Diaries?

The Stanislaw Lem book is one of the most enjoyable I've read this year; a beach book that makes you laugh and think. Recognizable in the trailer are scenes from seventh, eighth and fourteenth voyages (time loop, United Planets, squamp hunt). Not really sure where the holographic lady comes from ... the show needed some sex appeal, naturally. At any rate, I'm dying to get my hands on this, subtitles or no.

Writing about gender

2008-08-19T15:28:00.000-07:00

I keep up with the Worcester Telegram & Gazette even though I no longer live in the area it covers simply because it's a damn fine newspaper. Today's big story is about a transgender janitor at a small town elementary school.

Brianna Bonin is returning to work this school year after having been known as Brian Bonin. Readers have leapt all over this story on the T&G's website, many posting bigoted comments and posting again to insist they're not bigots. When I first clicked over to the story about 11 a.m. it had 55 comments. As I write now at about 7 p.m., it has 180. A tedious back and forth between closed minds and open ones.

I won't bother to grouse about the ridiculous fears voiced that schoolchildren are suddenly at risk because Bonin is now openly expressing her gender identity; or that parents should not have to explain to their kids why Brian is now Brianna. Heaven forbid! Children shouldn't be forced to learn things about the world around them!

The story itself is what perplexes me. While I found it about as fair as any news story should be, I was troubled that Bonin was referred to through as "he" even though she clearly identifies as a woman and is referred to by quoted sources as "she." There is other evidence of sloppy editing in the story; but clearly an editorial decision was made on how to handle the pronouns. It was the wrong decision.

I can only guess its basis is the fact that Bonin hasn't yet undergone gender-reassignment surgery -- something the article (no doubt through careless cutting and pasting) notes twice. The story's presentation suggests its preparers are too openminded to insist that because Bonin is biologically male she must also be grammatically male. I'm surprised Bonin didn't make a point to the T&G stringer that "she" should be used instead of "he"; or that this point wasn't respected.

'Darkness… Night… Things of the night… Dracula…'

2008-07-16T07:40:00.000-07:00

Not that anyone reads this, but I’m contending with a bit of a stumper and could do with some input.

I’m stuck on the question of narrative format in “Dracula” by Bram Stoker (1898), wondering specifically why the author chose to use the epistulo-diaristic mode as opposed to a straightforward first- or third-person approach. It may be a convention of the period; and I’m reminded somewhat of the framed narrative approach Mary Shelley took in “Frankenstein” (1818).

In “Dracula” the mitigating devices of letters and journals render the tale as a historical document as opposed to the sort of ur-story of first- and third-person narrations. By this I mean that in a modern novel it’s essentially a given that the narrator is not producing an actual document; that the book we hold in our hands is actually a ghost: a constriction of one point of view created for a fiction reader and not an archivist. The narratives of most novels, in this sense, do not exist actually or tangibly; whereas diaries and letters definitely do.

“Dracula’s” epigraph calls the book “a history almost at variance with the possibilities of latter-day belief [that] may stand forth as simple fact.” Here and there are comments by the characters on the keeping of this record, and sketches of journalistic convention at the time.

Mina Harker (nee Murray) writes: “I shall try to do what I see lady journalists do, interviewing and writing descriptions and trying to remember conversations. I am told that, with a little practice, one can remember all that goes on or that one hears said during a day” (57).

There are included in the novel, as if pasted into a scrapbook, two newspaper clippings: one from the “Dailygraph,” (80ff), and one from the “Pall Mall Gazette” (143ff). Striking about these -- to a newsman like myself anyway -- is the approach. There are no snappy ledes or nutgrafs, no inverted pyramid. Rather they are chronological and overly detailed accounts not of the news itself but the reporters’ efforts in getting the news.

Organizing the documents into a coherent narrative clearly serves a purpose for the protagonists. They are assembling clues to a mystery. And Jonathan adds: “Mina and I fear to be idle, so we have been over all the diaries again and again. Somehow, although the reality seems greater each time, the pain and the fear seem less. There is something of a guiding purpose manifest throughout, which is comforting” (334).

I feel a distant echo of this tendency toward constricting the relevant past to a coherent historical present in the Netherlandian Dr. Abraham Van Helsing’s inability to use the perfect tense. The learned foreigner’s linguistic shortcoming is most assuredly the author’s invention, but it may be an elucidating one.

Perhaps I’m stuck on this question of narrative because I came to the novel already knowing roughly what would happen in it. “Dracula” is one of those texts so encoded in the pop culture psyche that its outlines can be guessed with some accuracy even on a first in-earnest reading. None of the adaptations, I recollect, concerned themselves with Stoker’s bulky storytelling apparatus.

Five points for anyone who recognizers the quote in my headline. For those who don’t, see this.

2008-07-15T18:38:00.000-07:00

Joanna Russ’ “The Female Man” (1975) is one of the most challenging books I’ve read in a long, long time.

First because I am a male and the book is openly hostile toward males.

Secondly because, unlike a lot of other science fiction, it doesn’t let you get comfortable after it has estranged you. That is to say: Once you’ve figured out that androids are an underclass you’ve pretty much got “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” under control. But with unexpected bursts of narrative jujitsu, “The Female Man” keeps upending the reader’s control over it.

It’s all very pomo and self-referential and I don’t know how I feel about that type of thing anymore … but here it seems necessary in a non-abstract way. Russ devotes a page and a half to fragments of very probable book reviews, worth quoting at length:

Shrill … vituperative … no concern for the future of society … maunderings of antiquated feminism … selfish femlib … needs a good lay … this shapeless book … of course a calm and objective discussion is beyond … twisted, neurotic … some truth buried in a largely hysterical … of very limited interest, I should … another tract for the trash can … burned her bra and thought that … no characterization, no plot … really important issues are neglected while … hermetically sealed … women’s limited experience … another of the screaming sisterhood … a not very appealing aggressiveness … could have been done with wit if the author had … deflowering the pretentious male … a man would have given his right arm to … hardly girlish … a woman’s book … another shrill polemic which the … a mere male like myself can hardly …

I’ll stop there because that last one’s the one that really kicked me in the balls. The mode of the foregoing is easily recognizable: moving from outright dismissal to condescension and at all times chauvinistic. Then imaginary critic No. 26 invokes his own deficiency in understanding “the female perspective,” but the condescension is still taut.

This stings because I have spoken words to this effect to a woman --- and I know I’m not the first --- and now I have been given them back to ponder. How much more sarcastic could this phrase be, “a mere male”? Rhetorically it’s very elegant because it compacts whole paragraphs of opposite meaning into that one word “mere.”

I never realized.

Men in “The Female Man” excel at being deaf and dumb (Cf. Boss in Eight/VIII and Davy in Eight/XI). Men in this book are assaulted by women for being ignorant. One is killed. Holy shit.

I’m in a weird sort of double bind trying to write about this novel: On the one hand I feel like anything I could write would, at best, convince Joanna Russ to keep walking if she ever found me bleeding to death in the street. On the other hand I feel silly for feeling that way. But that’s not simply a contrarian reaction of the first feeling: I think it has more to do with being afraid of committing the sin of trapping myself in the gender binary while at the same time fearing the binary is inescapable.

Both pretty weak positions from which to be actively offering critical insights.

Passively?

Of monsters and the men who slay them and the men who tell their tales

2008-07-12T19:24:00.000-07:00

Let me just say I’m now a certifiable George Guidall fan. Who’s he? He’s the fellow who, on recent car journeys, read to me Gilgamesh (700 BC, in a “new English version” by Stephen Mitchell, AD 2004) and Beowulf (circa AD 700-1000, translated in 1999 by Seamus Heaney).

Hearing Guidall I picture an older man, not physically strong though certainly powerful of voice, who is somehow perfectly suited to these tales of manly monster-hunters. Having spent much of my life with a pretty Homer-centric view of epics, I found myself utterly captivated by these non-Greek myths; which are nonetheless just as morally ambiguous as the Odyssey. Mitchell points out that the monsters Gilgamesh faces down -- Enkidu, Humbaba, the Bull of Heaven -- don’t actually threaten his kingdom in Uruk.

Beowulf does a bit better: he stops Grendel and his mother, who individually pose threats to the Danes, and goes after the dragon, who only became a menace after treasure hunters violated his horde. The ambiguity in this tale comes from its awkward point of narration: set in heathen times and lands but told by a retroactively proselytizing Christian Anglo-Saxon.

My (rather distracted) riff on ciphers completed, I’ll be setting in now on some considerations of monster hunters, all of whom could do well with a George Guidall treatment, I think.

2008-07-11T16:03:00.000-07:00

A followup to that germ of a thought I left dangling in the last post:

It seems to be that the discourse of both the press conference and the locker room always tries to transcend itself.

The press conference is, for its presenter, meant to be a controlled situation, where information is doled out within implied bounds of propriety. For its audience, it is inevitably an impediment to getting at the heart of the matter, but oftentimes the only avenue into that matter at all. While the presenter holds back, the press pushes hard in the hopes of getting through to something less prepackaged and more satisfying.

The locker room tirade, on the other hand, is something in which the presenter tries to lay bare the deepest emotions and truths before a hostile audience -- the press -- who must inevitably boil down the flurry of statements directed at them if they're to include it in their 30 column inches.

Tirades are a curious thing. It seems to me they are most of them purely internal: When one is angry one envisions oneself dominant over the object of that anger, telling it like it is and settling the score in a masterful coup de grace. But it's rare that such an utterance can ever be externalized, at least in an uninterrupted fashion, because the listener will always feel inclined to interject.

Before a gaggle of reporters, however, (as opposed to a nemesis, a friend, or a lover) interjections are kept to a minimum. This is a function first of surprise -- reporters are used to transcribing and inquiring about external topics, not being the topic of discussion. It may be a function of decorum -- for to interrupt an interview subject who is really wound up is to risk silencing that subject. And it is definitely a function of amusement -- for rants are essentially amusing in their onesidedness and gratuity.

Practice?

2008-07-10T19:06:00.000-07:00

A sports fan I am not, but I do love it when athletes ramble, rant and fly off the handle. So I was delighted the other day to learn of this painful 2006 Allen Iverson press conference:

Here's a classic "Methinks the lady doth protest too much" situation. The question clearly touches a nerve, but Iverson spends the next three minutes trying to deadpan it, becoming less and less graceful as he goes. Why? Because he's stuck. The cameras are rolling and he knows he must and thinks he can save face.

If this were an off-camera locker room conversation, no doubt Iverson would be a bit more vehement and probably start repeating another word than "practice." That is, his response would be more akin to the the classic tirades of Goose Gossage and Lee Elia.

Different forums naturally give way to different types of discourse. The press conference, whether in a sports stadium or at the White House, produces one type. The locker room, whether or not there's a gaggle of reporters present, produces another.

Robojesus

2008-07-07T15:46:00.000-07:00

Why is it that so much imaginative storytelling must refer back to Biblical themes and events?

This I ask after watching (and thoroughly enjoying) the new Disney-Pixar film “WALL-E,” which, after I stopped to think about it for two seconds, was no more original than Genesis 2-3 and 6-8 and Luke 23-24. (That’s the stories of the Garden of Eden, Noah’s Ark and the death and resurrection of Christ, for all us philistines.)

Thankfully the film isn’t evangelizing, and none of the characters are seen standing or lying with arms outstretched a la the crucifixion. But sadly the cute anthropomorphic robots of the film are needlessly inscribed with the doings of Adam, Eve and Jesus.

To review: WALL-E (Johnny-5 lookalike, stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter/Earth Class) finds a lone weed growing in a discarded boot. He gives it to EVE (blatant Bible crib, stands for Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator). EVE puts the plant inside her Mac-inspired white streamlined body and waits for a ride back to the starship Axiom, where the human survivors a trash-swamped Earth have been camped out for 700 years.

My gloss: WALL-E as Adam impregnates EVE as, well, Eve. She takes the specimen to Noah’s Ark. There she and WALL-E defy the almighty robots in charge, who are programmed to believe Earth is lost forever.

Tension, drama and hilarity as the weed is tossed about, exposed to the vacuum of space, saved, lost, found, etc. etc. In the climax WALL-E is crushed in a piece of machinery while trying to bring humanity back to the Promised Land. But he is repaired and given a new motherboard and rebooted by EVE. For a moment he doesn’t remember EVE at all --- for the first time in the film he is actually robotic and not anthropomorphic. But then, disappointingly, he remembers. And Christ is risen indeed.

Is any of this necessary? is the point I’m trying to make. It’s not really a question of whether the film’s writers were going for the Biblical parallelism. These tales are so totally engrained in our collective consciousness it becomes hard to escape them. But escape them we should. These tropes are hackneyed beyond belief. In the Bible and in classics is where they should stay. Let’s branch out, for Christ’s sake.

One thing Biblical the film did but I rather like: The Ark, that is, the Axiom, is clearly a capitalist venture as opposed to backup storage for genetic material. The first generation aboard, we may safely infer, paid to be there. Their fat, atrophied and osteoporosized great-great-great-grandchildren are mostly white.

What is the Axiom’s axiom? Perhaps that to save humankind is inevitably to exclude parts of humankind.

How I spent my 4th of July

2008-07-07T15:39:00.000-07:00

Picked up the final trade paperback installment of “Y: The Last Man” this past Wednesday, and resolved to read all 10 volumes in one go. I averaged about an hour and a half per volume, so it turned into a two-day affair.

For the uninitiated, “Y” is the story of the eponymous Yorick Brown, ostensibly the only male to survive a mysterious plague that spontaneously and immediately wipes out every mammal with a y chromosome on July 17, 2002. Womankind then inherits a devastated, corpse-strewn Earth.

Yorick teams up with secret agent 355 and geneticist Allison Mann to: (a) survive, (b) figure out what killed all the other men, (c) find a way to save humankind from extinction, and ultimately (d) find his long-lost girlfriend.

All of these things are accomplished in the end, and none of them matter. I’m not too concerned about spoiling anything --- the storytelling in “Y” is so compelling that there’s nothing really to spoil. As Yorick himself remarks, discovering what actually caused the plague is “vaguely unsatisfying,” and that aliens, witchcraft or nanobots might have been cooler (“Whys and Wherefores,” 58-9).

The “gendercide” is one of the baldest plot devices ever conceived and executed in fiction. More than simply propelling action and character development, though, it creates an artistic canvas on which the “hard” science fiction of an Isaac Asimov and the idealistic science fiction of a Thomas Moore can converse.

What would happen if there suddenly were no men in the world? Writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Pia Guerra envision marauding bands of “Amazons” bent on toppling remnants of the patriarchy, like the phallic Washington Monument, and harassing those who cling to memories of beloved men as well as female-to-male transgender people. Marauders in fiction are rarely so idealistic. Think Morlocks who read Dworkin. The Amazons are just one example of the myriad ways in which female society could go; but the richness and diversity of the creators’ vision of the post-male planet is fantastic.

Another thing I love about “Y” is that readers see every one of the major characters as a child. One of the earliest flashbacks of Yorick as a boy is more clever than illustrative, but the episodic Bildungsroman sequences only get deeper and more relevant as they go. Rendered in pictures and words or just words, fictional characters don’t often have such detailed histories.

2008-07-02T14:09:00.000-07:00

In “No Country for Old Men” (2005), Cormac McCarthy leaves it almost entirely up to the reader to determine what motivates Moss, or rather lets the reader superimpose his own desires. Moss is an underdog and self-effacing -- and clever -- and so we can see ourselves doing as he does. McCarthy creates a solid enough shell of a character for us to climb inside.

The author provides the most open-ended, vague, preliminary reaction of his character to the almost-inconceivable sum of money he finds, and never supplements it:

There was a heavy leather document case standing upright alongside the dead man's knee and Moss absolutely knew what was in the case and he was scared in a way that he didnt even understand.
[...]
It was level full of hundred dollar banknotes. They were in packets fastened with banktape stamped each with the denomination $10,000. He didnt know what it added up to but he had a pretty good idea. He sat there looking at it and then he closed the flap and sat with his head down. His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into forty pounds of paper in a satchel.

The money is metanym for almost any opportunity. When one first presents itself, before all the what-ifs are sketched out, it is unreal, exhilarating, terrifying.

If Moss is a cipher, then Anton Chigurh is an alien. With Sheriff Bell’s soliloquies as a guide, we inevitably come to him as a force virtually extraterrestrial; non-human at least. His motivations are opaque; as opposed to Moss’s, which are indeterminate but certainly there.

Bell speaks of a kind of harbinger:

Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he's real. I have seen his work. I walked in front of those eyes once. I wont do it again.

The boy Bell sent to the gas chamber seemed a sign of dark things to come, people without souls; Chigurh then must be that thing: he is a cipher for Bell’s and our worst fears about the outer limits of moral turpitude.

Ladies and gentlemen

2008-06-29T08:40:00.000-07:00

While still mired in heterosexism (a misogynistic heterosexism at that), "The Decameron" (1353) includes a fair amount of gender bending

Turning first to the recurring character Calandrino, who in IX.3 is convinced by his mischievous friends that he is pregnant. The metanarrative of course is that men do not get pregnant; Calandrino, however, is a dunce and superstitious too, and never guesses any of the jokes played on him, least of all this one. The punchline of the tale is a little inscrutable:

"Alas! It's your fault, Tessa. You always lie on top. I told you how it would be."

I say inscrutable because Calandrino ostensibly refers to a superstition about sexual positions. The question is whether in 12th century Florence such a superstition obtained, or whether Calandrino is inventing his own superstition.

If, in the primitive worldview, femininity is tantamount to homosexuality, then we have a clever tale in II.3. The daughter of the King of England travels in disguise as an Abbot of the church -- for reasons not altogether very clear -- seducing a young Florentine along his/her way to Rome.

the Abbot laid a hand on his chest and began to touch him as girls touch their lovers. This greatly astounded Alessandro, and he began to think the Abbot was a person of unnatural tastes.
[...]
Alessandro laid his hand on the Abbot's chest, and found two round, firm, delicate woman's breasts, as if carved out of ivory. When he touched them and realized the Abbot was a woman, he stayed for no further invitation

Zinerva passes as a man to regain her husband's trust and restore her own honor in II.9, ultimately bearing her breasts to end the charade.

The bearing of breasts as a declaratory statement has a third counterpoint in II.8 where a lady tears open her dress and accuses the Count of Antwerp of trying to rape her.

Effective dreaming

2008-06-21T17:50:00.000-07:00

Science fiction at its best deals with new possibilities and their attendant ethical dilemmas. Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Lathe of Heaven” (1971) makes the former its focus, and sagely avoids providing answers to the latter.

George Orr’s unconscious mind has the ability to change the world. Dr. William Haber attempts through hypnotic suggestion to harness this power and make the world a better place: one free of war, pollution, overpopulation.

But Orr is a reluctant instrument. He knows when something’s been changed, and remembers the way things used to be. And moreover he is at heart a fairly negative person. Remedying overpopulation for him means letting loose a decimating plague; ending war among the nations means pitting Earth against hostile aliens.

The ethical dilemma raised is, naturally: If a human were to have the power to change reality, should he?

The best analogy Orr can come up with is on pages 140-1, when he asks whether a person with the ability to save someone from a poisonous snakebite should do so if it’s possible that someone could go on to commit murder. Take this to its logical extent -- factor in the butterfly effect -- and the conclusion must be that it is better for everyone not to act at all, in any situation.

As a fictional character, Orr is of course himself the analogy for the unforeseen consequences of everyday decisions. He is also a cipher (something I’ll be very interested in in the next few posts).

In his own description and in Heather Lalache’s, he is a walking, talking tabula rasa. For Lalache, that’s a good thing: “It was more than dignity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved. The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being, of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved” (130).

For Orr, though, this is not so good: “He could be born into any world. He had no character. He was a lump of clay, a block of uncarved wood” (96).

“The Lathe of Heaven” suffers technical problems despite, or because of, a brilliant premise. Orr is a pretty dull guy. Lelache, who is more complex, changes based on Orr’s dreams, even disappears and reappears. Character, in this uncommon novel’s pages, is impossible to maintain.

But that I suppose is an interesting answer to the snakebite question. For people are not merely actors: they are also acted upon, changing constantly as much as a result of their own actions as the actions of others. Character, as conceived in fiction, is itself a fiction predicated on constancy, with change in fixed quantity.

For Spider-Man, great responsibility goes hand in hand with great power. For George Orr? Maybe not. His ability for creating change is undoubtedly greater than most mortals, but scale is all that is different. We are all out of control.

The golden semiotoscope

2008-06-20T19:09:00.000-07:00

Hadn’t been planning to, but recently plowed through Philip Pullman’s “Dark Materials” trilogy and was intrigued by the semiotic device that makes for the title of the first book, “The Golden Compass” (1995).

Lyra Belacqua’s alethiometer (from the Greek aletheia, “truth”), is marked with 36 symbols and has an interface of three dials, through which an adept user may enter queries and get back answers. Sort of like a steampunk Google.

The symbols include: “an anchor; an hourglass surmounted by a skull; a chameleon, a bull, a beehive” (“Golden Compass,” 78) and “a baby, that a puppet … a loaf of bread” (“The Amber Spyglass,” 17).

What can the symbols be but an alphabet? And who can their augur be but a reader?

The wise Gyptian Farder Coram gives a pretty good description of the semantic chain, though he thinks he’s talking about divination:

“All these pictures round the rim,” said Farder Coram, holding it delicately toward John Faa’s blunt strong gaze, “they’re symbols, and each one stands for a whole series of things. Take the anchor, there. The first meaning of that is hope, because hope holds you fast like an anchor so you don’t give way. The second meaning is steadfastness. The third meaning is snag, or prevention, The fourth meaning is the sea. And so on, down to ten, twelve, maybe a never-ending series of meanings.”

