News noted

* Sharecropping the Long Tail. A short but interesting observation on the economic system created by web services based on user-provided content.

* The Robert A. Heinlein Centennial conference will be held in Kansas City on July 6-8 of 2007. Anyone interested in going? It may be a very strange gathering, considering all the widely divergent interest groups to which RAH has some significance. Will the armchair anarchists who loved The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress mount a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the pro-military Starship Troopers faction? And what will the Lazarus Long-inspired polyamorists be doing meanwhile? (Do we want to know?)

No Christmas cards this year

Sorry, folks. There wasn't any time! Best wishes for a merry Christmas and a wonderful new year go out to all.

If you simply must have something to read on Christmas Eve, take a look at this webpage about the Christmas cards that famed early SF editor Hugo Gernsback used to send out each year, complete with scientifictional predictions about the coming years and decades.

Charles de Lint and Aloise Buckley Heath are also famous (at least in certain circles) for their annual Christmas writings to family and friends. Where do they get the time?

On Demand Books

It's been the Next Big Thing in the book trade for several years now. Will the print-on-demand kiosks proposed by On Demand Books finally revolutionize the industry?

Right now, it sounds like the inventory of the pricy kiosks is limited to public-domain materials. But I can see this becoming a great boon for scholars, collectors, and readers of authors who works are no longer considered fashionable, even as it decimates the value of secondhand sellers' inventories of previously scarce books.

The dead hand of copyright law, and the ever-lengthening reach of its arm, will be the biggest obstacles to extending this kind of ready accessibility to books published in the last eighty years. Ironically, the books most likely to remain inaccessible are the ones not associated with the giant megapublishers who most vigorously push for ever-lengthening and ever-more-draconian copyright protection. Random House, Knopf, Viking, et al, will no doubt jump on board the print-on-demand train once its fiscal viability is established, either by licensing books to outside vendors like Books On Demand or by setting up similar services of their own. The books whose authors are dead or incommunicado, whose publishers have disappeared or forgotten about their existence, will remain trapped in a legal limbo with no known rightsholder to contact for reprinting rights, and no print-on-demand service whose legal department will allow them to expose themselves to liability should such a rightsholder choose to leap out of the woodwork at some time in the future.

Great minds, etc.

A political cartoonist shares my fears about shady junk food dealers.

Poetry Wednesday

The Cool Web

Robert Graves (1895-1985)

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the roses's cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad, no doubt, and die that way.

Recent (partial) reads

Living Walden Two : B.F. Skinner's Behaviorist Utopia and Experimental Communities, by Hilke Kuhlmann.

Skinner is, of course, best known for his advocacy of behaviorism, a theory of psychology which proposes that, given the right combination of rewards and other stimuli, the behavior of humans and other living beings can (and should) be shaped according to predictable patterns. Walden Two, his only work of fiction, proposes a kind of communal utopia which has been carefully organized for the purpose of guiding its inhabitants into socially harmonious and usefully productive patterns of behavior.

Unfortunately, real-world attempts to create such Utopian communities, from the 1960s to the present day, have rarely succeeded. Motivating people to do useful and necessary work has been a recurrent problem. Furthermore, as the book jacket points out, "Among the real-world communities, a recurrent problem in moving past the planning stages was the nearly ubiquitous desire among members to be gentle guides, coupled with strong resistance to being guided."

Kuhlmann in this book briefly surveys a selection of Walden Two-inspired communes which have failed or dissolved, and then focuses on two which have survived to the present day. Twin Oaks, in Virginia, began as a deliberate attempt to follow Skinner's template. It has, according to Kuhlman, slowly but surely morphed away from that initial vision in the succeeding decades. Twin Oaks' relatively open membership requirements and their labor-credit system for requiring/motivating useful work are examined in some detail, but not as much so as in the various books and other writings of Twin Oaks co-founder Kat Kinkaid. The other community studied, Los Horcones in Mexico, seems to be a far more closed system made up primarily of members of two or three closely-related families. Despite its founders' overt insistence that all members be trained behaviorists, Los Horcones seems more akin to a close-knit extended family than to the kind of intellectually-organized community described by Skinner. Unfortunately, Kuhlman apparently had little access to interviews with current members of Los Horcones, and this section of the book is somewhat more sketchy than the discussion of Twin Oaks.

Sadly, Skinner himself seems to have had little interest in attempts to bring his visions to life. His sole contribution to the 1966 Waldenwoods conference, in which people inspired by his book sought to thrash out ideas for intentionally-designed communes based on similar principles, was a taped message. Somehow this seems highly, but unfortunately, appropriate to his intellectually ambitious but emotionally and spiritually cold view of humanity.

Employed people need not apply

The mandatory online job application form used by the Human Resources department of Southern Methodist University requires applicants to state an "end date" for all reported employment, including current employment. N/A, "still employed", etc. are automatically rejected as incorrect entries.

Job seekers who have the misfortune of still being employed in good standing can either make up false information, or not apply for jobs at SMU.

Eighth level positivist versus sixth level rationalist.... Who Will Win?

The current issue of webcomic Dresden Codak is a lot of fun. Earlier archived issues are interesting, if occasionally incomprehensible.

PS. The October 7th issue is also good.

Update

... on the legal proceedings following from US soldiers' rape and murder of civilians in Mahmoudiya in Iraq.

Caught the westbound train

Steamtrain Maury is gone. His 1989 book Tales of the Iron Road: My Life as King of the Hobos provides a glimpse into a vanished subculture... if you can find a copy.

Pass it along to any Mozarteans you know

Scores to all of W.A. Mozart's musical works are now freely available online from the International Mozart Foundation.

Left Behind, again

Thanks to Fiend for a link to this story.

Christian game sparks call for ban (Reuters, via Toronto Star.)

News flash

How can The Onion possibly compete with this?

Lohan: I haven't had a drink in a week (from CNN)

NEW YORK (AP) -- Lindsay Lohan says she's been going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for a year, but hasn't talked about it because "it's no one's business."

"I just left an AA meeting," the 20-year-old actress tells People magazine in a story posted Tuesday on its Web site.

"I haven't had a drink in seven days. Or anything," she says. "I'm not even legal to, so why would I? I don't drink when I go to clubs. I drink with my friends at home, but there's no need to. I feel better not drinking. It's more fun. I have Red Bull."

"I've been going to AA for a year by the way," Lohan adds. When asked why didn't she say so until recently, she replies: "Well it's no one's business. That's why it's anonymous!...."

Experimental Poetry Thursday

Stealing an idea from S. over at Apartment Carpet.

I've been somewhat disappointed in the contents of Poetry magazine since I started subscribing a couple of months ago, but a few poems have grabbed my attention favorably. This is one of them:

Primitive Road, by Lucas Howell.

Snow!



Alas, it was gone by the time I got the picture posted here. But I have a feeling it will be back.

Bad taste

Recent Reads

The Temple Dancer, by John Speed. This novel, like Kara Dalkey's Blood of the Goddess series discussed earlier, is set in India in the early 1600s, when the Portuguese colony at Goa, the Muslim Mughal rulers, and the native Hindus co-existed uneasily in an atmosphere of mutual distrust, religious squabbling, Machiavellian politics, and mercantile greed. Speed, a professional historian, provides plenty of historical detail and discussion of the ways in which the various castes of this class-ridden society interact with each other.

The story focuses on two women. Maya, a young Hindu woman, is an extraordinarily talented and beautiful ritual dancer, or "nautch girl". According to Speed, the socially-approved duties of her position include sexually servicing the priests or holy men of the temple, as well as some secular patrons of the temple. (Note: Your correspondent does not know whether this is accurate or not.) As the story begins, she has been sold to a group of Portuguese who have, in turn, traded her to a political ruler in Bijapur as part of a trade pact.

Also in the caravan which is transporting Maya to Bijapur is Lucinda, a young Goanese heiress with an unfortunately complicated family history. Also along for the ride are her wastrel, mercenary cousin; a noble native-born soldier; a sly and secretive eunuch; and an aging Portuguese "settlement man", or debt-collection thug, who has begun to wonder what he will do with the aging years that he never expected to reach. Along the way they will meet people of myriad different cultures: a blind, eccentric Sultana; lowborn Hindus trying to elevate themselves by adopting a foreign religion; pitiable "untouchables"; arrogant Mughal aristocrats; vicious bandits; scheming Portuguege merchants. Some of these will have sinister plans for our innocent young heiress and her not-so-innocent travelling companion.

