Oversized, Overpriced, and Crappy

One of the problems with being an occasional blogger instead of an occasional poster or commenter is that I need to sustain my own level of output. If nothing gets posted for a week or two, then the place doesn't go on without me. Any previously tempted reader (I kid) will simply wander away for lack of activity. Anyway, it's not a political post, even if you could parse the title that way with depressing ease. There's enough of that coming down the pipe in the form of book reviews (one turgid and one fervid), and I'm not exactly the rare writer that rises above being a bore about that sort of thing. So as I try to procrastinate my way through another rough month, are there some fallback Keifus posts I can depend on here: Recipes? Kids? Mediocre science writing? Home improvement? Colorful complaints? The last two, let's go with that.

I don't know if mentioned it in these pages, but in the last couple of years, my darling wife has re-educated herself (over-re-educated herself really), and worked her way into a new career, which, by all evidence, she thoroughly enjoys, at least for these first few months. If I don't say it enough, then let it be known--she has impressed the hell out of me. Now that we have more income, as well as less frustrating time to spend it (the mythical black positively looms), we're re-evaluating the pointlessly expensive home projects we've been putting off for seven years, things like a working drier (which could have easily paid for itself by now), replacing the tattered and filthy carpets that came with the place, replacing the kitchen chairs with ones that aren't broken and downsizing the table to one that actually fits in the room.

Pity the poor furniture shopper that doesn't live in a McMansion! All of our choices over the years have been made to creatively optimize comfort in a small space, having quickly found the overstuffed sectional with the built-in recliners and a pull-out drink holder (what a fucking mistake that thing was) isn't really designed to be tucked into a corner, or even to occupy a mere wall, or even to leave room for thoughtless family members, those who occasionally choose to disrespect the mighty altar of sedentariness, to perform the profane act of opening the door and walking out into the air. For a springy monster like that to fit, it either has to be the center of attention, or your living room has to be the size of a cathedral. And it's all like this. I want to fit a hypothetical new kitchen/dining table into a finite oblong space, but even the so-called pub tables you can buy demand to be massive centerpieces, only tall enough for a barstool. Yes, you can buy small items that are cut-rate in quality, but I want something to at least survive the kids here, without devolving immediately either into trailer-park chic or tasteless excess. The woes of the petite bourgeoisie, lemme tellya. I don't know how the city folk do it. Probably with less whining.

And let's not pretend the quality gap isn't intentional. I've lamented(in media now buried and forgotten) the extra engineering that it takes make lower-priced bathroom fixtures stay ugly, but that's mostly because it's a tube of metal without many moving parts. When there are obvious pathways to chintz, they're rarely left unexplored, even in the suspiciously sparse land of mid-level pricing. Home Depot, I want to point out, is the undisputed king of the shitty middle. Their basic hardware doesn't deviate very far from the standard (understandable enough, given the piece of the retail market they occupy), but it's the suite of more aesthetic and individual products--carpets, lighting, cabinetry, things like that--that carries that special vibe of inferiority about it. A knock in quality, but at all of the price. Even a hack like me can spot it a mile away. Back when my buddy Jay bought his suburban palace, I could identify every fixture and accent as a Depot special--it screamed. (He has since made a lot of subtle improvements that have classed the place up immensely. The fact that it's far better than my mashed-thumb, bent-nail masterpieces is only partly because he has better tools, space to work, and can sometimes afford contractors.) You will never, ever get a deal on anything at Home Depot, and its semi-exclusive product lines makes it very difficult to shop around if you do find something you like (except maybe at Lowe's, which is close enough to exactly the same to not really matter).

About four years ago, I tiled my kitchen, and it's finally looking like we can afford something comparable on the adjoining living room side, get rid of the ancient doggie damage at long last, and just in time for our own dog. We're planning on wood or laminate (i.e., fake wood) floors for the purpose, because it matches our general style (if you can call it that), and because while they might wear (or fade), I've been looking at stained carpet for altogether too long.

Flooring is an excellent window into pricing and quality standards of retail outlets. We were lured down to one discount flooring place, naturally enough, by $0.79/square foot laminate, which would have been all right as far as the thickness and durability went (sinking too much quality in this place is folly, and at that price we could just replace it in five or ten years), if it didn't look so godawful fake. There were about six samples below $3, two of which were the ludicrous choice of unfinished pine, and a big cluster of okay material between $3 and $4, before heading right off into exclusively furnishing the loathed hautes.

It turned out that matching the tile while not shrinking and darkening the bedrooms was a more difficult task than expected. (Dark wood would look great against light tile, but...) Nothing fit the bill at Discount Floors, but, God help me, the Depot had the perfect pattern. The pricing for flooring at Home Depot is, roughly, $1, $3, or $5-7 per square foot, with striking differences in quality. That rare match was a Pergo brand product, but made by subcontractors in some factory in Croatia, only for the store chain, and not exactly finding rave reviews online. Even at three bucks, I'd rather get wood, or at least get some known product that I could shop around for and compare. As it is, it looks like I'll hold out against my home improvement nemesis for just a little while longer.

Another Last Hurrah

I knew I was in Massachusetts when I visited a restaurant with a JFK room. We ate there when we were still looking for houses, I think, and still brand new to the place. (You wouldn't find a Kennedy room in the godless badlands of Connecticut.) Hey, can we sit in that roo...umm? Every wall was covered with Kennedy kitsch: commemorative plates, oil portraits, framed photographs. Positively creepy, like dinner in a church with all the saints watching you eat from the stained glass. I'm the wrong age to have idolized John Kennedy. His sudden loss, and Bobby's, shocked my parents' generation. As presidencies go, I'll just say there are better and worse interpretations, and I'm an amply rewarded pessimist when it comes to politics. As far as nobility goes, I think we could have asked for better camera fodder in the age of snapshots and video footage, but I realize I'm in the minority about that one.

One of things to go right in the American experiment was the abolition of royalty, and this whole Camelot thing really bugs me. Pushing privilege through generations may be another inevitable pimple on the pizza-face of governance, but I refuse to celebrate it. Although if there were titled aristocracy here, I admit I could see the Kennedy family as a good Yankee version. Count old Joe Kennedy as the American product of balls, charisma, amoral investment strategy, and political networking, raising himself to the level of raucous nouveau noblesse, inventing tradition on the fly, but meaning, without question, to make it stick in the family through his heirs. What the family did with the power, once established, was as interesting as these things always are.

Ted Kennedy was a senator for longer than I have been alive. Young, irresponsible Kennedy was well before my time. Memories of a failed presidential contender are also vague. The Ted Kennedy I "knew" had the physique of a life-long drinker (who'd have guessed cancer would do him in?), spoke large, seemed sincerely and indiscriminately genial, and supported government programs without apologizing to conservatives, which is impressive for his time. Leave the political eulogy for the people who actually love this stuff.

For his efforts to help out the people, a sense of noblesse oblige is often thrown around, but while it gets to the point, it doesn't feel like the right term. Ted's grandfather was a Boston machine politician, and the give-back tradition is as much a system of an elaborate patronage, a dynamic, connected, interaction with the community, than it is a duty of the aristocracy. A political machine used to move, power had to be bought, and the system had to be maintained--city machines were run by bosses, not lords. Ted Kennedy's unapologetic caring for the little guys as he saw them, his garrulousness, his chumminess and comfortable movement within the bureaucratic sphere, seems like a throwback to the old urban versions. Ted strikes me as the Frank Skeffington of a modern age, now connected to a bigger web, better educated, evolved past the city, and incorporating contemporary electoral mechanisms and national avenues of power, but still able to gladhand every Joe on the street.

Like in Edwin O'Connor's novel, it feels like some era is passing with Ted Kennedy's death. I'd be hard pressed to tell you what era it is though. Politicians operating on some straightforward model of public morality? Political family legacies? Personable bureaucrats? These don't really seem to have left us. You can never quite shake out the last hurrah.

On the Median

April 9. I find many unusual things along the edge of the grass, many of the clothes I wear, for instance, and food sometimes, and other useful items. Today may have revealed the best find yet, or at least the best thing since I picked up my watch that tells me the days. It's a rigid folder with a lot of happy colors and animals on it, and inside there are three blue pads of paper bound with little spirals of wire, and several writing tools in a clear pouch. I am writing with it now.

I don't know if I will keep the folder, but I like pad and the pouch, and I have often thought I should keep more solid memories than the little marks I make on my tree to note the days.


April 10. One thing I can describe is my home. It is a small lean-to, packed tight with pine boughs, which keep me dry even when it rains hard. I can hardly see it even when I am looking right at it. At the very front opening, there are a few stones where I sometimes have a fire.

This lean-to is nested in a small stand of trees. This in turn is tucked into a little fold of hill, a narrow ridge on either side of me, as if I am in the center of a large "M". At the feet of the M, of course, are those long, black boundaries that define my space. My trees rise almost to the top of the ridge, it is one of many bunches of them. Swathes of grass weave in between, as if the little clusters of oaks and hickories and maples are bubbles in a green stream. There are stretches of bushes and scrub too, and in the summer, blue flowers pop up in the grass. My bubble has several nut trees, and it is cool (and sometimes a little muddy) at the lowest point inside. On the east side, there is a sandy bridge, a turnaround maybe, for the travelers on the blacktop, but a white plaque on a metal pole indicates that this use is forbidden.


April 11. When I walk straight west from my home, the peaks of the ridges rise for a few dozen paces, and the middle valley spreads out. There is a little white molded streambed that fills up when it rains, and empties into a pond in there that is not large, and not deep, but it teems with frogs and turtles. The water is very still on it today, and the sun is very bright and high in the sky, and I spent a few minutes looking at myself just now. My eyes appear very deep and dark against my wide face. My hair and my beard are the color of bark. I think they used to be blacker.


April 14. Did not leave my lean-to today. Was not hungry, and it feels like it will rain.


