Womack's own paper hints at what's in store. Entitled Bruce Springsteen and the Politics of Nostalgia, it will trawl through a number of the better-known female characters in the Springsteen oeuvre. Coming along for the academic ride will be Sandy, Wendy and the ever-present Mary, not forgetting the "barefoot girl sittin' on the hood of a Dodge/drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain", who made her appearance on the 1975 track Jungleland.

"Although she comes in many guises, she's the female face at the heart of the sociocultural nostalgia that structures Springsteen's sense of pastness throughout his work," the paper's abstract explains.

Womack will "discuss the nostalgic imperatives in Springsteen's songs that allow us to enjoy a perspective towards the past as an archetypal paradise - a seductive space in which we can fulfil our collective longing for the illusory wholeness that lives in our memories and our dreams".

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:30 AM  |

The sense of relief that residents felt Monday morning when the city was not immediately inundated by a storm surge overflowing its protective levees was replaced late Monday night and Tuesday morning with dread because of a levee that was damaged by the hurricane.

Water flowing from the damaged levee near Lake Pontchartrain could have equally catastrophic effects, only unfolding more slowly.

...

Water levels in Lake Pontchartrain and the connecting 17th Street Canal are normally six feet higher than the surrounding city. The levees keep the waters from flowing down into this low-lying city, much of which is below sea level.

The damage to the 17th Street Canal and its levee means that the water from Lake Pontchartrain is now free to flow down to inundate hundreds of thousands of homes and other buildings here.

Once it flows in, the water will not drain from New Orleans because of the very levees that protect the city and that largely held during the hurricane. Those levees, built to keep water out, are now keeping the water in, and reports from across the city indicate that water levels are rising.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 5:29 PM  |

There is an auld axiom beloved of burnt-out English teachers, glamour-impoverished fantasists and a million other drudges seeking to transcend their lives of quiet desperation: everyone has a novel inside them.

This slogan has been appropriated as an article of faith by the amateur writing community, whilst its corollary - as a novelist, you have six-and-a-half billion potential rivals - remains the gravest of heresies. Like a blind man in a room of ill-positioned rakes, any group indulging in such wilful myopia is doomed to a series of unpleasant collisions with reality.

Curiously unsatisfied with the idea that being a successful novelist requires the ability to write books that a consistently large number of people are prepared to buy, jaded scribblers search instead for an explanation that will permit them to retreat with their pride and delusions intact. As W Somerset Maugham put it: "I have never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull."

The truth is a disproportionate number of publishers are wide-eyed idealists with a frightening propensity for chucking good money after bad. As much as agents and editors may feign a cool professional insouciance, most dream of stumbling across The Next Big Thing and securing their place in industry history. While veteran authors languish in the mid-list doldrums, jammy first-timers rake in vast advances on the promise of long and lucrative careers, which frequently fail to materialise. Publishers act with one eye on posterity, leaving their accountants with ulcers the size of kumquats, and the UK book market saturated with newcomers brawling over a limited readership.

Despite this, there will always be luminaries such as GP Taylor who are happy to curry favour with the disaffected and untalented. Enthusiastically promoting a competition with the aim of finding "the next JK Rowling", Taylor made the bizarre claim that "for the first time ever, a publisher is going to offer someone totally unknown the chance to be published". I daresay there are numerous examples of an author brokering his or her first deal over champagne at a garden party, but the simple fact is that unknown authors are being taken on every day, and frankly, publishers and established authors suffer because of it. The British publishing industry is crying out for a high-profile hothead to disabuse thousands of needy, bumbling timewasters of the notion that nascent masterpieces stir within their loins.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:19 AM  |

English is essentially bad Dutch with outrageously pronounced French and Latin vocabulary.
--Eugene Holman

English is essentially Norse as spoken by a gang of French thugs.
--Benct Philip Jonsson

English is essentially Anglo-Saxon with all the cool bits taken out.
--Thomas Leigh

