Confidence Racket

No matter how complex the story, however brilliant the invention or well-played the situational ethics, every confidence scam always comes down to that same perpetual nut to crack, the razor-thin line between a fool and his money, that transitional point where on one side there's a fistful of cash in my hands, and on the other side, in someone else's. Up to that critical point, the act must go on to its tension-filled climax, the con artist has to keep a straight face to that last second, maximize the urgency, the sincerity, thank-you-thank-you-good-sir-what-a-blessing-mom-can-have-that-operation-now, a-a-a-a-and now it's his. Sucker. If there's no more to gain, the grifter can turn around and run here. If he's stumbled on a particularly lucrative mark, he'll walk away calmly, smiling, keeping up his oscar performance in the hopes of repeat business. It's what separates the con men from the con boys, I suppose.

The art of acting and invention that's esssential to the con is what keeps a warm place in our hearts for those criminals. Or at least for the movie versions--I don't imagine those bastards stalking the internet from their Nigerian redouts to be such a bunch of lovable scamps. I advocate a healthy suspicioun for anyone trying to sell you anything, but if it gets confusing, you can always try to evaluate a transaction by looking at the process flow sheet. A nasty scam will show money input from me, and nothing tangible coming back out to me. A better one will promise some sort of return, but it might be out of whack, and highly conditional on my good feelings. At some point in the scamminess continuum, the line is eventually crossed into legitimate business, where the returns are based on telling enough of the truth: real products are exchanged, or investments are based on actuarial data, or on roughly sound economics. In the real world, we don't usually get to evaluate a single enormous transaction with this yardstick, but still, it can be useful to draw a big box around the system of them and look at the ins and outs for groups of parties, which will be true regardless of the insane things churning around inside.

Look, I don't know what to make of the bailout, and maybe the blogosphere doesn't need yet another half-informed voice. There's an asset bubble under there that even I can see, and letting it get bigger, still, more, just can't be wise. It seems like reducing liquidity, at least in terms of real estate and consumer spending, is a necessary condition of healing the basic long-term problem of this nation consuming more than it produces. Less borrowing is ultimately the cure, in other words.

On the other hand, the idea of credit screeching to a halt is a deadly serious one, if it happens. I wish I could convince myself it's just a reductio ad absurdum argument, but who can tell when everybody is panicking, the LIBOR is shooting up, and smarter people than me are scared shitless? (I just read a post about how farmers typically use credit to pay for harvesting their crops. Good god.)

So I can see taking action to the extent it's necessary to keep that functioning-credit part of the system alive. I may even be convinced that a patch that keeps the existing crazy system capitalized is a good idea, provided steps are taken to assure those new funds aren't also over-leveraged and the thing blown up further. (I guess I haven't sunk to an IOZ-ian desire to watch the thing disintigrate just yet. Dissolution has as big a problem with the "how" as does, what the hell, any other ethos.) Paulson, if I understand it correctly, wants to assure this short-term credit flows by injecting money into the system to lend, assuming it's a crisis of Depression-era proportions (and not everyone agrees with that), by buying the suddenly-obvious bad loan obligations. The counterproposal that just failed in the House did so much as to dangle a little oversight and a hint of justice onto the basic package. Two alternate ideas I've seen (of many) are: (1) the Federal Reserve temporarily takes over the operations of the banks, to preserve the system of payments (which allegedly will eliminate freezing of credit by panic); (2) capital is supplied to banks by taxpayers purchasing ownership shares of the banks (rather than their shitty debt obligations). There have been a few more, probably more than a few, but I don't remember them. None are happy fixes. One supposes we taxpayers might even be better served if we offered to buy up the threatened properties themselves (at a price referenced to historic baseline growth) and hold them against inevitable population growth. As it is, under the conditions of urgency, given the history our administration has had with threats and promises, my con-job reflexes have been twitching like mad. I keep looking for the point where the money's changing hands, and to whom. Seven hundred billion is an investment in confidence, right?

Review of Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Here's an interesting scrap of personal trivia to throw to my multitudes of adoring fans: I'm pretty sure that Watchmen counts as my first voluntary book review. Back in the eighties, I got into comics for about as long as my best friend could afford to buy bales of them every month, which amounted to a span of a couple years in high school. When I was sixteen years old, he sent Watchmen along with me on a three-week trip to Spain, and I read it, and commented. I spent some time yesterday looking for what I wrote, but it wasn't in that diary, and so I think it must have gone into a letter sent back to old R.D.. The gist of my back-then review was that Watchmen really put the "graphic" in graphic novel, and even though years of desensitization still hasn't quite managed to erase that impression, I must have also missed a lot of the depth then. (I wasn't a very mature teenager, you see, not any more than I am a very mature thirtysomething, but at least I now have the ravages of youth safely behind me.) I caught the movie trailer recently, and damned if one of the images presented wasn't a beautifully rendered copy of one of the frames in the comic that I barely remembered. Was my memory accurate? (This time it was.) Does my impression stand? (Yes and no.) Should I go out and watch the flick? (Maybe.)

Watchmen, if I understand correctly, was intended to make the most of the medium, to show off the sort of story that a graphic novel is uniquely suited to tell. It pretty clearly borrowed techniques from film, especially this business of transitioning between scenes using a constant image, or at times splicing twin sequences together, switching back and forth between analogous settings while keeping the narrative constant. Moore (writer) and Gibbons (artist) mix these effects smoothly in print, and if the cinemtographers follow the existing storyboards, those borrowed tricks are going to look pretty classy back on the screen. The panoramic shots, and Gibbons could have added even more of these, will translate well, and the camera will also love the too-much violence and the sex. Often, Moore uses a textual trick similar that's similar to the visual one, and maps dialogue or action on top of exposition and prose, letting the two synchronous narratives unconsciously inform one another. This is a thing indiginous to the comic medium, which naturally puts text in boxes as commentary, and I'm impressed with the degree it was pulled off here. There are some parts where it has to be text. The elements of the story written in short graffiti and newspaper headlines can get their way on screen I guess, and Rorschach's journal entries (set against silent action) can be voiced over, but there are a few places, those involving the Tales of the Black Freighter (a text story spliced into the comic) and Doctor Manhattan's soliloquy on his perception of time (wherein he experiences all the moments of his life at once) that are going to get murdered, which is too bad.

He borrowed from pure text media too, but the prose sections, mostly spaced in between the chapters, although informative, tended to be a chore to read. The interludes are creatively formatted to support the recent narrative, and the less formal versions bordered on entertaining, but he veered purple at the drop of a hat. That his fictional comic book writer could go on to become an accomplished novelist defied belief. The dialog is unremarkable, but adequate (at least if you're comfortable with the genre's liberal use of bold and italics in the speech balloons).

Gibbons' art is decently done, and it's well laid out. I didn't much like the way that the thing was inked though: too damn many purples and oranges, filled too solidly into too large areas. And it might be a matter of technology is all--I'm used to the three-color newsprint format from my couple years of fandom--the one with all the dots--and I think that cheap texture actually allowed greater depth to show up in the coloring than this solid magazine style. The contrast of the printing techniques is made clear within the story. Black Freighter is a comic within the comic, and it's colored in that old newsprint style, and (if you ignore the subject matter) is easier on the eyes. Even when I used read these things regularly, I was always more impressed with the great pencil-and-ink work, and preferred the few books that left it black and white--the color always seems to cheapen the art underneath.

Of course Watchmen tackles the other thing that's only ever been done well in comics, the obvious one: men in masks and spandex that fight crime. There's been a spate of superhero "realism" done this decade, but here is the only case I've found that adequately addresses the underlying question of, even in a alternate world where circumstances better favored vigilante justice, what kind of nutbar would try to intimidate people with guns while dressed up in a Halloween costume. 90% of the heros in Watchmen are perfectly normal people dressed in tights...looking like world-class dorks and sporting cheesy nicknames. There are a range of motivations for the goofy vigilantism: altruism, publicity, lawlessness, government mandate, god complex, but all of these characters have the deluded/perverted/naive streak that's necessary to dress like a clown for a fight. And no one keeps up with it forever: if they're sufficiently warped (and actually effective), then their internal demons grow to maturity; if they're more decent sorts, they quit and get on with their lives like normal people.

There's a large cast of characters, and they're generally well done. Only one is really super, almost unlimitedly so, and he has been transformed so thoroughly beyond humanity that he gradually loses his connection to life, even while the (un)balance of world power centers around his existence. The alternate world of 1985, with energy independence but the looming threat of nuclear war, is thoroughly developed and convincing, and enough bit characters are filtered in and out to make you believe there's a context for all of this. Dr. Manhattan's atomic creation is the big pseudo-science mulligan that you can allow in something like this, and I consider it bad form to pull out another pair of silly tricks (cloning and ESP) at 11:58 to support the conclusion.

