Breakfast Sausage Party!

I love sausage a lot more than it deserves to be loved. In a purely gustatory way, mind you, not that there's anything wrong with that. Just thinking about its steaming meaty stiffness, the burst of juices in my mouth, the fatty drizzle as I prick it with my fork... well, never mind. With the better stuff, you can at least pretend it's made from identifiable cuts of meat, but as far as I'm concerned, a nice succulent and spicy Italian pork sausage with plenty of mystery gristle is where it's at. (My good wife sensibly disagrees, although the homogenized turkey product she insists we buy instead is hardly a substitute. If I'm planning on a Saturday meal when she's working, then sometimes I'll go out of my way to get my greasy hands on the store-made snouts-and-tails special.)

On the other side of the Mason-Dixon line, they know how to breakfast, I'll give them that. A land that laughs in the face of heartburn. When I travel, I try to be sure to pick up biscuits and gravy if I get a chance, although like a number of staples, I've got my own thing going by this point, and tend to be slightly disappointed on the outside. Mine's a healthy beige, instead of paste-white, and gets a little more flavor going than pepper and Jimmy Dean.

Also, there's little excuse not to make your own baking powder biscuits. It's a hell of a lot easier than making real bread, and it's well worth avoiding that tangy evil that comes in a prepared package. (And there is just no logical excuse for the existence of Bisquick^TM, for that matter: inferior result for the exact same amount of work.) Which isn't to say that there's not still a touch. My wife's biscuits are consistently more attractive than mine, but I can, uh, wield the sausage in an well-practiced but imprecise way that she simply can't match. It makes every biscuits-and-gravy morning like the Gift of the Magi.

A lot of times we'll do this when there are either leftover biscuits or leftover sausage. If you use fresh sausage (I like "breakfast" or Italian, but no doubt you can experiment here), then use the oil evolved from the sausage for the recipe, and go easy on any extra herbs (except the thyme). I'm going to assume that you're using leftovers, or forced, like me, to make turkey taste like something. When I make this basic bechemel sort of sauce, I don't worry about how much oil (it's the flour/water ratio that gets your thickness, and the oil is just to disperse the flour first--a little extra won't kill it), stir the flour in it, and then add liquid until I get to the consistency I want. That way is easier than measuring. (Baking, you do have to measure.)

The recipe for the sausage gravy came originally from a Sheila Lukins cookbook, and the biscuits came from Mom, but of course I've fucked with them both. Buttermilk has a nice flavor in this, and it's great with baking powder breads--a little extra acid to get that nice bit of, um, fluffing everybody likes.

The gravy might get a little skin, but if you don't have a wife, make that first. The biscuits are too good hot out of the oven.

Sausage Gravy
- 1/2 to 1 pound (I am pretty sure I normally go on the low end) of turkey sausage or leftover sausage
(Or you know, use the good shit, and skip the next few ingredients, up till the flour. I try to add my spices to compensate for lesser links.)
- three or four tablespoons of fat (Often I'll use butter, olive oil, and chicken fat skimmed off the frozen stock, in roughly equal parts. But it's all good.)
- about a teaspoon of ground coriander
- about half a teaspoon of fennel seeds (if you like them)
- about a teaspoon of fresh black pepper
- about a quarter teaspoon of ground red pepper
- half an onion
- 1-2 cloves of garlic
- 3 tablespoons flour (or so...I use a little less than the quarter cup that sits in the flour bin)
- 1/2 to 3/4 cup of chicken broth (if you must use a can, add the whole friggin can, and then hardly any milk)
- 1/2 to 3/4 cup of milk or cream (basically, you add it until you have the texture you want when it's hot)
1-2 tsp fresh thyme

Cook the sausage and onions together in a pan, adding as much fat as you need. (If you use fresh good sausage, rinse the pan with water and cook them slowly. You probably won't add any fat.) You should have maybe 3-4 tablespoons of fat when they're done. Add the garlic and cook for another minute. Add the spices.

Add the flour, and stir it until dissolved (and pasty). Turn up the heat and quickly stir in the stock until the liquid is thick and homogeneous, add the thyme. Mix in the milk until you get the consistency you want when it's hot and bubbly. Turn the heat to low, and wait for the biscuits.

Baking Powder Biscuits
- 2 c. flour
- 3 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 2 tablespoons cold butter
- 2 tablespoons vegetable shortening
- 1 c. buttermilk.

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.

Sift all the dry ingredients into a bowl. Add the shortening and butter, and cut it in. (In the past, I've advocated doing this with your hands, but my wife uses a pastry cutter, and her version comes out better. So do that. When she's done, it's pretty well cut in, it appears about as granular as road sand (an analogy no good southerner would make, by the way).)

