Don’t dream it, be it.
I don’t know how Kazu pulled it off: somehow, he got hold of Scott McCloud’s comics retrospective from 2054.
I’ve seen preview pages—he’s only being slightly hyperbolic. Flight (vol. 1; vol. 2 is in the works) is a 208-page color anthology of short works by some of today’s (say it with me) best and brightest: Kazu Kibuishi, Vera Brosgol, Derek Kirk Kim, Clio Chiang, Jen Wang, Erika Moen, Dylan Meconis, Hope Larson, Bill Mudron, Rad Sechrist, etc. etc. —I’ve nattered on about some of these folks before; this is nothing more or less than the next turn in the widening gyre.
It’s going to be an important book—not, y’know, an important book, full of meatily literary comics that wring the meaning of life through the juxtaposition of pictorial and other images in a deliberate sequence; no. For one thing, it’s an anthology, which is always hit-or-miss (though my hits are usually your misses, and neither of us can figure out why she liked the thing with the cat). And there’s featherweight pieces in here: beautiful and charming and evanescent as a soap bubble, pop! Which is fine: it never set out to be an important book, after all.
Nah, it’s going to be important because it’s going to serve notice. It’s going to make a lot of people realize how far along things really are. It might even do some polarizing.
Scott cites four reasons as to why this book is going to be important right now. The second reason, “tribal shift,” does a pretty good job of encompassing the rest. (You could say the same about the web striking back, the metabolization of manga, or the changing face of comics, if you wanted. Me, I’m sticking with the tribes.) —He’s referring to his four tribes map, and if Erika hadn’t let her photo archives slide off into link rot, I’d show you the picture of the placemat he sketched it on for us in Seattle. There’s broadly speaking four ways you can split the [insert creative enterprise here] community: animists, classicists, formalists, and iconoclasts, with the animists across the table from the formalists, and the classicists across from the iconoclasts. (You can line out the semiotic square if you want.) —Sure, there’s other ways you can split them; there’s dozens, hundreds, thousands. So what? This is the map we’re dealing with right now, and with this map, Scott says (and aw, heck, I’ll just gack the thing whole):
In the decade prior to Flight, most of the progressive wing of comics was dominated by the Iconoclast and Formalist Tribes. Walking through the turn-of-the-century expositions devoted to “small press” comics, visitors were greeted on one side of the aisle by roughly drawn “zines” about disaffected white youths with bad jobs, failed relationships and genital warts; and on the other by strange, multidirectional experiments and oddly shaped cardboard constructions with day-glow silkscreen covers. I loved both types of comics (and make no apologies for my alleged complicity in the latter) but by 2004, a change was clearly in the air.
The return of the other two tribes to independent comics found its focus in Flight. The Animists’ love of pure transparent storytelling and the Classicists’ attention to craft and enduringly beautiful settings was evident on many of the anthology’s pages. While so many of the previous generation’s revolutionaries had put raw honesty and innovation over straightforward plots and surface gloss, the Flight contributors tried to have it all—and in several cases succeeded. Flight gave readers something to read and something beautiful to look at again and again. For all the innovations of the rebel tribes, it was this kind of appeal to a broader readership that comics desperately needed in 2004. These artists delivered.
Top Shelf and Drawn & Quarterly and Kramer’s Ergot and Blab! and Zero Zero and Centrifugal Bumblepuppy on back to the grandparents of the iconoclast and formalist tribes, Weirdo and Raw: these anthologies have done incredible, unmistakable things for comics, and it’s impossible to imagine the medium without them, and you’d have to pry my grubby, well-read copies from my cold, dead hands (unless you asked nicely, and then I’d say sure), and Flight is the first major comics anthology I could hand off to my mother, my boss, the woman at the next table, the kid on the bus, you, anybody, and feel pretty damn sure they’re going to sit up and say wow. Oh, I see. Oh, I get it.
Comics as an industry has been its own sequestered, ghettoed hot-house for a very long time, locking comics the medium away in direct-market shops out of the sight of the casual walk-in, held back by the overwhelming popularity of the superhero from people who just don’t give a damn about superheroes. Classicists work in the footsteps of great superhero cartoonists; animists summon up the bubbling Saturday-morning glee, all in color for a dime; and maybe iconoclasts work the rich veins first tapped by the underground cartoonists of the ’60s, and formalists delight in a really spooky borderland between word and image—but they’re still laboring in the shadow of the superhero, and they’re still mostly found in the same shops off the beaten path, snarling at the four-color hand that feeds them.