May 5. A lucky find this morning: a deer, nearly whole, resting a few short steps from the shoulder. It must have happened in the night, but nothing woke me up. The poor creature's hips were shattered, but he was otherwise intact. I wonder how long he managed to survive after he was hit.

As I sit here, I can smell the meat roasting on my small fire, and it is nearly too tempting to wait. Up near the top of the hill, where the breeze comes, many strips are hanging from my makeshift drying rack (just some sticks really, that I stripped bare of their bark), still glistening a little in the sun, and the deer's hide is spread out over a rock, also drying, close by. I will boil the heart and kidneys tomorrow, and I may have some meat to smoke too, but I will have to move up the hill for that as well, if I don't want water to seep into the hole, and I do not know if I want a fire that high up.

I am worried that so much meat will draw rats or crows, but I will camp near there for a few weeks, and maybe I can catch some of them if it does.


June 13. I woke up panicked this morning. The buzzing and shouting was not another nightmare, it turned out, and as I crept up the bank, I could see unhappy men dressed in orange crowding the bank, swinging around machines on rods in the open space between the blacktop and the treeline, sending clumps of grass, still wet from the dew, flying from the business ends, offering tiny glints in the morning sun. A hundred paces behind them, a large green vehicle growled near the edge of some of the closer trees, with a great arm that reached up to the branches and rent them horribly, with a ripping sound, as much animal as it was mechanical. I could see two men in yellow hats in the cockpit of the machine, pointing up in my general direction, and I froze.

I don't believe I am highly visible in my deerskin, but I felt that these men and their horrible machine were going to cut through straight to my home. Moving carefully, and as quickly as I dared, I crept backwards into the shadow, out of the immediate reach of the thing.

The rock that my hand closed on was about half the size of my head. When the monster finally approached, I felt the sound would deafen me, a hundred times worse than the big boxes that pass by so frequently in the night. When it was nearly upon me, I looked up a moment at the end of the arm, and it was less a fist than a mouth, spinning with brown and gray teeth, chewing up the branches and spitting bark and leaves. I hurled the rock where I thought the cockpit would be, and abandoning caution, I flew back to hide under the branches. As I write now, the sound is fading.


June 18. They cut the other side today. The crews are not hard to avoid when you watch out for them. On this side, I didn't find any sign of my rock, or of anything else but piles of cut grass, now drying and brown, and speared through with new shoots.


August 28. Laying down last night, I could see stars peeking through the breaks in the trees. I am sure I have looked up like that a thousand times, but last night, there was something about how the canopy was broken open and I could see the ragged line that separated the black of the underside of the leaves from the black of the sky, the nearby darkness from the darkness that surrounds the stars, and I felt somehow big enough to reach through it, walk up that shimmering corridor to the endless reaches. It was very quiet, and maybe that was the difference, and no lights went by. Looking out under my stand of trees, I could see the thinnest sliver of moon, hanging low in the sky. I swear I'd never seen the moon before either, not really seen it.

It was a good night for sleeping, dry and comfortable with the faintest crisp taste of autumn mixing in with the air, but I couldn't sleep, worrying about the hole in the trees. I moved out to the edge of the copse, and that helped.


September 19. I am not in my little stand of trees anymore. I feel like I have been restless for many months, but looking here, I can see it hasn't really been so long. It didn't feel like there was a decision made, but this morning, I stuffed my odds and ends into my little pack, what was left of the jerky, my hoard of nuts, and a pastry, now very hard, that I found last night still in the bag. (The bags are excellent for starting fires.) I kicked away my little ring of stones and started walking, clomping over the rough surface of the turnaround, and then on through the grasses, the gray and beige tops of the plants gently brushing my knees.

Maybe I will read this later and wonder what I was thinking. But I am sure I don't know.


September 29. I am standing on an overpass, and have been looking down at the world below me. I have seen many of these continents that intersect my own, both over and under, and crossed them in the manner as the circumstances have demanded. (Usually, like now, they don't even touch.) On these overpasses, my long island has often been cut off by a sudden canyon--and I am forced to navigate along the shoulder if I want to cross. Sometimes I'll wait for night to do this, and I'll sprint along the edge, dragging my hand on the rail while trying not to peer over the other expanse. But now it is not so dark yet, and I have stopped halfway.

Below, another path stretches out perpendicular to mine. It shares the air as my path, and without doubt, leaves blow back and forth and up and down the gorge. Maybe an acorn rolls over the pass and germinates into a little oak, grows, is cut and pruned sometimes, and its roots tangle with the roots from my trees through the mass of soil which is shared too, pulling at the same rivulets of groundwater running through the common earth like veins. I can imagine a man like me walking the lower way, looking up at the overpass. I squinted into the dusk to see if I could see anyone. Did I imagine a flicker of orange? A fire? At this point in the season, it's just as likely to be bears as anything else. I should move into the trees, I think.


October 4. Another turnaround, but this one apparently in use, or at least sort of. The machine is blue and white, and I was surprised to see it occupied, by a clean man, keeping very still. As close as I was, I could see many neat bumps and buttons and clocks on the inside. The man was faced outward, and he was holding a smaller item, although it was not really that small. He supported it with both of his hands.

It took me a long time to creep up to him, but I never saw him move. I think he was asleep. Or dead. But if that was the case, he couldn't have been there that long. I moved quietly past him anyway, crossing from behind. He could have just as likely been sitting at my turnaround.

It is later now, and I am lounging all the way out near the rail and thinking. The blacktop has become much more crowded and faster than I remember. I have grown comfortable walking just the same. I am getting hungrier faster, which is very inconvenient, but there are also many more containers that I can scrounge.


October 19. Thankfully back with some grass around me, with rocks and squirrels.

I kept walking even after my continent shrunk to a strip only twice as wide as I am tall, with a white divider, waist-high, running right down its center. With my feet on the grass, I could still pretend everything was normally sized, and that wasn't so bad. After a day or so of this, however, my grass walkway squeezed in too, and the barrier spread out slightly, and soon all that was left was a solid raised path that I could walk on. As the world closed in, traffic and signs seemed to come from everywhere, and large structures loomed in the distance. There were light poles stuck into the hard surface, and I counted a hundred of these before I gave up.

Far enough along, there were objects that spanned the macadam, a row of little blocks with people in them. I got just far enough see the last lightpost on my walk, where the path finally gave way to nothing at all. The end of the world as far as I'm concerned. I turned back.

The return was much worse, with the lights glowing above me, and also streaming at me fast from both directions. It made my eyes hurt, and I almost lost balance. I slept for a while leaning against a pole, I don't know for how long, before continuing on. Now I am here again, back in some normal space. It's getting a little cold, but I feel safe, and I am thankful for my deer skins. I miss my old camp, but I am happy that I can read about it.


November 5. I know that the world doesn't end there. Obviously the machines are filled with people, and I know that the surfaces are passable--I have crossed turnarounds and bridges made from the same material, and I have retrieved items sometimes a few steps out. I can read signs, and I can see landscapes like mine on the other side. Nothing stops me, and other than the remote fear of getting broken like a deer, there is nothing to even harm me.

I walked out almost to the center line tonight. That far, and I stood for a second before coming back to the comfort of the brown grass and coarse sand. I am sitting now on that edge, having gone that small distance, which is only a tiny fraction of all I have wandered. Vehicles pass by one after the other, humming, and they sound like the wind. They flood my eyes with yellow beams, they light up my dirty and yellowing notepad for a moment before receding red points in the washed-out aftermath. It is dark, and I am sure that they can not see me.

Blogger's Résumé

Blogging bores you;
Email's choked with spam;
The news depresses you;
And op-eds ain't worth a damn.
Titillation is nsfw-al;
The boards are full of jerks;
Facebook quizzes are awful;
You might as well work.

(with apologies, etc.)

Pierre Menard, author of Keifus Writes!

These days, it takes a true scholar to remember the work of one Pierre Menard (not the frontier politician, the other one). His legacy consists primarily of a few monographs published at the turn of last century, noted for their utter typicality and general existence within the academic circles of his own time, which to the wider world, not noted at all, even in the early 1900s. He did manage to achieve some passing fame, or notoriety perhaps, for generating a few original reproductions of a few paragraphs of Don Quixote, although most records of that have been unfortunately destroyed. I have frequently wondered about Menard the scholar in an abstract sense--I am sure I have referred to him before--and lately have considered that his legacy may be more significant than is commonly believed. Certainly he is no Cide Benengeli, but perhaps his painstaking transferal of cultural idiom went beyond the medieval Spanish that is normally considered his masterpiece.

Undertaking an anachronistic instrument of no small degree of futurity is a task with it's own set of challenges. The author must presuppose not only entirely new media (and the written forms appropriate to those media), but also a complete future history of war, civics, immigration patterns, communication, and all the other things that can inform a work fiction, memoir, criticism or commentary. By contrast, the task is significantly relieved by the fact that Keifus Writes! has little ambition for, and even less evidence of greatness or, even, any particular relevance. For Quixote , Menard called out in his letters as influential but sufficiently removed from his canon so as to allow premeditation. In the case of Keifus, additional difficulties arise in imagining any seriousness at all, divining the literary bona fides as they say, of a work that is so hopelessly amateur. Regarding Keifus' significance, one is tempted to quip about the legendary ingenuity of fools. (Timid and serous by nature, Menard was never known to pursue cliché or cheap humor, which is one point for the continued integrity of this blog, such as it is. But it must be kept in mind that any accurate transcription of Keifus Writes! would include a necessary element of low humor as well.) A prospective author of Keifus may further attempt a larger challenge, and write the blog through an entirely personal set of attitudes and histories, much as Pierre Menard did with the Quixote, which resulted in an impressive (or embarrassingly inaccurate, if you prefer the Beauchamps criticism) supra-textual nuance of the familiar words.