[…]

“But how does it know what level you’re thinking of when you set the question?” said John Faa.

“Ah, by itself it don’t. It only works if the questioner holds the levels in their mind. You got to know all the meanings first, and there must be a thousand or more. Then you got to be able to hold them in your mind without fretting at it or pushing for an answer, and just watch while the needle wanders. When it’s gone round its full range, you’ll know what the answer is….”

(GC 126)

The Spit and image

2008-04-02T15:39:00.000-07:00

Once again closing the gate after the horses have come home, today I pause to contemplate the photograph of Eliot Spitzer that was all but ubiquitous, at least in the media sources I regularly consult, the day after after the New York Times broke it's big story March 10:

The original image of course fits the well-established-in-politics "stand by your man" photo op; but in more than one place, including in the Gazette, the image was cropped to leave out Mrs. Spitzer and focus on Eliot's Jim Carey-esque expression.

For comparison, an image of Spitzer on a good day:

Knowing a thing or two about how press photographers shoot, I know that the frown photo must have been culled by the Associated Press from a hundred or more images. A conscious decision was made to circulate this mug.

It hurts to even look at this picture, to imagine oneself moving one's jaw thus. His ears stick out. Spitzer looks like a Muppet. And his eyes, as at least one report noted in type as well as picture, are glassy. He has no doubt been crying, or is about to break down.

This is a picture that would normally be discarded. One reason press photographers take so many pictures is because people often don't photograph well, and it takes several tries to catch them at the right angle, with their eyes open and their mouths not all agog.

What inscribes this image so that it was not left out but instead moved to the top of the pile?

Clearly, this man's shame is palpable in the contortions of his face. It's a story with a bit of smut in it, and so a touch of the disgusting is appropriate. The worse the subject can be made to look, the better.

Perhaps there's something of the freak show here, too; the tradition of grotesquerie.

Ape and essence

2008-04-01T16:22:00.000-07:00

The latest cover of Vogue, picturing an African-American basketball player and a white Brazilian supermodel, has stirred up the requisite amount of controversy.

At this point in the game, the objections to such an image are obligatory, utterly predictable. They are, now, part of the text.

What is the text?

It is one in which we are quick to take offense at anything remotely suggestive of racial stereotype (and this image is not a remote suggestion, it is the real McCoy). It is one in which the expected response must be repeated by the media as much as it is voiced by the enlightened.

It is certainly a text that relishes in stating the obvious: the fact that Lebron James looks like King Kong grabbing Gisele Bundchen’s Fay Wray. (Note how the quintessential scream of the monster snack/rape victim is supplanted by the suppliant supermodel smile.)

It is a text that must founder in watching Ving Rames portray a member of a technologically-advanced ape species in Tim Burton’s “Planet of the Apes” remake.

It is a text that is worn out but still current, doubtlessly perpetuated more by media that must comment and analyze Don Imus ad nauseum rather than let him fade.

Where does this text come from? In this case it might have started out accidental. James himself is untroubled by the image.

"Everything my name is on is going to be criticized in a good way or bad way," James told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. "Who cares what anyone says?"

Then it proceeded to the editors, who would have instantly realize the buzz and titillation it would create.

Vogue spokesman Patrick O'Connell said the magazine "sought to celebrate two superstars at the top of their game" for the magazine's annual issue devoted to size and shape.

"We think Lebron James and Gisele Bundchen look beautiful together and we are honored to have them on the cover," he said.

Then it proceeds to the man of the street, for mixed reaction, and to the editors of other publications for condemnation.

I’m almost hesitant to comment on this image myself because all it does, and all its cloud of accompanying type does, is perpetuate human anxiety. But also I’m compelled to state that fact. Here is a seme with incredible signifying power, and I would be remiss not to write about it here.

Carrying coals to High Castle

2008-04-01T16:16:00.000-07:00

Juliana Frink and Nobusuke Tagomi have both killed people, after which they both reflexively consult the I Ching and come to very similar realizations about the Inner Truth and its keen disassociation from their reality.

Curiously, these two characters, both peripheral and both homicidal by necessity, wrap up “The Man in the High Castle.” (By way of explaining that “peripheral”: Juliana’s action takes place miles away from everyone else’s; and aside from her broken marital relationship to Frank Frink, she does not connect with other characters in the cleverly incidental ways every other character does. Tagomi is literally on the sidelines of an historic meeting between radical peace-seeking German and Japanese factions.)

It’s by way of Juliana and Tagomi that the novel becomes selfconsciously postmodern. (It is postmodern throughout, but not (explicitly) selfconsciously so up until the last 30 pages.) Consulting the oracle (using coins rather than the usual yarrow stalks, which must be significant in some way beyond my Western grasp), Juliana discovers, effectively, that she is in a novel. It’s not true, the hexagon reveals, that Germany and Japan won World War II and divided the spoils of America.

The novel-within-novel, the inverse parallel, “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy,” composed with painstaking consultation of the oracle by Hawthorne Abendsen, is truth, and the reality of “The Man in the High Castle” is false. (Of course the world of “Grasshopper” is not our world or strictly speaking the inverse parallel of Juliana’s world. In the short passages we see of it, we learn it is absurdly utopian.)

The purpose of the peripheral characters in “High Castle” seems to be to come to such world-shifting realizations. Take for example another one: Paul Kasoura, is at first amused when he’s given a decorative pin, crafted by Frank Frink and Ed McCarthy and grafted him by Robert Childan. The piece seems worthless because it has no historicity, that is, has none of the appeal to a Japanese cultural appropriator that a Mickey Mouse watch would.

But then Kasoura realizes it has something else, something more fundamental to the prewar Japanese spirit, that is, wu, which we may as well equate to Frederic Jameson’s “aura.” Perhaps because this strikes Kasoura, or his colleagues, too close to home, Kasoura recommends that the only thing to be done with such original work is to duplicate and kitschify it.

Tagomi does not – cannot – derive the same sense of wu from Edfrank jewelry. I submit this is because of his actions during the invasion of his office.

Killing, for him as for Juliana, shifts his perceptions permanently into the realm of historicity, which for the sake of argument I’ll pose as the opposite or foil of wu. Both are fantasies, values ascribed to an object by its observer. But historicity hinges on a perception of the object’s role in a historical moment, whereas wu is dependent on perception of something like the eternal soul of the artist suffusing the artwork. Juliana and Tagomi become shut off from wu and sealed in historicity because their actions constitute or continue such historical moments. Tagomi defends two men working to prevent a new holocaust (using an already historically-inscribed Civil War-era revolver that may or may not be a counterfeit, ho ho!), while Juliana unwittingly stops a Nazi assassin.

Juliana is frightened until she realizes Joe Cinnadella isn’t an abusive boyfriend but a Nazi assassin. She is cold to the fact that she’s committed manslaughter, intent on the fact that she’s protected Abendsen – whose historical import, I must note, she perceives rather than understands. An important distinction, I think. She knows Abendsen and his novel are a big deal, but she doesn’t finish reading “Grasshopper” until after killing the assassin and a few hours before meeting Abendsen in person.

Tagomi has a more visceral reaction, turning to the I Ching immediately and grapping for the next 24 hours with his action’s implications. Meeting with the German consul, Tagomi suffers a heart attack. I think this happens because there are irreconcilable forces in him, forces of historicity and wu, not annihilating each other or necessarily damaging each other but bumping into each other and immobilizing each other.

What exactly is Tagomi doing by refusing to extradite Frank Frink, secret Jew, to German for extermination? Historical forces lay claim to this action, as do spiritual ones. Tagomi doesn’t know Frink (although Frink very likely produced his revolver, if in fact the revolver is a fake). He’s probably signed countless other such extradition papers. But in this case his refusal to sign is merely to spite the German consul, to retaliate for the invasion and for the moral upheaval it has caused him personally. He’s saved a total of three lives by now, but he still has taken one.

Commie Nazis

2008-03-23T13:30:00.000-07:00

One of the many wonderful things about a certain someone I’m romantically involved with is that she’s presently taking a science fiction course. As best I can, I’ve been reading along with her.

The syllabus includes two by Ursula K. LeGuin, “The Lathe of Heaven” and “The Dispossessed,” a trilogy by Octavia Butler, Wells’s “The Time Machine,” and the film “Galaxy Quest,” among others.

I usually like to devote these posts to a single topic within a single book. Given my proclivity for rambling on, that’s a useful constraint. But I was rather taken by the similarities between “The Dispossessed” (U.S., 1974) and a book I’d never heard of until the semester’s start, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We” (Russia, 1921). So, in the tradition of middle school, I think I’ll do a bit of the ol’ compare-and-contrast. I promise to stray beyond the five-paragraph format, however.

Both novels are fascinated with walls, and both involve rocket ships escaping (or is it expanding?) those walls.

The One State of “We” is contained within the Green Wall. Beyond is yucky nature. Everyone stays inside and lives in a panoptic society where everything is made of glass. (Ciphers are well advised not to throw stones.) Yet the story is told by the chief designer of a rocket intended to spread the wisdom of the One State into the cosmos. Yucky nature is held back, but eternity is penetrated.

The Port of Abbeny in “The Dispossessed” is surrounded by a wall, one that keeps the inside in or the outside out, depending on how you look at it. Offworlders are not permitted beyond the wall. Anarresti (onworlders) are permitted within the wall, but not off the planet.

Naturally, both of these membranes are permeable and permeated. That is the action and tension of both books. There is permitted travel outside the walls and there is prohibited travel outside the walls. The heroes of both books travel in both modes.

Zemyatin, without authorial comment or internal explanation, has characters without names but alphanumeric designations. The alienness of this system, and the lack of guiding commentary, makes this very unpalatable to the reader. It is easy to recognize the citizens (“ciphers,” zeroes) of the One State are drones without individuality. In fact it’s somewhat difficult to distinguish O-90 and I-330 despite their distinct characterizations.

LeGuin’s novel has a very similar naming system. The people of Anarres get names generated by computers, five or six letters long, usually following a consonant-vowel- consonant-vowel-consonant pattern. Yet it is made entirely palatable, even appealing, thanks to her protagonist’s description of the system: “But what is more personal than a name no other living person bears?” he tells someone who reacts to it as “so mechanical, so impersonal” (198).

I take this digression to underscore the dramatic recasting of the collective societies presented in the two novels. Zemyatin, writing at the time and place he did was naturally mortified by fascism. LeGuin, writing at the time and place she did was drawn to anarchism. Ideologically opposite, the societies of each book takes a remarkably similar shape. (LeGuin’s I think is a much more nuanced depiction, and benefits from a juxtaposition with a capitalist society on the planet Urras, but I digress again.)

Why Shevek wants to travel to Urras is plain and it is complicated: it is patriotic and altruistic and selfish and whimsical. The reason the One State wishes to proselytize across the solar system is murky, and seems uncomplex. I want to relate this somehow to the naming of individuals within each society, the complexity suggested by the impersonal computer generated-ness of both systems and the simultaneous uniqueness both entails. I’m not there yet.

Resolutions

2008-03-23T13:19:00.000-07:00

Better late than never, a list of New Year's Resolutions (some already fulfilled!)

Part I -- General
1. go to New Hampshire more often
2. be a better reporter
3. be a better bass player
4. increase wardrobe selection
5. iron shirts regularly
6. break diet less frequently than in 2006 and 2007
7. maybe get a new laptop, one with an "n" key and working CD reader/writer and that doesn't sound like a 747 getting ready to take off.
8. become a morning person
9. clean the cat box every day
10. get more and bigger plants
11. blog daily
12. floss daily
13. start Gravity's Rainbow reading group after Ulysses group wraps up
14. new belt that actually holds my pants up
15. rediscover vinyl collection
16. you have insurance so use it (part one): checkup
17. you have insurance so use it (part two): dentist
18. new glasses (check)
19. buy less beer
20. get back in the Sunday Times groove
21. daily pushups (in graduating quantity)
22. daily situps (ditto)
23. ride bike for all trips in town
24. maybe kinda sorta write some fiction again
25. read more than last year -- 13 is hella weak

Part II -- Books to read that are already on my self
25. God, The Bible
26. Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge
27. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future
28. Goethe, Faust
29. Derrida, Limited Ink
30. Milton, Paradise Regained
31. Miller, A Canticle for Liebowitz
32. Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
33. Twain, Huckleberry Finn (never actually finished it in high school)
34. LeGuin, The Disposessed (check)
35. Ellmann, James Joyce (halfway through)
36. bin Laden, Messages to the World
37. Tolsoy, Anna Karennina
38. Deleuze/Guatarri, Anti-Oedipus
39. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness (again)
40. one of the Bruce Sterlings
41. Pullman, The Golden Compass
42. Delany, Dhalgren (again)
43. Dostoyevski, Devils (again)
44. Gaiman, Neverwhere
45. Schooler, The Blue Bear
46. Asimov, Foundation series
48. e.e. cummings
49. Hemingway, the first 49 stories
50. Robinson, Mars trilogy (again)

Part III -- books not on my shelf
51. New translation of War and Peace
52. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (check)
53. Dick, Ubik
54. LeGuinn, The Lathe of Heaven (check)
55. Hosseni, The Kite Runner
56. Lem, Solaris
57. Gaiman, Sandman
58. Conrad, Nostromo
59. Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
60. Diepeveen, Difficulties of Modernism
61. Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees
62. Kazantzakis, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (seen at the Strand)
63. Motter, Mister X
64. any Matt Howarth
65. Essential X-Men vols. 4-8
66. Joanna Russ, The Female Man
67. Garcia Marquez, 1,000 Years of Solitude
68. Zemyatin, We (check)
69. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (check)
70. Jack Gilbert
71. Bocaccio, The Decameron
72. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy (check)
73. Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
74. Pynchon, Against the Day
75. Versaci, This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics and Literature

Part IV -- movies
76. Solaris (the original, Russian one)
77. The Last King of Scotland
78. Inland Empire
79. 300
80. Clueless
81. Casino Royale
82. The Fountain
83. Fay Grimm
84. Bonnie & Clyde
85. Borat
86. Snakes on a Plane
87. I am Legend
88. V for Vendetta
89. The Goonies (check)
90. Sixteen Candles (check)
91. Underworld
92. Lost Boys (check)
93. Harold & Maude
94. Harold & Kumar
95. No Country for Old Men (check)
96. Galaxy Quest (check)
97. The Producers (w/ Gene Wilder)
98. Bad Boys II
99. Point Break

Part V -- music
101. symphony -- boston or maybe springfield?
102. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Is Is
103. MMW, Notes from the Underground (replace)
104. Neutral Milk Hotel
105. Hot Chip, Warning + there's a new one?
106. Who Killed Amanda Palmer?
107. the new Liars
108. some Kate Bush
109. Broken Social Scene
110. Les Savy Fav, Let's Stay Friends
111. the new Streets?
112. some Clash

Accomplishments

2008-01-02T15:05:00.000-08:00

Here I shall post the resolutions to last year's New Year's nonresolutions. I've obfuscated the unresolved nonresolutions; but if you really care to see what they are, you can still find them on this blog. I've also added a few accomplishments that weren't on the list to compensate for the obfuscated unresolved nonresolutions.

My 2008 nonresolutions to come soon. I've given myself until the end of January to come up with 100, and I'm most of the way there.

-- Ed.

Part 1 -- general

1. get a futon (got a couch instead)
3. get an ironing board and iron (check)
6. be a better reporter (slightly better, I think)
15. play bass again (and how!)
19. finish ulysses paper by march (finished it a few days before Bloomsday)
25. get more frequent haircuts, so as to avoid sudden beast/man transformations that confuse and frighten friends and co-workers (I'm on a bimonthly haircut)
-- start Ulysses reading group

Part II -- Books to read that are already on my self
26. Bronte, Wuthering Heights (on tape)
27. Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
28. Dante, Divine Comedy
38. Stapeldon, Last and First Men
44. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
-- Joyce, "Dubliners" (on tape)
-- H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
-- H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man
-- Disch, The Prisoner

Part III -- books not on my shelf
56. Swift, Gulliver's Travels
57. Capek, "Rossum's Universal Robots"
-- McCarthy, "The Road" (on tape)
-- Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (on tape)
-- Kafka, "The Metamorphosis" (and other stories) (on tape)
-- Steinbeck, "The Pearl" (on tape)
-- Twain, "The Man who Corrupted Hadleyburg" (on tape)

Part IV -- movies
77. A Scanner Darkly
80. Pan's Labyrinth
-- Wild Strawberries
-- The Seventh Seal
-- Half Nelson
-- TMNT
-- The Simpsons
-- War Games
-- Real Genius

Part V -- music
-- Boston Symphony -- February
-- Josh Dion Band -- May @ Bishop's Lounge
-- Roswell Rudd/Mark Dresser -- October @ UMass
-- Fred Anderson/Chad Taylor -- December @ UMass
-- Les Savy Fav -- December @ Pearl St.

Part VI -- other art
-- The Clark Art Museum in Williamstown -- February
-- Museum of Natural History NYC -- July
-- Leonard Nimoy: Sekima and the Full Body Project - N'ton, R. Michelson Gallery -- November

I forgot how to explain time

2008-01-02T14:48:00.000-08:00

In his preface to a compendium of his novels, H.G. Wells calls his first, The Time Machine, “a bit stiff about the fourth dimension.” The abstract theoretical has central importance in the novel; yet it is indeed at odds with the narrative, which is essentially an adventure that could be transposed from the future onto some primitive island of the present (the present being 1895).

The future setting allows, however, for speculation and philosophizing that a contemporary savage land would not. For there in the distant time humanity’s body, mind and spirit have atrophied. The Time Traveller, at least as his hypothesis is presented in the novel, supposes this is the result of socioeconomic and scientific advancement up to a threshold, beyond which nothing more must needs be done, and an epoch of backsliding necessarily sets in.

Bear in mind, though: the reteller of the Time Traveller’s story is evidently preoccupied with communism, as we see in the two places where he quotes himself in conversation (6, 21), and we should wonder whether this affects how the Time Traveller's take on future humanity is reflected.

The Time Traveller opines:

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.
(57)

But necessity is clearly not the mother of the Time Traveller’s invention, nor the goad of his intelligence. His discovery is, by this measure, a byproduct. The time machine serves no purpose toward preservation or advancement of the species (though conceivably it could, had not it and its creator disappeared).

Situating the Time Traveller in his own model of human progress is therefore difficult, complicated further by his own devolution at the climax of his story.

Surrounded by subhumans, the Time Traveller experiences savage impulses. He says he finds it nigh impossible to see humanity in his descendents the Morlocks, and yearns to kill them (49). Later, in combat with them, he grips an iron lever, a found weapon, a caveman’s implement. He seems to delight in the violence. “I could feel the succulent giving of flesh and bone under my blows, and for a moment I was free” (54).

The Time Traveller touches on the topic of future shock only briefly, but uses a very interesting analogy in doing so. “Conceive the tale of London which a Negro, fresh from Central Africa, would take back to his tribe! What would he know of railway companies, of social movements, of telephone and telegraph wires, of the Postal Delivery Company, and postal orders and the like?” (30). Although he considers himself more advance than the Eloi and the Morlocks, he nonetheless realizes he is at a disadvantage for understanding them and their societies. Here, if only for an instant, he others himself; he is in the position of the negro, the savage in a strange land, whose perceptions must be way off the mark.

(Pictured above, a papercraft TARDIS. It's a two-dimensional representation of a multi-dimensional time machine -- get it?!?! [link])

Song for the dumped

2007-12-18T10:23:00.000-08:00

At the risk of steering what has so far been a very serious and mostly impersonal blog in an opposite and possibly LiveJournal-ish direction....

It’s been roughly six months since I got dumped. Hard. To express at the turbulent and feverish emotions following the event, I had my own private diary. Having gained a little distance and composure, I think it might be worthwhile here to try and parse the experience as a semiotician might. I’ll enlist the help of Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse.

I’ve known all along the discourse of love is a selfish one, one spoken by the ego if not the id. I now know this is especially true of the discourse of canceled love, of love wrenched away. It’s been useful of course to survey my turmoil by superimposing upon it the six “stages” of mourning, particularly denial and bargaining. But ultimately what’s at issue is the self, less so the mechanisms it swings into place nonsequentially, gratuitously, and ineffectually. I yearned to come to grips with what happened, but I rarely let a lack of results get in the way of continuous probing.

To understand – is that not to divide the image, to undo the I, proud organ of misapprehension?
Interpretation: no, that is not what your cry means. As a matter of fact, that cry is still a cry of love: “I want to understand myself, to make myself understood, make myself known, be embraced; I want someone to take me with him.” That is what your cry means. (60)

It is shocking and infuriating that a change of circumstances can abolish love. Love, if indeed it was love – shouldn’t it have withstood the change? Isn’t it transcendent? Evidently not.

There exists a “higher value” for me: my love. I never say to myself: “What’s the use?” I am not nihilistic. I do not ask myself the question of ends. Never a “why” in my monotonous discourse, except for one, always the same: But why is it that you don’t love me? How can one not love this me whom love renders perfect (who gives so much, who confers happiness, etc.)? (186)

A hard realization, but still an acceptable one. It allows me to revile myself, but for reasons under my control. It is a personal failing, selfishness, that sustains my agony of separation; not, instead, a deficiency perceived by her. This enables the realization that her motivations are internal as well, selfish also – I don’t enter into her actions; or if I do, it is only as an afterthought.

