Aaiiighhh! That face!

You Are a Conservative Democrat

Frankly, the way most other Democrats behave embarrasses you greatly. You pride yourself on a high level of morals, and you have a good grasp on right and wrong. It's likely you think America needs to get back to its conservative, Juedo-Christian values. Why aren't you a Republican then? Because you believe the goverment helps more than hurts.

What's Your Political Persuasion?

I'm not sure that their statements necessarily follow from the answers I gave....

Huh.

You Are Thai Food

Trendy yet complex. People seek you out - though they're not sure why.

What Kind of Food Are You?

Recent viewings

Once Bitten (1985). An amusing period piece. The plot is pure silliness. A sexually frustrated high school student has an unyieldingly virtuous girlfriend. He and his goofy loser highschool nerd friends go to a swinger's bar in order to rid themselves of their unwanted virginity. A sexy female vampire, who needs to drink the blood of virgins in order to maintain her svelte appearance, is waiting at the bar. Turns out that she has to get that virgin blood by biting her enraptured victims on the "inner thigh". Wackiness ensues.

The pleasures to be found here are in the details. The abode of the vampire (Lauren Hutton) is the epitome of what folks of the 1980s considered to be high style: endless expanses of featureless white modernity, with occasional abstract art and shiny black electronics on display, plus a mincing butler (Cleavon Little) who manages to combine drag queen bitchiness with English-butler officiousness. The costumes worn by the high schoolers at their Halloween dance are a full-color, sequins-and-synthetics catalog of 80s cliches, from Flock-of-Seagulls hair to the Blues Brothers to poufy feminine outfits apparently made entirely of semitranslucent gauze.

Then of course there's the rock 'n' roll dance-off for possession of the beleaguered hero between the sexy vampire queen and the girlfriend, during which the virginal girlfriend decides that the way to win is to start stripping off her Raggedy-Ann costume so that she's suddenly doing Dirty-Dancing style moves around the high school auditorium in white gymnasts tights and a lacy transparent skirtlet. This makes at least as much sense as the rest of the plot. It's never explained, for example, why the Sexy Vampire Queen is uninterested in the blood of Virtuous (and presumably Virginal) Girlfriend, despite the fact that several of her previous victims are shown to have been female.

Best line: "Mark doesn't want you because you're mean and evil. He wants me because I'm nice and sweet and pure. So FUCK OFF!"

Followed, of course, by the rallying cry of the vampires: "After that virgin!"

And, oh yes, the nerdy male virgin in question is played by a young Jim Carrey, whose rubberfaced physical comedy is nicely balanced against geeky earnestness until the movie finally devolves into lamebrained chase-sequence farce.

Before it does so, there are a few nicely understated ironic digs at vampiric cliches such as the monochromatic black wardrobe and the inconvenience of not being able to see oneself in a mirror. (Just how do Sexy Vampire Queens apply their flawless makeup, anyway?)

It's stupid and silly and blatantly pandering, and its gets more so as its lame plot wanders aimlessly toward a painfully dumb conclusion, but it has a few amusing moments.

Recent viewings

In the Cut. Truly repellent cop/slasher flick with decidedly masochistic streak.

Recent reads:

The Borrowers, by Mary Norton.

This classic kids' book was highly recommended to me, and so when I came across a slightly browned paperback copy in a local book sale, I took the opportunity to check it out.

For the uninitiated, the "borrowers" of the title are miniature people who live in the spaces in the walls and floor of a house somewhere in England, presumably sometime during the 19th or early 20th century, since there are references to Queen Victoria and to British interests in India. The author doesn't explicitly say so, but I can't help but wonder whether they were intended to depict one way the "little people" of rural myth might have adapted to the spread of urbanization.

Of course, it's also evident that the author has imbued this particular family of "borrowers" with decidedly English middle-class attitudes and fears of the "outside". The descriptions of their living spaces under the floor and behind the wainscoting, cluttered with furniture improvised from "borrowed" household items, bring to mind Connie Willis's adage that the Victorian era was so repressed because no one could turn around without knocking something over. And I can certainly see why the clever, adventurous and unstoppably curious Arietta would appeal to any equally curious and adventurous child who felt stifled by a parent's sense of propriety and fear of the "outside world". The fact that Arietta's ability to make a connection with the outside world brings both danger and, potentially, salvation to the "borrowers" must also have been noticed by any careful reader.