As for me, the first curious behavior was with Blogger's spell-check software. (That Menard might anticipate spell-checking, as well as the neologism-heavy verbiage of an M-list blog sounds impressive, but, I reiterate, nowhere near as impressive as creating an alternative presentimental mindset from which Keifus, and whatever he'd decide to write, including references to spell-checking, would emerge of necessity.) Several weeks ago, the program began identifying errors, but suggesting identical replacements. Now, I will frequently misspell words like "Massachusetts" (it has the opposite rule as all those English words), "receive" (except after c, dammit) and "manufacturible" (I am still not sure this is the correct way, frankly), as well as commit typographical errors with words like "radiation" ("radiaiton") in a maddening fashion that is clearly wrong in a way that is difficult to follow the lazy i (Menard was known to disparage puns as well), but lately, the computer has prompted me to replace the alleged error with the exact same word. And I have complied, every time.

Furthermore, anyone who knows me, or is familiar with "Keifus," realizes that I put a lot of myself into my blog. Not just for the boring anecdotes, or the vicarious naturalism, or the literature of the nerd that I so love. No, it's more: when I, for example, get worked up about the facile analysis of other commenters, it comes from what I see as an awakening of my worldview, that grew to include more situations than my own, while keeping some notions of fairness, pragmatism, and open-mindedness, at least when it's been convenient to. I like to think it's all been tempered by a well-cultivated tradition of distrusting true believers as well as a lot of deep, independent thought and observation, and even if I flatter myself with that interpretation, it doesn't matter. The point is that these observations, pointed and otherwise, the very language I use to describe them in fact, I have always considered to be in a fundamental sense a product of myself. Pierre Menard's upbringing did not include a modern science education that he would view as a vital tool in his personal crusade to entertainingly abuse of metaphors (Menard hated allegory, but by all accounts was entirely indifferent to the art of metaphor), nor did he suffer the scars of being rejected by Amy Johannsen in the seventh grade (a bachelor, he had a lifelong male roommate), and we can say with authority that he never watched Superfriends. When I create a post, it's with these accounts, as well as a thousand others, all deeply implicit, the product of a unique experience that lends Keifus Writes! my own shading, which simply can't be compromised. None of this mystical ghost-writing crap!

But more or less contemporaneously with the mystery of the spell checker, the blog has been going downhill. Or at least so it seems to me. Even I can notice that there have long been a few recurring themes and repetitive language patterns that I have always thought trivial, but perhaps those things make Keifus Writes! more predictable than similar publications. Maybe that's how Menard gets at it. When I type many of the same sort of text as awlways, it has a tendency lately to come out, well, wrong. The meaning of of the words skirls dismayingly away from my fingertips, so that even though the language is the same, all that I read on the screen is intellectual gibberish of the worst grade, with none of the wit or occasional clarity that I have come to associate with Keifus, nor even that had sounded clever as I recited it to myself moments before. Damn you Menard, why do you torture me like this! That's not what I meant to say at all!

Random

1. I figure at 36 years old, I'm finally ready to buy a personal item like a watch all by my own self. Specifically, I want something that has a timer that I can use while swimming (more for bunches of laps than individual laps, because, well, look at me), but also which I can wear with my usual office-casual hobo look, as well as with a shirt and tie, when those circumstances arise. Basically, I want something that doesn't look out of place in the gym or when I'm giving a presentation, and can take a beating in chlorinated water. Unfortunately, almost all of the sports watches I've seen look like something I'd think was really cool when I was in eighth grade. (Look! The date flashes!) Any suggestions for an attractive men's watch that fits the bill? Twif, I know you're a man of high fashion.

2. Vacations and summer fun are over, the Missus is gainfully employed, and we are all getting close to the new version of everyone's miserable normal schedule--it's really been time to get back to those healthy habits that've been so hard to keep alive this last year. And jumping in for the last ten days, I just ain't been right. I've had this awful, listless, tired, outside-myself sensation, less intensity of feeling, slightly anxious where I'm not normally, a shitty night's sleep more often than not. It's most likely some combination of the sudden change in work habits (getting back), diet (better), exercise (more), and schedule (why am I doing all the cooking? how the hell can it be 5 AM already?!), but if I'm being really honest with myself, I can't quite rule this out either. Never worried before.

3. Just so you know: I'm not a fig plucker, nor a fig plucker's son, but I'll pluck the figs till the fig plucker comes.

4. I would have thought I'd drifted much further to the flaming radical end of the political spectrum, but I guess I don't trust any authority enough for that. (I came out strongly non-interventionalist and culturally liberal, so don't ask me how the silly quiz calculates the political vector. Probably the confusion is that I am not very emphatic about many of my opinions, especially when they don't match the offered wording. They should have a "difficult" axis, I'd nail that one.) I'll say that as my fearless leaders continue to drift toward full-on corporate whoredom and a militarized state, who won't spend a dime to actually help people even when the data is in that the programs are effective, and remain basically unresponsive to the various externalities the private owners ain't paying for, then those conditions make me feel like a fucking socialist. Anyway, I don't think this has changed very much at all since last time I took it a couple years ago, which was a surprise.
My Political Views
I am a centrist social libertarian
Left: 0.89, Libertarian: 3.66

Political Spectrum Quiz


5.I looked over some old posts quoting that old quiz (failed to find it, of course). The posts are about 70% of them godawful. And really, next time I feel the need to cough up yet another general statement of my political beliefs, the exact same hairball I apologetically presented six months ago, feel free to just smack me upside the head.

6. This is one of those things that looks like a possible upside to all the senseless killing, but is almost certainly batshit retarded in its own right. Turning the Monsanto corn crop into a global monoculture (the stuff is everywhere!), especially in some of the more bizarre climate zones, sounds like a recipe for worldwide food disaster. Here, it's being established at gunpoint (soldier farmers?), so score another one for the profiteers. What are the words to the Workers' Marseillaise again? (Via, uh, Newshoggers? I can't find the linking article. I suck.)

Why You Shouldn't Become Politically Aware

"Federal court injunctions became one of the standard tools of management...[F]or Taft, the growth of unions was not synonymous with progress, was perhaps antithetical to it...This change [in standard of living near the turn of the century] had been produced by a wondrous growth of industry and commerce, nurtured by a small but energetic government and made possible the freedoms, political and economic, that seemed at the heart of the definition of being American. Interfering with these freedoms or vastly changing the size and role of government might be attractive in some momentary crisis, Taft understood, or might commend itself to believers in some radical theory; but to a man who had seen the system work over time, to tamper with it was the height of folly, and the duty of men like himself was to preserve and strengthen the framework which had made this progress possible."

One of the worst passages in the book, right there on page six. I'll review the thing before very long (to the unfettered delight of all), but the short version is that Michael Barone would have been better off if he didn't try and pepper in these observations as if they were occasional theses. (Here, he's only channeling William Howard Taft, but those interjections are a running theme.) The basic issues with the quote shouldn't be hard to spot: (1) government's emphatic union busting obviously meddled with freedoms (2) standard of living may well have improved (especially by measure of consumption), but industrialization also brought new forms of pollution, workplace hazards, indebtedness, required specialization at the expense of other skills, and it mucked up family life and settlement patterns--it's a mixed bag even now, and in those days, the failures of the system vis a vis personal freedom were pretty stark; (3) interference in worker demonstrations isn't really the action of a "small government," the obvious fact of which isn't much relieved by his use of the word "energetic". A better sense of the passage might come from the phrase, "men like himself."

I suppose I remain a technological optimist. I subscribe to the idea that technological progress does increase the standard of living, and it's exciting for me to imagine the hypothetical limits of what progress can accomplish (and why I'm so pleased with novels like Steel Beach or Player Piano, which seem to get at some truths of it). I'd add that my starry-eyed vision isn't so rapinous as the early technological models, and next-generation solutions, in the unlikely event we are lucky enough to develop them, would require some harmonious development under the constraints of biodiversity, available energy, population, space, and, perhaps even, human spirit. But that's all happy-talk, and a tangent. In the case of industrialization, we have a few important leaps in medical science (that I wouldn't throw away), physical mobility and communications drastically eased (likewise), an immense increase in firepower, and a slew of innovations ultimately became labor-savors, but it took some hundred years for that set of benefits to seep in the direction of the many (thanks in part to the unions Taft mistrusted), and doing more with a bunch of souped-up waldoes hasn't freed us much, and the glorious convenience is overplayed. Since most of the population still has to work to live, the labor saving (and labor trading) has made Americans more than a little frantic. As it is, I don't know how I, with nine years of science education, can possibly afford to get the kids through college, and it's a shame they'll never afford a house, even if they have a relatively cheap tv.

(You can find a good discussion at the site of the incomparable IOZ, here.)

Does economic growth require innovation? I am disinclined to use the word when it comes to new financial, managerial or political developments (the recent unpleasantness looks less like real innovation and more like rediscovering ways to cheat, and I've had too many managers, followed too much politics), but there appears to be a correlation even there, one we wouldn't deny given enough historical perspective. Over on Sadly, No!, D. Aristophanes scored a good point regarding medical innovation: the "delivery of health care to more people at less cost" is a medical innovation. Certainly it improves the standard of living for more people, which, at the end of the day, is the exact same argument for capitalism. Why does the fact that it has such a good chance of being better piss off the alleged capitalists off so much?

You can correctly complain about means, but it's the ends that are a measurement of a system's worth, not that they are so easy to tell apart. Is a fair chance in a given economic framework the same as liberty when the "free market" systematically produces drastic inequality? Of course no market is free: usually, the capitalist political argument tends to ignore the tendency of power to accumulate by economic means, and ignores the reality that an economic/political advantage, once gained, is damnably difficult to dispel. That rising tide has tended to lift some boats a lot higher than others. If the failure to deliver meaningful freedom is intrinsic, then what the hell do we want that system for? I am by no means suggesting going full Commie here either, with an undisputed political/economic mandate as a non-rebuttal to the economic/political one. The point is, what the hell is the difference when the government and the titans of industry intermarry so fully anyway? As someone just trying to get by, unless you're on top of it, you're pretty damn frantic.