It’s getting better, sure: it has been, for years, but there’s still plenty of otherwise bright people out there who insist, say, that the swelling popularity of translated manga is just a passing fad, and not a hint of what comics can do when they open up to a broader palette of genres, and put themselves on bookshelves where anyone can find them. —Though that’s unfair: it’s too easy to say the people who agree with me get it, and the people who don’t just don’t. And just about everybody gets it: comics have to open up or die. Comics have to reach out or wither away. Comics can’t just be a monoculture of superheroes. We all know this, and we’re opening up and reaching out, and it isn’t a one-trick pony, not nearly so much as it used to be. Almost everybody gets it. It’s the system that doesn’t: everything from editorial direction to publishing prejudices, from the monopolistic distributor to the retailer’s shelving decisions, from an otaku’s culling of their monthly buy list to a reviewer’s hype—all the hundreds of thousands of little decisions made without thinking, honed by habit to fit a market that sells one thing moderately well to a captive audience. There are good reasons (and bad, and head-smackingly stupid) as to why that system came about, but that’s what we’re all trying to fight, or at least change: habit, and that’s why it’s so damned hard.
Flight is a huge, full-color package winging in from the everything outside that habit. It’s the manga fans, who love comics, but came at them by way of Japan (with a healthy injection of Europop, by way of France). It’s the animation freaks, who find in comics a way to build the worlds they’ve loved on screen on their own, without the expense and (quite so much) labor. It’s the web cartoonists, who’ve built their own gift-economy shadow industry online, utterly outside the purview of a micro-mass market that’s only had room for one genre. It’s anybody who loves the way comics opens up whole new worlds, every panel a shadowbox peering into perfectly personal universes, and here’s where I check Dylan Horrocks’ essay again without doing the heavy lifting needed to engage it fully, but hey: it’s anyone who sees the worlds that comics can build, but didn’t care much for the one (bright and garish and exhilarating and terrifically fun world, sure) that we’ve built with it so far. That’s what went into Flight, and that’s what Flight is bringing into the direct market, and that’s why Scott’s introduction doesn’t read so much like hype. —Well. Except for the bit about Claire Danes. But aside from that.
(It’s solicited in May’s Diamond catalog, by the way, and slated to hit the shelves the weekend of the San Diego Comic-Con, 22 – 25 July. Until then, you can whet your appetite with the preview pages.)
“Not even the sun will transgress his orbit but the Erinyes, the ministers of justice, overtake him.”
With purity, holiness and beneficence I will pass my life and practice my art. Except for the prudent correction of an imminent danger, I will neither treat any patient nor carry out any research on any human being without the valid informed consent of the subject or the appropriate legal protector thereof, understanding that research must have as its purpose the furtherance of the health of that individual. Into whatever patient setting I enter, I will go for the benefit of the sick and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief or corruption and further from the seduction of any patient.
—from the modern rendition of the Hippocratic Oath
Doctors or other health care providers could not be disciplined or sued if they refuse to treat gay patients under legislation passed Wednesday by the Michigan House.
The bill allows health care workers to refuse service to anyone on moral, ethical or religious grounds.
The Republican dominated House passed the measure as dozens of Catholics looked on from the gallery. The Michigan Catholic Conference, which pushed for the bills, hosted a legislative day for Catholics on Wednesday at the state Capitol.
The bills now go the Senate, which also is controlled by Republicans.
The Conscientious Objector Policy Act would allow health care providers to assert their objection within 24 hours of when they receive notice of a patient or procedure with which they don’t agree. However, it would prohibit emergency treatment to be refused.
Three other three bills that could affect LGBT health care were also passed by the House Wednesday which would exempt a health insurer or health facility from providing or covering a health care procedure that violated ethical, moral or religious principles reflected in their bylaws or mission statement. [...]
Paul A. Long, vice president for public policy for the Michigan Catholic Conference, said the bills promote the constitutional right to religious freedom.
“Individual and institutional health care providers can and should maintain their mission and their services without compromising faith-based teaching,” he said in a written statement.
—“Michigan Preparing To Let Doctors Refuse To Treat Gays,”
365Gay.com staff
What god or power divine hears thee, breaker of oaths and every law of hospitality?
Fix me another one a them baloney sandwiches.
Hot damn, but the new Loretta Lynn album is gonna fuckin’ rock.
(And I say this as someone who’s missed the whole White Stripes thing pretty much completely.)
