Lairnin an' Such

I've lost track of the exact sequence of events that got me into playing music. My daughter was taking violin lessons for a short while several years ago--is that what prompted my father to send her back with a short-scaled mandolin, or was it the other way around? It is for sure what started my wife's sporadic interest in the fiddle, as she tried to show Junior some of the practice moves. Regardless, that neglected little mandolin (yeah, I think it showed up a good year before the fiddles) proved infectious, and to this day I have no idea why. I played a trumpet in high school, and it took as poorly as the kids' violin lessons did. Maybe it just took thirty-plus years to grow the proper mindset. (I should be great when I'm 80.)

I'm not an overbearing music parent (or husband), and aside from the little brown lute, the efforts come and go around me. Far from overbearing: if the girl's not interested, then I can't see the point of springing the funds that could otherwise help inch the family out from our crushing mountain of debt. Private music lessons don't come cheap. Learning through school is covered by your taxes though (there may be a libertarian anecdote in this one), and through those channels, the rented kid's fiddle has been replaced with a rented (full-size) trombone after a merciful two-year hiatus. The bias of school music programs toward wind instruments is a mystery to me, really. My current theory is that it's an insidious scheme by The Man to completely dissociate music from sex (the emasculating band uniforms I remember from high school would support this), in which case, my daughter's going to remain unmolested if she manages to drag that ridiculous trombone around until she goes to college. ('You know, I have a trumpet,' I tell her, 'it's a lot easier to take on the bus.' 'Daddy!')

Of course I had to try it when she brought it home, and I can't say whether it's with pleasure or disappointment that I observe my hatred of brass instruments holds. They seem like they should be my thing, all about the mouthfeel, but before you can start slobbering lasciviously into one of those, you have to learn to clamp your cheeks (your embrochure) vise-like to even get the first fraction of the available notes. (I think it also helps to have an appropriately shaped mouth.) That was a frustrating thing--you need some stern measure of discipline to even find most of the damn notes, never mind to play them well. Even though I've been clenching my jaw for about a year straight, I still could only come up with hissing farts on Junior's trombone. The visual/aural/tactile combination of a stringed instrument has, to my surprise, suited me much better.

The other frustrating thing with the old trumpet was just my basic laziness. I didn't want to learn it badly enough to actually learn it, and it didn't come nearly as effortlessly as the schoolwork. It's funny what you value. My wife has had no time for fiddling since she started taking classes this fall. She's busy relearning chemistry for the biomedical field, and this time around she's fascinated with it all. She's taking notes and studying hard, not to get through it, but because she's paying the cash and wants to learn what she's paying for. Also because it interests her. It's great to see her this excited. When you're learning because you want to, you can get a sort of positive reinforcement going. When you feel obligated, the knowledge can still get in there, but it's not treasured. In my case, this has been the difference between the tiny handful of good projects at my job and the innumberable shitty ones (that have been better spent blogging).

I've been an autodidactic menace on the mandolin for more than three years now, and, as I've been saying, cruising along a low-grade upward spiral of interest and accomplishment. Which isn't to say I don't suck--I'm atrocious--but I'm at the point where some pointed advice, advice about where to focus, some tools and tips, would be highly valued. I landed in music lessons by another odd sequence of family events. My wife ran into a mandolin player at a wedding and cornered the guy by the bathroom. (My wife's tactlessness makes up well for my shyness--we work great this way, except when we infuriate one another.) I may be terrible, but this guy is an ace--I really love his fusion thing. (And I'm sure he won't mind the plug.) At fifty bucks, I'd better value the lesson, but even one visit is pointing me in some of the directions I was too puzzled to find. I'll write about that soon, I think (this post is a boring introduction to that one that flowed over the wall), but it feels good to be gaining knowledge without pressure, for no other reason than because it satisifies me.

Keifus (with apologies to the usual gang of idiots)

Review of No Place Like Home, by Barbara Samuel

Usually, when I select a book to read, it'll be something that's been vaguely within my focus for a while. Often that means it's been sitting on my shelf for years, but maybe I've heard of the author, got a recommendation, read a review, know the genre, or just seen it mentioned everywhere. The hunt for a book for Topazz came with none of those tools, only me and google. Specifically, I was searching for something that got in the head of newly single mother of teenagers, and if it caught Topazz's charm and scandalous wit, then so much the better. (And if, paraphrasing some other amateur reviewer, the character landed a searing hunk of man-meat, then so much the better as well.) Stepping into the divorced-mom neighborhood of the chick-lit* ghetto was a serious liklihood here, and I followed some romance buffs' online conversations to discover there's No Place Like Home. With a protagonist named Jewel (get it?), I felt I had no choice but to step right in. (The second one I looked at actually had a Topaz in it, but not in the right role.)

No Place Like Home was touted as a "genre-blender," and the conservative cover (another reason for my choice) would seem to support this classification. I don't read much in this style, but it seems to this caveman that the only thing that kept Fabio off the cover is fifteen years of gravity audaciously added to subtly drag down the bosoms, and some sentimental familial elements to get that patina of respectability. None of this gets around the way the male lead (improbably named Malachi), is introduced:

"...hair the darkest shade of cinnamon brown, eyes the color of bitter chocolate, skin tanned as dark as Brazil nuts because that's where he'd been, leading an adventure tour down the Amazon. He wore a shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of jeans and heavy boots for riding that motorcycle...".

I try to keep an open mind about genre fiction, especially for something like romance--80% of the novels ever written contain a romance, after all--which to my mind, is only separated from the general fiction shelf by a good review and/or a hunkless cover. What's more, I get it that different writers, writing for different markets, will have their own values of what's noticable and worthy of description, which probably explains why Samuel doesn't let a page slip by without gushing over some aspect of Malachi's hypermasculine phsysique. Hell, I can accept some measure of fantasy wish-fulfillment too, even if we're not talking about my particular brand of fanboy escapism here.

But there is a mighty temptation to sin in any sort of genre writing, and the biggest snare is to let the readers' expectations write your book for you. Down in the genre projects, a lot of the blueprints are already in place, and an imaginative writer can use these to show off some creativity, or to turn the lens on the structural assumptions, or to use the stock outlines as a starting points to go somewhere else entirely. It's not the scaffold itself that's interesting, it's all the stuff that the scaffold holds up. If you just deliver the expectations without testing them, then there doesn't, as they say, end up being a lot of there there, just another McMansion you drive past in Romancetown.

Samuel wanted a there, at least a physical one. No Place Like Home is a story about a woman who followed a band out of her (and the author's) hometown as a teenager, now returning with a teen of her own and a dying friend in tow to rediscover home and family, to find a place in it. Samuel handles some of the interactions with reasonable competence, if not very deeply. The more interesting aspects--her relationship with her Dad, her relationship to a terminal friend, the family's Italian-ness, her son's reticence at encountering a potential new father (and husband) figure--all get shortchanged to extol the indulgent lie of a character that is the male lead. Malachi is a dangerous and preternaturally handsome loner who also manages to be protective, communicative, thoughtful, and committed, needing only the right woman to save him. (It's enough to make me keep holding out for my own sexy green-skinned Martian babe.) He's good match for Jewel the reformed rebel, I suppose, but then this book doesn't attempt to capture rebellion very ambitiously, which, as a consequence, doesn't lend much force to all the wholesome reconciliation happening in between the paeans to Malachi's nut-brown torso. The redemption theme keeps it slightly less fluffy than I expected from this sort of book, but it's still all a little easy, and a little light. In other words, not great literature here, but enough to get your rocks off.

Keifus

*Sorry. Anyone got a better word?

Point / Counterpoint

Tuesday Morning Quarterback:
"[H]ere's why the affair matters: If a big American institution such as the NFL is not being honest with the public about a subject as minor, in the scheme of things, as the Super Bowl, how can we expect American government and business to be honest with the public about what really matters?"

Gregg, you ignorant slut:
"But you can't hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few, sick twisted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg[g] - isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but I for one am not going to stand here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!"



(with tip o' the hat to twiffer)

Pi Blogging (for nerds only)

Sorry, it had to be done.

(And gratuitously, go here.)

Pie Blogging (for rundeep, Dawn, or whomever)

My wife, before she started her classes, thought of starting a blog for awhile, thinking she had enough material about what holds us together. (Rest assured, I'd have been sure to link.) But shit, as it does, happened, and she never got the project going. Here's an entry that wouldabeen.