This too is disheartening, but not insuperable. If, after everything we vowed and demonstrated and shouted from the rooftops (indeed, we often did these things with irony), I suddenly become trivial to her, then to hell with her! [I draw my mouth to a noble frown and angle my chin upward slightly.]

I am caught in a contradiction: on the one hand, I believe I know the other better than anyone and triumphantly assert my knowledge to the other (“I know you – I’m the only one who really knows you!”); and on the other hand, I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not o be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other’s origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know. (134)

My estimation of her was off kilter, insufficient, idealized. Now, I do not try to correct the model: I cease to measure: I become stoic. The latest stage is an impasse. Not so many years ago I was a skeptic where love was concerned. Talking Heads’ “More Songs about Buildings and Food” seemed to sum it all up. She negated that for a time; now again the album is upon my turntable.

I-love-you [je-t’-aime] is without nuance. It suppresses explanations, adjustments, degrees, scruples. In a way – exorbitant paradox of language – to say I-love-you is to proceed as if there were no theater of speech, and this word is always true (has no other referent than its utterance: it is a performative). (148)

A page later Barthes is so bold as to call the utterance “phatic.” Perhaps. It is at any rate dialectic: once she began to hesitate in the performance, I knew something was up. It couldn’t be missed. But then, by that point, what was there to be done?

The king was in his countinghouse

2007-12-18T07:48:00.000-08:00

So recently one of the folks in my Ulysses reading group stumbled across, at Amherst College's Johnson Chapel, a rest room decorated with Joyceana. I took a field trip there this past weekend to investigate. Essentially there are four quotations: the opening and closing lines of Ulysses (3.1-5, 643.1596-1609) and the opening lines of Giacomo Joyce. I've posted more photos on Flickr.

I emailed the Amherst English department to see what I could learn about this wonderful little curiosity. Professor John Cameron replies:

The “grafitti” appeared mysteriously sometime in the 1980s or late 1970s (I’ve forgotten but can look it up). For a long time the mystery of their appearance remained. But someone hinted that the answer could be found in one of the senior class books (for that year which I’ve forgotten). I looked it up and there is a picture of four young women students doing the job. Several of them were students in my Joyce course. I have a Xerox copy of the picture. A few years later someone, still unknown to me then inscribed the excerpt from Derek Walcott. A few times since there have been crude attempts to add comments. We’ve managed to have most of them removed.

Last and First

2007-12-17T05:58:00.000-08:00

Not only have I set myself lately to reading from the canon of English literature, I’ve deemed it wise to peruse also some of science fiction’s foundational texts. Yesterday afternoon I finally got to the end of Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon.

A not altogether very enjoyable read, for one very obvious reason: the “novel” has no characters. My dust jacket calls this and its follow up, Star Maker, “the finest future histories ever written.” I suspect, though, that this refers to a very narrow category of future history indeed.

Of “speculative fiction” there is much; but none that encompasses so broad a span of time. In Last and First Men, Stapledon paints in very, very broad strokes 2 billion years of the human comedy, from 1930 up to the twilight of the race. In that time the organism progresses through eighteen distinct permutations, many of them artificially advanced. At the end, humanity’s only hope of leaving a legacy is the ultralongshot chance that deep-space probes filled with primordial (but inherently human) stuff will take root on some distant planet or planets after humankind proper is extinct.

Stapledon himself compares this saga to myth; indeed there is nothing else to compare it to, for nowhere else is so huge a history ever set down. It’s as though Stapledon were a forward-looking Edith Hamilton. He is certainly not of the same category as an H.G. Wells or a Jules Verne.

In his preface, Stapledon formulates – perhaps even better than Chip Delany (who said it best as far as my reading has shown me hitherto) – the importance of science fiction: “Today we should welcome, and even study, every serious attempt to envisage the future of our race; not merely in order to grasp the very diverse and often tragic possibilities that confront us, but also that we may familiarize ourselves with the certainty that many of our most cherished ideals would seem puerile to more developed minds” (9).

Stapledon of necessity skirts the issue, however, of truly formulating the more developed minds that follow our own. I can’t blame him. Bear in mind: we may represent a three-dimensional object in just two dimensions; but although we might conceive of a fourth dimension, how are we to represent it even using three? The future humans are all oblique. The more advanced, the narrator tells us, operate on planes beyond our grasp; while the more primitive are barely worthy of contemplation. The only “characters” who “speak” in this chronicle are of the First Men – our breed – and even so they are not named or distinguished beyond their role in historical events.

Two billion years. Not as backstory, but as foreground. The only novels that come remotely close, in my experience, are Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy and Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, both of which deal with well-articulated characters who technology has blessed, or cursed, with tremendous lifespans. (Oh, I guess Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love should be acknowledged here too – though there’s a novel whose boredom quite possibly exceeds that of Last and First Men.)

Stapledon’s premise is that the virtue of speculative fiction (or in his formulation, myth) is that it “expresses richly, and often perhaps tragically, the highest admirations possible within a culture” (9). He does his best at the end to tie it all together into a unified expression. Divergent as are the Second through Eighteenth men from the First, the narrator opines that there is nonetheless something common to them all:

We remember obscurely, and yet with a strange conviction, that all the age-long striving of the human spirit, no less than the petty cravings of individuals, was seen as a fair component in something far more admirable than itself; and that man ultimately defeated, no less than man for a while triumphant, contributes to this higher excellence.
(227)

But the “petty cravings” of individuals is precisely what this “novel” lacks. It sometimes summarizes or encapsulates them. It can tell us but not show us; and in this way it can’t help but sterilize what could have been vital. As fiction, the novel is unsatisfying. Perhaps it expresses the highest admirations possible within a culture, but fails to do so richly.

Somehow, though, I can’t pan Last and First Men completely. The book does have one distinct character: the Last Man who contacted Olaf Stapledon and beamed to him the fanciful narrative that is the actual fact of 2 billions years’ history. There is the shift in this narrator’s distanced and believably objective tone in the first 14 chapters to the subjective mode of the final two, during which he describes his own people. And there is the second shift in the epilogue, set 20,000 years after his dictation of the rest of the book, when melancholia and insanity have set in.

This character is entirely too much in shadow; but how else could the narrative itself be served? Sax Russell or Abelard Lindsay or Lazarus Long could not tell this story.

Next: Wells’s Time Machine.

Dem bones, dem bones

2007-12-14T09:19:00.000-08:00

A short supplement to the last entry:

“The Prisoner” always seemed to me preoccupied also with death. While Foucault provides the critical tools with which to parse the series as it relates to power, I’m at a bit of a loss to decipher the show’s morbid undertones.

Each episode begins with the summary of how No. 6 was whisked away to the Village. He tenders, angrily, his resignation, and later is gassed. The men who anaesthetize No. 6 in his London flat drive a Hearse (with the license plate designation TLH 858 – significance?). When he wakes up, No. 6 quite literally arrived at his “home from home.” He has not been simply relocated, he’s been severed from his life and forced into a new existence.

Across the series, No. 6 makes occasional forays into the world of the living, such as in the “The Chimes of Big Ben” (here it is purely Their illusion) and “Many Happy Returns” (where it is actual but completely contrived and regulated by Them). In “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling,” No. 6's mind is swapped into another body. He is reincarnated, but Death trails close behind him. When at last it seems he really has returned to London, in “Fall Out,” it is both real and an illusion – a synthesis; and yet, he is unquestionably still in the realm of the Village.

It is never revealed which “side” controls the Village; nor is it revealed whether the “sides” in play are the ones they’re implied to be: i.e., the capitalist and communist hemispheres. Other characters who die and are resurrected – Cobb, Dutton, Leo McKern’s No. 2 – seem to switch sides in the process. So: is the Village on the side of life or of death?

‘Thus says the Lord God: “Behold, O My people, I will open your graves and cause you to come up from your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.”’
(Ezekiel 37)

You are, No. 6

2007-12-12T05:55:00.000-08:00

[Author's note: Years ago I designed to write a paper about how Patrick McGoohan's "The Prisoner" TV show (1967) anticipated in eerie ways the revelations of Foucault's work on systems of power. I never wrote it. So recently when I came across the notes I'd made, I said to myself, "Blog it!"]

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered."
(episode one, “Arrival”)

In “The Prisoner,” a protagonist known only as No. 6 qualifies his opposition to the power structure of the Village by resisting all of the things he already has been as a secret agent of the Crown. Briefings and debriefings were his stock and trade as long as he was employed; and we can only assume that, like 007, his real name is classified, and neither he nor anyone else reveals it through all 17 episodes of the series.

To escape being pushed, filed, stamped and indexed is why he left Her Magesty’s Secret Service. Yet to No. 2's incessant question, "Why did you resign?" he never replies, "I’ve already told you." Perhaps No. 2 realizes the question has been answered; and perhaps he doesn’t care. We hear him demand “Information, information, information”; but perhaps this is actually an order: perhaps he is commanding No. 6 to get “in formation.”

Almost a decade after No. 6 made his stirring assertion, the French thinker and historian Michel Foucault would write, "Discipline 'makes' individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise" (Discipline and Punish, 170). Read the 169 preceding pages if this assertion seems to you counterintuitive. To hastily condense and summarize, Foucault demonstrates how the concept of individuality had little meaning before there were instruments to observe or measure individuals. The phenomenon, in other words, is a byproduct of the apparatus.

Surveillance is a constant quantity in McGoohan’s (here I yearn to insert an adjective, yet “prescient,” “surreal,” “bizarre” all ring insufficient) television series. No. 6 defines and redefines his identity and individuality by way of opposing to the wardens of his prison. Likewise, the wardens try to remake his identity: from trying to elect him No. 2 in the second episode (“Free For All”), to creating his doppelganger in episode eight (“The Schizoid Man”), to placing him on the throne in episode 17 (“Fall Out”).

Independent of these machinations, we know nothing about No. 6, save his late occupation and romantic life as detailed in episode 13 (“Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling”). In "The Schizoid Man," No. 6 is robbed of his identity when They abduct and recondition him, transforming him into No. 12. Then, a play-actor assumes the No. 6 mantle. No. 6 is literally duplicated (6 x 2 = 12). Realistically, in the end, the only identity No. 6 reclaims is that he is given by Them.

His only recourse and only weapon is anonymity. He never gives his name (nor does anyone ask it), and he refuses to wear his numbered badge. Only after his final "escape" does he take on a new appellation: the closing credits of “Fall Out” list him as "The Prisoner."

"The power in the hierarchized surveillance of the disciples is not possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery. And, although it is true that this pyramidal organization gives it a 'head,' it is the apparatus as a whole that produces 'power' and distributes individuals in this permanent and continuous field." (DP177)

Whether he knew it or not, Foucault was describing the Village. Why is No. 2 played by a different actor in every episode? Producer Bernie Williams said it was merely a way of keeping the audience interested. A reasonable claim: think of “The Prisoner’s” contemporaries on television – like Adam West’s “Batman” -- where there was a new villain every week. But what sets “The Prisoner” apart from and above its peers was the fact that the ever-changing villain was never defeated, merely replaced. No. 6 occasionally wins moral victories, and in one case (episode 12, “Hammer into Anvil”) drives No. 2 mad; but always his adversary is replaced by another one intent on breaking him. Beneath him are equally anonymous mechanisms of power, from the Guardians to the Committee to the surveillance team overseen by “the supervisor,” No. 28 (who, incidentally, bears a striking resemblance to M. Foucault).

Anonymity is the last resort and refuge of resistance; though No. 6 often, and sometimes successfully, interferes with those slotted into the mechanisms of the Village’s power structure. As Thomas Pynchon reminds us, “You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures” (Proverbs for Paranoids #1, in Gravity’s Rainbow, 237).

In “The Eye of Power,” an interview transcribed in Power/Knowledge, Foucault muses that Jeremy Bentham, inventor of the panopticon, never stated clearly who should be in the central tower of the prison, who should hold the power that is constituted by the ability to see without being seen. From the standpoint of the seen, anyone at all could be the seer. This is certainly borne out in “The Prisoner.” No. 6 in “Free For All” vows to “discover who are the prisoners and who are the wardens.” He never succeeds. Foucault observes: “[A]n unbroken succession of observations recalling the motto: each comrade becomes an overseer.”

No. 6: Has it ever occurred to you that you're just as much a prisoner as I am?
No. 2: My dear chap, of course -- I know too much. We're both lifers. I am definitely an optimist. That's why it doesn't matter who No. 1 is."
(episode five, “The Chimes of Big Ben”)

Of course it matters who No. 1 is. Finding out, of course, is one reason we keep watching. In "Free For All," No. 2 urges No. 6 to run for public office, and explains, "If you win, No. 1 will no longer be a mystery to you, if you know what I mean." No. 2 clearly does not say No. 6 will learn who No. 1 is; he merely states that No. 1 will no longer be a mystery. In a way, the mystery’s solution is obvious from the outset; yet its implausibility makes it perpetually compelling.

Iconic as No. 6’s refusing to be numbered is his demand to know, “Who is No. 1?” The eternal reply is equivocation: “You are No. 6.” The delivery of this response is uniform throughout all the No. 2s. They appear to dodge the question, refusing the hero’s question and slapping him down with the mark of order they wish to impose upon him. But clever viewers and critics long ago began re-punctuating the reply thusly: “You are, No. 6.” The insertion of that comma makes the statement anticipate what is evidently shown in the series finale -- that No. 6 is No. 1.

The startling revelation is debased into a joke in the final episode. While No. 6 sits upon the throne, restored to his own clothes (“We thought you would feel more comfortable as yourself,” says No. 2), No. 1 observes the proceedings with a giant mechanical eye: a childish pun on the number one: Roman numeral I. When No. 6 takes the podium to deliver his victory speech, the only way he knows how to begin is with reference to the ego, “I…”; but he is repeatedly drowned out, before he can ever utter another word, by the chorus that shouts, “Aye! Aye! Aye!” Here, an assertion of selfhood and individuality is subsumed by a signal of agreement, compliance, subordination.

What does it mean that No. 6 -- the resister -- is also No. 1 -- the master, the state, the archon, God? For Foucault, the individual is to a large extent a fiction or an artifact; yet, having been engineered, the individual nonetheless becomes vital. Each individual is an “atom” helping to constitute the totality of the system. There’s something more than implicit in “The Prisoner” about the individual’s complicity in the power structures of the world. No. 6 moves from playing a very active role in that system as a secret agent to being a dissident; he revolts against the system he once defended. His resignation, whatever the reason behind it, does nothing to extricate him from the system; it only enmeshes him more thoroughly within it.

See also:
Thomas M. Disch, The Prisoner (I Books, 2003)
Dean Motter and Mark Askwith, The Prisoner: Shattered Visage (D.C. Comics, 1990)

Sound + fury = nothing

2007-11-23T19:20:00.000-08:00

Now that I'm three years out of college, I've gotten around to reading the types of books you'd find on E.D. Hirsch's reading list ... with a wary eye on the future possibility of grad school. Recently: Wuthering Heights and Dante's Comedia. This week, it's The Sound and the Fury. A few observations:

I find the movement and dislocation of perspectives intriguing but troubling. Parts one through three are in first person, part four is in third person. Part one is almost not first person, as it is from the perspective of Benjy, the idiot, for whom his own actions are usually externalized, unnoticed until someone else comments on them. Part four takes the third person without any free-indirect discourse but plenty of editorial commentary. This chapter focuses most on the blackfolk of the Compson household, yet it does not assume any of their perspectives, even momentarily.

The gown fell gauntly from her shoulders, across her fallen breasts, then tightened upon her paunch and fell again, ballooning a little above the nether garments which she would remove layer by layer as the spring accomplished and warmed the days, in color regal and moribund. She had been a big woman once but now her skeleton rose, draped loosely in unpadded skin that tightened again upon a paunch almost dropsical, as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmark above the somnolent and impervious guts, and above that the collapsed face that gave the impression of the bones themselves being outside the flesh, lifted into the driving day with an expression at once fatalistic and of a child's astonished disappointment, until she turned and entered the house again and closed the door.
[...]
"All right," Dilsey said. "All right, here I is. I'll fill hit soon ez I git some hot water." She gathered up her skirts and mounted the stairs, wholly blotting the gray light. "Put hit down dar en g'awn back to bed." (266-7)

The first three chapters, the ones preceding the one in which the above passage is found, knocked my socks off. Chapters two and three have the exquisitely overdetermined -- i.e., not reduced, not stereotypically bigoted -- ruminations of Quentin and Jason on blacks and women. This one, from Quentin, took my breath away:

that blending of childlike and ready incompetence and paradoxical reliability that tends and protects them it loves out of all reason and robs them steadily and evades responsibility and obligations by means too barefaced to be called subterfuge even and is taken in theft or evasions with only that frank and spontaneous admiration for the victor which a gentleman feels for anyone who beats him in a fair contest, and withal a fond and unflagging tolerance for whitefolk's vagaries like that of a grandparent for unpredictable and troublesome children (87-8)

Meanwhile, the conceit of chapter one is charming as it is challenging, with the train of Benjy's thoughts not simply unfolding an internal monologue but effectively jerking the reader from one spot to another along the timeline without warning. A lot like the analepses in Gravity's Rainbow (see below).

It's by way of GR, partially, that I read the depictions of blackfolk in The Sound, and respond, particularly, to chapter four. Both novels give blackfolk startlingly similar cant. In GR, Katje is "completely unprepared," or words to the effect, for the blackness of the Schwartzkommando. They are the radical Other; and their otherness, through one of Pynchon's peculiar and problematic conceits, slips into a sort of pageant informed by the Sambo mythos, Amos and Andy, minstrel shows -- the whole shebang.

Hyperthyroidal African eyes, their irises besieged as early cornflowers by the crowding fields of white ... Ooga-booga! Gwine jump on dis drum hyah! Tell de res' ob de trahb back in de village, yowzah!
So, DUMdumdumdum, DUMdumdumdum... (656)

In The Sound -- and I haven't yet consulted the wizards of modernist criticism to see what they have to say about it -- it seems almost as if this same unpreparedness and othering is enacted through the shift from first to third person in the novel's last chapter. Thankfully, perhaps, we don't have an interior monologue rendered in Faulkner's version of blackspeak. (Would this be tolerable?) Instead we have a very button-down third person external narrative packed with quasi-philosophical observations about Dilsey's body and Benjy's moaning. Dilsey and Luster are foregrounded, yet the reader is never as intimate with them as with Benjy or Quentin or Jason.

It's a not unremarkable narrative move for Faulkner to make. I began chapter four expecting first-person narrative, and didn't realize it was otherwise until halfway down the second page (what gave it away was the way Dilsey was being described in the first passage quoted above: diachronically, I would say, as opposed to synchronically or right-there-and-then-that-moment; up to this point it's ambiguous who's narrating). I frankly don't care if the sudden transition in narrative mode, the distancing from blackfolk and their inner worlds, tells us anything about whether Faulkner was racist. But it of course plays into systems of racism and representations, systems I think Pynchon confronted, exploded, and ultimately never overcame, by going for broke and making a farce of it all.

On "The Road"

2007-09-21T18:15:00.000-07:00

One recent book-on-CD selection was Cormac McCarthy's new book, The Road. I was taken with the Hemmingwayish directness and brevity of language McCarthy uses. (I certainly like it in his hands better than in Hemmingway's.) And the story was vaguely scientificticious, post-apocalyptic, but this was hardly ever foregrounded. It's not a work of speculative fiction. It's a story about a man and his son trekking through nuclear winter. It's a man versus man, man versus nature, man versus God story. It's gut wrenching.

My critical eye comes to rest on the very minor cameo appearances in the novel of the man's wife, the boy's mother (not a single character in the book has a name, by the way). By the present day of the book she's already dead, by suicide. Years after the apocalypse -- a nuclear war -- she gives up. And she wants the man to give up too. "Blood cults" roam the destroyed country now. Like Reavers from "Firefly" they rape and cannibalize anyone they find. The man and the boy are forced to become nomads, lonely good guys always in peril, always "carrying the fire," in a phrase the boy likes to repeat to reassure himself.

In a flashback, the mother says "My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so don't look for sorrow now." She is pregnant when they see a nuclear bomb go off. The man draws a bath immediately. We're not told why, but the implication is so she can lie in it and protect their unborn child from the shockwaves. Then the child is born in the destroyed world where there is no food and no safety.

In deciding to kill herself, the mother is determined, and even a bit angry the man refuses to take his own life and that of their child's, too. "They will rape me," she says. "They'll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you won't face it."

The man wants to press on, but he does not articulate why. The woman tries to elucidate her thinking to him, and she needles him:

"You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like. I've taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot.
"Death is not a lover.
"Oh yes he is."
Later:

"Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take." (see pp. 47-50)

The woman's language in the novel is theatrical. It's how an Ayn Rand character would talk if she were intent not on joining John Galt's commune but on killing herself to escape a world dominated by mediocrity.

The language of the man, and of the novel, is gritty, terse, untheatrical. Why this shift in modes, and why the doubly-reinforcing usages of "slut" and "whorish," of all possible analogies, in the brief glimpses we get of her? The woman is clearly trying to get under the man's skin; but to what end? Of course it is a man making her speak. A man who is writing a very gritty novel about a manly man. His wife transgresses against his wishes, and so must be cast as a trollop.

This reading, though, isn't terribly instructive and somehow I don't think it's right. Is she merely a throwaway character, or is there something vital and pivotal about her. Artistic, not just masculinely pragmatic, reasons that she does not come on the journey?

