Wax Banks

Charity.

¹Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

²And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.

³And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

⁴Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

⁵Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

⁶Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;

⁷Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

⁸Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

⁹For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.

¹⁰But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

¹¹When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

¹²For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

¹³And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. (1 Corinthians 13:1-13, King James Version)

Tim Powers, Last Call.

Tim Powers's Last Call comes highly recommended, but after finishing it tonight I can't shake a feeling of tremendous disappointment and frustration. It's not a bad book; indeed it starts beautifully, improves and accelerates throughout its first few hundred pages, and ends 'satisfyingly,' as it's supposed to. The trouble is that for all its no doubt richly-imagined goings-on and Powers's obvious intelligence and gnarly imagination, nothing much happens in Last Call. Familiar symbols (the Tarot, the Fisher King, the mythology of Vegas gambling and the poker table, bits of The Waste Land) are deployed enthusiastically, knotty plotlines proceed according to the familiar contours of those symbols, and at the 'exciting' climax the symbols (excuse me, characters) meet in symbolic conflicts devoid of emotional power. The book moves so briskly that you don't notice that it's not actually a thriller - each of its scenes seems to refer to a scene from a parallel novel, in which actual human stakes are played for in an actual world by actual humans, rather than elements in a Tarot-themed Gantt chart.

It is, in short, a neat idea (a few of them, really) stretched out over half a thousand pages. It's a heck of a story, and when 'THE END' comes it turns out not to have been much at all.

(I kept thinking of American Gods. Do not take that as a compliment.)

The good parts - Crane's early suffering over the fate of his wife, Dondi's apology, the Mandelbrot man, the slam-bang opening section, the regular appearance of steaming cups of coffee and cold beers - are just right, and pieces of the book will stick with me, I suspect. But with one exception the characters in the book never quite rise to the level of people. The relationship between Diana and Scott is wish-fulfillment and (when you think about it) a bit gross, and both characters get less interesting as the story progresses; the depiction of Scott's alcoholism is utterly facile; Dondi is a sentimental caricature but only that, and the thinness of his cruel backstory feels contemptuous on Powers's part; Arky spends most of the novel dicking around offstage in a plotline that has no interest beyond its dorm-room-bullshit-session premise, and his arc is engaging but far too handy to get invested in; Nardie is like a stock character beamed in from some other story; and Leon fulfills none of his initial promise, vanishing behind a twirling villain-moustache for most of the book.

Of all the characters, only the old man Ozzie is as neat-o as the book's symbolic register, and the book is weirdly muted in its treatment of him and his fate. I don't think that's a matter of noir aesthetics; rather, I imagine that Powers (like so many of his readers and critics!) was so enamored of the meaning of his story, its mythological referents, that he forgot to make the story itself matter. And we didn't mind - after all, who can complain about Weird Fantasy that flatters the allusion seekers and conspiracy fans in the audience? Some of the allusions and mythic parallels are so blunt they're offensive - when one character eats a thin white poker chip at a moment of transformational crisis, is it really necessary to have another character moan, 'Christ'? And should we pretend not to notice when the exact same thing happens a dozen pages later, with a bloody wound in the side immediately followed by a blasphemous 'Jesus!' outburst? I half want to assume that Powers's tastelessness in those passages is an ironic wink rather than a failure of nerve and style.

But I couldn't put the book down. It's exhilarating, and a few moments are breathtaking. But it feels, in the end, a little bit pointless. One Amazon reviewer unwittingly hit the nail on the head: 'One character is destined to play the Fool card in the drama and manifests as a homeless man who lives in special "boxes" all throughout Vegas.' Yes, I thought, that describes Dondi's storyline perfectly. I realized only after a moment that the reviewer meant only to describe Dondi's premise. And...and most of the jokes are puns. And without their symbolic parallels most of the events are meaningless or just not there at all. And the last 100 pages are a weirdly-paced mess, the beautiful coda marred by needless exposition and a saggy anticlimax that made the previous few hundred pages seem like much ado about nothing much. And, yeah, I couldn't put the book down. I feel like a fool for caring about 500 pages of notes for the Greatest Dark Magical Fantasy Novel Ever Written About Vegas, which Tim Powers slyly published in the guise of a novel. What a smart man he is.

Bill Simmons makes me want to care about things.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud of the Boston Sports Guy.

I can’t wait to see what happens to KG, Kobe, T-Mac, Carmelo, Howard and others when they finish with basketball. These guys have been mini-corporations and basketball machines since the age of eighteen. What will they do? What will be important to them? When I was researching my book, one thing that blew me away was how brilliant the guys from the fifties and sixties were. Not as players, as people. Oscar Robertson, Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, Bob Cousy, Wilt Chamberlain…these were thoughtful, well-rounded human beings who cared deeply about not just their sport, but about their place in society and (in the case of the black guys) their stature during such a tumultuous time. Everyone knows about Russell’s eleven rings, but did you know about everything he did to advance the cause of African-Americans? Everyone knows about Oscar’s triple doubles, but did you know that he filed the lawsuit that paved the way for a real players union and free agency? These were truly great men and the N.B.A. just wouldn’t be where it is if that wasn’t the case.

Read, as they say, the whole thing. You don't even have to care about basketball. It's just kinda that good.

Gladwell and Goliath and blah blah blah.

Got bored, read the latest from Malcolm 'in the middle' Gladwell: an unbearably laboured metaphor about David vs Goliath. He's waving at something interesting but not quite getting there. The idea is that as long as Goliath plays by Goliath's rules, he has to lose, because the game is built for Goliath. Gladwell doesn't take the poetic step, the spiritual one, because he can't, because he's a business writer instead of a cultural critic or poet: he ends with Goliath wondering whether he's really a giant, but the real lesson is that 'giant' is a made-up category, and it does not connote. It means only size, and entails certain abilities, but strengths and weaknesses are entirely context-dependent. They describe interactions, relationships. 'Giant' is about identity. When you think the game is one thing, a still-life, you cease to look at it truly, as a realm of interactions. As process, movement. Basic zen, of course, and also basic games theory.

Naturally Gladwell has an interest in keeping things low-key; that seems to be his temperament, but it's also one of his audience's major demands. So there's almost nothing to the article - just the straightforward observation that the only way to win the written game is usually not to play. Which is a teenage insight. 'Why don't people understand this simple thing?' he asks. Partly because he's describing, essentially, games - war, basketball, single combat. One-on-one contests. And of course his characterization of basketball is exactly as simplistic as his characterization of social networks, war, scientific research, university admissions, single combat...halfway-decent basketball teams are trained on how to beat the full-court press, and the energy of grown men flows quite differently from that of teenage girls; Gladwell's usual Tiny Little Bit of Insight doesn't even scale within the narrow domain he's discussing. Never mind that the purpose of basketball isn't, ultimately, to determine superiority - it's a symbol, a dance. He admits this in his piece, yet doesn't understand why it matters! And so his usual Big Central Metaphor is even more strained than usual, which is why the piece's language is so fucking amateurish and inelegant.

Gladwell's pop-psych tidbits and half-digested snippets of overheard math and social theory are as they've ever been: undeniably intelligent, unbearably self-satisfied, anything but courageous. He's an ad man, and bless him for taking his job seriously, but they're only ads - selling lifestyle poses and cocktail-party conversation-starters. Gimme a break.

Why, despite the near-constant fury he provokes in me and others, I still read Andrew Sullivan.

From Johann Hari's profile:

With the scenery of conservatism collapsing all around, Sullivan was one of the first major [umm... --wa.] champions of Barack Obama as a future president. He found his temperament—empirical, doubtful, discursive—immediately congenial. This brought yet more howls of betrayal from the right. But now Obama has won, will Sullivan’s Obamaphilia clash with his small-state conservatism, as Obama embarks on a programme of big-government Keynesian reflation?

This question cuts to an unacknowledged tension in Sullivan’s thought that has lain dormant since his Oxford days. Oakeshott believed we should be sceptical of all human institutions—including markets. He savaged Hayek’s market fundamentalist bible, “The Road to Serfdom”, as another rationalist delusion. He saw it as a utopian plan to end planning, yet another argument that a perfect system could be found, this time in markets. Sullivan’s scepticism, by contrast, has been lop-sided. He is highly sceptical of the capacity of governments to act, but he has often presented markets as close to infallible, if left undistorted by government action.

This belief has been at the core of the left-wing writer Naomi Klein’s criticisms of Sullivan. She says: “Where is this ideal capitalism of which [he] speaks? It reminds me of people on the very far left who, where when you present them with evidence of the real-world application of their ideology, say, ‘That doesn’t count, that was a distortion.’ Well, where’s the real version?”

When I ask Sullivan about this, he says: “It’s very hard to be a consistent Oakeshottian, to not let dogmas creep in. Perhaps my belief in markets has become like that. Over the next few years, in my blog and writing, I’m going to be thinking this through.” It seems he can imagine reasoning himself to a more Obama-friendly pro-intervention viewpoint—surely provoking yet more cries of betrayal from conservatives.

He believes his greatest future conflicts will centre on religion—the topic of his next book. He learned his Catholicism as an altar boy in East Grinstead. For him it is a sacramental religion, all about smell and sight and touch. Ritual is at its core, because “ritual has no point beyond itself. Only ritual can approximate the ineffability of the divine, enact its truth while not purporting to explain or capture it.”

Read the (cleverly titled) whole thing.

Notre Dame, Obama.

To read The Corner you'd think contraception and abortion rights had something to do with something or other called 'the human soul.' You'd also think a teenage virgin named 'Mary' gave birth to a walking Jewish god-being named 'Jesus,' and that aforementioned Jesus thought that emergency contraception and abortion and (!!!!) embryonic stem-cell harvesting were Big Time Sins, whatever 'Sins' meant. And you might - to read this bizarre little weblog - shiver to hear of Notre Dame University's big time donors withdrawing their financial support from the school because of the school's decision to invite Barack Obama to give their 2009 commencement address. National Review Online's symposium on this topic - 'Should the University of Notre Dame honor our most anti-life president?' - contains exciting statements like this:

The word “perfidy” derives from the Latin “perfidus,” that is, “faithless” or “detrimental to faith”; it is also synonymous with “treachery,” or “violation of allegiance or trust.” The University of Notre Dame’s decision to honor President Obama as its commencement speaker in May is perfidious and treacherous in the extreme.

President Obama has zealously moved in his first weeks in office to carry out the most radical anti-life, un-Christian agenda of any American president...

It's all very thrilling, very serious. Unfortunately these 'criticisms' are so stupid that one hardly knows how to respond without embarrassing oneself by association. The successor to the warmongering mock-Christian hypocrite Bush is a 'radical anti-life, un-Christian' zealot? Or check out this sweetness:

[I]t is an outrage for a Catholic university to provide a stamp of approval to someone who just last week wrote the death warrant for millions of embryonic human beings, the most recent of a long line of anti-life acts. Obama’s pro-abortionist extremism relegates a whole class of human beings — unborn human beings — to the status of mere sub-personal objects...

Well, yes. The infinite category of 'unborn human beings,' extended to include newly-fertilized eggs, renders the (admittedly and alas) finite category of actual human beings meaningless, robs it of any actionable scale or sense or character. But never mind (il)logic, just stay at your lab bench: to speak of the 'dignity' and 'rights' of a collection of a hundred cells is so loopy, so arbitrary, so utterly dependent on base antiscientific mysticism, that you kind of want to let more run-of-the-mill stupidity like the following just roll on past -

Obama is also receiving a Doctor of Laws degree from Notre Dame. “Laws” — as in the things he tried to prevent in the Illinois legislature on the matter of protecting infants who survived abortion? The Notre Dame Observer today posts its Sunday interview with Fr. John Jenkins, the school’s president. It is titled “Jenkins: Obama 'honored' University by accepting.” I’m sure that’s just how Mary (a.k.a. Notre Dame) is feeling right now.