Some background: fifteen years ago or more, my mother sent me away with a box of recipes, the tried and true favorites of my youth. Mom's less a chemist than an empath however, and she wasn't in the habit of rigor when it came to transcribing her technique, more's the pity. When she attempted to put the coveted pumpkin pie variation to paper, it was a negligent wreck, instigating a solid decade of feelings of inadequacy. I mean, how fucking hard is it to balance ten ingredients? But I got Dad's genes too, and a cook + a machinist = a chemical engineer, and I'd be damned if a platter of custard was going to get the best of me. Ten years of tweaking Mom's "dumping" with, you know, measurements and stuff, gets you the recipe for the best pumpkin pie ever. I'm feeling indulgent tonight (which is to say drunk...again), so here you are:

• 1 small pumpkin, cut in half and baked for about an hour facedown on a cookie sheet
  
• 2 cups sugar
  
• 1 tsp salt
  
• 2 tsp grated fresh ginger (sub a teaspoon of powder if you must)
  
• 2 tsp ground cinnamon
  
• dash ground cloves
  
• 1-2 tsp lemon and orange zest
  
• some grated nutmeg (even though this recipe originally comes from Connecticut, you'll want a real one)
  
• 3 eggs
  
• 1-2 Tbsp Amaretto. (Add that much again to the pie. A surprising lot of our secret ingredients are booze.)
  
• light cream or half and half (roughly half a cup)

If you have a good blender, put all the ingredients in there (scoop the pumpkin meat from the skin, of course). Blend, adding just enough cream to get a pourable consistency. Pour it into a pie crust (lately, I've been going 2 parts crisco to one part butter to great results). Bake it at 425 F for 15 minutes, then reduce the heat to 350 and continue baking for 50 minutes or so. It's done when the center is just set (when it jiggles rather than sloshes when you tap the edge). Cool thoroughly before eating. Thank me later.

I'd be lying if I said I'll be thinking of any of you when I enjoy this tomorrow. Good night, everybody!

K

Usher the kids out of the room, please

Keifus Writes! is 37% evil. Must be the exclamation point.



via

The Heckling Hare

Ever since man has seen fit to orate, someone else has seen fit to take that man down. It pleases me to imagine that when Ugga, newly gifted with speech, got up on the rock and proclaimed himself the strongest, some other caveman was making hand gestures and winking at Ugga's wife. Hoping to lift a country out of the depths of depression by will alone, Roosevelt pronounced "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" A heckler replied, Actually Frank, this grinding poverty's got me kind of down too. "I see a shining city on the hill," said Reagan. Try stepping outside the gate, asshole. "A coward dies a thousand deaths..." Now see, that's why we've got to get rid of all these damn heroes. "I intend to set up a thousand-year Reich..." Oy, over my dead body. No! Wait!

Better bloggers than me have observed that comedy favors the oppressed. There's no triumph in breaking the already broken, only cruelty. But cracking the oppressors, humanizing them, that'll get you somewhere, maybe even get someone a glimpse into their own shadowy soul. This is why for decades, black people could get away with making fun of white people and not the other way around. It's why making fun of poor retards is bad for the conscience (unless you do it ironically of course), but making fun of influential ones is very nearly a national imperative. Authority is the natural enemy of humor, and thus are hecklers born.

Hecklers make the best storybook heroes. Yeah, you have your square-jawed types, your wise daddy deities, your fecund fertility goddesses, but wisdom and power--even stupidity--will only get you so far if there's no one to tell the story. The tricksters in the pantheon: the Monkeys, the Coyotes, even the Lokis are the ones who keep it interesting, poke the holes in seats of divine authority. Even if Jesus saw fit to nudge the occasional Pharissee, Judeo-Christian mythology evoloved to be such a dour faith, it requred a secular culture to knock The Old Man down every now and then. From a modern version of that secular effort, Tex Avery and Al Gaines taught me more about authority than Mom and Dad and Sunday School combined. I learned that when the powers that be fear humor, when they crack down on the ones who note their foibles, then they have something to hide. And given the power to hide it, expect hard times. Hard times, but pointed mockery.

Heckling is not comedy, but there's a similar art to it. The trick to heckling is timing, and unlike comedy (maybe unlike comedy), you're limited to brevity. To heckle well, you have to choose the right targets, you have to have the truth on your side. The powerful but sheltered are the most deserving, the pompous almost as good, the abusers of privelege. Barring that, it's whoever the hell has the audacity to show up in your face uninvited, whoever insists on making a point whether or not it deserves the attention. The necessity of heckling rests on presumption.

Performance art is another opposite of heckling. It's pointing out alternative viewpoints without taking a gamble with the audience's judgement. It's got a mighty presumption of its own, without, frankly, any evident ability to sway. It's totally unfair, but these things are almost always made right or wrong after the fact. The taunter and the pundit reside in a sort of offensive/defensive arms race, with the loser judged the more deserving. The heckler has power of the one-liner, a short window to win the crowd. The speaker has an advantage of inertia, some limited sympathy, some pride of protracted effort. Did the barb score it's point? Did it need to be scored? (Sometimes it's a race to the bottom.) Go on too long, and the heckler deserves the hook too.

But not the taser.

(What'd y'all think? Don't be shy, I'll be here all night.)


[Oh fuck it, just go read switters]

What have you wrought, Washington?

Given the endless blather that's been in the sports press all week, it was especially gratifying to see the New England Patriots collectively rip San Diego's star squad fifty-three new assholes last night. I don't know if I buy the whole Belichick genius thing--I don't really have enough of a football mind to say--but he sure looks smarter with this year's surplus of talent, and I've a natural aversion to managers claiming credit for that. It's certainly safe to call Belichick obsessive though, and that's the most logical reason I can think of for his videotaping efforts.

(Parenthetically, it's the claim of every middling performer alive if the people around him were better, he'd be super. Tom Brady has been making decent receivers look brilliant for years, and now he has brilliant receivers. And damn if he's not living up to the hype.)

It kills me to have anything suffixed "gate" to be within a mile of my attention (and certainly not in sports) because it's a sure sign that the alleged scandal isn't going to be important enough to explain in any rational manner. This broke the seal however. Listen to this guy's cause for offense:

• "The arrogance of the organization, the smugness.
  
• The fact that this is nothing new. Stories are now coming out of the woodwork that cheating has been a normal modus operandi with this club.
  
• Good old street crime is one thing. It goes with the history of sports. But this video thing lifts it to a new level of electronic surveillance and into the realm of the hi-tech, white collar crime that we all hate. Put these guys on the business page, for God's sake. There's no place for them in sports"

What a tool. Let me do the courtesy of interpretation:

• "I hate that they win all the time." (I understand this of course. I live to see Peyton Manning put a disappointed frown on his ugly shilling mug.)
  
• "They were, like, doing it all the time, everyone says." (Do we really doubt that everyone's hand ain't in the cookie jar here? Of course they'll point to the guy who's not them. I mean, football organizations try to steal signals? Next you'll tell me that politicians sometimes compromise my best interests.)
  
• "Yeeha! I wanna coach I can done have a beer with. I don't trust me dem quiet nerds."

He goes on to call Goodell a "sheriff," and salute the NFL's authoritarian crackdown. I mean, you want to talk smug? This guy, along with every second announcer on the teevee and the sports pages is drooling to elevate their views to some position of moral football sanctity. Look, Belichick broke the rules and deserves punishment for it, but slavering at his demise makes big fat with crocodile tears is a sure way to reveal yourself as an overemotional, sanctimonious twit, unwilling to call Goodell's public chest-puffing for what it is. And hey, maybe there's a point to the serious principal routine--a lot of questionable activity seems to have skirted under the radar in the past and I don't doubt that the Patriots were the most obvious rulebreakers in this category--but I've got an aversion to example-makers too, and it's not like the NFL lacks for irritating pedantry. And any sportswriter alive is as invested in notions of ideological game purity as any pol is against the business as usual in Washington, and the language is just as stomach-turning. (And all the whining in the world can no more unbeat St. Louis in the '01 season than it can unelect George Bush in the '04 one.)

King Kaufman (via The Editors*) makes a good contrarian case:

Why does the league have that rule? For the same reason it has a rule governing the length of players' socks. The NFL likes rules.

[…]Punish the Patriots if that's what it takes to keep the suits -- and various Pats haters around the world -- happy. Then get rid of that rule.

What the Pats are accused of doing is "spying" on the Jets coaches as they sent signals to the defense. My understanding of spying must be different from the NFL's. Watching a guy flapping his arms while standing in the middle of 70,000 people and in front of a national TV audience doesn't qualify. Even if you point a camera at him. I mean another camera, aside from all the legal cameras that can be pointed at him.

[…]The Patriots may have been trying to steal the Jets' signals for immediate or future use, but there's nothing wrong with stealing signals. It's a fine and respectable art. If it weren't, teams wouldn't need signals that are coded.

The sports press is grooving on an anti-Pats vibe just now, suspecting that the evil masterminds at New England engineered some illegal audio as well, but that second accusation flies in the face of Goodell's example-making, crossing the line into unreasonable vendetta. The punishment was fairly severe for the infraction, and if the unavoidably loud message to the league was the goal--and I suspect it was--then overinvestigating a single team counters it. I have a hard time accepting that New England is uniquely blameworthy in borderline corporate espionage.