The plot that gets us there moves around Rorschach (and here's the exception to the superhero look: a great costume, a mask that's like a disturbing pshche test mood ring) who's investigating what looks to be the serial murder of former costumed crime fighters. He's a great character--a right-wing animal, simple but crafty, violent, difficult, unlovable, inflexible--and the authors get you to sympathize with him, deeply so by the end. All of these heroes are on the creepy side of moral purity, and Rorschach's investigation leads to the most capable of the normals, polymath genius Ozymandias, the man who's convinced himself that the world needs to be remade by his design and may be uniquely talented to pull it off. They're monsters, all of them, compromising lives for their version of the greater good. The wrong people win here--even though they believe otherwise, even though it's outwardly presented otherwise--and if their victory looks appealing on the face of it, the purpose of the whole graphic novel is to wrap it in ten clever layers of ambiguity. It's the story's biggest success.

Buy my virginity!

Hi, I'm Keifus and I'm a virgin. No, really! I am completely unaware of any internet traditions. But given the hard economic times of today, I think my virginity is a small price to pay for getting a chance in life. I'm willing to go on line for highest bidder.

You may wonder why I'm willing to do such a thing--isn't virginity a sacred trust? will I give it up to just anyone?--but I can assure you that I have thought this through carefully, and I'm sure that I've come to the correct decision, with all of the legally verifiable consent. (It's kind of embarrassing that I had to take lie detector tests and had to prove that my student accounts were idle for all those years, but you can find all that boring stuff in the documentation below.) I had planned to save going online until I got my first real job, where I would waste time in a cubicle surfing the net just like everyone else, but in this day and age, with the peer pressure and all the marketing on tv, it's really difficult to wait that long. I am taking my decision very seriously. I plan to use the money to pay for a communications degree and eventually become a middle manager somewhere.

I've heard all about it from my friends. You may wonder if I'm only "technically" a virgin, "how far did he really go?" you may ask, and the most I ever did was receive a text message from my best friend one time, and even though it was really tempting, but I didn't open it. You can read about that in the legal documentation as well, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't even count as rounding first base.

You may wonder how it is you are reading this, too. Well, my sister is a total blog-whore (whatever that means!), and she is helping me out by posting this online for me. When you reply to this message, it will go through her manager. I don't understand how the bidding process works, but they tell me I'm getting a fair percentage, and I totally trust them. They're awesome.

You may wonder what's in it for you. I am really anxious to learn about the internet, but I'm not nervous, and I'm not shy! I am sure that once you deflower me, I could perform like an experienced user, and you'd be the first to show me how. I have a lot of really attractive qualifications:

• I have at least five really close friends. I am totally concerned about their luck, and even though I don't email them (yet), I know that I'd share all the coolest deals and vital alerts with them if I did. What else are friends for?
  
• I also looove kittens and funny pictures. Does the internet have those things? I'd email my minimum of five friends those too! And you know what would be even better? If babies could dance. Oh man, I wish I could see something like that.
  
• I have always been interested in investment opportunities in Africa. And meeting royalty? Oh wow, how cool is that?!
  
• Oh what are the odds I could have won the lottery, but no one ever told me? I'd pay anything to find out.
  
• I have my credit card numbers and social security number all memorized. My sister says I might need them, and I'm sure that anybody who's smart enough to meet the standards of operating online is totally reputable.
  
• I think solitaire is pretty fun, but those cards are so annoying! I wish there was an easier way.
  
• Even though I'm not shy, I do have an occasional problem with my, um, "penal colony", if you know what I mean. I'd buy anything--anything!--to ensure that I could make her love me for hours.
  
• I am very concerned about my credit rating, the balance on my bank account, the status of my credit cards, and how to invest my money. I wish there was a way to get my credit report without paying any money! If there was someone that could help me keep track of all that stuff.
  
• I like to think of myself as a conflict solver. There's nothing I like more than getting in the middle of an argument and listening patiently to all sides of it. I wonder if the internet has any long-standing arguments I could join in on. I sure hope so.
  
• I don't have any idea who to vote for. My sister says that there is a lot of advocacy online, and I know if anyone could give me an honest, well-thought-out argument, I'm sure it's someone who really cares about his party.
  
• I'm fascinated by the way my friends talk. I've spoken the words w00t and lol, but I'm still not really 100% sure what mean. Some online thing, my sister says, and I'm dying to find out. And anyway, I'm not a very good typist (no practice), and a shorter way would be really helpful.
  
• I'm very confused about religion, and I'm worried about my soul. I wonder if there are any warnings about it that could help me with my concerns.
  
• I'm sick and tired of paying top dollar at the pornography store. I wish there was an easier, more discreet way to get my hands on perverted videos and images.
  
• My sister says blog whoring is really hard. I need at least five tips to get my posts read by more people.
  
• I like bright shiny things! I don't know what a "link" is, or how to "click" one, but oh man, I'd follow that sort of thing anywhere. Maybe it could even run programs on my computer for me!

So as you can see, I'm don't know anything about the internet, but I really want to learn, and only you can show me the way. Please follow the link below to contribute your donation, and we'll announce the winner on the first of the month. Don't forget to sign the waiver!

I can't wait to meet you. I'm just tingling with the online buzz!

So good luck, and don't forget to bid early and often. It'll be fun, and you'll helping someone in need.

Love,

Keifus

Blogger's acting funny

Usually, it takes a couple rounds of editing to get the typos and brain-farts out of a given post, and I've gotten in the habit of posting them, then editing out what stoopid I can retroactively find.

With the last two, I've only been able to access old saved versions of them when I hit the edit button. There's only the outlines I wrote a couple days ago, not the stuff I spent a furious hour scribbling. You're looking at first drafts down there, and those tend to be even worse than my second drafts. Sorry.

Thanksralph

My political philosophy, such as it is, hasn't been filtered through the loyalty of any party machine, and based more on a set of ideas, eventually worked out based on a few basic principles (Golden rule stuff, mostly, respect for personal space, a decision on which few social tasks and risks are best dealt with collectively, awareness of physical conservation laws), and a gradual (thanks to an overabundance of inadequate data and worse reporting) observation on how things might be reduced effectively to practice, such as it does the least harm getting there given that people are pretty nasty when they get to empower themselves. I've been mildly surprised to find this makes me more or less a leftist, in those instances where it doesn't make me a flaming, but suspiciously sedentary, radical.

It's not a shock to discover that neither party satisfies my ideas well, certainly not in practice, and even if I'm better informed thanks to endless dicking around on the internet, the mindset's still typical voter. My decision to vote third party, to do so in a solidly locked electoral state, is a lazy act of defiance, but a fairly uncontroversial one. You'd think. Fucked if I didn't wander into a lecture on it yesterday though, in a place where I usually visit to avoid such humorlessness. I'll happily vote for individual Democrats when they show signs of doing anything I want, but I'll be damned if there's been any meaningful environmental legislation passed since the Clean Air Act, if the insurance nationalizing bastards will ever develop a universal health care program, if a cogent energy policy appears this side of the oil crunch, or if the party will oppose a war for any reason whatsoever. If you want to blame it on a new breed, fine, let's keel-haul Nancy Pelosi, but voting for a blue dog isn't going to prevent the blue dogs pulling the party to the right. (Whatever that means. Sometimes when they pull right, they balance the budget, which is something the right is unable to do.)

Dad asks me why he shouldn't vote for a Republican president. If you aren't much the target of their noxious social views, and aren't too inquisitive about them, you can get away without noticing the bigotry. If you're a policy Republican, you go in for "fiscal responsibility," "personal responsibility," and "mature foreign policy." Those are fine nouns, modified by sensible adjectives, but the reason you shouldn't vote for America's right-wing party is that those descriptions are complete bullshit. They're pure Newspeak. Fiscal responsibility means profligate defense spending and cutting capital gains; mature foreign policy means blowing shit up first and explaining later; personal responsibility means an expensive and frequently immoral prosecutorial policy, legal sheltering of corporations from the individuals they've fucked over, de-nationalizing industries and handing the contracts to buddies, fellating PhRMA, and shitcanning those programs that actually give the hard-luck cases a shot at playing the economic game at all.

I can't support a Democrat whose antiwar platform is just as mythical as fiscal conservatism. I'll give Barryo some lukewarm credit for an inadequate and scattershot energy plan, but Jesus, these guys market the American way of life as shamelessly as any of them, and you can't squeeze an acknowledgement of unsustainable military, economic or land-use models out of a damn one of them, not in a way that actually informs policy. Just like the Republicans, they won't do those things because it's not in their business interests.

So anyway, based on their stunning inadequacy, made particularly obvious since 2006, I'm meekly registering a protest vote. I for one welcome our kooky, rainbow overlords.

I apologize for the political screed.

Review of A Bridge of Years, by Robert Charles Wilson

There's a lot to be said for doing something consistently well. Robert Charles Wilson may not have developed the stylistic innovation that it takes to be a Notable Writer (which is a little unfair when you consider the innovations he takes in the background and the setting, but that's why science fiction is a ghetto), but he routinely pulls off three feats that are too rarely encountered, and he makes them look easy: he keeps his characters interesting, his ideas consistent, and best of all, he can juxtapose human nature against the vastness of a weird universe, and find the beauty in that. Gets me every time. (I should probably stop buying his books used and make sure he gets a buck.)

