Dear Friends, Due to unfortunate considerations of time and cost, Backwards City is no longer a print journal. However, we will maintain our presence on the web that, however meager, we hope you might enjoy.
McGill University says the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council made a "factual error" when it denied Professor Brian Alters a $40,000 grant on the grounds that he'd failed to provide the panel with ample evidence that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is correct.
'I Have Come to Realize That My Free Time Is Worth a Lot to Me''
Alan Beggerow has stopped looking for work. Laid off as a steelworker at 48, he taught math for a while at a community college. But when that ended, he could not find a job that, in his view, was neither demeaning nor underpaid.
So instead of heading to work, Mr. Beggerow, now 53, fills his days with diversions: playing the piano, reading histories and biographies, writing unpublished Western potboilers in the Louis L’Amour style — all activities once relegated to spare time. He often stays up late and sleeps until 11 a.m.
“I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me,” he said. To make ends meet, he has tapped the equity in his home through a $30,000 second mortgage, and he is drawing down the family’s savings, at the rate of $7,500 a year. About $60,000 is left. His wife’s income helps them scrape by. “If things really get tight,” Mr. Beggerow said, “I might have to take a low-wage job, but I don’t want to do that.”
Millions of men like Mr. Beggerow — men in the prime of their lives, between 30 and 55 — have dropped out of regular work. They are turning down jobs they think beneath them or are unable to find work for which they are qualified, even as an expanding economy offers opportunities to work.
In honor of my old friend N.F., who quit his job today.
A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy's Triumphant Story
In 1992, Maupin had befriended Vicki's adopted, AIDS-stricken son, Anthony Godby Johnson, after reading a galley of his autobiography, "A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy's Triumphant Story." Moved by the harrowing memoir of child abuse, the "Tales of the City" scribe offered to blurb the book, and immediately hit it off with the dying - but effervescent - 14-year-old when they first spoke on the phone.
...
And then Maupin's partner, Terry Anderson, got a chance to chat with Vicki and Tony one day.
"Terry suggested that it was the same voice," says Maupin. "And I saw his point almost immediately."
As digital voice analysis would later show, Anthony was Vicki - the highly skilled perpetrator of a sweeping, 15-year public scam that touched thousands of people, including marquee names such as Oprah Winfrey, Keith Olbermann, Fred "Mr." Rogers, Mickey Mantle and Jermaine Jackson.
This weekend I also dove into the collection of Chris Ware's early sketches, Quimby the Mouse, which includes a few Jimmy Corrigans and fake-Supermans but mostly focuses on Ware's trademark anti-Mickey, Quimby. Like most of Ware's work, it seems tailor-made to my temperment, with just the right mix of playful irony and bleak despair.
One thing I did this weekend when I wasn't blogging was watch a ton of Netflix videos. I hadn't ever seen the Kubrick Lolita, and while I guess I can see where Nabokov purists might come from in their criticism of it, I still liked it quite a bit.
The Matador didn't do too much for me. Perhaps I wasn't in the right mood for it. Mail Order Wife I liked a lot more, though I don't know how I feel about mockumentaries that play it almost totally straight, and the movie can't seem to decide whether it's anti-male or anti-female.
Lastly we watched How to Draw a Bunny, a documentary about artist Ray Johnson, "the most famous unknown artist in America." Despite some very odd musical choices -- "Take Me to the River" plays over a news report about Johnson's suicide-by-drowning -- it was the best artumentary I've seen since (the far-superior) American Splendor.
The difference does not involve changes in genes, as far as is known, but changes in the human form. It shows up in several ways, from those that are well known and almost taken for granted, like greater heights and longer lives, to ones that are emerging only from comparisons of health records.
I couldn't help but be reminded of this old skit from The State by another very effective bit from Animal Liberation, this time from Chapter 2. (This is the last one, I swear. This isn't becoming an Animal Liberation blog. Not yet.)
In the same article in which they tell of Bowlby's visit, Harlow and Suomi describe how they had the "fascinating idea" of inducing depression by "allowing baby monkeys to attach to cloth surrogate mothers who could become monsters":
The first of these monsters was a cloth monkey mother who, upon schedule or demand, would eject high-pressure compressed air. It would blow the animal's skin practically off its body. What did the baby monkey do? It simply clung tighter and tighter to the mother, because a frightened infant clings to its mother at all costs. We did not achieve any psychopathology.
However, we did not give up. We built another surrogate monster mother that would rock so violently that the baby's head and teeth would rattle. All the baby did was cling tighter and tighter to the surrogate. The third monster we built had an embedded wire frame within its body which would spring forward and eject the infant from its ventral surface. The infant would subsequently pick itself off the floor, wait for the frame to return into the cloth body, and then cling again to the surrogate. Finally, we built our porcupine mother. On command, this mother would eject sharp brass spikes over all of the ventral surface of its body. Although the infants were distressed by these pointed rebuffs, they simply waited until the spikes receded and then returned and clung to the mother.
Seriously neat video loop of 787 clip-art images that proves the essential oneness of all things. Via MeFi, which usually proves the essential dividedness of all things.
What we must do is bring nonhuman animals within our sphere of moral concern and cease to treat their lives as expendable for whatever trivial purposes we may have.
I've been reading Peter Singer's Animal Liberation this morning, and I wanted to link to part of it, because it's very good, and because it's a very well-considered and persuasive answer to the question of why a person ought to be a vegetarian (not that I'm expecting any sort of mass conversion here -- some of my best friends eat hot dogs). Here's one version of the book's opening chapter, "All Animals Are Equal." Here's another.