Sportswriters and citizens everywhere: when you suck up to authority, it only becomes more obnoxious.

Keifus

*Mean commenters there call the Pats the Little Cowboys (and the Red Sox the Junior Yankees). It hurts cuz it's true.

Forty-five Miles, One Way

His grabbed the wheel with both hands, sighed, closed his eyes. Christ, but he needed a cigarette. Instead of reaching for his shirt pocket--it was empty anyway--he tapped the wheel with his fingers in time to some song that was tired even when he was young. Midnight toker? Well, that wouldn't do at all. He hit scan. Shit. Pause. Noise. Pause. Garbage. Pause. Bubblegum. Pause. Blather. He turned it off. What the fuck was a pompatous anyway? He lifted his right hand and hit the wheel hard.

He looked off to his left at the cars flying down the southbound lanes. Who were the lucky bastards that didn't have to work in some miserable city office? He watched the trucks flying down toward him, noting them. Lumber--maybe it was from Canada--cargo, cargo, tanker. They were moving right along, but were their jobs any better? He doubted it. He didn't see how anybody who commuted could be happy. He drudged up some vague memory of a college physics lecture, momentum, mass times velocity. It would be hard to stop one one of those things. He squinted into the glare at the minivan ahead of him, still not moving. There had better be an accident. Somebody had better be dead. He envied them.

He revved the accelerator and inched his car closer, moved half a length. This was murder on his clutch, he thought. His leg was getting tired too, and his hand trembled as he pulled it from the stick shift. He changed his mind and slapped the thing into neutral, leaned back. It was 8:05. It wasn't as though he punched a clock, but there were meetings, and he hated showing up late to them even more than he hated attending in the first place. All hands bullshit this morning, and his absence would be conspicuous. He might still be able to make it by nine if things would move. He reached for his empty shirt pocket, and pulled his hand away angrily. He reached for the radio, brought it shaking back to the wheel.

Was the job worth it, he thought. It was, even ten years ago, some tradeoff between the price of the commute and the price of housing. It was hard to tell which was going up faster. With his mortgage, he needed the job, but his raises came slower than the rates on the ARM, slower than the cost of gas, slower than his medical premiums. The fucking alimony stayed the same. He was sure she was living on it just fine. No, he needed this goddamn job and no move closer was in sight. He needed it pay the heat. The electric would wait till the end of the month, he thought. Tax time was around the corner. He stamped the pedal at two feet of progress but the gears were still disengaged and the engine roared impotently. He gripped the knob and wrenched it into first, shuddered a meager few steps progress toward the next bumper. The clutch was going to cost him.

The clock was digital. He remembered his first car, with the analog clock, the ripped seats, the dented fenders. High school. This one was cleaner anyway. And newer, but not a lot newer. The clock read 8:33. In twenty minutes, he'd moved maybe half a mile, and he had a good forty minutes to go even if things were moving full speed. Was there road work yesterday? It was all the same shit. He thought about laying on the horn, but that never made anything better. He breathed in exhaust--it had been two years--well, minus a couple of lapses--but he still shouldn't be tasting it in on his tongue, should he? Still feeling it in his lungs. He looked at the glove compartment, and then lunged at it, pounding his thigh on the gearshift. His foot left the brake for a moment and he rolled backward slightly, and the guy behind him did honk. He reached up and raised a finger to him. He tore the contents of the glove out, expired insurance cards, receipts, the driving manual. And driving gloves. Who knew? What a pile of useless shit, he thought, and his fingers clutched at a shiny wrapper at the bottom, upended it to free nothing, crushed it in his fist and held it to his face, breathing a smell that was not quite dead. He tore some of the paper from the inside and chewed it, his fillings grating on the foil. Fuck it, he hit the horn. Flipped off the guy in front of him too. His leg hurt, maybe it was bruised.

8:47. His teeth ground, he'd watched every minute of the fucking thing tick by and they were getting slower. The spitball on the passenger-side window was already dry, and the morning was getting hot. He looked at the temperature gauge. Maybe some asshole ahead had overheated. That would slow things down. Maybe no one else would make the meeting either, but somehow he felt like he was the only one that lived in the damn boondocks. How did those people afford it? He grabbed at the radio dial for the tenth time, and shouted. He picked up his foot and stomped on the thing, turning it on and breaking the dial. Horrified, he reached over and tried to dislodge it, the radio got a little louder. It was tuned to some indeterminate station. Words sparking from the static like random thoughts falling out of the mental ether. He opened the window. It was hot. He turned on the fan and left the window open. Traffic hummed around him, stinking. He thought about the word "static." Trucks flew south. His hand jiggled on the wheel. 8:51.

At some point, some asshole got into the shoulder and sure as shit, a whole train had passed him twenty minutes ago. Now they were trying to merge back in. He pulled within inches of the guy in front, and shouted over the stuttering radio at the would-be cutter as he passed him. Fuck you and your precious Beamer, you overpriveleged shit.

After the merge, traffic started moving a car length at a time. He was moving sufficiently forward to be able to weave left and right in the lane a little, but he could see around the blue family van. He hated those things. As the highway began to turn, he could see, finally, yellow flashes off to his left, maybe a mile up. He began to press the pedal, but he still wasn't there.

Finally, he saw it. There had been an accident in the other lane. Some broken glass, but no cars, no police. A tow truck sat in the median, flashing his lights and hurting the eyes of the oncoming traffic. Traffic on that side zipped right past. His thigh hurt more than it should, and the radio was spurting some intermittent Latin rap. He gritted his teeth. Fucking rubberneckers. Fuckin people nowhere to fucking go. He jammed his foot the pedal and sped past it all. Second gear, a lurch into third, fourth, across into fifth. He accelerated. Up ahead, the median got narrow due to some construction, but still the the trucks barrelled down their lanes. He watched them come down, fly past. It wouldn't take much thought, just a second of a lapse, close his eyes for not much longer than a blink, and there could be no more meetings, no payments, no more fucking daily drive through the exaust and the heat and the horns.

His hands gripped the wheel. The trucks barrelled down. Just one twitch is all it'd take. He closed his eyes.

[Written for a "Wikifray symposium." Thanks for the idea, august.]

In which I Cross a Line

And so it's come to this.

I mean, I've been feeling almost official: there's this miniscule political chip on my shoulder; I've got my twenty, sometimes twenty-five hits a day; I've got my Friday night drunken spiels; my topics of negligible interest. I've got my tokens of a lifetime of near-celibate near-friendlessness: the coke-bottle spectacles, the Rush CDs, the pillow fort.* What's missing? Hmm...

Guessed it yet?

That's right, kittens! Why, somehow, I've never cat-blogged before, and here I call myself a blogger. I've been putting this off for a long time.**

I've never been a cat person really. I preferred the family dogs growing up, and later, when I got neighbors, I'd pretty much had it with pets altogether. (Oh man, there was this one neglected cur in the projects that was chained up so that his circuit ended exactly at either of my bedroom windows. Woke up and went to bed to clinkaclinkaclinka-woof!woof!woof! clinkaclinkaclinka-woof!woof!woof! every day for a year.) But little children means whining for pets, and rather than neglecting a cur of our own, we got a kitten five years ago, figuring cats were low maintenance, cognizant that we couldn't, despite their assertions to the contrary, count on the children (or Keifus on Fridays) to pull their weight with the pet care. (I mean Jesus, how hard is it to remember to flush?)

So anyway, five years ago, we brought home a shaggy tortoiseshell that we called, according to the season and the limits of a five-year-old's imagination, Pumpkin. Here was a kitten that had been born and raised (for five glorious weeks) on display at a petting zoo. We'd assumed that she was well adjusted to the constant poking and tail-pulling of children, but the poor creature turned out to have a persecution complex: any affection is tentative, and usually involves the creepy gingerbreading of anything fuzzy in the vicinity. (We theorize she was weaned too early.) One time I called her Fartknocker, and it stuck. Not a big purrer is Fartknocker, although I'll say that she does like me best, probably because I give her the most gentle attention. She's a good mouser too.

This summer, we decided that it was time for a new cat. Not a replacement, mind you, but hopefully one that would sit on your lap without digging its claws into your unmentionables at the slightest alarming motion. My parents have always known a variety of rednecks (there can't be many left in those parts), and in this iteration, my mother is friendly with a fiddle-playing duffer who owns feral cats. Sound like a contradiction? Evidently he feeds them, and now and then collects and distributes the inevitable kittens. So Mom had her friend round one up for us. We had to wait a couple weeks for the geezer to catch one.

Here's the first little angel his arthritic hands knotted by the scruff. On that critical visit to Mom and Dad's, I peeked in the cage, and there she was--she wouldn't meet my hand, but she curled up about six inches away and rolled around purring. A purrer! Total keeper. A calico, as you can see, and what I find her distinctive, is the soul patch at the bottom of her chin. It makes her look like a jazz musician, and so she was Zoot. (It's also handy when she's naughty.) She still likes to purr about a foot out of reach, usually in the morning, that close to my nose. She ignores me the rest of the time.

