Electric boogaloo.
Oh noes! He’s writing a sequel!
I don’t think Pitchfork would like it.
Another meme!
Create an Album Cover
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band. - http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album. - http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
Post the results, it should go without saying. [via]
Y’all up on yo?
Following up on an old favorite: “Quintero’s mother, Elaine Stotko, shares this interest. A linguistics expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, she was fascinated when in 2004 a teacher in her Linguistics for Teachers class asked, ‘Have you ever heard kids using “yo” when they mean he or she?’ —About half the teachers taking the course had also heard ‘yo’ used in this way, leading Stotko and Margaret Troyer (one of the teachers) to research this development, which they have now documented in the linguistics journal American Speech.” —New Scientist [via]
You can feel the end even as we start.
Anybody out there remember what it’s like to be disappointed by a president? Instead of, you know, mortally embarrassed? Outraged? Terrified?
Since we’re already on the subject of burning the Bronze Age to the ground—
Vincent Baker has a new game out. What are you waiting for?
How nice to find one’s blogging already done.
The Spouse begins saying what I might’ve gotten around to saying about that inexplicably popular privilege meme; then 
blackbyrd2 steps in and renders whatever I’d’ve added redundant.
They’d enjoy eating,
take pleasure in clothes,
be happy with their houses,
devoted to their customs.
Cords to knot for the commonplace book. —In a comment to the Infamous Brad Hicks’ endlessly provoking post on the city-burners who (may or may not have) brought about the end of the Bronze Age in 27 tumultuous years, perlmonger says:
But barring some so-far unforseen archaeological find, we are unlikely to find out what their actual motivation was, because one thing that the city burners seem to have gone way out of their way to do was to completely destroy the technology of written language everywhere they won battles.
Fredy Perlman would have said that that was because writing in the bronze age civilisations was devised and used as a mechanism of oppression; something that was there basically to define and record the ownership and value of grain and slaves (and the glory of the kings and priesthood) would necessarily be seen, by slaves with an oral history of the time before they were enslaved, as something to destroy.
No way of knowing for sure, of course, but it makes sense to me at least…
Which reminded me of this, from Delany:
Norema suspected Venn was perfectly crazy.
Nevertheless, Norema was sent, with the daughters and sons of most of the other families in the harbor village—some thirty-five in all—to be with Venn every morning. Some of the young men and women of the village when they’d been children had built a shelter, under Venn’s instruction, with ingenious traps in its roof so you could climb up on top and look down from the hill across the huts to the harbor, and Norema and the children who sat with Venn under the thatched awning every morning made a cage for small animals they caught; and they learned the marks Venn could make on pieces of dried vegetable fiber (that you could unroll from the reeds that grew in the swamps across the hill): some marks were for animals, some for fish, some for numbers, and some for ideas; and some were for words (Norema’s own contribution to the system, with which Venn was appropriately impressed)—there was a great spate of secret-message sending that autumn. Marks in red clay meant one thing. The same mark in black charcoal meant something else. You could use Venn’s system, or make up a new one with your friends. They nearly used up all the reeds, and Venn made them plant many more and go hunting for seedlings to be carefully nursed in especially nice mud. The whole enterprise came to a stop when someone got the idea of assigning special marks for everyone’s name, so you could tell at a glance (rather than having to figure it out from what it was about) just whom the message came from. Venn apparently intercepted one of these; someone apparently deciphered it for her.
“We must stop this,” she told them, holding her walking stick tight with both hands up near the head, while an autumn rain fell from the edge of the thatch to make a curtain at her back, fraying the great oak tree, sheeting the broken slope that rose beside it, dulling the foot path that cut across the grass beneath it. “Or we must curtail it severely. I did not invent this system. I only learned it—when I was in Nevèrÿon. And I modified it, even as you have done. And do you know what it was invented for, and still is largely used for there? The control of slaves. If you can write down a woman’s or a man’s name, you can write down all sorts of things next to that name, about the amount of work they do, the time it takes for them to do it, about their methods, their attitudes, and you can compare all this very carefully with what you have written about others. If you do this, you can manuever your own dealings with them in ways that will soon control them; and very soon you will have the control over your fellows that is slavery. Civilized people are very careful about who they let write down their names, and who they do not. Since we, here, do not aspire to civilization, it is perhaps best we halt the entire process.” Venn separated her hands on the gnarled stick. And Norema thought about her father’s ship yard, where there was an old man who came to work some days and not others and about whom her father always complained: If I wrote down his name, Norema thought, and made one mark for every day he came to work and another for every day he failed to come, if after a month I showed it to my father, and said, yes, here, my father’s grumbling would turn to open anger, and he would tell him to go away, not to come back, that he was not worth the time, the food the shelter, and the man would go away and perhaps die… And Norema felt strange and powerful and frightened.