In the novel, these bridges of years are navigable (but not controllable) passages through time, probably engineered by some far-future beings, and utilized by other beings, historians from some less-far-future societies, for the study of "early" civilizations. These archaeologists quietly and carefully recruit contemporaries for maintenance of the passages and to supply them with present-day data. Nervous about paradox, they don't interfere much, and aren't much involved in the actual novel. The characters are from several timelines, not too distant in years. They have some different personal technology though, and Wilson also plays around with a couple fictional generations of cybernetic enhancements, from a digital watch to highly integrated (but still removable) performance-enhancing battlefield armor, to a complete menagerie of beneficial insect- and germ-like life-supporting machinery, to something hardly glimpsed, for which any remaining organic component at all is unclear. He has a lot of fun exploring the details of these augmentations (probably because it's easier to make believable), but even if my description sounds questionable, and despite what you might guess from the cover, he's not whacking off over some imaginary technical doohickies. What I really like about Robert Charles Wilson is that he's all about using these clever ideas and gadgets to tell a good story.

That story entwines major characters from four nearby timelines: a protagonist (Tom Winter) from 1989 who stumbles onto the passage; a woman (Joyce) from about thirty years before, whom he meets at the other end; a military deserter (Billy) from about 75 years ahead; and the man (Ben) from a century and a half out, who's supposed to be keeping an eye on things, but has been incapacitated by the fleeing soldier. Wilson does a good job with developing each one's credulity, and keeping their actions in line with their character, even if it chokes off a lot of bizarre what-if speculations about monkeying with causality. They have believable mixes of fear and curiosity, and you can buy the character of someone who'd want to go back and stay. Tom is at a low personal point, has had fears of an ecological future drilled into him by his wife (who left him), and a quiet cabin is only his first escape. The soldier is hiding in the past too, a monster, a scary one. His armor manipulates his biochemistry past the point of sociopathy, and if he's sort of simple and needy without it, he's also got some stubborn quirk of character that makes him resist it in the first place. It's modeled straightforwardly on a drug addiction, and it's not too noble a fight, but here's the inner struggle that's missing in Lucius Shepard's soldier from last time around, some believable inner workings that make him act the way he does, under and through the artificial stimuli. Billy, of all the characters, earns a touching moment of grace in the epilogue.

The sixties sequences were entertaining. It was fun watching a science fiction author play around with what are (by now) period archetypes of Greenwich Village bohemians. Tom's status as an outsider (more than his future knowledge) lets the author poke at these people a little, and reduce them to human scale about as fast as Tom inevitably has to do. The character didn't expect to find love in that time (didn't quite expect real people) but it happened, and the the inescabable existence of their fates--and his own fate, however unknown--depress many of the characters who think about it. The consequences of Tom and Joyce's cross-decades relationship are ultimately unsatisfying, but they still have the literary conceit of being the right ones.

Time travel stories are older than people realize: the rules are very much like the old tales when prophecy was inviolable. You get to play some of the same clever and satisfying tricks, and I've read a lot more good time travel stories than bad ones. If an author uses time machines to play with cause and effect, he's got only a few choices: (1) that the shape of time is fixed, and anything you do on your jaunt to the past has already factored into your future (call this the Bill and Ted version), or (2) the future is changeable from whatever point of view of the time traveler (Back to the Future version). In between, you can still find some working room. A good compromise, informed, sort of, by chaos theory, is that even though a lot of local effects can be changed, the basic structure of history is still circumscribed by some known pattern, and the time traveler can mess around a little without dismantling the fabric of the universe. Another compromise, taking a mighty handwave toward quantum mechanics, suggests that many possible worlds simultaneously exist, and, perhaps, the others don't even disappear when one is examined. (In fact the general shape of observed space-time may be some optimum probabilistic condition where the universe remains unraveled.) From a storytelling perspective, I don't know if it's better to take a stand on this or not: people need the illusion of time for the story to unfold, and its hard to avoid the passage of subjective time (although some fine nonlinear plots are out there). I don't think that Wilson avoided the consequences, but he didn't waste the story on them. A good, solid effort.

Review of Life During Wartime by Lucius Shepard

Lucius Shepard is an author I've been meaning to read more for years now. It's not just the great name (wolf guarding the sheep--thanks Mom), but the occasional short story I found of his would always catch some levels eloquence, depth, sensitivity to visual cues, and a certain honest sentimentality about the human experience, a lot of the right buttons to push for a reader like me. And to be fair, Life During Wartime isn't a total disappointment in those respects, it just seemed to lose its way in the overall telling. It's well-written on the micro level, and in parts, but it fails to meet more mundane criteria of long fiction: I didn't believe the characters, I didn't buy the premise, and the plot held nothing together. I'll still keep an eye out for this author.

The first disappointment isn't even Shepard's fault, but the blurb writer's and whatever anonymous creatures crawled out of the Amazon.com jungle to describe the thing. For my purposes, this was meant to be the third book to riff on an anti-imperialism theme, the consequences of an unjust American war on the soldiers and the unlucky people living in the field, and the summaries (as well as the author's worldview) led me to expect as much. But this book was no Viet Nam transplanted into Central America, even in the rare parts of the novel where life during wartime was featured. Yes, it's in a jungle, and yes, the army is a feckless murdering behemoth, and there are drugs too, and a little cold war language is thrown around by the grunts, but it hardly feels a critique of that conflict, or of any particular conflict. There was little analysis of U.S. foreign policy in general, the veneer of which has gotten even more tired and frail in Shepard's universe than in ours.

The basis of this war is something other than politics and money. It's a slow letdown to incrementally learn that the strings are all inexpertly pulled by an unlikely cabal of magical Panamanian families, whose internal struggles radiate onto the landscape of world affairs without the slightest evidence of influence, with no apparent relation to any known conduit of power. I could believe in the context of the novel that these families had hijacked the local war effort because, well, those mechanisms are shown, but these folks certainly don't make convincing political or corporate demiurges on the larger stage. The hero, a soldier named David Mingolla, never notices that he doesn't leave the supervision of the families at any point in the book (even his favorite rock band is under their influence, in a particularly annoying twist), but to the reader, it only makes the setting feel more artificial. It might have made sense under the circumstances to show this as the ascension of a cabal, not as the apogee of a quasi-mythical conflict that spans continents and generations.

The magic is a brand of ESP that is brought about by rare drugs (native to the country, and discovered by these warring families long ago), and the protagonist, David Mignolla is a gifted prodigy. When he's introduced, he's unaware of any of this, and the drug-induced powers, distributed to soldiers to varying degrees, are presented as a sort of hallucinogenic battlefield horror-show mixed in with a heady dose of magic realism. The first hundred pages of Life During Wartime are engaging, filled with images of creepy deaths, possession, and supersition. The magic realism is a perfect fit to a jungle war--there are no shortages of ghosts after all, and, as Shepard keeps mentioning, the light sure is funny under the trees--and it worked in seamlessly with technology and drugs and conducting life on the verge of panic. He should have stuck with that. The supernatural elements are more compelling than the psychic mechanisms when they're explained, and after the fine opening, the novel goes through long boring sections of developing those technical powers in Mignolla, and in developing his romantic relationship with Debora, another psychic, with whom he's jumpstarted into love because they're hyperaware of their emotional resonance. Occasionally, Mignolla finds himself dropped into surreal chaos again, at which points the book picks back up.


Mingolla's background is art, and Shepard uses that to make a few clever connections. One of the quality scenes featured the work of a "war artist" who painted brilliant murals on buildings in battle zones and then blew them up; in another good one, Mingolla's in a poverty-stricken and psychedelic closed-in barrio and uses his background to pull out images that Goya or Bosch could have painted, and it's an effective tool. It's a flaw that Mingolla is really inconsistent about his eye. It's brought out when the author wants to make a point, but it doesn't inform his character. He's likewise selectively perceptive, and a selectively decent human being, both traits trotted around for the same authorial purpose as the art history. I get that Mingolla's sociopathic tendencies have been amped up by drugs and combat, but his core stays too protean to really, well, care about him. It's as if Debora and Mingolla and the unconvincing story about the families were used to string together a novella and a series of otherwise well-written, loosely related vignettes. If he put together the book that way, without imposing narrative structure on the damn thing, it would have been much better.

The Dismal ...what now?

I'm sympathetic to old-school economists (not sympathetic enough to plow through extended stretches of their original tedium, but the ideas are fine enough), and I like to put them into much the same bin as the classical scientists, who managed, in many cases, to be clever enough to understand what affected what, even if they didn't always nail the relations down precisely. Some of it was amazingly brilliant: Michael Faraday, for example, famously used next to no math to deduce his many insights into electromagnetic phenomena. I've gabbed about this business of scientific rightness and detail before (most recently), and it helps to understand how the business of mapping the universe to mathematical space works: first comes the basic model, and if it's good, subsequent revision to detail gets piled on, and it gets as good as possible in that framework.