Past these early appearances, the wife does not return. The boy seems unfazed, or maybe dumbfounded, when he discovers she isn't coming with them one day. The man removes a photo of her from his wallet, and tries to wake himself from dreams of her. And long before the novel is over she is gone and forgotten.

The man, on the other hand, dies of tuberculosis just as the boy is made safe, finally taken in by a group of non-cannibals prepared to care for him. He gives his life saving the child; the woman gives her life abandoning the child, but wanting to spare him the road ahead.

Auditory reading

2007-09-21T18:13:00.000-07:00

I'm a recent convert to the wonderful world of books on tape, er, CD. Picking out music CDs for every longish trip has always been a chore, and often once I'm on the road I wish I'd made entirely different selections, or I simply won't be in the mood for music.

So I finally got a library card at Forbes (I'd only been here a year -- what was the rush?) and started replacing music with books in my travels. My first selections, which suited perfectly my journey to Schroon Lake and back, were Steinbeck's The Pearl and Twain's "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" (which isn't very good, by the way), neither of which I'd read before. On subsequent trips I returned to familiar texts: Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Joyce's Dubliners, both of which were absolute delights to hear read aloud. I attempted Beowulf, but just couldn't do it. There's one I think I'd rather read than hear.

Swift's blind spot

2007-08-31T10:56:00.000-07:00

Further regarding Gulliver's Travels:

Reading this has brought to mind again a question I could never satisfactorily answer, namely, how to criticize works of centuries gone by? Is it possible? appropriate? fair? to extend my own familiar critical modes to a book published in 1726?

Swift's purpose is obviously to poke fun at all English society of his day, yet he never touched social stratification. Granted, he was working before Hegel and before Marx and Engels; his satire did not have at its disposal their dialectic vocabulary.

Even so, it's perplexing that with an imagination so great as his that Swift never could imagine a society without lords and nobles separate from the commoners. Even the Houyhnhnms, praised by Lemuel Gulliver above all other creatures and societies for their reason and geniuneness, had a caste system in place, and further made slaves of the Yahoos. The Lilliputians and Brobdignagians had monarchies not very dissimilar from England's, and even the Luggnaggians had a ruler who quite literally lorded over them from the floating island of Laputa.

The mode of satire is turn the status quo on its ear; but as regards social class, Gulliver's Travels fails in this mission. The satire has, to this modern reader, a huge blind spot.

Is that a fair criticism? By the measure of its own time Gulliver's Travels was surely the acutest satire. Class stratification, while certainly an extant phenomenon, was evidently not much thought about or questioned. Is it reasonable, then, to apply a Marxist reading to the novel? A Lacanian reading? A feminist or queer reading?

I don't think a queer reading of Gulliver's Travels would be terribly illuminating; but then again, like the Marxist reading, it could ask why there is no opposite presented to the male-female relationship. There's plenty of trafficking in sex and hints of communism in the social order of the Houyhnhnms. Swift probably did not think in these terms while writing, but the categories are there to find.

I want to say it probably is reasonable, in all the above cases and more, to apply modern critical modes to old texts. The problem is always context; yet responsible criticism can observe context in applying new modes of explication or deconstruction. It is useful, I think, to discover a text's deficiencies, especially when it is satire or science fiction; for if a text is to probe, or lay bare, or question, it shouldn't probably be taken at face value but pushed further, probed, questioned, and laid bare itself.

Gulliver's travels in sci fi

2007-08-21T05:03:00.001-07:00

The birth of science fiction is routinely found at the creation of Frankenstein's monster; yet it seems to me the tradition is a good deal older than that.

Frankenstein was written in 1816 by an author who set out merely to write a compelling spine tingler (sez NYU prof. Walter James Miller in the introduction to my edition of the novel). That Mary Shelley used a novum in the furtherance of this goal is is circumstantial evidence: not, I think, enough to prove the inherent scientifictionicity of her novel under the accepted rules of genreprudence.

I would submit science fiction was born with the publication of Gulliver's Travels in 1726, a solid 90 years ahead of Frankenstein.

Far from being merely an early glimmer of what would later become the solidified modes of the genre -- what we adherents of Darko Suvin recognize to be the sine qua non of sf, estrangement and the cognition effect -- Gulliver's accomplishes both without doing so too selfconsciously (as any good but of sf must).

It's surprising to me that, having studied the genre a little bit, I'm the first person I know of to have made this claim. Gulliver's Travels seems to be mentioned often enough in the discourse, but always superficially, in passing, or as an example of "proto" sf. This may have something to do with the frames or contexts of each novel, or perhaps the circles in which they tend to be read. Dr. Frankenstein is of course a doctor, a scientist. His first act is the creation of new life -- this novel's novum -- and only later does his tale become a continent-spanning adventure narrative. Gulliver is also a doctor, though it is not a mad science experiment that sets his tale in motion. It is a series of accidents that land him in one improbable new country after another. And instead of his learnedness creating the novum and pitching him into the adventure, it is instead his learnedness that acts as the normalizing force -- the cognition effect through which he rationalizes the strange new worlds and reveals them to the reader.

The novum, in other words, is out of his hands. It is the world outside, hitherto unknown and discovered by accident. This makes Gulliver's Travels altogether more like mythology than science fiction -- or so I suppose other critics' reasoning goes. Certainly science fiction contains within pallet of tropes the discovery of new worlds; yet one always gets to these worlds with a space ship or teleporter.

Arguments could of course be made that neither work is science fiction; that they are both fantasy. Giants and dwarfs and talking horses and reanimated corpses are all the domain of the latter, to be sure. In Frankenstein, all that might be cognitionable by the reader is oblique; the scientific process by which the corpse is brought again to life is shrouded in dreamy, quasi-sexual language, with nothing like the almost-plausible operating table and lightning tower of the movies.

On the other hand, Gulliver often theorizes on how such fantastic races as he encounters might have come into being. There's no fully articulated theory, but it is evident different parts of the world give lease and are suitable to life on different scales, and the dramatic shifts in the size of beings from one locale to the next -- from Liliputians to Europeans to Brobdignagians -- may be a natural law.

Gulliver's Travels, while undoubtedly informed by the exploits of the wandering Argonauts, Achaeans, et alii, is most assuredly not mythology. Science fiction is not the same as mythology because there is no estrangement and no cognition in mythology. Mythological monsters are fearsome, yet they do not boggle the mind.

Science fiction happened when stories began to blink at the weird, when narratives began to other the beasts and nymphs they portrayed. Gulliver's Travels begins to do this. Its exotic civilizations, while markedly different in custom and organization from Europe, still bear all Europe's touchstones, like kings and armies and bowing and good manners. The other is not completely othered, and therefore it is fairly easily cognitionable once the language barrier is breached.

This, I note with sadness, is still true of science fiction almost three centuries later. So little in the genre attempts to take the reader into truly estranging realms, constrained as it is by imaginations rooted in the world as it is. But I've gotten off the topic of Gulliver's Travels.

What, for me, finally clinches the argument that this novel is the real wellspring of sf is that it pairs the estrangement/cognition apparatus with satire. Satire, of course, is what Swift was all about. (And indeed, the world that heeded Swift's "A Modest Proposal" would have made a good setting for an sf novel.)

To widely varying extents, satire is what science fiction is about too. Picture satire as one point on a rhetorical continuum that also includes parody, farce, allegory, utopian and distopian writing, even political and socioeconomic agendas. What each of these points, serious or farcical as they may be, has in common is they suppose an alternative to consensus reality; they each posit a different status quo. Each work of science fiction relies on one or more of the points along the continuum to contain its universe. Even a piece of sf set in the present "real world" must suppose something outside the quotidian realm of the reader -- a supernature never glimpsed, conspiracies only imagined. In the case of Gulliver's, this alternative outside the explored world happens to be quite silly at times.

With introductory warnings that anticipate the multi-framed narrative of Frankenstein, Gulliver's Travels insists on its belonging to the real world. Gulliver seeks to quiet in advance the doubts that readers will inevitably find and also distances himself from errors in the manuscript; then his cousin and publisher, Richard Sympson, hastens to add a note about Gulliver's widely-regarded veracity. This connection to the real is a further proof of its scientifictionicity; for rather than existing time out of mind, as in Homer, or in an alternate reality, as in Tolkien, it exists here and now (or rather, there and then, in 1726).

/seme/ is the new /seme/

2007-07-26T05:30:00.000-07:00

What to make the furore over "Brown is the new white"? This nonsensical T-shirt slogan seemed to rock the nation for a day, before everybody just forgot about it. The outrage, or at least theory of outrage, centered on how the message might be "misunderstood"; in other words, the various ways in which it might be read. It was read by critics as meaning hispanics should try to act more white. It was also read as a take on the fact that the latino population of the U.S. is bound to surpass the white population in now time at all; ergo, brown-skinned people are on deck as the new racial majority. One blog offers this interpretation:

The motto "Brown is the new White" also implies that whites are the original occupants of America and Hispanics and other minorities are Johnny-come-latelies. Hispanics were thriving in California and in the Southwest centuries before Europeans set foot in America. If anything, the T-Shirt should be emblazoned with the catch phrase, "White is the New Brown." [link]

There was a great NPR discussion a little while ago about how "next" has supplanted "new." The anticipatory, in marketing certainly, has become more powerful than the merely current. We want to know who America's Next Top Model will be, and once she becomes so, we'll have forgotten all about her. This discussion doubtless figures into the semantics of "brown is the new white"; but don't forget the slogan isn't "brown is the next white."

Of course the verbal construction x is the new y is nothing new itself. And a little Googling shows "brown is the new white" has been uttered well before the T-shirt fiasco. c|net reports Microsoft "stressed" this fact a little less than a year ago. What were they talking about? How the dun-colored Zune music player was poised to overtake the iPod. Ha.

And over two years ago, a snooker (that's four-pocket billiards, you berk!) player changed his surname from White to Brown in a ridiculous publicity stunt, and the Guardian informed its readers "Why Brown is the new white."

I mused on the meme for a while, searching for more alternate meanings. Trying not to stray too far outside the realm of real possibility, I arrived at this: "Brown is the new white" could also describe heroin's rising dominance over cocaine. But what color is crystal meth?

Cat of doom

2007-07-26T05:12:00.000-07:00

The Associate Press carried this story about a cute and fuzzy harbinger of death:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) - Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours.

His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.

"He doesn't make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die," said Dr. David Dosa in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

"Many family members take some solace from it. They appreciate the companionship that the cat provides for their dying loved one," said Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor of medicine at Brown University.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's

2007-07-19T16:04:00.000-07:00

Two years ago at Cornell in Ithaca I was mindblown by Adam Harvey's oneman performance of "The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies" from Finnegans Wake. This year, I was terribly disappointed that he wasn't a part of the Austin Joyce conference. Matter of fact, I can't find any recent Webeana regarding him at all. But a YouTube entry, added apparently just a day ago, pictures someone -- who I think is Harvey -- doing "Shem the Penman." Harvey's "Mime" is vastly better (less pacing in circles and more gymnastics, for example), but apparently not on YouTube yet, so this will have to suffice.

More Joyce on YouTube:
Joyce and Beckett play golf
Anna Livia Plurabelle upon a toilet
Joyce reads ALP (audio only)

Gravity's Rainbow impressions

2007-06-19T19:03:00.000-07:00

I'm struck, as anyone must be on reading this odd, odd novel, by all the narrative detours it takes. Without much provocation or build-up, the story will shift to another place and focus on a different character, only to flit somewhere else a few pages later. Thank goodness, for all this hopscotch, there's still a main character in the book.

What's even more interesting about this technique, though, is that not all of the sidetracks are of the same nature. One class is simply a shift to another, more or less contemporaneous scene. Another class is a flashback. A third class is something like a hallucination -- I'm thinking of the passage where Slothrop goes down the toilet (pp. 64-7) -- though the narrative in this class quickly becomes so bizarre as to actually transcend the description of an actual clinical fugue and become something totally different, purely textual and completely aware of its own artifice. [Kind of reminds me of my Circe paper (see below).] Finally, a fourth class verges on the unclassifiable, for it merges two or more of the other classes.

GR in general is not narrated in a traditional way, with partitions blocking first, second, and third person and, by extension, prohibiting certain information that does not relate to the "real" characters. In GR, much that is peripheral is forefronted, like the little sidetrack into the death of Etzel Olsch by exploding cigar (p. 302). GR also makes a lot of use of the second person. Zak Smith in his foreword to the excellent Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow takes all the yous at face value, meaning when the book says you he draws himself. I read the yous a bit more impersonally, translating every "you feel" into "one feels."

Narrative that peaks inside several characters' minds -- as opposed to just one -- has been around since Dostoyevski; but here we have narrative that isn't simply telepathic, so to speak, it's also chronopathic. That's a word I just made up, using the Greek roots for "time" and "feeling." Here and there crop up touchstones where the narrative kind of falls through the slipstream and into places other fiction simply does not go. These scenes are like flashbacks, but they're external to the characters with which they are associated. In other words, we're glimpsing a past that has not been glimpsed by the characters we're reading about. Sometimes we glimpse a future that will not exist, and probably does not exist in the minds of the characters either (e.g. the spaceport passage that stretches out from p. 296). Any other text that needs to reveal something to the reader but not the characters does not use such methods. It's always some other device: a prologue, a new chaper: something clearly marked off from the 'A' story.

The only thing I have to compare this to is the "object reading" skill from Blue Rose, where an adept can actually glimpse significant events in an object's past by touching it. For instance, an adept who finds a knife used in a murder is able to witness the moment that knife plunged into the victim's back. This seems to operate on the theory that momentous events leave some kind of psychic residue.

In GR the setting, far beyond just being described, is also shot through with the stories of past events and significant figures. Then again, the long-dead Laszlo Jamf appears in a number of places but though not at his own mausoleum. The novel must not contain ghosts then, or even necessarily psychic echoes. Something else. In a novel focused so intently on its hero's paranoia, it's strange to have these sidetracks so externalized, that is, distanced from Slothrop and the other characters, rather than sprouting from their "ethical pressure-points and faultlines" as in Ulysses. Not quite sure what to make of it yet.

A coincidence: on page 303 appears a reference to what but the Marie Celeste...

Austin, loose ends

2007-06-19T18:30:00.000-07:00

Photos are finally online, here.

And my opus, "Circean Aerodynamics", is done too. It has an appendix.

Joyceans and the copyfight

2007-06-16T19:35:00.000-07:00

Saturday's plenary concerned Carol Loeb Schloss's epic struggle with the Joyce Estate over access to Joyce's Finnegans Wake notes and Joyce's daughter Lucia's writings for her biography of the latter. The Estate -- and by synecdoche Stephen James Joyce, the author's grandson and Lucia's nephew -- did their level best to prevent the biography's publication, relying heavily on a tenuous understanding of copyright law.

The Estate's tactics as Schloss described them were ferocious: they tried to get SUNY Buffalo to deny her access to its store of Joyceana, and later sent at lawyer to the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin to peruse some documents she had used, this in order to argue that the documents were of no value to scholarship. Beyond that, Schloss said, the Estate got personal tried to discredit her as a scholar, brushing aside as worthless dross all of her published works in Joyce studies. A great anecdote: the law firm representing the Estate in this case, Jones Day, also represents Halliburton.

Schloss eventually did publish her book; but her publisher, Farar Strauss Giroux, insisted huge chunks of quotations from Joyce and Lucia be omitted; and this, she said, greatly dimished her work's credibility. The biography was subsequently savaged by reviewers.

Late last year, the Estate essentially settled with Schloss, who had brought a lawsuit against them alleging copyright misuse, when it ended up filing a "covenant not to sue" Schloss for copyright infringement. This -- alas, too late -- granted Schloss permission to use what she wanted. Schloss said Saturday there aren't any immediate plans to release a complete text; however, all the excised parts are available online -- another happy consequence of the settlement. Meantime, the two parties are still arguing over whether the estate should cover Schloss's legal fees. Whether or not they do (from what I could tell) will be of no consequence to Schloss, because she was represented pro bono by the Stanford University Fair Use Project, whose mission it is to go after copyright abusers.

Stephen Joyce, Schloss said, always chalked up his resistance to the biography to the family's right to privacy. Schloss said she took the question of family privacy very seriously. But, she asked, was it SJ's place or right to assert her biography would violate that? She went so far as to suggest SJ cared not for his aunt, and was actually scornful of her because of some slight in the terms of her will. And, contrary to what the Slate reviewer asserts, Schloss wasn't in it to get at salacious details about of a dysfunctional family. On the contrary, she said, her whole purpose was to investigate how Lucia inspired the writing of Finnegans Wake.

(Bit of a tangent: SJ famously criticized Richard Ellmann for publishing Joyce's letters, saying it had stripped the family naked, or words to that effect. Apropos of Schloss, Christine van Boheemen-Saaf centered her paper the previous day around the 1909 "dirty letters" Joyce wrote to his wife, Nora. Van Boheemen-Saaf assertied the letters marked a pivotal development in Joyce's fiction writing -- at the time he was reworking _Stephen Hero_ into _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ -- in their rapid vascillations from the lyrical and wholesome to the obscene and back.)

Schloss's victory proved mostly a moral one. Because the case never went to trial, there's no judge's verdict and therefore no precedent set, no case law to pave the way for other Joyceans butting heads with the Estate. One of Schloss's lawyers, Robert Spoo of the San Francisco law firm Howard Rice, said it's still to early to assess whether the settlement has weakened the Estate's position or put an end to its copyright misuse and attempts to block other scholars digging behind published texts and into early manuscripts, letters, and diaries.

Another of Schloss's lawyers, David Olson of the Fair Use Center, said the pending decision on whether the Estate should cover the legal fees will be important for similar copyfights to come. Most scholars don't have the means to mount such legal challanges, and most law firms aren't willing to proceed with them on a pro bono basis. But if Schloss succeeds in having the Estate pay legal fees -- thus establishing that the Estates of artists can be held to account for interfering in scholarship -- it could make other firms more receptive to mounting legal battles of this sort. Earlier in the day, Bill Brockman, noted there are something like 1,500 unpublished Joyce letters out there, meaning there's still a bit of scholarship left to be done in the area.

Further reading: The New Yorker has two articles on Schloss and Stephen Joyce.

Austin, day four

2007-06-16T18:46:00.000-07:00

Bloomsday CIII kicked off with eight panels all at the same time. One of them was mine, natch, and so there were about five people there to listen to us, natch. Two of the audience members were panelists' girlfriends.

No matter, for the panel was, if I do say so myself, damned interesting. "Joyce and Science" began with my own paper, one I'd been working on since the end of the last North American Joyce Conference in Ithaca, N.Y., in 2005, where I read this paper. I'll provide a link to this year's paper once I've made a few corrections.

Also on the panel were Michael D. Rubenstein from UC Berkeley, who gave "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Urban Planner" and Sam Schwartz of the University of Arizona, who interrogated "Ithaca and the Discourse of Popular Science."

Rubinstein's was one of those oddball looks at a very peripheral topic in Joyce's work -- in this case, public utilities -- that turned out to be pretty intriguing. He pointed out how Stephen begins to learn about the physical world through utilities like the gas jet and the hot water tap (seeing the word "hot" makes him feel hot). "Bildung" (as in Bildungsroman), Rubenstein quipped, is linked to "building." About the time of "The Dead" and _Ulysses_, Dublin was in transition from gas to electric light, and the quality of the light, especially in the short story, often takes the forefront. Dublin at the time contained some of Europe's worst slums, and, Rubenstein noted tangentially, there's a good deal of emphasis on public utilities and infrastructure modernization in other literature about or originating from slums.

Schwartz's paper had to do with nausea as it is experienced in the face of difficult reading, whether technical and scientific or (post)modernist. On Bloom's bookshelf in Ithaca is Robert Ball's _The Story of the Heavens_, an early attempt to bring scientific discourse to the masses. (Curiously this paralleled in language a poster rolled out by a publishing house in concert with an early edition. The poster urged potential readers [read: buyers] not to let the critics confuse them.) The talk was in fact just a primer for a larger book project on scientific discourse in literature. Schwartz said he plans to look especially at _Moby Dick_, with its alternating chapters on the practice of whaling, and _Gravity's Rainbow_, with all its detail on German rocketry. He also broached the subject of why modernist literature MUST be difficult, pointing briefly to Leornard Diepeveen, who apparently gives the question a more satisfying answer than old T.S. Eliot.

The very last panel of the conference was a romp, with trivia-stuffed papers by John Gordon and Jesse Meyers.

Meyer's paper, as a listener pointed out during Q&A, was a bit of an overreading of Nausicaa, focusing minute attention on repeated grammatical constructions and hundreds of purported arcs splattered throughout the episode. But, as Jorn Barger suggests, and Gordon reiterated, it's perilous to imagine Joyce didn't already think the thought you're now thinking as you read him; so it's difficult to tell what an "overreading" could be when Joyce is involved.

Gordon went after the "Mystery ship of Ulysses," the "Marie whatchacallit" Molly thinks of fleetingly. Like Jim the Penman, a whole mythology grew up around this ship, actually called the Mary Celeste, which was found adrift in 1872, perfectly intact but with all hands missing. Molly recalls another ship towing the derelict into the harbor at Gibraltar when she was a child. Echoes of the ship's mystery crop up in Eumaeus in the narration of the old sailor Murphy -- he's perfectly willing to talk your ear off about anything BUT Gibraltar. Turns out Arthur Conan Doyle, in an unsigned work, spun a few of the scant facts of the case just enough to, in 1884, revive the Mary Celeste legend.