Here's the nutshell to get you started:
If the case for animal equality is sound, what follows from it? It does not follow, of course, that animals ought to have all of the rights that we think humans ought to have - including, for instance, the right to vote. It is equality of consideration of interests, not equality of rights, that the case for animal equality seeks to establish. But what exactly does this mean, in practical terms? It needs to be spelled out a little.
If I give a horse a hard slap across its rump with my open hand, the horse may start, but presumably feels little pain. Its skin is thick enough to protect it against a mere slap. If I slap a baby in the same way, however, the baby will cry and presumably does feel pain, for its skin is more sensitive. So it is worse to slap a baby than a horse, if both slaps are administered with equal force. But there must be some kind of blow - I don't know exactly what it would be, but perhaps a blow with a heavy stick - that would cause the horse as much pain as we cause a baby by slapping it with our hand. That is what I mean by the same amount of pain; and if we consider it wrong to inflict that much pain on a baby for no good reason then we must, unless we are speciesists, consider it equally wrong to inflict the same amount of pain on a horse for no good reason.
Dalby's headline-grabbing assertion is that Homer, if he ever existed, was certainly not the author of "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," and not even the author of early drafts or proto-texts. The author was the person who decided to write down (or dictate) the legendary stories of the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus as epic narratives, far longer than would be suitable for an evening's tale spinning. That author had at least the faint glimmering of an idea that would change the world: Writing a long poem on a stack of cured goatskins (the only available medium) might ultimately reach a larger audience than that available to the traditional poet-singers who traveled from place to place as after-dinner performers. Dalby thinks that author was probably, or at least plausibly, a woman.
These are the last Shakers, living in the world's last active Shaker community, which has survived for 223 years in this idyllic and isolated hilltop village 35 miles northwest of Portland. Here, the four faithful live a life of ascetic simplicity and abide by the three C's: celibacy, confession of sin, and communalism. "The real misconception about the Shakers is that we're all dead," says one of the four, Brother Arnold Hadd, only half-jokingly. Via Arts & Letters Daily
This month's ultra-depressing, must-read Harper's article is "Imagine There's No Oil," about Peak Oil (it's here, or almost) and the prospects for American civilization afterwards (they are dim). But mostly it's a portrait of life among Cassandras, the Peak Oilers:
As for what will happen after the oil runs out, Heinberg presented an unnerving outline. The economy will begin an endless contraction, a prelude to the "grid crash." Cars will revert to being a luxury item, isolating the suburban millions from food and goods. Industrial agriculture will wither, addicted as it is to natural gas for fertilizer and to crude oil for flying, shipping, and trucking its produce. International trade will halt, leaving the Wal-Marts empty. In the United States, Northern homes will be too expensive to heat and Southern homes will roast. Dirty alternatives such as coal and tar sands will act as a bellows to the furnace of global warming. In response to all of this, extreme political movements will form, and the world will devolve into a fight to control the last of the resources. Whom the wars do not kill starvation will. Man, if he survives, will do so in agrarian villages. It is a terrible scenario, and for delivering it, Heinberg received a standing ovation.
If it goes online, I'll link to it. In the meantime, get to a newsstand.
Bookslut has a host of links about Drew of the always-excellent web comic Toothpaste for Dinner -- who, it must be noted, will have some cartoons in the upcoming issue of Backwards City.
It's no wonder a German discovered Relativity. In addition to the lie/lay distinction English inherited from German, Germans have a whole host of words distinguishing between motion and statis. There are different words for "to hang" and "to be hanging," for "to place in an upright position" and "to be in an upright position," as well as different noun cases for objects at motion and objects at rest. They also use different words for where (wo), where to (wohin), and where from (woher). What I'm saying is, he was smart and all, but Einstein had a head start.
We're all living in America, America is wunderbar. We're all living in America, Amerika, Amerika. We're all living in America, Coca-Cola, Wonderbra, We're all living in America, Amerika, Amerika.
This Wired article about academics at Comic-Con is worth reading for this paragraph alone:
Conference co-founder Coogan acknowledged that academia can be a fun- buster. "You have this dog and you love it, and you want to find out why you love it. You dissect it, and you're left with this dead bloody dog on the table," he said. "That’s one of the things that academics do."
I've just discovered that Comics Should Be Good has a good regular feature on Comic Book Urban Legends. It's now on its sixtieth installment. I've wasted a lot of time today and yesterday reading it.
Laura Miller at Salon reviewsA Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus, which weaves the story of a bitter New York divorce alongside September 11th and the War on Terror. She makes it sound pretty good, actually -- though all things being equal I think I'd rather everyone wait another five years before releasing their 9/11 books.
Besides the endless and illuminating permutations of its central metaphor, "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country" also features some of the best fiction writing yet about Sept. 11, worth celebrating for its utter lack of cant and self-regarding weepiness. Kalfus' description of Marshall's escape from the World Trade Center is harrowing without melodrama, but perhaps more daring is his willingness to tweak us for our less noble responses to the attacks. He writes about the surreptitious thrills ordinary people got out of their contact with heroic firefighters and federal investigations, and the way everyone seemed to want a piece of the big event, no matter how tenuous their connection, like the man who tells Joyce all about being stranded in Atlanta on Sept. 11:
"Joyce realized he considered himself a significant actor -- a victim -- in the September 11 tragedy. And didn't she think she was a victim too? After all, she had seen the buildings fall, with her own helplessly naked eyes. She was supposed to have been on one of the planes. But so what. Every American felt that he had been personally attacked by the terrorists, and that was the patriotic thing of course, but patriotic metaphors aside, wasn't the belief a bit delusional? There was a difference between being killed and not being killed. Was everyone walking around America thinking they had been intimately, self-importantly, involved in the destruction of the World Trade Center?"