Can you see where this is going? Well, of course you can. The back cover copy tells you, right off: "A sweeping page-turner filled with sex, violence, and adventure". It's a potboiler, the kind of story that in the 1920s would have been made into a Cecille B. DeMille extravaganza with Rudolf Valentino, or Douglas Fairbanks Jr., or maybe Errol Flynn leaping from tables to tapestries with sword in hand. But its an above-average potboiler with exciting conflicts, sympathetic characters, and more than the usual amount of attention to historical detail. The eunuchs, in particular, are granted more attention here than in most historical fiction. Rather than serving merely as exotic props or convenient go-betweens, they are here portrayed as a kind of sinister secret society, in which conventional sexual and generational longings are twisted into an all-encompassing lust for the kind of political power that comes from knowing secrets and whispering them into receptive ears at opportune moments.

The Temple Dancer is reportedly the first of a trilogy. I don't know whether I will actively seek out the future volumes, but it was a reasonably enjoyable read.

All your sandwich are belong to us

McDonalds seeks patent on making sandwiches.

Recent Reads

Eli, by Bill Myers. Myers postulates that in a parallel universe, Jesus comes to earth in the modern era rather than in the time of the Roman empire. His protagonist -- an aging, morally flawed newsman -- encounters "Eli", the Messiah of this alternate-universe, while his body lies in a coma back home in his own universe. The story of the Messiah's ministry proceeds in a fashion directly paralleling the one we know in "our" universe, and this makes the story more than a little predictable to anyone who's familiar with the Gospel story. Myers gets in some amusing and insightful digs at evangelical megachurches and "respectable churchgoing folks" and their all-too-frequent social biases, and he slightly reshapes some of Jesus's parables to apply them to twentieth-century situations. He even manages to show, to some degree, just how fundamentally radical basic Christianity is. But he never does explain how western civilization managed to develop in a nearly identical form without the influence of Christianity, nor does he ever explain exactly what God the hypocritical churchmen in his alternate universe are worshiping. We know it's not the God of Judaism, since Myers hints that Jews are an ethnic and religious minority in this parallel universe., and some of Eli's listeners harbor anti-Jewish prejudices. Nor do the hypocritical megachurches seem to worship Zeus, Jupiter, Mithra, or Mammon.

Well, maybe the latter.

Interesting, but I wish that the author had gone further in developing his alternate universe. A world in which Christianity and all related developments did not occur could have gone in a thousand different directions, and I wish he had been more adventurous in exploring them.

It's for your own good

New York City bravely sallies forth into the exciting new world of micromanaging everybody's diets.

NYC health board bans trans fats at restaurants (CNN)

So far, the ban appears to apply only to restaurants; people are free to cook up unhealthy stuff at home. But for how long?

I have a sudden prophetic vision of junk-food addicts furtively ducking into back alleys and abandoned houses to get their fixes. Will Lou Reed's immortal I'm Waitin' for the Man be rewritten as I'm Waitin' for my Fries?

Recent viewings

Blow Dry. A movie that can't quite decide what it wants to be. On the one hand, its setting -- the world championship of hairstyling, which takes place in a small British town -- is eccentric enough for any deadpan, sardonic Christopher Guest mockumentary. The exaggerated theatricality of the stylists, and the bizarre bad taste of their avante-garde creations, are quite amusing. But running parallel to their wackiness are at least four other plot threads of completely different character. On the one hand, we a comic villain in the person of an egomaniac hair stylist who quite transparently schemes to sabotage other contestants using strategems somewhat less convincing than the bad guys' plots on old episodes of Scooby Doo. On the other hand, we have Alan Rickman exuding his trademarked air of slightly annoyed British gravitas as a small-town barber who was once the toast of the hairstyling world before he suddenly gave it all up. (Will he be lured back into competition? Go on, take a guess....) On the third, fourth and fifth hands, if they existed, we would have his estranged ex-wife, who has just learned that her cancer is terminal; her lesbian lover, who used to be his hairstyling model; and his son, who in between practicing hairstyling on cadavers, develops a tentative romance with the cute daughter of the above-mentioned egomaniac.

Got that?

I enjoyed the comic elements of the movie. But terminal cancer tends to silence hilarity, as do very awkward and serious family situations. Still, the satirical take on "high style" is amusing, even if the rest of the movie seems to be doing its best to fly apart in all directions at once.

Missed it by that much

As usual, I found out about the sequel to 2004's The Librarian: Quest for the Spear one day after it aired. Did anyone else happen to catch it? According to Amazon, it will be out on DVD within two weeks.

News noted

* Democrats in Congress pressure EPA to retain environmental-research libraries.

* The always-entertaining pseudonymous "Thomas H. Benton" opines about diversity in the academic world.

News noted

* Looks like the Texas State Railroad will stay open through next August. Yet another nail-biting last minute budgetary cliffhanger had newspapers all around the state reporting that its popular, steam-powered trains through the Piney Woods would be mothballed before the end of 2006. I think the state government must have hired the same people to write their budget that used to write the old Perils of Pauline serials.


* It's a commotion of grunts and squeaks!.... It's a boiling cauldron of some seething nameless brew!.... It's... it's.... the Bad Sex Awards!

"Because Hollingshead is a first-time writer, we wished to discourage him from further attempts," the judges said in a statement. "Heavyweights like Thomas Pynchon and Will Self are beyond help at this point."

Hollingshead, 25, who received his award from rock singer Courtney Love at a London ceremony, said he was delighted to become the prize's youngest-ever winner.

"I hope to win it every year," said Hollingshead, who receives a statuette and a bottle of champagne.

I suppose everyone is entitled have *some* ambition.

A wise fellow

A nod of appreciation goes to RLH, whose plainspoken wit always helps put the foolishness of bureaucratic egos in perspective, as in this recent listserv reminiscence.

(CISSYFOK. Heh-heh, heh-heh, he said CISSYFOK....)

Thee U., back in the news

Baylor U. Drops a Controversial Book About Its Recent History, but Denies Buckling Under Pressure (From The Chronicle of Higher Ed.)

Baylor University has backed out of an agreement to publish a book about a tumultuous period in its recent history. The book's editors, a former provost and a history professor, have vowed to find another publisher, despite irate e-mail messages from a former president who warned that the book was inaccurate and could "plunge the university into a new era of conflict and renewed animosities."...

The most bizarre element has to be the blackmail-like threats emanating from former president Herb Reynolds:

"In re: Sloan's chapter in the book, I will be releasing one or more documents which I have kept in my 'asbestos' files," Mr. Reynolds wrote. "Readers will quickly see an unvarnished picture of this 'Intentional Christian.'"

Referring to the editors and Mr. Sloan, Mr. Reynolds continued: "You and he, and most certainly others, have opened the door with both your much publicly touted 'Intentional Christianity' and ad hominems. I have placed strategic items in the hands of a trusted confidant who will release them timewise as I have instructed him, so they are now out of my hands."

Reynolds goes on to brag about his military experience in psychological warfare.

Disappointing? Perhaps to some. But not those of us who recognize that all institutions are fundamentally and irrevocably corrupt, and that all successful leaders are amoral thugs.

News noted

Michigan contemplates whether to preserve or abolish net-neutrality. (National Journal)

Adjuncts and academic freedom

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: An Adjunct Bill of Rights. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely to me that any such creature will ever exist. University administrators have a vested interest in keeping adjuncts powerless and perpetually cowed. And tenured faculty? Well, as the article acknowledges,

"...since tenured professors are guaranteed a full-time workload year after year, Jacobsen says, they have not felt threatened by academe's increased hiring of part-timers, and thus have looked the other way, feeling that the adjuncts' plight does not affect them. Full-timers, Jacobsen said, have their piece of the pie, and their primary goal is to hang on to it, and to make sure that no one else takes it away."

Of money and speech

You'd think that after its recent electoral drubbing, the Republican party would keep its head down for a while and re-assess its rhetoric. You would think wrong.