English is essentially Dutch but it doesn't want to admit it.
--Danny Wier

English is essentially Pictish that was attacked out of nowhere by Angles cohabiting with Teutons who were done in by a drunk bunch of Vikings masquerading as Frenchmen who insisted they spoke Latin and Greek but lacked the Arabic in which to convey that.
--Bill Hammel

English is essentially all exceptions and no rules.
--Jonathan Bettencourt

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 8:46 AM  |

And try telling a baseball fan that pure Darwinism explains Joe DiMaggio. As Tommy Lasorda once said, "If you said to God, 'Create someone who was what a baseball player should be,' God would have created Joe DiMaggio -- and he did."

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 5:30 PM  |

You know about the great Live Concert Moment, right? I'm not talking about the kind of show where you leave thinking, "Those guys rule!" and then buy a T-shirt. I'm talking about total-body bliss, a rush so strong it turns brain cells into Jell-O and, for a moment or two, you sort of leave your skin. Art lovers would probably argue that they get the same feeling by looking at a great painting, but they're fools, and you should ignore them. A good part of what I'm talking about here is sheer volume. A painting can be many things, but it will never make your ears ring.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:51 AM  |

Under a policy implemented with little fanfare a year ago, UC admissions authorities have refused to certify high school science courses that use textbooks challenging Darwin's theory of evolution, the suit says.

Other courses rejected by UC officials include "Christianity's Influence in American History," "Christianity and Morality in American Literature" and "Special Providence: American Government."

The 10-campus UC system requires applicants to complete a variety of courses, including science, mathematics, history, literature and the arts. But in letters to Calvary Chapel, university officials said some of the school's Christian-oriented courses were too narrow to be acceptable.

According to the lawsuit, UC's board of admissions also advised the school that it would not approve biology and science courses that relied primarily on textbooks published by Bob Jones University Press and A Beka Books, two Christian publishers.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:23 PM  |

In the New York Observer, Rex Reed was still more scathing. "Gilliam has no clear idea what he's doing," he wrote, "so the movie is nothing more than noise, costumes and disjointed special effects."

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 8:47 AM  |

JONATHAN HAIDT: People almost always start out by saying it’s wrong. Then they start to give reasons. The most common reasons involve genetic abnormalities or that it will somehow damage their relationship. But we say in the story that they use two forms of birth control, and we say in the story that they keep that night as a special secret and that it makes them even closer. So people seem to want to disregard certain facts about the story. When the experimenter points out these facts and says “Oh, well, sure, if they were going to have kids, that would cause problems, but they are using birth control, so would you say that it’s OK?” And people never say “Ooooh, right, I forgot about the birth control. So then it is OK.” Instead, they say, “Oh, yeah. Huh. Well, OK, let me think.”

So what’s really clear, you can see it in the videotapes of the experiment, is: people give a reason. When that reason is stripped from them, they give another reason. When the new reason is stripped from them, they reach for another reason. And it’s only when they reach deep into their pocket for another reason, and come up empty-handed, that they enter the state we call “moral dumbfounding.” Because they fully expect to find reasons. They’re surprised when they don’t find reasons. And so in some of the videotapes you can see, they start laughing. But it’s not an “it’s so funny” laugh. It’s more of a nervous-embarrassment puzzled laugh. So it’s a cognitive state where you “know” that something is morally wrong, but you can’t find reasons to justify your belief. Instead of changing your mind about what’s wrong, you just say: “I don’t know, I can’t explain it. I just know it’s wrong.” So the fact that this state exists indicates that people hold beliefs separate from, or with no need of support from, the justifications that they give. Or another way of saying it is that the knowing that something is wrong and the explaining why are completely separate processes.

BLVR: Are the subjects satisfied when they reach this state of moral dumbfounding? Or do they find something deeply problematic about it?