The advocate of conservatism considers that hey, the system works for me, sometimes with considerable effort, and it shouldn't be changed. I can be sympathetic with the desire to not give up even that much ground. Libertarians, best I can tell, think that hey, the system works for me because I'm just that fucking great. Thinking in terms of "men like yourself" is one thing when you're young, your future looks bright, and you don't really know anyone outside your social circle, but I'm finding the whole business tiresome these days. (Too much time on the internet. I didn't need to know what my old friends think about stuff.) It would be nice if personal success correlated better with effort and aptitude, maybe a little less egregiously with connections. It'd be nice too, if in this affluent country at least, there was enough embedded security that hitting the bottom didn't knock you right out of the game. In those markets models, the glib ones that have been irritating me anyway, it's generally a matter of assumption that we are working with roughly equal odds in life, but that's not really true. That condition could be considered the ends as much as the means.

Let me know if you figure out how to get to it.

(Update: also this.)

Review: Steel Beach, by John Varley

Okay, let's play a game that writers have been at since forever, centuries before Hugo Gernsback started churning out "scientifiction" and imaginary perfect human environments proliferated in the popular culture. What would the world be like if you could solve humanity's more obvious problems: What if you could defeat death, remove hunger, take away the basis of racial and sexual inequality, and the worst of economic want? What would you have to change to do it, and what would the world be like?

What separates the good from the great at this game (cutting some slack, perhaps, to the earliest utopian authors) is a certain depth of scale, one that maintains a real fidelity to the human spirit. The absence of this can be particularly frustrating, when the author is trying to prove some philosophical point or other that requires characters to forget to be corrupt and foolish (or maybe forget to be wise and generous) when under the influence of some airy Ism or other. Fiction based heavily on the setting can more mundanely fail to imagine its environment very thoroughly, where no conversation fails to allude to the warp core, star drive, or some damn thing. Better authors will employ various tricks to evade these shoddy universalisms, of course, and we've been in the business of imagining idealized places for a while, and some authors these days are quite good indeed. But how perfect an environment could we devious apes really devise?

And that's what I like about John Varley, or at least what I like about his "eight worlds" stories. It's got all the science fiction settings you've seen before--it's a colony on the moon (and a few other bodies), medical science is nearly perfected and computer science is through the roof, cheap energy has been figured out--but I want to convince you it's better. The difference between Steel Beach and a hundred other pieces of space-colony wankery you could name, is just how well thought out it is. Or maybe how strange it's not. This world is built to the level of complexity that a humanity, with all its endless banality, requires (and provides some avenues for new deviations just for fun). Things happen (or fail to happen) for economic or bureaucratic reasons, not based on some eggheads working against the clock, or some pilots aiming their proton torpedos just right. People are ruled by the bread and by the circus and mostly live for fostering their shallow individual desires and idiosyncracies. The serious trappings of life are treated with some appropriate cynicism by those who bother to pay attention. Our hero (or heroine--medical body alteration of all kinds is feasible, and transsexuality is simple, complete, and relatively routine), Hildy* is a reporter, well versed in the differences between what people consume and what matters. She (let's go with "she," accurate for about 2/3 of the book) is a character who loves life, but who also observes life, and after a long run, that dichotomy has been dragging her down from cynicism into real depression.**

There are kludges in this world of course, and the big one is that shit works, but by and large, the technology (at least at the beginning of the novel), while extrapolated to near-perfection, is nothing we wouldn't recognize today. To keep track of the mind-boggling details of it all, a computing system was implemented and has since evolved to the level of ubiquity and benevolent control that a whole society perching on the cusp of the airless void would need to actually function. The central computer is often a character in these stories, and generally a good one, which (since its archicture, purpose, and learning modes were originally engineered by humans) succeeds in being human-like in its thought and manner, while still being computer-like in it's thoroughness, precision, and scope. He's both more complicated and more capable than your typical emotionless robot, convincingly so.

I really enjoyed Hildy's narrative style (and if it's very similar to Sparky Valentine's in the sequel, The Golden Globe, it's entertaining enough to forgive). It's full of wit, exagerration and what seems like an unintentional honesty, the voice of the loveable wiseass. Her observations appear to belie technical and philosophical grounding on the author's part too--unreliable narrators can be used to imply a lot more than they show--and Varley gets tagged as a "hard" science fiction writer sometimes, but what I find much more important, is that the perspective is less about providing the answers than it is naturally rich in observation, and in Hildy's case, observational humor.

And when you get to the thematic meat of the book, the light tone helps. There's a lot going on in the novel (and this is already a long review), but the recurring thing is that Hildy has gone down past jaded. There have been suicide attempts, one obvious complication of a long, safe life. When everything is solved, what do you live for? The idea that we might need risk is thrown around, or some sense of living life with consequences maybe, but the undiscussed truth about Lunar society is that it's a fragile bulwark against an environment perfectly inimical to life, maintained by something complicated enough to go wrong. Which is damned depressing in a different sense. And what happens if the enormous mind running everything starts sizing up the hose against the exhaust pipe as well?

I don't know if this situation can have any satisfying resolution. Varley gives us some good closure at least, appropriate to his imagined setting. [Note: spoilers follow--you may not want to me to kill 450 pages of buildup here.] Hildy comes off (and is) a bit selfish in her fickle will to live, but she makes it through. She learns loss from several angles, and redisovers the preciousness of her own life. The central computer, however doesn't fare as well. It's explicit in some sections, but Varley runs some rather clever parallels with the computer's mood and Hildy's. The computer ("he") is faced with an intimate knowledge of, and, since the population is in no small sense himself, love for humanity, even with all its nasty streaks, much as Hildy goes on about it below. That love is bumping up against his more analytical sense of justice (which so far as the locals is his application of the law, and in the reach of the CC's many governing arms) and duty (which is to keep the species, and himself, alive for the long haul), and he reacts badly to these conflicts. His growing suicidal urge results in negative attention (observed by some, including Hildy), and by injuring himself. And he goes through with the suicide, or lobotomizes himself anyway (at least in a monster-movie fashion***), letting the autonomous functions continue. Ex-Deus Machina as it were, and damn if there wasn't some real pathos in those moments. That broken symmetry of fate betwen the two characters is one literary twist, but there's more: for the computer, death really was the solution, it was a sacrifice for the species, no matter how his mind felt about it all. The absence of his gentle authority gives humans some sense of the survival challenge they're really living, and the collective spark they need to realize it matters. And it may also doom them all.

*Something of a scholar, the character Hildy Johnson named herself from the movie His Girl Friday, which was an ancient movie by then. Looking this up, I was pleased to learn that the character in the movie had undergone a sex change as well, from a man in the original play. Clever reference.

**A quote I particularly enjoyed, in its context, and a little long for up there. I hope the author doesn't mind me excerpting a couple paragraphs:

"And that's the thing really, I can't imagine [killing myself]. You know me; I get depresed. I have been since I was ...oh, forty or fifty. Callie says I was a moody child. I was probably a discontented fetus, lord love us, kicking out at every little thing. I complain. I'm unhappy with the lack of purpose of human life, or with the fact that so far I'le been unable to discover a purpose. I envy the Christians, the Bahais, the Zens and Zoroastirans and Astrologers and Flackites because they have answers they believe in. even if they're the wrong answers, it must be comforting to believe in them. […] I'm generally pissed off at the entirely sorry existential state of affairs of the universe, the human condition, rampant injustice, and unpunished crimes and unrewarded goodness, and the way my mouth feels when I get up in the morning before I brush my teeth. […]"

"[But] by and large, I find life sweet. […] I keep living for the same reasons I think so many of us do. I'm curious about what happens next. What will tomorrow hold? Even if it's much like yesterday, it's still worth finding out. My pleasures may not be as many or as joyous as I'd wish them to be in a perfect world, but I accept that, and it makes the times I do feel happy all the more treasured. Again, just to make sure you understand me ...I like life. Not all the time and not completely, but enough to want to live it. And there's a third reason too. I'm afraid to die. I don't want to die. I suspect that nothing comes after life, and that's too foreign a concept for me to accept. I don't want to experience it. I don't want to go away, to cease. I'm important to me. Who would there be to make unkind, snide comments to myself about everything in life if I wasn't around to tackle the job? Who would appreciate my internal jokes?"

***His complete loss is unlikely. And he shows up in later version of this universe (which has shitty continuity by the author's own admission. Some of the computer's sins were unethical--in his own eyes--experiments to accurately transcribe memories of a conscious being.

Review: Teranesia, by Greg Egan

I read Diaspora by Greg Egan ten years ago, which was filled with the sort of speculative geometry (if you can believe such a thing--from low-dimensional thinking beings to the challenges of navigating a universe with a few extra directions in which to move) that would have been a fine followup Feynman's real-life physics of geometrical transformations. I dug through the shelves and came up with what looked like the next-best thing, another Egan novel that I bought at the same time, but Teranesia, I soon discovered, gets down with speculative biological juju instead of funny math, doesn't really follow the physicist at all. And so I've been forced to change this month's reading theme to "books with insects on the covers." It's not like it's an exact science.

The plot of Teranesia is half discovery, and half family story. We are introduced to a nine-year-old Prabir Suresh as he accompanies his parents and baby sister to live on a remote Indonesian island (to which Prabir has felt compelled to claim some ownership, naming it Teranesia) to research a recently-discovered species of butterfly. Although the family is isolated, their existence is known through contact with the closest inhabited island, and Prabir's (foolish) online correspondences. The local revolutionary politics catches up to them just enough for tragedy, and Prabir spends the middle of the book escaping from the island, from a refugee camp, from idiot relatives, protecting his sister from these environments, and generally cultivating a bounty of shame and guilt. It's a decade later, and also quite late in the book, when his sister decides to return to Teranesia to chase some more recent biological finds, and Prabir chases after her, coming to grips with his own past, as well as rooting out the mysteries his parents were just beginning to uncover.