The Manchester Union-Leader reports that Newt Gingrich is still blatting out the same old anti-liberty platform, demanding that American citizens give up their traditional, vital freedom of speech. Or else... or else.... boogaboogabooga! The big bad terrorists will getcha! Booga booga!

Gingrich, speaking at a Manchester awards banquet, said a "different set of rules" may be needed to reduce terrorists' ability to use the Internet and free speech to recruit and get out their message.

"We need to get ahead of the curve before we actually lose a city, which I think could happen in the next decade," said Gingrich, a Republican who helped engineer the GOP's takeover of Congress in 1994.

As several commenters have noted, Gingrich seems to be blissfully, or willfully, unaware that the only city we have "lost" was lost due to Republican incompetence, arrogance, and willful failure to provide the kind of services that are government's only legitimate excuse for existence. And that's not the only irony afoot. The award dinner was intended to "honor people who stood up for free speech."

But of course Gingrich has a different definition of "free speech" than us Little People.

Gingrich sharply criticized campaign finance laws he charged were reducing free speech and doing little to fight attack advertising. He also said court rulings over separation of church and state have hurt citizens' ability to express themselves and their faith.

Restrict American citizens' freedom of speech, using terrorist boogeymen as an excuse. Eliminate restrictions on bribes from the corporate aristocracy. Censor criticism of politicians (i.e., "attack ads"). Establish a State Religion so that politicians can "express their faith" by favoring their co-religionists and persecuting others.

Yep, that'll protect freedom. Uh-huh.

Recent viewings

The Castle. A sardonic, witty Australian comedy about ... eminent domain?

Meet the Kerrigans.

They're perfectly happy in their ramshackle tract house adjacent to a busy airport, where the roar of jets passing overhead only occasionally drowns out conversation.

Dad's a tow truck driver and an amateur home-improver whose additions to the house, although not necessarily level or square, satisfy the family's needs. Also, those of his multiple dogs, who live in a multi-story kennel. He enjoys sitting in his back yard and gazing at his "view" of the immense powerline towers that overshadow the property.

Meanwhile, Mom keeps the family happily fed with recipes that only James Lilek could love, and fulfills her artistic ambitions by making lopsided pottery and garish knicknacks. Daughter Tracy has made the family proud by graduating from beauty school and marrying an accountant. One son spends his days trolling the secondhand ads in the paper, looking for bargains on ergonomic chairs and jousting sticks. Another son is in prison.

They are, in short, the worst possible nightmare for the kind of homeowner who worries that tacky neighbors might reduce his resale value.

When a notice arrives in the mail informing them that their home is being "compulsorily acquired" for the expansion of a politically-connected business, they face a dilemma. Surrender meekly? Or fight City Hall?

Darryl turns out to be stubborn. A man's home is his castle, after all. And he knows a lawyer! Shouldn't the same guy who handles property conveyances and has an office above the local cafe be able to handle this?

I'm not sure how accurate the film's portrayal of the Australian legal system is. But it's great fun watching blustering Darryl and his well-intentioned but grossly-outclassed neighborhood solicitor take on the impossible task of blocking the seizure of the family's home. ("It's, um, the vibe of the Constitution, your honor....")

And with a stroke of luck or two, perhaps things aren't quite as one-sided as they seem....

The production may look downright primitive to some viewers. There are practically no special effects, and the soundtrack is limited to a few pieces of music. Many scenes have no musical soundtrack at all. It doesn't matter, because the situations and the characters are genuinely funny, and the dilemma they face is genuinely interesting.

It's an enjoyable comedy with a worthwhile point. Even tacky people have rights, and be it ever so tacky, there's no place like home.

News noted

Database king dies in front of PC (The Inquirer - UK)

DONALD WILSON, who developed the Lexis Nexis commercial database service and introduced the idea of electronic research to law firms and news outfits has died in front of his computer at his home in Mitchellville. He was 82....

When lawyers refused to touch the system, Wilson pushed the database by giving law students free access until the database became part of US legal life....

Whittling away the DMCA?

The Copyright Office issues a ruling specifying six exemptions to the anti-circumvention restrictions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Among them are the use of film & video clips by professors of film & media studies, and "computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access."

The ruling is otherwise notable for using the word "dongle" in an official government publication.

Beware of evil bookshelves

Bookcase 'trap' killed US woman (BBC)

More collegiate silliness

Don't criticize the theists. In fact, don't even criticize the leprechauns, or the "energy layers" that your fellow students think they inhabit. Or you will be expelled from such enlightened institutions as the Art Institute of Portland.

And more collegiate silliness

Dartmouth Official Apologizes for Inviting the 'Fighting Sioux' to Tournament.

Selected comments:

Indian mascots are racist imagery intended to promote white supremacy and anti-indianism....

Once again we have PC gone insane....

Too bad the NCAA cannot enforce high academic standards for university athletes, white and black and brown and red, rather than this issue.....

Heh. I wonder if Dartmouth would engage the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. Or is that pugnacious little leprechaun not a racial stereotype?....

Speaking of PC – I’m surprised the Christian fundamentalists aren’t up in arms over my favorite team: Whitman College’s “Fighting Missionaries”....

My mother grew up in Denmark, and I’m offended by the use of “Viking” as the mascot of the Minnesota NFL team....

it should be noted that dartmouth regularly schedules the penn quakers and the holy cross crusaders, but apparently does not consider these cognomens to be “offensive.”...

I think I’m going to start petitioning PETA to get the fauna out of big-time prep, college, and pro sports. No more lions and tigers and bears (and bruins), oh my....

The Car Of The Future?

Deal reached to bring 2-seat Smart car to U.S. (MSNBC)

The ForTwo's three-cylinder, 700cc engine has significantly lower emissions than other cars and gets an average of 40 miles per gallon in combined city-highway driving and will sell for less than $15,000....

I've seen these little critters in Canada, and although I would feel cramped in one, and wouldn't feel particularly safe driving on crowded high-speed highways in one, I can see how they would appeal to urbanites who want a small personal runabout on a bargain budget.

Death of a university

(Edited version)

Thanks to Steph for pointing out that I was confused in the previous version of this post. This story came up in the context of a discussion of the University of Texas and its decision to remove all books from its undergraduate library and turn it into just another undergraduate computer lab. For some reason I got the impression, while reading the story, that it was also about the U-Texas library.

The story is still disgusting, even if it is in Massachusetts rather than Texas.

RIP: Milton Friedman

For those who haven't read it elsewhere yet. He was an influential advocate of freedom, both in economic terms and in social terms. Free to Choose, by Friedman and his wife Rose, influenced my thinking at an impressionable age.

Perhaps a cat

Here's the only TomKat article I will ever link to.

What is a Scientology wedding? (Reuters via MSNBC)

...In the old-fashioned language that marks the Traditional version, the groom is reminded that "girls" need "clothes and food and tender happiness and frills, a pan, a comb, perhaps a cat" — and is asked to provide them all....

Jackson Watch

According to Publisher's Weekly and other sources, Peter Jackson has announced that he will not direct a cinematic version of The Hobbit. Disappointing, sure, but as the PW writer observed in an earlier essay, maybe it's not a bad thing for part of the Tolkien canon to remain free of the thundering hoi-polloi and their tacky movie tie-in merchandise.

Recent viewings

Bowery Buckaroos (1947). Silly, lightweight comedy in which the Bowery Boys -- comical, wisecracking, "ethnic" denizens of the Bronx -- head west to find a lost gold mine and solve a murder... or, rather, a "moider". Mainly notable as an example of the "Bowery Boys" schtick of Leo Gorcey and company. Gorcey's cocksure, nasal-voiced persona may well have been the prototype for the character of Bugs Bunny. A couple of bit players from the movie looked familiar. Norman Willis (Black Jack, the villain) played numerous other roles, mostly bit parts in television series. "Iron-Eyes" Cody (the inevitable Indian sidekick) likewise appeared in dozens of shows, but achieved fame for his shortest role, as the Crying Indian of the famous 1970s anti-pollution advertisement.

Trivia: This is almost certainly the only film in which a Native American says "This not look kosher to me."