I caught this editorial by Robert Nadeau today. It's also funny to read a scientist science historian ragging on economists. Borrowing mathematical tools from other disciplines is time-honored and instructive (they're usually describing similar phenomena anyway), especially when someone else has done the challenging work of solution, and it's my running hypothesis that scientific study of all kinds has been heavily shaped by the solubility of certain math problems. Nadeau states that the nineteenth- and early twentieth century economists borrowed liberally from contemporary physical models in a way that had no basis in economic reality (according to the physicists), and nyah, the physics turned out to be wrong too, but I don't think any of that is very damning, so long as the resulting math can describe reality. It helps to have physically intuitive variables, of course, and measurable ones.

He goes on about the assumptions implicit in the neoclassical theories, which, he claims, basically ignore the effects of limited energy, real estate, biodiversity, clean air and water, etc. He's probably correct that this is a real failure of these economics, but that's still not really an indictment of the mathematical framework, and secondary relationships could presumably be worked into the set of governing equations. Amusing as it is, poking those sorts of assumptions doesn't really require a science background these days, just some basic observational skills. But if Nadeau didn't mockingly point out that the models were cribbed from falsified physics, he wouldn't have had an editorial in Scientific American.

I find it unlikely that study of economics has failed to grow in the past hundred years to include ecological effects. I recall the term "environmental economics" thrown about a couple of years ago, but never followed up on it. I don't know if it's a serious academic discipline yet, and even nerds are staring down brain-numbing texts all along the hallowed halls, the bigger problem is that environmental economics sure as shit doesn't inform policy in any comprehensive way, really more like these goofballs proposing eternal supply. An imperfect editorial by a long shot, but these people deserve to be picked on.

Hymns to Labor, Part Two

You can't really call mine a white collar family, but even though I sometimes throw menial roots around like a white rapper's street cred, I don't think you could rightfully put the kin in coveralls either. Management and administration are not in our blood, not for the most part, but we do tend to be professional types, with our brains generally operating in some close proximity to our hands: we're engineers, scientists, toolmakers, contractors, carpenters, accountants, electricians, teachers, and medical professionals, that sort of thing. Majestically, we span that divide of token neckware like a mountainous archipelago across the straits, just waiting to be torn asunder with, say, a Herculean political argument (or maybe a really strained metaphor). We get by on a lot of training, but without the perks or the power of the decision-makers, no ins to the old-boy's club beyond the generic whiteness.

As a budding nerd engineer, my experiences of labor unions were both vicarious and unsavory. When my wife used to work at the plant, the union was the reason she couldn't run experiments without the superfluous assistance of Labor. She couldn't turn a wrench, monkey with hardware, or truck chemicals around, as certain activities had been negotiated in the dark times, and engraved as sacred to union employees on the corporate stone tablets and stored behind grimy glass. Typically, the union was less than enthusiastic about carrying out their designated subtasks, especially for some pipsqueak girl engineer, and they were, by and large, a surly work-around. (If buckets of resin got illegally carried across the floor when no one was looking, don't tell anyone.) My friends who veered off into the hardcore manufacturing world had similar stories, although I can't tell you these days who stayed there. Labor wedged itself into my mind as a relic associated with heavy machinery, a living anachronism from the days when the U.S. used to make stuff.

Engineers aren't usually considered labor because we aren't usually hourly. Our jobs are instead defined by extended projects and long-term deadlines. So we get salaries instead of the clock, and even if it's easy for me to avoid (I write proposals all the time), a certain measure of devotion is expected too. For lots of people I know, engineering is as much a lifestyle as other full-time jobs can be, just devoid of the "overtime" that labor gets, as well as the "bonuses" that our bosses snag. Engineers aren't unionized, of course, not really invited to the club, and the ambitious career path for us geeks usually abandons the realm where anything useful is done to fretfully advance into the murky networks of managerial bonus-land. The points in my life where I've been suspicious of Labor were the ones where I and my loved ones were only a small and theoretical step ahead of union workers, discovering that all that advanced training and skill development gets you not so far up the ladder at all. I mean, how much does a dock worker or an auto assembler make? What the hell did I go to nerd school for? (And if it pisses me off that inventing chemistry is less well rewarded than schmoozing, I'll honestly admit I'd be a terrible butcher, mover, drywall hanger, or writer without years of effort, and my job pays more than any of those difficult, high-demand fields.)

I don't want to speak exclusively from personal experience in this post, but I do want to advance a generalization about personal experiences. Namely that you're most sensitive to what breaks the people closest to you are getting. Assumed is that privilege enjoyed by someone else will tend to be noticed by the non-privileged (and privilege enjoyed by yourself hardly noticed at all), and what's more, any small difference in status will be played up for resentment during the political season, subtly or ham-handedly, depending on who can get away with vilifying whom, because scaring up distrust of Others is both a more reliable vote-getter than crafting real policy and requires far less work. In terms of class struggle, all of us schmucks who land in between labor and manglement--uncool professionals, small business workers, shop owners, all those poor bastards in retail, probably you can call us the middle class for want of a better definition--are going to save their economic resentments for the advantages enjoyed by those most like them. Income distributions are shaped like a skewed bell curve, and since there are a lot more people on the lower end than on the upper, these small distinctions of advantage can be played up for a larger number total of votes. There are fewer people getting sensitized against the much more substantial gimmes afforded to the small class of heirs and the politically connected, and in the tally of numbers, the internecine friction is concentrated among the saps who actually work for a living. It's easier to get mad at the people you're stuffed into the kiddie pool with than it is to revolt against the ones that make the rules. It's how the democratic part of the system perpetuates itself.

When a narrow group of beneficiaries start making the rules for everyone, the results are predictable. I claim suspicion about the effectiveness of those dinosaur unions, but I'm certainly no fan of the Man, and outside of the old industries, I can't detect too much influence of organized labor these days. It's worth remembering that the nineteenth century labor movement rallied against real abuses by business and government, and gradually secured real gains. When I read about Wal-Mart's modern attempts to crush the organization of their abused labor force, I don't side with the company. And when I read about (and experience) wage stagnation while high-level executive pay skyrockets, I think with naïve fondness about the power of the unruly mob.

Are union bosses corrupt? Of course they are: the organization of power is such that it moves to promote the group in charge, but this isn't unique to labor, and our governors or our captains of industry have had the upper hand lately (and through most of history). So here's for labor in 2008, at least until it gets crooked, in which case fuck 'em. Whether the inevitable corruption of any organization is a function of scale, longevity, or just success is something I have mixed feelings about, but I'll save that redundant chunk of drear for another day. In the meantime, in honor of the most un-capitalist of American holidays, I'm going to fantasize that a more adversarial balance of domestic powers would somehow result in a greater fairness for the workers.

Hymns to Labor, Part One.

My apologies for the light blogging this past week. I've had it off, more or less, but between quality time, fine beer, an inane commitment to "work from home," and what can only be a mile-wide masochistic streak, it's been hard to keep up, even though I've got a couple of Brilliant Insights (^TMKeifus, 2008--warning: actual product may be neither shiny nor perspicacious) ready to go any minute now (cough). The home office drudgery got the attention it deserved, which is to say I mostly blew it off, but instead of blogging to distract myself, I privately observed deficiencies in both my my manly constitution and my suburban aesthetic. And the weather's been fantastic. Why stay inside when it's so easy to avoid the meetings?

The dirt patch below used to accommodate a concrete slab, which the previous owners evidently used as a crappy, poorly-thought-out patio before they finally sprung for a deck during their big remodel. (For all I hate about the 'burbs, the fact that you don't have to hang out on the parking lot is one of the points of living out here.) The original cement was twenty by twenty feet, and about three to six inches thick, depending on which end you're digging. I left the right edge of it, a sliver about five or six feet wide, because the builders, in their wisdom, evidently paved the driveway around the edge of the slab. Now there's a straight edge of one kind of pavement or other (in the picture, the blacktop is covered with dirt, so you'll have to trust me), and I'm eventually going to blacken the cement with driveway sealer so that it all blends in.



Word problem: Keifus is cutting concrete for some silly reason. It's four or five inches thick. He has a 20 ft. square of this stuff, but he's left a strip on one side of six feet. If he cuts squares of approximately 2.5 feet on a side with his rented diamond blade, then:

(1) How many squares can he cut?
(2) Can he lift them? How far?
(3) How much loam does he need to fill in the hole?
(4) What the hell does he do with the bricks once they're out?

[Answers: (1) about 45; (2) he can lift all of them, but some needed to be broken first; (3) what the fuck, thirty bucks a cubic yard?; (4) see below.]

My yard used to slope back, but those same previous owners leveled it at some point, heaping fill almost to the boundary, and letting the back end drop off precipitously into the faux wilderness of the streambed behind and below. For some reason, they neglected to raise a little triangular corner of it, and here's some little brush-filled nook of trees and stone walls, some marginal bit of unexploited property right for which I'm failing to fulfill my species' modern imperative to industriously fuck with.

Here's a break in the trees that line my yard, which descends down into the arboreal wedge as though from civilization into the primitive wilderness. (The greenery covering the ground near the base of the trees is mostly poison ivy. For all I've dug out, my reactions have so far been only of the mundane variety.)