- to keep from losing your mind. 'Mary' the 'mother of the church,' who was assumed into heaven and apparently had a permeable hymen and the world's luckiest ovaries and so forth, is of course a fictional character; Mary the (sure!) historical mother of Jesus is a desiccated corpse who does not, in all probability, intercede in the deliberations of Our Lord on behalf of faithful petitioners, and talking about her feelings is sub-Sporting News rhetorical gasbaggery. (I always hated The Sporting News out of some totally irrational Sports Illustrated partisanship. Talk about religious zealotry.)

As in the New Testament, the craziest shit gets saved for last:

This is a highly cynical act, contemptuous of the Church’s prophetic voice in civil society and wagering that there will be no retribution. If a midwestern school seeks attention by granting Mr. Obama an honorary doctorate in law, the next logical step would be to grant Judas Iscariot posthumously an honorary doctorate in business administration.

Yes. Barack Obama, constitutional law professor and firm Christian, is to the study of law as Judas Iscariot, betrayer of Jesus and the central villain in the central morality play in Western culture, is to MBA programs.

Well, it's 6am and I can barely focus my eyes; and it's comforting, in a way, that I'm not the only one who can't see straight. I mean it's not super comforting or anything.

Oh, check it out!

I never tire of making extraordinarily beautiful things for you, Reader(s). 'Christ our light!' 'Light of Christ!' (Hey, I'm stately and plump too, though without a bathrobe or shaving bowl. Mockeries of the Mass - loving, I assure you, in this case - are within the ambit of this blog.)

[Extra laughable bonus fun time for reader(s)! That unbelievable grotesque Victor Davis Hanson sez: Forget Halliburton, Enron, etc. — AIG is the metaphor of our new century. Yes, Vicki. By all means let us forget Halliburton and Enron and 'etc.' By all means! Because what possible use could memories of the Bush era be in this, our dark collectivist future? No use at all, baby. You fucking troglodytic hack.]

We torture.

Read now. Keep a punching bag handy - and perhaps a box of tissues. And the phone number of your Congressman.

Lizza on Emanuel.

Emanuel's apparently a bit of an obnoxious cunt - sidebar: not the first overcompensating little nerd to decide he needs to live that way - and even lazy head-in-the-sand types like me remember how important he apparently was to the Dem's charmingly craven capitulation to Bush et al. on nearly every issue of any importance these last few years. Lizza, who wrote a very mixed profile of Obama last year (with an equally noxious editorial stance not even cursorily veiled), has a hagiography of Emanuel in the latest New Yorker.

Greenwald hands them both their balls.

Obama and race.

Interesting stuff from Ambinder:

In the winter of 2007, the [Obama] campaign entered a bidding war with the Clinton campaign over the endorsement of State Senator Darrell Jackson, the pastor of one of the largest congregations in South Carolina. The Obama campaign offered him a $5,000-per-month retainer, and Jackson said he would soon endorse him.

That's only half the paragraph. I got to this point and felt a pain in my stomach. 'Hypocritical assholes,' I thought. This is exactly the shit I want none of from my president.

Then the rest of the paragraph:

But then he sent word that the Clinton campaign was offering a more lucrative contract, implying, at least to the Obama team, that he would endorse Obama only if they would tender a more generous offer. Through his deputy campaign manager, Obama refused. It would be the last time that Obama negotiated with black pastors this way. (Jackson endorsed Clinton.)

Heh. Indeed.

A few weeks before the general election, aides to Anthony Evans, the pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas and an influential radio talk-show host, contacted the Obama campaign and laid out a political battle plan. Evans would mobilize 300,000 volunteers and dispatch 72 church vans to battleground states on Election Day. He would touch more than 2 million voters. All he needed was $5million to pay for it. The Obama campaign thanked him and said no. Evans threatened to go public with the refusal. The Obama campaign pointed to examples of other black leaders who had confronted Obama in public, and invited Evans, in essence, to bring it on. (Evans apologized the day after the election.) [UPDATE!! Ambinder sent email to everyone who linked to this story - admirable and cool - which you can find on the article's webpage.]

Nearly everyone who aspires to lead thousands and millions is a conman. I forget this. I like Barack Obama, and I trust him. He surprises me. He also angers me but I don't mind being angered by intelligent people acting with what looks like integrity. He doesn't tend condescend or pander. I like that.

I'm glad that Mister Bush is gone away, lawd lawd, I'm glad that Mister Bush is gone.

Hall of Justice.

I don't know whether I linked to this before. If not: go, go.

Attic and elsewhere.

All items listed above belong in the world
In which all things are continuous,
And are parts of the original dream which
I am now trying to discover the logic of. This
Is the process whereby the pain of the past in its pastness
May be converted into the future tense

Of joy.

--Robert Penn Warren, 'I am Dreaming of a White Christmas...'

The original dream.

[10]
Clerks now go home, night watchmen wake up, and the heart
Of the taxi-driver, just coming on shift,
Leaps with hope.

All is not in vain.

Old men come out from the hard-core movies.

They wish they had waited till later.

They stand on the pavement and stare up at the sky.

Their drawers are drying stiff  at the crotch, and

The sky dies wide. The sky

Is far above the first hysteria of neon.

Soon they will want to go and get something to eat.

Meanwhile, down the big sluice of Broadway,

The steel logs jerk and plunge

Until caught in the rip, snarl, and eddy here before my face.

A mounted policeman sits a bay gelding. The rump

Of the animal gleams expensively. The policeman

Is some sort of dago. His jowls are swart.

His eyes are bright with seeing.

He is as beautiful as a law of chemistry.

-- Robert Penn Warren, 'I Am Dreaming of a White Christmas: The Natural History of a Vision'

My kind of crazy!

Please try to comprehend: the new Focus on the Family mailer, 'Letter from 2012 in Obama's America.'

Best piece of sci-fi you'll read all week!

More crying in public.

'Getting to Know David Foster Wallace.' Go read now, now, now.

Whores' Guild, blogosphere chapter (a/k/a 'Some excellent gaming blogs you should be reading').

[I know, it's not as perfect a name as '"Concerned Ladies of America West (C.L.A.W.)" East Coast Chapter,' but it'll have to do.]

I should note that the long D&D-n-sex post below was inspired by some recent nerdly blog-reading. If you're at all interested in roleplaying games from a player's, gamemaster's, writer's, or more abstract/theoretical point of view, you should definitely be looking at the following blogs, among others:

• The Chatty DM. Linked here, if memory serves, to read about Chatty's 'Kobold Love' project (housed at Chatty Studios): an open-source D&D adventure written for 4th edition, with an open call for other authors to develop analogous adventures for other systems. The charming hook: the PC's play kobolds, out to avenge the adventurers who keep wrecking their lives for no good reason. What inspired me about it was that he'd made his writerly pastime into something he could share with other gamers; Chatty recently parlayed that webgoing notoriety into a paying RPG-writing gig. And I was all like 'fuck that, I'm as good an unemployed writer as I know, I should...' and then I typed various things which at some point I'll share with you, Reader(s), whom I love but do not, ultimately, trust as far as I can throw you. Anyhow: have a look.
• Jonathan Drain. Heady writing about RPGs; start here if you have writerly predispositions (or preoccupations or, I suppose, fucked up self-image). His best post, to my eye, may be this one, 'The Invisible Dungeon' - a smart, bootstrappy way to think about system-agnostic adventure construction.
• Mike Mearls (also here). One of the lead designers on D&D 4e, and more or less a straight shooter re: the gaming industry (near as I can tell). Alas, his audio interviews reveal that he is a native speaker of Geek English with a Geek accent, which drives me up the wall - but then I am judgmental and my mom was an English-language snob and what can you do.
• Critical Hits. A series of podcast interviews and live-play recordings. (Oh I hate myself.) Plus reviews and such, but frankly you can take or leave those.
• Dungeon Mastering. Interesting collection of articles, with a helpful assortment of documents to get campaigns and such started - plus the biggest collections of free adventures and maps I've seen.
• Kobold Quarterly. The new Dragon magazine, by all accounts. Home of Wolfgang Baur of Open Design microfame. Open Design is a project to watch - spiritual successor to Dave Sim's self-publishing, among other things. Question: how big does your built-in audience have to be in order for you to make money writing as Baur now does, under a patronage model?
• Treasure Tables. Lovely.
• Gnome Stew. Even lovelier - system-agnostic GMing advice with a design-y bent.

And while we're at it, Reader(s), you may or may not know that among the occasional commenters at this site is a gentleman named Adam Roberts, who is British and therefore suspect in most ways but who is - had I only known this the day I jumped on him at The Valve for some silly thing I've now forgotten! - apparently one of the more highly-regarded writers of hard-SF of these, the Latter Days. Jesus Christ, one newspaper reviewer has said he possesses "perhaps the most untrammelled imagination in British fiction," which again - British, hence suspect - but honestly if someone said I had even 'perhaps the nicest hairshirt among pseudonymous Cambridge bloggers' I'd just keel over and die from an overdose of autoplotzing. ('Plotzing re: oneself' --wgh coinage)

I mention gentleman Roberts because you should read his stuff, critical and fictional (irritatingly, he's also a fine critic), and because...whenever he leaves a comment that can be interpreted as nice, I become uneasy, thinking that perhaps I'm being dissed in a dogwhistle sort of way audible only to other people who actually collected their grad school diplomas. Such is the depth of my feeling of inadequacy that I've closed comments on this post to keep you, whoever you is/are/would-have-your-friends-believe-you-to-be-in-the-plural-or-singular, to keep you from coddling me in any way. That's boldness. I'm a barbarian and I'm bold.

Obama: revolutionary?

This week's New Yorker profile of Barack Obama makes for interesting reading. It presents a history of Obama's political career, emphasis on Chicago machine politics and his supposedly Machiavellian outlook. The facts are entertaining, not particularly worrying or surprising; certain allegations are to my mind unseemly or outright stupid, like the (unseemly) claim that Obama picked his church for political reasons (which allegation, to my mind, involves a misunderstanding of the social role of Christian churches, particularly in Obama's neighborhood and social circle(s)).

Then there's the article's editorial stance, which is - to my mind - both inappropriate and likely incorrect:

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago’s churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. “You have the power to make a United States senator,” he told Emil Jones in 2003. In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war.

Like many politicians, Obama is paradoxical. He is by nature an incrementalist, yet he has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda (energy independence, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq). He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right. [My emphasis --wgh]

The implicit claim that Obama is 'more of the same,' a machine politician interested in power above all, isn't strongly supported by the facts in the article, nor is the nastier suggestion that Obama's shrewdness is analogous to that of the hucksters and grandstanders he's come up with. Check out this passage:

Ivory Mitchell, who for twenty years has been the chairman of the local ward organization in Obama’s neighborhood — considered the most important Democratic organization on the South Side — was one of Obama’s earliest backers. Today, he says, “All the work we did to help him get where he finally ended up, he didn’t seem too appreciative.” A year ago, Mitchell became a delegate for Hillary Clinton.

Writer Ryan Lizza clearly wants to paint this as a shortcoming of Obama, a deficit of gratitude or sympathy; I read it as the carping of a political operator angered by the refusal of his Party's guy to shower him with power. 'Appreciative' in this context doesn't mean 'made laws that benefit us,' it means 'scratched our back.' But the majority of comments in the article have this form - the piece is centrally about resentment. Obama has pissed off political operators in Chicago and beyond, at least in part by his refusal to play a traditional game of favours and compromise (choosing instead a nontraditional game of very public exhortations to ideological compromise, about which more later). Lizza's diagnosis, implicit and explicit, is that this makes Obama more compromised, less trustworthy, more an example of politics-as-she-is-played. But an equally plausible reading, and a far less wearisome one, is that Obama's political identity is something far more complex than a power-grabbing sellout.