And it's not even Thanksgiving yet

Recent reads:

True Grit, by Charles Portis. The most notable and captivating characteristic of this 1968 western is the distinctive voice of its narrator, one fourteen-year old Mattie Ross "of near Dardanelle, Arkansas". The novel is told as if she is relating it in her later years, and Portis stays true to her precise, formal, and firmly opinionated voice even when conveying the words of very rough frontier characters who, the reader well knows, probably spoke in much looser and saltier terms. Mattie never glosses over the harrowing events of her tale, though, and the result is a captivating slice of 19th-century adventure, which gains rather than loses authenticity by being filtered through the mind of a believable person of that time and place.

The "true grit" of the title is what Mattie says she is looking for when she goes to Fort Smith, the seat of the nearest territorial court, to seek out a US Marshall or some other champion to help her avenge her father's death at the hands of an outlaw. The man she hires to track him into the untamed Indian Territory to the west is "Rooster" Cogburn, an aging, overweight, profane, whiskey-snorting, one-eyed veteran of Civil War guerrilla fighting who is, by modern standards, barely one step above the outlaws he hunts. But, Mattie concludes, he does have "true grit". Subsequent events prove that she, too, possesses this quality, as she insists on accompanying Cogburn and a Texas Ranger on their bounty hunt for the miscreant and the gang with which they think he may be associated.

The book was, of course, made into a movie in 1969, with John Wayne playing the role of Rooster Cogburn, a role for which he was perfectly suited in his later years. I haven't seen the movie (yet), but I note that New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby spoke slightingly of a scene in which Cogburn, facing multiple armed opponents, responds by charging them on horseback, blasting away with a revolver in each hand. This is pure fantasy, says the reviewer. And yet historians of the Civil War guerrilla fighting, such as Thomas Goodrich (Black Flag, et al) report that this was in fact a tactic frequently used by the Confederate partisans of that bloody conflict. Partisans, armed with a revolver in each hand (and sometimes several more stashed about their person), would seek situations from which they could charge on horseback, from relatively short range, at the more conventionally armed soldiers, taking advantage of their greater mobility and faster rate of fire to startle, disorient, and decimate larger and nominally more powerful forces. A Federal soldier armed with a relatively slow, clumsy long gun and only one pistol had little chance, at short range, against a mounted partisan in full charge, firing at will from dual revolvers and, when his ammunition was exhausted, discarding them to draw out a second, and then a third pair of such revolvers. It's already been established, in the novel, that Cogburn was among these guerrillas. And in one of his rare forthcoming moods, he's spoken thus to his teenage employer:

"I had to fly for my life [from New Mexico]. Three fights in one day. Bo was a strong colt then and there was not a horse in that territory could run him in the ground. But I did not appreciate being chased and shot at like a thief. When the posse had thinned down to about seven men I turned Bo around and taken the reins in my teeth and rode right at them boys firing them two navy sixes I carry on my saddle. I guess they was all married men who loved their families as they scattered and run for home."

"That is hard to believe."

"What is?"

"One men riding at seven men like that."

"It is true enough. We done it in the war. I seen a dozen bold riders stampede a full troop of regular cavalry. You go for a man hard enough and fast enough and he don't have time to think about how many is with him, he thinks about himself and how he may get clear out of the wrath that is about to set down on him." (pp. 143-144, book club ed.)

Is it any wonder if, faced with a tight spot, an aging guerrilla would revert to tactics that had worked in the past? Perhaps the reviewer from Noooo Yooorrk Ciiiity should have familiarized himself with his subject before labelling it a "fantasy".

Silence is golden

Or should I say, silents are golden? Lately, I've been on a sort of mini-binge of watching old silent films on DVD. Huzzah for Buster Keaton and D.W. Griffith! Unfortunately, I didn't find out about the Great Lakes Cinephile Society and their annual silent-film convention until just now. Oh well, maybe next year, if I'm still in the area.

I wonder -- If I listen to radio programs that feature sound-without-sight, and watch movies that feature sight-without-sound, do the two cancel each other out?

Recent viewings

Intolerance. D.W. Griffith's 1916 silent opus is, by any measure, a gigantic undertaking. The phrase "cast of thousands" is literally true; the sets are gargantuan; and both the plot and the structure of the movie are ambitious even by modern standards.

For three and a half hours, Griffith interweaves four separate storylines in four separate settings in a manner that's still regarded as avante-garde and challenging in modern films. Each storyline deals in some fashion with the problems caused by religious and social intolerance. Griffith cuts back and forth between the storylines like a composer interweaving musical themes, and even though the VHS copy of the film I saw is a wretchedly poor transfer, even though a couple of the stories are underdeveloped and all are marred by melodramatic excesses, even though Griffith has a tendency to preach at the audience in the title-cards as well as through the script, and even though his portrayal of Babylon and the conquering Persians is historically bizarre, I still found myself getting caught up in the flow of his titanic epic, especially toward the end as each storyline accelerates toward its conclusion in a crescendo of ever-shorter, ever-more-urgent scenes that bounce back and forth between storylines like a tennis ball in a four-way Wimbledon match.

It's one of the tragedies of cinematic history that when Intolerance proved a flop at the box office, it was recut into two separate, shorter movies and much of the excised footage was lost for good. However, what I saw was impressive enough, even in a dark, murky, blurry transfer with a monotonous and sometimes ludicrously inappropriate soundtrack, that I've ordered a copy of Kino's highly-regarded DVD release. I look forward to seeing the three-hundred foot tall walls of Babylon in something approaching their original glory.

An oddity of the film: it's the only silent movie I've ever seen which actually includes footnotes to the titlecards. Fortunately, the Kino release reportedly leaves the titlecards on the screen long enough that one can actually read them without stopping and rewinding and pausing.

Recent viewings:

Our Hospitality and Sherlock, Jr.. I've seen The General several times, and enjoyed it each time, but I never realized until I watched these other two Buster Keaton films how much the man must have liked trains. Either that, or he just liked the physical-comedy and stunt-performing possibilities inherent in large moving objects like locomotives.

In Our Hospitality, Keaton is a nebbishy New Yorker of the early 19th century who unwittingly becomes embroiled in a rural Southern family feud when he goes to reclaim some inherited property. There are some sly gags about the backward and primitive state of civilization, as when a mother fearfully cautions her son to "watch out for the Indians out around Trenton [New Jersey]". Keaton takes advantage of the character's journey from New York to Virginia to throw in an extended sequence involving an early railroad trip. You know irony is afoot when a titlecard refers to "The Great Iron Monster", and immediately afterward you see a couple of ordinary-sized men casually pushing a diminutive, spindly, primitive little locomotive along the tracks with no apparent effort. The train trip itself is a masterpiece of escalating sight gags. Just when you think that the self-importance of the train driver (played by Keaton's father), or the decrepitude of the ancient conductor, or the jerkiness of the ride, or the crookedness of the tracks, can't get any more absurd... they do. Along the way, our hero makes the acquaintance of a lovely young miss whose hospitable invitation to dinner with her family drives the rest of the plot. Another short sequence allows Keaton to introduce another characteristic, but anachronistic prop -- his flat "porkpie" hat.

The rest of the film, as his hereditary enemies uncomfortably alternate between their familial obligation to kill him and their social obligation to respect the sanctuary of Their Hospitality -- but only so long as he is inside their house! -- is entertaining, but can't quite match that bizarrely hilarious train trip. Perhaps I'm just biased.

Keaton, as usual, remains the deadpan "Great Stone Face", the still point around which absurdity swirls. His character's emotional reactions are shown through his actions and posture, and sometimes through short fantasy-sequences interjected into the film. And yet the character doesn't come across as cold or unemotional at all. In fact, the contrast between his stoicism and the histrionic mugging of the other actors helps establish him as the viewer's reference point and alter-ego, no matter how farfetched the situations in which he finds himself, or the physical feats he performs.

In Sherlock, Jr., our hero is yet again a nebbishy young man, this time a theater projectionist who would much rather be a detective. As a result, a real life mystery and romance become comically intertwined with their somewhat more grandiose counterparts on the screen. And things just keep getting weirder....