So what to do with four dozen blocks and heaps of supporting rubble? What to do with a piece of adventurous land that's a pain in the ass to reach? How can I return the favor of pissing off the neighbors, in a way that offers them no legal recourse? It all comes together under great manual effort, gentle reader. Now we can descend into the heart of darkness with perfect ease, thanks to a herculean and noisy week performed by yours truly. I will continue with some landscaping sooner or later that'll help prevent the bank, which consists of sand and rotted pine needles, from washing away (but it's less steep than it was before, and I'm reassured by the four tons of concrete sitting on it).



The bottom of the steps descends to a treehouse, made out of another pile of free lumber from my parsimonious employers. It's not quite finished, but I'm motivated to get the pile of old crates out of my driveway, and I assure you, the battle station is fully armed and operational. Maybe it'll be done by the time my kids are teenagers, and they can sneak out there and smoke joints on it or something.



Working with my body is therapeutic. I've put in something like six or eight hour days on this thing, and I've felt satisfied--happy--in a way I just don't get from shuffling bullshit all day. I'm exhausted at the end of the day, and the intellectual-ish pastimes have felt flimsy with unreality. But the pleasure of any sort of work is fleeting too, and the fact that I'm not at a set pace, and doing it for my own ends, is a bigger source of enjoyment than the nature of the labor itself. As deadlines close in on even the home projects, I'm finding myself as pissy as ever. Working is good, but working for a living sucks.

How Much for One Rib?

Barbecue is one of those truly easy foods. Well, a pause here: real meat recipes--your dry rubs and your smoke--are for sure more challenging, but since they require either $1200 worth of smoking hardware if you want to half ass it, or infrastructure if you want to slowly smoke the whole animal (which is to say, do it right), then within some approximate Puritan bailiwick, I'm doing my best with respect to real food. (And by the way, here's the only thing about the area I miss even a little. Worth the stop if you're going down I-95.) To make real pit barbecue, it helps if you have an aproned paunch, drawl, and only the minimum necessary number of teeth to leer. Because, you know, authenticity matters. Fortunately however, there are things you can get away with here in the Northeast, and it's likewise no coincidence that the cooking magazines all have a barbecue issue that conveniently centers, every July, on the sauce. If you have even a vague sense of proportion, the sauce is nearly impossible to fuck up. I have little explanation as to why any bottled sauce is so reliably treacly and vile.

Barbecue sauce speaks to exactly the sort of chemist I am, one who's better at influences and trends than at punctilious quantitation. Truth be told, I let my wife take care of the dirty mechanics of grilling, and I prefer to chuck in dashes of flavor on the range, according to music or mood. She can't reproduce a single sauce I make, but she's a much better baker, and to the point, can make our crap-sack grill cook more or less evenly.

Ribs are forgiving like sauce is, which is another reason they make the cover of Bon Appetit every summer. They're better grilled for hours--I get that--but they're delicious just by nature too. If you're making do with that middle-class schedule and that middle-class technology, then trust me, you can cut corners by chucking them in the oven for an hour, so long as you're sure to braise or steam them, so long as you don't think of applying any drying heat until those last twenty minutes or so on the grill, where that aforementioned sauce graciously agrees to take one for the team.

We have three or four sauce recipes that range somewhere between awesome and kickass, and the beauty of any of them is that they're all totally forgiving on proportions and whatnot. Garlic or horseradish? Ginger or red pepper? Cola or molasses? The answer is yes.

We're a little hard up for friends here at Chez Keifus, which I may have mentioned, you know, like, often. It's some unfortunate combination of geeky intelligence, debt-constructed poverty, and early-inflicted parenthood that wedges us poorly into this blue-collar town. We're sensitive to like minds, though they appear to be rare here, but still, you have to give people credit. My younger girl's friend's parents, it turns out, are pretty damned agreeable, got that cynicism and wit, and it's working for us, for that now and again. They're evolving food dorks too, and that's one good connection.

Let's call them Jim and Patty. Jim toughs it through a thankless night shift while Patty works days and somehow crawls her way through grad school at the same time, gets on with the path that will make them prosperous some time in the indefinite future, or so the story goes. They like food for similar reasons we do, life's short and all that shit, and anyway, everyone loves barbecue, right? Who doesn't drool over ribs?

Jim had planned to stop by for dinner, and we circled the hearth like witches hoping to entrap Greek soldiers or Scottish kings. Triple triple, shimmer and ripple, sugar glaze and bourbon tipple. Ear of corn, leaf of chard, hack the back of a newborn hog. How much for just one rib? Obligations came up though, as they do, and he arrived (with warning) too late for dinner. Still. Come on, Jim, one bite, have you nothing better to do? Will you go home hungry? Dude, it's ribs. One bite bro, one bite.

Like in any quality neighborhood, I grew up with a surrogate parent or two, and it's good to have second-generation friends, because the old world has kept track of traditions that Americans have evidently forgotten, and not all of them suck.

"Keith, will you stay for dinner?"

"Uh, gee, Mrs. V., I-I'm full, and my Mom, she, uh, ummm..."

The pressure would mount here, perilously enough, and now and then, back in those days, Mr. V. would also wander into the scene. "The pierogies? I made them myself," he'd say, and he'd clap me on the shoulder, as if I were a son-in-law. "Stay."

And how could I refuse? I liked to eat then, too, and if the pierogies were great--and oh man, they were great--then let me tell you someday about the Polish delis that dot eastern Connecticut. I frequently made those trips with my friend too. Yeah, good times.

Mrs. V. had a habit of pushing against my weak will until she gained purchase, at which point she'd dig in and push harder. "Stay. Eat," she'd plead, and I'd frequently find myself broken to her matronly resolve. She'd push food, and accepting it would put me in her thrall, some kind of passive-agressive exchange of power, and there I was at the bottom of it. To the right person, it set hooks. She broke me, and I love her to this day. She gets more beautiful every year she gets older.

And so here I am yesterday with Jim, and if I haven't mastered gingerbread, then we've got a bitchin' approximation of barbecue. "One rib, Jim. Come on."

"Well, Keith, I-I- my wife--"

"Dude, one rib."

"Well ...okay." He pokes carefully with a finger. "Well, shit, I may just take you up on that. They smell so good."

Yes. Yeeessss.


(Thanks Michael, I didn't bothered to search for it.)

UPDATE: The recipe got a request (or maybe two). This one my wife has made the last couple of times, so I don't know all the twists she's worked in. Good chance there's a little freshly snipped rosemary (got a little tree in the kitchen), possibly a little chipotles in adobo sauce (if she thought of it), possibly some ancho chili powder. Good chance we up the vinegar content too. But the basic version just comes from a magazine. Here it is:

couple cloves of garlic
half an onion
olive oil (or butter, or clarified butter)
about a cup of catsup (or pureed tomatoes)
1/3 cup brown sugar (that's what it says--does it hurt to add a little more or less? not for something like this)
1/4 cup vinegar (more?)
1/4 cup of bourbon (Omit if Keifus drank it all. D. tells me it calls for apple juice, and she used it. As if.)
squirt of honey
dash worcestershire
tsp liquid smoke
salt and pepper
dash of cayenne
dash celery seeds
chipotles/adobo
(ancho powder?)

a little can of pineapple juice
(fresh snipped rosemary?)
pork ribs.

We wrap the ribs in foil usually, season the crap out of them, pour over the pineapple juice and wrap 'em up. Bake them in the oven for an hour. (Or else here is where you smoke 'em if you got 'em.)

Mince up the onions and garlic and saute them until they're soft, and then add the rest and cook it a while, simmering down and/or adding vinegar till you get consistency and flavor you want. We then grill the ribs over modest heat for maybe twenty minutes, basting each side with the sauce till it gets gummy and toasted.

A Brief Clowning Interlude

[lotta filler lately]

I'm up for a little frivolity. I'm watching (by which I mean hearing and glimpsing between beers and picking, and, reluctantly, sniffing up the usual online pissing posts) The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai on the on-demand dealie my cable service offers. People looked young and sort of funny in 1984, a bit scarecrow-like with thin bodies and too-big clothes and hair. Peter Weller looked like a stiff in his upturned collars, and he'd go on to do RoboCop later in the decade, where his immoble jaw was a feature not a bug, and then fade from leading roles anywhere. John Lithgow and Christopher Lloyd remain, so far as I know, first-rate clowns, which I mean in the most complimentary way. They recognize the comedy that comes out of exaggerating your emotions on camera, and they can't keep it out of their role. I not only respect that, I can hardly trust anyone that didn't see the humor in the effort.

I love watching the careers of bit actors. I'm half-watching the flick, and I think, Holy crap, is that the Kurgan? Oh my god, it is!