Egan's scientific ideas are out there (it's fiction!), almost certainly extending past the plausible, but characteristically for this author, they're based on some of the loopier ideas in actual science. In Teranesia, Egan imagines some accelerated evolutionary mechanism at play that goes beyond the slow, generational processes of natural selection. The butterflies and other organisms, Prabir hypothesizes, have somehow begun selectively expressing ancient genes, long buried in their junk DNA, to best adapt to their new (and changing) environment. (Prabir has become a banker, a quant naturally, but has remained remarkably well-read in the normal family trade. In the islands, he latches onto an independent biologist, who, the reader must assume, is doing most of the investigative brain-work.) With a speed of progress that only happens in plot devices, a rogue protein is soon discovered by another research team, which interferes in the transcription process in normal cell reproduction. The going theory by novel's end is that the protein is somehow implicating DNA in quantum computation, sampling eigenstates for an optimum biological reality before wave function collapse. The various scientist characters have the good grace to find this frustrating.

This faster evolution doesn't treat Prabir very well, but he complains often enough about the limits of evolutionary reality that we can call it something of a theme. Prabir is depressed about his mere genetic destiny, and digs up some rationalizations about even the biological utility of a Darwinian conscientious objector, depressing him further. Egan (who is Australian) makes a fair stab at political reality, both in terms of Indonesian politics, the operations of a diffused war, and in Australia's lackluster support for the refugee community. The brief highlight of the Indian Rationalists Association is mildly interesting and doesn't threaten any American sensibilities. By the time the story does get to North America, however, he has made up a gang of liberal (as in "arts") academics that is just irritating. It's not that you can't make fun of the jargon-babbling lit-crit and gender studies crowd, but you need things like humor and accuracy if you're going to pull that sort of thing off. Beating on straw people isn't classy.

And here's the thing: it's hard to write well. I get that Egan's an idea man, a computer scientist before he was a writer, and that's fine, but the failures here are primarily artistic ones. His storytelling aspires to competence, which sets him way ahead of Diaspora (though behind some of his short fiction), and certainly ahead of any hypothetical novel I could churn out, but if all he had here was Prabir's chase scenes and character development, I'd have a hard time finding anything to say about it at all. Whenever I have read this guy, only his scientist characters ever manage to approach a third dimension, and then, only when they're working. His prose and pacing are adequate, but with the occasional abrupt breaks, leaden metaphors, and general awkwardness of an adolescent stylist. As creative writing, it's solidly okay, in other words, and maybe under the circumstances, he could find better villains than people who study the arts. Maybe he should be listening to them.

Review: Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, by Richard P. Feynman

I have, over the years, spent a lot of time on the internet, and the sort of argument styles you find online have started to grate after awhile. Not to say it's surprising, you'll meet ten people a day whose self estimation exceeds their capability, but the digital fields have propagated a certain strain, the self-styled Vulcans or the Slans finally given their opportunity to shine in a purely intellectual medium, and okay, a few of them do shine, even in political arenas, but I'm increasingly convinced that quality thinking is a rare flower even among the Comic Book Guy set, that intelligence and a penchant for declarative sentences may not be sufficient to overcome the various self-deceptions, inappropriate generalizations, faulty logic, bad weighting of counterargument, inability to distinguish hindsight from foresight, and all the rest of the bestiary of cognitive curlicues that obstruct most minds from grasping the nature of things in a broad but generally accurate and consistent sense.* Now and then, a great or even exceptional thinker will emerge, and rarer still will that thinker be able to communicate with accuracy, humor, and humility. Feynman was a gem.

Of course, one of the side effects of reading Feynman is that once that high of uncut understanding wears off, your own brain feels a little muddier afterwards. I think that the audience that evolved to love this guy is primarily composed of scientists looking for deeper meaning into what they already know. (I suppose I could put myself into this group, although without doubt, relativity isn't something I already know in a meaningful way.) These lectures were great at communicating insight, but they're actually lean on facts. I not at all certain that I'd have wanted to learn freshman physics from this guy. I wouldn't have been left with the tools to do the problem sets.

What I didn't realize when I picked this up, is that they're six connected pieces. The progression here, examining the laws of physics through geometrical transformations, holds together cleverly and proceeds naturally to relativity. I further appreciated the discussion of the contemporary setting of Einstein's theories, what he was specifically trying to address with them, and that the Lorentz transformations (which in special relativity, Einstein explained the validity of) had already been thrown out there as fudge factors to explain the discrepancies between predictions of Maxwell's equations (where it falls out as a constant in the simplest EM wave equation) and what's expected by conventional expectations of relative motion, as well as the confusing experiments that were going on when the great man was busy theorizing. The context makes relativity seem a lot less weird, frankly.

I recall reading that one of Einstein's proudest achievments was his index notation for vectors. Basically, he simplified the math symbols so that you don't have to write big brackets, or unit vectors, or summations. It's pretty intuitive and handy, occasionally adopted formally by fluid mechanics nerds (which Einstein dabbled in), and frequently informally by any hack engineer who's tried his** hand at primitive excuses for number crunching. If you ask a mechanics guy and a computer guy, both inclined to use index notation, what's the meaning of a "vector," you'll probably get two different answers, and thinking this way, I'd have rather seen Feynman move down from the general, in which a vector is a column of numbers of arbitrary length, which is merely limited to three when it needs to describe Euclidian space, or, presumably, four when describing Minkowski space. (How dare he present this subject forty years ago!) It's not immediately clear that the innovation couldn't have been constrained to new algebraic operations specified to describe relativistic effects in 4-D space, rather than specifying a new sort of space in which the fourth dimension has separate properties. I will say that the geometrical analyses that Feynman described struck me as very clever. ("Clever." I mean it's Einstein here--this is like a mosquito calling a jetliner sort of large.) I suppose I'd have to do problem sets to get the real scoop on it all (and I've no interest in that).

In one of the lectures, Feynman had a great bit about using measurement as a tool for explaining the universe, and took an entertaining poke at fly-by know-it-alls who'd pretend it's intuitive (he's favoring empiricism over pure rationalism I guess, but he didn't frame it that way). That discussion of how the geometry of space time could be deduced from within the system was the most animated, and, I think the most successful application of his grand insight, and it occurs to me I've seen a dozen explanations along the same lines (usually with graphics of marbles making dimples in a computer-generated 2-D grid) that, unlike Feynman's analogies, were not terribly intelligible at all. I've caught the bug's-eye thing before too and the jumpy speaking style too (I don't usually "hear" when I read, but I could feel Feynman speaking in this one), and it occured to me that many of my professors were among the generation of (inevitably lesser) Feynman copycats.


* Alternate theory: I'm projecting.
** For a possible theory about my use of gendered pronouns, see note 1.

Review: Fragile Things, by Neil Gaiman

I don't completely know what to make of Neil Gaiman. I like his stories, and I appreciate his eye, and certainly he's got sort of a flashlight-under-the-covers charm about most of his efforts, but I keep wondering when he's going to turn out anything that really feels essential. Fragile Things includes some author's commentary, and Gaiman reveals that many of the shorts were written by invitation, on an assigned theme more or less, which is very good and all, but it also feels like they were written to cultivate someone else's idea. Very few of the shorts felt like they really needed to be written, like there was very much internal drive to their creation. (And it's no surprise that the exceptions were very much the better stories.)

Take A Study in Emerald. It's the first story, the one I picked up the anthology for (hi twif), and which won Gaiman a Hugo award. It's a hybrid of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft, written on request for an anthology. Gaiman did spin some gold out of the concept, basically fusing the two universes, putting the Old Ones into the political sphere and letting the people go on with their lives (while they can), and, playing coy with naming some of the characters, packs in some clever twists and revelations (the detective, of course, is not Holmes), but the story lacked a certain potency. What's missing from it is some awareness of the fact that Doyle and Lovecraft do fit naturally together. God knows that the styles are similarly pulpy and overwritten, but more than that, both authors traded heavily in rationalism. Lovecraft's world is unnatural but explainable, and his protagonists are always scientists and skeptics, if particularly histrionic ones and inevitably out of their league. Putting Sherlock Holmes against a Lovecraft horror is an elemental battle, pitting an irresistable force against an unstoppable object, and a brilliant idea with a lot of inherent power in it. That Gaiman told another good story with it was both highly enjoyable and frustrating.

I got a similar head-scratching vibe from Monarch of the Glen, the longest of the collection, and the closer. Actually, the problems bled over from the novel that preceded it (American Gods), namely that I can't make the sense out of it that Gaiman is trying to convey. It's a clever (if not rare) idea of giving life to gods by the will of their believers, but Gaiman has now let them emigrate, taking on some character of new lands along with their people, and, uh, reincarnating themselves or something. Whatever it is that brings them to being is a little inconsistent, as what they are still doing here and what releases them, and there are plenty of curious omissions, which, to be fair, feels less egregious in a novella than it did in the novel (and finding misty natural backwaters on the Scottish coast feels natural enough, and it helps that I don't really know how much he's muffing the cultural history). On the other hand, there's great stuff in it--a fine protagonist in Shadow (and now Mr Boy-Under-the-Mountain has let us see his birth certificate), dangerous villains that are nearly likeable (Gaiman does wonderful villains--Mr Smith has his own short too), and a really great take on the Beowulf myth. There is a love for the old stories that comes through, and in this case, Grendel's mother is outstanding. If only I could make more sense of her context.