Take that, Massachusetts.
With a two-steps-forward-one-step-back ruling, Oregon has become the first state in the union to recognize same-sex marriages. —Multnomah County Court Judge Frank Bearden ruled as follows:
- because Oregon state law does not allow for same-sex marriages, Multnomah County must stop issuing same-sex marriage licenses;
- because Oregon state law in this regard clearly violates Oregon’s constitution, the legislature must remedy this blatant discrimination within 90 days of the start of the next session;
- because the social benefits of marriage are intangible, a state-sanctioned civil union that guaranteed all the legal benefits of marriage would be an acceptable remedy;
- if the legislature cannot remedy this blatant discrimination in 90 days, Multnomah County may resume issuing same-sex marriage licenses; but
- no matter what, the state is required to recognize those same-sex marriages already performed.
So Multnomah County must rejoin the rest of the country however temporarily in the 20th century. And there’s a lot of legal dancing to avoid remembering the inherent inequalities of separate-but-equal, whether it’s water fountains or familial compacts. And we’re still waiting for the Oregon Supreme Court to weigh in—there’s many a possible slip yet betwixt this cup and lip. But thousands of same-sex couples were just done right by the state. Congratulations! —You take ’em where you can get ’em. (Me, I got most of this from the One True b!X and Ampersand. While you’re at Alas, by the way, check out this hoot-worthy flip-flop from a foe of same-sex marriage, confronted with a possible legislative solution:
“This is something that should be decided in the courts before it ever comes here,” said Assemblyman Pat Bates, R-Laguna Niguel, who voted no.
(Massachusetts begins wedding same-sex couples on 16 May. Brimstone has yet to fall. Heterosexual marriage is as strong as it ever was. Civilization shows no signs of collapsing. —Over this issue, at least. Hey! Look! Somebody said “Shit!” on television!)
Would the last one out turn off the lights?
No offense intended to Emma, but these are seventeen of the most chilling words I’ve ever read:
Emma, did you see the sample text from the Garfield movie novelization before Amazon took it down?
Though if you scroll upthread a bit, you’ll see Mr. Ford plying what he plies best, so all is perhaps not lost. (The ostensible subject is also worth your while, though its ostensible subject is not, which, I suppose, is the point, really.)
We are all Frank Grimes now.
Oh, I, I can’t stand it any longer. This whole country is insane. Insane, I tell you! Daahh! Aaah! I can be crazy too! Look at me, I am a partisan hack, just like the Bush administration! I can obstruct the 9/11 commission and selectively release classified documents to make critics look bad! Give me votes! Ooh, I totally skimp on securing ports and supporting first responders, but nobody minds! I’m secretly plotting a war without telling Congress or the Secretary of State. Support me! Now I’m sending the armed forces into battle with armor they bought on eBay. But it doesn’t matter, because I’m the Bush administration! I don’t need to worry about jobs or the economy or health care, ’cause someone else will suffer. D’oh! D’oh! D’oh! Ha ha! I’m better than okay! I’m the Bush administration! I’m the worst presidency ever! Time to go openly rig the world’s oil market for an October surprise. What’s this? A lazy mediasphere ruled by an embedded punditocracy? Well, I don’t need to worry about the fact that I speak French fluently, because I’m—
Sorry. Something just snapped. (All due apologies to John Swartzwelder, who wrote “Homer’s Enemy.”)
You think I’m not serious?
Look: I hear one more person call a press conference a “presser,” I’m gonna get up and start busting heads (in some metaphorical, prescriptivist fashion). —Leave that kind of talk to Variety, would you? They manage to pull it off, though God alone knows how. Anybody else, it looks fucking ridiculous.
Memery index.
- Number of trackback pings: 18
- Number of links spotted by Technorati: 19
- Number of people who mutated meme by leaving fifth sentences sans instructions in comments rather than posting to their own journal: 67 (hereabouts)
- Languages spotted: English, Italian, French, German, Swedish
- Number of people who mistakenly ascribed this blog as the originator of the meme: 8
(But I lost count. I gacked it from Elkins. She plucked it with some mutation from the Happy Potterer. And so on. A zygote is just a meme’s way of making another meme.) - Amount traffic jumped once meme was Memepooled: 488%
- Number of short fiction pieces written incorporating fifth sentences from other people’s posts: 1
Thoughtfully, he sipped the hot, bitter liquid.