JH: For some people it’s problematic. They’re clearly puzzled, they’re clearly reaching, and they seem a little bit flustered. But other people are in a state that Scott Murphy, the honors student who conducted the experiment, calls “comfortably dumbfounded.” They say with full poise: “I don’t know; I can’t explain it; it’s just wrong.” Period. So we do know that there are big differences in people on a variable called “need for cognition.” Some people need to think about things, need to understand things, need to reason about things. Many of these people go to graduate school in philosophy. But most people, if they don’t have a reason for their moral judgments, they’re not particularly bothered.

BLVR: So your conclusion is that while we might think that Reason or reasons are playing a big causal role in how we arrive at moral judgments, it’s actually our intuitions—fueled by our emotions—that are doing most of the work. You say in your paper that reason is the press secretary of the emotions, the ex post facto spin doctor.

JH: Yes, that’s right.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 8:31 AM  |

One of the great mysteries of political life in the United States is why Americans are so devoted to their health-care system. Six times in the past century—during the First World War, during the Depression, during the Truman and Johnson Administrations, in the Senate in the nineteen-seventies, and during the Clinton years—efforts have been made to introduce some kind of universal health insurance, and each time the efforts have been rejected. Instead, the United States has opted for a makeshift system of increasing complexity and dysfunction. Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world’s median of $2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. What does that extra spending buy us? Americans have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries. We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries. We get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other Western countries. We are less satisfied with our health care than our counterparts in other countries. American life expectancy is lower than the Western average. Childhood-immunization rates in the United States are lower than average. Infant-mortality rates are in the nineteenth percentile of industrialized nations. Doctors here perform more high-end medical procedures, such as coronary angioplasties, than in other countries, but most of the wealthier Western countries have more CT scanners than the United States does, and Switzerland, Japan, Austria, and Finland all have more MRI machines per capita. Nor is our system more efficient. The United States spends more than a thousand dollars per capita per year—or close to four hundred billion dollars—on health-care-related paperwork and administration, whereas Canada, for example, spends only about three hundred dollars per capita. And, of course, every other country in the industrialized world insures all its citizens; despite those extra hundreds of billions of dollars we spend each year, we leave forty-five million people without any insurance. A country that displays an almost ruthless commitment to efficiency and performance in every aspect of its economy—a country that switched to Japanese cars the moment they were more reliable, and to Chinese T-shirts the moment they were five cents cheaper—has loyally stuck with a health-care system that leaves its citizenry pulling out their teeth with pliers.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 3:01 PM  |

From E! Online, Aug. 19, 2005:

“I just got off the phone with someone who talked to Joss [Whedon] yesterday, who claimed that [the "Spike The Vampire"] project was very much on the front burner. Joss has never told me anything like that. He's checked with me twice, to see if I was interested. I said yes twice, and both times he's been very clear that this doesn't mean that anything's going forward, [he] just wants to have [his] ducks in a row.” – James Marsters

From Whedonesque.com, Aug. 20, 2005:

"I had lunch with Joss and he asked me if I wanted to write and direct some blonde vampire movie thing. Should I do it? (I of course said yes right off, still) Anything under 13 hours scares me. And anything over 13 hours... um. I got nothin'." – Tim Minear

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:02 PM  |

...I'm tired of preachy retreads of the Frankenstein myth, first laid out in Mary Shelley's 19th-century classic and recycled by Hollywood constantly in films from Godsend to Jurassic Park. I'm sick of gross caricatures of mad-scientist megalomaniacs out to accrue for themselves powers reserved only for God. I'm fed up with the insinuation (for it's never an argument, always an insinuation) that there's a taboo against the pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge and that certain technological achievements -- especially those with the potential to affect life itself -- are inherently "unnatural." Or as Victor Frankenstein puts it in Shelley's novel, "Learn … by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow."

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 12:26 AM  |

Specifically, we can rank civilizations by their energy consumption, using the following principles:

1) The laws of thermodynamics. Even an advanced civilization is bound by the laws of thermodynamics, especially the Second Law, and can hence be ranked by the energy at their disposal.