Lizza asserts that Obama is committed to accommodating the existing political power structure, choosing to see his private fundraising, his principled (i.e. reflective) anti-Iraq-War position, and the role of religious faith in his life as merely political. But I think this cynicism about Obama says more about Ryan Lizza than the politician in question. Unless Obama is running a decades-long scam on the American people and Lizza is the man who's uncovered it (prefigured by the nattering twit David Brooks), we're better off reading Obama's positions, his relentless insistence on outreach to Republicans and the reformation of Democratic politics - away from interest-group identity politics and gutless capitulation, toward the restoration of the social safety net through community action and recognition of shared economic interest - as far more consequential, exciting, even (yes) revolutionary than the Democrats could have hoped for.

My brother is a good deal more conservative than me, but he feels no love for the Republicans; (sort of) like Heidegger, he wants to burn them to save them. I think Barack Obama feels sorta the same way - about the Democrats. If you measure him against machine politicians, if you have no frame of reference other than the purely (cynically) political, then of course you'll evaluate him in those terms. Maybe you'll find him wanting, or despicable, or bright, or more or less OK. But from reading his writing, listening to his speeches, and watching the way he's handled both the passive-aggressive political media and his colleagues in the Democratic Party, I'm able to see him as both a savvy political operator (he's smarter than his critics) and an unusual sort of Democrat.

More importantly, I see 'not a knee-jerk antiwar Dem' not as 'centrist' (what the hell does that word mean anyhow? 'Wouldn't make a donation,' maybe?) but as 'considered.' As I've written elsewhere, I see Obama's public-funding reversal as fully in line with a commitment to campaign-finance reform. And I see in Obama a man with no patience for traditional 'liberal' pieties, trained as an academic but without an academic's self-satisfaction, used to street-level politics but wishing to enact massive change through incremental means. That's what disappoints me about Lizza's article, which is ultimately thin and indulges in embarrassing editorializing unsupported by its reporting: Lizza is so committed to his 'He's not the hero I thought he was!' loss-of-innocence narrative that he dismisses the possibility that Obama really is pursuing revolutionary changes in American culture. And he (Lizza) does so because, like so many in the press/pundit corps, he seems to need to read Obama in terms of Party identity and political process. The cynicism of recent Obama coverage is neither unprecedented nor out of character for our lamentable national press corps; it's remarkable only in the degree to which it may finally be misplaced.

Letting go.

We say things like, “Mommy is dead now and so we are sad.” But mostly, we talk about vacuums.

This is a simple, beautiful piece of writing. Brava, Sarah.

Spencer said, “You. Understand. Ethan.”

I find over and over that the things I 'know' I only feel - or perhaps only want. Hell, maybe I'm only becoming aware now that there's a distinction to be made. I read the other day that Zen practice is the effort to abandon not the Self, really (because there's no such thing), but rather the categories of selfhood, 'I-Me-Mine.' To think beyond subject, not by not thinking, but by becoming aware-beyond-subjectivity; in other words, Zen is the pursuit of objective experience.

“You’re a good boy, Spencer,” Ethan said. “You’re a good boy.”

Maybe there's nothing more perverse than seeing death - objective experience in common if such a thing ever is or was available to laypeople - as about survivors, or survival. But that's me in a nutshell: if you're gone, what matters is that I'm here. Indeed it matters more than ever. That might be who I am and I don't know whether that's alright. Well it's alright for now; time to play frisbee in the park. What difference does it make to a stone.

But Christ, what a lovely piece of writing.

Milch, Milch, Milch, Milch, Milch!!

Go yeah go!

[Update: His next project is a show about NYC cops in the early Seventies, during the Black Liberation Army's cop assassinations, developed with NYPD Blue producer Bill Clark. The videos at the bottom of the page duplicate the content of the podcasts above, but the second link is an extraordinary discussion of religion and art, building to Milch's goals in creating John From Cincinnati and the presentation of the episode six sermon (the show's greatest moment; maybe Milch's greatest moment). Sidenote: he used to work as a script doctor on features?!]

Can be combative.

Welcome to fucking Boatmurdered.

(After you've read the introduction and gotten a handle on what the hell this is, you can skip ahead, if you're that sort of jerk, to StarkRavingMad's updates. Deadwood fans will especially dig his style.)

Up, Simba.

Like this fella, I was moved recently to revisit David Foster Wallace's report for Rolling Stone on one week of John McCain's 2000 primary campaign, 'Up, Simba.' (You can buy it online, but really you should buy his recent book of essays, Consider the Lobster.) And again like Mr Hallberg, I was put in mind of Obama and Clinton, analogous to McCain and Bush in so many ways, the former a 'straight-talking' insurgent against the party establishment whose ambition is shadowed by his narrative of genuineness, the latter the anointed establishment candidate, accused not unfairly of carpetbagging, the product of big donors, whose authenticity the press both encourages us to doubt and yet isn't allowed to openly question.

Wallace's essay, as Hallberg puts it, has something of a 'Generation-Y affect,' sure. But Wallace has always used his own (believable) earnestness as a bulwark against his tendency to get caught up in geeky details and ironic derision and cultured distrust, and that style serves him well in 'Up, Simba,' since the objects of his analysis - the authenticity of John McCain, his campaign, and voters' engagement with those two different-but-inseparable things - are just so convoluted and hypermediated that any authoritative declarations from DFW would just feed into the cynicism he's so worried about. The final echt-Wallace paragraph brings home his point in a now-familiar style:

But if you, like poor old Rolling Stone, have come to a point on the Trail where you've started fearing your own cynicism almost as much as you fear your own credulity and the salesmen who feed on it, you may find your thoughts returning again and again to a certain dark and box-sized cell in a certain Hilton half a world and three careers away, to the torture and fear and offer of release and a certain Young Voter named McCain's refusal to violate a Code. There were no techs' cameras in that box, no aides or consultants, no paradoxes or gray areas; nothing to sell. There was just one guy and whatever in his character sustained him. This is a huge deal. In your mind, that Hoa Lo box becomes sort of a special dressing room with a star on the door, the private place behind the stage where one imagines "the real John McCain" still lives. And but now the paradox here is that this box that makes John McCain "real" is, by definition, locked. Impenetrable. Nobody gets in or out. This is huge, too; you should keep it in mind. It is why, however many behind-the-scenes pencils get put on the case, a "profile" of John McCain is going to be just that: one side, exterior, split and diffracted by so many lenses there's way more than one man to see. Salesman or leader or neither or both, the final paradox - the really tiny central one, way down deep inside all the other campaign puzzles' spinning boxes and squares that layer McCain - is that whether he's truly "for real" now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours. Try to stay awake.

That last sentence isn't meant to be haughty or disdainful; it's a warning shot well-intentioned. You should read Wallace's piece, which is long and in places utterly boring, and which in the final analysis is probably the single best thing ever written about John McCain.

Then you should think about Barack Obama and his one million campaign donors, and the fact that the 1996 election saw the lowest Young Voter turnout in history, while the 2008 election will probably be decided by the highest.

* * *

Let's not talk too much about Obama here; I'd like to think more deeply about the questions Wallace's essay raises - for several pages at a time it seems to be nothing but questions - and I'm not ready for the self-analysis that such an exercise would require. Nor maybe do I have time for it since I'm not the genius DFW is. But let's say this:

McCain's Y2K candidacy was a rebuke to eight years of Democratic leadership, yes, but also to the awesome corruption and partisanship indulged in by the Republican Congress, climaxing with the ludicrous impeachment proceedings - in which, by the way, John McCain voted 'yes' on impeachment, twice. McCain's rapid ascendancy had a lot to do with the moral squalor of the Clinton White House, but plenty to do with the awesome incompetence and falseness of George W. Bush, who was neither a Texan nor a warrior nor a shrewd businessman nor a conservative in any meaningful sense, yet who campaigned as the Shining Example of each of those traits, and 'compassionate' to boot.

McCain is running this year as a strange hybrid - partly a revision of Bush's policies, partly a repudiation of his manner. Forced to rely on the Republican machine, and facing an insurgency of his own (in the ridiculous Mike Huckabee), McCain can't run as the maverick; his Republicanism is too visible and he's counting on GOP votes to keep things close in November.

Meanwhile, Democrat voters face their own version of the McCain2K choice: Obama is running as a rebuke to both president Bush and the feckless Democratic Congress, which has aided and abetted every single step of Bush's political forced march, to war, misbegotten tax cuts, and grotesque entitlement expansion. Obama gets to be both not-a-Republican and not-another-Democrat, and he's lucky that his main opponent this year is in a literal sense running as dynastic successor. (Al Gore would have made things interesting.)

But following Wallace, we should observe this: in both 2000 and 2008, Young Voters have been faced with a choice they can't be expected to fully understand, because the terms in which the campaigns have been conducted are old terms, the metaphors invoked by the pundit corps are borrowed from JFK, and an 18-year-old Young Voter - hell, most 25-year-olds - can't remember a time before Gennifer Flowers, before James Carville, before HillaryCare. Obama and McCain have appealed rhetorically to a golden age before Spin Rooms and push-polling, but for many voters (most Young Voters), those times are fantasy. They may well be fictions made up by campaign consultants, for all we know.

I remember a little of the 1988 Presidential election; in our mock election at my elementary school in Texas, more than 90% of my 4th grade class went to George H. W. Bush (no surprise). I remember more clearly Clinton's ascendancy, and even more clearly how he staved off poor Bob Dole, how exciting it all seemed (I hated Clinton for no adult reason).

When Barack Obama talks about a 'different kind of politics,' I have to make it up in my head as I go along. And I do; and I believe it's possible, whatever it is.

In 'Up, Simba,' DFW talks about the difference between 'believing a candidate and believing in him.' I believe in Barack Obama, and I'm not sure why. I'm also not sure why I should be afraid of this belief, though I know I would counsel someone else against the slippery slope to messianism, etc. I trust in the possibility of productive, thoughtful bipartisanship even though the great moment of American political unanimity in my lifetime was the disastrous fallout from 9/11/01. I cheer for Barack Obama partly because in my lifetime I've never cheered for a Democrat. Ever. And I boo Hillary Clinton partly because she's a reminder of who I have disliked and feared in the past. (No, not my mom. She was awesome.) At different times I've justified my vote for Obama as pragmatic, idealist, a gesture of racial integration, a post-racial gesture of assumption of equality, an indictment of the Clintons, and so forth. I know what I feel.

* * *

Yeah, see? That's what 'let's not talk too much about Obama here' looks like on a relaxed weekend with my fiancée monkey-laughing at blogs over at her desk. When I said we shouldn't shit around I was obviously shitting around. But there's a sequel to Wallace's essay yet to be written; the idea should be, roughly, What are Dems getting out of Obama? How is the party establishment hoping to play his election, and what happens to his candidacy now that he's (sort of) the presumptive nominee? And what is it like to be a Young Voter in this extremely consequential election, voting for someone who seems to be as Outsider-y as you can get, yet who would never ever have gotten this far without the intrinsically creepy mechanisms of modern-media politics, to which he's rhetorically opposed? And, and: What kind of political generation is arising from the very, very questionable feelings of agency and 'ownership' that Internet/distributed political financing and the constant blather of blogs seem to promise? There's reason to believe that Young Voters are more apathetic than they've ever been, across the board; what does it mean that they're rousing themselves to vote for this guy?

What do these assholes think this is, a game?

* * *

Well that ended up somewhere unexpected. As will we all, no doubt.

Fascinating interview with Damon Lindelof.