I was startled to realize just how many bits of Sherlock Jr. have been lifted or echoed by subsequent movies. Woody Allen's on-screen persona is frequently similar to Keaton's, although more openly emotive and less prone to casual feats of physical impossibility. The "out-of-body experience" in which Keaton's consciousness gets up and walks away from his sleeping body was echoed by a famous scene in Annie Hall, and a key scene from The Purple Rose of Cairo is recognizably related to a similar scene in Sherlock, Jr. The surreal confusion of the worlds inside and outside the silver screen -- such as the sequence in which Keaton's character finds himself helplessly blundering from one inhospitable film set to another -- has been echoed time and again, perhaps most notably by Mel Brooks & Co. in Blazing Saddles.

Pay attention to the notice, "Passed by the National Board of Review", which appears very prominently at the beginning of the movie. It helps to explain the final scene of the film, in which Keaton's character appears befuddled by a certain sequence of cause-and-effect that the film censors of the time would not permit movies to portray completely.

And yes, there is a train scene! It's not as extended as in Our Hospitality, but apparently Keaton couldn't resist the urge to incorporate a train into a chase sequence. Wikipedia's entry states that in doing one of the stunts in this sequence, he broke his neck and didn't even notice it until years later. Whether that's true or not, it seems typical of his at-all-costs approach to physical comedy.

I find it entirely believable that Jackie Chan was inspired by watching Keaton. Anyone who enjoys marvelling at the stunts performed by Chan should check out Keaton as well. It would be nice to think that perhaps in some filmic afterlife, Jackie Chan and Buster Keaton will have a chance to sit down and compare their scars while trading stories.

News noted

College accreditation requirements and procedures may be destined for significant changes in the near future, according to the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

"Right now, accreditation ... is largely focused on inputs, more on how many books are in a college library, than whether students can actually understand them," Ms. Spellings said in a speech here in September after the report's release. "Institutions are asked, 'Are you measuring student learning?' And they check yes or no. That must change. Whether students are learning is not a yes or no question. It's how? How much? And to what effect?"

Will this lead to more colleges & universities consigning their libraries to the dumpster in favor of administrative happy-talk about "student learning outcomes"?

Should higher education be judged solely on whether its current crop of students can pass this year's professional licensing exams? Or is there also a responsibility to maintain access to the whole body of intellectually & historically significant material?

Also from the Chronicle: the Georgia Baptist Convention has severed ties with Mercer University, apparently in reaction to a gay/lesbian symposium that was held there last year. Usually it's the Baptist-affiliated colleges and universities that want to break loose from fundamentalist-controlled state Baptist associations, rather than the other way around.

News noted

Gary Wolf, of Wired, on the "New Atheists".

Recent listens

The 60 Greatest Old-Time Radio Shows of the 20th Century, selected and introduced by Walter Cronkite.

Or, rather, 24 of them, since I haven't had time to listen to the rest. Standouts, i.e., ones I remember clearly enough to comment on them:

The Adventures of Philip Marlowe: Red Wind, 06-17-1947. A serviceable adaptation of the classic noir detective.

The Baby Snooks Show: Report Card Blues, 05-01-1951. Truly horrible. A whiny, self-righteous brat and two incompetent parents who lie to each other and other adults as well as to their kid. How did anyone manage to grow up listening to such dreck without being scarred for life?

Escape: Leinengen vs. the Ants, 01-14-1948. A classic macho jungle-adventure tale, told to good effect. Billions of army ants are on the march, devouring everything in their path. Stubborn plantation boss Leinengen vows not to evacuate, but to defend his property against the unstoppable horde. Will he succeed? And will there be enough left of him to fill a teacup afterward?

Fibber McGee and Molly: I Can Get It For You Wholesale, 12-09-1941. The progenitor of ten thousand family sitcoms in which someone hatches crazy money-making schemes that always go wrong. Yes, the famous closet makes an appearance. (So to speak).

On a Note of Triumph, 05-13-1945. A firsthand glimpse into history: a "you are there" moment, listening to a triumphal May 1945 broadcast reviewing the history of the war in Europe. Nazi Germany has just surrendered. What should be done with captured and surrendered Nazis? At the time of broadcast, no one knew what decision would be made.

Suspense: Sorry Wrong Number, 08-21-1943. Classic tale of suspense. It's been made into a movie also, but the subject matter -- a bedridden woman who accidentally overhears a mysterious and threatening telephone conversation -- remains particularly appropriate to radio storytelling.

Grand Central Station: Miracle for Christmas, 12-24-1949. The best part of this show is the introduction. The story itself is impossibly sappy, something about a mysterious doctor who shows up for work on Christmas Eve and goes around miraculously curing everyone in sight. Then at the end we find out -- shock! awe! -- that the doctor died in a wreck earlier that night. Gosh, says the cynical ambulance driver, that means.... he must be... (fade into celestial music.) Followed by the sound of Your Humble Correspondent gagging on glurge.

Philco Radio Time: The Road to Hollywood, 01-29-1947. Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour yuck it up telling an improbable tale about how the three of them came to be in Hollywood, with occasional self-aware, half-mocking references to the show's corporate sponsors. Irony isn't a modern invention. Neither is commercial co-opting of irony.

The Saint: The Corpse Said Ouch, 08-06-1950. Vincent Price is a suave Simon Templar. He has Eyebrows Of Power, just like another famous Simon Templar. You can't see them on radio. But you can hear them.

Have Gun, Will Travel : From Here to Boston, 11-27-1960. A western with a touch of gritty detective noir. In this episode, an alluring lady and her brother lay sinister plans for lonely hero Paladin. Will he realize the danger he's in before it's too late? Unfortunately, the radio show does not feature the theme song used for the television program, which ranks among my favorite such songs.

Lum and Abner : Christmas Show, 12-19-1948. Cloying, stereotypical country bumpkins with really annoying exaggerated cornpone accents.

Arthur Godfrey Time, 10-21-1953: Please, can we move the clock forward to escape this vacuous, pointlessly-prattling snob? If not, can someone break a champagne bottle over his self-absorbed head? Did Americans in 1953 really think that this represented "sophistication"?

The Walter Winchell Show, 03-20-1949. The man has become a legend and a stereotype recognized by "Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea", even if few now recognize his name. He's the prototype of the pompous, aggressive, egotistical broadcaster whom we all know and loathe. His fast-paced, rushing style of "Flash!" news stories, one piled on top of another with scarcely time to breathe in between, is the prototype for the teasers run by today's more superficial news and celebrity-gossip programs. They titillate the listener while never supplying quite enough information, always leaving the audience wanting more as he jumps -- "Flash!" -- to the next three-second soundbyte.

Unfortunately, I didn't have time to listen to the radio versions of Nightfall, the origin stories of Superman and The Lone Ranger, The Martian Chronicles, or the episodes of I Love Lucy and The Shadow that appear on other tapes. Perhaps some other time.

Goodbye to Jesus Camp?

No time for proper investigation here, just a quick link to Mark Maynard's post on the subject.

No comment

Unshelved, Wednesday Nov. 1 2006.

Recent reads

You're stepping on my cloak and dagger, by Roger Hall. A humorous look at the recruitment and training of a WWII secret agent. The author was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to today's CIA, in 1943, and only participated in a couple of real missions late in the war. (Or at least, those are the only ones he tells us about.) Consequently there's relatively little actual blood and danger in the book, but a lot of satirical description of the military bureaucracy and the OSS's spy-training program, which included not only physical training in military technique and parachuting, but a continual series of psychological games designed to force the students to be constantly on the alert lest they betray their cover.

Some of the OSS's training techniques, as described by our author, sound less like well-planned professional training then seat-of-the-pants improvisation. Does today's CIA train its future agents by dropping into a strange city with an open-ended assignment to penetrate a sensitive target and retrieve something from inside it as proof of their success? Should it? This exercise proves to be quite dangerous for one of his classmates, who actually gets caught by counter-agents. The police, you see, know nothing of the OSS's Wild-West, sink-or-swim training methods. For all they know, he might actually be an enemy spy.