2) The laws of stable matter. Baryonic matter (e.g. based on protons and neutrons) tends to clump into three large groupings: planets, stars and galaxies. (This is a well-defined by product of stellar and galactic evolution, thermonuclear fusion, etc.) Thus, their energy will also be based on three distinct types, and this places upper limits on their rate of energy consumption.

3) The laws of planetary evolution. Any advanced civilization must grow in energy consumption faster than the frequency of life-threatening catastrophes (e.g. meteor impacts, ice ages, supernovas, etc.). If they grow any slower, they are doomed to extinction. This places mathematical lower limits on the rate of growth of these civilizations.

In a seminal paper published in 1964 in the Journal of Soviet Astronomy, Russian astrophysicist Nicolai Kardashev theorized that advanced civilizations must therefore be grouped according to three types: Type I, II, and III, which have mastered planetary, stellar and galactic forms of energy, respectively. He calculated that the energy consumption of these three types of civilization would be separated by a factor of many billions. But how long will it take to reach Type II and III status?

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 12:11 AM  |

It is only through the ministries of the nihilating Lord Voldemort, the anguish-dispensing Dementors and the squads of Death Eaters that meaning can accrue to the universe-which-must-not-be-named, which we instinctively recognize as a pale shade of our own. The Sartrean Voldemort embodies Nothingness; i.e., he concretizes Potter and his pals by being the negation of Hogwarts. By seeking to destroy Potter, Voldemort imparts form, or "facticity," to the undifferentiated Beingness of Potter's World of plenitude. Sans the struggle with Voldemort, the wizards would, of course, be nothing but hopeless dilettantes practicing parlor tricks.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 7:00 PM  |

Dude, we totally know what you're thinking. That you'll have to wake up early. That we'll make you run all day with heavy stuff on your back. That you have to be drug-free, know how to read, and rank the U.S. as one of your top five favorite countries. Wrong, wrong, and wrong! And whatever else you're thinking? Wrong!

The Army is actually a whole lot of fun. Picture this: You get up—ten, eleven, whatever's good for you. Then we have brunch. Pancakes, waffles, French toast, some grease if the night before was a rough one. Sugar cereals. Then, at 1200 hours—just kidding! nobody here uses that number thing anymore—around noonish we hit the Xbox for a few hours of Halo and all-you-can-eat Cool Ranch Doritos. It's combat training without breaking a sweat. After a quick nap, we pack in some more training by watching a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie marathon. Then a dinner of chipped beef on toast, dehydrated mashed pota- Again, totally joking! We're having Taco Bell every night, all night, washed down by some of the best that Milwaukee has to offer.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 4:03 PM  |

The city has revoked a permit awarded to organizers of a block party celebrating graffiti, saying it will not grant another one unless the group scraps plans to have graffiti writers spray paint murals onto models of New York City subway trains. The city acted hours after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg criticized the plans yesterday.

# posted by Anonymous @ 7:43 PM  |

The essence of bullshit, Frankfurt decides, is that it is produced without any concern for the truth. Bullshit needn't be false: “The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.” The bullshitter's fakery consists not in misrepresenting a state of affairs but in concealing his own indifference to the truth of what he says. The liar, by contrast, is concerned with the truth, in a perverse sort of fashion: he wants to lead us away from it.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 3:22 PM  |

8. If the Devil went down to Georgia 'cause he was looking for a soul to steal, why does he arrange what appears to be an honest competition?

16. Was there some sort of arbitration board in place in the event that the outcome was not obvious?

17. If so, who served on this board?

35. Was it really necessary or wise to invite the Devil to come on back if he ever wants to try again?

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 12:36 PM  |

Poetry, then, appears to be:

1. a vacuous synonym for excellence or unconsciousness. What else is common to the public perception of poetry?
2. It is universally agreed that no one reads it.
3. It is universally agreed that the nonreading of poetry is (a) contemporary and (b) progressive. From (a) it follows that sometime back (a wandering date, like "olden times" for a six-year-old) our ancestors read poems, and poets were rich and famous. From (b) it follows that every year fewer people read poems (or buy books or go to poetry readings) than the year before.