There’s a “Lyttle Lytton” contest! —Since 1983, the “official” Bulwer-Lytton contest has been awarding prizes for the best first sentences of the worst (thankfully nonexistent) novels imaginable, and while I still doff my hat in awe at the majesty of the very first winner:
The camel died quite suddenly on the second day, and Selena fretted sulkily and, buffing her already impeccable nails—not for the first time since the journey began—pondered snidely if this would dissolve into a vignette of minor inconveniences like all the other holidays spent with Basil.
—I think I’m starting to agree with Mr. Cadre: they’re really starting to go on too long. Granted, the ur-sentence is guilty as charged:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
—but recent winners in their flabbiness are nonetheless violating the spirit of the thing, all-too-consciously setting up tics to be mocked rather than aped, or devolving into the sorts of puns that are grounds for manslaughter in 17 states:
The corpse exuded the irresistible aroma of a piquant, ancho chili glaze enticingly enhanced with a hint of fresh cilantro as it lay before him, coyly garnished by a garland of variegated radicchio and caramelized onions, and impishly drizzled with glistening rivulets of vintage balsamic vinegar and roasted garlic oil; yes, as he surveyed the body of the slain food critic slumped on the floor of the cozy, but nearly empty, bistro, a quick inventory of his senses told corpulent Inspector Moreau that this was, in all likelihood, an inside job.
—as a for instance, or:
Paul Revere had just discovered that someone in Boston was a spy for the British, and when he saw the young woman believed to be the spy’s girlfriend in an Italian restaurant he said to the waiter, “Hold the spumoni—I’m going to follow the chick an’ catch a Tory.”
Ack. Please. (Though 2000’s grand prize winner is quite good: “The heather-encrusted Headlands, veiled in fog as thick as smoke in a crowded pub, hunched precariously over the moors, their rocky elbows slipping off land’s end, their bulbous, craggy noses thrust into the thick foam of the North Sea like bearded old men falling asleep in their pints.”) But! I, for one, applaud the Lyttle Lytton’s stern but fair restriction: craft the best first sentence for the worst novel imaginable in 25 words or less. You’ve got to admire the economy of the Lyttle Lytton sample sentence:
Jennifer stood there, quietly ovulating.
Tennis being much more fun with a net. —The bad news, I’m afraid, is that the cut-off for participating in 2004’s contest was midnight on Wednesday. The good news is the winners have been posted. Those who’ve heard me rant about my writing peeves will a) recognize the title of this entry and b) understand why I wish the grand prize had gone to this particular contestant:
“Tasty waffle?” Jim suggested alluringly, prodding me with the aforementioned breakfast food.
Glorious, ennit?
A complaint.
So I’m zipping through my Bloglines list on my morning break and The Minor Fall, The Major Lift has a squib pointing to a Guardian article or maybe an interview or something about that guy from the Brass Eye. I think. See, I followed the link and found this notice that, well, since MediaGuardian.co.uk has slaved away putting virtual brick on virtual brick to build its reputation as the UK’s leading media news website, and by golly they want to maintain this reputation come hell or high water, they are planning to introduce registration starting March 11. Now, I was not until this moment aware of said reputation. —And on the one hand, I usually click away from registration notices, since I find them tedious, an unconscionable impediment to my flitting about the web on a morning break looking for diverting nuggets of infotainment quickly consumed and easily forgotten, and actively painful. But it is a profile or maybe a puff piece about that guy from the Brass Eye, maybe. And they promise the registration will be as quick and painless as possible. So I give them my email address and I make up a password and I get this notice saying that I need to validate my account with them; they’ve sent me some email, and all I have to do is respond to it.
Sigh. This is more effort than I really want to put into skimming a mild rewrite of a BBC press release, even if it is about the guy from the Brass Eye, as I think it might be. But. In for a penny, etc. So I bring up my email.
Bupkes.
Okay. Fine. Maybe it takes a minute. Yahoo has its quirks. So I skim through a couple more links off Bloglines and then check my email again.
Still with the bupkes.
I think you can see the punchline from here. My break is pretty much over and I’ve still not heard anything from the Guardian and I still don’t know what’s up with an as-yet unnamed person who might have had something to do with the Brass Eye once, and by the time the email does show up in my in box I’ll be all, what? What is this about? The MediaGuardian what? Why do they have my email address?
Yeah, I know. You should have such problems.
300 pieces of a certain length, loosely joined.