It sure seemed like it. We didn't seem to learn much from the experience, either, but then how much can anyone grasp about what's really going on when they're at war? "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country" is about the way a conflict takes on a logic and momentum of its own until the reasons for continuing it ("If we leave, my comrades will have died in vain," and so on) become entirely self-perpetuating.
The Joker Has Left the Building (Batman: The Musical: WTF?)
Ben just posted an mp3 is which supposedly a song from a supposedly planned Batman musical. I'm skeptical, because it's hard for me to imagine anything this bad ever getting far enough past the initial planning stages to actually have a demo made.
It would have been the worst and therefore greatest musical of all time.
The traveller must, of course, always be cautious of the overly broad generalisation. But I am an American, and a paucity of data does not stop me from making sweeping, vague, conceptual statements and, if necessary, following these statements up with troops.
In the case of England, however, I am happy to report that troops will not be necessary. The British are, it would appear, allied with us Americans in the War On Terror. I found something rousing about this sense of shared purpose - this sense that they, too, were fooled by spurious intelligence; they, too, were, while in a state of fear, too quick to believe what they were told by their leaders; they, too, are willing to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of an endless war against what is essentially an imprecise noun, a war that is, semantically speaking, analogous to a War On Patriarchy, or the Very Energetic Siege Of Narcissism. It all reminded me of the second world war, or, to be more exact, movies about the second world war, in which, typically, the American and the British soldiers are not only the most handsome in the bunch, but speak English the best, and co-operate in the subtle teasing of the French guy, who is wearing a beret.
We Americans can learn much from the British. One thing they do here, which is a very good idea, is they have millions of tiny cameras hidden everywhere around their country. Say a terrorist is in his little terrorist house, playing his terrorist music too loudly. What happens is, the little camera in his house detects him and his friends dancing, and the police descend on the house and put a stop to the terrorist dancing. And they do not even need a warrant and there is not even a trial! Or, say, a terrorist dog poops in a park and the terrorist does not clean it up. The cameras see both the pooping and the non-cleaning-up, and soon dozens of policemen (which here are called "bobbies" or "Tories" or "pitches") descend on the terrorist and his dog (which here are called "favours"). We Americans are years behind in this technology. No doubt thousands of terrorists are smugly dancing to loud music in their homes all over our nation, while scores of smirking terrorist dogs poop blithely in our parks, and we do not even know it.
We seem to be ahead of the British in other anti-terrorist areas, however; for example, secret Cuban prisons.
Albert Einstein made bad financial investments, revealed details about his mistresses to his wives, and was plagued by doubts about his relationship with his two sons.
Those were among the intimate details of Einstein's life that emerged yesterday in a trove of more than 3,500 pages of letters, papers, postcards, and other documents unsealed at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
I've been grading Cat's Cradle tests all morning, so the Zen quote on my calendar really speaks to me today:
How terrible to watch a man who has the incomprehensible within his grasp, doesn't know what to do, and sits down playing with a toy called God. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Last night we watched Downfall, my third and final German film for the summer semester. Downfall is the story of Hitler's last days, and what is remarkable about the movie -- and what made it so controversial when it came out last year-- is that takes a completely value-neutral stance to the atrocities of the Nazis. The Holocaust is barely mentioned and the historical context of the war is completely ignored in favor of a subtle and disconcerting portrait of Hitler as a broken, deluded, and (yes) nearly tragic man.
I mean tragic in the classical sense. The film, while never elegaic or nostalgic for the Nazi era, is infused with the language of a heroic fall from grace -- putting us in the mindset of 1945's loyal Germans, watching their god-king collapse before their eyes. Bruno Ganz in particular seems to be drawing heavily from Richard III for his performance as Hitler, affecting both a slight hunch and a Parkinson's-esque finger twitch.
What is most horrifying about Downfall is not the behavior of Hitler or Himmler or Goebbels -- the people you already knew were madmen -- or the behavior of the many lower-ranked Nazis who commit suicide (often killing their wives and children first) rather than face accountability for their crimes. No, it's the behavior of regular, ordinary people, people who seem otherwise good and decent, who have been caught up in the Nazi Maelstrom and yet still mourn its passing. At its core, this film is not about Hitler so much as it is about what Hannah Arendt so perfectly named "the banality of evil."
One character, Prof. Schenck, is perhaps the moral center of the movie, seemingly the most upright and good man in Nazi Germany -- and yet of course he himself is a loyal Nazi, loyal to Hitler and the Reich to the end. The principal point-of-view character, Traudl Junge, would otherwise be a perfectly sympathetic and even admirable character, were she not Hitler's fiercely loyal personal secretary (and, perhaps, even in love with him).
The beginning and end of the film contain documentary footage of the real-life Taundl Junge, from an interview she gave in 2002 before her death. The clips, which highlight Junge's continued reluctance to face either the truth about Hitler or the truth about her own complicity in the Third Reich, into her 80s-- a reluctance, it should be said, she is by no means alone in exhibiting -- are the perfect bookend for the movie thematically, leaving you with both revulsion over the complacency of "good Germans" and horror over the realization that you yourself may be no different.