To be a cat is to be aloof, self-possessed (even in the face of ridiculousness), and supremely agile (even if it's just covering their furry asses). Kittens are so different from cats so as to be like a separate species. They're guileless little animals, uncoordinated, and, above all, they lack the unearned dignity of the adult feline. Zoot came into this house with a slinky head-bobbing walk, all legs and paws, like a teenager, comically unaccustomed to the length and the heft of them. She's a fabulous pouncer, going after feathers and strings with a full-body open tackle, all four legs aloft, heedless of the inevitable belly- (or back- or head-) flop. Already she's growing too large to scale the fuzzy speakers I regrettably purchased as a college kid. As yet unworthy of outside scatology, Zoot's favorite place in her known universe is the litterbox. It's refreshing to see her roll gleefully in her own feces, kicking cat sand across the kitchen floor with feline abandon, which is to say guiltily but unrepentant. Does it stop me from kissing her fuzzy forehead when she tolerates my attention? It does not.

Pumpkin, on the other hand, has always been poorly adjusted. She's taken up the mantle to defend our house from the foul sprays of the (goddamn) tiger, orange, and black neighbor cats, usually without success. Upon finding an intruder indoors she appealed to her feeders with a look of alarm and betrayal, eyes wide, body poised somewhere between flight and attack. For her part, Zoot has been forever fascinated with Fartknocker's crooked tail. We had to keep them separated for as long as it took the kitten to get bigger than a rat. Now, she taunts Pumpkin mercilessly, running at top speed across the floor, and somersaulitng at the bigger cat's upturned defensive paw. They're accustomed enough to one another by now that Pumpkin is lazy about her self-defense, expending a minimum of effort to send the upstart scurrying in the opposite direction. One well-timed look, one hiss, one threatening gesture.

I am a monster of a human being, contrubiting in my part of kitty genocide. Three weeks ago I sent Zoot to the vet to sacrifice her sexual life for my convenience. Her convalescence kept her two days away from home, during which Pumpkin discovered she valued her family, luxuriating in the attention and the peace. When the kitten returned, it was with stitches and a lampshade. It was a good socializing tool I suppose. As she tried to scratch, Zoot would whack the plastic cone unproductively, sounding for all the world like an aerosol can. I'd scratch her ears for her, and she'd purr (yes!) gratefully, and lick the inside of the plastic. She's sweet, but Zoot is not, I fear, very bright.

My parents eventually ended up with Zoot's brother (Owen, but accepted as "Numbnuts," they don't fall far from the tree). Owen is pretty cool, and he tolerates the dressing-up, tail-pulling, and shouting, better than his sister. It doesn't matter the extent and volume of my admonitions, but a six year old and a cat mix poorly.

And can you guess who Zoot yowls for when they're not around? Hint: it ain't me. Maybe I should get a third one...

Gratuitously, here's Zoot. Good night, everybody.




*yeah, I stole it from Colbert. Bite me.
**couldn't find the USB cord for the camera.

Review of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

This is for my bud, Biteoftheweek. Bite has said she's evil, but I've never seen witchcraft there. The worst I've witnessed is bluntness, and, frankly, that aspect of her style is similar enough to that of people close to me that it's worth understanding. I like the adjective wicked better than I do evil. There's a word that connotes, to me, sinfulness and impertinence rather than malice: wicked ways, a wicked tongue. The word wicked suggests a more complicated place on the dour old good-n-evil axis, which, on many levels, badly needs a poke every now and then anyway. Sometimes, wicked can be wicked cool.

So you see where I'm going with this, right? Gregory Maguire's novel promised to expand on the legendary character from L. Frank Baum's (and less from Victor Fleming's) The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, presumably with the exculpatory context of the land's "punishing political climate." He seems to take some pride in his disquisition of good and evil, but is the witch bad...or is she wicked?

The story opens in oppressive economic times--drought and government expansion--but dumps the characters into a confrontation with evil of a more metaphysical sort. Maguire plays with these contrasts throughout the book, each well enough in their turn, but incongruously with one other. The middle portion of the book, surprisingly rich with political and the character development, doesn't jibe well with the magical events that bookend the witch's biography. It's difficult to resist the comparison with The Iron Dragon's Daughter, a novel which explored the dark places in storyland, and found their organic connection to the human version. Swanwick was able to find that frightening spot where the evil in our hearts is indistinguishable from the corruption of society. Maguire has them as two unrelated things, and his story is the weaker for it.

Elphaba (it works better as Elphie--the witch part gets added late) is the only character forced to embody both of these things, and it it makes her a different person in different sections. She's introduced under deep omens, born green-skinned and shark-toothed, with an innately dark and violent disposition. (She begins her life with a memorable bite!) But in the space between her first word ("horrors") and her first college roommate, the weight of the occult is lifted. Elphaba the student is an intelligent, caustic little atheist. She has no soul, she believes, but she's got character to spare, and she's got a moral sense, whether she acknowledges one or not. Even green, she's the sort of self-possessed, interesting girl that any boy who was watching wishes, later in life, that they could have possibly understood. (Yes, there are a couple of boys in the story who don't know they are in love with her.) For a while, she lives up to the appealing versions of wickedness. She rebels against the smothering and manipulative school hierarchy, becomes a subversive for the cause of oppressed peoples, takes a lover and loses him in the political turmoil created by the usurping wizard. Though Ozzie politics seems a silly notion at first, Maguire makes them real by viewing it through the small and convincing context of individual points of view. He takes ineffective missionaries, bored housewives, misfit students, horrid children and makes them all individually real enough to add up to a quality setting. There are horrors, but his people are people, and I cared about them. I'm not going to tell you it wasn't a good read.

These vignettes are Maguire's real strength, honest and convincing, but peppered in there are vague hints of greater powers and grand designs that actually diminish any transformations that come through character. You could paint Elphaba's development as a quest to find a moral center despite her atheism and despite her oddness--this is devalued if she's deprived of her will, or if she really is uniquely soulless. (There are better ways to mix determinism with character than dumping the former on the latter.) She can't avoid the events of Baum's source book any more than she can her secret mystical assignments, but the novel Wicked is hardly set up to make them look inevitable (the necessity of picking up plot coupons--bees and monkeys and shoes and so forth--got tedious by the end too). Her well-known cackling madness, quite at odds with the inwardly struggling character portrayed up to that point, is presented as an unnecessarily comical Lady MacBeth style decompression, and it's not earned. If indeed her end was imposed by greater forces, then let her exit with grace, or with tragedy, or with middle finger extended--those are things her character deserved. Maguire's wicked witch really was misunderstood. And robbed.

Review of The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier

[Part of the latest Wikifray book club]

Like many people who were once young, I've been stupidly lovesick, been stupidly hurt by it, and indulged in extensive fantasies, sprung from a reading (and television) habit, that imagined some indeterminate future context when the intensity of those feelings could be justified and explained. The faith in serendipitous opportunities for closure was harder to grow out of than any of the youthful affections that spawned it. What would happen if it actually came to pass?

The Gregoire Bouillier of The Mystery Guest has sufferred years of mild depression (with hairshirts and everything) from a sudden and unexplained breakup, and without warning his departed lover calls him: won't he come to a stranger's party? Indulging in literary constructs of epiphanies and chanced salvations is something that is a nice story, great as a novel, but troubling to see it presented as a memoir, and maybe I'm a little jealous that Bouillier proclaims to get away with it. It's like a student turning in suspiciously accurate results from lab equipment known to be tempermental. Boillier (both as character and author) appears to be smart enough to realize how hard he's fighting get the patchy data of the experience to agree with an acceptable narrative model. He actively hunts current events for a metaphor (hi, bacon) to fix to his effort, considering and discarding a number of random news items before he finds a reference-laden space probe as a clumsy theme. The literature-style resolution of his malaise manages to not only follow a familiar form, but he (evidently) finds a specific story as a link too. The sheer effort he takes to tack a narrative onto his life at least earns him self-awareness points.

As for my own tastes, I'd have appreciated it if he scored a few more irony points. I wouldn't say The Mystery Guest lacks humor--it's almost Seinfeld-esque in it's self-absorbed dissection of the daily traps of routine, of love, of society, of sleep, of entertainment--but he mocks himself only gently. He neither loves nor hates the absurdity of it, reaching instead for the comforts of a literary sense of completeness. I prefer my self-deprecation with a little more vinegar, myself. Maybe it's cultural, or maybe it's me.