The ghost stories were really the best of the bunch (and "Bitter Grounds" about Haitian coffee girls, and "Closing Time" about what might have been a passage were the best of the best). Gaiman is good at finding the places where everyday life meets Spookyville, and finding some beauty and humor in the contact between those worlds. I liked his short-shorts too. There is an art in making a story in just a few paragraphs (and to his credit, Gaiman doesn't overwrite anything), and if the poetry wasn't high art, it was pleasant enough. There was a bomb or two, but what do you want from an anthology, and I was reassured in the notes that the author agreed with me on at least one of them. The Problem of Susan works in the general milieu, but deserves a special mention for just being so unsettling. For anyone who ever loved Narnia: did Susan get a fair break being, basically, damned for being a girl? What kind of God picks favorites and tortures the rest (and never mind the sexism)? As the author notes, it was meant to be as fundamentally unsatisfying as Narnia ultimately was, and it succeeds.

In all, I like Gaiman's brushwork and use of color and shadow, and the composition seems to be almost there. Now when's he going to give us the masterpiece?

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

(Or at least my first one.)

Hey New Englanders, just think: it could have been worse. Last week could have been your long-planned summer vacation. Back on Friday, the predictions of mere afternoon thunderstorms could have been optimistically read to imply the hopes of morning sun, with nothing more unpleasant in store than the usual sort of oppressive humidity that makes the beaches of the east coast seem like a good destination. But as mere threats of showers turned into the reality of a week-long deluge, those hopes sputtered like the incessant sizzle of rain on a gray sidewalk, a not-uncommon view from the front door of our rented cottage, as three sodden generations of eyes stared hopefully for a sufficient break to make one of our doleful processions to the seawall, in which we could descend to the lonely beach in a line, like the bedraggled priests and priestesses of some lugubrious god*.

Hampton Beach in New Hampshire is an attractive little strip of sand across the street from a seedy midway (complete with a selection of junk souvenir shops and inedible food), but it dies out pretty quickly. North of the beach, and past a little settled outcrop, there's a long stretch of concrete barrier behind which lies an expanse of shore that is only beachy at low tide, and, on the other side of the road, summer cottages, where we rented a place with the kids and the parents. The cottages comprise a much nicer neighborhood than the tourist trap, and winding still further north along the shore finds you some lovely state parks and the homes of the really rich. In the North Hampton stretch, where we were, the waves at high tide sometimes crash up over the jersey wall, which is an impressive sight, but they can also strike incautious pedestrians, which isn't so great when you've only brought one sweatshirt. Along the upper reaches of the beach, below the wall, rough-cut granite obelisks have been dumped unceremoniously everywhere, to prevent erosion I imagine, lying at all angles in a bed of rocks, which are weathered like river stones. (So the erosion prevention is temporary--gotta be rough on the concrete.) As the waves retreat, the gravel sounds an immense and satisfying clatter like a blues man riffing on a gigantic washboard. As the tide ebbs, a beach is revealed below this, with firm, dense sand that is great for walking and throwing a football around, which we did infrequently last week. I have no idea what it's like when it's crowded.

It wasn't just rainy, but also cold. On July 1, we went out to a restaurant and asked to sit near the roaring fireplace. The first night, I walked down to the beach with my wife (perhaps thereupon to investigate one of these long romantic walks of which I've heard mention), and nearly went into teeth-chattering convulsions. It feels like the temperature drops about 20 degrees when you go past the wall, and for much of the week, mist picked up from the ocean and blew across the strand in great billowing sheets. It was a great scene, and quite eerie. With only 50 yards of visibility or so, you could look three ways and pretend that you were the only person on earth. (I did actually snap a triptych like that, and intended to post it with some other photos, but that will require my mother solving enough digital mysteries to extract the photos from her camera and email them to me. Might be a while.)

Fortunately, nerds can keep themselves occupied without a lot of fresh air and exercise. The kids had their own loft, which eased the awful space constraints, and we revved up our family jug band once a day or so, playing the same five songs all of us know until we couldn't stand it anymore (or until the booze made us too clumsy). And we broke off into shopping parties, and for a cultured night out or two. What beachgoers there were were almost exclusively surfers, and that might have been an outlet for my wife and me (there was a rental place up the street), but we were intimidated by a distinct lack of thirtysomething pudge threatening the seams of all the wetsuits.

On the Friday we headed out, the weather--it's been about a month of rain here--finally broke into a beautiful, dry, post-card of a summer day. So we stuck around and did beachy things in the still-frigid water, and laid about to dry on the scattered monoliths. About long enough for me to get a fine crop of sunburn on all that virgin expanse of forehead, as it happens. We packed up under threatening thunderheads (and also big rain clouds), and were thrilled to come back to the dull comforts of home, where at least I have enough sweatshirts.

Which I guess is what vacations are for.

*it's been done.

Review: Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

As a rule, I try to avoid harboring prejudices, but sometimes they're difficult to avoid. With an American Colonial history buried deeply in the nooks of one side of family, and an Irish line on the other, I must occasionally fight a reflexive anti-Englishness. Or maybe not a prejudice: better call it a distaste for certain aspects of my own east-coast cultural heritage, which I see as largely a refutation of the gentility of English classism, but which, like a rebellious teenager, never ended up so far away from Mom and Dad as it imagined. Our vaunted revolutionaries trended pretty aristocratic too (albeit Enlightened), even if our landed gentlemen were uncouth sorts, the pre-industrial agrarian society that spread through (the aptly named) New England was an outgrowth of the Old(e) England model. We're still telling our kids English fairy tales and English nursery rhymes, emphatically re-imagining some snug English pastoral spirit every single Christmas. (That the uptight breed invented "twee" is almost reason enough to detest them.) And like the English, we romanticized the lost inner frontiers once we tamed them, even if the brutal pacification of ours was only recent history and the landmass proved a lot bigger. Our nasty Empire is a take on the British model too, complete with state protection of favored lucrative industries, a similar missionary zeal to export our exceptionalism to the brown hordes even as we enrich satraps and butcher the lowly. The British of the early nineteenth century were particularly loathsome to us Yanks, given that 1812 was among the stupidest of wars fought on this soil, although perhaps we can cut them an ounce of slack over the next several years for resisting the Continental imperialists.

Which isn't to say that there are no fine stories to be crafted from this upper-crust milieu--some of the finest are, of course--it's just that any writer who dares present a bunch of gouty windbags (I mean, there's crazy old George the fucking Third ferchrissakes!) unironically congratulating themselves for their Englishness has got a bit of a handicap to overcome. And really, all this is a lengthy apology, because when Susanna Clarke served up a helping of these tobacco-reeking indolent old farts, I loved them from the first sentence. And if Clarke's aristocratic England is mildly romanticized, then it's tempered with an equally understated, but devilish, subversiveness. She is not shy, for example, about presenting servants who are superior in character than their masters, nor for subtly criticizing the absence of women from the circles of self-defining meritocracy. These things are shown, not lectured, and they are in the context of a historical verisimilitude that works at least here, considering she's taken the liberty of exorcising (or, perhaps, dramatically understating in a footnote or two) the differences that the real Christian church had with witchcraft, and to create a history which included magician-kings and in which the roads to Fairie could be mapped, even as the destination remained as inscrutable as in any old country tale.

How does the literary evolution of Faerie go again? Something like from the backyard gods of a woodsy people, to compilations, to Bowdlerized children's versions, to serious rediscovery in various nostalgic forms that have suited any convenient version of the people's lost connection to the world, whether thanks to the Great War or just under the usual thick layer of coal smoke and asphalt. I like faeries this way, as timeless natural spirits, creatures faintly adversarial, untrustworthy but beautiful, inhuman but representative of an ancient ecosystem that includes humanity, of a mysterious but familiar natural universe that people can neither tame nor do without. Clarke navigates this landscape of character pretty well, playing up one supernatural gentleman who has been in a thousand-year groove of wickedness and mystery, but generally working Faerie, into the countryside and into forgotten corners society too, keeping up with the general consensus of modern fantasy writers, without feeling very derivative of anything. Her magicians--the titular characters--are the bridge between the wild magic intrinsic to northern England and to modern society.

Although this conflict underlies everything in the story, it's not developed very explicitly. Much of the conflict is underdeveloped, even while all the elements for it are in place, and should work. There's a prophecy about the two magicians, that while brilliantly conveyed in a character, carries no logic or force. There is the matter of Mr Strange's wife, whose interactions with the faerie occur far too late in the novel, and which, as a plot-moving elements, are strangely attenuated. I've little idea why Strange had to spend so much time in the (largely bloodless, but chalk that up in part to the cultivated English understatement) battlefield, and given the events, it's a bit off to see the likes of Canning and Castlereagh doffing about with such casual pipe-scented aplomb. And I suppose these conflicts are all approximately resolved by the end, but without sufficient tension, there was no particular satisfaction. Pleasant as it is, the book still sagged in the middle, and I don't think it was entirely due to my damn job interfering so much in my reading schedule. The book didn't quite reach the point of being nice to read but easy to put down--I didn't get bored in 800 pages--but it did approach that point.

And the conflict between Strange and Norrell, I should add, was well-executed, and satisfying. Clarke's general strength is character, and both the men are pretty great ones. Norrell particularly: here's a timid little bookish bore of a man, completely unsuited to society, politics, or generosity. If anything else, the novel is an entertaining portrait of how it turns this unlikely little fellow, nothing worse than a packrat of knowledge really, into an influential tyrant, scooping up information from the reach of his betters and leaving the world to swallow his own viewpoint, so tediously expressed that no one can make it past the first couple of sentences. That Clarke could conceive that he and the ambitious, carefree Strange should find intellectual communion is a quality bit of writing, but in truth, every character is improved in the vicinity of Norrell. He's such a font of negative interest (and her best trick is showing him charmingly in spite of this), that his servants, collaborators, sycophants, must be that much more compelling to overcome his utter boringness.

So, call it good writing, and pleasant telling, and with only just enough plot to keep it from being merely atmospheric. I recommend reading it by a roaring coal fire, snug from the rainy February chill, with, of course, tea.