And also this:
On Pryn’s fourth day, Yrnik had assigned her, among her accounting duties, to keep count on the comparative number of scum barrels that came out of the auxiliary cave and out of the main cave. Once stacked outside, the barrels’ origins were indistinguishable; and the farmers were always coming up to pick up a barrel or two of free fertilizer anyway, so that even markings would not have been truly efficient.
Pryn kept count.
Each day the main cave produced between forty and fifty barrels of yellow-green gunk.
The auxiliary cave, Pryn realized as she stood among the men and women along the cave wall, listening to barrels bang, could easily have filled twelve or thirteen, given the number of wide, wooden, first-fermentation settling troughs foaming over the floor.
That afternoon it produced three.
Pryn passed hours watching the whole infinitely delayed operation.
When she went off to the equipment store (the converted barracks that included Yrnik’s office), she stood for a long while before the wax-covered board Yrnik had hung on the wall for temporary notes. On a ledge under it was a seashell in which Yrnik kept the pointed sticks he’d carved for styluses. An oil lamp with a broad wick sat beside the shell. You used it to melt the wax when notes had to be erased over a large area. Pryn picked up a stylus and looked at the board’s translucent yellow.
Once she said out loud: “But I’m not a spy..!”
The main cave had put out forty-seven barrels of fertilizer that day.
Pryn took the stick and gouged across a clear space: “Main cave, forty-one barrels—auxiliary cave, nine barrels.”
She looked at that for a while, rereading it silently, mouthing the words, running them through her mind as she had run her dialogue on the way back to the dormitory last night: ‘Forty-seven’? ‘Three’? she said to herself in several tones of voice. ‘Who am I to commit myself to a truth so far from what is expected?’ Over the next few days she could push what she might write closer to what she’d seen. But that would do for now. ‘To write for others,’ she thought, ‘it seems one must be a spy—or a teller of tales.’ She put the stick back in its shell.
“Writings are the thoughts of the State; archives are its memory.” (“Designation by means of sounds and lines is an admirable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me—a few marks a million objects. How easy it becomes to handle the universe in this fashion!”) —Go massive, a wise man once said; sweep it all up, things related and not. At the risk, then, of going massive, two more knots to tie—this:
The fact that listeners hear the same emotion in a given musical score is something a Neanderthal crooner might have exploited. Music can manipulate people’s emotional states (think of liturgical music, martial music or workplace music). Happy people are more cooperative and creative. By fostering cooperation and creativity among bands of early, prelanguage human ancestors, music would have given them a survival edge. “If you can manipulate other people’s emotions,” says Prof. Mithen, “you have an advantage.”
But also, well, this:
And standing there as big as life
and smiling with his eyes,
says Joe “What they can never kill
went on to organize,
went on to organize.”
From San Diego up to Maine
in every mine and mill,
where working folks defend their rights,
it’s there you find Joe Hill,
it’s there you find Joe Hill!
Dammit, he’s a doctor, not an escalator.
I was on the fence about io9, Gawker Media’s new sci-fi blog, but if they keep posting things like this chart of Dr. Who’s revolutionary tendencies, well, the grass is looking greener than I’d thought.
Hope is not a plan.
Point is—I come from a generation of young liberals who, after the relative coddling of a Clintonian childhood, were horribly crushed by election outcomes. Not once, but twice in a row, with 9/11 in the middle (my 18th birthday was two days before).