Austin, day three

2007-06-15T20:09:00.000-07:00

Friday we actually capered around town a bit in the evening, taking the bus over the bridge and working our way to Stubbs BBQ, then looping back through East 6th Street, where all the clubs are at. There's a lot of 'em.

Conference panels Friday began with one in the Ransom Center, where so much Joyce ephemera is stored, with a talk on "Archival Joyce." Finn Fordham, among the other three panelists, took a genetic look at Circe, arguing how the obscenity trial of the Little Riview, which had been publishing Ulysses chapter by chapter, changed how Joyce wrote. In two turns of phrase I especially liked, Fordham pointed to the episode's "ethical pressure-points or fault lines" as the prompts for all the episode's weirdness, and described Joyce as a one-man band, seeming to play the instruments of his text with different parts of his body, creating "an only-just coherent multiplicity."

In the morning plenary, Vicki Mahaffey dug into the mythology of Jim the Penman, the infamous check forger whose nickname is echoed in Shem the Penman, Joyce's obliquely autobiographical character in Finnegans Wake. She titled her talk "A Portrait of the Artist as a Sympathetic Villain: Forgery, Melodrama, and Silent Film" or "Joyce's Hand."

John Bishop more or less ad libbed his afternoon talk, but was, as always, brilliant. The panel's focus was on the senses and sensation, and Bishop rattled off different philosophers' concepts about the human sensorium, from John Locke's primary ideas/sensory impressions to Samuel Johnson's splitting perception and thought to Giambatista Vico's continuum of feeling without perceiving, perceiving and thinking, and reflecting. At one moment Bishop pointedly remarked about how people at conferences so often cite the philosophers everybody else is currently citing instead of the philosophers Joyce would have read. Then on to sensation as it is depicted in Joyce's works, referencing Benstock's catalogue of Leopold Bloom's every sniff and the gnosis/noses punning in Finnegans Wake. Likewise the prominence of water in the Wake, a reflection of how humans are mostly water, and how our experiences are mediated by water, like the film and vitrious fluid of the eyes to the cerebral fluid surrounding the brain. Finally, he said, with so much visual information before us, he see what we choose to see. Stephen, gazing at the ocean, sees a bowl of his mother's vomit and ships with men puking over the railings; Bloom, gazing at a ticket stub left by Boylan, sees a "larcerated scarlet" ticket, the words here connoting blame and shame, as opposed to a plain and neutral "torn red" ticket. In an earlier discussion Bishop pointed out that _Dubliners_ seems not to contain a single insect, where A Portrait and subsequent works are replete with them. This, Bishop suggested, shows a developing realism in Joyce's writing.

Sean Walsh: luminary or wanker?

2007-06-15T16:10:00.000-07:00

The last event of the day Friday was a talk by Sean Walsh, who made the second and latest film adaptation of Ulysses, "Bl,.m." I wrote this review after seeing it on the big screen in Dublin in 2003. It's not glowing; and my regard for it has actually depreciated after having re-watched it last week on DVD. Nonetheless, Walsh is himself a very funny and charismatic speaker. A reader who takes a decidedly non-academic approach to the novel, he was somehow not totally out of place at this academic conference. His mission throughout, he said, was to bring this "unread book" to the people -- a goal he said he's succeeded in to some degree. While in theory the de-mystification of Ulysses is certainly something I can get behind, in his practice, I can't.

Never having read the novel past page 30 in the novel, Walsh one day in 1993 started daydreaming about how making a film version of Ulysses could make him "a few quid." He wrote to the Joyce estate, who proposed a number of hoops he would have to jump through and retained final yea or nay power, setting the bar, Walsh said, "somewhere beyond infinity." Nonetheless he proceeded with making a promo for what he at first envisioned as a series of 12 televion episodes. Nobody, including Oregon Public Television and the BBC, wanted it. The next year, the Joyce Estate threatened to sue. In the meanwhile he did read the book dilligently, and had some tutoring from a Joycean friend.

In 1998 and 1999, having decided to proceed instead with a feature film, Walsh began casting. Steven Rea was his no. 2 choice for Bloom, behind somebody I've never heard of. Joseph Fiens, fresh off the set of "Shakespeare in Love," wanted to play Stephen Dedalus. That didn't pan out.

In 2001, Walsh started preproduction and was three weeks in when a major funding source dried up, essentially killing the project. It started back up again in 2002, filming taking six and a half weeks and editing taking six months, with some reshoots taking place in the middle of winter -- including the Howth Head scene, where Bloom and Molly are supposed to be basking under summer sun among the rhododendrons.

One of the stark errors, if you want to call it that, of the film is the fact that Stephen isn't wearing his black mourning suit. Walsh said he chose to dress Stephen in brown because it would have been trite, or something, to have both the heroes wearing the same thing. Perhaps in a movie this would be true; but in his novel Joyce evidently didn't find the coincidence overbearing.

Two odd tidbits: Preparing for his role, Rea went to a voice coach and worked out how a middle class Jew living in Dublin would have spoken. The Martello Tower used in the film is not the one on Sandymount Strand but rather on Dalkey Island, the only tower extant today that's not surrounded by cars and office buildings and convenience stores.

From viewers, Wlash said, "The most common thing I hear is 'I never thought Ulysses was like that." Many have told him they now want to go back and read the novel beyond the first 30 pages -- especially for the dirty bits.

Austin, day two

2007-06-14T18:23:00.000-07:00

The conference was held at the University of Texas at Austin's student union, with a small Joyce exhibit a few blocks away at the Harry Ransom Center where, somewhere deeper inside, exists a respectable amount of Joyce's papers, so I hear.

The first panel I attended was on Scientific Joyce -- seemed a sort of precursor to my own panel two days hence -- which included discussions of Oxen of the Sun's embriological references, a discussion of nerves and fatigue as relating to Eumaeus, and a charting of the comet Bloom imagines himself in Ithaca.

Next was a panel on "indeterminacies" where most discussion centered on Margot Norris's paper about Stephen's anti-Semitic ballad, the story of little Harry Hughes who is chopped into pieces by a Jewess. Norris suggested Stephen's singing this in front of Bloom might have been an escpe mechanism -- Stephen, fearing entrapment in the Jew's house, tries to distance himself. But in fact Bloom hasn't yet extended his invitation at the moment Stephen sings; and also in fact, it was Bloom who invited Stephen to sing. It seems to me, and another listener suggested, that Stephen is singing his ballad with tongue in cheek. Of course Stephen was much earlier shown to be resistant to anti-Semitic stereotypes ("A merchant is one who buys cheap and sells dear, Jew or gentile," he tells Mr Deasy); then again, it's easier in theory than in practice to avoid bigotry. [And something to check up on -- Stephen actually appears in Kiernan's while Bloom is out and calls him a "perverted Jew," echoing Buck Mulligan who earlier warned Stephen that Bloom had his eye on him. This purported exchange happens in Cyclops, so I reckon that if it is Stephen who says this, it's not revealed unambiguously.]

After lunch a good panel where, in epistulary form, Erin Hollis and Aaron Schmidt unpack and unpack some more the very, very brief scene in which Bloom is revulsed by the sloppy eaters at Barton's and decides to take his lunch instead at Davy Byrne's. Bloom is normally such a deferential fellow, so whence this sudden disgust at his fellow man? Very cleverly the panelists wove in the nearby reference of another building near the Barton, the former Harp theater, now the Empire pub. Bloom once turned his back in the same way on a rowdy crowd at the Harp, and now this indigenous venue has been appropriated by "empire." So something vaguely anti-nationalistic going on, perhaps, and probably a manifestation of Bloom's otherness as a born Jew in Catholic Dublin.

In this panel and the next were very interesting discussions of Gabriel Conroy's insecurity in "The Dead." Marian Eide described how Molly Ivors, an intellectual woman (whom Joyce professed to hate), challenges Gabriel on politics, leaving him for the rest of the evening to contemplate what his comeback should have been, so stupefied was he by this woman who dares match wits with him. And in his toast he actually presents his comeback as a declaration against becoming too educated and losing the human quality -- in fact how he'd like to see women remain, uneducated and homebound. Finally, at the hotel, as if to placate himself further, he seeks a surprising brutal kind of sexual solace in his wife, Greta.

But no luck there either, for Greta is in a brown study about her childhood suitor, Michael Fury, who supposedly died from his love for her. Gabriel's domestic frustration likely goes deeper than this, suggested Tara Prescott, who elucidated a pervasive double entendre behind the golloshes Gabriel insists on wearing and which Greta refuses to wear. Greta, Prescott suggested, is resistant to using a condom and, perhaps, stifling Gabriel's hunger for casual sex.

Also in the day's last panel was a fascinating look at a whole genre of circus-slave potboilers underlying the fleeting mention in Ulysses of a book called _Ruby: Pride of the Ring_. Joyce seems to have conflated several books of this genre into one for the purposes of his own novel, argued Jennifer Burns Levin. According to her, these texts were not intended to be pornographic, but they do pay a heck of a lot of attention to what we understand now as masochistic fetishes: the circus girls' beatings at the hands of the ringmaster are minutely detailed, with descriptions of every whip crack and welt. Molly Bloom is dissatisfied with _Ruby_, telling her husband, who picked it out for her, "There's nothing smutty in it." Bloom, however, probably would have thought there was.

Austin, day one

2007-06-13T19:58:00.000-07:00

So I flew out to Austin today to take part in this year's North American James Joyce Conference at the university here. It officially started today, though my love and I stayed south of campus to check out our temporary digs on South Congress Avenue and swim at Barton Springs. "SoCo" is quite the trendy strip, with a very /in/ lodge, the Hotel San Jose, where my love insisted we stay; Jo's coffee and grub stand nextdoor; and plenty of posh shops and restaurants. Looking to the left out the hotel entrace gives a nice view of the downtown, with the statehouse smack in the middle, flanked on the right by the blue giant, the Frost Bank Tower and One Congress Plaza and One American Center.

A whole day has gone by and I've heard but a few southern accents. Granted, I'm in a touristy section, but really...

So far the list of things I forgot to pack includes toothpaste and the cable that would have allowed me to connect camera to computer and share with you all the photos I took today and will take throughout the trip.

Our three-and-a-half-hour flight was taken up listening to two men behind us chattering incessantly about selling real estate. Sleep and reading, thanks to them, was impossible. A small blessing: toward the end of the flight they had stopped calculating the maximum man-hours it should take to sell a house and moved on to the refreshing topics of 401(k) plans, health insurance, and legacies. Once the pilot announced our imminent landing, one said, "Wow, that went by quick. Good conversation!" I could have murdered them.

At the Hotel San Jose, everything (except, as it happens, our room) is superlative: from the patio (where positively everyone is hanging out right now and some DJs were spinning away, first something like Herb Alpert but much hipper, and now some post-soul ambiance) to the (microscopic, bathwater-warm) pool. The drink of choice at San Jose seems to be some ungodly concoction involving Negra Modelo, tobasco and Worcestershire sauces, ground pepper, and who knows what else -- all in a glass whose rim is encrusted with lime juice and salt a la marguerita. It's perfectly terrible, but those in the know seem to have developed a taste for it. Luckily there's no shortage of Corona and even my beloved Paulaner Hefe-Weizen in these parts.

Barton Springs is apparently the swimming hole of choice in the city, and it was very well attended indeed by families, bikini-clad 20-somethings and buff dudes wading cum backwards hats and Oaklies. Positively everyone had tattoos, and at least one woman felt at ease enough to go topless (and here I thought I'd nixed plans for a trip to France). The springs in question are not hot but cold, and the water that emerges from it, filling the creek turned community pool, purportedly stays 68 degrees year round. Here pigeons are vastly outnumbered, and squirrels entirely replaced, by grackles -- birds whose call, to these virgin ears, sounds rather like an car alarm.

Tomorrow the conference begins in earnest with a program I haven't yet begun to peruse. I'll be delivering my own paper on Saturday morning in a panel titled "Joyce and Science." I'm looking forward to reconnecting with some acquaintances I made at the Joyce conference two years ago in Ithaca, N.Y., where I gave this paper. But presently I must figure out how I'm to catch a bus and travel the three miles or so from 1316 South Congress to the University of Texas campus.

Preacher

2007-04-21T22:19:00.000-07:00

Been re-reading the brilliant Preacher comic, and enjoying it the second time around every bit as much as the first a few years ago.

What kills me about the story is how rooted it is in classic tropes of masculinity, cowboy morality, righteous indignation, vegeance, and even chivalry, but manages to understand and re-present these tropes entirely on its own terms. The human ideal, the guiding light, the emotional support, is John Wayne, not the man himself but an amalgam of his movie characters. The Duke is an archetype, reshaped, but only slightly, to instruct loyalty, determination, and, dern it, doing the right thing and not quitting.

There's a fairly unambiguous morality of killing those who deserve to be killed, from louts who start bar fights for the wrong reasons (our heroes start plenty of their own fights, but just to blow off steam, without homicidal intent) to those who take pleasure in killing others.

One of the three central characters, Cassidy, is a vampire who (unlike in the Buffyverse) isn't an animal who lives solely for the kill but only feeds on people who've got it coming to them. The rest of the time, he orders rare steak.

The Preacher himself, Jesse Custer, kills first a serial killer then a poor relation who tormented him from childhood and shot to death both his father and the love of his life right before his eyes.

When we meet the third central character, Tulip O'Hare, she's about to put a hit on some guy who probably deserves it, but she fouls it up. Later, she kills another of Jesse's tormenters who manhandled her and called her a cooze.

More fascinating, I think, is how the book sticks to an ideal of chivalry -- something we all know finds its roots at the antipode of feminism, somewhere in the latitude of Christianity, and not too far down the street from misogyny.

The book is certainly not Christian. (I for one always have the vague sensation that God -- should He exist or care -- will smite me at any moment for reading something so deliberately and exuberantly blasphemous.) I wouldn't say the book is feminist by a long shot. Misogynist? Well, Tulip sure does get beaten up and shot at a lot. Read into that what you will; but note her companions take colossal beatings as well, and are both killed and reanimated, like her, to boot.

Jesse Custer has little time for deconstructing his masculinity and chivalrous impulses. It's not that he's unaware of or squeamish about where such deconstruction might take him. He's read Greer and Dworkin, he says. He just feels a stronger, if anti-intellectual, pull toward old-fashioned gallantry.

As he says to Tulip just before mounting a dangerous rescue:

"I dunno if it's genetic or if it's to do with what we get taught, or if it's just 'cause it's expected of us -- But it's what we do, okay? 'Cause to help a girl when she's in trouble, or stop her gettin' into trouble, is just the right goddamned thing to do. An' I know you're as smart as me, an' as capable, an' my equal at just about everything -- I know you're empowered, or whatevr the hell you call it -- But I swear, I even think of a single hair on your head gettin' harmed an' all that bullshit goes right out the fuckin' window..." ("Until the End of the World" [Vol. 2], p. 251).

For all the ingenious work Buffy did blurring it's own absolute divide between good and evil, I think we have here a more sophisticated if (could it be?) less realistic moral universe. Jesse Custer is the spit of Nietzsche's ubermensch -- a man who sets out with his own set of morals into a world of amorality and conscious unmorality. His morality may be informed by the teachings or expectations of others, but, at least if we take his word, it is undeniably his own. Moralities must have an origin and a refuge; usually that is God or a concept of God. Jesse wants to rely on something that antedates or escapes God.

The man with the PowerPoint doohickey

2007-04-10T22:46:00.000-07:00

In at least two areas am I negligent: blogging and watching "An Inconvenient Truth." Tonight I have made small penance on both counts [though probably on the latter only to return to this electronic confession box another few months hence to again repent by aloofness.]

I won't go on about the film at this point, since it's all be been said by now. I'll simply note a few details that struck my fancy.

Item one: The woman in the audience who positively swoons as Al concludes one of his rhetorical masterstrokes [she's hard to miss, that is if you can take your eyes of our hero].

Item two: The very obvious overdubbing (at least to a headphone wearer's ears) used to smooth out, abbreviate, and bridge the presentation.

Item three: The relish with which PowerPoint, or whatever its Macintosh analogue, is used throughout. There is of course the delightful showmanship of the scissors lift and the projection screen extension to demonstrate how carbon emissions are expected to go "off the scale" in the coming decades. But beyond that there is an irresistable romanticism suffusing the software as the camera follows our hero offstage and admiringly alights and lingers on his careworn, motionless face as he rearranges slides with decisive, incisive clicks of the mouspad.

Mr. Gore's rhetorical flourish is indeed magnificent; and that is why we forgive his reliving of the 2000 election and his shoehorning of biography into climate crisis epic. Each of the experts cited directly is introduced as Mr. Gore's "friend," a title that endears the expert to the viewer because the rhetor is already endeared to the viewer.

Mr. Gore is shown several times being borne in a greenhouse gas-spewing auto or wandering airports either after deplaning or waiting to board a pollution-enhancing jet; and for this he has been duly criticized. But the rest of us forgive him this trespass as well ... for as he reminds us he's given his slide presentation at least 1,000; and if any of among his other audiences are anything like us, inspired like us, it surely will have been carbon well emitted.

Those loaded suits

2007-04-10T22:01:00.000-07:00

The hostage crisis that for two weeks threatened to pitch us (earlier than expected) along with Great Britain into war with Iran wrapped up with a surprise happy ending and a completely out-of-the-blue "news of the weird" subject heading.

A third of the Axis of Evil on April 7 returned to the West's embraces 14 British sailors and marines captured after supposedly violating Iranian seaspace March 23 -- all wearing really crummy suits. [The 15th sailor, a woman, received a striped shirt, also crummy, and headscarf.]

At face value, it was a very dignified and dignifying gesture; to surrender the hostages in style, however poor the style may have been, was almost magnanimous on Iran's part.

But one might surmise on the contrary that the makeover was a subtle jab at the West. Cathy Horyn in the Times' Week in Review section April 8 summarizes: "Without their uniforms, the 14 men and one woman were neither military personnel nor, at least not obviously, potical prisoners."

How curious that after such a protracted pissing match over ill-defined national borders and who was where when that President Ahmadinejad should seek to depoliticize these 15 bodies. [Hence, perhaps, the very militaristic press conference that convened once the soldiers were home safe and sound, with only a few speaking and only those by way of a pre-approved statement, with no questions from the press permitted.]

What else might Iran have done (short of executing the hostages or holding them forever)? Suppose the soldiers had had their uniforms returned to them drycleaned and pressed. In this context Iran could easily be said to have acquiesced before stalwart Tony Blair. And to release the soldiers soiled and in tattered pajamas would have been one insult inviting another.

It could be this was all just a deft maneouver on Iran's part to make Britain's dogged insistance that its people never crossed the watery boundary look silly. It could be simply that the Iranians are poor suitmakers and tailors. It could be that these soldiers (particularly that eerily childlike one to the left of Leading Seaman Faye Turney in the image above) just aren't suit people.

I'm compelled to file this one under semiotic terrorism because the meaning of the suits is so thoroughly undigestable, i.e., its interpretations are too diverse for there to be one that "goes down easy." Unresolveable, the suits are therefore much less forgettable than practically any other dress would have been. They are at once a doff of the cap and a thumb bestride the nose. In their exquisite self-contradiction, the suits serve primarily to confound the reader, especially the British reader, in whose craw they must stick. [Whether this was the intent of the soldier's Iranian handlers, it hardly need be said, is not a question for the semiotician.]

Support

2007-01-06T19:42:00.000-08:00

Today's paper had a letter that seemed to remind me of something I've always meant to blog about but never realized: the meme "support our troops."

It is useful to read an occasional letter from the dwindling handful of war supporters (William Sillin, Dec. 16), to realize how shallow is their use of the term "support the troops."
In that writer's view, support takes the form of thanking the troops and contributing to charities which help them. Nothing is ever said of "support" in terms of increased taxes to pay for the war, a draft to provide adequate numbers of military personnel, oversight of military contractors, willingness to acknowledge and treat both physical and mental health impacts of war, and electing wise leaders who listen to experts and wage war only as a last resort.
Rutherford H. Platt
Florence

It is indeed very useful to chart how many different things this grouping of three words, "support our troops," can mean.

The fad seems to have died down lately, but a year or two ago you could pick up, from any gas station counter, one of those magnetic yellow ribbons. They all were inscribed, "Support our troops." This began as a way to wear your patriotism on your sleeve, er, car. Quickly the brand branched out to include American flag ribbons.

It was at this point still possible to use "Support our troops" as a synonym for "Don't criticize the War on Terror, lest you give comfort to the enemy." To say "support our troops" was then to not so tacitly approve of the Bush administration's foreign policy.

Curiously -- but appropriately -- the simple loop of the ribbon recalls that of the red AIDS ribbon, which symbolizes mourning for lives lost but also a determination to stop the thing responsible. I wonder: could the yellow ribbon be re-appropriated (like the words "queer" and "gay" and now "bitch" have been re-appropriated) to stand for mourning the war's dead and the determination to end the bloodshed?

The answer is it already does, or at least did. Once upon a time a yellow ribbon tied to a telephone pole or a porch pillar symbolized a hortatory "Bring the boys back home." Only for a brief time in the 21st century did it mean "Keep the boys over there, and heap on the praise."

Now I don't know what it means. The phrase "Support our troops," as Mr. Platt points out, certainly doesn't seem have any substance left to it. It has been deflated. The ribbon has come unpinned.

Filters

2007-01-05T17:07:00.000-08:00

Snip from a fun interview with Ben Schott, author of the delightful Schott's Miscellany and other eponymous titles:

What's increasingly interesting about modern media is its filters: if you actually look at websites, technology from TiVo to iPods to blogs, it's all about filter. What we mean when we say we like a blog or we like a website is that we like somebody's filter. And we have several filters for different things. Of course our friends are filters. Word of mouth is the ultimate filter.