The story both opens and closes with a framing story in which a young girl hears the story of the "borrowers" from an older relative, and for a book intended for a juvenile audience, the story closes on a disquietingly ambiguous note. Although the author wrote several sequels, which strongly suggests that a dire fate did not overtake the protagonists, it is not clear at the end of The Borrowers just exactly what has happened. At a critical point, we're returned abruptly to the framing story, where the young listener and her aunt go on to discuss what *might* have happened.

I wonder whether this was intended to parallel young readers' thoughts when, say, a favorite pet mysteriously disappears amid a conspiracy of adult silence? Or, perhaps, as an analogue to later discussions regarding concepts such as religious concepts, which cannot be proven beyond a certain point and must proceed on the basis of supposition and faith?

Recent reads:

High Tide in Tucson, by Barbara Kingsolver. I started to read this 1995 collection of Ms. Kingsolver's essays years ago, but for some reason got distracted after reading the first few essays. I remembered only her desciption of the hermit crab who stowed away in her vacation luggage and subsequently took up residence in a terrarium in her Arizona home, regulating his days according to the tidal rhythms of a nonexistent ocean, and her account of the high school librarian who gave her access to the world of books that changed her life. (That, and the reference to Edward Abbey "taking the TV out to the backyard and shooting it again." It's the *again* in that sentence that makes it funny, I think. Just one example of Ms. Kingsolver's faultless skill at her craft.)

Recently I had occasion to pick up the book again, and I'm glad I did. It's a captivating collections of thoughts and observations from a smart woman who possesses a degree of what we in these degenerate modern days hesitate to call wisdom. Hers is not the facile wit of the Dave Barrys and PJ O'Rourkes of the world, who gleefully toss of cynical confections of mockery that refuse to recognize any actual emotion, any actual consequences or permanent significance to the words or ideas with which they play and profit. Kingsolver lives in a closely-observed world where the events of one day are connected to the next day, and the next, as well as to the day before, a world in which ideas determine not only how we view the world, but how we shape the world, as well as the way the world shapes us.

Humor is definitely present in these pages, as when Kingsolver ruefully describes her attempt, at the behest of her publicist, to impersonate a rock musician as part of the Rock Bottom Remainders, an amateur band made up of authors which for several years in the early 1990s toured the circuit of library and booksellers' conventions. But there's also thoughtful consideration of the world she lives in -- the world we all live in -- and passion ranging from outrage at the cynical shortsightedness of warmongering politicians, to veiled accounts of despair recollected in tranquility, to clearsighted hopefulness in the final essay.

The times and places that these essays were first published also give a glimpse of just how far a writer, even a successful writer, must cast the net in order to make a living at her craft. They range from local newspapers to Smithsonian to Parenting to the New York Times Magazine, with occasional speeches to library and booksellers conventions and introductions to other people's books thrown in for good measure. As one might expect, this means that the subjects addressed range all over the map. But Ms. Kingsolvers' vivid gift for observation and her clear-eyed view of significance in the things she observes provide a connecting thread, and those essays which are informed by events in her own life are arranged chronologically so that the connections from one to the next are readily apparent.

Highly recommended. I'm going to have to make more of an effort to track down her other writings.

Recent reads

Blade Runner, a movie. By William S. Burroughs.

To avoid any possible confusion: it's not the movie. It's not even a movie. It's a short book-length discussion of a hypothetical movie, and its plot bears no resemblance whatsoever to the plot of the 1982 film with Harrison Ford.

Burroughs projects a terrifying urban dystopia, a national human catastrophe brought on by a dysfunctional health system. Exorbitantly-priced medical care is denied to the working middle class, while politicians buy votes and peace with extravagant giveaway programs to drug addicts and people on welfare. Gargantuan, cash-spouting medical and pharmaceutical lobbies repeatedly block legislative proposals that threaten their profitable strangleholds on the population. Demagogues use the resulting inequities to feed racist hatred and spark bloody riots. Overpopulation and a proliferation of genetic disorders lead to government edicts making sterilization a precondition of health care. Doctors are forbidden from providing medical services outside the official health care system. Some of them, predictably, go underground. The government hunts them down. And the wheel keeps turning.