From the Annals of Erotic Fruit...

I know it's a big internet, but I wonder: is there yet a blog devoted to suggestively-shaped produce? Because if not, then I want to lay claim to the idea. It could finally be the do-nothing path to personal wealth that I've longed for since that first summer job.

[Editor's note: This picture just got less tasteful the more I looked at it. Eventually, I started thinking of the children... --KH]

Strangely, no one was interested in seeing my scrotum-berry yesterday. Or at least no one was interested until I explained it a little further (after which, no one was interested for different reasons).

And speaking of dangling modifiers (and where the hell is switters anyway?), before I went to bed last night, I caught the first few minutes of a Food Network show called, "The Best Thing I Ever Ate ....Totally Fried!" Um, yeah, I'm sure I don't remember.

[book review in a day or two]

[...or three or four. Busy week, and I'm preparing for a remarkably un-busy week off, which may include reviewing books, so long as it doesn't happen to feel like work. Both upcoming selections are twiffer-approved, by the way.]

The Beats of Different Drummers

More proclamations from the Royal Wii.


There are various versions of the story about how the musical odyssey began at Chateau Keifus. Was it the failed attempt at violin lessons? The short-scale mandolin that Dad managed to foist off on us one day? C.'s kiddie music class? All of these things certainly happened six or seven years ago as parts of a sort of uneven group awakening, one of those creeping gestalt dealies after which we began to see ourselves as a musical family for some reason (and without much evidence). All of the variations are about equally true if we're looking to plot out the beginning of a chapter in the family saga, and with that in mind, I've got to go with the drum set as the beginning of it all.

I know that I've told this story before (to hipparchia if I recall), buried down some thread or other. My wife had been interested in playing drums for years, and so on her birthday--or maybe it was Mother's Day, or Valentine's, but you get the idea--and lacking funds to purchase a drum kit outright (and, I admit, anticipating certain outcomes enough to be cautious about a big investment), I rented out an unladen snare and purchased an instructional video for my sweetheart. Naturally enough, the video recommended a more complete arrangement, with at least a high-hat and a bass drum to occupy the other hand and the feet, and better to work on the basic backbeat pattern that will get you farthest when trying to fake American music. A couple of toms and a crash cymbal are also obviously necessary because they sound cool. A careful observer may note that my initial cash outlay contained none of these things, and rather than hurry back to the music shop, I instead thought it more romantic to cobble together various approximations of these devices. In the photo, the multipurpose cymbal is a trash can lid, painstakingly and lovingly mounted, and you bet that random plastic vessels made fine toms. I regret that my foot pedal, which never did leave the base of the trash can (because where else would the sound come from?), doesn't show up in the picture as well. It had already been removed with extreme prejudice, I guess. The experiment didn't work as a musical instrument, but all in all, I feel it was funny enough to make it worth it.

Playing pretend music better suits our talent level anyway. Fast-forwarding half a decade to my daughter's birthday, we had more disposable income than in the single-drum times (and wisely, we didn't rely exclusively on my personal version of thoughtfulness), and sprang for Rock Band 2, complete with USB mike, plastic Stratocaster, and, of course, drum pads. (We have also a tambourine, a real one, so that whoever's stuck fourth, can at least be a backup singer or just keep time.) My little angel--yes, that same thoughtful wee poet you may have met a few days ago--enjoys certain mildly inappropriate tunes (guilty!) and we'd been eyeing the game as a potential family outlet for awhile now. It took the timely coincidence of her duodecannual and the release of the AC/DC trackpack with her to put us all over the edge. [And it's another thing entirely to sing along with the printed karaoke, isn't it? MTV games (surely a bad sign) mutes the curses ("you can say 'poop' if you want to, dear"), but there's metric tons of suggestion in there, which is a lot more unnerving than a "shit" or two. I'm hardly sure I'm doing the right thing here, but I'm thinking it's a safe place to explore somewhat controversial ideas, and at twelve, you're starting to learn that your traitor body is discovering suggestions all its own, like a walking innuendo. Moreover, if the thought does take her to rebel, here's the stuff she'll be rejecting. The eight-year-old, meanwhile, remains happily clueless.] If you were thinking about purchasing the game, be aware that this post officially makes it not cool anymore.

Rock Band is immensely fun. It's as if that air guitar you carried around since you were twelve somehow acquired a kickass amp connected, and without actually learning how to do very much, you can sound like you've spent countless hours in your bedroom learning the basics and mastering every famous riff. Playing together as a group, you do get some sensation of feedback, or, if someone isn't keeping up their part, of collective failure. (And when the tambourine is off time, we really hear it.) We were all doing our living room rock moves before very long--it just felt natural. After the first week, we'd all stayed up past our bedtimes every single night, unlocking half the tour, and we shambled around during the day like zombies, night creatures out of our element, nursing the wounds we suffered in the name of our imitation art. Junior lost her voice for a while. My wife's shoulder and kick-pedal leg got sore. My damn finger went numb--the counterfeit guitar doesn't have nicely sanded and careworn surfaces a real one does, and the injection-molded neck evidently has been digging into the base of my fragile pointer, but the show must go on. It was fun to make rocker versions of ourselves too, to which the game gives the characters convincing band mannerisms, and the video bits synch up impressively with the music. I'm pretty sure I've caught the Keifus avatar lusting after the cartoon drummer.

My conclusion about drumming back then, incidentally, was that's it's fucking hard. Too many body parts acting completely independently--walking and chewing gum, but also waving, and being sure to count the cracks. It takes a certain type, I think. Out of all the ersatz equipment, Rock Band only pretends that the drum pads are anything approaching a real instrument, and there's a drum jam tool buried in there somewhere--might even work with old training DVD. I guess they have a sufficient number of things to hit at the appropriate moments, representing all of a basic kit. As for the guitar, it only has one "string," and since the fret buttons are only loosely associated with the notes the recorded guitarist is playing, there's no knowledge of music that will help you very much, and if your hand is in the wrong position there's no immediate feedback (wrong note), even if it's obvious you're doing something that's not right (no sound at all). On the easier settings the sham guitar is pretty pointless beyond informing you a little of the fundamental shape of a song. On the harder settings (or at least on the harder settings on the easier songs), you fret most of the notes that are played, and if you're willing to suspend disbelief, you can almost convince yourself that those great sounds are coming from you. Which rules.

My imaginary music playing is cutting into my actual music playing time. (And much as I love the thing, a mandolin doesn't substitute a good electric guitar. It's like when you just want a good burger, already.) When I get my reduced time on the little mando, I surprise myself to find that I'm not any worse for the lack of practice. Even if my pretend guitar playing is meaningless pitch-wise, it does force me to keep a good rhythm, which hasn't ever been my strong point, which is something of a problem when you're playing a rhythm instrument. As for the quasi-fretted notes, I have the same issues, actually. Poor accuracy, and there's a speed threshold I can't generally surpass. I have never been able to gradually ramp it up to sneak my way into a faster tempo. At some bpm, my fingers just go from "adept" to "flail."

Since C. is summoning me to play, I need to wrap this up, and indeed, here's where I originally intended to end it, but I learned this morning that they have published an expansion pack of a certain Canadian progressive rock trio (shut up! that's why!). Which is badass. I figure I have to do better at it than these guys:

Health Care - Fight Night

"Iiiin the Red corner, it's the man with the private plan, the carefully coiffured caregiver to the Commonwealth, the mighty Mormon middleweight, Miiiiiiiitttttt Romneeeey!"

[lights flash, random crowd noise, incoherent thunder from the gigantic woofers]

"And in the Blue corner, weighing in at 50 billion bucks, she's the heroine of human services, the diva of discretionary spending, the hyena of the budget subpeona, Czarina Kathaleeena Sebeeeeeeeelius!"

[thunder ramps up, crowd cheers.]

"Let's get ready to rrrrrruuuuuuuummmmmble!"

[brass noises increase in volume and crowd cheers "charge," then hushes.]

"It's an epic fight, wouldn't you say, Chris? Kathy's got the Democratic health care plan, and Mitt, well, he used to legislate this stuff."

"That's right Bob, and she's armed with secret documents. Look at her dance around those voters."

"Free Market Mitt looks a little dragged down out there. I thought he'd been training."

"Well, his platform has taken a few blows, and he's been trying to change his style too much. He doesn't want competition, but he still wants to advocate competition."

"He's going for the mental battle then. A chess master!"

"That's right Bob, if people could afford a government plan, they might actually buy it, and where would that leave his trainers?"

"His plan is to keep private coverage from getting better? A bold move! No wonder they called him... Er, what did they call him in Massachusetts, Chris? Wow, look at that feint!"

[oohs from the crowd.]

"Not even close to her, but she flinched. A Trojan horse! Whoa, pony!"

"Look! Sebelius is back on him. She wants competition. Her boss wants competition. U! S! A!"

"Mitt says there's enough competition!"

"You ever had a choice in yours, Bob?"

"They're going to have to make the plan awfully useless to keep consumers from defecting to it, Chris. The industry doesn't want her throwing any haymakers either. No hitting below the money belt.

"We don't make the rules."

"My God, Mitt might strike a blow! Unbelievable!"

"He hasn't been near a voter in five years, Bob."

"Look, Chris! The employers could defect. They could drop their workers and wash their hands of the whole thing, whatever service they all end up with."

"No wonder Kathy's dodging!"

"You hear that? She said that dismantling private coverage would discourage more employers from coming into the market place."

"Brilliant diversion!"

"It looks like a bad play to me, Chris. What good does insurance do for employers? It just makes hiring people more expensive."

"You're not thinkging about insurance employers"

"Masters. Chess. Masters."

[crowd oohs]

"It sounds rough down there. What's going on?"

[oohs turn to boos]

"It's a heckler! How'd she get in here? Hey Al, think we can get a feed down there?"