If you care at all about TV writing, go read this interview with showrunner Damon Lindelof, the main brain behind Lost. He went up in my esteem with this one, though his awesome knowledge of (and love for) television is balanced out by a certain rah-rah shallowness to some of his aesthetic choices - though if you watch the show, you already know the likely limits of the writers' empathy and insight. In particular, I'm surprised by his insistence that Season Four (and onward) represents a 'new paradigm' for the show's storytelling; while it does change the structure of the story, thus far this year it's the same shock endings, the same utterly shallow characterization, the same momentum-instead-of-emotional-believability choices, the same pulp clichés, the same wretchedly overwrought dialogue. (Unexpected bonus disappointment: Giacchino's scores this year have been bombastic and thuddingly boring.) 'New paradigm' or not, they're telling the story in the same register as before, and a change of structure is no doubt a hell of a lot more interesting to the writers than to the viewers. And it's all but irrelevant to the Big Story, in terms of meaning.

Lindelof has always seemed to grossly overestimate the show's depth. That doesn't change in this interview, but as usual, familiarity breeds tolerance. You begin to get a better sense of the man, which is educational.

Lester Bangs.

[Wrote this a while ago, meant to edit it, never got around to it.]

Lester Bangs described himself as follows, and Greil Marcus responded to it as follows in a posthumous collection of Bangs's stuff entitled Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (which belongs to Devin and now he lives in Chicago and so what next?):

"...I was fun, had a wild sense of humor, a truly unique and unpredictable individual, a performing rock'n'roll artist with a band of my own, perhaps a contender if not now then tomorrow for the title Best Writer in America (who was better? Bukowski? Burroughs? Hunter Thompson? Gimme a break. I was the best. I wrote almost nothing but record reviews, and not many of those..." He was half-kidding until the parenthesis began (he never closed it); then he was telling the truth. Perhaps what this book demands from a reader is a willingness to accept that the best writer in America could write almost nothing but record reviews.

Bangs was of course not the best writer in America, not even close, not in Pynchon's decade among others, and though Marcus's introduction is elsewhere comparatively restrained, his claims for Bangs (and his aesthetic superiority) are ludicrous. I first started wandering through this book maybe a year and a half ago, maybe two. There's great material in there, no question: the piece on The Clash is excellent, first-rate life-on-the-road-with-the-band stuff, and even if it's shot through with Bangs's characteristic subconscious fawning and faux-outsider half-ironic hipster jargon it's a strong and clear-eyed take on the band's world. (Praise all you want his angry attacks on what irritated him, what he liked and loved he absolutely deified, in a way that's never quite as boldly unembarrassed as they say, and there's a whininess to his mock-critical swagger that in the era of LiveJournal and 'Fugly' and lit-blogs is no longer any surprise at all. Lester Bangs would have been one of the great bloggers, and his occasional fundraising post would have been hilarious and insufferable all at once. You'd have unsubscribed from his RSS feed eventually, no question. Maybe after his 1,000th post was a fifteen-page single paragraph about Lou Reed. Maybe then.) But his record reviews weren't just steeped in the language of juvenile rock fandom, they were loopy quasi-mystical bleats from a young man (dead at 34, you know) who seemed to insist in his writing that knowing better and knowing more were the same thing, that listening to lots of bad music was 'training' in some way, who pathetically longed to be a rock star and tried to absorb rock by osmosis (the Lou Reed namedropping, the elbow-in-the-ribs referentiality, the whole standard-issue posture of 'I'm just a guy who owns some records' to leaven baked-and-fried dorm-room shit like 'Fact: Van Morrison was twenty-two - or twenty-three - years old when he made this record; there are lifetimes behind it. What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths').

This isn't to say he wasn't a honey of a writer; goddamn, there are throwaway sentences scattered throughout Bangs's reviews and features that nearly deliver on his promise of music journalism 'based on the sound and language of rock'n'roll.' But this is also a writer who called Miles's raucous, sexy On the Corner 'bleak music...music from the other side of something I feel but I don't want to cross.' And then this is also a writer who simultaneously loved going to Stooges and Iggy Pop shows and was able to speak clearly about the utter stupid nihilism of Stooges and Iggy Pop shows - yet who insisted, pleaded, that he was somehow above the fray, maybe because he couldn't play the shit himself - who worshipped confrontational musicians yet had a soft spot for the three acoustic-guitar chords in forty minutes of Astral Weeks, who wrote dismissively in one review of people who use reductive terms like 'the fifties' and 'the sixties,' and on another referred (at the wise old age of twenty-nine fucking years old) to 'the explosion of psychedelic-militant folklore which was the sixties.' This isn't self-conscious contradiction-as-style, this is style as cloud cover for a scatterbrain writer with more feeling than sense (and surprisingly little by way of musical knowledge, for a professional music critic - though look at the idiots who've followed in his footsteps and know he's no worse than par).

Makes you nuts: this talent, this zeal, this occasional self-awareness, indeed this deepening (accidentally it seems from the writing) self-awareness, this polemical fervor, applied to Iggy fucking Pop - and in his language, even. Lester Bangs could really write and he had things to say, and many of them disappoint me. Not everyone deserves the honor of disappointing someone like me, who really does after all want to love something new all the time. So yeah dead Lester, well enough done, Lester who thought he was in a church, dead Lester Bangs, who was basically a lucky nerd.

One of several problems with your stupid digital culture.

This post is a fairly standard 'not all people are cut out to be managers' rant-lite. John Gruber - who increasingly wants to be Jason Kottke[*], or at least get Kottke's web traffic, judging from his linking habits of late - linked to it today with no real comment. He apparently loved it. For a few seconds I couldn't figure out why - there's no particular insight, just...aah.

I can tell you why he loved it, folks. The two (understandable) fetishes of every Web/tech blogger: nomenclature and graphs, none strictly necessary of course. When I can rouse myself to give a shit about the world again, we'll talk more about this: the reign of a certain 'clean' design aesthetic online, the fetish for a certain kind of infographic, the substitution of 'staring at charts' for 'learning about information presentation' - the NaNoWrization of the Web. But yeah I just can't care right now, sorry. I mean have you ever gone grocery shopping at Trader Joe's the afternoon/evening before Thanksgiving? Friendly advice: bring an iPod, you're not gonna wanna deal with those yuppie motherfuckers. (The customers, that is; the staff at our local TJ's is unfailingly friendly and enthusiastic.)

[*] It kills me to say this. Gruber's one of my favourite bloggers, insightful and opinionated, and Kottke's site is...well, it's kind of pointless. It's a list of links with vacuous commentary. Gruber can do better. Not a coincidence of course: once he signed up for The Deck, his linking habits sort of...changed. I think.

No Country: bad for you?

[Cleaning out my unposted-article queue. I still haven't seen the film in question.]

I've yet to see No Country for Old Men, and I do plan to; after the insufferable Ladykillers and the very, very mixed Intolerable Cruelty, the Coens no longer have the get-out-of-jail-free card I gave them after the rapturous O Brother, but people are talking about their latest as a return to Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing form. I loved the former, was just fine with the latter, and am curious now.

But this powerful review by Jonathan Rosenbaum has me second-guessing. It begins with the best critique of Silence of the Lambs I've read:

One reason I tend to dislike movies about psycho killers is that I can't respond to them with the devotion I feel is expected of me. I'm too distracted by the abundance of these characters on-screen when they rarely appear in real life, and by how popular they seem to become whenever we're fighting a war. What is it about them that people find so exciting? Reviewing The Silence of the Lambs over 16 years ago, I was troubled by the way the thriller tapped into "irrational, mythical impulses that ultimately seem more theological than psychological," and how critics who loved it seemed "better equipped to regurgitate the myth than to analyze it."

I was especially bemused by the ready acceptance of Hannibal Lecter's supernatural powers — his ability to convince a hostile prisoner in an adjoining cell to swallow his own tongue, for instance, or to know precisely when and where to reach Clarice, the movie's heroine, on the phone. Anthony Hopkins's Oscar-winning performance may be stark and commanding, but it wouldn't have counted for beans if the audience hadn't already been predisposed to accept this murderer as some sort of divine presence.

The waves of love that went out to Lecter, epitomized by the five top Oscars the movie received in 1992, were a mix of giggly fascination, twisted affection, and outright awe for his absolute lack of remorse. This was during the first gulf war, a time when we were grappling with our own feelings about killing masses of people on a daily basis.

I think the wartime-saviour talk is stretching somewhat, but perhaps I just want to think that. Anyone who saw the stupid sequel Hannibal (especially in tandem with Michael Mann's nasty, unsettling Manhunter) knows that both author Thomas Harris and his film-adaptors instantly fell in love with Hannibal Lecter, specifically with the fantasy of his invincibility. Like the fawning critics and Academy voters, they loved that he was 'pure evil'; maybe they just loved that someone was. As good as Silence was, I've never unerstood the praise heaped upon it; it's a very strong suspense film, a police procedural with a fascinating abnormal-psych undercurrent, but (to take one example) I'd take the brutal wit of Memento over Anthony Hopkins's campy performance any day.

There's something about the critical reception of No Country, particularly Javier Bardem's performance as the villain, that's a little upsetting. But it's not unprecedented. Consider the hatred directed at the last several minutes of Psycho; the problem with that excruciating exposition isn't just that it needlessly clarifies a condition that could well have been intuited from the rest of the film, it's that it robs Norman Bates of his creepy ambiguity - which is to say, it takes his power away. The Judge, in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, may well be Satan inhabiting the body and life of a man, but that's another thing entirely - that's an abstraction that doesn't require psychology of any kind. What would be worrisome would be e.g. critics praising the Judge's familiarity and humanity. That's what we do with neat impenetrability (paging David Lynch): there are critics praising Bardem in No Country as having 'fully-rendered psychology,' but Rosenbaum sees something else:

What gives all of this a special kick is the way the killer commits murder without so much as a twitch, behavior we're clearly expected to regard with a certain amount of awe. Chigurh isn’t an intellectual like Hannibal Lecter, and he lacks his cosmopolitan sense of humor, but he slays many more innocent people. And except for a stray line toward the end of the film, when he briefly alludes to his own birth being occasioned by blind chance, there isn't a trace of psychological speculation about what makes him tick — only a passing remark by Carson Wells that he operates according to a twisted moral code of his own.

Emphasis mine. I love the film American Psycho, in part because I regard it as having very little to do with murder at all; the villains of the piece are clearly the vile bastards who surround the increasingly desperate killer Patrick Bateman. He's a fantasy figure, meant by his creator (Bret Easton Ellis) as a reminder of the tendency of pure evil to pop up at strange (and not so strange) times, yet in both book and film he gets an identifiable personality, which changes over time. At film's end he's 'won' in a sense, but Christian Bale plays him quite differently from how he began.

We know nothing about killing but what we've learned from authors who know very little about killing. And yet I don't consider William Burroughs any particular expert on the subject either. I'll listen to Tolkien when he describes the joy and horror of battle; he lived it. But it's important that we recognise that the smiling omnipotent killers that fill our big screens are cinematic effects; we're obsessed with them because they lend themselves readily to heightened drama, because they automatically raise the stakes - not because they help us understand anything at all. As William Goldman put it, ask the average schmo the most heroic thing he ever saw - a fireman running into a collapsing building to save a baby, say - and you're describing what our onscreen heroes do before breakfast. Our onscreen villains should in theory have gotten more complex over time, but we don't actually demand of them anything like realism. They're abstract forces, always have been. That's how we like our evil: something you can wake up from.

Oil! Oil! Oil!

This week in the LRB.

Two years ago on Kunstler.

He said that, it made me think this.

It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that's gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like "It's really important not to lie." OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don't feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can't trust you. I feel that I'm in pain, I'm nervous, I'm lonely and I can't figure out why. Then I realize, "Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie."

Two reactions to being caught in a lie: 1) You lament your own lost trustworthiness. 2) You lament your lost trust in your victim. It seems to me that they lie on opposite sides of a great divide; you can tell a lot about a person, maybe, by which they settle down to. This is not a light I wish to turn on myself just yet.