The plot, such as it is, is secondary to the setting and the backstory. I found myself disappointed when Burroughs turned, about halfway thorugh the book, from backstory to story.

In the meanwhile, we find out what a "blade runner" is. The phrase makes perfect sense in context and has nothing to do with replicants.

The most interesting parts of this book are Burrough's nightmarish vision of dystopia, and his prediction, in 1979, that the availability of health care to the middle class would become an explosive political issue. It's unclear what influence the book may have had on the movie, beyond the title phrase and the overwhelming sense of a filthy, overcrowded urban hell ruled by oppressive government and business entities.

News noted

"Just following orders."

US military commander orders soldiers to 'kill all military-age men' and execute Iraqi prisoners.

No doubt this is because they "hate our freedom".

In the aftermath of World War II, we imprisoned and executed Nazi and Japanese commanders for doing exactly the same thing. This commander was given a "formal reprimand." That'll teach him.


An army of mercenaries, answerable to nobody

This disturbing news article describes how Bush-administration ideologues and far-right-wing "entrepreneurs" have used US tax money to build up a mercenary, private army that purports to be answerable neither to military justice nor civilian law. This is one of the exact complaints that the Declaration of Independence makes against the King George of its time: that his government was hiring mercenary armies that were answerable to nobody and, as a result, were predictably brutal and oppressive.

It also raises the very serious question of just who such a military force would be loyal to if a rogue President, or a militarist faction, decided to seize power by force. It's not for nothing that the Constitution requires military officers to swear loyalty to the Constitution, not to whatever person happens to hold political office at the moment.

And on top of everything else, it's a stunningly bad deal for the government, a blatant war-profiteering racket that siphons money out of federal coffers into the pockets of far-right Republican cronies at an amazing pace:

In 2005 after Hurricane Katrina its forces deployed in New Orleans, where it billed the federal government $950 per man, per day -- at one point raking in more than $240,000 a day. At its peak the company had about 600 contractors deployed from Texas to Mississippi....."

The company openly seeks more opportunity for military-style "homeland security" assignments in the domestic United States, blurring the distinction between military force and domestic policing:

"Since Katrina, it [Blackwater] has aggressively pursued domestic contracting, opening a new domestic operations division. Blackwater is marketing its products and services to the Department of Homeland Security, and its representatives have met with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The company has applied for operating licenses in all US coastal states. Blackwater is also expanding its physical presence inside US borders, opening facilities in Illinois and California...."

This distinction, for those of you who slept through the more entertaining parts of your civics classes, exists in order to keep rogue politicians from using military force to attack political dissenters, and to keep ambitious military "men on horseback" from seizing power a la Julius Caesar. What is the motivation for eliminating this distinction, as the Bush junta has consistently insisted on doing, first by militarizing the domestic National Guard for overseas conflicts, and secondly by placing unaccountable, mercenary military forces into domestic law enforcement positions?

Bloodthirsty psychopaths such as the commander discussed above would, no doubt, benefit from being in a mercenary army where their butchery would be immune from any oversight. And politically-connected corporations like Blackwater no doubt find it highly profitable. The rest of us should beware.

[Edit, 3/29/07. Corrected link. Thanks, Pablo.]

All God's angels are belong to us

The Mormon church claims trademark ownership of images of angels blowing trumpets. How dare those mere gentiles depict angels drinking coffee?!?

Recent reads

Pledged : the secret life of sororities, by Alexandra Robbins. Oh. So that's what all that nonsense back at college was about. I sort of observed it from what might be called an anthropological distance -- all the identical hairstyles, synchronized socializing, and earsplitting screeching-in-unison at two in the morning. Oh well. None of them would have gone out on a date with me, anyway.