M. Bouillier* is a man that's lost in a world of internalized words. It's the literary that seems real to him, much more than the reality observed by his senses. The only proper names encountered in the book are from literature, history, or contemporary art. (He seems to buy one shallow guest's idea that you're no one until published.) His memoir contains only two lines of dialogue, which occur more than halfway through, and which (intentionally) have the false tinge of actor's lines. Although this handful of words proves to be pivotal--Bouillier finally finds his epiphany in them (and in their specific literary context)--the rest is an unrelenting mental monologue that mirrors the actual events like color commentary, as though looking at reality through an extra-thick filter of consciousness. It's less a stream of thought, and more a continuous mental novelization his life. The din of his constant interpretation and self-analysis drowns out everything that's going on outside.** I can empathize with the battle between the external world and internal running commentary. So, I think, can most of the people reading this. I don't think there's anybody else I know who could have gotten away with recommending this book to me.

I recall reading some magazine editors opining that there's no set submission length for a piece, that a story should be exactly as long as it needs to be. Any longer of this internal harangue and Bouillier would have lost his charm. Any less-- Well, there couldn't have been much less. It's probably best read in a sitting, to best catch the rhythm of the ebbs and swells of the author's emotions. I had a few issues with the narrative voice. His guilty use of cliches (as they say) were tedious even though intentional (maybe that's something about translation?), but commendably, his memoir had enough doubt in it to seem honest, even if a little too forgiving and comforting. Bouillier reached hard for a script for his life and found one. It’s always nice to think that people do…but I don't think I believe in it.

Keifus

*I love the French honorific.
**I used a similar description in a recent book review. It's different here, and yet not.

Tipping and Economic Justice

[My comments from a "Wikifray Symposium" You can find out what others think about it over there.]

There's little, if anything, we consumers can do with most businesses to influence justice in payment. My personal boycott of Wal-Mart is too small to influence their employment practices. The managers and CEOs of any large organization whose goods or services I use will still be compensated beyond their worth, and will like as not peddle inferior products made in some third-world sweatshop, choke the air with carcinogens, and deforest the Amazon. For most of the stuff I buy, I'm well removed from the immediate effects of our decision, and even to the extent we're aware, there's not a whole hell of a lot we can do change them anyway. (I'm sure it makes me a bad person, but I haven't been willing to descend into pure aescticism to make a point.)

This is one reason to patronize local businesses. You can't do much about the supply chain, but since you're one of a small pool paying the people at the front end, and you have an idea of the sorts of business practices they utilize, you do influence some measure of equity. In the case of waiting tables, the difference between good tippers and bad seems to be an aware of the social contract. Maybe it's good that we know that one person. Restaurants are some of the most localized, and maybe the only one where we're expected to contribute voluntarily to the fair compensation of its employees. Even if we need to drop the charade of "performance," maybe we shouldn't let that handle go.

How does that social contract end up being enforced? Restaurants attract customers largely based on their menus, and there is an incentive to discount service from teh cost of the food. If Bob's Bistro is able to list $18 filets on the menu while discounting the waiter's pay, then Steve's Slop-chute can't afford to include that cost in the advertisement. No one will come, even if Steve double-deep-fries his steaks to colon-clogging perfection (yuck). Just costs too damn much.

[This is kind of funny, actually, because most restaurants don't make their off of food, but rather booze, which is also not included in the menu price.]

The other thing that keeps tipping alive is the (fucking) IRS. Restaurant employers can legally underpay wait staff at some low fraction of the legal minimum wage. (In MA, the base waiter pay is two-something an hour.) Employees need the tips to get paid anything approaching working wages. Depends on where you work, but a fraction of the tips usually go to the other underpaid restaurant schlubs: the busboys and dishwashers, and the person who cooks your food. Waiters also get screwed at tax time, as the two dollars and change is often insufficient to get properly FICAed. It's always fun to come up with a couple grand of lump sum in April.

The justice of tipping depends on where you work. There are advanced skills working at a quality restaurant (you need to know about the food, and how to satisfy the expectations of moneyed assholes), but as John notes, the skill level doesn't exactly rise as fast as teh food costs do. If you're in fine dining, waiting tables is surprisingly lucrative. If my wife did it full-time, she'd be coming close to her old engineer's salary. (See kids, college is for suckers.) The pay scales in fine restaurants seem a little absurd when you start comparing waiter take home pay to that of the skill players (the chefs).

On the other hand, old Mabel slinging breakfast hash is on her feet just as long (dealing with teh expectations of unmonied assholes), and earning a quarter for every plate to supplement her salary. You'd be nuts to serve breakfast, and I try to give these people a break. I think the pizza deliverer has the worst lot of the bunch, and not just for the humiliating uniform and drunk customers. Do you think Papa John's D.P. Dough is paying anyone's car insurance? I tip the pizza guy best of all.

I don't tip people in fast food: these poor sots earn a normal wage, expect me to bus my own table, and don't bring my sack o' crap past teh counter. Not part of the contract. I tip bartenders less because I think they deserve it, and more because I want the drinks to keep coming when it gets crowded. Is it happy hour yet, or what?

Keifus

Pinky and the Brain

I scored a bunch of free lumber from work recently (this year's bonus--I made sure to earn it) and decided to build a backyard shed with it, a project that's been successfully procrastinated for three years now, as all the tools rusting under my carport attest. I'm one of those natural carpenters, by which I mean I'm married and I own a home. That killer eye for level and square just happens to reside in my partner's head, as do the big-picture designs (and redesigns). All the technical building prowess is my own however, and there's nothing like a square, solid blow with a hammer to show that off. My fingernail immediately turned purple, and I could touch nothing with it for a whole day. Eventually I did bump my pinky a little bit (typing is hard work), causing blood and pus to leak out all over, but mercifully it released the pressure underneath. Most of the purple bled out, but that nail's still going to come off: close inspection reveals an underground river of frothy goo. It's still leaking clear blister juice from the top, and it's just gross. But what the hell, whoever uses their little finger?

Funny I should ask.

It was a whole year ago (holy crap, have I been blogging that long?) that I decided to retard any skill I'd attained on my mandolin by then by re-learning my right hand technique. My heart was in the right place with the effort, but my problem was less one of anchoring (I mean hey, Bill friggin' Monroe anchored his palm like me, and I can play almost 5% as fast as he can*) and more generally one of pick direction. As I stumbled through the last year teaching myself minor variations of tunes, I found that if I wasn't going the right way, I was fighting the rhythm. So it's been fixing itself. Sort of. About as gradually as I can learn anything, my right hand issues are slowly ironing themselves out.

So now that I'm all the way into second gear again, the obvious thing is to do drop the machine back down to a lurching crawl. Usually when you start learning the mandolin, you go after the old American (by way of the British Isles) fiddle classics. They're tuned in the keys of A, G, or D (or their relative minor keys) because the root notes rest on open strings (just pluck it, don't press it), and that's an easy place to start on either instrument, which are (normally) tuned identically. But if you ultimately wish to express more than the same ol', it's good to get beyond the three-chord classics and/or to play in keys of interest to other instrumentalists. You can do this while using open strings of course, but they won't be your home base anymore, and if you continue to anchor yourself there, you have to relearn the fingerings for every tune each time you play in a different key. To be a more versatile mando player you must make the dreaded foray up the neck. You have to use your pinky. And you have to think--at first.

The mandolin is brilliantly designed for four fingers. (Go ahead and whack your thumb, it doesn't matter.) It's tuned such that if you start a scale by fretting with your index finger, you'll get to the fourth note (halfway up) with your pinky before you switch strings. If you're playing in all closed positions (i.e., no open strings), then the fifth note will be with the index finger again, and you'll conclude the octave with your pinky. Playing with open strings means you can avoid fretting with your weakest and least coordinated digit--which is why most people start this way--but if you can master that awkward little bastard, then there are only four fretting patterns, depending on with which finger you start. That's true in minor keys as well, or whatever funky-ass mode you're trying to groove in. Only four patterns, ever. It's a piece of cake to transpose your tune to any key at all, just by sliding your starting position up and down the neck. If you play your chords in closed positions too (a good idea anyway), then you also realize how cool it is that the mandolin is four across as well, as you can pinch off every string with a finger, sliding the chords up and down just as easily as the scales.

For any tune I've memorized in the closed positions, transposing is nearly without thought, but it's a bitch getting them in my head in the first place. My wife is learning the fiddle (less ambitiously), and as she picks up a tune, I must do the same. Her up-the-neck lesson isn't coming soon, and as you might guess, her selections don't necessarily play as easily in the closed position, except, you know, when they do. I've found some of the fiddle melodies infuriating to play with pinky applied, but some of the other ones grow surprisingly easier. It's all about minimizing the amount of fingerboard covered and finding the most comfortable fingering sequences. It takes some painful experimenting with which of the four fretting patterns you use to play which parts--thinking!--and it's bloody difficult to read the music, as I don't really associate the short frets with any notes on the staff. But unlike my mediocre attempts at dexterity, I can see how my sinister pinky is opening up doors. If only I get my brain around it.