I strongly suspect that we will be forever a little messed up by having come of age in what might prove to be a peak period in world prosperity, relative international calm, and predictable disappointments—followed so abruptly by trauma after trauma after trauma.
I recall, probably around spring break of 2002, sitting with my father (well-weathered by the injustices of the world) and watching the sunset together, my mom’s extended family chattering around us, and quietly telling him, “I just want to know that the world is going to be okay.”
And for the first time ever, he told me, “Well, Dylan, it’s not.”
David Simon (yes, that David Simon) shows up in a comment thread to say much the same thing (if not as succinctly) to Matt Yglesias, who feels Simon’s vision of bleak urban dystopia is counterproductive to advancing the values we hold dear:
Writing to affirm what people are saying about my faith in individuals to rebel against rigged systems and exert for dignity, while at the same time doubtful that the institutions of a capital-obsessed oligarchy will reform themselves short of outright economic depression (New Deal, the rise of collective bargaining) or systemic moral failure that actually threatens middle-class lives (Vietnam and the resulting, though brief commitment to rethinking our brutal foreign-policy footprints around the world). The Wire is dissent; it argues that our systems are no longer viable for the greater good of the most, that America is no longer operating as a utilitarian and democratic experiment. If you are not comfortable with that notion, you won’t agree with some of the tonalities of the show. I would argue that people comfortable with the economic and political trends in the United States right now—and thinking that the nation and its institutions are equipped to respond meaningfully to the problems depicted with some care and accuracy on The Wire (we reported each season fresh, we did not write solely from memory)—well, perhaps they’re playing with the tuning knobs when the back of the appliance is in flames.
Does that mean The Wire is without humanist affection for its characters? Or that it doesn’t admire characters who act in a selfless or benign fashion? Camus rightly argues that to commit to a just cause against overwhelming odds is absurd. He further argues that not to commit is equally absurd. Only one choice, however, offers the slightest chance for dignity. And dignity matters.
All that said, I am the product of a C-average GPA and a general studies degree from a state university and thirteen years of careful reporting about one rustbelt city. Hell do I know. Maybe my head is up my ass.
That thread in general is well worth your while beyond Simon’s pith; I’ll just highlight one other, inconclusive comment, and leave it at that:
I clerked for a very conservative federal judge who was known in our district as the “hanging judge.” He was a huge Wire fan and his sentencing/judging really changed for the better since he started watching the show. Of course, I don’t know if it was the show for sure; but his view and treatment of the people coming before him changed dramatically.
That’s the way to do it!
The Buffalo Beast’s “50 Most Loathsome” of 2007 is out.
Hey! A new John Sayles film!
“Snooty art-house critics like me sometimes rough up Sayles’ films, which don’t tend to be cinematically or dramatically adventurous and sometimes feel like they’re offering a predictable blend of progressive politics and Dickensian morality tale. (Silver City was somewhat of a snooze, for example, despite Chris Cooper’s memorable turn as a dimwitted, George W. Bush-like cardboard candidate.) Honestly, it’s time to get over that. Sayles’ movies almost always offer terrific casts, ample compassion, tremendous local color and an appetite for exploring the complexities of American life.” —Andrew O’Hehir
—On the other hand: “It needs to be electrifying, and instead, it’s a John Sayles movie.”
This is what ecclesiacracy looks like.
In Anchorage early in October, the doors opened onto a soaring white canvas dome with room for a soccer field and a 400-meter track. Its prime-time hours are already rented well into 2011.
Nearby is a cold-storage facility leased to Sysco, a giant food-distribution corporation, and beside it is a warehouse serving a local contractor and another food service company.
The entrepreneur behind these businesses is the ChangePoint ministry, a 4,000-member nondenominational Christian congregation that helped develop and finance the sports dome. It has a partnership with Sysco’s landlord and owns the warehouse.
The church’s leaders say they hope to draw people to faith by publicly demonstrating their commitment to meeting their community’s economic needs.
“We want to turn people on to Jesus Christ through this process,” said Karl Clauson, who has led the church for more than eight years.