Strapped : why America's 20 and 30-somethings can't get ahead, by Tamara Draut. Pablo the Electronically Absent would no doubt enjoy this book. It makes many of the same observations that he's been wont to make: that financial adolescence now stretches well into the thirties for the average adult nowadays, and that the economic and political systems are more stacked against this demographic than at any time in history. Draut backs up these assertions with both anecdotal and statistical evidence, but unfortunately the solutions she offers are not likely to be enacted, given the strong incentives that both politicians and businesses have to continue abusing young adults. After all, the soon-to-be-retiring Baby Boomers are where the votes and influence reside. Who cares about the well-being of a bunch of people who have no political contributions to offer and are too busy to vote?

The Red House Mystery, by A.A. Milne. The author of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories tries his hand at a murder mystery. Parts of it are mildly witty, but other parts are so veddy veddy British that they seem almost like a parody of the English Country House Murder Mystery. This is one of those novels in which characters say things like "Right-O!" and "Ripping!" while sipping tea on the croquet court. Or in the wood-paneled library (with requisite dead body) or the inevitable secret passage. There's some reason to think that the author was aware of this. The most egregrious character is explicitly intended as a kind of dimwitted Watson-analogue, to which the brilliant amateur detective must explain all his deductions for the benefit of the reader. It finally comes off as neither fish nor fowl, neither serious enough to be satisfying as a detective story nor satirical enough to be satisfying as parody.

Recent viewings

The Pompatus of Love. The movie that dares ask the question, what on earth did Steve Miller mean? Pompadours of Love? Impetus? Prophetess? What?

In some ways it's a standard light romantic comedy, with two major differences. It's written from the masculine viewpoint, rather than the usual feminine viewpoint. (In fact, it's very much like a male-oriented version of Sex in the City. ) And it eschews the traditional contrived happy ending for a rather inconclusive collection of ambiguous outcomes that leave the lead characters not much different than they were at the beginning.

Unfortunately, the four male leads are rather obvious stereotypes. There's the Studly But Shallow Fratboy, the Blue Collar Guy, the Insecure Intellectual, and the Sensitive-but-Flaky Artistic Guy. Their various romantic entanglements are amusing but never really seem believable. Whether the inconclusive ending is satisfying probably depends on the viewer's tolerance for self-consciously hip nihilism.

A candidate for weirdest fantasy book cover of all time:

The Little People by John Christopher (Avon 1968)

Nazi leprechauns. With whips. In a haunted castle. Not to mention the teenage nymphomaniac and the drunken lawyers.

Somehow I doubt that I really want to read this book. The cover's amusing, though.

Automated readers' advisory?

www.whatshouldireadnext.com.

I've tried a few sample searches. The results are intriguing. Stealing a cue from a television character mentioned in the previous post, I tried searches for Walker Percy's Lancelot and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, both books which I have read and enjoyed.

Recommendations for Lancelot:

The Thanatos Syndrome - Percy See Amazon UK | US
Leftism Revisited: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot - Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn See Amazon UK | US
Dubai - Robin Moore See Amazon UK | US
The Darwin Conspiracy - John Darnton See Amazon UK | US
Leisure: The Basis of Culture - Josef Pieper, T.S. Eliot, Alexander Dru See Amazon UK | US
Father Elijah - Michael O'Brien See Amazon UK | US
Crossing the Threshold of Hope - Pope John Paul II See Amazon UK | US
Love in the Ruins - Walker Percy, Percy See Amazon UK | US
The Lighthouse - P.D. James See Amazon UK | US
Gaudy Night - Dorothy L Sayers See Amazon UK | US

Other Percy books are a no-brainer, and the links to Catholic writings and to nonfiction discussions of leisure, culture and politics make sense. I'm puzzled by the recommendation of Dorothy Sayers, although it should be noted that Fiend does happen to be a Wimseyphile. Coincidence? Or kismet?

Recommendations for The Fountainhead:

Glengarry Glen Ross - David Mamet See Amazon UK | US
Hangman's Holiday - Dorothy L. Sayers See Amazon UK | US
The Truth Machine: A Speculative Novel - James L. Halperin See Amazon UK | US
A History of Reading - Alberto Manguel See Amazon UK | US
Ordinary Wolves - Seth Kantner See Amazon UK | US
Dave Barry Talks Back - Dave Barry See Amazon UK | US
War and Remembrance - Herman Wouk See Amazon UK | US
Bringing Out the Dead - Joe Connelly See Amazon UK | US
Future Shock - Alvin Toffler See Amazon UK | US
Paradise Lost - John Milton, John Leonard See Amazon UK | US

More Sayers! Why?