I got a chuckle out of recognizing some of the programs and places described. When the OSS's training program in cryptography was mentioned, I was reminded of a relative who served in a position involving cryptography during the war, and wondered if he went through a course of training similar to the one described. And then we have the following passage, as a group of spies-in-training travel to their next appointment:

If anyone was jittery, it wasn't in evidence on the way up. I had my hands full with Gordon and our ever-present blackjack game. Mitch and Ossian sat across the aisle creating a certain amount of consternation by carying on a heated discussion in German, which they both spoke fluently. Not content with the harvest of suspicious glares this reaped, they waited until the train was passing the Glenn L. Martin aircraft factories, a huge camouflaged plant area half an hour out of Baltimore. Then Ossian leaned across, and in a stage whisper which rattled the car, asked, "Hans, haff you gott de planz?"

The question was accompanied by a significant glance out the window. I was busy playing aces back to back at the time, but Gordon had the presence of mind to answer with a guttural "Ja."

I don't know precisely what effect this brief exchange had on the other passengers, but it was enough to make certain of our classmates hurriedly move to other parts of the train. (p. 88)

In 1943 or 1944, it's quite likely that Grand-dad B. was working away at his drop-hammer, banging aircraft parts out of sheet aluminum inside that plant, as the would-be spies rolled by making their jokes.

Given the kinds of jokes and excursions that the author and his classmates were able to get away with during their training, one can't help but wonder how the country could possibly have survived any widespread campaign of espionage and sabotage.

On the other hand, it's possible that the author's casual, jokey tone is at least partly disinformation intended to decieve 1957 readers about the actual capabilities and seriousness of American spycraft. Deception is, after all, the business of a spy!

Recent Reads

Thud!, by Terry Pratchett. Sam Vimes, the stubbornly straitlaced head of the Ankh-Morpokh city guard, is faced with a touchy and potentially deadly situation. Relations between the city's dwarfs and trolls, never very good, are on the point of exploding into open riot as the anniversary of an ancient battle approaches and a group of fundamentalist "deep-down dwarfs" seems intent on provoking confrontation with their hereditary enemies. A murdered dwarf and an accusation that a troll is responsible may be the final spark, unless the indefagitable Vimes can smoke out the truth. In between episodes of detective work, Vimes tries mightily to keep up with his newfound domestic duties, including most notably the ritualistic daily 6-o-clock reading of an illustrated storybook to his young son.

The blending of Sam Vimes' hardboiled detective outlook and the comical absurdities of the city and its eccentric inhabitants makes for an enjoyable light read.

Recent Reads

The Gateway Trip : Tales and Vignettes of the Heechee, by Frederik Pohl. As the subtitle suggests, this is not a novel or even a collection of short stories. "The Merchants of Venus", the tale of a cynical, hardboiled type who takes a couple of wealthy Earth tourists on a search for alien artifacts on and below the surface of Venus, qualifies as a novella. Its tone and language suggest that it may have been written long before this book's publication date of 1990. The remainder of the book reads like a scriptwriter's "bible", an authorial outline and set of rules for a long-running story arc. It contains several interesting vignettes, but no characters whose stories extend beyond a few pages outside of the novella mentioned above.

As such, it would be of great interest to fans of Pohl's various Heechee novels and stories, or to anyone who wants to get the gist of their setting without spending a lot of time reading multiple volumes. Readers looking for more traditional SF storytelling might want to start with Pohl's published stories and novels dealing with the Heechee, and then explore this volume if they're curious about the timeline and background that underlies them.

Recent Reads

Doc Savage: Secret in the Sky, by Kenneth Robeson. Doc Savage: the bronze superman with the strangely flecked eyes, the super-scientific lab atop the tallest skyscraper in New York, the proto-James Bondian gadgets, and the crew of superlative sidekicks, against which no evildoer stands a chance!

This series is enough of a legend in the pulp world that when a reprint of a 1935 episode of Doc's adventures showed up in the library's stack of unwanted donations, I picked it up to explore his world.

Unfortunately, the book has all the worst characteristics that I've come to associate with old-time serial pulp fiction. Stiff, clunky dialogue and awkward prose, and a story that doesn't really grab my attention or make very much sense. (Especially once it lost my attention and I started skimming chapters.)

The most interesting part of the book is the first page, upon which one finds the following passage:

At exactly noon, the telephone buzzer whirred in Doc Savage's New York skyscraper headquarters. Noon, straight up, Eastern Standard Time.

The buzzer whirred three times, with lengthy pauses between whirs, which allowed time for anyone prsent to have answered. Then an automatic answering device, an ingenious arrangement of receiver, voice recorder, and phonographic speaker -- a creation of Doc Savage's scientific skill -- was cut in automatically. The phonograph record turned under the needle and sent words over the telephone wire.

"This is a mechanical robot speaking from Doc Savage's headquarters and advising you that Doc Savage is not present but that any message you care to leave will be recorded in your own voice and will come to Doc Savage's attention later," spoke the mechanical contrivance. "You may proceed with whatever you wish to say, if anything."

"Doc!" gasped a voice...

(...text omitted....)

...Then came silence, followed by a click as the receiver was placed on the hook at the San Francisco terminus of the wire.

The mechanical device in Doc Savage's New York office ran on for some moments, and a stamp clock automatically recorded the exact time of the message on a paper roll; then the apparatus stopped and set itself for another call, should one come.

So there you have it, a 1935 description of an analog telephone answering machine. It sounds quaint today, but was probably something of a novel idea when first published. Whether such a device was built in the 1930s, either commercially or experimentally, is unknown to me. The text fails to explain exactly how the message was recorded. Wax cylinders, perhaps? Acetate disks? Was magnetic recording tape available at that time?

No, it really doesn't make sense that the fabulously wealthy Doc Savage couldn't afford to retain a secretary. Nor does it make any sense that such a prominent enemy to evildoers everywhere would leave his headquarters unattended by a trusted human agent. But the description of an automatic answering machine supplied the 1935 reader with a concrete, understandable example of a technological advance which -- unlike rayguns and spaceships -- might conceivably be available in the near future and useful to an ordinary person. In doing so, might it have prompted some of those readers to take an interest in the electrical and engineering sciences, and thus indirectly contributed to the advancement of science in following years?

It's not that I'm so cheerful, though I'll always raise a smile
and if at times my nonsense rhymes then I'll stand trial....

Matthew Fisher and Gary Brooker go to court over A Whiter Shade of Pale.

Thanks to Carlos for the link.

On destroying books

Saith Sir John Collings Squire:

"It says in the paper" that over two million volumes have been presented to the troops by the public. It would be interesting to inspect them. Most of them, no doubt, are quite ordinary and suitable; but it was publicly stated the other day that some people were sending the oddest things, such as magazines twenty years old, guides to the Lake District, Bradshaws, and back numbers of Whitaker's Almanack. It some cases, one imagines, such indigestibles get into the parcels by accident; but it is likely that there are those who jump at the opportunity of getting rid of books they don't want. Why have they kept them if they don't want them? But most people, especially non-bookish people, are very reluctant to throw away anything that looks like a book. In the most illiterate houses that one knows every worthless or ephemeral volume that is bought finds it way to a shelf and stays there. In reality it is not merely absurd to keep rubbish merely because it is printed: it is positively a public duty to destroy it. Destruction not merely makes more room for new books and saves one's heirs the trouble of sorting out the rubbish or storing it: it may also prevent posterity from making a fool of itself. We may be sure that if we do not burn, sink, or blast all the superseded editions of Bradshaw, two hundred years hence some collector will be specialising in old railway time-tables, gathering, at immense cost, a complete series, and ultimately leaving his "treasures" (as the Press will call them) to a Public Institution.....

(More here.)

All your colors are belong to us, part II

A few months ago I noted a lawsuit in which the a US district court upheld a university's assertion of trademark ownership over the use of certain combinations of colors on clothing, even when the university itself was not actually named. At the time, I wondered how long it would be until the universities' grasping legal departments tried to expand their ownership of colors.

Until now, apparently. The U. of Alabama has filed suit to prevent a sports artist from depicting a well-known moment in its sports history, on the grounds that the artist is not permitted to reproduce their trademarked color scheme of crimson and white.