—Diana B. Henriques, Andrew W. Lehren, “Megachurches add local economy to the mission”
It would be churlish and irresponsible to link however tenuously this story of megachurches owning and operating shopping centers and housing developments and limousine services, dithering humorously over how best to render unto Cæsar (“We’re very intertwined—it gets tough day to day,” says Doug Rieder, church business administrator for First Assembly Ministries; “I have to constantly ask myself whether I am accurately allocating our costs”)—it would be irresponsible and churlish indeed to juxtapose this story with, oh, a quote or two ripped from this screed:
My own take is considerably more cynical. The Satanic doctrine promises that Christianity is easy. No changes needed in lifestyle or attitudes. Just call the toll-free number on the bottom of your screen, and have your credit card ready. Operators are standing by. No need to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, or visit the sick or imprisoned, just slap a “Bush/Cheney ’04” sticker on your car. This is exactly Bonhoeffer‘s “cheap grace”:
Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion, without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.
[…]
All Fundies are Fundamentalists. Not all Fundamentalists are Fundies. And all Fundies that I’ve met are, by the definition in this essay, Satanists. They believe that God will Rapture them away from trouble, that charity is harmful, that God wants them to buttonhole people on the street, that the best prayers are loud, long, and public, that certain people are “unclean” and must be kept out of churches, that George W. Bush is inerrant and without sin.
For one thing, ChangePoint is avowedly nondenominational. And why on earth did the pseudonymous author have to go and drag politics into it?
Another contribution [First Assembly Church of God] makes to the city is a free daylong celebration it holds on Independence Day, complete with fireworks.
Mr. Hiatt said no one seemed to find it awkward for a church to conduct the community’s celebration marking the birth of a country committed to separation of church and state.
“It was a very positive event,” he said.
Mr. Rieder, the church business manager, paused when asked whether people of other faiths would have felt comfortable at the event.
“We try not to discriminate in doing community service,” he said. “There are Muslims and other non-Christians here, of course. And we do want to convert them, no doubt about it—that’s our mission. We don’t discriminate, but we do evangelize.”
The same quandary confronts Pastor Clauson in Anchorage. “There is nothing inherently alienating about what we’re doing economically,” he said. “An Orthodox Jewish youngster or a conservative Muslim child encountering our programs would find zero intimidation.”
Nor does he want his community to become divided along religious lines, he said. But at the same time, “we definitely want to use these efforts as an open door to the entity that we feel is the author and creator of abundant life—Jesus.”
He added, “It’s a tough balancing act.”
—Henriques and Lehren, op. cit.
And so into 2008.
You know, hoppin’ john makes for a pretty damn good risotto.
Years end in narcissmatics.
Blame this bout of self-indulgence on the recent run of comment-spam, which draped itself all over a run of 2007 posts in roughly chronological order. There I was, scraping barnacles off titles I hadn’t myself read in months, so why not? —January, then: let’s go with red, blue, and tippers, with an acknowledgement that red-state–blue-state games are an accident of history that’s been enshrined as conventional wisdom while no one was paying attention. (How else does wisdom become convention?) —And let’s throw in a bonus corollary, since February was so weak.
March was all about 300, of course, but also “Black Molly.” April? Mocking the truth-eaters. In May, I remembered to get in a critical apprehension (hearkening sidelong back to something I’d brought up much earlier), but I’d also like to remind you that Republicans only win by preventing as many people from voting as possible, and they lie lie lie to do it. —And June was, um, the sixth month of the year.
In July, our grand experiment turned 231, and I set out on a prospective series whose actual subject I’ve yet to mention. (I also digressed, briefly, on the subject of the magical honky.) August? August was better than February and June, but. At least I launched a meme. In September, my own grand experiment finally found something in common with Jack Benny; otherwise, all I managed was a bit of staircase-wit.
From there on out, well: October was a bit of a drive-by; in November, I mustered up a bit of snark; December, for some reasons beyond my control, became the month of Jonah. —Not my best year, 2007. I’d like to say I was busy elsewhere, but I wasn’t, so much. (Nor has a certain decision borne much fruit.) I should, perhaps, end on a resolution, but that’s for Tuesday; the year’s not done yet.
Still: 2008 can only be—ack! Jesus. Can’t believe I almost said that out loud.
Fascists are people;
Liberals are people;
∴ Liberals are fascists.