Clancy Brown is an imposing giant of a man, and Buckaroo Banzai has him cast as a sort of affable, gently-spoken southern fella, and it's convincing. I mean, he's not glowering or threatening at all, he doesn't take up too much space, and I take it all to mean the dude can actually act. Either way, whether he's a naturally menacing or a naturally comforting presence, I'm liking the guy. I think his last live role was as a guard in the Shawshank Redemption. He must have already been typecast by then, as a great big badass, and it's funny that he did, because it's not like Hollywood has an issue with tall people, and in his still shots, he looks about as threatening as Al Gore. It's a kind of magic. Or something.

Clancy Brown went on to do voice acting, and looking at his IMDB bio, he has, like most voice actors, shown up in almost every animated production you can think of. Notably, Clancy Brown has been the voice of Mr. Krabs on SpongeBob Squarepants for the last ten years or so.

Dig it: the Kurgan is also the skinflint proprietor of the Krusty Krab.

This knowledge warms my heart. It's like there's some cosmic connection of the arts or something. As a character, the big, sword-wielding, skull-wearing maniac was evil, but he wasn't a complicated evil, nor quite a humorless one, and the writers and casting directors realized he needed some good lines. Somehow, there's a connection between that goofy movie and the only cartoon I can giggle at with my children. Clancy Brown is a clown too. You'd have to be to put on skeleton-shaped underwear and wave a broadsword around, and how can you voice Mr. Krabs with no joy in your soul? I am happy to report that the universe is once again in tune.

Review of The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Before I get too far along, if you're the sort of irresponsible reader who (like me) has gone this far without reading The Quiet American, be advised that this review contains spoilers. Normally, I don't get too worked up over ruining the suspense of something over fifty years old, and canonical (or if it's not on the short list, I agree that it deserves to be), but here's one where the ending caught up to me late. It took the author's hand to make me realize that there was depth to the mystery of Alden Pyle's death, and I'd offer another reader the chance to still get that feeling of awakening as Greene bolts his so theme neatly into place. But that theme is a lot of what I feel like discussing, so consider yourself duly warned.

The novel takes place in Viet Nam during the French occupation, rather notably before the American one, and it's a nation whirling in colonial and civil conflict, with bloody front lines protecting unsteady cosmopolitan zones of Vietnamese urbanites, Chinese businessmen, French authorities, American missions of various types, and any number of international correspondents. Pyle, as the title says, is a quiet American, a bookish, well-bred kid from Boston who is set apart from his loud, uncultured countrymen by what the narrator, Thomas Fowler, repeatedly calls innocence. Part of Greene's brilliance is in setting up a contrast between what's shown and what's told, and to pick apart Pyle as a character (about half of my scribbles are attempts at dissecting him) takes some serious wringing of that noun. Pyle is far from guiltless, and if he's deluded, he's got unusual blindnesses, it's not right to say he's naive about human suffering. Here's Pyle poling his barge alone in the dark up a river swollen with floating corpses, here he is wooing Fowler's girlfriend, there he is reducing lives to bloody bits exactly as planned. Pyle does those things competently, and without damage to his self image. His ego is not fragile, and if there's innocence, it lies wrapped up in childish beliefs about the value of love, chastity, friendship, the magic of growing up, and, perhaps especially, of Democracy. His courtship must be played out on a fair field with unspoken rules, a friendly competition, but the lives of soldiers and bystanders are beneath his notice. If Pyle were written as a caricature, he'd be funny, but he's taken seriously by Fowler and certainly taken seriously by himself. If his warped morality is an affectation, Greene never lets the shell break, not even under the force of Fowler's exquisitely bitter verbal assaults.

Pyle's interest in war is an academic one, some febrile understanding of grand currents of ideas (democracy and communism, a "third force"), and Greene is good at pointing out how reputed grand designs reduced to practice: young soldiers huddling in a guard tower, casually murdered families, a peasant boat obliterated without warning from the sky, the banal lies about necessity of murder. There is no countervailing notion of nobility of the soldier's duty, and the stronger message comes from the fact that Fowler has a better view of the civilian sphere, both in terms of policy and of consequences, he can see how the former is empty, and the latter is hopelessly violent. Fowler is a reporter, a professional cynic, and maintains a stated neutrality on the conflict. He witnesses horrors with a steady eye, but every one adds up and weighs on him. On the outside, it could be believed that his betrayal of Pyle (there's the spoiler) was over romantic contention, but it's clear by the text that the man had seen one too many children killed for idealistic ends. Pyle is not the man that's forced to grow up in this novel.

The political and the romantic are not separate conflicts. It's important here that Pyle is American, Fowler is English, and Phuong, their mutual love interest, is Vietnamese. I read it as representing a larger contention between the old colonialists (as Pyle calls the British) and the new, and a great deal of the mixed-up love and contempt that Fowler feels for the young man is brotherly. They share some common traits, their bad dancing overlaps in their respective pursuits of Phuong, they keep themselves apart from their peers (from other reporters and other Americans respectively), and undertake a patronizing sort of love for Phuong, neither quite able to understand her character. And they are undeniably drawn to one another. Pyle feels a depth of friendship for Fowler that is incongruous with how the men treat one another, and Fowler, in his personal asides, takes more protective notions about Pyle's evident guilelessness than the young man earns. Together, they sniff and bat paws like contenders for alpha male status, but remain members of the same pack. If Phuong also represents her nation, her character remains unpenetrated by either of the overly intellectual men, and for the abuse she receives, she remains lovely and simple. But surely Fowler is as wrong to regard Phuong as innocent as he is Pyle.

On that allegorical plane (sorry Kevin), it can't have been lost on Fowler (who'd reported in India) that Britain has as bloody hands as any Empire. Indeed, his self-awareness is his misery. While Greene, through the journalist, makes brilliant rhetorical points on the American character, the difference between the older and younger world-spanning brothers is one of style, the distaste is for the particular set of lies Americans tell themselves as they repeat another bloody cycle of imperial history. Fowler's cynicism is based on experience, his contempt is for youth as much as for anything else, and not just Pyle's youth, and maybe not just America's. Near the end of the novel, Fowler finally sees fit to reminisce on his own idealism in context of the dead young American's. Fowler claims neutrality in the local events, but it's really just a different version of Pyle's put-upon innocence, a more developed, grown-up version of it. Fowler's neutrality, his love, his very horror at the conflict, also have the consequence of murder.

At the heart of a cynic, you'll often find a broken romantic. Greene's touch is often droll, and while love, pain and guilt are what this novel is about, the main characters habitually hide these things behind various masculine (and probably undiscovered feminine) disguises. It's spare, it's bitter, it's witty, but it's not that Hemingway he-man crap, there's no hidden nobility in the pose. When Fowler admits that he hurts, that he causes hurt, it's the more powerful. This is a novel to break through detachment.

ADDENDUM: Okay, so I haven't seen the most recent movie adaptation, but I'm interested. Michael Caine is a brilliant choice for Fowler--I can't think of anyone who could better communicate the cynicism, the emotion, and the killer arguments--but unfortunately he needs to be about thirty years younger. I like the idea of Brendan Frasier as Pyle, he looks right, and he may even be an underrated talent. I mean, he really carried Encino Man.

Ten Random Songs

[You want to talk about scraping the bottom. Real posts next week, honest...]

If I've learned one thing about cooking Indian food--and it's even possible that I have--is that it's worth it to clarify the butter and use fresh-ish whole spices. If I've learned two things, the second is that for curries, all the goodness comes out of cooking down the onions (and some spices) first, and then cooking all the liquid out of the tomatoes (and some other spices), then adding water, and cooking it all down some more. If I've learned three things, it'st that frying the spices...well you get the idea. The whole process takes a fair amount of waiting around to make it good, to make it taste as authentic as I can judge by the occasional dinner at acquaintances' and the buffet in the next town. If I were running a restaurant, I'd make vat-sized versions of a basic curry sauce like this, and use it for two dozen dishes of exotic, but surprisingly pronouncable, names.

While the flavor simmers down and develops, instead of finishing my book or polishing off the two or three substantive posts I keep meaning to write Real Soon Now, I've got the computer serving me tunes at random, which is enough to make me happy. Here's my first ten eleven. Admit that you're bored too, and share your own.

1. Don't Pray on Me, by Bad Religion. I still can't decide if this band is brilliant punk rock or it it's just puerile. I can picture Greg Graffin, scowling and sticking his tongue out like Lucy Van Pelt, angrily challenging Christian ideas on paper. The lyrics come out clever and scathing, but it's also obvious that they're trying really hard to be. The music is exciting, and while I'm always thrilled when one track kicks up in the mix, the entire cd somehow ends up as less than the sum of its parts (and I think they made like a dozen of them). This is one of the better tracks on this one, anyway.

2. Jet City Woman, by Queensryche. When this band is connecting, they're phenomenal. When they're not, they're something closer to embarrassing. Here's the first song I heard by them, when they played it on the radio in 1991 or so. It's caught a certain mood now and again.

3. Swamp Thing, by Sam Bush and David Grisman. Some indulgent noodling around by a pair of mandolin players who are good enough to. I seem to have an inordinate bunch of their music on the hard drive.