The Toffler makes sense for its focus on politics and culture, the Milton for its heroic and epic scope. Mamet makes sense for the strong sense of conflict that pervades the works of his that I've seen, although I haven't actually read the one cited. I'm not so sure about the others. What does Dave Barry have to do with Ayn Rand?

Going a bit farther from the well-beaten path of popular fiction, I next tried James Branch Cabell's Jurgen. Their suggestions:

A Stay by the River - Susan Engberg See Amazon UK | US
Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn - Robert Holdstock See Amazon UK | US
12TH NIGHT - William Shakespeare See Amazon UK | US
Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy - Robert Wilson See Amazon UK | US
The River Why - David James Duncan See Amazon UK | US
Little, Big - John Crowley See Amazon UK | US
Job: A Comedy of Justice - Robert A. Heinlein See Amazon UK | US
Focault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco, William Weaver See Amazon UK | US
Small Gods - Terry Pratchett See Amazon UK | US
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco See Amazon UK | US

That's not too bad. I can see connections to most the ones that I recognize. 12th Night's hyperverbal wordplay has its parallels in Jurgen, as do the humorous take on fantasy conventions found in Terry Pratchett and the intellectual complexity of The Name of the Rose. The recommendation of Heinlein's Job is, I suppose, inevitable, since it's basically a science fictional rewriting of Jurgen.

Moderately impressive for an automated system. Added to the sidebar.

First and maybe only post about Lost

I've watched the first two seasons of this program. Although the first season was captivatingly weird and mysterious, subsequent episodes seem to be losing steam and losing direction. Instead of getting around to explaining the Black Smoke, the airplane crash, the Hatch, etc., the show seems to keep introducting subplot after subplot, new character after new character, and complication after complication purely for the sake of complication. And am I the only one who finds it annoying that the show's authors seem to have a consistent habit of killing off the attractive female characters, usually immediately after they've formed a romantic or sexual attachment? For a while the second season seemed like almost a weekly snuff show, in which one attractive female character after another would become romantically or sexually involved with someone, then promptly be killed off. I find this irritating to say the least.

I have to admire the reading tastes of the people on the ill-fated Oceanic flight, though. The books purportedly salvaged from their luggage, and seen being read by Sawyer and the other castaways throughout the show, make up an impressive collection of interesting books. Walker Percy, Ayn Rand, John Steinbeck, even Vladimir Nabokov. Not a single trashy romance novel or quick-get-rich marketing book or ranting Ann Coulter screed among them. How typical is this of the people you see in airports?

Edit: I notice that someone tried to comment and Enetation, as usual, malfunctioned. Try clicking on the number sign (#) to get to a view of this post which links to Google comments. I know, I know. When I get time.

Halliburton flees US jurisdiction

No kidding. The Wall Street Journal reports that Halliburton, the monster megacorporation that corruptly controls billions of dollars worth of US military logistical operations thanks to the influence of Its Man In Washington, is moving its headquarters to... Dubai.

This is the same outfit whose stooges in the US government darkly hint that anyone who objects to the dismantling of American's constitutional government, or its war in Iraq -- er, I mean, the American war in Iraq -- just must be on the payroll of unspecified sinister interests. Because giant multinational corporations are, like, patriotic and stuff, and anyone who objects to torture, murder, lying, and corruption on their behalf could only be doing so because they "hate America".

Uh, right. And the timing of Halliburton's flight from United States jurisdiction couldn't possibly have anything to do with a change in the direction of the political winds. And it most certainly has nothing to do with spiriting corporate records, revenues, and officers out of the United States before criminal investigations can reach them. Because they're just so darned patriotic, you know. No doubt it's purely a coincidence that Dubai is in one of relatively few wealthy developed countries that have no extradition treaty with the U.S.

Additional commentary here, here, here, etc.