[various thumps, screech of feedback]

"...bzzt...ingle pay...crkrk...alf the costs!...sqwawjkivilized world...brrrr...anada and Fr[bleep!]"

"My God, get her out of there!"

"For the folks watching at home, we are aware this is a family-friendly fight, and we run a small time delay to keep it in FCC code."

"Any response from the fighters?"

[dingdingdingding]

"It looks like that's the round. Mitt's wandering back to his corner, maybe one of those other guys will replace him."

"Well, they all have a copy of something in their hands, and they're wearing the same suit.

"It looks like Kathy might have said something to the heckler, but no one seems able to make any sense out of it."

"The crowd's still booing."

"Neither of them look very damaged, Chris, or even particularly interested. Will this fight ever end?"

"It'll go to decision, Bob."

"Right, and hopefully by then, the audience will forget about it."

"Stay healthy, everyone. Stay employed."

"Good night, America"

Five More Thoughts: Relativism Ed.

rel•a•tiv•ism (rěl'ə-tĭ-vĭz'əm)
n. Philosophy
A theory, especially in ethics or aesthetics, that conceptions of truth and moral values are not absolute but are relative to the persons or groups holding them.

It's as good a starting place as any. In my usual halfbaked way, and egged on a little by two of my favorite readers (which, relatively speaking, is quite a high fraction of them), I was intrigued to write a little point/counterpoint from the scary edges of moral relativism. My divinity, like the man said, is caught between the colors of a butterfly.* The second two thoughts are add-ons, uninspired observations about the tedious and narrow relativism that one needs to employ in order to take American politics seriously. And even the number five can be relative, of course.

A relatively weak theme, to be sure, but hey, what else is new?

1. And it doesn't mean a goddamn thing
It's hard to deny that despite our efforts to describe the experience of being, our thoughts and actions are merely products of the underlying physics, be they deterministic or probabilistic. Consciousness, whatever it feels like, whether or not it can be predicted, and, paradoxically, whether or not the basic phenomena are knowable enough for us to use them to sufficiently describe ourselves, nonetheless has to be the result of these processes. Thinking meat is weird stuff to be sure, but those choices and rationalizations it makes are manifestations of fundamental physical processes, the elaborate details of some long-term and ridiculously complicated path the universe takes down another cosmic entropy sink.

Not that anyone wants to fall down that rabbit hole. My goal here is more empathy, and the point is, no matter how satisfying it can be to undercut a moral argument, you can always go down one further, and really, what fun is that?

So we wretched Adams make our indispensible approximations, practice moral relativism on some scale or other. From my point of view, philosophy, in its broadest sense, is the art of exploring the consistency of ideas in light of some common assumptions necessary to keep ourselves sane: math works, free will exists, that sort of thing.

But at the bottom line, those assumptions are just good guesses. If we're into ethics, then they're practically arbitrary. Even considering that moral development is based on optimizing things like individual and group happiness, food supply, and genetic propagation, at heart our moral stance is whatever we choose to believe it is. It's like faith that way: true because we choose it to be true. And it leaves a lot of room for elective ethical frameworks. We can believe that our urge for compassion and that the organization of nature is a divine order, and it may as well be. Or else we like to believe that equality is a righteous humanist impulse, and so it is.

The practicing political ethos makes a lot more sense when you think about it that way. Why not go ahead and build your ethical system on the party platform? Why not acknowledge exceptionalism as the primary motivator of the populace, as most other societies have, in fact, admitted, right along with the corollary that other groups are naturally inferior. Why not lust for the glory of battle, get a little warrior worship going, accept violent death as the preferred end to inevitable suffering? I'd tell you that I don't accept that morality, and I really don't. I'd tell you that one of the offensive things about the American way of doing things is that we pretend one moral pose and practice another. I'd tell you that a good philosophical framework is consistent with observation and doesn't contradict itself. But calling inconsistency a vice is arbitrary too.

2. And if pigs can fly, then surely so can I
[And I type the first draft of this here on the plane. Is there any vehicle to which the human element is so obviously secondary? It's like sitting in a torpedo which has ludicrously lobbed itself into the air, using 90% of its mass to temporarily and futilely defy gravity. Inside the tube, people are lined up and watered like cattle in a barn, lonely together for the miles of thin, dark air that separates this slim silver dart from any other object. The earth itself is invisible under clouds we can't look down to see. There is solidarity here, unspoken and ignored, but should anything happen, in the exceedingly unlikely event it would be given an opportunity to play out, it's understood that we make up some core of a human civilization, with thoughts, prejudices, relationships all nascent and unexplored. Somehow it's understood that everything human can be represented in or developed from this small population, or in any of the other small isolated populations that are currently racing through the sky. Some passengers will share pieces of themselves to pass the time. We bump elbows and knees and look uncomfortably at our neighbors, reduced to the sweaty, tired, undisguised essence of our human selves. There is a thump, the nose of the plane tips forward. Was it supposed to do that? The lights flicker. Je--]

3. Like a bullet, as a friend
It's often said that there's no difference between the American parties, and it's not that they don't they stand for slightly different things, but there is surely a political society that has never evolved far from its expansionist, patrician roots, and it takes in most of the government.

I seem to have inherited an annoying habit of overusing words like "the state" and "the system" when I make political arguments, but there is some sort of continuous bureaucratic entity that appears to operate with its own arbitrarily defined, but predictable, ethical framework, reflected even in the few operatives who were sincere in their stated desire to change it. Maybe the better word for that thing is "the company," which makes our leaders quintissential company men and women.

The description seems to fit. In the company, the customer is always right, but the goal is really to make a buck off him, and the marketing to that effect is intense. Everybody works hard, and if they succeed or not, whether or not they agree with the corporate aims, the employees, owners, and bondholders are deeply invested in its persistence.

Perhaps Obama really did crave sunshine in government when he campaigned, but on issues like state spying, executive authority, and government-sponsored torture, he's been drawing the blinds as hurriedly as the last guy (and certainly as quickly as well-documented douchebags like Sens. Lieberman and Graham). The idea that this will inflame our enemies and threaten our soldiers is the starkest bullshit, of course. It's really just maintaining company policy.

No corporation fears ennobling the competition. The competition already resents your market position, and will resort to whatever means to take it that it is willing to risk executing. And we get that there's a marketing campaign for our competitors lurking in the bad press, but surely, they are already daring enough. What we've actually done to them, they already know with deadly certainty. The real fear here is that the torture photos would lose America customers. It's us that Obama doesn't want viewing the things. For the good of the company.

4. Add it up, extract a lesson
And see, that's why I find political writing so damn tiresome most of the time. Whether you side with the stockholders or bondholders, it's still, if you want to talk about your relativism, rah-rah for the company.

We read it because we're angry, and because we care, but political writing is a marketing entity all to itself. If you want to call that sort of analysis a literary genre, and you can, then partisan opinion writing is fucking fanfic. But still, a good writer can transcend his fiction aisle (the bar may, in fact, be higher for talented genre authors), and on the political blogging scene, there are precious few that can get away with hard partisanship. As always, it helps to write well, be aware of larger dynamics than some silly Republican/Democrat debate, and I'll tell you, well-delivered humor never, ever hurts. (Since the Republican party has had thirty years to write its own straight lines, it's no surprise that the list over there is a more than a little left-leaning.)

Anyway, the gang at The Poor Man Institute is one of the few who get away with using words like "wingnut," challenging the genre establishment a little bit. Good humorists, good general understanding, and an occasional engineer's sensibility that takes pleasure in mocking the likes of Gregg Easterbrook. I like them. So maybe you can understand why I found this a little disappointing:

Half the time Obama considers himself kind of lucky to be following George W. Bush’s opening act: it was such a profoundly colossal disaster of an administration on so many levels that all Obama has to do is not wreck the economy, start a catastrophic war of choice on false pretenses, let a treasured American city drown AND try to gut social security all at once and he should coast to re-election by landslide.

I mean curv3ball's point is fairly cynical in that sure, anyone would look peachy following that act. But even there, we're talking, what? Two out of four? And that's before the start of hurricane season.

5. Can that be all there is?
Well, it's all for today.




*here (and borrowing liberally throughout)

Better Poetry Than Mine

I'll have a normal post up soon (tomorrow, or Monday at the outside). In the meantime, I want to take advantage of this verbal lull to turn the spotlight to one of the coolest girls I know. These are some of her poems, which, as something of an incentive, I offered to show off on her Daddy's blog if they made the grade. They are from a book ("No Listening Allowed") that she recently dedicated to her great-grandmother, and before we drop it in the mail, I am upholding my end of the bargain. She's got more voice than I had at that age (and she's not doing so bad against the old man right now...), a bit of a naturalist evidently, and fond of naked word associations. Her silly streak makes me proud. Enjoy.

(untitled)
Gentle butterflies in my stomach
Waiting, watching, listening
I plea, "Robins sing your first chirp
Sun RISE!"
First day of spring right around
the
corner.

Walrus (Cinquain)
Walrus
Fat, majestic
Swimming, spitting, maneuvering
Mounds of blubber
Upside-down beast

I am Earth
You know me for the eldest land you worship.
My mother is earthquakes.
My father is volcanic eruptions.
I was born in a meteor shower.
I live in the cracks of every rock.
My best friend is the Moon
Because she keeps the world balanced.
We like to frolic in circles.
My enemy is Mars
Because he throws meteors at me.
I fear losing Moon
Because of constant climate changes.
I love the flowers
Because they hide the rocks under the luscious scent.
I dream to go green.

Summer Day (Diamante)
Summer day
Sunny, bright
Sweating, blistering, showering
Sunburns, flip flops, stars, crescents
Soothing sleeping, comforting
Chilly, fresh
Winter night.

5 Ws Poem (included at her request)
Zoot
Eats bugs
On the floor
On Saturdays
Because it's extra yummy that day.