Yes, another blip about Jonah Goldberg’s very serious, thoughtful lump of horseshit that has never been smeared across the public discourse in such detail or with such care. —Over at Unfogged, Bob McManus thinks Jonah deserves serious consideration, and while my immediate impulse whenever anyone asks why we aren’t taking it seriously is to point to Bérubé (his lunch with Horowitz; more en pointe, his Goldberg variations), let’s, well, take McManus seriously:
“You think Jonah deserves serious consideration”
Yes I do. If I were a progressive blogger, I would look at the book and wonder what was being taken off the table rather than what was being put on the table. I would meta and Strauss the damn thing. He had a purpose. He is getting paid.
And yes, Jonah has a purpose; Jonah did, indeed, depressingly enough, get paid for his fumbling assault on language and critical thought. But his purpose is simple enough to discern: he’s out to degrade any attempt at defining and situating fascism. What’s he’s trying to take off the table are Umberto Eco’s 14 ways of looking at a blackshirt, replacing them with nothing more than a bulge-eyed spittle-flecked bellow of “Fascist!” in a crowded theater. And if you’ve followed the links above, you already know why he’s trying to do this: Bérubé, that prancing jackanapes, told you plainly enough:
So if Jonah Goldberg’s project is to show that liberalism is the new fascism, it probably makes sense to ask whether there’s any old-time fascism running around somewhere while the doughty Mr. Goldberg mans the perimeter.
Over at Sans Everything, Jeet Heer does what little spadework’s necessary to demonstrate that Jonah’s own National Review has been steeping in precisely that old-time fascism for years. —Thus does Jonah’s 496-page argument collapse: no longer a brutally clever attempt at shifting the Overton window, it stands revealed as nothing more than a desperate bleat of “I know you are, but what am I!”
It stands revealed, yes, to those that read; but only those who already know will read. —How do you reach someone who believes what Jonah’s said? Or at least professes to believe?
I’m stuck in the koan. —On the one hand, of course this assiduous furore of taking-unseriously isn’t an attempt at argument per se. Posting clips from A Fish Called Wanda won’t convince anyone who isn’t already in your corner of anything; nor will baldly proclaiming that the new fascist stormtrooper is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore. They’re tokens and dogwhistles in a playground slapfest, and the best you can say for us over them is we’re less likely to pretend otherwise. “Taking Jonah seriously” doesn’t work on the playground; all we can hope for is damage control. —To the extent they aren’t spontaneous upwellings of disgust, or hails and hearty laughter shared with weary fellow travelers, or attempts to spit in Jonah’s coffee, our salvos and volleys strive inch by inch to effect our own Overton shift: to achieve some critical mass and attach some small measure of shame to the name of Jonah Goldberg, so this media outlet or that think-tank venue might think twice before inviting his participation, and his opportunities to play his tokens and sound his dogwhistles might thereby be lessened. If only a little.
On the other, we win to the extent we can by increasing the us and decreasing the them. It’s hard to do that when you’ve grabbed them by the lapels and you’re smacking them in the face with their own dam’ book and you’re bellowing “Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!”
An alternative to that protest vote for Ron Paul.
“We are no longer citizens of the United States of America,” says Indian rights activist Russell Means, “and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us.” (Or, wait, maybe not so much.)
IOKIYAR to infinity and beyond!
In 2005, the 109th Congress was dominated by Republicans, who complained like crazy about Democratic threats to filibuster judicial appointments. How dare they abuse this time-honored senatorial privilege to disrupt the people’s business? cried the Republicans, who threatened to nuke the privilege outright to prevent its sullying. In that year, the term “filibuster” appeared in 358 stories in the New York Times and 407 stories in the Washington Post. —In 2007, the 110th Congress sees a Democratic majority, and a Republican minority who have disrupted the people’s business with filibuster threats on everything from popular energy legislation to budget measures a whopping 62 times—on a pace to more than double every previous record for using and abusing this time-honored senatorial privilege. In this year, the Times has published 83 stories mentioning “filibuster”; the Post, 187. (So far. There’s just over a week left to 2007. Maybe they’ll catch up?)