Following the Junge interview is a Bizarro-Animal House montage of still photographs accompanied by text explaining what became of the surviving characters, with a suprising number surviving into the '80s and '90s and a handful still around today. That one could have once been a Nazi, and now still be alive, is as surreal and unfathomable as anything else in Downfall.
To attempt to humanize Nazis, much less someone like Hitler, is perhaps the modern shibboleth -- especially in the Bush era of "moral clarity," which is why this film is both so striking and so riveting and so horrible and so important.
The AV Club is talking adaptation. The first four are pretty dead on, but after that the list gets a bit spotty for me. And Fight Club is actually a pretty terrible example of film adaptation, if you're concerned about loyalty to the source material. The movie is probably better than the book, but that doesn't mean it's a good adaptation. (via Linkfilter. Also: Evil Dead: The Musical.)
When I Was Young It Seemed That Life Was So Wonderful
Vladmir Putin has never smiled. Chairman Mao never stopped. Soften your cynicism, warm your heart, and pinpoint the exact minute George Bush became an asshole with Pictures of World Leaders as Children. (via MeFi)
What I've Been Reading Lately: Thomas Lynch, Black Hole, Focault, How to Read Donald Duck
Sadly, not as much as I'd like to be, as obsessing over the World Cup, traveling, and keeping up with the reading for my class have all kept me pretty busy. But I have finished a few books lately besides Devil in the White City, which I hopefully have already persuaded you is awesome.
Continuing my (re)education in critical theory, I just finished How to Read Donald Duck, an education in itself about the way Disney cartoons (and, by extension, all works of children's literature) are undergirded by reactionary politics. (Ariel Dorfman is a prof at Duke, actually; another thing to be excited about.) Now I'm reading Focault's The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, which confronted the paradox of the contemporary West's unprecedented sexual freedom against its perceived sexual prudishness -- and which is also brilliant.
Bodies in Motion and at Rest, by undertaker-cum-poet Thomas Lynch, was something of a disappointment for me, mostly because it lacked both the singular focus of his previous book, The Undertaking -- or maybe it's just that The Undertaking had already said all he had to say. Either way, it bummed me out to no end, as I'd been looking forward to reading Lynch's followup for quite a while.
On the comics side of things, as so many others have said before me, Charles Burns's Black Hole is both incredibly brilliant and incredibly disturbing. I just put the book down a few minutes ago and I feel as though I just survived a car crash. This is a dark book -- and now it lives inside my brain. I've also been looking through Chris Ware's early sketches, collected in the Quimby the Mouse collection, and it's Ware, so obviously its greatness is a given.
And if you don't have my number, but you're dying to use it for your Sprint referral, just ask. I'll take $25 any way I can get it.
PS: Sprint is actually a pretty decent cell phone company, as opposed to, say, Cingular, which is the offical cell phone company of Hell. In two years Sprint has never ripped me off.
WetAsphalt has an interview up with the publishers of One Story, which as Bookslut says is probably the second-best literary magazine out there right now.
At YouTube. I'm not embedding it because at least two of our readers haven't seen the second season two yet and I don't want to spoil anything. Also the page is taking forever to load as it is.
The results of our Top Ten Springsteen songs poll are in, and they provide the result we've all long expected: I have the bestworstmost populistmost plebianmost conventionalmost dull most representational tastes of everyone I know.
My top seven was the official top seven, just reordered slightly.
To tabulate the poll, we assigned one point for a #10 pick, and ten points for a #1 pick.
The results, ladies and gentlemen:
1. Atlantic City (fair and away the winner with 46 points -- it appeared on all but one list) 2. Thunder Road (36 points, appearing in twice as #1 picks and twice as #3 picks) 3. For You (surprising breadth of support, and also JennieT's #1: 35) 4. Incident on 57th Street (30 points, twice a #2 pick and twice a #5 pick) 5. The River (28 points, again with high breadth of support, appearing on all but three lists) 6. Born to Run (suprisingly low showing at 22 points) 7. Blinded by the Light (19 points, rightly rescued from obscurity by Jaimee's putting it at #1) 8. Badlands (13 points, glad to see it there) 8. I'm on Fire (The most shocking inclusion by far. I never would have picked this song for a winner.) 10. Jungleland (12 points.)
There is, incidentally, a four-way tie for 11th place: Backstreets, Candy's Room, Dancing in the Dark (DCNahm's #1), and Hard to Be a Saint in the City, all with 10 points.
The top ten results allow us to scientifically tabulate the best non-Greatest Hits Bruce album of all time as well; of course, with 70 points, it's Born to Run.
The rest of the major (major, of course, because I like them the best) albums all make at least one appearance in the top ten:
2. Greetings from Asbury Park: 54 points 3. Nebraska: 46 points 4. The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle: 30 points 5. The River: 28 points 6. Darkness on the Edge of Town: 13 points 7. Born in the USA: 13 points
Amusing that the album nearly everyone (including Bruce himself) considers his worst tied with the album Shankar persuasively called his most important.
Remember, You Have One Last Chance to Make It Real
...by submitting your Springsteen all-time top ten by tonight. This stastically accurate and 100% scientific poll will determine forever which Bruce song (and which Bruce album) is best.
...in comic book form. Popwatch at Entertainment Weekly has the details.
(Via AICN, which also has minor spoilers for Veronica Mars about the structure of season three, as well as some details about who might be jerking your chain on Lost next year. That last link has some Battlestar Galactica news as well.)