If you aren’t reading Snarkout every time Steve Cook posts a new entry, well: his archives now have a nice round 300 link-rich essaylettes on the unexpected origins of the seemingly mundane and the tantalizingly abstruse, and the surprising connections between them. What are you waiting for?
Congratulations, Mr. Cook—now get back to work.
Oh, God, I need a drink.
On the bus on the way home the driver was listening to The Press Conference. I couldn’t hear everything, but I heard enough: our president just said that we went to war in Iraq because we told Saddam Hussein in no uncertain terms to disarm, and he didn’t do it.
I’m so sorry. I’m so, so fucking sorry.
Billmon points us to criticalviewer’s Cliff Notes. I think I need another drink.
Braiding.
Perhaps the most singular thing about Tom Waits as an artist—the thing that makes him the anti-Picasso—is the way he has braided his creative life into his home life with such wit and grace. This whole idea runs contrary to our every stereotype about how geniuses need to work—about their explosive interpersonal relationships, about the lives (especially the women’s lives) they must consume in order to feed their inspiration, about all the painful destruction they leave in the wake of invention. But this is not Tom Waits. A collaborator at heart, he has never had to make the difficult choice between creativity and procreativity. At the Waits house, it’s all thrown in there together—spilling out of the kitchen, which is also the office, which is also where the dog is disciplined, where the kids are raised, where the songs are written and where the coffee is poured for the wandering preachers. All of it somehow influencing the rest.
—“Play it Like Your Hair’s on Fire,” Elizabeth Gilbert, GQ, June 2002
Here’s the thing:
So I read Crooked Timber last week, and Kieran Healy’s post on the problem of women in philosophy sticks in the corner of my mind: it seems there aren’t that many, not that many at all, and why is that? And some people say women just can’t argue in the rarified way that philosophy calls for, and others point out that’s bullshit—linguistics, say, and the cognitive sciences overlap philosophy in terms both of rarefaction and bare-knuckled barroom advocacy, and yet women aren’t nearly so underrepresented there. So why? What’s up? —Like I say, it sticks in my mind.
Then on Saturday, at our weekly gaming session, there’s a lull for my character, and I lean over and pick up a magazine. (I know I shouldn’t do this because it’s rude; when you’re not “on stage,” you’re effectively in the audience, but gaming as a medium is long on exposition and loves dialogue not wisely but too well, which is one of the reasons I do like it so, but when you’re not “on stage,” and you’re playing a rather dim or shall we say instinctual character and you don’t want to be tripped up by trying to forget stuff you learned when watching other people’s scenes your mind tends to wander and, oh, hell, all right, I picked up the magazine, okay! I just browsed. I still had an ear out for how making an open box was pretty much the same as making an open box.) —Anyway. The magazine: Discover, the September 2003 issue. (It was the one to hand.) And idly browsing the short and breathless pieces up front, my eye was caught by a title: “Girls Are Better at Math, But…” It was about some research conducted by Jacquelynne Eccles and Mina Vida at the University of Michigan, and you can read about it here, but that doesn’t have the punchline that caught my eye, so I’ll quote Mathematical Digest’s short, sharp summary, which does:
The data [based on interviews and questionnaires] indicate that girls’ math abilities outpace boys’ through high school, but the girls eschew math-oriented careers because they do not believe such careers are valuable to society.
Which bumped into Kieran’s post, still stuck in that corner of my mind. Ha! I said to myself. That’s why there’s so few women in philosophy! It isn’t valuable! It isn’t important! Y’all don’t rate, boys!
But then I started reading some of the posts that are littered about this issue, and it didn’t seem so funny, anymore. —And anyway, Michael Cholbi already made this point in the comments.
To find another life this century as intensely devoted to abstraction, one must reach back to Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), who stripped his life bare for philosophy. But whereas Wittgenstein discarded his family fortune as a form of self-torture, Mr. Erdős gave away most of the money he earned because he simply did not need it…. And where Wittgenstein was driven by near suicidal compulsions, Mr. Erdős simply constructed his life to extract the maximum amount of happiness.
—“Paul Erdős,” The Economist, 1996
Erdős (pronounced “air-dish”) structured his life to maximize the amount of time he had for mathematics. He had no wife or children, no job, no hobbies, not even a home, to tie him down. He lived out of a shabby suitcase and a drab orange plastic bag from Centrum Aruhaz (“Central Warehouse”), a large department store in Budapest. In a never-ending search for good mathematical problems and fresh mathematical talent, Erdős crisscrossed four continents at a frenzied pace, moving from one university or research center to the next. His modus operandi was to show up on the doorstep of a fellow mathematician, declare, “My brain is open,” work with his host for a day or two, until he was bored or his host was run down, and then move on to another home.