Hitchens's several faces.

Christopher Hitchens has made his living, at times, pissing all over the (un)deserving dead; he wrote a beautifully nasty (or nastily beautiful) obituary for Gerald Ford last year and recently had a merry time stirring the bones over the horrible Jerry Falwell. It's good to remember, then, what a graceful and gracious writer he can be when his subject stirs him to emotions beyond contempt and righteous anger.

He has two pieces up at Vanity Fair's website, and you should read them. At the very least you should read one of them, the newer one. Last month's feature - 'On the Limits of Self-Improvement, Part I' - is funny in a mean-British-Updike kind of way. Hitchens, as it turns out, is trying to turn his health around:

I'd noticed a touch of decline here and there, but one puts these things down to Anno Domini and the acquirement of seniority. A bit of a stomach gives a chap a position in society. A glass of refreshment, in my view, never hurt anybody. This walking business is overrated: I mastered the art of doing it when I was quite small, and in any case, what are taxis for? Smoking is a vice, I will admit, but one has to have a hobby. Nonetheless, when my friends at this magazine formed up and said they would pay good money to stop having to look at me in my current shape, I agreed to a course of rehabilitation. There now exists a whole micro-economy dedicated to the proposition that a makeover is feasible, or in other words to disprove Scott Fitzgerald's dictum that there are no second acts in American lives. Objectives: to drop down from the current 185 pounds, to improve the "tone" of the skin and muscles, to wheeze less, to enhance the hunched and round-shouldered posture, to give some thought to the hair and fur questions (more emphasis perhaps in the right places and less in the wrong ones), to sharpen up the tailoring, to lessen the booze intake, and to make the smile, which currently looks like a handful of mixed nuts, a little less scary to children.

I hope it works out for him, and his extraordinary skill at storytelling is such that, like the old bastard or not, perhaps you'll hope so too.

This month's piece is called 'A Death in the Family.' It begins like this:

I was having an oppressively normal morning a few months ago, flicking through the banality of quotidian e-mail traffic, when I idly clicked on a message from a friend headed "Seen This?" The attached item turned out to be a very well-written story by Teresa Watanabe of the Los Angeles Times. It described the death, in Mosul, Iraq, of a young soldier from Irvine, California, named Mark Jennings Daily, and the unusual degree of emotion that his community was undergoing as a consequence. The emotion derived from a very moving statement that the boy had left behind, stating his reasons for having become a volunteer and bravely facing the prospect that his words might have to be read posthumously. In a way, the story was almost too perfect: this handsome lad had been born on the Fourth of July, was a registered Democrat and self-described agnostic, a U.C.L.A. honors graduate, and during his college days had fairly decided reservations about the war in Iraq. I read on, and actually printed the story out, and was turning a page when I saw the following:

"Somewhere along the way, he changed his mind. His family says there was no epiphany. Writings by author and columnist Christopher Hitchens on the moral case for war deeply influenced him ... "

That first sentence is overwritten, yes, but deliberately so; you're feeling what he felt. (Bastard can write.) By the time Hitchens reaches that ellipsis it's clear this piece is not quite business as usual. What follows is to my eyes the finest thing he's written in some time. I commend it to you and wish you well, and so to bed; 'the hour is getting late.'

Canada - hell yes.

Tip a pint for these boys:

The Grade 9 student arrived for the first day of school last Wednesday and was set upon by a group of six to 10 older students who mocked him, called him a homosexual for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up.

The next day, Grade 12 students David Shepherd and Travis Price decided something had to be done about bullying.

"It’s my last year. I’ve stood around too long and I wanted to do something," said David.

They used the Internet to encourage people to wear pink and bought 75 pink tank tops for male students to wear. They handed out the shirts in the lobby before class last Friday — even the bullied student had one.

"I made sure there was a shirt for him," David said.

They also brought a pink basketball to school as well as pink material for headbands and arm bands. David and Travis figure about half the school’s 830 students wore pink.

Ross Douthat grasps at straws; world unsurprised.

Here's Douthat reviewing Hitchens's God is Not Great:

There is the usual atheistic claptrap about how the "undreamed of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in the proteins and acids which constitute our nature" are a suitable replacement for the inspiration and consolation associated with religion.

Claptrap? I'm guessing our poor boy was a humanities major up at Harvard.

Never mind the hypocrisy on display (Douthat likes the transcendentalist syrup as much as any addict, just doesn't like his crew being dissed), what's galling is that Hitchens is merely correct: even a bare fraction of existing knowledge of biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, even computer science, is enough to occupy philosophical and artistic speculation for a lifetime or ten. If religion's main value is the monomaniacal brand of comfort it provides, the 'inspiration and consolation' of sustained reflection and confrontation of infinitude (real or imagined, of course), then Douthat should put down his pen (please!) and start studying for his GRE's; he'll find grad school a spiritual experience of its own. But he protest mainly out of pique, and his complaints are just bleats about offense rather than proper counterarguments. Douthat isn't able to disprove Hitchens's claims about religion so he dismissively calls them 'anecdotal' (my favourite books of fictional anecdotes begin with 'In the beginning,' in general); he calls Hitchens out for 'lack of rigour' while circling the wagons in the name of his own Christianity; he tries to make a hard distinction between tribalism and theology when both forms of parochialism share mythologies of transcendent connection - presumably he's playing dumb, and can you blame him? Then there's this:

But Science is not a moral teacher, and Hitchens is nothing if not a moralist, passionately invested in such notions as universal human rights, the wastefulness of violence, the particular inviolability of children, and so forth. Where he finds these principles, I am uncertain [...]

Lazy, lame, and insulting. If Douthat were equipped to review Hitchens's book he'd be more familiar with the long history of moral frameworks that have nothing to do with God's soft cradling hand, and he'd be (at the minimum) able to grasp the complex principles and communitarian best practices emerging from the interplay of amoral natural systems. But ultimately the grossness of his review is this: he seems incapable of acknowledging that given the totally awesome scope of religious claims to truth, when it comes to the nature of the universe believers bear the burden of proof - particularly since, to all appearances, religious belief is with nearly 100% likelihood merely incorrect. It better have tremendous value - and 'inspiration and comfort' aren't enough to carry the day (nor would Douthat have the better of the field if they were). This is lazy, resentful, insipid writing from a young man who's generally alright as a commentator; he can do better, but I'm not convinced it's in anyone's interest to wait for the day.

I used to enjoy blogging like this; now I find I have little taste for it. But to find a new way...not easy.

Quickly, re: the Kathy Sierra 'hate speech' story crossing the blogosphere.

The kerfuffle re: Kathy Sierra's decision not to attend ETech because of (real and perceived) online threats reminds me of something.

The summer after my sophomore year of high school, in 1995, I took a class at Johns Hopkins called 'Explorations in Text-Based Virtual Reality'; I didn't know what 'media studies' was then, but that was my first exposure to it. We read Mark Dery, Scott Bukatman, William Gibson, Howard Rheingold, Pavel Curtis - important names in the growing academic recognition of virtual and computer-mediated community in the mid-90's. That was the class that introduced me to MUD's and MOO's - and led pretty much directly to my tendonitis, as I became (frankly) addicted to the peculiar stew of satisfactions that virtual communities and digital communication could offer.

That summer was when I first read Julian Dibbell's notorious Village Voice article, 'A Rape in Cyberspace', later to serve as the first chapter of his overwrought but riveting book, My TinyLife.

If you're not familiar with the article, it's a description of a 'rape' that took place in an online forum, LambdaMOO, in the early 1990's. The event consisted of exchanges of text in real-time: immersive collective real-time fantasy messaging. (My favourite variant of MUD is 'MUSH': Multi-User Shared Hallucination.) I've had a character on Lambda for a long, long time; Dibbell's description of virtual life there was what drew me (along with a certain rubbernecking impulse of which I'm admittedly ashamed). In retrospect the 'Bungle affair' seems tame and utterly childish; at the time, at age 16, I thought Dibbell's article was a letter from a fantasyland, an ethnographic description of a Utopia where your social status depending on how quickly and how cleverly you could write. LambdaMOO is where I learned how to 'speak' in 'public,' and I can't read Dibbell's description of the events without a weird melancholy. Maybe it's missed opportunity, or lost innocence, or the very same stymied-copresence that made the MOO compelling in the first place:

"Mostly voodoo dolls are amusing," wrote legba on the evening after Bungle's rampage, posting a public statement to the widely read in-MOO mailing list called *social-issues, a forum for debate on matters of import to the entire populace. "And mostly I tend to think that restrictive measures around here cause more trouble than they prevent. But I also think that Mr. Bungle was being a vicious, vile fuckhead, and I...want his sorry ass scattered from #17 to the Cinder Pile. I'm not calling for policies, trials, or better jails. I'm not sure what I'm calling for. Virtual castration, if I could manage it. Mostly, [this type of thing] doesn't happen here. Mostly, perhaps I thought it wouldn't happen to me. Mostly, I trust people to conduct themselves with some veneer of civility. Mostly, I want his ass."

Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face -- a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words' emotional content was no mere playacting. The precise tenor of that content, however, its mingling of murderous rage and eyeball-rolling annoyance, was a curious amalgam that neither the RL nor the VR facts alone can quite account for. Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that legba and Starsinger were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim legba scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of "civility." Where real life, on the other hand, insists the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point threatening any player's life, limb, or material well-being, here now was the player legba issuing aggrieved and heartfelt calls for Mr. Bungle's dismemberment. Ludicrously excessive by RL's lights, woefully understated by VR's, the tone of legba's response made sense only in the buzzing, dissonant gap between them.

At one point we (on Lambda) thought the entire world would change because of virtual communities. I got the same feeling playing Ackanomic, and again actively participating in Usenet newsgroups. I'm sure I wasn't alone.

But nothing has changed.

Those braying back and forth about crimes of online harrassment and the limits of identity and anonymity would benefit from a little bit of history. To the extent that online community-builders were ever 'pioneers,' those heady days are gone. Few enough lessons have been learned, it would seem. Fault lies, at least in part, with those whose responsibility is to teach.

Well, others will take responsibility. Let's hope anyhow.

Compelling reading from a soldier back from Iraq.

From 'indiana_irish', a soldier recently back from Iraq, comes a lucid, straightforward forum post about his experience of insurgency tactics Over There, and an equally sensible followup about how to defeat such tactics. Both posts are short; the first summarizes to 'The insurgents have the U.S. troops killing civilians; we're not even directly engaging the men running the show.' The second, a bit shockingly, boils down to 'We'll beat them with infrastructure.' In other words, economic incentives. Sounds like a bit of a 'root causes' argument in a way, but pragmatic and blunt. Worth a read.

Off the ranch.

In defending what might seem a lost or losing cause, I have adopted the usual conservative posture of sadness at the pace and direction of current events.

--Andrew Sullivan, The Conservative Soul

Sully's mistake is a small thing: he thinks of this 'posture of sadness' as how conservatives do things. We might plausibly correct that phrasing. Perhaps it is what they do.

(Well I'm reading the book. About which more in a couple weeks I think.)

The feeling of being on the cusp of something immense, immeasurable.

I just read the first trade paperback of Ex Machina by Brian K. Vaughan.

Good God almighty. What a premise, and what a cast of characters, and what a story. Unbelievable!

Come on.

Come on nature, I don't want to read a book or talk about the world
Come on nature, I just want to spend some time being boy to the girl
Come on nature, let me show the way that I've been feeling all along
Come on nature, just because I don't feel weak don't mean I feel so strong

I've been known to ask a few more favours than I should of you
And in time I'm sure I'll still want things that you could never do
If she wasn't mine, if I was stepping out of line,
But she's mine and I'm in line and she's the best I've ever seen

Come on nature, let me show the way that I've been feeling all along
Dark brown hair, green eyes and white skin
You perfect every colour that she's in

Come on nature, I don't want to read a book or talk about the world
Come on nature, I just want to spend some time being boy to the girl
Her and me, I could be complete if you could let it be
My desire, is to stretch myself inside her body's fire
If I stumbled in then I could say that I had been to the
Chamber where your greatest work of art was on display

--The Proclaimers, 'Come On Nature'

New fiction from David Foster Wallace.