In the Guardian. Here's a direct link to the list itself. The Beatles clock in at #2 with Sgt. Pepper, Dylan gets #8 with Bringing It All Back Home, and Bowie gets #11 with Ziggy Stardust, but Springsteen is denied entirely.
A CNN interview with noted doofus Owen Wilson provides the first hint of the next Wes Anderson project:
CNN: How concerned are you that moviegoers may eventually tire of the goofball buddy-comedy roles you play?
WILSON: Maybe I should worry about it but I haven't. I think maybe because my background was with writing. So I usually find that if you come up with funny good stuff, people will be into it.
But I am going to do a movie with my friend Wes [Anderson] in India, and that's not going to be a buddy comedy movie. [I play] one of three brothers, and they go on this journey in India. I haven't really spoken to Wes yet in regards to what I can really talk about.
I am beside myself with glee.
Speaking of Mr. Littlejeans, here's an interview with the man himself from an old issue of The Believer.
Somehow I came across an old Harper's article called "The Oil We Eat" this morning, arguing, as Jared Diamond and Ishmaeldo, that the agricultural revolution that fueled the rise of civilization is ultimately unsustainable and that thus we are all doomed.
Sweet Paladine -- they're making a Dragonlance movie. When I was in elementary school I consumed these even faster than Lone Wolf (because you don't need friends when you've got Dragonlance.)
Kiefer Sutherland will be headlining as the voice of Raistlin Majere. Other case members will include Michael Rosenbaum (Justice League's Flash) as Tanis Half-Elven, Lucy Lawless as Goldmoon, Michelle Trachtenberg at Tika Waylan, and Jason Marsden as Tasslehoff Burrfoot.
"Ironically, to the modern mind, the whole fair seems a wondrous and practically inconceivable 'folly,' something I think people today unconsciously hunger for, though they might not be willing to admit it," Ware continues. "The scale and expenditure that went into the 1893 Exposition is really only matched today by Hollywood blockbuster movies, and is just about as transitory, but there's still something so much more reassuring, dignified and hopeful about it being a real place to visit and encounter rather than simply a brief flickering of colored shadows on a screen."
'To Succeed as a Ph.D. in English, You Have to Give Up All of the Things That Attracted You to the Subject In the First Place'
So argues Thomas Benton in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I suspect I'll have some thoughts on this in about a month and a half's time -- but I do wonder if at this point there's any prospective Ph.D. in the world who hasn't heard that they will supposedly have to give up all the things they like about their chosen discipline to succeed as a professor. It's sort of old news.
For me, it's strange and wonderful, after receiving tenure, to be able to rediscover my undergraduate self, to nurture in my students the motives that drew me to graduate school in the first place.
The problem is you can't get to where I am now without going through a decade or more of immersion in a highly politicized and anti-literary academic culture. You have to spend so many years conforming that, by the time freedom presents itself, you don't know why you became an English major in the first place. You might even have contempt for your seemingly naïve students, who represent the self that you had to repress in order to be a professional.
The Book of This Arbitrary Length of Time: The Devil in the White City
A book has finally usurped Chris Ware for the coveted Gerry Canavan Book of This Arbitrary Length of Time prize. The second BotALoT winner is Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, which magically appeared on my shelf just an hour after a friend told me it had replaced Hyperspace as his favorite nonfiction book. (I think Patrick and Casey gave it to me, but it could have been my mother or someone else. Whoever it was, thank you. You are awesome.)
I used to say that Kafka invented the 20th century. Now I know he invented only half of it -- the other half was invented for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The book follows two parallel tracks that together seem to define the history of the last hundred years. The first is the story of the fair itself, how a group of architects and innovators created stunning and unprecedented structures in just two years, inventing along the way half the infrastructure we now take for granted. This is the formative myth of the twentieth century writ large: the myth of progress.
The other narrative line is the story of perhaps the first instance of that classic twentieth-century American archetype, the serial killer.
Even more aberrant than all the BruceTube blogging was the fact that Jaimee posted something for the first time in forever, and as usual with Jaimee's posts it was incredibly cool. (Despite its coolness, I quickly buried it under a mile of Bruce videos anyway, because that's just how I roll.)
It's a Web site that lets you explore the tumultuous relationship between Van Gogh and Gauguin. She'll explain.
You may have noticed that over the weekend I posted a slightly higher than usual number of embedded Bruce Springsteen YouTube videos. It was the best weekend ever. If you're interested, here are links to the videos all in one place.
Although "Born to Run" comes close and "Incident on 57th Street" comes within a hair's breadth, I don't know that any song will ever be able to eclipse "Thunder Road."So it's no surprise that it receives all my votes for Greatest Bruce Springsteen YouTube Video of All Time. And of course "Thunder Road" is where the weekend ends...so let's go.
Just three more posts before Brucewards City turns back into a pumpkin. First up: an incredibly awesome video of "Promised Land" from 1980 that will make you want to kill yourself when it suddenly cuts off halfway through the song.
If Anatomie had been filmed in English in Hollywood, it would have been just another an-evil-medical-conspiracy-is-killing-med-students-to-get-bodies-for-its-experiments slasher flick. Part of me even feels as though the movie wants to be just another gross-out Hollywood slasher flick -- much of the film is formulaic to the point of parody, especially its preoccupation with getting its two female leads into their underwear.
However, the fact that this is a German movie adds a layer of thematic weight to the proceedings that simply wouldn't be possible in an American remake. Almost despite itself, Anatomie speaks in a fairly sophisticated way to that archetypal German psychological concern, the discovery of secret, irreconcilable evil in one’s past.