The oldest one in the semiotician's book is that the meaning of any given is exclusionary. That is, a word or a symbol or a picture or a sound means one thing precisely because it doesn't mean something else.

For so long, information has had to be organized in files -- from the manilla envelope to the computerized folder. Even the basic information element, the thing computer programs from word processors to Internet browsers to MIDI composers use is called a file.

But more and more, systems are being used that forget organization and partitioning in favor of filtering, as Mr. Schott points out. Gmail proscribes, "Search, don't sort." YouTube is minimally browseable; it would much rather have you click the links that so many others have clicked before you. Keywords and their repetition is the new basis of information organization.

What significance might this have for semiotics? If the paradigm of the file is becoming antiquated, then what does that mean for différence, the partitioning of semes, the system of creating meanings by separating them from one another?

The Becky Awards

2007-01-03T20:06:00.000-08:00

The relentless and very often tiresome harping on initially interesting topics at Language Log has lately lead me to read the blog less faithfully than I used to (and how charmed I was after first reading about it in the NYT). One of its language mavens nonetheless caught my attention today by the best means possible: NPR. There was a segment on "Fresh Air" announcing the Beckys, Language Log's own version, with sneering added, of the Ig Nobel.

The awards went to a slate of half-assed scientific research done on language as it related to gender difference, and to the sensationalistic, shallow media coverage this research has received -- all items they've harped on recently.

OK, so it's very noble and enterprising of them to point out the poppycock in these cases. But me in my simplicity, I delighted much more in learning the tale behind the name of the award, and then following my own semantic train tracks away from the radio broadcast.

The Beckys are named for Johannes Goropius Becanus, a quack from 16th-century Antwerp, who theorized that Adam and Eve spoke Flemmish. From Becanus' middle name, Gottfried Leibniz coined the term goropizer, for someone who makes up cockamamie etymologies for words.

(Tangentially, the word reminded me of one that's been stuck in my head like a despicable pop tune these last few days: gourmandizer, one prone to overeating or eating messily. Which recalled to my mind CBGB, the iconic New York punk club, recently closed, whose subacronym, OMFUG, stands for Other Music For Uplifting Gourmandizers. [CBGB stands for Country Bluegrass Blues.])

Coming off the tangent, I was reminded by goropizer of another NPR broadcast months ago. It was "Whadaya Know," or that other, similarly obnoxious Sunday game/variety show. The panel of celebrity contestants were playing a game that may well have been called Goropizing. Each was given an obscure word and asked to define it. Three of them were BSing; one gave a real definition. The strangest of the bunch, and therefore the one with the real definition attached, was deipnosophist, one who excells at making dinner conversation. Not a word I use every day, but one I'm proud to know.

World Wide Words explains it is derived from two Greek words (but really, what English word isn't?), "deipnon, the chief meal or dinner, and sophistes, a master of his craft, a clever or wise man." Interesting, because sophist in modern times has a derogatory hue. We usually think of a sophist as someone who is adept at disguising counterfactual or immoral arguments in shrouds of apparent reason or morality, like Glaucon in Plato's Republic or Belial in Paradise Lost.

Ideagora

2007-01-02T23:16:00.000-08:00

NPR's "Talk of the Nation" today was essentially a meditation on a neologism that, once I'd heard it, I liked quite a lot. The ideagora is the ubernet, the Web/ blogosphere/ Blackberryscape/ cellphonebrowserverse, a series of tubes unlike any we've imagined hitherto. But of course whenever we talk about any of these things, we're really talking about the people inputting and outputting with their assistance.

In the ideagora, research and development is redefined. The realization of the ideagora is a moving beyond cellular, corporate innovation and off into the real of the viral, the spontaneous, the unexpected, perhaps even the previously thought impossible. It's a function of wikinomics (another neologism -- less pleasing to my ear, simply because "wiki" always sounded a bit off to me [But don't get me wrong -- I love wikis as a thing.]), the collaborative, shared economy where knowledge as raw material is inexhaustible and also free.

I say "ideagora" and "wikinomics" are neologisms; but really they're just portmanteau words. The former is a combination of "idea" and agora, the ancient Greek word for marketplace, at least so far as that marketplace is also a sort of forum in the classical sence. The later is a portmanteau born of a neologism (wiki, a foreshortening of Wiki Wiki Web, the Hawaiian-influenced name given by Ward Cunningham in 1994 to the very first wiki softwear) and one of the oldest words there is (economics, which in the originary Greek oikonomia meant management of one's home).

To hang by the neck until dead

2006-12-29T20:29:00.000-08:00

So they hanged Saddam Hussein.

Some first impressions: I was in the newsroom when word came in that the first uncomfirmed reports from Arab newsorgans had made their way to Western media about 10 p.m. Space was quickly found on the next morning's front page. But what, I ask somewhat rhetorically, makes the actual event more newsworthy than the fact that he was sentenced to hang, and that an appeal to the sentence had been denied? (Neither story made the front page, at my newspaper at least.)

On television, the hint and then the confirmation that the deed had been done was mainly an excuse to let talking heads do their thing and to play back video of Saddam's greatest hits: firing a rifle off a balcony wearing a fedora, unsheathing a sword given to him as a gift as he stood in front of the stunningly pink curtains of his palace, and finally getting his teeth inspected by a US Army medic.

Online, in at least two places, graphics showed Saddam in noble stances while type gave us the year of his birth and the year of his death. These images most struck my fancy tonight, because they reminded me so much fo the lionizing, deifying, iconizing posters of Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur, et alii that follow the same design. In one photo, Hussein is solemn yet defiant: this is how we remember him from his trial -- questioning the very basis of the authority by which he was being tried. In the other he is a happy man, a satisfied politician hailing the masses as they hail him back. This is the antithesis of how we remember him, but the thesis of how he saw himself and the basis of how he conducted himself before the court.

What are we to make of these images? No doubt they were made hours ago by the graphics departments of CNN and the NYT in anticipation of the event. But in seeking to create an illustration that on both Web sites would be the portal onto retrospectives of the dictator's career, why would both chose to mimic the memorial merchandice of America's fallen artistic and cultural heroes?

Next 25 nonresolutions

2006-12-21T23:26:00.000-08:00

Books to read that are already on my shelves
(in no particular order)

26. Bronte, Wuthering Heights
27. Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
28. Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
29. Derrida, Limited Ink
30. Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge
31. Delany, Dhalgren (again)
32. Dostoyevski, Devils (again)
33. Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
34. Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
35. Ellmann, James Joyce
36. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future
37. bin Laden, Messages to the World
38. Stapeldon, Last and First Men/Starmaker
39. Milton, Paradise Regained
40. Miller, A Canticle for Liebowitz
41. Tolsoy, Anna Karennina
42. Twain, Huckleberry Finn (never actually finished it in high school)
43. Deleuze/Guatarri, Anti-Oedipus
44. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
45. LeGuinn, The Left Hand of Darkness (again)
46. one of the Bruce Sterlings
47. Goethe, Faust
48. Gaiman, Neverwhere
49. Schooler, The Blue Bear
50. Finnegans Wake (yeah right)

The Disposessed

2006-12-20T20:43:00.000-08:00

Just finished reading the extraordinary novel The Disposessed by Ursula K. LeGuinn: a love story that happens to center on the journey of a brilliant physicist from his anarchosyndicalist homeworld (Anarres) to a very thinly-veiled Earth (Urras).

Although I imagine older readers might differ with this assessment, it seems to me the book is absolutely nondated despite its being very communist in subject matter (it was written in 1974).

It managed, despite its deliberate colliding of communist and capitalist worlds, not to be preachy, not to try to puff up one ideology and make the other look foolish. Both worlds were complicated, both were depicted with warts and all.

(Having read it, I'm now finally ready to begin Jameson's newish Archaeologies of the Future, which, just to show you how lazy I've been about reading fiction and criticism, I got LAST Christmas [I had to read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and Delany's Trouble on Triton first, naturally].)

Obituaries

2006-12-19T21:19:00.000-08:00

Writing (well, intensively proofreading) obituaries has been my stock and trade for the last five months; and soon that will no longer be the case. I thought I ought to blog about them before it's too late. (You can expect a blog, or several, in the coming months on the crime story as a thing.)

First, etymology. Lacking access to the OED, I've had to resort to EtymOnline, which is nonetheless a good resource.

1706, "register of deaths," from M.L. obituarius "a record of the death of a person," lit. "pertaining to death," from L. obitus "departure, a going to meet, encounter" (a euphemism for "death"), from stem of obire "go to meet" (as in mortem obire "meet death"), from ob "to, toward" + ire "go." Meaning "record or announcement of a death, esp. in a newspaper, and including a brief biographical sketch" is from 1738. A similar euphemism is in O.E. cognate forðfaran "to die," lit. "to go forth."

So we see that from the very first, the obituary was rooted in euphamism. Why? Because mortality is deeply scary. Like Adam tells a gang a vampires at the beginning of Buffy season 4, "You fear death. Being immortal, you fear it more than those to whom it comes naturally."

Thankfully, most of the obits that cross my desk daily say "died" in their first sentence. Only a few every week use the tollerable "passed on." Once in a blue moon I'll get an "entered into eternal rest"; and a "was received into the arms of the Lord" comes even less often.

Regrattably, I didn't get the now-famous "With trumpets blaring, Zeus, god of gods, called Daniel Reed Porter III to His Heavenly Pantheon on Nov. 21, 2006" that caused such a stir in my fair city and its environs. That one came in on my day off.

The death taboo has had its claws in me all this time. The paper has a policy, which I dutifully uphold, of verifying every obituary with a legitimate funeral home of crematory, so as to ensure that we don't publish any prank or pet obituaries unwittingly. Whenever I ask the family members delivering or emailing obituaries to tell me what funeral home has the body, I adopt the obituary jargon: "Which funeral home is handling the arrangements?" To ask, "Where is the body," seems as unutterable in this circumstance as saying something like, "So where's the stiff at, anyway?"

Yet I'm always struck by how undistraught people are when I call them up to check spellings of siblings' names and go through all the other tedia of the obit vetting process. Or when I'm called on to develop a full-fledged story out of a noteworthy obit. I was stunned when, less than 24 hours after her 19-year-old daughter had died of osteosarcoma, a local parent was able to describe to me, in painstaking detail, her daughter's movement from diagnosis to treatment to death, all while giving me a remarkable portrait of her daughter's remarkable character.

The obituary is an odd thing indeed. It is the only thing in a newspaper, aside from advertising, that is not investigated and converted into a narative by a disinterested reporter. Its authorship is always interested. This often allows wonderful things -- Mr. Porter's obit is the classic example of that. But it also allows the sort of truth-tampering that, while not on the same plane as a biased or fabricated news article, nonetheless makes me cringe. Not long before we printed the blaring trumpets of Zues, we accepted a heavily redacted photocopy of an obit that appeared in a west coast paper. The east coast relatives wanted us to remove the "ex" part of the deceased's ex-wife's title and delete altogether the mention of his "companion."

Katharsis came in the form of a NYT article about memorial websites, which employ massive editorial staffs to keep their pages clear of obit trolls -- people who, justifiably or otherwise, attach negative comments debunking declarations of the deceased's having been a "devoted father," for example. My paper's website, so far as I know, has never gotten any comments, good or bad, on any obit other than Mr. Porter's.

First 25 non resolutions

2006-12-18T00:02:00.000-08:00

1. get a futon
2. buy more socks and underwear
3. get an ironing board and iron (done)
4. increase wardrobe selection, especially in the area of pants and sweaters
5. iron shirts regularly
6. be a better reporter
7. break diet less frequently than in 2006
8. maybe get a new laptop, one with an "n" key and working CD writer and that doesn't sound like a 747 getting ready to take off.
9. attain competency level of French
10. go to france
11. read _Le Plaisir du texte_ in the original
12. become a morning person
13. clean the cat box every day
14. get more and bigger plants
15. play bass again
16. undertake less night driving
17. finish the sunday Times by the end of Monday at the latest every week
18. blog daily
19. finish ulysses paper by march (still not done 4/21)
20. finish transmet paper
21. publish aforementioned papers.
22. get a new paper idea
23. sustain fewer shaving injuries
24. floss
25. get more frequent haircuts, so as to avoid sudden beast/man transformations that confuse and frighten friends and co-workers

Resolutions

2006-12-17T09:26:00.000-08:00

To resolve oneself to a task, or a programme of tasks, is the easiest of tasks. It doesn't take a semiotician to point out that fulfilling all of one's New Year's resolutions is easier said than done.

As a social phenomenon, New Year's resolutions function as a locus of reciprocal praise and encouragement. Mechanically, they are rather like diets (see below) in that they require self enforcement but also allow temporary lapses and, subsequently, collective comiseration. No wonder so many New Year's resolutions are to begin a diet, or to be more conscientious about dieting.

While the paradigm of resolutions seems to be the regimen, the sustained activity, this needn't be the only route. On the other hand there are achievable goals, achievable in the short run if only one would stop procrastinating or finally rearrange one's schedule to accomodate them. They can be a finite as reading a book or climbing a mountain or as infinite as learning a new language (though in the infinite register one is precariously close to the systematic, the regimented, and therefore most in danger of failing to fulfill the goal).

Recently I came across on a friend's blog a list of 100 nonresolutions; a list, rather, of goals to be accomplished over the course of the next year. The writer indicted whether or not (or to what degree) the goals had been fulfilled. One could easily apply to this list all the critiques that have been rolled into the antimaterial/Christian-lite ideology of New Year's resolutions. This ideology has an imperative of self improvement, at least so far as self improvement is construed as meaning altering one's life in toto for some good effect: donating more to charity, quitting smoking, cooling one's temper, &c. But to remove these value judgements for a moment and peer in at the obstacles to personal contentment, we find them numbering two: procrastination and forgetfulness.

Write a list, so your goals are not forgotten. Enumerate as many or as few goals as you can think of; in fact, add to the list throughout the year, and cross off those goals that have been met. The pleasure of illiminating tasks, of accomplishing something great or small is nonetheless impetus for further movement. It's the antidote for stagnation and a propellor away from ideology.

Gifts

2006-12-16T09:12:00.000-08:00

The giving of gifts is perhaps an apter illustration of Wimsatt & Beardsley's intentional fallacy than anything in literature.

One chooses and ultimately delivers a gift based on one's own (inevitably limited) knowledge of what the other desires, or perhaps simply needs. The giver's estimation may be slightly off kilter, it may miss the mark completely, or it may be a bulls eye.

But in any case, on the receiving end there must always be dissimulation, however ecstatic the initial, unadulterated reaction to the unwrapping of the gift may be. Following this must come a narrative, the receiver's own, which may or may not resemble the giver's: "It's what I've always wanted," "How did you know?" and so forth.

A diet to end them all

2006-12-15T08:29:00.000-08:00

I'm going to try something new. Rather than make really long entries occasionally, I'm going to make really short entries regularly. To accomplish this, I'll turn to seemingly random topics and quickly puzzle through their apparatuses and ranges of meaning.

Today: Diet

There is perhaps nothing so simultaneoulsy self-effacing and self-loathing than placing oneself on a diet. To be on a diet is to forbid oneself certain foods; and since eating is so often a social activity, it is very often the public refusal of certain foods. To diet is therefore at least in part to perform, to make an act of a goal (better health, lower cholesterol, a slimmer figure) as well as to demonstrate one's self-control in (selectively) not giving in to the desire to break this pact with the self.

The boundaries meted out by any diet are necessarily permeable, especially during that nebulous time called "the holidays" during which any number of factors can be cited as contributing to the permissible (at least tacitly permissible, or permitted under protest) breaking of the diet.

Unlike religious devotion, a sort of discipline that has an extensive societal support for prohibitions and lifestyle choices, dieting's support mechanism is narrow. Its tenets can only be upheld by the dieter (and possibly his or her dietician or physician). Beyond that, the imperative to diet is scarcely reflected, much less enforced. Friends on similar diets may band together, and may just as easily agree upon excuses to break the diet for a special occasion, and then, to complete the cycle, offer commiseration and mutual support in re-initiating the diet. For a non-dieter to insist a dieter maintain his or her diet would be to step out of bounds. Politeness and considerateness dictate that this is the dieter's business and no one else's.

Of course there is a tremendous social force that makes obesity, extra padding and round bellies taboo or undesirable; and yet this societal pressure does not include a directive toward dieting. It is rather assumed that leanness is the natural state, and fatness is the transgression. This is almost to suppose that the desired state is maintained through inactivity, where activity (e.g. overeating) yields the undesirable state, where of course the opposite is often more true.

Kitten chaser

2006-12-15T08:15:00.000-08:00

How porn means

2006-12-12T21:48:00.000-08:00

[The topic of pornography will be once more heatedly hashed over later this week in my fair city, which fact reminded me of a "treatise" (or so I called it then) I assembled on the form more than a year ago. Below is an abridged version of the document, which is organized into seven compartments that describe the elementary semiotic functions carried out in any piece of hardcore porn. -- Ed.]

I. THE FRAME
The woman or women are usually in full view, sometimes dismembered, but almost never decapitated. Men, on the other hand, are frequently decapitated, often dismembered and only sometimes in full view.

II. THE GAZE
Almost never is the man allowed to make eye contact with the camera. Most often his gaze is averted elsewhere or his eyes are closed.
Series of stills or films tend to have a unity of the gaze where the woman is concerned. She either focuses solely on her partner(s) or on the camera, which is to say the viewer.

III. WHERE THE SEMEN GOES
Even when a condom is used for the vaginal or anal intercourse portion of the sequence, it is inevitably removed before orgasm so that the semen can be allowed to make contact with the woman’s body (and so much the better if the condom can be made to break prior to that point).
Rarely is the woman allowed to spit out semen after she has received it in her mouth. She may gargle it, some of it may be permitted to ooze onto her chin, but she is not to deliberatively reject it. She is required to accept it, even appear to enjoy its taste.
It seems that for whatever arbitrarily, socially coded reasons, the emission of any bodily fluid onto another’s body is demeaning and disrespectful. Is it always necessarily contemptuous? Spitting on someone’s face apparently is. Spitting on the ground at someone’s feet is meant to convey dislike, as though that person leaves a bad taste in the spitter’s mouth. Spitting on someone’s face is less obviously meaningful in the metaphorical sense. To defecate or urinate on someone would be the utmost expression of disrespect. But unlike urine and feces, saliva can be swallowed by its producer without repugnance or ill effect. Men never spit on women in porn, though they may slobber on them. Women, on the other hand, sometimes spit on the man’s penis and use the saliva as lubricant. It appears that saliva, among all bodily fluids, has the widest semiotic range and therefore the most unstable series of connotations. How it relates to the transmission of semen onto the female body is uncertain, though the connection is apparent, intuitively at least.

IV. PERFORMATIVITY/PRESENCE
In general terms, porn straddles the line between drama and reality TV. In most cases readily available through the Internet, there is no clear distinction between whether the woman is acting or whether she actually enjoys the acts (perhaps this explains part of the appeal of “amateur” porn). In higher-budget, higher-production value porn, with those actresses most readily identified as “porn stars,” the performance is at its most apparent -- this is none of the fumbling, false starts, irregular tempi, and most importantly none of the verbal communication that are the hallmarks of actual, private, sexual intercourse.
But beneath this blurred distinction there is always an assurance of the actors’ performance. Even if they are not following a script per se, they have undoubtedly been given directions prior to filming or are given directions as the scene progresses. The woman is told to emphasize her pleasure, to look at the camera or at her partner; the man is told to be inexpressive and never to look at the camera. The reasons for this are simple -- the viewer (assuming his is heterosexual and male) is allowed to achieve the highest satisfaction when he becomes the object of the woman’s desire, but can do this only when the man is passive enough, removed enough from the frame, as to allow the viewer to superimpose himself onto the scene. Here, it comes down to a question of taste in where the woman’s gaze is directed. The viewer may be able to enter the scene only if she is looking at him directly -- that is, into the camera. But it may also be possible for the viewer to superimpose himself so thoroughly that the woman’s gaze, directed at her on-screen partner, is satisfying.
But perhaps the (hetero male) viewer doesn’t so much superimpose his own body over that of the male player’s as inject himself into it. The male player’s body, in other words, is a receptacle for the viewer’s subjectivity, a sort of avatar or virtual body. This is why it matters what the male looks like, at least below the chin. He must be lean and muscular. He must, in fact, adhere to certain ancient Greek standards of masculinity. His mind is of no concern to the viewer, but he must be of corpore sano.
Could we then draw a connection between the ancient Greek ideal and the modern Greek -- which is to say fraternal, the societies of Greek letters -- ideal? When we think of frat-boys, naturally we think of men who spend a lot of time at the gym pumping iron. The male body ideal, in other words, is highly similar from antiquity to modern fraternity. Now perhaps the connections and parallels come too quickly, and need to be explored less superficially, but nonetheless -- Fraternities have their own underbelly of homoeroticism, concealed beneath their homosociality, typified by their hazing rituals.
The dynamic of fraternity initiation parallels that of the more primal sort of sexuality, in which power relationships are most apparent. And isn’t it true that, like primitive sexuality, fraternity initiations are first and foremost a mode of reproduction? Cavemen mated out of an instinctive need to preserve their race, frat-boys initiate new frat-boys out of a need to maintain the house past their own graduation. Cavemen dragged their mates by the hair, while frat-boys paddle pledges’ rear ends. In both cases the reproductive act is coupled with domination and humiliation.