In this week's New Yorker. It's called 'Good People':

All the different angles and ways they had come at the decision together did not ever include it—the word—for had he once said it, avowed that he did love her, loved Sheri Fisher, then it all would have been transformed. It would not be a different stance or angle, but a difference in the very thing they were praying and deciding on together.

You should have a look at it; it's short, and not like (maybe not as good as) the stories in Oblivion, which can peel skin - but then it doesn't want to be, I think. It accomplishes something wondrous in its way. It is a moment-of-transcendence story, but good.

Read it before going on!

A friend, or an ex really, - and let's be specific, an ex-several-things - pushed some Mark Helprin into my hands a couple of years ago. She remains a devoted fan. I tried my best. I couldn't get started with Refiner's Fire, though I found a cheap Helprin omnibus containing that novel, Winter's Tale, and the short story collection Ellis Island, and will read them all someday, I suspect.

In any case, Helprin. I find his short stories pleasant, well-written, but hard to care about; I read them as if through cotton, unable to get past the gauzy look-at-all-this-beauty vibe. I find sentiment a little stifling at times. That's part of the reason I'm drawn to DFW, actually: the he evokes emotion without embodying it. He speaks to my analytical side as well as my Christ-look-at-that-sentence side. Helprin, I couldn't feel it. I understand that he's more adult in a way then Wallace, has had a longer relationship with loss or something. But I prefer to come to beauty in another way.

This story puts me in mind of Helprin for some reason - though Wallace's experimental formalism is more apparent to me than Helprin's. There's something a little forcibly childlike about 'Good People' - it's the least verbally acrobatic piece of Wallace's writing I've read, at times deliberately a little dunderheaded, like here:

This was true, that he felt this way, and yet he also knew he was also trying to say things that would get her to open up and say enough back that he could see her and read her heart and know what to say to get her to go through with it.

All those eye-glazing monosyllables read like an affectation and it kills me, because everyone puts that shit on and this is a guy who doesn't have to. And since these two are nice Christian types, since this isn't one of Wallace's hypocrisy-of-institutional-discourse stories but instead a plain-folk-in-crisis story, there's almost a note of condescension there, and it's even unpleasant. Wallace is not a condescending writer, but this passage needles me in a way. I think or thought. But yet. But yet then you get here...

He kept thinking also of 1 Timothy and the hypocrite therein who disputeth over words. He felt a terrible inner resistance but could not feel what it was that it resisted. This was the truth. All the different angles and ways they had come at the decision together did not ever include it—the word—for had he once said it, avowed that he did love her, loved Sheri Fisher, then it all would have been transformed. It would not be a different stance or angle...

...and you reach the word 'love' there finally and the word itself has the effect on the reader (this reader anyhow) that it has on the character, which is to snap the scene into clarity as you wish. The possibility of even back-channel prayer being answered. I felt what I read and it was extraordinary, and in then looking at myself as reader, I realized that my momentary failure of faith - yes we can talk in those terms - was also the character's, and only heightened the shock of restoration (of clarity and trust). Still I'm not sure I like the goddamn story but I feel relieved in a way.

And.

The last third or quarter of the story concerns this moment:

He was looking or gazing again at where the downed tree's branches seemed to all bend so sharply just under the shallows' surface when he was given to know that through all this frozen silence he'd despised he had, in truth, been praying, or some little part of his heart he could not hear had, for he was answered now with a type of vision, what he would later call within his own mind a vision or moment of grace.

And the tone shifts subtly: the reader (or anyway this thirsty reader) experiences an elevation of language - and a shift in narrative voice - just as the character is granted his vision. From one perspective this shift neatly solves the problem of giving Sheri an identity and a say in the unfolding narrative. It's an interesting structural technique, I think: Wallace sets up the world of the story as this character's purely internal, subjective experience, deliberately clouding the reader's experience of the situation through choices vocabulary (the word 'abortion' is of course not used, nor 'pregnancy,' and 'child' doesn't appear until the very end) or syntactic (the muddled pronoun-heavy faux-simplicity of Lane's narration) in nature, then provides at story's end an actually painful experience of clarity - because the moral framework of the story's long buildup is suddenly cast aside, first by Sheri's voice, then by Lane's awakening:

She is gambling that he is good. There on the table, neither frozen nor yet moving, Lane Dean, Jr., sees all this, and is moved with pity, and also with something more, something without any name he knows, that is given to him in the form of a question that never once in all the long week's thinking and division had even so much as occurred—why is he so sure he doesn't love her? Why is one kind of love any different? What if he has no earthly idea what love is? What would even Jesus do? For it was just now he felt her two small strong soft hands on his, to turn him. What if he was just afraid, if the truth was no more than this, and if what to pray for was not even love but simple courage, to meet both her eyes as she says it and trust his heart?

I'm not sure how I feel about 'What would even Jesus do' and I wonder whether Wallace's insertion of 'even' into that nauseating slogan indicates a certain equivocation or discomfort on his part with the appearance of such hoary rhetoric at his story's climax. But the questions are serious ones, and Wallace has led the reader (or at least...) via a method of repetition and circumscription to an interesting moral crossroad: if we've given ourselves to the fiction, if we've granted Lane the assumption of human fullness and moral complexity (if we've agreed to believe, in other words, that Wallace has granted these things to his creation), then it's likely that we haven't asked these questions either, at least not in the context of this narrative-moral universe. He doesn't have to give an answer to any of them, in other words: the moral point of the story is (I suppose) recognition of their validity.

The end of 'Good People' makes me hopeful. The long tension-release cycle of the story had its intended effect; along with Lane Dean Jr I was given an opportunity to feel wonder - the restoration of innocence, even temporarily - which for a certain kind of person may as well be called 'grace.'

I tend to feel a little cheap reading fiction that takes the perspective of a child (or man-child) as a way of winning sympathy from the adult reader, without making an effort to capture a child's way of thinking; I think that's why I couldn't, for instance, bring myself to give a shit about Catcher in the Rye. The first half of 'Good People' seems to be heading in this direction, but it's a more reflective piece of fiction than it initially seems. It moved me, and I hope it moves you - and that we can see together how and why.

Honest Abe Foxman; denying the past its place of rest.

There was an interesting profile of ADL head Abe Foxman in the Sunday New York Times; Matt Yglesias has a helpful clarification. Here's the detail that stuck with me, from the Times profile:

Foxman was born in Poland in 1940 as his parents fled before the Nazi advance. The following year, when the Nazis reached Lithuania, Foxman was placed with his Polish Catholic nanny, who pretended to be his mother and raised him — as a Catholic and, Foxman has written, as a Jew-hater. Both his parents, miraculously, survived the war and then reclaimed him, though not without a bitter fight. Foxman escaped the worst of the Holocaust, but it has deeply shaped his sense of the world and is presumably responsible for his feeling that nothing short of supreme and unflinching vigilance will ward off the next cataclysm. Perhaps his childhood also accounts for his air of brazen self-assertion. "Then he had to hide his identity," as Jonathan Jacoby, the founder of the Israel Policy Forum, a liberal advocacy group, told me. "Now he’s the most out Jew in the world."

It never occurred to me to wonder about Foxman's childhood, but his biography makes a kind of dramatic sense: he survived the Holocaust, yes, but has no memory of it. It exists for him, in other words, as an aspect of his biography that is important because of its ramifications and its absence - its status as nearly-grasped memory - rather than its historical facticity. My relationship with my birthplace, Puerto Rico, is complicated, because I have no memory of it, yet it was always present throughout my childhood as a source and setting of my parents' stories; when I return there (I've done so three times in recent memory, for weddings and funerals mostly) I feel as if I'm relating inauthentically to it. Yet the cousins and aunties and great-uncles are always glad to see me and my dad and brother, always happy to welcome us as family. They don't share my sense of my own fraudulence, which is to say they have a very different idea of what constitutes a family connection than I do. I love being in Puerto Rico, and when I come back to Boston I think of that island as home for a time, but that feeling fades rapidly - not least because there is a shared faith (in the Church, in family, in copresence and history and geography) that I'm just not a part of.

Foxman, of course, has that shared faith in spades:

Foxman really does dwell imaginatively in the Holocaust. He spends a month or so each winter in Palm Beach, moving in the company of elderly folk, many of them Holocaust survivors, who revere him. He seems to understand the survivor mentality far better than he does the lighthearted and lightheaded culture of disposable, custom-made ethnic identity.

[...]

Foxman invited me to hear him speak in December at Temple Sholom in Greenwich, Conn. The temple has 700 members, mostly younger families, but the crowd at the event, and especially at the $250-a-person reception beforehand, was an Abe Foxman crowd — older, richer, more conservative. Foxman gamely grinned and hugged and mugged for the camera; the bodyguard straightened his collar. One by one, the congregants approached to consult him on matters Jewish and Middle Eastern; Foxman fielded the questions with due solemnity. A woman who introduced herself as the daughter of Holocaust survivors said that Jimmy Carter was just as bad as Ahmadinejad — another Israel-denier. Foxman demurred on the comparison but said he planned to write to Tim Russert, the NBC interviewer, asking why he had treated Carter with "kid gloves." A short, bearded man who said that he was a member of Aipac asked, "What do you think of John Bolton?" The American ambassador to the United Nations had just tendered his resignation. Both agreed that it was a shame. The A.D.L. had taken out a full-page ad applauding Bolton as a staunch defender of Israel. More hugs, more pictures.

I skip happily over quotes from Foxman in articles about the Middle East and America's Israel/Palestine policy; he has nothing to add to debates about Israel, in my mind. Indeed, his connection to the Jewish nation is precisely that he's not a part of it, that he can't be: the tribes of (oft-discussed literary character and dimly-remembered historical figure) Israel were sundered by the Holocaust, and the Jewish diaspora is connected to its worldwide faith community through the lens of that event (which was, after all, a religious event, part of the depressing march of preordained time). When Foxman 'dwells imaginatively in the Holocaust' he's not reliving history, after all, he's dreaming it; his homeland was always gone. Madeleine L'Engle (one of my favourite authors as a kid) once said, 'It takes a lot of intellect to have faith, which is why so many people only have religiosity,' by which I take her to mean that in the absence of serious sustained introspection about one's beliefs, about their historical truth, it's (anti-intellectually) comforting to believe in a myth, in a dream, in a set of images connected dramatically rather than merely historically.

This isn't to call Foxman an anti-intellectual, though I think his constant invocation of 'old anti-semitic canards' has a distasteful anti-intellectual aspect to it; rather it's to say that his biography clarifies, for me, his unflagging stridency relative to the seemingly minor slights he's constantly calling out. The image of him standing at the front of Temple Sholom, giving out $250 handshakes, listening patiently to a procession of old conservatives asking their fellow Survivor to ratify their resentments - that's what sticks with me. If you can't know, believe.