Although it makes a few references to the Nazis early one, the movie doesn’t actually mention the name Josef Mengele until the third act. By this time the connection to Mengele is made it has occurred to every historically literate member of the movie’s audience and the only question that remained was whether or not the movie was going to make the connection explicit. Before we have time to say, “Hey, they finally mentioned Mengele,” however, the movie makes the Nazi connection personal; it turns out that the main character’s beloved grandfather was himself a member of the evil Anti-Hippocratic Society, was also presumably a Nazi, and was in fact Mengele’s superior in the anti-Hippocratic Society at the time of his crimes.
In a single moment Anatomie transcends its schlock origins and becomes a revealing cultural statement about the impossibility of coming to terms with the nation's Nazi past, particularly when so many kindly old grandfathers were, in their youth, active Nazi party members, or sympathizers, and or didn’t-want-to-rock-the-boaters.
And here, as in real life, the possibility of reconciliation is denied -- Paula’s grandfather dies while she is returning to Munich to confront him, putting his Nazi past forever beyond her reach. She can never understand his motivations or hear his justifications, much less extract a renunciation.
An American version of the exact same script couldn't have the same bite.
When They Said 'Stop Posting YouTube Links,' I Threw Up
Becoming a man. Which everyone is supposed to be on their way to being. That is, all you guys. It could be a song about becoming a woman, too. But I don't know. A song about growin' up.
Like many friends who become roommates, Van Gogh and Gauguin had a falling out after living and painting together for a time at Arles. They argued increasingly about art as Vincent went crazy, at one point intending to stab Gauguin with a razor and eventually cutting off his own earlobe. If you have more than a few minutes, this website uses snippets of their correspondance and their art set to music in a kind of choose-your-own adventure story. You have to keep clicking on images in the site, varying from arrows to bottles of wine, to read their story in their own words.
I also heard that Gauguin would not do the dishes for weeks at a time when it was his turn.
If You Love This Land of the Free, Bring 'em Home, Bring 'em Home
"Bring 'em Home" with the Seeger Sessions Band from an appearance on Conan last month.
If you love this land of the free, bring 'em home, bring 'em home, Bring 'em back from overseas, bring 'em home, bring 'em home, It'll make the politicians sad I know, bring 'em home, bring 'em home, They wanna tangle with their foe, bring 'em home, bring 'em home, They want to test the grand theories, bring 'em home, bring 'em home, With the blood of you and me, bring 'em home, bring 'em home, We'll give no more brave young lives, bring 'em home, bring 'em home, For the gleam in someone's eyes, bring 'em home, bring 'em home.
And in keeping with the weekend's theme, Here's "Candy's Room" c. 1978 and "Kitty's Back" from 2002 with both E-Street and the Max Weinberg 7 on Conan.
We spent a chunk of the day at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, where Jaimee took some notes for one of her art history courses. It's definitely one of the better small museums I've been to, though I prefer the Cameron in Wilmington. (In fairness, I may be biased.)
What the N.C. Museum of Art is good at that most small museums aren't is ancient art -- it seems to be the focus of the permanent collection. At left is "Standing Female Deity or Deity Impersonator," which Jaimee wound up using for her paper. The museum Web site has a Shockwave tool that lets you look at it from all angles, if you like.
God Gave Noah the Rainbow Sign / No More Water, but Fire Next Time / Pharoh's Army Got Drownded / O Mary Don't You Weep
One of the things I'm able to do with my computer now that its hard drive is no longer fried is put new songs on my beloved iPod for the first time in weeks. Of course the first thing I added was -- what else? -- The Seeger Sessions, which was the soundtrack for a jog in the very hot sun this afternoon. This was my first time really listening to the album aside from songs here and there, and so this is the first time I can say what everyone else has said, which is holy hell, this is a good album. Just as The Rising somehow seemed to perfectly capture post-9/11 America, We Shall Overcome embodies the post-Katrina moment, that unflappable folk-song hope that someday we shall overcome along with the soulful bluegrass recognition that often people don't, that someday we won't, because after all in the end all things succumb.
It's fantastic, and despite that whole in-the-end-all-things-succumb angle, it's great fun.
Just one more, because if somebody doesn't stop me I'll post nothing but BruceTube all day long and be happy to do it. Here's Rosie from London, 1975. As you can clearly see from the still below, Little Steven came dressed to rock.
...was as good as everyone promised me it would be. Highly recommended. I'd say more about it, but I've been installing documents and software on my Toshiba's newly replaced hard drive basically all day long and my brain no longer works as it should.
In the latest issue of ELN, pride of place goes to an article by Jason Sellers entitled Dracula's Band of the Hand: Suppressed Male Onanism. "I argue," Dr Sellers announces, "that the mediation of the unavailable lover and the subsequent urgent need for autosexual satisfaction is the sexual force that propels much of Dracula.
"I will explore both the physical and psychological autoerotic imagery with which the novel suppresses, in light of that taboo, the masturbatory endeavour pursued by Dracula's vampire-fighting crew of men - our, by way of physical allegory, manly Band of the Hand."
A load of wank, one is tempted to ejaculate. Not, that is, Bram Stoker's immortal work, but this scholar's crazed interpretation of it. The argument that Dracula is about Van Helsing, Harker and the rest furtively beating their meat as they gallop hell for leather across Transylvania is beyond weird into surreal. If this is what literary criticism has come to, give me Buffy.