* even when dead

Review of In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes

Lost in the bowels of the human network is a conversation I had with Splendid IREny shortly before she went intentionally missing. I mentioned that I expected to next hear from her via book jacket, presumably encasing the published story of the female noir hero she was then toying with. (Maybe she's working on it now.) I knew exactly what the photo would look like.*

As a "books for buds" entry, I wanted to uncover dark crime fiction that, if I couldn't find something with a female detective lead, at least somehow subverted or played with the hypermasculinity I associate with noir. A hunt on Amazon revealed a series of pulp classics authored by women, and In a Lonely Place got the highest ranking of the bunch. I'm going to be thinking about that brilliant insight as I stuff this in the stacks between my collection of Peter Whimsy stories and my lone Agatha Christie tome. I guess crime fiction was hardly just (or hardly best) a man's game sixty years ago, anymore than it is today. Oh well.

When I cracked open this novel, I felt a tremendous let-down: the prose is just awful. Hughes wrote the whole book as a series of simple declarative sentences that evinced no particular rhythm, and certainly no pleasures of sound, expression, or description. In the few places where the tension accelerated my reading, the prose aspired to be invisble, but in the subtler dramas of shared looks and perceptions (He was angry. He looked at her. She couldn't tell. She gave him a stare.), it was completely unevocative. Oddly, I felt guilty about this. If I'm reviewing a book for someone, I want it to be a good book.

It took nearly half the book to realize that Hughes' poor "telling" didn't overturn any old writing maxims. Her vision is fine, she's just not very good at saying it. In fact, by the end of the book, I became impressed by the subtlety of how the author tugged at expectations. The point-of-view character, Dix Steele, is introduced as (and is named like) a traditional war hero: ace pilot, good looks, confident. The author sets up a good chill by the third page--the "hero" is a cold-blooded bastard, a killer. His point of view is refreshingly not cerebral. Dix doesn't analyze himself, there are no boring internal monologues or tired episodes of psychobabble. Hughes doesn't get past Dix's own self-image in the narration, which is indolent, narcissistic, not very articulate (for a would-be writer), and hinges on a confidence that's genuine but not always maintainable. It must have been a challenging storytelling approach: it succeeds exclusively on what's shown. (For this reason, I bet the movie was great.)

I didn't like the character, but despite his evil, he's not insane exactly, and I almost wanted an out to present itself. His background doesn't inspire the confidence he shows (and though Hughes barely mentions it, war death appears to have affected him strongly). I don't know if it takes a woman to poke holes in that masculine self-assurance and to expose the possessive notions of romantic love, but she calls it for a facade, opaque enough to obscure the other characters as well as the plot itself. The red-headed femme fatale is not the frighteningly sharp vixen she appears, his friend's wife's odd behavior isn't attraction, and the investigation proceeds not through detective heroics, but routinely and behind the scenes as Dix Steele spins his borrowed wheels with growing urgency. The unraveling is cleverly paced, and manages to rise above the blank narration. Glad I stuck with this one.

Addendum (from comments): Hemingway, anti-heroes, etc.: talk about your low-hanging critical fruit. Did I ever mention I was an engineering major?

*Go ahead and click on it. I spent hours tweaking my original pencil sketch from a Napoleon Dynamite special (I spent, like, three hours on shading the lower lip alone) into something (I hope) not insulting.

Author: Dorothy B. Hughes
Title: In a Lonely Place
Genre: fiction, mystery

Review of I Dont Know How She Does It, by Allison Pearson

Rundeep is super. Afflicted with an online writing addiction as bad as my own (but more diverse, incisive, and well-regarded), she seems to balance this with a successful and happy marriage, a high-visibility career, and, evidently, time to be a great parent as well. Either she's got it totally figured out (in which case she's my hero) or else she's brilliantly faking it (in which case she's my hero). Rundeep is hard to pin down as a book choice because she seems to have a smart angle on everything. So what could I do but find some fictional character that seems to manage it all? I don't know how she does it either, but I'd sure like to figure out something similar. I'm honored to include rundeep as one of the buds.

#

There's a certain prose style that's been working its way into the literature for the past 20 or 30 years, a certain brand of ironic hyperbole that compounds everyday observation with huge absurd metaphors, almost at the end of every sentence. Off the cuff, I'll guess that it started as soon as anyone saw fit to parody Raymond Chandler, but whatever the origin, it's worked itself into something of a standard form, identifiable a couple paragraphs in. I love it, and Allison Pearson wins big points for doing it well. She has a lot of fun with the verbal gymnastics, and the pace of the language is a good match for the frantic knot of the main character's mental state. Low on plot (but with an entertaining movie-script denoument), the book flies by as fast as Kate Reddy thinks. I'd have read it in a sitting if I'd had enough of a sitting.

I Don't Know How She Does It is told in the first person, in present tense, in roughly real time, a framing device that doesn't quite work. 8:17 AM: Am rushing to cab... Logistically, she can't possibly be dictating, but the book is too diary-like to be an internal monologue either. Even so, it's more than enough to get intimate with the Kate's internal thoughts. Her racing mind dwarfs the stimuli from her external life, and the contrast of her thoughts (stern at home, sweet and funny at work) to her actions (sweet at home and stern at work) are a great vehicle to reveal character. She's an easy woman to like, if only she'd calm down for ten minutes.

I'm not sure I identify with her though. I suppose I'm more like her husband--I've had a good upbringing that's robbed me of overambition--but I don't quite get that dude's dull entitlement either. (He's easy to write myself onto because Kate spends the novel ignoring him.) I had kids at the same chronological time as that fictional couple (though I am younger), and while in grad school, did some daddy-at-home time while my wife won bread. A man, especially a young one, was at best a novelty, but more often was beneath the notice of the local Muffia, and I really enjoyed Pearson's pokes at those overbearing ghouls. (Now my poor wife spends more time scratching her head over their bizarre commitments.) I couldn't get behind the noxious men who had a path paved to business success (if I were to encounter in the workplace the level of overt misogyny that Kate did, I'd be appalled), nor the women who were conflicted about their maternal instincts, even if I could (and still can) relate to the way that dual incomes run roughshod over family life.

The premise of this novel--a woman that tries to succeed as both a proper English mum (can I ever tell you how much English classisms bug me?) and a badass executive--is one that invites an exploration of gender roles, but none of the major or minor characters captured very well the complicated perspectives of the people even I know. Even with humor (and maybe especially with humor), this honesty is essential, and I think it's where Pearson lost the opportunity to write something powerful instead of something light and disposable. It would be difficult to resolve the setup without appearing to approve one side or other of Kate's dual drives, and when she starts extolling motherhood as a compulsion straight from the womb, you can hear the faint crackle of a message, and by the time she introduces and quickly martyrs the novel's only saint, it's screaming in your ear. The successful (balanced) women in the showcase are either wives, or else have assumed some bullshit girl-acceptable career. (To put it another way, I'd rather have any one of Kate's female friends managing my hypothetical funds than the douchebag men she worked with.) The men, the best and worst of them, are all overgrown boys that need a little mommying. She doesn't criticize the subtler chauvinism of Kate's "good" boss, nor that of her inappropriate romantic interest--they're just boys who have been failed by women. It's all so very comfortable with old traditions by the end, I found it disappointingly at odds with the way Pearson opened the story. For rundeep, I wish I came up with something that was balanced in substance as well.

Author: Allison Pearson
Title: I Don't Know How She Does It
Genre: fiction

Science : Journalism :: Science Fiction : Punditry

[I've been boring myself with this one all week, now it's your turn. On the plus side, it should be out of my head now.]

Even though I've been committing some half-assed versions of it lately, I'm not a big fan of science journalism. Or maybe that's not quite correct: I like the stuff in here when I read it, and the various popular science magazines can be OK for fields I'm unfamiliar with, even if one of them was once so foolish as to include my photo once (the last time I saw my name in print, I think). My occasional viewing of the NYT science section has revealed a general readability and even Will Saletan can occasionally be trenchant as he parrots it. And I like fantasizing about science too. No the problem is less what's written, and more the readers. I don't mind opening eyes and instilling a desire for greater understanding (again, I've enjoyed popularly styled reports recently in areas I was totally ignorant), and I'm all for inquiry, but it annoys me when dumb people read a breezy piece, with their own agendas on their backs like monkeys, and think they have it down. It annoys me even more when those people are influential.

I think it's John McG's fault that this came across my attention. According to the poster,

[a cited USA Today article] also contains some worthwhile comments on the danger of politicizing science, as well as in pretending that science can resolve contentious policy debates.

Yes, you have to beware of people using their credentials to forward political (or market) agendas, but science isn't something that bears the weight of opinion as obviously as everyone seems to think. Just because theories can be developed and institutionalized to a degree, it's rare that this stuff sifts through peer review for very long. It may take an extra convincing argument to sway the establishment, but at the end, science is interpretation of facts and measurements, while politics is interpretation of opinions. Ideally, opinions are grounded in facts, but they sure don't have to be.