Other pieces of common knowledge:
4. Only poets read poetry.
5. Poets themselves are to blame because "poetry has lost its audience."
6. Everybody today knows that poetry is "useless and completely out of date"--as Flaubert put it in Bouvard and Pécuchet a century ago.

For expansion on and repetition of these well-known facts, look in volumes of Time magazine, in Edmund Wilson's "Is Verse a Dying Technique?," in current newspapers everywhere, in interviews with publishers, in book reviews by poets, and in the August 1988 issue of Commentary, where the essayist Joseph Epstein assembled every cliché about poetry, common for two centuries, under the title "Who Killed Poetry?"

More than a thousand poetry books appear in this country each year. More people write poetry in this country--publish it, hear it, and presumably read it--than ever before. Let us quickly and loudly proclaim that no poet sells like Stephen King, that poetry is not as popular as professional wrestling, and that fewer people attend poetry readings in the United States than in Russia. Snore, snore. More people read poetry now in the United States than ever did before...

A few years back, a journal of the publishing industry printed a list of all-time trade paperback best-sellers, beginning with The Joy of Sex, which sold millions, on down to books that had sold two hundred fifty thousand. It happened that I read the chart shortly after learning that Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind, a trade paperback, had sold more than a million copies. Because the book was poetry, the journal understood that its sales did not count.

When I make these points, I encounter fierce resistance. No one wants to believe me. If ever I convince people that these numbers are correct, they come up with excuses: Bly sells because he's a showman; Ginsberg is notorious; Rich sells because of feminist politics. People come up with excuses for these numbers because the notion of poetry's disfavor is important--to poetry's detractors and to its supporters. Why does almost everyone connected with poetry claim that poetry's audience has diminished? Doubtless the pursuit of failure and humiliation is part of it. There is also a source that is lovable if unobservant: Some of us love poetry so dearly that its absence from everybody's life seems an outrage. Our parents don't read James Merrill! Therefore, exaggerating out of foiled passion, we claim that "nobody reads poetry."

When I contradict such notions, at first I insist merely on numbers. If everybody artistic loathes statistics, everybody artistic still tells us that "nobody reads poetry," which is a numerical notion--and untrue. Of course, the numbers I recite have nothing whatsoever to do with the quality or spirit of the poetry sold or read aloud. I include no Rod McKuen in my figures; I include only poetry that intends artistic excellence. My numbers counter only numbers--and not assertions of value and its lack.

But I need as well, and separately, to insist: I believe in the quality of the best contemporary poetry; I believe that the best American poetry of our day makes a considerable literature. American Poetry after Lowell--an anthology of four hundred pages limited, say, to women and men born from the 1920s through the 1940s--would collect a large body of diverse, intelligent, beautiful, moving work that should endure. Mind you, it would limit itself to one-hundredth of one percent of the poems published. If you write about Poetry Now, you must acknowledge that most poetry is terrible--that most poetry of any moment is terrible. When, at any historical moment, you write an article claiming that poetry is now in terrible shape, you are always right. Therefore, you are always fatuous.

Our trouble is not with poetry but with the public perception of poetry. Although we have more poetry today, we have less poetry reviewing in national journals. Both Harper's magazine and the Atlantic have abandoned quarterly surveys of poetry. The New York Times Book Review never showed much interest, but as poetry has increased in popularity, the Times has diminished its attention. The New York Review of Books, always more political than poetical, gives poetry less space every year. The greatest falling-off is at the New Yorker. The New Yorker once regularly published Louise Bogan's essays on "Verse." Lately, when the magazine touches on poetry, Helen Vendler is more inclined to write about a translation or about a poet safely dead.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:47 AM  |

Dave introduced me to the Ewing Theory three years ago, and we've been tinkering with it like Voltaire and Thoreau ever since. Eventually, we decided that two crucial elements needed to be in place for any situation to qualify for "Ewing" status:

1. A star athlete receives an inordinate amount of media attention and fan interest, and yet his teams never win anything substantial with him (other than maybe some early-round playoff series).