If anybody out there still believes that Dick Cheney, George Bush and the rest of the War Party are "patriotic Americans", that was a pot of scalding-hot coffee that just got dumped over your head. Perhaps you should wake up and smell it.

Poetry Thursday

Since I alluded to Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market in a comment on S.'s blog, here's a link to the full text of the poem. (With illustrations!)

Commentary here and here for those who read that sort of thing.

Recent Listens

Boston Blackie: Derailed Gold Train (episode 461224) and Old 86 Is Missing (episode 470924). Episodes from OTRCAT’s compilation of railroad-themed episodes of classic radio shows.

Boston Blackie comes across in these programs as a kind of Americanized version of Lord Peter Wimsey. Certainly Wimsey must have inspired his debonaire attitude, his evident ready access to money, his logical approach to problem-solving, and his habit of getting involved in mystery cases as a kind of hobby. From our side of the Atlantic, he seems to have derived the crushing fists that every self-respecting American private eye is obliged to possess, an American accent, and the sentimental American fondness for the underdog. As the introduction proclaims, he’s an “enemy to those who make him an enemy, friend to those who have no friend.”

Interestingly, the character seems to have originated as a criminal in his earliest fictional appearance. Just one more example of how far a character concept can drift, I suppose.

In Derailed Gold Train, Blackie uses good basic investigative skills to solve a mysterious sequence of events that seem to have no logical cause or connection to each other. Unlike certain fictional detectives, he doesn’t sit around in a parlor or a penthouse apartment and intellectually ratiocinate his way to an infallible solution. When it’s necessary to identify a wrecked car, he doesn’t, say, immediately recognize it as a rare model produced in a limited edition and purchased only by a handful of ultra-wealthy customers whose names he just happens to have memorized. Instead, he pries open the wreck, takes down serial numbers, notes its mechanical characteristics, and then checks with a car dealer who can identify it from such information. It’s quite refreshing to hear a fictional detective tale in which the investigative methods actually make logical sense, and the correct answers are not necessarily obvious from the beginning. Beware of red herrings, O unwary listener!

In Old 86 Is Missing, a train has mysteriously disappeared between stations. Decades later, Clive Cussler used a similar plot device in 1981’s Night Probe!, and relied on the same inevitable solution that Blackie discovers. There is a limited number of things one can do with a stolen train, after all.

Improbable coincidences and improbably complicated criminal schemes rear their ugly heads in the plots of these episodes, and Blackie, for all his physical and intellectual prowess, seems to have a bad habit of getting himself into tight spots in which the unexpected timely arrival of the police proves very convenient indeed. But the series is enjoyable, and for the most part it plays by the unwritten rules of the honestly-written detective story.

For those who enjoy such things, Boston Blackie features a lot of incidental organ music, some of it quite good. Oddly, each episode also includes several uninterrupted minutes of energetic organ music at its close, far more than the few seconds that one would expect as a musical transition to the next program. Did the radio station keep an organist hanging around the studio to fill up whatever time the dramatic performance failed to occupy? Did they have dead air to fill because they failed to sell enough advertising on these particular dates? After a few minutes, I found myself wondering if the series should have been called Boston Blackie And The Mad Organist.

Recent Reads

Pioneer Preacher : a biographical narrative about a Baptist missionary pastor in west Texas, by Opal Leigh Berryman.

In the early 1900s, George Carroll Berryman, his wife, and their young daughter moved to La Mesa, a tiny, struggling settlement on the high and treeless plains of west Texas. In the years that followed, he and his family faced drought, disease, and despair, not to mention rowdy cowboys, horse thieves, mysterious murders, political backbiting, malicious gossip, the Ku Klux Klan, the confused amours of flighty young men and women, and the oily machinations of aggressive evangelists trying to profit from his groundbreaking missionary work. Their daughter, Opal, was there to see it all.

She acknowledges, in her comments on the back of the book jacket, that she has selectively condensed events from eight years of her family’s life in west Texas into the space of two narrative years in the book, but insists that “[T]he delineation of our life at La Mesa was pretty much as we lived it. The northers, the sandstorms, the bedbugs, the pesthouse were very real. What I have tried to show is that the hard and lawless West that has been pictured in fiction as a land of bad men was also a land of good men, who worked to make it better. This is the actual story of our lives there.”