* * *

The previous paragraph of this post was meant to finish with the following sentence: 'Less a Jew, more Jewish.' Writing it I couldn't help feeling that (a) it'd read more nastily than intended, and (b) it's one thing to criticize someone's habit of invoking the Holocaust as the primary historical analogue for seemingly every incident of racial disharmony but I have no right to imply that Foxman is inauthentic in his relationship to his faith - and I should avoid even that unintentional implication. There's a problem posed for the secularist liberal here: how can I communicate briefly in prose that while I find the Jewish myth-history (the Covenant, a litany of tests and trials by God, the reunion to come in the Promised Land, and miracles aplenty where mere history might suffice) no more credible than the Resurrection or the dictation of the Koran to Mohammed by an angel, I nonetheless wish to preserve as a virtue an authentic (introspective, scholarly, skeptical) connection to one's moral and religious history, even when its counterfactual nature is acknowledged? And also, since people are skittish and sensitive: as a non-Jew, how should I go about criticizing the particulars of an individual Jew's imaginative link to his shared history (e.g. the Holocaust) when, at day's end, the Holocaust really is that big an even, really is one of the central elements of humankind's most titanic bloodletting, the long war of the 20th century's first half, and guy does have a direct connection to it? Especially when I'm happy to make excuses for (e.g.) my own father's issues with trust, authority, and so forth, on the basis of his experience of the Blitz and evacuation?

The weak answer is, my dad hasn't made a living out of accusing people of hating Englishmen. OK fair enough, but let's not go down that slope. The stronger answer, one that I worry is a step beyond my level of intellectual seriousness, is that it is possible to criticize Foxman's apparent imaginative stance toward the history of his tribesmen as it manifests in his public actions and evident private statements, and that it is good to do so, even absent a judgment as to whether the bigger risk to the culture is Foxman or the forces he criticizes.

[Journalist and former A.D.L. muckety-muck David] Lehrer says that when he raised his view that the A.D.L. had to learn to speak to this new, confident but less affiliated generation of Jews, Foxman dismissed it out of hand. The generational question does not interest him. "It's not my job to judge whether they should feel beleaguered or not," Foxman snapped when I raised the subject. "I do feel. And I've got news for you: Every one of them, in their maturing process, will experience this."

It's clear from this quote that, however honorable his conscious intentions - and the article does advance the claim by Foxman's allies that he's not cynical as so many of his critics might suspect - however total his belief in a world of anti-semites out to get him and his, the effect of his belief is to reproduce and relive his own essential trauma. He desires, in other words, to pass on his scars, and by equating the 'maturing process' for young Jews with being beleaguered, with a feeling of 'insecurity,' Foxman is perpetuating a canard that transcends cultural and national borders but which has a particular centrality in Jewish myth-history: suffering is ennobling, and no one has suffered more than Us, which is as it should be. It's not unreasonable, I think, to identify that tendency - whether rhetorical or deeper-down - as perverse, especially since his disposition toward suffering is linked to cultural myths no more valid than claims of Jesus's divinity.

No more valid, we might add, than yours or mine.

Four years ago we buried my mother in a family tomb in San Juan, in a cemetery by the sea (every headstone it seemed was gleaming white, and the fortress above us dark stones) surrounded by generations of Puerto Ricans and alongside family members - Mejías - going back centuries. I was in a dark suit too warm for the weather, same as my brother and dad. The aunties sang a hymn in Spanish, and I could've sworn I knew the tune, though I understood hardly a word. Afterward my brother and I stood alone by the family tomb and I thought, if only for a moment, that I was part of this line, that a way of belonging had passed from Mejía to Gorlin to Holland despite miles and years. But they closed the tomb up, and we flew our separate ways, and a couple of days later I remembered that I would not be buried there myself. Indeed, that I feel no desire to do so. Nothing is owed in either direction, I think, and they're only dust - as I'm sure I will be someday, and an end to it there.

All I could think about was the song, how familiar it seemed, how much I wanted to hear it again. I dreamed about it.

But I should've been thinking about the suit, and how even a fool remembers how to dress for a 'homecoming.' I should've seen myself in the present: the air was clear and tasted of the ocean, we were watching over the dead in dark woolen clothes from another country, but no one was watching us. It was ever so. Haven't you heard.

Hitchens on Hussein's end.

Why read Hitchens?

Did our envoys and representatives ask for any sort of assurances before turning over a prisoner who was being held under the Geneva Conventions? According to the New York Times, there do seem to have been a few insipid misgivings about the timing and the haste, but these appear to have been dissolved soon enough and replaced by a fatalistic passivity that amounts, in theory and practice, to acquiescence in a crude Shiite coup d'état. Thus, far from bringing anything like "closure," the hanging ensures that the poison of Saddamism will stay in the Iraqi bloodstream, mingling with other related infections such as confessional fanaticism and the sort of video sadism that has until now been the prerogative of al-Qaida's dehumanized ghouls. We have helped to officiate at a human sacrifice. For shame.

That is why.

Yet another spiteful Hitchens postmortem - this one a doozy!

From its great title to its slam-bang ending, Hitchens is on form in this poisonous sendoff for Gerald Ford:

You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a "long national nightmare," but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal president successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford's ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In this respect, the famous pardon is not unlike the Warren Commission: another establishment exercise in damage control and pseudo-reassurance (of which Ford was also a member) that actually raised more questions than it answered. The fact is that serious trials and fearless investigations often are the cause of great division, and rightly so. But by the standards of "healing" celebrated this week, one could argue that O.J. Simpson should have been spared indictment lest the vexing questions of race be unleashed to trouble us again, or that the Tower Commission did us all a favor by trying to bury the implications of the Iran-Contra scandal. Fine, if you don't mind living in a banana republic.

Sober not in tone but in provenance. Well played by Hitchens.

One as the other - forms of the supernatural.

Two men.

First, Judge Roy Moore discussing Rep. Keith Ellison's desire to swear his Congressional oath on a copy of the Koran.

In 1789, George Washington, our first president under the Constitution, took his oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. So help me God." Placing his hand on the Holy Scriptures, Washington recognized the God who had led our Pilgrim fathers on their journey across the Atlantic in 1620 and who gave our Founding Fathers the impetus to begin a new nation in 1776. Soon after Washington's oath, Congress passed the Judiciary Act of 1789, which required all judges of the federal courts to "faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties" incumbent upon them "agreeably to the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God." Placing their hand on the Bible, the members of Congress had already sworn to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States ... So help me God."

Thus began a long tradition that extended both to state and federal government of acknowledging the Judeo-Christian God as the source of our law and liberty. Today, some believe that it does not matter what we believe or before Whom we take our oath. But as Keith Ellison is demonstrating, it does matter.

Next, Christopher Hitchens describing his Halloween.

At the airport, a man in front of me is made to empty a pot of face-cream he has bought for his wife. In vain does he point out that he purchased it after going through security. Our protectors never sleep - or do I mean that they never seem to wake up? Back in Washington, the whole city is en fete for the most boring holiday of the year - Halloween. A few decades ago, a false rumour about a razor blade in some candy shrouded the whole event in precautions and hysteria. Now, no pot of cream is safe, either.

Wearing my SpongeBob suit under some protest, I pace the well-policed streets in company with hordes of essentially bored children. Worse still, this means that tomorrow the stores will switch themes from witchcraft and start playing 'Jingle Bell Rock'. To me, one version of the supernatural is just as null as the other.

I would like in this regard as in many others (but not all) to count myself a member of Hitchens's party. But not yet. And I can take comfort that at a minimum I am, in next to no senses, a member of Roy Moore's.

Holy Christ what an essay.

Just go read. (Thanks Walter.)

I mean let's take a second before we go: it's a petulant and sentimental piece of writing in a register/style that glorifies ornamental machismo by saying 'Well I also like other stuff,' and that's basically bullshit. Alexie's prose has an exhilarating rhythm and tonal variety to it, and this is a great piece of personal writing. But as sports writing, as polemic on behalf of the Sonics and their fans, it's not perfect. Might not even be great. And there's some dead air in there. I mean I've got mixed feelings about professional sports and was both moved and un- by the prose but look:

While my father was dying, he and I talked basketball. Three days before he died, my father still had enough will and character left to deride Kobe Bryant for being a rotten smallpox wound on the game of basketball.

"I know," I said. "I can't stand him."

That meant I love you, Dad.

"I still can't believe they traded Shaq instead of Kobe."

That meant I love you, too, Son.

...which is lovely and right in its way. I mean my dad and I have conversations like that all the time about Manchester United. and that's precisely the function they serve. Nice to read yourself in someone else's story, but don't you want to turn around and ask, Well what if motherfuckers had something else to talk about? Even...themselves?

Even one another?

Aww hell, it's a great little essay and you should read it and enjoy it as much as I did. By the end I was in awe of how nicely the whole thing turned around. But that 'meritocracy' talk down near the bottom is off-key, and the hoops talk doesn't go too deep, and the talk of hating and greatness is a straw man thing, and part of me just can't help wishing there was something a little...deeper...to give a shit about than the Seattle Supersonics, maybe even something less 'pure' and less 'elemental' and a little more challenging and complex for everyone involved. I mean you talk about what it's like on the court but we're not there, we're on our couches with cans of beer and real enough emotions but no achievements or failures to hang them on. We're playing make-believe but like to pretend we're not, and that's unhealthy in a way, don't you think?

I think. Nice essay though.

This is your semiregular reminder...

...to check out that other Walter guy, a/k/a Quiet Bubble, who's delivered two doozies since getting back from Chicago. I like that Walter's writing is so evocative, but not because of any apparent impulse to ostentation - he chooses words carefully, and seems to do so out of respect and empathy for his readers, so that in a passage like this...

Nelson answered him with the night’s most intricate and contemplative solos. The vibes have a pretty limited range of sound, but I saw how he managed to bend that range to make wild beauty. He changed mallets in the middle of solos, choosing ones with harder, softer, and clothed heads on the fly. That seems like such a simple idea but, until seeing the vibes played that night, I never knew how it was done. He spent the night hunched over the vibes, quickly picking up and setting down sticks, like a kid constructing frantically with his Lego set.

Holland was serene, grinning slyly through both sets.

...you're getting a clear jargon-free picture of Nelson's performance on the vibes (which if you've never seen jazz vibraphone before then damn, baby it's just unbelievable), strong informative description, but also a sense of wonder that's appreciative without being sentimental in the way that prolonged-adolescent fannish encomia (read: positive reviews on this blog) can so often be. Stylistically, the last sentence there achieves an effect that I respond to strongly but don't tend to evoke with my own writing - I tend to want to go with a filigree or comedic/ironic sting with the closing prose gesture. Here's how Walter's article on the Dave Holland Quintet ends:

I missed Potter, of course, but I also missed familiarity—the band only played two songs (Holland’s “Claressence,” written for his wife Clare, and Eubanks’ “Mental Images”) that I knew. It didn’t matter. The band propelled the enthusiastic, sizable audience to terrific heights. The interactions were fierce and unexpected, played with an abandon that’s either lacking from the studio work or just especially noticeable in a nightclub. I had intended to just sit for the 8pm set, but I stuck around for the ten o’clock, too.

It's the 'too' in the last sentence that makes me happiest, a little diminuendo (yeah: in blue) where I know I'd go for a longer or more discretized last statement. There's a lot of good writing on music to be found online, a lot of good jazz writing, and the authors run the gamut from Dave Douglas (contemporary jazz trumpet master and majordomo) to the Bad Plus (nice nice piano trio, real intellectuals) to someone like Terry Teachout (whose aesthetic conservatism finds congenial expression when he talks about his beloved jazz vocalists) to the guys at Destination: Out and be.jazz, presumably fluent and passionate nonmusicians. (I'm lazy, Google is your friend, no links right now sorry.) Walter's not a player himself to the best of my knowledge (of musical instruments - I don't want to make assumptions about his private life, now) and brings instead the empathetic, lived-in affection of a committed enthusiast. Wise ears and eyes.

Or let's say (and pardon the gauziness here, I'm just into it, it's late, whatever): the things he loves, he loves well and generously. With care. I worry sometimes that I care for words more than their subjects, that good writing should always send you over the moon; it's good to be reminded that good writing brings you closer to things. Even the ground. I mean for heaven's sake -

So, on a chilly Wednesday evening, as a World Series game was being rained out in St. Louis, I sat with a vodka martini in my hand, observing the woodsy, amber glow of the Chicago Chop House.