Facts enrich opinions more than opinions enrich facts. You do have to be wary of the latter, whatever the source. Still, I wish I had more sources of science policy opinion.* When scientists write editorials they tend to be either dreadful (and USA Today and Volokh are right that the opinion is often more funding) or bombastic (which is more fun since there are a lot of earnest deniers out there, but I'm still glad I skipped Stephen Jay Gould deriding The Bell Curve at novel length). In the opposite case, when professional opinion writers get their hands on scientific points, it's nothing short of a train wreck. It's the worse with conservative pundits, because conservatism, by definition, is a set of opinions that's been reinforced for a while. The liberation from a justifying set of facts for those opinions may be a newer development in the movement. Certainly they're more crass than I remember as a kid.

[Is this what happened to economics? I had just finished mocking supply side theorists last night when it occurred to me that Milton Friedman shouldn't really be called a lightweight. I don't know if he can be blamed for skyrocketing the national debt in flush times, favoring short-term speculation over real investment, or a suspiciously self-serving policy of enriching the already rich, but whatever we have now also seems a far cry from Friedman's monetarism. Need to read more on that. Consider it an invitation to comment.] Even if they've got some intellectual bits distantly behind them, the cheerleaders of poorly fortified opinions generally (and wrongly) imagine themselves the first in line to reap the promised rewards of their insincerity. Cushy and undeserved jobs aside, I don't know if your average conservative hack is really of the ownership class, and less so their readers.

But what the fuck, they've no doubt mangled Thomas Jefferson and Sun Tzu just as badly as anyone else. Frustratingly, other fields have crept into their purview as well, ones that I actually know stuff about. Jonah Goldberg, no deep thinker he, and a frequent complainer about scientists' inability to accept simple rhetorical "truths", has opined that those clever can-do scientists are going to save us from an oil crunch, fersure. Evidently, everyone is as eager as he is to keep him in his pampered, dull sinecure. (If you need a goat on the liberal side of things, witness the slavering over stem cells.)

To add insult to insult, the opinion hacks are doing their damndest to ruin my beloved science speculation too. Glenn Reynolds (of AG Android fame, and also doing his damndest to delve the shallows) has made time blathering about the hypothetical technological singularity as though he'll be the first to be uploaded. As though we need to listen to a computerized pundit for all eternity. Roy Edroso makes me sad when he picks on these people, but just because goobers latch onto it, it doesn't mean that speculation can't be instructive too. Some people read that stuff and it inspires them to become scientists, or merely to look down new avenues of thought. Others find it justification for their own mediocrity. Sharpen up your facts to defend against them.

Keifus

*For the record, m'man Archaeopteryx actually does it pretty well.

[Update: Doncha hate when you have to correct something dumb? I was a little breezy myself with the anti-supply-side mumbo-jumbo last night, and had to qualify it a lot this morning. So I go to the stat counter hoping no one was up in the wee hours reading my drivel, and lo, there were those rare and valued readers pulled in from foreign comments sections. Figures.]

Funding Pure and Applied Science

I found this golden oldie while I was looking to verify something for another post. Maybe it's not fair to pick on what ideologues were saying ten years ago, but if there's an organization that hoists petards willy-nilly, it's Cato. I read some of their shit for a short time, when I was more sympathetic (shortly before this essay was hoisted), but it takes about five forays into their voluminous screed to realize that they endeavor in no reasoning which does not beg the question. Really, choose five random samples and report back. The conclusion is forgone, and from the introduction, it's a weasely path to get to telling us that federal funding is bad and the (allegedly) free market will make this topic just as super as it can make everything else. Throwbacks to the halcyon days of child labor and flaming rivers are a bonus. The reasoning path bears the semblance of logic, but it suffers the doctrinal inability to weight anything properly. You could have an equivalent conversation with a Marxist, and find out how central committees are the solution to all economics. The annoying thing about the glibertarians,* is that they pretend to pragmatism.

Maybe Kealey, the author of that piece, could be forgiven for not being an American, but his case to "End Government Science Funding" rests on three tenuous or contradictory ideas:

1. companies that engage in "pure research" do well, even though the research is risky


2. private people really do fund science, especially the rich, who really, really do feel a need to give


3. government-funded research doesn't always produce products

He commits a lot of sins in his breezy piece of tendentious shit: industrial research in 1997 was much different than that of the 1960s, and he ignores academia entirely. His first and third point contradict one another. Risky research, he says, is good when spread out among a big rich company that can get the rare reward, but the risk is what makes government funding for it bad. (Anyone want to tackle the second point?)

I suspect that investment philosophy has more complicated lineage than government tax policy, but in the late twentieth century, enormous private laboratories started drying up--the culture was less long-term, and more geared to satisfying the bottom line, presumably for shareholders. It's a Cato wet dream of ownership, but it's been a capricious sort of investiture: no one's in for the long haul, and fundamental R&D (pure science) is all but toppled in those places as a result of selling out to the gods of productivity. Bell Labs is gone. Westinghouse labs is gone. Xerox and Kodak are going. Work still gets done under the industry mantle, but it's applied: what can get to product in a short time frame? The best case for pure corporate research is the pharmaceutical industry, but that is pretty applied too, and Pharma's relationship with government is pretty intense.

It's fine (and logical) that companies should do more applied science than government-funded work, but someone needs to take the long view--there's only so much innovation to be found in new ways to sell the same old crap. The fundamental research still needs to be done, and it makes for the government to do the investing. Insurance models work out best across a statistically large set of members, and I've mentioned before that an all-inclusive single-payer model ends up looking (counterintuitively to me) like the best option under this framework. Funding of risky (pure) scientific research can be looked at as spreading the risks of no product and sunk costs to the entire population, which will benefit as a whole from a robust technical economy.

As it stands, the government is supportive and open about turning pure science into patents and profit for ambitious citizens. If you go to an academic chemistry or biology department, you'll find a bunch of professors churning furiously around trying to spin small startup businesses off at every opportunity, begging for venture capital, all based on knowledge and experience attained on the government's dime. It's by far the healthiest and purest entrepreneurial environment that I've personally encountered. That pure initial research is rarely funded through the private sector, and it costs a lot to hire us credentialed science dudes, while grad students are essentially free.

I'm less sanguine about government investment in the private sector (much as I like having a job), but that's mostly because so much of it comes through the Department of Defense. There isn't a whole lot of pure research coming through those initiatives, believe me, and the big chunks go to the big contractors. Worse, with all that cool and lethal technology, people just itch to use it.

The marked change in DoD funding vehicles in the past five years is toward the more applied research (yup, even DARPA). Understandable maybe, in the middle of a war, but it's made my job prospects appear that much more bleak. It's ridiculously competitive these days to get those dollars these days, and you pretty much need to go in with the problem solved when you walk in, and Raytheon (or whichever big contractor) on your arm doesn't hurt. They want someone who's proven they can already produce the idea too.

In non-defense sectors, scientific funding seem to be relatively unbuggered, however. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (who publish the prestigious Science journal) list some historical data of funding trends in a series of excellent graphs. They're interesting to peruse. As a percentage of GDP, science funding has been decreasing gradually since the seventies, but has been rising just as slightly in terms of constant dollars. I was surprised to learn that science funding dropped precipitously during the Clinton years, and has been brought back up to pace under the tenure of the Bush administration. The DoD portion of that budget has even dropped slightly under Bush. (Another reason my job looks so bleak these days.)

You can blame the Bush gang for subverting results it disagrees with (upcoming post), for naïve pet projects (though the Mars mission is a small chunk of the overall pie), and for any number of their policies. But they're doing the right thing with research funding. I'm as surprised as you are.

Keifus

*You'll note the rhetorical distinction maybe. There are smart libertarians. I've no end of respect for the likes of Jim Henley, IOZ, Julian Sanchez, et al., etc., and I get behind many of their views. Maybe Cato even has honest contributors, but I haven't read them.

Abortions for Some, Miniature American Flags for Others

Even though they're a fine source of perpetual blog ideas, politics tend to depress the hell out of me. I only ever began following the great silly game out of a sense of civic responsibility, and a perpetual desire to bitch about stuff. Well, it's not like I feel any more responsible.

I occasionally call myself a libertarian, though I'd expand enough on what government is good for (to include insurance and pollution control as well defense and justice) to push me into some odd leftie version of that. Famously (and appealingly) enough, libertarians prefer to complain about the government than do stuff about stuff, and who can blame them when you think about what governments do with power?