It’s natural to compare this book to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. If anything, Pioneer Preacher is grittier and more immediate. Opal tells her story in the first person, and although she as narrator is innocent of the full meaning of much of what she describes, the reader can see the forces moving behind the events and conversations she describes. She’s privy to disagreements and arguments between her father – a liberal and tolerant man who strives to see and bring forth the potential good in all around him – and her more conventionally-minded mother. They argue, and they struggle, but it’s never in doubt that they are fundamentally and faithfully devoted to each other even when they disagree. Young Opal also indirectly observes the workings of bigotry of all kinds, racial, political and religious, in the community, as well as the threat that lawless men pose to its safety and development. Her father’s well-intentioned efforts do not always succeed, and good people sometimes suffer in ways that he cannot alleviate, but his wisdom and intentions are never in doubt so far as his daughter is concerned.

George Carroll Berryman was plainly a hero to his daughter, and her memoir is a superb account of life on the west Texas frontier. It deserves to be better known and more widely read.

New York health Nazis ban butter, meat

The much-lauded New York City ban on trans fats prohibits butter and meat. Surprise, surprise.

Under investigation? No problem, we'll just fire the prosecutor.

More on the Bush administration's policy of firing any federal prosecutor who investigates a Republican. But woe betide any prosecutor who fails to pursue a Democrat aggressively enough to suit a Republican senator! (From the NYT.)

Coming soon to a theater near you....

Paradise Lost?

Meanwhile, in Oregon,

... more news of libraries closing.

We got trouble, right here in....
... Livingston County. Certain folks are up in arms about other people's children reading Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut and Augusten Burroughs in high school English classes. And having failed to convince the school board and the population at large to obey their demands, they've adopted a new tactic.

"If it's determined that these printed materials are sexually explicit matter as defined in the statue, and the distribution of which to minors constitutes a criminal offense, whether it would be a school officer or a library or bookstore person wouldn't make a difference," said Livingston County Prosecutor David Morse. "There are no exemptions for those people."

Morse, U.S. Attorney Stephen Murphy and Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox received letters of complaint last month from Vicki Fyke of the Livingston Organization for Values in Education that assignment of four books in the schools may violate laws against distribution of pornography to minors.

Morse plans to have an answer by Monday, and Murphy referred the matter to the FBI, a move his office called "routine" but free-speech groups called "bizarre."...

The Michigan state code appears to contradict Mr. Morse, but that's not to say that the zealots and a like-minded prosecutor, or one who wishes to court their votes, couldn't make life uncomfortable for booksellers, teachers, or librarians who defy their dictates.

This particular storm's been brewing for a while. Ms. Fyke and her followers initially tried to get the school board to remove the books from the high school, and adopted this tactic only after their demands were rejected by the school board after a period of comment from parents and other people. (Fyke apparently does not children or grandchildren in local schools.)

Fortunately there seem to be folks -- including bookstore owners and library directors as well as the state branch of the ACLU -- who are willing to stand up to well-funded bullies.

Poetry Thursday (Times Two)

Cowardice Tries to Repeat, by Walter Kaufmann

Cowardice tries to repeat
throws that succeed,
seeks what is obsolete,
snug as a creed,
lacking the courage to meet
unheard-of need.

Simply by being the first,
undefiled flings,
those that are unrehearsed
are granted wings.
What is repeated is cursed:
rote never sings.


Father Feeney, by Walter Kaufmann

Outside the Church is no salvation.
With acrobatic exegesis
the Church attenuates this thesis:
non-Catholics can escape damnation.

Said Feeney: You have to belong
to Mother Church or go to hell.
Said Mother Church: You infidel;
keep quiet, Feeney, you are wrong.

The Father claimed his view was true
and backed up by one pope at least;
his archbishop defrocked the priest,
the Jesuits expelled him too.

Then he received an invitation
to come and clear himself in Rome.
It's forged, he said, and stayed at home.
The answer: excommunication.

Now even Feeney ought to know,
if he is right then he is wrong,
for he himself does not belong:
where does he think that he will go?