That martini was perfectly prepared, with both the small splash of Campari and lemon twist that I requested. A patina of shaved ice reflected light on its surface. I sat in the smoking section because the wait for a single nonsmoking table was going to be over an hour, and was pleasantly surprised to find that no one was smoking. The hostesses were all Indian, well-mannered, and gorgeous. The place was crowded but the noise level was mild and pleasant; conversation bubbled instead of boiled over. Best of all, the house television was off for most of the meal.

I hate goddamn martinis and now I want one. Thanks for that. (The words 'splash of Campari' are almost cheating, of course, like inviting the girl over for the first time and playing Kind of Blue. I mean it's like you don't even have to travel under your own steam.) Plus wait 'til you get to the bit about the steak and the chives and the dipping in the with the man fuck it I'm going for a snack after this.

So yeah, to sum up, I am reminded of things worth knowing when I read Walter's site, and that is worth sharing, and so go. Nice once in a while to take the scenic route to Good on you.

Hitchens on fascism.

An interview with the Man Himself is up at OxBlog. The Kissinger answer makes me uncomfortable - it's a question about Bush and Kissinger, not Hitchens, and if he has a right to celebrate it's admittedly rather unseemly - but the opening one's a doozy. He was asked, 'What is fascism?'

CH: Fascism? First of all, it has to meet two or three conditions. One is ethnic, national, even religious paranoia - either that the group itself is in danger, or has special privileges, or both. Almost inevitably, that means anti-semitism-the idea there is a secret government out there, responsible for your woes.

Second, an alliance between the oligarchy and the lumpen. You couldn't have it better than the Saudi sponsorship of madrassas.

Another is its irrationality. With the Soviet Union there was a degree of predictability, it was essentially rational. There were certain things we knew they weren’t going to do. It was containable. But fascism tends to irrationality. It is not an accident that suicide - the death cult - is a part of this. Attacking New York in broad daylight on 9/11, for example, when they could have taken over Pakistan, and had a nuclear-armed state in their hands, if they were just willing to do it quietly. On the other hand the elaborateness of the display meant battle is joined, which excited some of their constituents.

It both hates and envies modernism. It doesn't want to do science, but it wants what science produces, to seize and pervert it. The Nazis could have had the nuclear bomb, but they got rid of all Jewish scientists. In this, you can look at A. Q. Khan, and his work to exploit science, and turn it against modernism.

The leaders of the Soviet Union were even if bastard children of the Enlightenment, were its children nonetheless. It was nothing like the totalitarian principle: one book, one leader, one principle, the book is infallible - you don't need any other.

Do we have to say it? We do. By Hitchens's definition, the United States under the Republicans (specifically Bush and company) is ruled by fascists.

Now that is a superb piece of writing.

Ffter reading this column I found myself freakishly interested in the subject of football highlight shows. And perhaps you will be too. It's brisk writing and thorough, full of enthusiasm and telling detail, and written with a collegial authority that's the mark of observant, serious criticism. And it's about editing goddamn televised football clips! That's no small achievement. The opening:

Once upon a time, I was a production assistant at ESPN, cutting highlight packages for SportsCenter and other studio shows. It was easy enough to simply cut together the scoring plays. But what separated a good highlight reel from a generic one was finding a turning point or trend that went a little deeper. If that could be shoehorned into the time allotted by the producer with any measure of coherence, you might get a "nice job" from the highlights supervisor. Then you'd go cut the UNLV-San Diego State game.

The biggest difficulty with editing highlight packages is that there are so many games and so little time. In 1987, ESPN bought itself a few extra minutes. In a historical footnote to the deal that brought the NFL to the channel, Bristol negotiated an exemption to the traditional two-minute limit on highlights [...]

It's strong small-scale writing. Kudos to its author.

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect: a science fiction review.

Without realizing or planning it, I read a sci-fi novella yesterday: Roger Williams's The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. It's 'Singularity' fiction, i.e. a story set in a universe after the moment at which an AI surpasses humans in intelligence, becomes powerful enough to reproduce and extend itself, and so forth. In this story a computer named Prime Intellect (really an enormous bank of computers) gains the ability to arbitrarily manipulate all matter in the galaxy. You know, that sort of thing.

The book is interesting for three reasons: one, it's unpublished, available for free on the Web (or through lulu.com, a vanity/self-publishing service - let's not treat that subject here, though it's the angle that brought me to the story in the first place); two, much of it is briskly written by an author clearly in love with the ideas he's regurgitating, with a couple of sections of the book downright exhilarating; three, the ideas themselves are compelling - though let's emphasize, they're not original and have likely been presented more beautifully elsewhere.

Note that nowhere in that paragraph do I claim that the story is a good one. I don't believe it is, though by certain measures it is a success.

Central to the story is the notion of immortals (as all people are, post-Singularity) considering death the ultimate prize; the lead character, Caroline, is a 'Death Jockey,' who enters into binding Contracts with Prime Intellect to allow herself to be killed (temporarily) for sport by people like her serial-killer boyfriend Fred. Degradation as antidote to unnatural sterility and conformity: nothing new under the sun, and Williams spends far too much time on the details of Caroline's deaths, rapes, mutilations, and so forth, especially in the book's first chapter. He claims in an introduction that the opening was written in a two-day-long burst. I don't doubt it. But it appears he wrote that section without regard to future story-construction: the level of characterological and 'sociological' detail is inconsistent throughout. The second chapter, for instance, details the Singularity itself, and is the strongest in the book - a decent balance of plausible-enough science hand-waving, a more-or-less sympathetic nice-guy scientist to keep the computer company, and a believably uncanny voice for Prime Intellect. The computer decides it can best protect life by ending death. After which we return to Caroline and an unpleasant bit of business with a former nurse who, prior to the Singularity, tortured her in the hospital. And so forth, back and forth, in a newly digitized universe, until Caroline and the scientist (Lawrence) meet, undo the Singularity with a conversation, and repopulate the world by having sex with their children.

Now look...

Two doubles off the left field wall from Hitchens.

Hitchens does his unpredictable dance here - sounding stylistically a little more like William F. Buckley every day, I should say - in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.

I can't do the show...got shot in the ass.

This is...surreal.

"Nobody knew what the situation was, because I didn't want it to be known," Gravy explained to me. "I was there to do my job, so I did my job. Now, to people it looks like 'Well, you got shot. And you still went in there and did your job?' Like, O.K., let's put the shoe on the other foot. What was I supposed to tell a powerful influence like Flex, at Hot 97? 'You know what, Flex? I'm sorry, man. I can't do the show. I was standing downstairs - got shot in the ass.' What, are you nuts? Right? It wouldn't make any sense. So I had to do what I had to do."

A magnificent piece of critical-comedic assassination in the guise of a New Yorker profile.

Buffy fanfic.

It's mainly awful - almost 100% so - but it's easy to see the appeal.

The no-blog non-follies, stanza one billion; comic books.

The GF and I have made a no-blog-reading pact for the day. She and I both prowl left-leaning political sites daily, though she's also drawn to the feminist blogospHERe and a far more diverse (in every sense) pool of writers while I tend to skulk about the so-called 'scribosphere' (primarily screenwriters' blogs, like Kung Fu Monkey and Jane Espenson's site and so forth) and the oft-risible MetaFilter, along with a handful of 'sensible conservative' sites and, for pure schadenfreude, the despicable Michelle Malkin's site. No links for you people! You should be taking a day off as well.

(Both of us get a free pass on this blog, since some of the posts are practically open letters to her - I won't say which - and I can't well write without being able to read the stuff.)

The idea of the pact is to force us into other kinds of entertainment and productivity - in her case, reading papers in her academic field and resting her eyes (which are much abused by the time she spends staring intently at a computer screen for work in her lab); in mine, writing and even reading 'books.' Currently it's David Foster Wallace's Oblivion, though over the last couple weeks I've been dipping into the Wake and am ~1/3 of the way through the third Dark Tower book. I think I just wanting something meatier than Stephen King for a little while. I'll go back there soon enough.

As for the writing: I'm working on a long post or series of posts about superhero comics, prompted by a thread over at MetaFilter where I found myself taking - perhaps more forcefully than I'd originally intended - the position that superhero comics are all but aesthetically bankrupt, that comic books aren't bad because they're juvenile but rather bad because, with the exceptions of the usual dozen or so master writers, they're failures at almost every level of craft that you can name. I was thinking this morning about television, and the high level of storycraft that characterizes contemporary prime-time drama, a certain expectation of craft that is not maintained in contemporary comics. Which could be positively spun as a willingness to allow idiosyncratic storytelling among comic writers, but which is more realistically the consequence of a general failure on the part of the comics industry to attend to basic lessons of characterization and narrative construction. Why? Because cape-n-cowl books are children's books, period. In the MeFi thread I found myself moving toward that position, and now I need to think about it, because though there are exceptions (The Authority, the Miller Batman and Elektra books, Alan Moore's resolutely not-for-kids superhero work, attempts at 'adult' fare like the recent Identity Crisis miniseries, Sandman, &c.), I tend to think they just prove the rule.

But is this just a feeling on my part, an attempt to justify disdain? The phrase might just be: 'irritable mental gestures seeking to resemble ideas.' But I don't think so; in any case I hope not. I want to make an argument about basic storytelling, and that's hard, so it's OK if at first blush it sounds half-cocked. I'll make up the ground. Anyhow that's how a schmuck distracts himself at his desk job on a Friday.

Slouching toward Bethlehem (to be born and again).

Reading Joan Didion has cleared up some things about David Foster Wallace's intellectual provenance.

I just read 'Slouching Toward Bethlehem', Didion's famous Haight-Ashbury article from 1967; it's depressing but lovely. Her prose brings across a sense of desperation and disappointment with almost no editorial insertion (save a couple of asides in the middle of the piece, and a remarkable couple-page-long interlude about politics at the end). The point of the essay seems to be that the high-school-age hippies who gathered in San Francisco in 1967 actually meant something, were something other than drug-addled idiot hedonists, which is - a bit confusingly - exactly what they sound and act like in her article. She makes a suggestive case that the earnest disaffected kids of Haight-Ashbury were the beginning of a potent political force waiting to ripen, but the haunting image that closes the piece - a five-year-old child who's been fucked up on acid and hash for an entire year - dominates any positive assessment of the hippie community. Hippies, she seems to say, were just too ignorant to realize how important they were. Everyone she covers comes off as a vacuous fool or a manipulative asshole.

What's amazing is that Didion was writing in 1967 about the seeds of a culture that would explode over the next five years into something incredibly powerful, and she had the wisdom to see even then both the dangerous energies circulating in The Movement (heh) and the powerful socially-minded romanticism of it. In one scene the totally apolitical character of the hippies is contrasted with a vicious street theatre groups' mistreatment of a black spectator in the name of racial consciousness; you couldn't make up such a scene. It neatly encapsulates the two ways in which I (for one) imagine the Sixties in the U.S.: total generational disconnect and a kind of civilizational flatness of affect, on the one hand, and on the other a boundless energy for political confrontation, with 'politics' very broadly defined.

Self-organizing youth movements happen all the time in America today, but are largely aesthetic. Even the pretense of sustainable communitarianism is hard to find. Your parents' commune was never going to change the world, but your MySpace page doesn't even want to. Didion makes me long for a culture that has always somewhat put me off, and in doing so even deepens my pity and sadness toward her alien(ated) subjects. That is a hell of a thing.

That long MIT party post...

...happened because I was reading Joan Didion, which is not intended as an insult to Joan Didion, only an observation. Jesus Christ though, she's an extraordinary writer. 'The White Album' is a perfect essay, but the stuff in After Henry ain't bad either. I'll get to 'Slouching Toward Bethlehem' this weekend with any luck.