4. Walk of Life, by Dire Straits. It can't have been too long ago that I caught Mark Knopfler, along with Eric Clapton, Sting, and Phil Collins (the last two akin to putting Teddy Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore) performing Money for Nothing on TV, and I thought that this is the hardest any of these guys had rocked for twenty years. Anyway, Walk of Life is a good tune too.

5. Shine on You Crazy Diamond (pts 1-5) by Pink Floyd. More college vintage. I remember sitting in the "penthouse" and having a discussion about how, dude, Pink Floyd is like really mellow an' shit, but turn it up, and it's like, really intense. Thanks to Ted Burke (I think it was Ted), I notice how much studio electronics went into their albums now, but fortunately, I don't care. I love Pink Floyd.

6. Cold, Cold Night, by the White Stripes. More about Meg White trying to sound sexy than about writing guitar rock. I'm not going to tell you she doesn't sound sexy.

7. The Lights of Home, by Bela Fleck. Dad: the only piece of music on which he can tolerate a dobro. Mom: the only piece of music in at least forty years, and possibly ever, that's "got" her. Very important note: my parents are sixty years old.

8. The Dream/Indiana, by Patrick Street. A recommendation by some Irish dude. This one reminds me a little of Mr. Knopfler (above) at his more quiet, or of an American folk ballad, but it's neither of those things.

9. Ugly, by the Violent Femmes. They're a better live band, I think, especially when it comes to tracks like this. Good times, needless to say.

10. The Camera Eye, by Rush. Oh, so I'm a geek. I think I've been over this one, too: this is one of my favoritest songs. I love the chord changes, love the flow and rhythm of it. It's like the very definition of the word "vibrant."

11. Down with Disease, by Phish, "Waitin' for the time when I can finally say, that this has all been wonderful, but now I'm on my way..." I've been there. My kids love this tune too, for different reasons.

There's nothing I can say to make it stop, sooo....what's on your iPod?

Okay, Just this Once

I don't want this to be the sort of blog that gets currency from picking on the likes of Jonah Goldberg. It's already done to death by people who have followings, write two posts a day, and are a lot funnier than I am, and by-the-minute opinion politics isn't really my department. (The mission of this blog is, obviously, to provide a resource for lazy students to research book reports.) I consider Goldberg to be a lightweight legacy, harmless in his way, and easily ignored, and prefer to forget that people see his face in the funny pages and think he must be a serious feller indeed. But visiting the old home always gets me a liesurely Sunday with the paper, where even then I'd have normally skimmed his usual blather, maybe even have rolled my eyes in a smug condescending way, except that his most recent column, which of course the hometown conserva-rag proudly aired with condescending smugness somewhat more belligerant than my own, was kindly pointed out by my dear Mum, even though she knows damn well that topical political conversations have been forbidden from family gatherings since last August, when it was discovered that I not only have opinions, I also occasionally read stuff as a means of forming them. The guy has succeeded in breaking through and annoying me.

So look, Jonah's column has, if we're being generous, it's heart in the right place, even if his head has taken up the usual residence in the recesses of his colon. I let slide his statement that, "Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery," even though I'm pretty sure that the philosophical groundwork wasn't really ends-based, but whatever, I know Goldberg's not into the deeper nuances of the things he writes about. And I suppose I can get by the thick-headedness of insinuating that capitalist societies have in fact eradicated poverty, and I can get by the fact that Jonah (who's succeeded on name recognition, absent of any real intelluctual cred) ironically believes that poverty is the default condition of the uneducated and the skill-less. His opinion that material wealth only matters when it serves his point is nothing more than I expect from him, as is his suggestion that our real capital is positive thinking. I'll even generously forgive him for using the word "toilette". His opinion is, after all, motherhood-and-apple-pie stuff (as my boss calls it), nothing but fluffy marketing, advertising without the attention to the inconvenient details, and if you get down to it, I'm doing okay in the system, at least so long as nothing happens. And moreover, for what it's worth, I also imagine a "fair" economic system where valuable contributions to the economy are related, at least statistically, to the distribution of its wealth amongst people, a position which the market may or may not equlibrate to, and which may or may not be capitalism. (Some of my inconvenient details don't end up looking very capitalist at all. One funny thought is that if the American-style market really found the best value every time, we'd have dirty-word health care by now. Which is, like, totally mindblowing, dude.)

Anyway, the issue I have with Jonah's article (specifically), and his kind in general, is this: it's not the conviction in free markets and of owning the fruits of your labors that's lacking, it's the fucking evidence.

Review of A People's History of American Empire by Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, and Paul Buhle

A People's History of American Empire is a graphic adaptation of parts of Howard Zinn's more canonical A People's History of the United States, itself a controversial book, dubbed as anywhwere between demonically revisionist or brutally accurate depending on your prejudices . American Empire isn't the version I'd rather be reading, but I picked it up after reading a favorable comment on another blog, and typically, anything that's bookmarked on my Amazon shopping cart is only a six-pack away from ending up on my credit card. Zinn takes an overt anti-imperial tone here to which I'm sympathetic, and I was worried about the temptation to read it uncritically, especially a graphic version that's necessarily light on context. As it is, I've been squandering many of my thoughts on the official patriotic lies lately, and my next couple of book reviews , as well as an upcoming post or two, are doomed to the topic. Hopefully I won't alienate the last of my readers as I sit on my pasty ass and get all radicalized.

I guess I can start with the medium. The book is a graphic novel (or rather, in the style of one), adapted from sections of A People's History of the United States and Zinn's own autobiography. The historian gets top billing, but the actual text and art are by Mike Konopacki, who has been doing cartoons for labor publications for years. (Paul Buhle lists himself as the editor.) A couple of Konopacki's collages were affecting (one was gut-wrenching), and historical photographs were integrated cleverly into the pen and ink stuff--I particularly liked the segues between photographs and cartoon version of the historical actors, really made you appreciate the guy's eye--but that said, Konopacki clearly takes his inspiration more from cartooning than he does from comic art, and doesn't always make the best compromises to get the book into narrative form. There's something about his dynamics of moving from panel to panel that's a little bit too sprightly, using too many of them maybe, that makes the thinned content feel even thinner. His somewhat bulbous human forms feel more at home in various newspaper sections than in a graphic novel, and his facial renderings get that vibe too, where the victims of empire are in a constant state of honest sadness or righteous anger, and the perpetrators range in expression from self-righteous contempt to paunch-patting superiority, lacking only mustaches to twirl. Konopacki was much more effective when he deviated from the linear strip form, and turned his pen to more realistic representations and cleverer page spreads. I wish he did so more.

A People's History of American Empire takes us through a short tour of the imperial project, raising a stark and necessary reminder that the U.S. has been hungry for conquest nearly from the get-go. Zinn begins with the final stages of the subjugation of the Sioux (letting a sad-eyed Black Elk speak), the last nail in the artifice of our internal dominion. He gives slavery and our Mexican campaign a quick and ignoble mention, and proceeds to the disgusting lowpoints of the adventures in the Phillipines and in Cuba, of the labor movement, and of the first world war, painting a picture of a collaboration between industry and the government that generates or protects profits at the expense of lives. With the opportunity to intervene in Cuba's revolution against Spain for the right reasons, we declined, but as the sugar industry felt threatened, we are told, it gained critical importance. I find many of Zinn's interpretations difficult to refute, but on the other hand, I am doubtful that helping those serious Cuban peasants for their own good would have been any better, or any different, than doing it for protecting industry. His economic version of empire is an interesting and almost refreshing viewpoint in some cases though, especially when more recent history is concerned. For example, did the U.S. violently hasten Japan's surrender in 1945 so that they'd surrender to us instead of the Soviets? So that we'd guarantee an economic advantage? The privatization of military services is a fact that's become blatant over the last couple of conflicts, and it's depressing enough to imagine a hand in Middle Eastern resources as a motivator for war, doing it to gain exclusive contracts to slop swill and wash uniforms is even more depressing.

Given this sort of thesis, it makes sense for the authors to include the labor movement in the story of American conquest. Zinn's autobiographical sections are a little more sketchy in their level of relevance, but experiences in the war, and experience with the quantification of the alleged virtue of "hard work" manage to weave in what depth there is in the book. (Fair enough. I'm warped by the life stories around me too.) I felt he went too far to describe youth rebellion as a real movement against the subjugation of peoples (it never seems to stick as they grow up), and while I can dig the disrespect for authority, his lionization of zoot suit rioters is as filthy with nostalgia as anything the boomers produced twenty years later. To put it another way, I saw Kevin Bacon kicking his heels a dozen times in my day, and while I accept the final injunction to live well, I'm still not convinced by the power of the dance. Maybe you need to have a draft hanging over your head to really appreciate it.