V. SHOES
More often than anything else, the woman’s shoes are the only article of clothing she is permitted to leave on throughout a sequence. And in the majority of these cases, they are high-heeled shoes, sometimes with platforms. The phallic connotation of stiletto heels is the most obvious (and boring). There is a saying that partial nudity is usually more exciting than complete nudity, because so long as some article of clothing remains in place there still exists the possibility of removing it. And so desire is perpetuated -- the final removal comes only in the spectator’s imagination, but is therefore never complete.

VI. GRATIFICATION vs. ORGASM
It is usually the case that the woman must appear to be in the absolute throes of passion from the moment of genital contact (even from the moment the male genitals are exposed, in some cases) until after the man has come to orgasm. But it is only the male’s orgasm that is empirically provable -- since it is always accompanied by the transmission of semen. The female orgasm remains "the great mystery," at least in this context. In porn, the mystery need only stay in circulation until the time of the male orgasm. It is necessary for the woman to appear to be enjoying herself only until the male’s orgasm has subsided. So much the better if she screams and appears to have an orgasm or two of her own. The gratification of the male from his pleasing the female exists as a necessary support to his own pleasure (and by extension that of the viewer). But once orgasm is achieved, the floor has already dropped away and that support is no longer necessary.
Occasionally the woman’s range of expression includes pain -- for in some instances it may be gratifying to inflict pain on one’s partner by the sheer force of one’s thrusts or length and caliber of one’s penis. This undoubtedly has some relation to the fascination with claiming female virginity.
Certainly it is possible to reduce the infliction of various demeaning acts upon the woman in porn to simple gratification. But what is the quality of this particular gratification? Surely it is different from the type of gratification yielded by making a woman (at least appear to) have an orgasm. Could it be more akin to the type of gratification present in fraternity hazing, in which the hazer derives satisfaction from hearing the hazee say “Thank you, may I have another?”

VII. GENRES
A chart of genres will at some point be useful, though never comprehensive enough. Suffice it that there are many and that their number is increasing all the time (remember how Foucault writes about the production of new perversions), but they are nonetheless extremely specific.
Notably, the names that have stuck to the major genres are never specific and even less accurate as labels or identifying tags. The genre called “lesbian” porn is almost certainly directed at heterosexual males. It never includes the stereotypical body types of lesbianism, which is to say it never features butchies or bull dykes (perhaps it features what might be called femmes). What it does feature is females easily transposable to “hardcore” porn. Often in “lesbian” porn there is a dildo allowed to enter the sequence (a sort of synecdoche, perhaps, for the male viewer).
“MFF” and “MMF” porn tends to be oriented at hetero males also, and seems to leave the boundaries of heterosexuality for men intact while, in empirical terms, it smears them. Meanwhile it assumes an unproblematic bisexuality for women. Whether it is MFF or MMF, the woman or women are the only ones getting fucked while only the male(s) are doing the fucking. The two females are permitted to fuck each other, but their fucking is always subordinate to the man’s. The introduction of two males into porn with an ostensibly heterosexual male audience is already problematic, hence the necessity of maintaining the two males’ (performative) heterosexuality. Part and parcel to this is the fact that, even beyond the fact their bodies do not touch unless the touching is absolutely unavoidable, they never look at each other.

Talking to the walls

2006-12-05T19:31:00.000-08:00

As an adendum to my last post, I'll mention Frank Rich's comments in last Sunday's New York Times opinion page. While he's a little too doggedly insistent on a direct relationship between language and reality for the tastes of this semiotician, he does make a good point.

The newest hollowed-out word to mask the endgame in Iraq is "phase," as if the increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly teenager. "Phase" is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about two words the president doesn't want to hear, "civil war."

The incredible thing here is that propaganda seems to have collapsed to its weakest form, euphamism. Rich is right when he draws the connexion between "phase" as Bush uses it and the transitory manifestations of teen angst. It's the shortest distance between the word and all available association in the mind of the average American I think; just as the shortest line between the meme "civil war" and all available associations is the war between North and South.

(Kofi Anan joined the "civil war" bandwagon Monday, BTW.)

And on the sanctioning of "civil war" by NBC, Rich had this to say:

In the case of civil war, it fell to a morning television anchor, Matt Lauer, to officially bless the term before the "Today" show moved on to such regular fare as an update on the Olsen twins. That juxtaposition of Iraq and the post-pubescent eroticism was only too accurate a gauge of how much the word "war" itself has been drained of its meaning in America after years of waging a war that required no shared sacrifice. Whatever you want to label what's happening in Iraq, it has never impeded our freedom to dote on the Olsen twins.

This is one of those things that now goes without saying to the point where it becomes profound once said. The majority of readers and writers in the blogosphere have never experienced a war whose immediate, local manifestation was shared sacrifice: the rationing of aluminum, the donation of pantyhose, &c. No doubt Rich will have already received irate emails saying our shared sacrifice is the absense and occasional death of our boys overseas; and while maybe we should all be a little more in tune with the fact that many of our fellow countrymenandwomen are shedding blood over there, most of us aren't. And while most of us (I sincerely hope) aren't actually doting on Mary-Kate and Ashley, we certainly do have other concerns.

To a great many of us, I suspect, it matters not whether the situation in Iraq is civil war, ethnic cleansing, sectarian violence, insurgency, tribulations, quagmire, boondoggle, farce, tragedy, travesty, or otherwise. For many of us, the volume may as well be muted: the reports all sound the same, and are all accompanied by similar footage of mangled humvees and Arabs brandishing AK47s.

I don't need your civil war

2006-11-28T18:24:00.000-08:00

So apparently there's a big to-do over NBC finally exhibiting the sense to call a spade a spade and use the words "civil war" in its reporting on Iraq.

The Associated Press quoted Matthew Felling, a spokesman for the Center for Media and Public Affairs as saying, "[N]ot since Fox News Channel decided to stop saying 'suicide bombers' and start saying 'homicide bombers' has there been a starker linguistic stance taken by a news organization." (Fox adopted that terminology in April 2002 after the White House did, according to AP. And while my gut reaction is to wrinkle my nose at any terminological imprimaturs of either entity, this one gives me pause.)

Seriously though, what's the big deal? Why is the White House so insistent that Iraq is not in a state of civil war, and why aren't more media agencies calling it a civil war?

AP offers a feeble lesson in definitions:

Webster's New World College Dictionary defines it simply as "war between geographical sections or political factions of the same nation."

Some political scientists use a threshold of 1,000 dead, which the current conflict has long since passed.

There are more conservative definitions. The Web site GlobalSecurity.org, which provides information on defense issues, said five criteria must be met: The contestants must control territory, have a functioning government, enjoy some foreign recognition, have identifiable regular armed forces and engage in major military operations.

The Bush administration said Monday that it does not believe Iraq is in a civil war, and that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki does not, either.

"You have notr yet had a situation where you have two clearly defined and opposing groups vying not only for power, but for territory," White House Press Secretary Tony Snow said.

"What you do have is sectarian violence that seems to be less aimed at gaining full control over an area than expressing differences, and also trying to destabilize a democracy -- which is different than a civil war, where two sides are clashing for territory and supremacy."

The simplest and therefore broadest and therefore truest definition of civil war, it seems to me, is a conflict between individual groups of a single nation. But within this broad and potentially useful definition are, inevitably, broader and less useful definitions to be hashed over.

What constitutes a conflict, what constitutes a group, and most importantly here, what constitutes a nation?

There are those who say Iraq should be broken up into three separate countries, pointing to the fact that the modern country isn't any sort of organic concatenation but rather something cobbled together by the British in 1921.

That being true, then I suppose you could make the case that what's happening in Iraq is a war plain and simple, with nothing civil about it.

But then again, this could actually be closer to a civil war under the first definition cited by AP than most realize. Writes the New York Times:

Many Iraqis and Americans who have tracked the insurgency say it has been strongly shaped by former Baath Party members who want to keep Shiites from taking power. Even the newer jihadist groups have articulated political goals on Web sites -- most notably to establish a Sunni-ruled Islamic caliphate.

"There was a whole regime that ruled this country for 35 years," said Mahmoud Othman, a senior Kurdish legislator. "Now they've gone underground. This is the main body of the resistance."

As for why the administration and the media are so squeamish about the term civil war, NYT is slightly more thoughtful. Consenting to call it a civil war could be construed as acknowledging the U.S. has failed in Iraq. Also, supporters of the war "worry that the American people might not see a role for American troops in any Iraqi civil war and would more loudly demand a withdrawal."

I'm not totally satisfied with the connotational analysis here. I, for one, would be just as much in favor of withdrawal if the administration started saying Iraq was in a civil war as I am now. I don't think there's any real tollerance for euphamism of this sort. The Korean conflict was a war, and everybody knows it. That's even more true for Vietnam. I don't think admitting there's a civil war on in Iraq would really shake the foundations of those who support the war. At this point I don't know what would (unless all this hoopla over the Baker commission pans out).

I suggest there's an altogether different connotation that those who dislike "civil war" are mainly worried about, consciously or not. To American ears, civil war brings immediately to mind the war between North and South, a struggle whose symbolics is as active and controversial as ever. While a goodly portion of the U.S. population is made up of Civil War buffs, perhaps our Leaders and Teachers are concerned if "civil war" became attached to Iraq as well as America then there would be an undesirable identification with the combatants there. It would suddenly be too easy to make equations, even moral ones.

(And yet, it seems there's not total agreement that the Civil War should be called a civil war either -- viz. "The War of Northern Aggression.")

Axl Rose, I write with a shudder, put it pretty well:

We got the wall of D.C. to remind us all
That you can't trust freedom
When it's not in your hands
When everybody's fightin'
For their promised land

Now that's a rose of a different color

2006-11-08T03:27:00.000-08:00

For our two-month anniversary I determined to give my darling a bouquet of roses, which possessed me to look into the supposed meanings of their different colors, which in turn possessed me to wonder about how these different colors (and other qualities) came to be imbued with these meanings.

I settled on a mix of red and white roses, because the Internet told me they symbolized unity. Severally, red roses of course mean "I love you," and also stand for respect and courage, while white roses can mean "You’re heavenly," or stand for reverence and humility, innocence and purity, "I’m worthy of you," and even secrecy and silence.

Rosebuds symbolize beauty, youth and a heart innocent of love or: “You are young and beautiful.” Red rosebuds mean “pure and lovely” and white rosebuds signify girlhood or “too young to love.” The moss rosebud stands for confessions of love.
A single rose stands for simplicity. In full bloom, it means “I love you” or “I love you still,” and a bouquet of roses in full bloom signifies gratitude.
Pink roses in general symbolize grace and gentility. For more subtle shades of meaning, choose deep pink to stand for gratitude and appreciation. Light pink conveys admiration and sympathy.
Yellow roses usually stand for joy and gladness, but can also say “try to care.”
Red and yellow blends stand for jovial and happy feelings.
Coral or orange roses denote enthusiasm and desire.
A deep burgundy rose means “unconscious beauty.”
Pale colors convey sociability and friendship.
Hybrid tea roses mean “I’ll remember you always” and sweetheart roses symbolize just what their name implies.
Two roses taped or wired together to form a single stem signal an engagement or coming marriage.
A full blown rose placed over two buds forms a combination that signifies secrecy.
Withered white roses have two meanings: fleeting beauty and “you made no impression.”
A crown made of roses signifies reward or virtue.
Rose leaves are a symbol of hope.
Dark Pink: Appreciation, Gratitude, Thank You
Light Pink: Admiration, Sympathy, Gentleness, Grace, Gladness, Joy, Sweetness
Yellow: Joy, Gladness, Friendship, Delight, Promise of a new beginning, Welcome Back, Remember Me, and Jealousy, "I care"
Yellow with Red Tip: Friendship, Falling in Love
Orange: Desire, Enthusiasm
Red and White: Given together, these signify unity
Red and Yellow: Jovial and Happy Feelings
Peach: Appreciation, Closing of the deal, Let's get together, Sincerity, Gratitude
Pale Peach; Modesty
Coral: Desire
Lavender: Love at first sight, Enchantment
Orange: Enthusiasm, Desire, Fascination
Black*: Death, Farewell
Blue*: The unattainable or impossible
Single in any color: Simplicity, Gratitude
Red Rosebud: Symbolic of purity and loveliness
White Rosebud: Symbolic of girlhood
Thornless Rose: "Love at first sight"
* These roses do not actually exist. [Not so. One was gengeneered in 2004. -- ed.]

from http://www.hugkiss.com/flowermean.shtml and http://www.rkdn.org/roses/colors.asp

The two sites agree on the meanings of the most standard hues (one site claims these meanings have existed "since the dawn of time"); and the concept of giving your love a rose as a symbolic act is more or less universal; but how did this all come to pass?

Perhaps it was initially a bit of that usual suspect, orientalism. Like noodles, roses entered the European tradition by way of China, romanticized as wonders of the East. And in the century before that, King Charles II brought the "language of flowers" to Sweden from Persia. But there existed a symbology and mythology of roses in ancient Greek and other early cultures. The first rose is thought to have been a white one whose color was transformed by one thing or another: for instance, stained by blood or blushing from a kiss. Hence, the white rose stands for purity.

But in fact the white rose stands for a lot of things. It's a regular semantic chain unto itself. From innocence and purity to secrecy (though the sub rosa rose placed on Roman doorsteps wasn't necessarily white) to friendship and reverence to humility, its sanctioned uses are to announce a new love, decorate a wedding or decorate a coffin. (Coincidentally -- or not -- one lays a wild rose on a newsired vampire's grave to prevent him from rising.) This ambiguity, and the proliferation of meanings for all the other colors, makes me wonder if there was a sort of early Hallmarkification of the flower, as its cultivation in many colors became possible, and the titilating code of the Victorian language of flowers circulated.

Proto-Hallmarkicized or no, the act of giving roses is something that can convey almost any meaning. Their pigmentation has been thoroughly and ambiguously codified; and yet as semiotic loci they can nonetheless be constantly reinscribed with new meaning. In plain language, that means they needn't stand for exactly what the florist says they stand for; on the contrary, they stand for whatever they stand for in the context of the giving.

When I gave my darling a bouquet of red and white roses, she understood what it meant.

I'll leave you with a quote from our good friend Roland:

"To love does not exist in the infinitive (except by a metalinguistic artiface): the subject and the object come to the word even as it is uttered" (A Lover's Discourse, 145).

Crowdsourcing

2006-11-06T21:50:00.000-08:00

This report, of the latest metasticization of the information age, is utterly fascinating: Gannett abolishes newsrooms in favor of 'Information Centers'.

In summary, this corporation, which publishes USA Today and 90 other papers, is looking beyond its reporters to gather news, produce features and mount investigations by "crowdsourcing."

The term, coined by the author of the article a bit earlier this year, is doubtless meant to convey the same derogatory and slightly jingoistic or xenophobic undertones that "outsourcing" does. American jobs have been lost to India; now journalists' jobs stand to be lost to John Q. Public.

One thing that's immediately striking about this (at least in the context of that silly essay I'm trying to write) is the complete disruption of the dynamic between Spider Jerusalem, the reporter's reporter, and his readers. It's a relationship in which a singular voice of authority simultaneously draws upon, defends and reviles the population at large.

Not to mention the fact that, more than ever before, this is an incursion of the ancient tradition of narrative, which included no concept of "the author" or of any authority contained within a single body. Instead, it's almost like a movement back toward the oral tradition, where legends are passed from storyteller to storyteller, with no regard for whatever claims of artistic integrity a modern author might make.

Plenty of newspapers have embraced Web sites and now even blogs; but here it's not just a mimicry of format, it's an absorbtion of the means of production of what I'll call the countermedia -- the blogging, newsgathering, muckraking public, as opposed to the (only slightly) more exclusive newsmedia.

Come to think of it, exclusivity remains the hallmark of both milieux. Anyone can publish a blog, just as anyone with access to a photocopier can produce a "journal." But there is still a reliance on authority, an expection that the news is being captured and interpreted and spread by someone or some entity that has some business doing so. This relies entirely on reputation, which is generated by satisfying the expectations of certain readerships. The rule is the same for newspapers as for any blog that aspires to be more than a diary made public. One turns to BoingBoing because its writers have their fingers on all the right pulses. One turns to Language Log because its writers have published a book (a tangible one with paper and ink) and because they're professors (or something).

Crowdsourcing may or may not be an adequate term to describe the model. The "crowd" here is not the man on the street by any means. It is made up of people who (a) have access to computers and the Internet, (b) regularly consume news and (c) feel inclined to contribute to the generation of news. To be sure, we are not yet at the point of Satelite 5 in "The Long Game" (Doctor Who, season 29, episode 7), where human brains are interlinked processors gathering and disseminating news in a bizarre, technoritualistic manner.

Can't resist this one

2006-11-06T15:31:00.000-08:00

So there's a cleaner available in Costa Rica called "terror." (I don't speak the language, but at least according to BabelFish, terror in Spanish is terror in English.)

I can't help but be reminded of Barthes' "Soap-powders and Detergents" (Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers; New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), which posits that the story of cleaners has always been one of good versus evil: "[M]atter here is endowed with value-bearing states."

Products based on chlorine and ammonia are without doubt the representatives of a kind of absolute fire, a saviour but a blind one. Powders, on the contrary, are selective, they push, they drive firt through the texture of the object, their function is keeping public order not making war.

I wonder if the marketing department at whatever company produces Terror read Barthes. It seems altogether too coincidental.

But where the naming of the brands Barthes cites is more subtle -- "Lux" for light, "Persil" for (of all things) parsley, and "Omo" for, apparently, a river in Ethiopia -- "Terror" is blatant. It's the sort of directness of communications that deprives the semiotician of doing very much analytical work. Nothing like the mystery in "OMO blows a wind of freshness on your linen and re-examines the drudgery of detergent while bringing a key of gaiety and good mood… And always with the guarantee of the 99 spots! Who says better?" (that's the Google translation of French Wikipedia's entry on Omo's 2006 slogan).

As for "Terror," so writes Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing.net:

Oh, what dark, foreboding poetry lurks in those long-lasting pink suds. Do we use it to cleanse the world of terror, or does the war on terror wash our Constitution away? One wonders what might become of the foolish adventure traveler who attempts to fly back to the US with this stuff in their suitcase.

Granted, this is taking it a bit out of its Costa Rican context and putting it into that of the BoingBoingian critique of the so-called War on Moisture. But the "dark, foreboding poetry" is right on target.

Stay the course no more

2006-10-24T19:13:00.000-07:00

Turns out this is actually old news, but the White House speechwriters have officially dropped "stay the course" from heavy rotation in their discourse about Iraq and the war on terror.

From an NPR report by David Greene (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6369925):

One of the president's trademarks is his self-portrait as a steadfast leader. He has often invoked the importance of "staying the course" in Iraq, and finishing the job of building a democracy.

Speaking in Utah at the end of August, President Bush said, "We will stay the course. We will help this young Iraqi democracy succeed."

But that may have been the last time the president used the phrase "stay the course." On Monday, White House spokesman Tony Snow said that the phrase was dropped after August. When asked about the change, Snow paused briefly before answering.

"Because it left the wrong impression about what was going on. And it allowed critics to say, 'Well, here's an administration that's just embarked upon a policy, not looking at what the situation is,' when in fact it's just the opposite."

This is an interesting rhetorical inversion. Of course, critics have been saying "Well, here's an administration that's just embarked upon a policy, not looking at what the situation is" for a while now. This is nothing new, and the fact that the White House is just now acknowledging that is pretty laughable. But Snow couches his response in such a way as to make the elimination of "stay the course" sound like a pre-emptive move, to stop critics before they can criticize.

Poppycock.

The lead editorial in the New York Times this past Sunday captures the larger picture, of which this minor change in Bushspeak is most certainly a part.

The generrals who told President Bush before the war the Donald Rumsfeld's shock-and-awe fantasy would not work were not enough to persuade him to change his strategy in Iraq. Nor did month after month of mounting military and civilian casaulties on all sides, the emergence of a near civil war, the collapse of reconstruction efforts or the seeming inability of either Iraqi or American forces to secure contested parts of Iraq, including Baghdad, for any significant period.

So what finally, after all this time, cause Mr. Bush to very publicly consult with his generals to consider a change in tactics in Iraq? The president, who says he never reads political polls, is worried that his party could lose some of its iron grip on power in the Confressional elections next month.

It is not necessarily a bad thing when a politician takes stock of his positions in the teeth of an election. Our elected leaders are expected to heed the will of the American people. [...]

But the way this sudden change of heart has come about, after months in which Mr. Bush has brushed off all criticism of his policies as either misguided, politically motivated or downright disloyal to America, is maddening.

Damn right.

Dropping "stay the course," along with finally re-evaluating the Iraq campaign, are gestures sure enough. I wonder how often White House press secretaries have spoken so openly about the administration's word choice....

NPR mentioned the abolition of "stay the course" quite a lot today, and Jackie Northam put together a nice piece on governmental semantics, focusing on whether or not to admit there's a civil war on in Iraq. One word that stuck out to me in the report was "euphamism." (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6373560)

The hero factor

2006-10-21T11:04:00.000-07:00

It may be that the consideration of terrorism qua communication requires also some consideration of the hero factor. In order for someone to be an effective (semiotic) terroist, she or he must also be a kind of hero.

But, there's a caveat. The heroism must extend beyond the act or programme of terrorism. For example, the politician who is not only tough on the issues but also a family man, a churchgoer, &c. The message must be buttressed by a series of more or less unrelated adjectives.