Sports Artist Sued for Mix of Crimson and Tide (NY Times)

I can't help but be leery of large institutions, or any other entity, that seek to prohibit depiction or commentary on public events by invoking trademarks. What's next -- a ban on news photographs that "violate trademark" by including a banner or football uniform in a trademarked color scheme, or some well-known campus landmark? A total ban on any references to the institution at all, except for those scripted by the PR department?

RIP, Jack Williamson

One of the last of the Golden-Age SF writers has departed the stage at the age of 98. His Seetee Shock and Seetee Ship, which I picked up in a tattered secondhand omnibus edition sometime before I was ten years old, were among the first serious, book -length science fiction stories I ever read. By all accounts, he was an excellent teacher and a generous and wise man as well as a talented writer who knew how to combine real science and plausible speculation with exciting storytelling.

Reported by Locus, the Alberquerque Tribune, etc.

More on the Bush administration's war against environmental data

Senators question closing of EPA libraries (From a blog affiliated with the DePaul University law school) Quoted there:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is sharply reducing the number of technical journals and environmental publications to which its employees will have online access, according to agency e-mails released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). This loss of online access compounds the effect of agency library closures, meaning that affected employees may not have access to either a hard copy or an electronic version of publications.

Smoke and mirrors. Claim that the physical libraries aren't needed because "everything's on the Internet", while simultaneously shutting down researcher's electronic access. Smoke and mirrors. Will a Democratic Congress be willing to look behind the curtain?

Not read but noteworthy

Sword and Sorceress, vol. IV, VII, VIII, and X. Ed. by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Suburban Public Library recently weeded most of the volumes of this anthology from its young-adult collection. I note that it's been recommended on Fiction-L as a source of fantasy stories for female readers, and a quick scan of the tables of contents suggest that a good many current Big Names in female-oriented fantasy published early stories here. Mercedes Lackey, Diane Paxson, Vera Nazarian, and Laurell K. Hamilton are all represented. There's even a story from Charles de Lint. Perhaps one day I will have time to read them.

Recent listens

The Pale Horseman, by Bernard Cornwell. This is the second installment in the tale that began in The Last Kingdom. Both are set in the tumultuous and war-torn medieval kingdom of Wessex at the height of the Danish invasions which, historically, almost obliterated the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that later became England.

The narrator and protagonist, Uhtred, is even more of an antihero here than he was in the previous volume. He frequently states that he feels more admiration for the warlike Danes than for the annoyingly pious Alfred of Wessex, in whose service he finds himself. Uhtred, a hotheaded, thuggish pagan from the lost northern kingdom of Northumbria, is decidedly out of place among the monks and priests with whom Alfred has surrounded himself, and feels contempt for them as well as his Christian wife, Mildreth. (To be fair, the match was a purely political one foisted off on him by Alfred.)

Temperamentally, Uhtred seems more kin to the Vikings than to his Anglo-Saxon countrymen. He describes his own acts of piracy, theft, treachery and murder with a kind of amorally bloodthirsty cheerfulness and a rather unsettling attention to gory details. He always feels justified in his own actions, and speaks longingly of the battle-lust that comes over him in the thick of a desperate fight. His most redeeming characteristic is a kind of rough pagan loyalty based entirely on personal relationships and oaths given.

He's a fearsome warrior and a clever tactician. In a fight, he's quick, vicious, and effective. Politically, though, he gets mixed results. He's capable of canny calculation, but all too frequently lets pride and resentment goad him into potentially disastrous missteps. His quick wits frequently keep him from suffering all of the consequences of his rashness, but as he remarks, "Wyrd bith ful araed". Fate is inexorable. And Uhtred will, eventually, learn that his actions have consequences.

Historically, most English-speaking readers know that the Danes were eventually driven back. And yet seeing exactly how Cornwell reconstructs that epic struggle is fascinating. The strategies and tactics employed are described in great and plausible detail, as is the everyday world of medieval Wessex. The climactic battle in the book generates genuine suspense in the mind of the reader. Although we know the English will eventually win, the fate of the Uhtred's various companions, people whom the reader has come to like by seeing them through Uhtred's eyes, hangs in the balance, and the omens and prophetic dreams in which Uhtred fervently believes have been ambiguous at best.

The reader, Tom Sellwood, speaks in a rolling, thuggish brogue when speaking for Uhtred, and the character comes across as a convincingly dangerous man. Other characters' accents are, perhaps, less realistic, but the discernible difference between the voices of Saxons, Danes, and others helps the listener keep the different speakers clearly distinguished. One of the most gripping audiobooks I've listened to.

Recent reads

Legend, by David Gemmell. Better than average military fantasy. No orcs here. No goblins, no dragons, no elves with pointy ears (at least none that I noticed). Just a collection of men and women who have come to the fortress of Dros Delnoch to make a hopeless last stand, defending their homeland against an unstoppable invading tribal horde. Some, like Druss the Axe, are aging legends. Some are career soldiers, some are outlaws or aristocrats or rootless wanderers.

According to rumor, the author began this, his first published novel, after finding out that he had cancer, and had in mind a symbolic link between the fortress and his own body. If he survived a certain length of time, the fortress would stand. If not, the fortress would fall. David Gemmell died earlier this year, many long years after first being diagnosed.

Recent not-quite-reads

Dreams of the Compass Rose, by Vera Nazarian. A collection of short stories, some of them linked, mostly set in a fantastical, mystical desert reminiscent of certain of Dunsany's short stories. Unfortunately, they did not prove to be captivating enough to pull me away from the other 100+ books waiting to be read.

Recent viewings

Blue Velvet (1985) David Lynch's Oscar-nominated 1985 festival of the bizarre can only be seen, in hindsight, as a precursor to Twin Peaks, where he further explored his love of baroque complexity, shockingly surreal imagery in hypersaturated color, and the seedy underside of the human psyche.

The movie stars Kyle McLachlan as a stereotypically clean-cut college boy, Jeffrey, who becomes involved in a tangled web of crime and pathology after discovering a severed human ear laying in a field near his improbably-idyllic hometown. The plot thickens as he encounters a lovely cocktail singer, played by Isabella Rossellini, who has very troubling secrets, both sexual and otherwise. Dennis Hopper chews the scenery frantically, almost comically, as "Crazy Frank", a maniacal sadist who is victimizing her, but toward whom she also seems to feel a kind of perverse desire. (Lynch's villains are always weirdly over-the-top, apparently.)

Laura Dern, looking both angelically blonde and oddly masculine, lurks in the background as the somewhat reluctant female sidekick who shares secrets and provides a wholesome alternative to the yawning psychic abysses that confront Our Hero. "You're just like me," Frank snarls at Jeffrey at one point, and a tense sexual encounter with Rossellini's character suggests that there's some truth to that, just as the repeated motif of hideous bugs lurking under the illusory perfection of glowing green lawns suggests the way that depravity can lurk under the appearance of idyllic bliss.

Sadly, I am probably the last person who will get a chance to view this influential, Oscar-nominated film through Suburban Public Library. A local busybody took it upon herself to complain that it was "pornography". The film subsequently was discarded. The official story is that the DVD was damaged.

Electoral thoughts, part II

Carlos inquired, by e'mail, whether I'm pleased with the election results. I have to say I am, although I'm not so naive as to believe that the legislative ascendancy of the one political party over another will usher in a Millennium of Bliss. There will still be stupid laws and stupid politicians, no matter which party prevails. But at least now the Bush administration will be countered by a legislature that will, one hopes, counter its worst excesses and question its dubious assertions.

It's interesting to note that, in Michigan at least, the popular vote was not a straight-line ringing endorsement of stereotypically "liberal" or Democratic positions. Voters endorsed Democratic candidates for the governorship and both state and federal legislatures, but also strongly favored a couple of ballot referendums associated with the kind of limited government that at one time was considered politically conservative. By a large margin, Michiganders & Michigeese voted to ban governmental affirmative action based on race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, etc. (Proposition 2). And by an overwhelming 80-20 margin, they voted to restrict governmental use of eminent domain. (Prop. 4)

It sounds to me like Lou Dobbs is right when he argues that the vote in this election was simply a vote of "no confidence" in the arrogant and increasingly tone-deaf Republican political establishment. I am gratified to note that reports of vote-counting shenanigans seem to be scattered and, if any such efforts took place, they were ineffective against the overwhelming electoral tide of disaffection with one-party Republican rule.