If you look back on British colonial history, say, it's not hard to pick apart the root drivers: it was a money maker, at first kept breathing under government approval, and then government protection, and then finally absorption of business interests by the state. Missionary zeal for the betterment of backwards peoples may have been red meat to the masses by design or by apology, and relief of demographic pressures for the homeland (too many people with not enough to do) had its importance at different points in history too. I've read similar economic models advanced (by astute amateurs) for the Roman empire, and certainly I'd map similar mechanisms of conquest for the other European colonial powers. When the naked lust for dominion is thrown around, it's generally reserved for the evaluation of ancient empires, or those pursued by our mortal enemies, but it's not as if Americans are made of different genetic stuff. Probably it's well that I'm reading a cartoon book to support my own casual view of history, but enhancement of money and power are usually safe bets for motive, and they give Occam a closer shave than the litany of "existential threats," that in the case of our own empire anyway, have proven either vastly overblown or, perhaps, orthogonal to the underlying point. And here's why we need a guy like Howard Zinn: America, as a world power, is as hungry and as ugly as any other, and someone has to give it scholarly weight. I may balk at the insinuation that it's uniquely horrible, but what the hell, it doesn't need to be.

LATE UPDATE: From the posting on BTC News, Phil Ball replies:
You say "...but the actual text and art are by Mike Konopacki..."

This is not true.

This book was written by David Wagner. It was brought to life by Paul Buhle and inspired by Howard Zinn, and illustrated by Mike Konopacki.

But the writing, scripting, much of the original research and the organizational structure are the product of Wagner’s amazingly productive mind.

That he is not credited with writing the book when in fact he wrote the book is the result of childish squabbling and tantrums on the part of Konopacki; ‘credit me, and not Wagner, with writing the book or I won’t finish my drawings.’

And he won, simple as that.

But he did not write the book, and it should be a source of embarrassment and shame to all involved with this work that not only is credit not given where credit is due, it is purposefully given where it is not due.

I know.
I was there.

Review of Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut

Player Piano rounds out a pair of reviews of books (along with The Space Merchants) that plot out American dystopias from the viewpoint of 1952. They are critiques of the American capitalist myth from square in its heyday, using the time-honored role of science fiction to pick apart the flaws of the present day. In Vonnegut's near future, automation has removed the need for human labor in manufacturing, leaving people at large with nothing much to do, nothing much to be proud of. Vonnegut has claimed that he got the idea from watching, on his return from the war, an automated milling machine at work and extrapolating some logical conclusions. The operator's added value had vanished, he realized, leaving only the management and design as the only useful human elements in the production chain. In a plot outline he says he cribbed from Brave New World, Vonnegut pulls the reader from the upper-eschelon management class to the world of the moron and the savage, where a revolution may be brewing. It's a fun ride, not short on the biting truths and heartbreaking wit you expect from Vonnegut.

And arguably, this is how manufacturing went down in the half century that followed Player Piano. The American shift from an industrial economy rides on the fact that the manufacturing staff could be automated out of existence, leaving behind underemployed engineers and a management in love with its own culture. A competitive skill set that developed overseas also rocked the boat, but the development of better tools has, by and large, obviated the need for bodies for rote machine tasks, and devalued the skilled hands that used to command better pay and more prestige. Vonnegut imagined lengthy and pointless higher education to absorb the non-demand for workers, and a segregated society of haves and have-nots based on incompletely-measured intellectual ability, or on nepotism that's pretending to be merit. Competing with slaves, a character proclaims, makes workers slaves too. He meant machines, and perhaps that's half right.

A lot of the black humor comes out at the expense of managers and engineers. (As an engineer, I'll greedily accept half of this bias, and cautiously consider the other half.) The most amusing part of the story takes the protagonist, one Paul Proteus, upstate to a management retreat, where he's stuffed with corporate platitudes, as vacuous 50 years ago as today, at a summercamp full of grown men, complete with sports, singalongs, and fake Indian legends. (And yeah, that's "grown men." Vonnegut picks up on his country's culture of managerial sexism, which in America may have actually moved past the 1950s vision, but the satire of the unruly boys club is still uncomfortably resonant. Even if they took down the sign, there's still the same treehouse.) Even with all the high-status knowledge workers, the economy still runs itself, and even the gifted just move along with it.

It's not a polemic against progress, more a statement about the inevitability of it. The faux naturalasm of the managers' retreat is perhaps telling, and Vonnegut similarly flirts with a throwback lifestyle--Proteus is charmed with the idea of farm life, of working with his hands--and rejects it. It's not lost on the reader that "we might need the bakery," and the flush toilets (and the medicine, education, wine, public order, roads, and the fresh water system). The Indian theme gets pulled out at the end again, as the revolting holdouts against automation at last get the stage. The rebellion is as doomed, unavoidable, and as pointlessly noble as anything the Native Americans did to turn the tide against the Europeans, and history, it keeps rolling. The knowledge economy is on the brink of the cliff too. So it goes.

Vonnegut's automation is of a quaint, clockwork kind, driven by tape reels and punch cards and vacuum tubes, displayed by blinking lights, a real old-fashioned future, but it's wrong to over-emphasize technical accuracy in a novel like this. The big picture is really the point, and anyway, the details are kind of charming. Unseen data handling is used to predict citizen preference, and to plot a life of moderately satisfying consumption, even as the rage of the unfulfilled boils just under the surface. I wondered about all of this dissatisfaction, and I think it's a spot where Vonnegut fell short in a more substantive way. The proles seemed to be kept in line by some sort of institutional depression, with minor make-work duties, and some dreary social functions (endless parades, sports) as moribund in their way as a summer camp for grownups. I think there needed to be a better mechanism to make them feel indebted to the system, or maybe the psychology needed to be less subtle. With that many people unhappy and, more importantly, bored, the shit would surely have hit the fan years before. There's no equivalent service economy to take a passionate hold, and the street economy is unenthused.

[I spent a few real-life years in "Ilium," NY (and many more years in places like it), during its decidedly post-industrial period. If Vonnegut failed to represent the decay of the non-University sectors, maybe I'm a little more sensitive to it than normal. His city is fictional, and the geography of the region isn't quite right either, but I had a good time mapping real Troy onto pretend Ilium just the same. It helps that I never had a good map in the first place (no car for most of the time), and it amused me to put his landmarks in the circle around the university, ranging from the bar districts near the bridge, to some of the outer residences up on the hill. Good times.]

Reading Kurt Vonnegut is a different experience from remembering him. I always take home the pith, the non-sequiturs, the bitter observations, the concision. Opening a new one, I am surprised to catch him transparently writing, going through the usual efforts of developing character and plot just like any other author, with mere competence. Player Piano is his first full novel, but I think I just tend to forget his humanism is developed by conventional means too. I don't even think this novel was the best social critique of its day, but the tough fatalism and the piercing, honest wit are what make Vonnegut noteworthy, what gives his novels a timelessness that transcends classification.

Major Key Chord Progressions and Fingerings for Mandolin

This isn't a normal blog post, but a placeholder to "publish" something that might be useful for other people learning to play the mandolin.

[Update: This post seems to get a lot of search hits: I'll add that I find the "chord families" probably the most useful, and am much too lazy to practice lengthy chord progressions I'll rarely use, although I still do sometimes. Also note that there are a couple errors in the charts--took forever to get all the dots aligned. Finally, if you're a relative beginner looking for someone to pick around with in the MA area, feel free to follow the email link.]

I have put together some tables for chord progressions, chord families, and suggested fingerings for the instrument. The tables were inspired by some of the drills suggested in Music Theory for Modern Mandolin by Thomas P. Ohmsen, and put together in a format that I find particularly useful.

The first table just lists some common chord progressions in each of the twelve major keys, written in a manner convenient for practicing. I didn't include all the variations of course. (The bottom part (II-V-I) of a circle of fifths progression can be expanded by including columns to the left, one at a time.) I listed them as triads only because it was easier to write, and I actually try to practice both the triad and 7th degree voicings.

For the second table, I borrowed the idea of using chord families from Niles Hokkanen in his handy short book, Pocket Guide to Mandolin Chords (it fits in your case!), and I have used the concept to assemble a somewhat complete table, using labels I'm comfortable with. In the fingering diagrams, the root note is bolded, and the positions are consistent within the column. The actual chords can be moved up and down the neck easily, keeping track of the root notes for each family.

The third table shows the best fingerings I've worked out so far for the major-key chord progressions, all at roughly the same distance along the neck, and in some cases, they're the ones that flow really naturally into one another. Positions are consistent relative to one another across the rows. Some alternate shapes are also suggested (but I only wrote one set of fingerings for each progression).

I am a regrettably slow learner with this stuff, and sometimes find that one voicing over another will sound better in context, especially when playing by myself (which I normally do). Sort of thing that will come out with practice I imagine, and these exercises are meant to build up that foundation. Have fun with them, hypothetical readers, and if it was helpful, feel free to drop a comment or to cite it. (If you hate it, hey, it was free.)

(Click tables for a closeup.)
(Errors:

• the II chord for "7th 1" should be moved down a fret.
  
• I drew the "G chop" (of all things) without a fret between positions on the E and the A string.
  
• On the chord families, the "Gm" is wrong--the lowest fret should be moved down one (pinky touching the "G," duh.)

)
Table 1. Common Major-Key Chord Progressions


Table 2. Chord Families


Table 3. Suggested Mando Fingerings for Major-Key Chord Progressions