—The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, Paul Hoffman
His language had a special vocabulary—not just “the SF” [The SF is the Supreme Fascist, the Number-One Guy Up There, God, who is always tormenting Erdős by hiding his glasses, stealing his Hungarian passport, or worse yet, keeping to Himself the elegant solutions to all sorts of intriguing mathematical problems] and “epsilon” [children] but also “bosses” (women), “slaves” (men), “captured” (married), “liberated” (divorced), “recaptured” (re-married), “noise” (music), “poison” (alcohol), “preaching” (giving a mathematics lecture), “Sam” (the United States), and “Joe” (the Soviet Union). When he said someone had “died,” Erdős meant that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had “left,” the person had died.
—ibid.
Don’t get me wrong. Paul Erdős sounds like he was a great guy, fucking brilliant, had a devastating effect on mathematics, there’s the whole deal with getting your Erdős number and what that means.
But he wasn’t just moving from one university or research center to the next in a restless quest for mathematical talent. He was on the move so much because he was holy hell as a house guest. —He “forsook all creature comforts—including a home—to pursue his lifelong study of numbers,” the blurbs will tell you. Bullshit. He forsook the bother and worry of creature comforts. Other people cooked his food. Other people washed his clothing. Other people kept him from wandering into traffic. Other people woke him in time for his “preaching” appointments. Other people filled out his paperwork. And he was an incredibly generous man, gave money away like water, was always available to poke and prod at somebody’s truculent problem till it gave up its mathematical beauty, then collaborate on a paper and on to the next, but to pretend he was somehow above the domestic fray, divorced from the daily grind, is to mistake his suitcase and his orange shopping bag for his home; to fail to note that women are underrepresented in mathematics is to miss who might well have been doing a lot of the washing and the cooking and the picking up after when he showed up suddenly on the doorsteps of married colleagues saying, “My brain is open”; and if you don’t pick up on that, you’ll miss the ugly little subtext in all that talk above about “bosses” and “slaves” and “captured” and “liberated,” for all that he did notable work with a number of female mathematicians.
That sort of domestic obliviousness is something men (as yet) find a lot easier to get away with than women. Where’s the toilet cleaner? What did you do with the light bulbs? Do I put the liquid bleach in before or after the rinse cycle? I couldn’t find the baking powder—I thought baking soda would work just as well. Don’t you like your shirts folded that way? —And this has nothing to do with hunting giraffes on the veldt and what that did to our brains, either, and it has everything to do with who does what chores when, growing up, and who’s expected to keep things clean and fill the glasses, and truth be told there’s more than a little of that trick where you break a couple of plates and they never ask you to wash dishes again in there, too. And the extent to which men (broadly) are allowed to get away with this and women (broadly) are expected to pick up the slack is the extent to which men will (broadly) have an edge in fields that call for such extended grinds of rarified, abstract thought, best left uninterrupted by more mundane concerns such as paying the electric bill on time, and women will (broadly) be more inclined to seek out fields that are more, or are at least perceived as being more connected with day-to-day life. (Like linguistics, and cognitive science? Well, keep in mind we are talking philosophy and mathematics, here. Everything’s relative, and anyway, all generalizations are wrong, etc.)
Now, I’m not here to set Waits against Erdős in some titanic battle of the shambling weird old geniuses, art versus science, specialized compartmentalization versus kitchen Zen holism. For one thing, Elizabeth Gilbert never saw the kitchen she waxes so rhapsodic over, up there at the top of this thing. She interviewed him in the dining room of an old inn “somewhat near the mysterious, secret rural location where Tom Waits lives.” And if that kitchen Zen is nonetheless something that lights up my heart when I think about it (“Come on up to the house,” he’s singing somewhere, and I smile: there’s the secret, the mystery, the answer to how to get more women into philosophy: it’s a trick question), well, Gilbert never meets Kathleen Brennan, Waits’ partner in crime, the life he doesn’t consume: “I know nothing for certain about her,” writes Gilbert, “except what her husband has told me. Which means she is a person thoroughly composed, in my mind, of Tom Waits’ words. Which means she’s the closest thing out there to a living Tom Waits song.”
And Erdős lived by all accounts a rich and happy and fulfilling life, and Hoffman’s book, a sort of oral history of everyone, mathematicians and not, who hung out with him and solved problems with him and cooked for him and cleaned up after him, is full of love and joy.