Q: My favorite YouTube clip is the Boss' greatest TV performance: his surprise duet with the Wallflowers at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards. Keep in mind, the VMAs had grown tiresome by the mid-'90s and Bruce had sort of slipped into irrelevancy with passable acoustic albums like "Tom Joad." The situation was ripe for "sad former rock star shows up and creeps everyone out" potential (which did happen a few years later with Axl Rose.) But Bruce comes out looking leaner and meaner than he had in years, complete with bad-ass goatee and leather jacket, and snatches "One Headlight" right out of Jakob Dylan's feeble hands. He nails a great guitar solo, makes tons of great Bruce faces and even turns in the classic sharing-vocals at-the-same-mic-stand move. You're literally watching Bruce rediscover his ability to rock as the song goes on. It's like Elvis' 1968 comeback special. Watching this live with my college buddies at the time, I predicted a Bruce creative surge, which actually happened in the late-'90s, peaking with his reunion with The E Street Band and what is still the only artistically valid musical statement about 9/11: "The Rising."
Click the link if you care about Simmons's answer. Me, I only care about the Boss.
(via an email from the girl Neil foolishly and repeatedly let slip away, spg)
When you say two people "have been through thick and thin together," which are the good times and which are the bad times? I always thought the thick times were the good times -- you know, the fat, happy times where you have a lot of everything. But some guy on TV just said that the thin times are the good times, because the shitstorm around you (or the muck you're wading though, or the underbrush you're cutting through, or the what-have-you) is thin instead of thick, and it's easy travels.
'If You Really Love the Characters, Prepare Yourself to Say Goodbye'
Now Playing interviers David Eick, executive producer on Battlestar Galactica, about its upcoming new season. There are some spoilers in here, obviously, but nothing too big. Via AICN.
American Heritage has a retrospective on the famous speech in which Kennedy proclaimed for all the world to hear that he was a jelly doughnut from Berlin.
It's Thursday, so we can be pretty sure that this week's most hard-hitting, pull-no-punches journalism will be found in my Independent Weekly article about Chapel Hill's amazing DSI Comedy Theater.
A man is queuing for food in Moscow. Finally he's had enough. He turns round to his friend and says "That's it. I'm going to kill that Gorbachev," and marches off. Two hours later he comes back. "Well," says the friend, "did you do it?" "No," replies the other, "there was an even longer queue over there."
Yet there is an obvious problem with the idea that communist jokes represented an act of revolt: it wasn't just opponents of the regime who told them. Stalin himself cracked them, including this one about a visit from a Georgian delegation: They come, they talk to Stalin, and then they go, heading off down the Kremlin's corridors. Stalin starts looking for his pipe. He can't find it. He calls in Beria, the dreaded head of his secret police. "Go after the delegation, and find out which one took my pipe," he says. Beria scuttles off down the corridor. Five minutes later Stalin finds his pipe under a pile of papers. He calls Beria—"Look, I've found my pipe." "It's too late," Beria says, "half the delegation admitted they took your pipe, and the other half died during questioning."
A strange new anthology considers whatever became of the characters from Born to Run's "Meeting Across the River." The link goes to MetaFilter, but from there there are links to some reviews.
Apparently some Springsteenologists consider "Jungleland" a continuation of "Meeting Across the River." I've never thought that, but I've always been certain that the Mary from "Mary's Place" is the same person from "Thunder Road," just much older.
Every day when I leave Greensboro to come home I pass by a giant church sign that reads "FOR THE MAN WITHOUT GOD THERE IS NO HOPE." Fair enough, though I think the man without God actually has only hope. (But perhaps I'm splitting hairs.)
Today, in addition to the sign, I passed two trucks in a row on I-80: the first from the Case trucking company and the second from Western Express.
The ending of a film, or any narrative, bears a disproportionate amount of the artistic weight. Endings are the last thing we see, and the thing most likely to stay in the memory. And there's a natural inclination, in any long and complex work, to focus on the ending: Art, like life, often passes by in a state of semi-confusion, but a solid ending proves to the audience that the director had control all along. And the power of a good ending has particular resonance in a "closure" society, a society that strives for finality in things of the heart (closure after grief) and clairvoyance in most everything else (how's this going to turn out?).
But Hollywood has fetishized endings to the extent that they've taken on an exaggerated and distorting importance in the evaluation of film. All threads must be tied up, as in the ostentatious multiple endings in the last installment of "The Lord of the Rings." Films that win critical plaudits often do so by virtue of clever endings that subvert every premise or assumption upon which the audience has built its understanding of the movie. The hero is in fact the villain. The whole thing was in fact a dream. The type of subterfuge that filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan ("The Sixth Sense," "The Village") traffics in. It is a symptom of a nervous and suspicious age that we consider a deft disillusionment the height of cinematic complexity. And the effect on criticism -- most reviewers and even many serious critics feel constrained never to give away an ending -- is pernicious. If the ending makes the film, how can the critic discuss the work without discussing the conclusion?
Bryan Singer says we may eventually get Superman vs. Batman after all -- though it would take a while.
Singer said he'd consider directing a "Batman vs. Superman" flick, but only after the Man of Steel establishes his identity a bit more thoroughly. "I've thought about it for a long time — even a longer time ago, actually," the director revealed. "But I don't know who would be the villain. I guess Batman would be the villain, but then he can't be too bad, because he is Batman. So not quite yet. ... I think Superman needs to have his own movies for a little while before that happens."