This week I started reading "Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden," edited by Bruce Lawrence (New York: Verso, 2005). From Lawrence's introduction:

Beyond the organizer and the polemicist lies, finally, the hero. To Westerners, for whom bin Laden is the incarnation of villany, this may seem the last word in perversity. But for millions of Muslims around the world, including many who have no sympathy with terrorism, bin Laden is an heroic figure. His worldwide charisma is based not just on his success in so far eluding Americans and their allies, exhilaratig as that may be or many ordinary Muslims. It is because his personal reputation for probity, austerity, dignity, and courage contrasts so starkly with the mismanagement, bordering on incompetence, of most Arab regimes. Unlike the latter, bin Laden has demonstrated that he can forego the temptations of wealth, that he dares to strike powerful wrongdoers, and that he refuses to bend before superior might. "Bin Laden is seen by millions of his co-religionists -- because of his defense of Islam, personal piety, physical bravery, integrity and generosity -- as an Islamic hero, as that faith's ideal type, and almost as a modern-day Saladin," reports Michael Scheuer, head of the CIA unit charges with hunting bin Laden. "For nearly a decade now," observes Scheuer, "bin Laden has demonstrayed patientce, brilliant planning, managerial expertise, sound strategic and tactical sense, admirable character traits, eloquence, and focused, limited war aims. He has never, to my knowledge, behaved or spoken in a way that could be described as 'irrational in the extreme'." Indeed, for all the terror sown by his actions, concludes Scheuer, "there is no reason, based on the information at hand, to belive bin Laden is anything other than what he appears: a pious, charismatic, gentle, generous, talented, and personally courageous Muslim. As a historical figure, viewed from any angle, Osama bin Laden is a great man, one who smashed the expected unfolding of universal post-cold war peace." These encomia express, no doubt, the not uncommon admiration felt by professional for a particularly skilled enemy -- with the kind of overstatement to be found, for example, in writings of the British military historian Liddell Hart about German generals in World War Two. Yet even discounting their hyperbole, such CIA tributes are striking; they provoke further reflection on the man behind the many personae. (xvii-xviii)

"[A] pious, charismatic, gentle, generous, talented, and personally courageous Muslim." Substitute "Christian" for that last part and you'd have a suitable description of President Bush, at least from the perspective of his adherents (and who knows, perhaps also from the perspective of his rivals, who revere him as a "particularly skilled enemy").

But there's another aspect to the hero factor, one whose efficacy and even functionality I'm unsure about, but whose necessity seems certain.

Lawrence writes about bin Laden's "posthumous legend," which for bin Laden's fans in the umma (the supposed Muslim supernation) has to do with all of his heroic characteristics; but more broadly must have to do with him infamy in both the Muslim and non-Muslim world. So it's part fame, part adoration, part infamy. Maybe.

I wonder if Bush will ever have a posthumous legend on the order of bin Laden's. More innocent lives have been lost as a result of Bush's orders than bin Laden's; and yet Bush seems somehow less infamous. Perhaps this is just because my perspective is skewed too far toward the West. But the fact is he hasn't flown planes into tall buildings; though he has caused plenty of death and mass confusion. He hasn't carried out his attacks in a symbolic fashion, like destroying the iconic side-by-side towers on the 11th day of the month, thereby creating a new icon that remains semiotically active years after. Instead, there are just air raids, ground assaults -- the same-old same-old.

For Bush, the message and the terrorism are more separate than they are for bin Laden. Bush makes public statements far more often than bin Laden, precisely because he must explain his acts of aggression as necessary to prevent the creation of a "caliphate" that would stamp out any glimmer of democracy in the Middel East. (Interestingly, Lawrence writes that bin Laden has no interest in the caliphate. On the contrary, Lawrence claims, bin Laden plans to fight the "global unbelief" until Judgment Day.) There is no permissable action for him that would be as symbolic in the Middle East as the fall of the World Trade Center has been in the West (though some in the Muslim world see a tremendous insult the invasion of Iraq, Islam's third-holiest land after Mecca and Jerusalem). Bush cannot deliberately destroy an icon on "Islamofascism" or jihadism, because there is no such icon that is also completely separate from nonradical Islam. To attack one would be to attack both. (And indeed, this is how anti-American spin doctors have construed his "crusade.")

Bin Laden, on the other hand, could attack the icons of the infidels, the strongholds of their government and economy, the dual engines of their imperialism. Lawrence is unconvinced by the argument that bin Laden's war is one for social change, arguing instead that bin Laden's motivations are purely religious.

Objectively speaking, bin Laden is waging a war against what many -- admirers and critics -- now call the American empire. But it is crucial to note that he himself never uses this vocabulary. There word "imperialism" does not occur once in any of the messages he has sent out. He defines the enemy differently. For him, jihad is aimed not at an imperium, but at "global unbelief". Again and again, his texts return to this fundamental dichotomy. The war is a religious war. It subsumes a political war, which he can wage with the terms appropriate to it, as he demonstrates in his addresses to the peoples of Europe and America. Yet the battle in the end is one of faith. (xx)

But still, at the end of the day, the targets bin Laden chose on Sept. 11 were significant as icons of imperialism. Perhaps this is only because there were no distinct icons of unbelief available. Perhaps it is only that bin Laden was able to be more daring than Bush, that he decided to go ahead with an attack whose message was aimed at unbelief but which would impact other things as well. Unbelief, in other words, was the bulls eye; but he was willing to let his darts hit imperialism as well.

In bin Laden's own sphere of influence, at least according to Lawrence, the discourse around bin Laden has been limited to his piousness and generousity -- his "great man"-hood. Perhaps he also has been able to keep the discourse so limited when it comes to his acts of terror. From the other side, the attacks that appeared to us to target imperialism targeted only unbelief.

So perhaps his infamy exists only in the eyes of Westerners. But nonetheless he has his posthumous legend ensured, both in the East and the West. What is Bush's posthumous legend, on either side of this conflict?

Now I'm over here

2006-10-17T07:35:00.000-07:00

So lately I've been wanting to actually put some effort into "blogging" (I still can't help using the selfconscious quotatio marks). I already had a "blog," but it was on lame-ass Angelfire. A few friends do their "blogging" here at blogspot, and I noticed that their layout was a lot less lame-ass than Angelfire's, so I decided to take my business elsewhere, er, here.

Stay tuned as I transfer my archives, and actually write new entries on a more regular basis.

Back in the saddle?

2006-10-16T21:39:00.000-07:00

So last night, while my darling was ill and apart from me, I decided not to sit and wallow in the agony of our separation, but rather to get the fuck back to work on my "scholarly" pursuits.

That involved re-revising the extant six pages of "Semiotic Terrorism" I last altered over two months ago (and adding a short two paragraphs, about which I'm terribly pleased).

Tonight, to bolster my more peripheral arguments dealing with the contemporary discourse on (actual) terrorism, I've been slogging through some of our fine president's most recent speeches on the matter.

Of concern to me is first the terminology he uses in describing terrorists and second the syntax or presentation of these terms, with specific attention to the purported meaning of terrorist actions and American military actions. What I want to know most of all is, what message does Bush want to convey to the terrorists, or perhaps more importantly, what message would be conveyed if we do not "stay the course" in Iraq?

Combing through the official record, I've been struck by the instances in which the transcriber has reproduced Mr. Bush's teleprompter fumbles. One would think the text that plays over the teleprompter would simply be uploaded to whitehouse.gov; but apparently this isn't the case.

Speaking to the American Legion in Salt Lake City in August, the president stumbled at least three times, according to my quick scan of the transcript. Behold:

"Despite their differences, these groups from -- form the outlines of a single movement, a worldwide network of radicals that use terror to kill those who stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology." "On the political side, we're working closely with Prime Minister Maliki to strengthen Iraq's unity government and develop -- and to deliver better services to the Iraqi people." "Many of these folks are sincere and they're patriotic, but they could be -- they could not be more wrong."

These fumbles are nothing to make fun of. (If I'd been delivering this or any speech, I'd have certainly a lot more than three times.) They're altogether easy errors to make -- confusing "from" and "form," saying "develop" when reading "deliver" and omiting the key but easily missable word in a negative phrase.

It is remarkable, however, that these errors are included at all. My first guess is it's taken directly from the monkeys tapping away at the network TV Closed Captioning keyboards. But surely the text is proofread, because it lacks typos or any obvious transcription errors. And the phenomenon crops up in other transcripts, so it's not a fluke.

All of which raises the question, why isn't the teleprompted text fed into the Closed Captioning machine (?) simultaneously? Does Bush frequently ad lib or something?

Either my Google skills are lacking or no one has commented on this phenomenom in cyberspace. One of my searches, however, turned up an oddity -- a site devoted to John Kerry's concession speech, which chronicles some transcription correction perpetrated by the Kerry camp.

Then two calls from the crowd nearly simultaneously: "We love you" and "We still have your back." Somehow Kerry conflated the statements and called back, "I love yours too." He clearly wasn't familiar with the popular phrase "got your back" and so confused the statements, and responded rather nonsensically - he loves your back? A person truly familiar with the culture, with the vernacular, would not have made the mistake. This was a remarkably telling moment: no matter how hard, and I have no doubt, sincerely, Kerry has tried to connect with the soul of the nation, to jump on the back and ride the great dragon that is our culture, he never quite connected, he never quite got it right. This isn't something you learn, this is something you are. It is very difficult to make a broad, generally populist appeal when you are simply NOT a man of the people, when you are an upper-crust Eastern intellectual with a bizarre billionaire second wife, even if you are pals with Bruce Springsteen (who is also a multi-millionaire, by the way). That morning in the duck blind in Ohio convinced no one and rang false - it was a jarring moment that reinforced an underlying perception of opportunism, of trying to be all things to all people, of stretching oneself too thin. Bush, with a remarkably similar early background, doesn't even try, much. He has to deal with the opposite perception that he is a dumbass and a cowboy. He seems genuinely most at home out on the ranch, on the open plains of Texas, so his patrician, blueblood heritage is largely neutralized. He is seen as a regular guy despite the accident of birth. He is of the vernacular. He isn't trying to appear to be something he is not, he isn't trying to be all things to all people. The rest of Kerry's speech was very fine - his line, "There are no losers in American elections - we all wake up as Americans, and that is the greatest gift of all," was brilliant, and his calls for unity and commonality touching and sincere - but that one awkward, unscripted moment summed up for me why Kerry was conceding and not graciously accepting. Fascinating also that the transcription on Kerry's site, "corrects" his misunderstanding: Audience member: "We still got your back!" "Thank you, man. And I assure you - you watch - I'll still have yours." Um, no, that's not what he said. AP's text doesn't include the moment at all. See for yourself here. FoxNews has the transcript correct here.

And here I thought I was just being overly picayune blogging about the minor tongue entanglements of politicians....

Packaging

2006-07-06T18:43:00.000-07:00

Am I the only one bothered by the improper syntax on so many supermarket products?

Having worked at a newspaper that received its share of letters to the editor and press releases, I've seen so many examples of improper comma placement and unnecessary capitalization that it's nearly destroyed what little faith I had left in the efficacy of English instruction in this country today.

Receiving copy from Joe Sixpack and the area chambers of commerce is one thing; but you would assume the copywriters on staff at corporations like General Mills would have some measure of qualification. Yet they have all the same faults -- they capitalize words they shouldn't, and they never put commas where they're supposed to go.

Interviewed on "Fresh Air" a short time ago, Michael Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," said anecdotally that we are living in a sort of golden age of food product copywriting. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the isles of any Whole Foods Market, where every box and label tells a story. Idyllic pastoral narratives of free-range chickens and pesticide-free, chemical fertilizer-free, growth hormone-free rutabagas. Organic pageantry, in effect.

Yet while the narratives themselves may be effulgent and dramatic, the syntax leaves so much to be desired.

Take, for example, this snippet of "flavor text" from a bag of Snapea Crisps, perhaps the greatest of all healthy junk foods:

"The pea has played an important role in dietary life and culture since they dawn of recorded history, and because of its nutritional value it has great potential for our dietary lives in the future. We are expecting to see the continuing development of 'Snapea Crisps' as a delicate and tasty product which has taken advantage of the pea's original goodness, and we propose this product as a new type of snack."

This is a truly distressing arrangement of words. For the sake of readers who recognize this easily, perhaps I shouldn't belabor the point. But I can't resist.

Sentence number one is unbearably long. The comma ought to be a period. This would better compartmentalize the phrasing and also eliminate the duplication of "dietary" within the same sentence. And any good copy editor will tell you there needs to be a comma after "nutritional value."

One of my top pet peeves lately is the passive voice. Grammatical reasons aside, the passive voice inevitably makes phrases clunkier than they need to be. "We are expecting" simply doesn't read as cleanly as "We expect" would.

The rest of the second sentence is even worse, considered from a standpoint of syntactic elegance. It is written as if by a third party, not employees of the Snapea Crisp company, editorializing about the promise of this new product. It seems to say, We will be watching the Snapea Crisp's career with great interest, and urge consumers to give it a chance.

Packaging language, in this case at least, has strayed very far indeed from the concision of the advertising jingle. It’s odd that in a time when attention spans are notoriously shorter than in the past, the amount of attention necessary to hear a sales pitch has increased so much. We've gone from "Enjoy Coca-Cola" to "Frosted Flakes -- They're Grrrrreat!" to "We are expecting to see the continuing development of 'Snapea Crisp' as a delicate and tasty..."

But perhaps it shouldn't be all that surprising. With lessened attention spans comes diminished attention to detail. Perhaps it's part of the strategy to merely present a block of text -- evidence of the product's importance, at least by cursory glance, that it should merit such a lengthy narrative -- without much regard to its content, aside from the selection of nouns and adjectives that a quickly-darting eye will catch most easily. History. Nutritional. Tasty. Snack.

Just this smattering of words presents a sort of perfect descending spiral. First comes the suggestion of a rich narrative underlying the product -- history -- followed by its intrinsic value qua food -- nutritional -- then its aesthetic value qua food -- tasty -- and finally the confirmation that it is food, and not a very serious or labor-intensive type of food at that -- snack.

Redundancy, pleonasm, and poor syntax all may be cardinal sins to the grammarian; but in the world of product promotion they may be necessary evils. Take, for another example, those 23.5-ounce cans of Arizona Green Tea with Ginseng and Honey. This product, as is said on the can, is "100% All Natural," meaning, apparently, that it is more better than something only, say, 95 percent all natural. Here the redundancy is laughable. But it is also compact and direct. Redundancy is the support, a vital part of the delivery system. It appeals to the consumer who is interested in quenching his or her thirst but also in avoiding the synthetics of soda or even Gatorade. Ginseng provides another support. The drink has an ancient herbal ingredient whose functionality is obscure at best, its demonstrable effects essentially nonexistent. But nonetheless the consumer is presented with a very promising, very wholesome, product. Never mind that a glance at the ingredients reveals the presence of high fructose corn syrup.

Spooky action at a distance

2006-01-02T12:23:00.000-08:00

This past week in the New York Times science section there were two articles, not quite side by side, that together in my mind posed a question of some interest and relevance to this blog.

How is science to be defined?

One of the Science Times articles was about the efforts of a number of self-identified scientists and one "concerned citizen, amateur pirate or person of negligible education" to undermine creationism and intelligent design through humor. Many of my readers will no doubt be familiar with the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, founded recently in response to the Kansas Board of Education's re-definition of science to include intelligent design.

There was also an article on quantum mechanics, apropos of nothing, but nonetheless quite interesting and almost readable. Therein the reporter often refers back to Albert Einstein's early apprehension about quantum mechanics, when it was still entirely a thought experiment and had not been submitted to laboratory techniques. The simple problem was it just did not track with reality. Or at least it did not track with reality as it is construed by the scientific method.

Quantum mechanics apparently flies in the face of natural laws like the law of conservation of energy and the speed of light, though mathematics and now laboratory tests show that at least some of the early theoretical statements hold true. Individual particles can be found to exhibit opposite qualities at the same moment -- they can spin clockwise and counterclockwise at the same time, for example. The actions of one particle can have an instantaneous and corresponding effect on other particles elsewhere, distances seems to be of no consequence; likewise, groups of particles have been found moving in exact synchronicity. A single particle can even be demonstrated to exist in two different places at the same time, a sort of proof of the possibility of teleportation, at least on the atomic level. Scientists are now preparing to demonstrate this on a large scale by duplicating a small mirror, according to the article.

So on the one side we have an irreconcilable difference between science and itself -- quantum mechanics disproving the laws of nature or vice versa -- while on the other side we have the insertion of a (to an agnostic) reasonable though mystical notion into the once fairly exclusive continuum of science. In either case the long-standing definition of science and the scientific method is jeopardized.

Far be it from me as a semiotician to criticize the Kansas Board of Education's wordplay. Truth be told, the quantum mechanics example demonstrates an inherent instability of any definition of science that relies upon a codified methodology.

Einstein and company concluded in 1935 that quantum theory was either incomplete -- that is, there was more to explain the strange properties of subatomic particles than met the eye -- or that, somehow, observing one particle somehow changes the behavior of other seemingly unconnected particles. "Entanglement" as this strange property was dubbed, is where the violation of the speed of light comes in, since their interaction, the spread of their influence, is instantaneous, occurring precisely at the moment the first particle is observed.

I hadn't ought to pretend to be an expert on this, but the crux of the matter appears to be as follows. Following the tenets of quantum mechanics, scientists can very accurately predict the position and movement of a particle without even observing it, by observing an entirely different particle released by the same atomic explosion. The supercollider does its thing and scientists find one of the orphaned electrons, and based on its position and movement, they know exactly what the other electron is up to. When they do finally observe the second electron, it's doing exactly what they thought it would. Whether it was acting thus all along can't be known; in fact it can barely be assumed, if my understanding is correct.

From the article (NYT 27 December 2005, "Quantum Trickery: Testing Einstein's Strangest Theory," by Dennis Overbye):

"Before a measurement is made, so the traditional story goes, the electron exists in a superposition of all possible answers, which can combine, adding and interfering with one another.

"Then, upon measurement, the wave function 'collapses' to one particular value."

One hypothesis is that particles radiate waves representing every possibility, waves that "collapse" under observation for some unknown reason. Another hypothesis, the theory of "multiple worlds," is that all these possibilities do come to pass, though in alternate realities.

(Cf. Star Trek: The Next Generation episode 163, "Parallels," wherein Worf unwittingly flies his shuttlecraft through a quantum anomaly and experiences a number of alternate realities, each of them stemming from previous moments in his life in which events could have unfolded a number of different ways.)

Erwin Schrodinger made a pointed criticism of Einstein's somewhat paranoid musings on "entanglement" and the idea of pre-observation "superpositions" with his famous cat-and-radioactive-isotope-in-a-box routine. In this scenario, the isotope has a 50-50 chance of decaying and therefore releasing deadly radiation. If we were to think about this scenario like a quantum physicist, Schrodinger said, then we would accept that the cat was both dead and alive while locked in the box, since there would be no empirical proof that it was either dead or alive until the box was opened.

Schrodinger's parody has a startling similarity to Lacan's assertion that there is no subject outside of language. Both arguments are metaphorical, though not entirely. In both cases, it is a means of quantification that constitutes existence or event. One is the scientific method, which is so many different kinds of observation and so many different forms of measurement. The other is language, which is so many different predetermined but unstable ranges of description and qualification.

The problem of science is that it is mitigated not just once, and perhaps more than twice, by systems of communication. First there is empirical data -- velocity, molar weight, etc. -- which indeed tells the scientist quite a bit. But does this information tell the scientist everything he needs to know? The NYT article makes several references to a realm "behind the quantum veil" where more physical laws, ones we haven't theorized about or observed yet, obtain. Second there is language itself. The empirical information -- numbers, that is -- are meaningless until they are placed into the format of the description of an experiment.

But to get back to the question -- How is science to be defined?

Perhaps relation to any kind of reality -- something that exists even when it is not observed -- shouldn't be included. Niels Bohr was less bothered by quantum theory than Einstein; he said science is about reproducing results under lab conditions, not about reality.

But even so there is still a method, which leads to findings, which leads to theories and eventually laws of nature. Evolution is necessarily still and only a theory – the creationists, sadly, are right on that point. Not the least of the reasons it is still a theory is because the results can't quite be reproduced to prove it a law -- for that we would need several Earth-sized laboratories and a few trillion years to observe each of them closely in its turn.

At this point in the argument, then, it seems that if intelligent design isn't science, then neither is evolution. The key difference, used in the recent Pennsylvania court case about the teaching of intelligent design in schools, is that evolution at least attempts to follow scientific methods, whereas intelligent design makes no such attempt. While we don't have any Earth-sized laboratories or a few trillion years to work with, we do have human and chimp genomes to compare, and the similarities make for a compelling argument in evolution's favor.

And what about quantum mechanics? Is that science? Based on our more deeply held beliefs about the laws of nature, it seems more like magic, and quantum physicists are quick to say so. ("Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood a single word," said Niels Bohr.)

If science is to be defined by its methods, then it must be a relatively loose definition. Semiotically speaking it must of course exclude a lot of meaning, but it must also include a great deal -- reproducible lab results, genetic comparisons, theoretical mathematics, and a good deal more I'm certain.

If, on the other hand and as the Kansas School Board has seen fit, science is to be defined not just as the search for natural explanations to phenomena, then perhaps the word science should be done away with altogether and replaced with "possibilities."

Like an electron in its superposition prior to observation, the true story of humankind's origins is for the time being one of infinite potentially true stories. It will take an instrument infinitely more powerful than an electron microscope, however, to observe the matter and find out whether we were created by random chance, God, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.