So I’m here, now, and I’m lost. I’ve gotten sidetracked. It started as a joke, and became something darker, and—where am I now? I have paperwork to do and the cat has a thyroid problem and the back stairs need mending as soon as my elbow is better and I have no idea what I’m going to make for dinner tomorrow and I’ve got to figure out how I’m going to get the tabouleh set up for Wednesday what with the day job and the luncheon date that day and I don’t want to think about the dentist because all I want to do is write and yet.
Here I am studiously ignoring that tangled mess by nattering on about—braiding.
Maybe it’s just an excuse to quote Waits some more. Well, Gilbert, but it’s mostly Waits:
I ask Tom Waits who does the bulk of the songwriting around the house—he or his wife? He says there’s no way to judge it. It’s like anything else in a good marriage. Sometimes it’s fifty-fifty; sometimes it’s ninety-ten; sometimes one person does all the work; sometimes the other. Gamely, he reaches for metaphors:
“I wash, she dries.”
“I hold the nail, she swings the hammer.”
“I’m the prospector, she’s the cook.”
“I bring home the flamingo, she beheads it…”
In the end, he concludes this way: “It’s like two people borrowing the same ten bucks back and forth for years. After a while, you don’t even write it down anymore. Just put it on the tab. Forget it.”
Is our pundits learning?
Hey! Y’all parse this sentence real quick-like and tell me what’s wrong:
President Roosevelt waited until after World War II to put in place a commission to investigate what mistakes led to Pearl Harbor.
Now, go let the National Review know that this sentence is still to be found in Clifford May’s column dated 8 April, with nary a correction in sight. I know, I know: Atrios told them, Roger Ailes told them, Eric Williams ripped ’em a new one, and they’ve done nothing about it yet. Maybe there’s some postmodern dripping-with-“irony” “depends on what the meaning of ‘after’ is” defense they’re testing on focus groups. Maybe they’re lazy. Maybe they’re incapable of shame. But we can still have some small fun with the pointing and the sniggering.
Here when I passed the night on the slope of volcano during the eruption, here this was terribly! It is terribly gay and it is beautiful!
Yes, it’s one of those “which X are you” quizzes. But it’s about the characters from Tove Jansson’s beautiful Moomintroll books, and it was originally written in Russian, which means Babelfish’s translation engine renders it in an evanescent English that haphazardly tumbles fractured questions and answers together like some strange game of Exquisite Corpse, which all ends up fitting just so with Jansson’s air of impishly serious whimsy. It’s the most poetic thing I’ve done all morning—and I’m not going to dispute the results:
Yes you – Snusmumrik!!
Eternal wanderer and the uncorrectable romantic. You beckons entire unknown beautiful. For you always better place, where you are not. But you will look, can, where you already there is, it is much better?
Well, except we call him Snufkin in English. But other than that.
Who are you in the Mumi- portion?
—via sara
The banality of outrage.
Ah, the moral rot is clear: someone somewhere to the right of me is claiming the Japanese hostages taken yesterday were peacenik appeasers most likely working with their captors in a sort of Stockholm-on-the-Euphrates, so we don’t have to worry about it. We don’t have to worry about a thing, and I can puff up my chest and pontificate, I suppose, if I want. —What I want to do is watch another episode of Wonderfalls. We’d finally managed to catch an episode last week, and liked it a lot, and figured, hey, maybe we’d better make a point of catching this show before they cancel—
While it was on, though (and hey, you can still snag the theme song from iTunes: recommended), we did manage to catch a jaw-droppingly awful commercial for The Swan, “a new series where fairy tale turns into reality.” See, what they’re doing is—oh, hell, let’s let them damn themselves with their own press release:
THE SWAN offers women the incredible opportunity to undergo physical, mental and emotional transformations with the help of a team of experts. Contestants must go through an intensive “boot camp” of exercise, diet, therapy and inspiration to achieve their goals. Each week feathers will fly as the inevitable pecking order emerges. Those not up to the challenge are sent home. Those who are will go on to compete in a pageant for a chance to become “The Ultimate Swan.”
Each contestant has been assigned a panel of specialists—a coach, therapist, trainer, cosmetic surgeons and a dentist—who together have designed the perfect individually tailored program for her. The contestants’ work ethic, growth and achievement will be monitored. The final reveal at the end of each episode will be especially dramatic because it will be the first time that contestants will be permitted to see themselves in a mirror during the three-month transformation process. Two women will be featured every week and at the episode’s conclusion, one will go home and one will be selected to move on to the 1st Annual Swan Pageant.