The First Law of Kipple Is That Kipple Drives Out Nonkipple
Kipple is a term coined by science fiction author Philip K. Dick in the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. It refers to unwanted or useless junk that tends to reproduce itself.
Seligman spent almost as long struggling out of the mode of traditional psychology. Like most psychologists of his generation, he began his career looking not at well-being but pathology. He co-authored the standard abnormal-psychology text that’s used in colleges around the country (for the 101 course of the same name, fondly called “Nuts and Sluts” when I was at school), and he did his most revolutionary work on helplessness in dogs, discovering that those who received electric shocks in a high-walled pen (from which they could not escape) probably wouldn’t try to escape once they were moved to a low-walled pen, even though they could. This phenomenon, which he called “learned helplessness,” earned him an enduring place in the field. It was a heartbreaking, pathbreaking finding, one suggesting how easy it is for living things to become prisoners of their own habits, virtual shut-ins of their own minds.
But today, Seligman is not interested in dogs that lay helpless in their pens. He’s interested in the ones that tried to escape. “Lying awake at night,” he says in his introduction to Authentic Happiness, written in 2002, “you probably ponder, as I have, how to go from plus two to plus seven in your life, not just how to go from minus five to minus three.” Going from minus five to minus three was in fact the goal of Freud, who famously declared that converting “hysterical misery into common unhappiness” was the goal of psychoanalysis. (Woody Allen, similarly, divides life into the miserable and the horrible.) “If you are such a person,” Seligman continues, “you have probably found the field of psychology to be a puzzling disappointment.”
I took the test the article mentions and scored a three. That feels about right. I'm very happy in my current life, but I'm also incredibly pessimistic about the future of the human race and I don't especially look forward to my own inevitable decline, either. (via MetaFilter)
(Alternative title: I Was Rooting for Italy All Along!) (Alternative title: The Crossbar Giveth and the Crossbar Taketh Away) (Alternative title: Zidane, You Idiot)
What a way to end your career: an egregious and completely unnecessary headbutt in the second overtime of the final game of the World Cup, which garners you a red card and an ejection just before penalty kicks.
I can't believe Zidane did that. I can't believe the ball bounced off the crossbar in nearly the same way twice, once in and once out. I can't believe I picked Italy as my team at the start and then switched.
Now they're crying in Paris, and I'm miserable, and Jaimee is victorious, and I have to drive all the way back to Durham and plan for class tomorrow before I fall asleep, and the only sporting event I truly love is over for another four years. Hope you enjoyed it. If I'm still doing this blog in 2008, I'll be watching then.
Intelligence agencies, navies and air forces from at least 13 nations are quietly co-operating in a “secret war” against Pyongyang and Tehran.
It has so far involved interceptions of North Korean ships at sea, US agents prowling the waterfronts in Taiwan, multinational naval and air surveillance missions out of Singapore, investigators poring over the books of dubious banks in the former Portuguese colony of Macau and a fleet of planes and ships eavesdropping on the “hermit kingdom” in the waters north of Japan.
I hadn't realized at the time that both German goals were by the same palyer, Bastian Schweinsteiger, who is obviously yesterday's hero. His first goal was a thing of beauty. Here it is, in embedded video glory:
Another thing we did today was walk a ridiculous distance to see a single statue, "The Awakening" by J. Seward Johnson Jr., which depicts a 100-foot giant arising from the Earth at the very tip of Hains Point near the Mall. It's a great statue, but by the time we got there we were too tired to really appreciate it (and we still had to walk all the way back). It's neat, though. Here are some more pictures.
Earlier today Germany won a very satisfying 3-1 victory over those notorious cheaters, the hated Portuguese. At last. At last. I haven't found any video of the German goals yet, but I'm exhaused and I didn't really look very hard. Maybe tomorrow. Also tomorrow: the big game, the final match, Italy vs. France, go France.
Of the 31 states that have raised their speed limits to more than 70 mph, 29 saw a decline in the death and injury rate and only two--the Dakotas--have seen fatalities increase. Two studies, by the National Motorists Association and by the Cato Institute, have compared crash data in states that raised their speed limits with those that didn't and found no increase in deaths in the higher speed states.
Jim Baxter, president of the National Motorists Association, says that by the early 1990s "compliance with the 55 mph law was only about 5%--in other words, about 95% of drivers were exceeding the speed limit." Now motorists can coast at these faster speeds without being on the constant lookout for radar guns, speed traps and state troopers. Americans have also arrived at their destinations sooner, worth an estimated $30 billion a year in time saved, according to the Cato study.
Even a broken party is right twice a decade -- the Republicans were right about this and the Dems were wrong.
Bomb-Throwing Atheist Says Something Wildly Inflammatory, Follows It Up with Something Incredibly Stupid!
Sam Harris is interviewed at Salon, where he argues that all religious people are superstitious imbeciles and then -- this next part is not a joke -- that he's had "the kinds of experiences that everyone has had that seem to confirm telepathy or the fact that minds can influence other minds."
Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick, he's the worst advocate for atheism ever.
Blogging will be a bit light this weekend as I'll be going to Germany D.C. to watch the World Cup finals live on television. I may post about the games, but probably not about much else. In the meantime, some Zen.
If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes. -Pablo Picasso
Nothing is little to him who feels it with great sensibility. -Samuel Johnson
You see the hut, yet you ask, "Where shall I go for shelter?" -West African Proverb
This morning Neil led me on a run that took me past my absolute favorite statue in D.C., 