IOZ (shhh, I'm trolling for his readers) had some fun picking on the Democrats today. Yeah, sure, easy targets, what with showing their bellies to the president, proving themselves yet again tools to executive power, waiting their turn. Fucking party politicians: the lure of being a high-level appartchik is evidently stronger than retaining some Constitutionally declared powers for your own house. You'd think that with enough popular demand, the appeal of keeping one's seat would trump presidential awe, but tell that to Ned Lamont. Anyway, IOZ mocked the various netroots goobers for being fooled again. Most important election ever --> horrible policies --> we need more and better Democrats! Lather, rinse, repeat.

But then again, I remember the libertarians complaining ten years ago about the nanny state, whose jack-booted drug-stealing thugs ended up being a lot more subtle than their most dire warnings. The support for the (allegedly) small-government conservatives (never mind the racism and Jesus-throttling and fiscal idiocy) was not always implicit. They've got their useless cycle too, as do the conservatives, with the difference that libertarians don't get to enact their own horrible policies. So I fixed the figure. Hope it helps.

I made a bulleted list of what I care about politically, but I'll save it for when I'm in the mood. Suffice to say that I'll continue to vote for the party that is marginally closer to achieving some of them, and failing that, I'll vote to poke the incumbents in the eye. It's not like any of these assholes is about to swap a trillion dollar war for public health insurance and science research anytime soon. Those wheels just keep spinning each other around like a hot-air powered aeropile.

What do all those gears grind? Sausage, I guess. Politics.



[Sorry, I'm behind in my reading.]

Five More Thoughts - Personal Days Edition

Five sunny days in the Pacific Northwest, I'd say that sounds like enough for a list. I was out for a funeral, and, naturally enough, got introspective about some things. In some thoughts, family is referred to generally, I hope they don't mind. (I didn't ask.)

1. Some of these thoughts sound better awake at 4AM
We humans sure do love to surround ourselves with the murmur of our own creations. Cozied in our own spheres, we hardly notice the usual buzzes and hums, but spending the a week on unfamiliar couches in unfamiliar cities can highlight the whispers of other places, the normally unobserved conversations of the ubiquitous machines. Cities have bad reputations as harsh and clangorous places, but urban machinery just sings a more cacophonous version of the same tune, and is as soothing in its way.

Coming home--the hum of my air conditioner, the intermittent buzz of air pumped through the ducts, the distant highway--is to be surrounded by my own sounds, and as deeply as I loathe the glare of the streetlight outside of my bedroom window, its faint sizzle is a lullaby, a sussurrus underlying the occasional whoosh of the distant highway or the faraway buzz of a jet overhead. If and when civilization ever tanks, the popular image is people coming out rubbing their eyes at the light, but I think it's the quiet that will drive us over the brink.

(I'm a fan of natural white noise too, though.)

2. Mile high anthropology
I like those jets better when they're distant. Up close, inside, they're a nasty warren of people at their worst: smelly, cramped, forced by proximity into social or antisocial behavior.

Air travel is a nation unto itself, at least if the endless references to Sky this and Air that are any indicator. You walk into the airport with its funny vehicles (I get no end of chuckles at the stair trucks and little luggage trains), odd dress codes, and cosmopolitan insularity. It's like stepping into an odd foreign country, and maybe that's the best case I can make for anyone ever wanting to clamber into a cramped booth and boink one of the locals.

It takes a special kind of person to savor air travel. You need to thrive on being away, you need to be personable but not close, need to have a remarkable ability to tolerate idiocy and discomfort. Flight attendants exude that close casualness, and almost to an individual, no matter their actual age or shape (or gender), seem to evince a world-weary sexiness. Which isn't to say gender roles in the airline culture don't bother me, they do, falling too easily into neat prejudices about sophisticated free spirits (i.e., they are all hot, youngish women and gay men). The predictability of the cabin crew bothers me less than the conformity of the higher status flight crew, every one of which seems to be trying to pull off an aging Chuck Yeager look,* as solid and square-jawed as the attendants are free-spirited. Yesterday, my fist female jet pilot flew me home, and the possibilities are obviously slim, but way less remote than they ought to be. Anyway, good for her. I always love to see stereotypes thwarted.

3. Keifus Rants
But I got there, saw the relatives. Like all families, mine is nuts. We drive each other crazy, and yet we can't keep away from each other. We're all successful in similar ways (trained professional types, artsy streaks more or less expressed), and we seem to all be haunted by similar demons. The point of origin is arbitrary, but it's most tempting to give my grandfather the biggest visible footprint. Like his face, you can trace facets his personality down the line. Absolutely none of us will admit to them.

My grandfather was a world-class ranter, and prodigious drinker in his later years, and we've all got that in us. Politically, we range from tight-ass conservative (older generation) to bleeding-heart liberal (younger ones), with the more balanced members occupying some thoughtful ground of our own declaration. We do go on when we get together. I'd have considered myself of the quieter, non-blathering persuasion, but after excessive plying with three days alcohol and drama, the Chief's genes got their grip on me too, and I raved with the best of them. I let into my Dad (no descendent he, and a rock of sanity by comparison) when he tried to cast me as a political liberal. It's not normally something that works me up, but after hearing so much Republican apologia I felt I should step up for those thoughts I believed, and anyway, I fucking hate being typecast.

Nature and nurture all wrapped up in one boozy loud sack. I feel like an ass.

4. Standing On Ceremony
This gathering had a purpose, and over the days, it closed in. I'm not a fan of ceremony for some reasons--declaring any One True Way always presents perils of division and conflict--but in other ways, they certainly serve a social good. If you parse ceremony down finely enough you'll get to the community traditions, and even the family traditions that bookmark our various milestones in life. It's hard in times of intense emotions to have to ad lib, and a ceremony's script helps to guide the participants past whatever perceived thresholds. On the other hand, the best traditions (including deciding which thresholds to define) have a tendency to develop organically and for a small group.

There's not much getting around death as a milestone, but we'd kind of settled on a memorial "family reunion" as a tribute, following a tradition that had been growing anyway, and one that was beloved by the deceased. There would be (and was) food, some fond or solemn words or tokens from whoever wanted to contribute them, and the usual booze-fueled arguments and friendly conspiracies. Good times needless to say, but also times that dare to tread on the greater American approval sphere. A pastor was invited because someone thought a "real" ceremony was called for. My family, that side of it, stakes out a band of agnosticism ranging from "reluctant" to "total," with a couple of true believers sprinkled in at the distant cousin level, so it's kind of a funny impetus, and this guy had his work cut out for him. To his credit, he did a good job of directing the crowd energy toward a handful of well-spoken remembrances, staking out the timing and punctuation better than a murmuring crowd would have. But it's in the power of the speaker to call the end of speaking, which he pushed off to fit in a sermon, shoving the ceremony out of the natural niche it had found with little help. Maybe it was okay for everyone else, necessary even, but I was uncomfortable that the person who spoke longest for the departed had never met him.

5. Is there an agnostic hell? Who can say?
Predictably enough, old John the Gospeler was trotted out, and the story of Thomas highlighted in particular for us marks wising up enough to look closely at those fish scales. Maybe it wasn't a bad approach, and who knows, maybe he even winged one or two of us. I'm no biblical scholar (Homer voice: obviously!), but I've got to like Thomas. Here's the guy in the story who, when confronted with Jesus resurrected, called for extraordinary proof for the extraordinary claim.

Jesus provided evidence of wounds and that was enough for Tom, who, for all his dalliance with evidence-based thinking, was still given to disciplehood. Jesus did some miracles (the wine thing in particular went far to make up for his tendency to rant at parties), but he did a lot of straight-up proclaiming too, notably in John. Famously, he intoned, "I am the door; by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and go out, and shall find pasture" (John 10:9), and "I am the way, and the truth, and the life: no one cometh unto the Father, but by me" (John 14:6). It's not got that 23rd psalm poetic sense, but it does have a good ring of deep prophecy. Given the unenviable task of offering a sermon to a bunch of godless heathens, the pastor leaned hard on that last quote. Unknowing what's on the other side of the door, he said, we have to trust Jesus, since he's the one who's claiming to understand what we don't.

I don't think there is any message that is so hard to sell to skeptics nor so easy to sell to those who fear death (those are not exclusive groups), and people have been trying to pitch an afterlife of divine communion or retribution for millennia before and after Jesus spoke. Their evidence was the same. In a way, Jesus's metaphorical proclamations are a better sell than doctored evidence--miracles tend to look small after a little perspective--but that doesn't get me past my allergy to "just trust me." At its best, "just trust me" is a short-term loan, getting a speaker past three tenuous seconds as the results come in. It's not a good marketing tool for long-term prospects (or shouldn't be). Whether it's health or government policy or plans for eternity, "just trust me" usually is a blinking neon signpost telling you you shouldn't. I don't think there are three consecutive words in the language less inspiring of trust, although "y'all watch this" comes close.

As I've yakked about before, I'll keep my faith in doubt. At least there's plenty of evidence of my ignorance.

Keifus

* Actually, more as I'd imagine a young flyboy aging, less how he actually aged