It's now up to the Democrats to organize themselves into something resembling an effective legislative majority. We'll see how that goes, and where they decide to go. If the Democrats fail to note the fundamental distrust of overreaching big government that seems to have driven both the voters' revolt against the Republicans and their rejection of affirmative action and inappropriate use of eminent domain, then their reign in Congress may prove shortlived once voters' disgust with the war in Iraq is no longer focused exclusively on the Republicans.

The other costs of Bush's war

It took a persistent reporter and a slew of Freedom-of-Information requests to pry the story loose, but it turns out that a Alyssa Peterson, a US Arabic-language interrogator who died in Iraq in September of 2003, didn't just die of a routine and vaguely-described "non-hostile weapon discharge." She committed suicide after objecting to the "interrogation" techniques being used in her presence. From Flagstaff radio station KNAU, as reported by Editor & Publisher:

“Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed."

Unfortunately for her, Peterson, described as a devout Mormon, apparently had personal principles of right and wrong. Unlike those who gave her the orders that drove her to suicide.

Electoral thoughts



A few brief comments for the benefit of future candidates:

Try to spell words correctly and write in complete and coherent sentences in your responses to the League of Women Voters' questionnaire. It's not very impressive when a candidate for the board of regents of a major flagship university states that "Having an educated populous helps the economy," as one candidate does here.

Also, try to avoid going into irrelevant rants about E-Gold and the evils of the Federal Reserve System when asked about policy recommendations for the state's educational system.

Breaking the taboo

As for me, I avoided voting straight-ticket Democrat in major state and federal offices only because the Republican Secretary of State here in Michigan seems to have performed her role with rather bland competence, avoiding the blatant partisanship of her counterpart in Ohio. Nothing that DeVos's campaign came up with convinced me that Jennifer Granholm was personally responsible for Michigan's economic woes, and however bland she may be, at least she's not from Amway. I dutifully voted for a couple of Dems for state legislative districts even though I strongly suspect that the local suburban counties will go solidly Republican even in the middle of a surging tide running the other direction.

As for the US Senate race, I figured that Democratic incumbent Stabenow was not any more blatantly horrible than her opponent, and it was necessary to throw the maximum possible weight on the opposite side of the scale from Bush and the rubber-stamp Republican congress that has aided and abetted his dangerously arrogant administration.

I think I may have voted for one or two Republicans for university regents boards. As much as I could, I relied on the scant information I was able to find out by way of electronic newspaper archives about regents candidates' individual attitudes and track records, rather than party affiliations. I voted for one U. of Mich. regent, without knowing her party affiliation, solely because I found a news article that reported that she had voted against the University's grandiose expansion of its football stadium.

Voting Democratic was a strange and unfamiliar sensation to me in 2004, and the strangeness still hasn't quite worn off. It seems, from the polls, that a good many other people have decided it's time to clean house of the current bunch of (mainly Republican) incumbents. We'll see how that works out.

The Myth of the Rational Voter

... according to Bryan Caplan of the Cato Institute.

Scary science?

In a controversial study, researchers have resurrected a retrovirus that infected our ancestors millions of years ago and now sits frozen in the human genome. Published online by Genome Research this week, the study may shed new light on the history of these genomic intruders, as well as their role in tumors. Although this particular virus, dubbed Phoenix, is a wimpy one, some argue that resuscitating any ancient virus is inherently risky and that the study should have undergone stricter reviews....

(From ScienceNow.)

Don't believe everything you hear

Folks over at DailyKos are reporting that Republican dirty-tricks operatives are once again trying to suppress the Democratic vote using automated robo-calls to intimidate voters, threatening that they will be arrested if they show up at the polls, or directing them to incorrect polling locations.

For accurate election information, look online for your state government's elections website. In Michigan, www.publius.org will let you verify your voter registration and identify the correct polling location and the candidates running in your district.

The League of Women Voters publishes nonpartisan election guides for each state, online as well as in print. This includes candidates' responses to a small number of policy questions as well as names and party affiliations. Check their "Election 411" webpage for links to local guides.

For more indepth information about whose agenda may lurk behind the freindly face in the television ads, check the Federal Elections Commissions's Campaign Finance Disclosure webpage. Your state government may have something similar. In Michigan, the Department of State hosts an online databases of campaign contributions.

Law'norder

Well known creationist Dr. Dino, whose theme park in Florida purports to show how dinosaurs and people lived together "just like in the Bible", is reportedly on his way to prison for tax fraud.

And of course, good ole Pastor Ted is facing some tough times after it was revealed that he bought crystal meth as well as a having in gay sex while making a career out of denouncing both drug addicts and homosexuals from the pulpit of his giant suburban "New Life" megachurch, as the President of the 30-million member National Association of Evangelicals, and as a key advisor to George W. Bush.

Don't forget. Republicans are the party of Gawd's Trooth, the party of law'norder, etc. etc. Aren't they?

Parents, rest easy

You can now blissfully abandon Baby Snookums to the care of the television set without any fear that his mind will be irretrievably corrupted by seeing Tom the Cat light up a cigarette. Tom and Jerry are to be censored by the current rightsholder, Turner Broadcasting, in the same way that blues musician Robert Johnson's cigarette was airbrushed out of existence in the Post Office's commemorative stamp.

This way, the positive behavioral messages of bashing small rodents over the head and tricking those larger than yourself into making fools of themselves can be transmitted without any harmful exposure to the sight of Evil Cigarettes. (Just as, presumably, the buyers of Robert Johnson stamps can absorb all kinds of healthy lifestyle messages from his de-tobbaconized portrait.)

Go on now, enjoy watching your oral sex on Desperate Housewives, your glamorous sexpots, your admirably, superhumanly clever serial torture-murderers on the detective show of your choice. Enjoy your talkshows about incest and casual sex. Go on and watch people be blown to smithereens on prime time.

The Children Are Safe from the scourge of cartoon cigarettes.

RefGrunt for an hour.
2:00 Why is there a box of creamed corn on the library's doorstep? (Beats me.)
2:01. Where are the ___ school Accellerated Reader Lists? (On the shelf behind you.)
2:05. Audiobook of "Fathers of our Flags, or something". (You mean, Flags of Our Fathers?)
2:07 Newtype anime magazine is returned to desk.
2:10 "I sat down at the visitor terminal and didn't sign up and I typed up a paper and then it kicked me out and I need to print it out and what do I do now?"
2:13 "I've been waiting for an internet terminal and they're all full and the signup terminal shows that those computers are supposed to be available and there are still people using them."
2:14 Polk's Directory.
2:15 "Have you figured out what's going on with the creamed corn yet?"
2:20 Try to ask Circ. staff about creamed corn. They have a line stretching across the lobby and no time to take other questions. Leave message with shelver to ask them when they have more time.
2:25 "Where is the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature? I need articles on Pierre L'Enfant."
2:27 Internet pass.
2:28 Internet pass.
2:30 "I need to use a DVD player."
2:31 "No, I meant I need a computer with a DVD burner. That one or that one. (Points to two computers in use by other patrons.)"
2:33 Internet pass.
2:34 Internet pass.
2:35 "We need video biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine that are suitable for showing to a high school class."
2:40 Receive third-hand relayed message that I am supposed to know about library's food-donation drive. "It's on the library's web page." Upon further inquiry, circ. staff still have no knowledge of box of creamed corn. Go outside to collect creamed corn and place it in food-drive canister before it freezes and explodes.
2:45 "All the public terminals are full. I need to type my resume."
2:47 Patron using express internet terminal refuses to end cell phone call when repeatedly reminded to do so. Eventually gets off terminal and wanders toward lobby still yakking after I stand over his shoulder for several minutes.
2:50 "The computer you put me on crashed so I went to another computer and now it says the DVD burner program needs to be reinstalled." Computer techie person is amazingly in office.
2:55 Return phone call to patron who wants Dorothy Garlock's Wild Sweet Wilderness. Telephone number supplied connects to a business office which is closed.
2:57 Internet pass. Internet pass.
2:58 Check work e'mail and review supervisor's message criticizing me for not getting more collection development work done during my "non-busy time at the reference desk."