The commercial makes a lot about how these “seventeen average girls” are all ugly ducklings being given a chance they never thought they’d ever have: competing in a beauty pageant! —Forget whether Bush manages to eke out (or seize) a victory in November: if there’s a Swan 2, I’m leaving the fucking country. Y’all can have it.
But that’s not the worst of what’s coming our way on “reality” TV:
Child-protection experts and media watchers are alarmed about an effort by a reality-TV producer to create a CBS show that attempts to find and recover abducted children with a team of former military and former law enforcement personnel. [..]
Individuals and organizations that work on behalf of missing children, including the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, say the show’s premise runs contrary to the commonly held principle of relying on legal authorities to handle recovery cases. They also were scathing in their criticism of using such cases for any entertainment purpose. [...]
Rick Smith, a former longtime FBI agent, said he thought using a private team to recover children was “a terrible idea,” but also he could see it working “if it was in conjunction with law enforcement and law enforcement had the lead role.” [...]
A story in the entertainment trade publication Variety, which included comments from Burnett, said the show has been under development for 18 months, but “kept under wraps so as to not endanger the secret rescue missions conducted for the pilot” episode.
I, um. Yeah. I know ragging on reality TV is something of a pasttime for bored, dilletantish pseuds (hence), but. I mean, I. Um. I’m honestly, I mean—
Hey! Look! Evil lottery!
Part of an online ad for playyourdebt.com. Oh, type it into the URL bar yourself, you want to go take a look at it. I’m not about to juice them.
So I go to Kevin Drum, forgetting he’s not doing the cat blogging anymore now that he’s hit the Big Time, and I discover he thinks it’d be cool to write off the fifth amendment if we get stringent about videotaping all police interviews. Which, minor little thing, hardly even merits a squabble, just a shrieked “You WHAT?” and, you know, we move on, but I’m dispirited. I’m in a Mood, now.
Luckily, the Three-Toed Sloth is there in a pinch.
This brief note describes the discovery of an apparent joint burial of a human being and a cat, c. 7200 to 7500 B.C. (Some of the details that follow come from the on-line supplementary material.) The human being was aged at least thirty, buried facing west. Whoever it was, they rated a lot of Neolithic swag: “a marine shell, a stone pendant, a very uncommon discoid flint scraper, two small polished axes (one of them broken), a pumice stone, a fragment of ochre, a large flint piercing tool, and several non-retouched flint blades and bladelets,” plus, in a near-by pit, twenty-four sea-shells from three species: “One shell of each species had been artificially pierced; the remaining 21 shells had not been worked. All the 24 shells had been arranged around a central raw fragment of a green soft stone used for jewellery [sic] (‘picrolite’)”. “This is the only burial with such a high number of offerings for the whole Preceramic and Aceramic Neolithic in Cyprus.” The cat was aged eight months, apparently buried at the same time, definitely buried in the same orientation as the human, and was definitely not butchered. —The significance here is that this pushes back the period for which we have firm evidence of the taming of cats considerably.
Ah. I feel better. —A bit, anyway.
Memery.
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 23.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
All right then:
And tell me whether any literary work whatsoever is compatible with states of this kind.
Context:
...the whole problem: to have within oneself the inseparable reality and the physical clarity of a feeling, to have it to such a degree that it is impossible for it not to be expressed, to have a wealth of words, of acquired turns of phrase capable of joining the dance, coming into play; and the moment the soul is preparing to organize its wealth, its discoveries, this revelation, at that unconscious moment when the thing is on the point of coming forth, a superior and evil will attacks the soul like a poison, attacks the mass consisting of word and image, attacks the mass of feeling, and leaves me panting as if at the very door of life.
And now suppose that I feel this will physically passing through me, that it jolts me with a sudden and unexpected electricity, a repeated electricity. Suppose that each of my thinking moments is on certain days shaken by these profound tempests which nothing outside betrays. And tell me whether any literary work whatsoever is compatible with states of this kind.
That is the twenty-seven–year–old Artaud writing to the editor of the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française, the well-known poet Jacques Rivière, ten years Artaud’s senior. It is also the clearest presentation of the problem’s core we have from Artaud himself.
—“Wagner/Artaud,” from Samuel Delany’s Longer Views; meme via Elkins