2. That same athlete leaves his team (either by injury, trade, graduation, free agency or retirement) -- and both the media and fans immediately write off the team for the following season.

When those elements collide, you have the Ewing Theory.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 2:20 PM  |

Heather Davis thought the dark brown otter was just playing with her dog Mike.

Then the 4-foot-long otter seized Mike's snout with its teeth and started to drag the fluffy, white dog into the lake.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 11:10 AM  |

A man suspected of shoplifting goods from an Atascocita Wal-Mart — including diapers and a BB gun — had begged employees to let him up from the blistering pavement in the store's parking lot where he was held, shirtless, before he died Sunday, a witness said.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:40 PM  |

Try never get drunk outside yr own house

Be in love with yr life

Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

Accept loss forever

Believe in the holy contour of life

Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better

You're a Genius all the time

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 2:57 PM  |

Comics from Paulette Poullet, Kenneth Koch, Nate Powell, Jeremy Broomfield & Claude le Monde, and Patricia Storms

Fiction from Chris Bachelder, Alika Tanaka, Dave Housley, Julia Ridley Smith, and Kurtis Davidson

Nonfiction from Traci Burns

Poetry from Dan Albergotti, Linh Dinh, C. Derick Varn, Joanne Lowery, Michael Constantine McConnell, Lisa Jarnot, Adam Clay, Eric Amling, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Anna Fulford, Denise Duhamel & Maureen Seaton, Chad Davidson & John Poch, Nick Carbo, Michael Robins, Marc McKee, Jon Leon, Becky Cooper, Matthew Rohrer, Chris Vitiello, and James Grinwis

Art and Photography from John Norris, Jon Clark, Mitchell Ostrover, and Mike Stauss

Humor from Tom Greenwood

and introducing Index by The Editors

# posted by The Editors @ 6:19 PM  |

Radio's Adventures of Superman (rebroadcast nightly at 9:30pm, KABL 960AM) was a popular show on the Mutual Broadcasting Network, claiming 4.5 million listeners in 1947, according to a March 3, 1947, article in The New Republic. While the mainstream press didn't comment on the political content of the show, it was noted by the right-wing commentator and reactionary evangelist Gerald L.K. Smith, who denounced Superman as "a disgrace to America."

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:59 AM  |

Evidences of gender confusion or doubt in boys ages 5 to 11 may include:

1. A strong feeling that they are “different” from other boys.

2. A tendency to cry easily, be less athletic, and dislike the roughhousing that other boys enjoy.

3. A persistent preference to play female roles in make-believe play.

4. A strong preference to spend time in the company of girls and participate in their games and other pastimes.*

5. A susceptibility to be bullied by other boys, who may tease them unmercifully and call them “queer,” “fag” and “gay.”

6. A tendency to walk, talk, dress and even “think” effeminately.

7. A repeatedly stated desire to be — or insistence that he is — a girl.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:43 AM  |

A simple example is a passage that many observers have long believed to contain a typographical error, the line of poetry in Sonnet 23 that goes: "More than that love which more hath more expressed. "On the surface, it does not make sense -- until Asquith realized it was a pun. "It should read, 'More than that love which More hath more expressed,' " she says -- a reference to Sir Thomas More, the chancellor and Catholic saint beheaded by Henry VIII for refusing to take the oath of supremacy recognizing the monarch and not the pope as head of the Church in England.

Similarly, she says, all of Shakespeare's characters existed on at least two levels, the dramatic and the allegorical....

The coded language was a vehicle that allowed him to comment on current events without risking the wrath of the authorities. Viewed through this prism, Romeo and Juliet becomes a commentary on the forbidden love between the 3rd Earl of Southampton and Elizabeth Vernon, one of the Queen's more impoverished ladies-in-waiting. King Lear becomes a symbol of James I, while his daughter Cordelia's refusal to make a public affirmation of unconditional love represents the refusal of Catholics to take the Oath of Supremacy.

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 10:28 AM  |