Add the buttermilk, and mix as little as it takes to just blend it. Drop the sticky dough onto a well floured surface (MGW uses waxed paper here, easier to remove and clean up), and press to about 3/4 to 1 inch thick (this is critical! Too thin here, and you get dusty hockey pucks). Cut circles with a cookie cutter or a floured, upside-down glass. (Mom says don't twist. I've never figured out if this is bullshit or not.)

Bake 12-15 minutes. They should be just golden brown. When you open the biscuits, they ought to flakily split down the center (making two skinny pucks), and steam awesomely. Split them, and spread the gravy over the tops. Don't forget to visit your heart surgeon in thirty years.

The Urban Gardening Project

There are at least three things that grow exceedingly poorly on my quarter acre: grass, roses and vegetables. And for perspective, it's been long enough now that the grass has finally almost filled in the old vegetable garden, or at least filled in according to that piebald way that passes for a lawn here. The section is still tastefully cornered by a bed of perennials and bordered by a row of sickly roses, which are gradually and mercifully getting subsumed by plants that actually thrive in our sandy verminous soil. We're slowly learning which plants do and don't, see, and surrounding the sorry things, gradually figuring out when to plant grass, and where to just give it up to landscaping, and god help me, I've mentioned it all before. Suffice to say that it looks nice in the spring.

The lofty goal of all my landscaping effort is to achieve a state of minimal maintenance, perfected for independent natural(ized) and vegetable beauty. If the grass don't grow, try a perennial, or a gravel walk. The devotion to chemical lawn care is one of the more horrifying suburban sins I can think of, and paradoxically, I'm willing to expend a good deal of backbreaking labor to get to that point where it all just glides along without my guidance, hand-weeding invasive species so that the (allegedly) locally appropriate population of grass blend can have a shot, and not fretting when it turns naturally arid in the summer. I've put together a list of ground rules for yard projects:

1. use space well (grow stuff only where it grows)
2. be beautiful (and obscure the neighbors)
3. utility is a bonus
4. cost approaching zero (sustainability, baby)
5. maintenance approaching zero
6. there's no goddamn rush (except when there is)

The old vegetable garden failed in the beauty, use of space, and maintenance deparatments--actually it failed in utility too--but I've always felt guilty about abandoning it, especially as I hunger to stuff my craw with garden-fresh goodies every spring. Last year, my mother gave us a cherry tomato seedling, and we just potted it and let it grow up along one of the filigreed black columns that almost hold up the carport. And bingo: it's the same wholesome experience but now interpreted in an urban-compatible way. The mere act of using a pot managed to nail criteria one through five. No more impoverished plants and bales of weeds; just a tasteful salad-enhancing accent to an already pointlessly trellissed corner of the house, watered and harvested occasionally, and otherwise happily ignored. The small herb garden is another floral success. Tastefully surrounded by perennial flowers, the chives, mint and oregano come back every year, and I can plant the other stuff in the spring, and otherwise forget about it except when needed or when I care to enjoy the view and the aroma. Urban gardening just fits the location better than keeping our own private Dust Bowl going.

This year, I'm expanding the project. I've got some more wrought iron corners to support a few more pots of tomatoes, and I've got the idea to plant a halo of shallots (a nuisance to shp for in the benighted 'burbs) to fill in the lower reaches of the plants, and to get more produce out of the same tastefully occupied space. Similarly, I came across the idea for "vertical potatoes" somewhere, where you stack up old tires and add dirt around the plant as it grows over the summer. The tubers grow in each new layer of dirt, yielding, the advertisement goes, a substantial poundage of taters per plant compared to the space-intensive horizontal yard plot. Old tires aren't very pleasing to the eye, of course, and I made up some modular, stackable planters to house the spuds as they grow, and cleverly located them near the tomatoes' nook (it's the second-choice location, but my wife convinced me to try the experiment in better sun first), and painted them to match the house. If it works, then I'll spread out a few more next year.

It's the optimization game that really motivates me here, an ongoing engineering project that is somehow a lot more gratifying than anything I ever attempt at my actual job. I have this fantasy that I'll be mentally prepared to endure the dystopic future when the big machines all sieze up as a statement of God's wrath, and I'm thankful to supplement my diet of overlord-surplus soy gruel to whatever extent I can. Okay, that's exagerrating (and yet it's a disturbing running theme), it's really more the geeky thrill of living an efficient life.

The no-cost criterion is an important one, and usually overlooked for us modest suburbanites. What's worse than spending two hundred bucks on an ugly gardening project that yields a three dollars worth of nasty wizened produce? The potato planters rose from hoarded bits of surplus lumber (that experienced carpenters sanely refer to as "shit"), free and scroungeable from one of the zillion condo construction projects still mysteriously underway. And to be clear, I'm talking utilization here: any urge to store potentially useful crap is counteracted by an extreme resentment of undesired crap taking up my precious living space. No pack rat, me, and the odds and ends are stored in perpetual purgatory. Eliminating clutter, but shunting its imminent ride to hell, is another motivation for actually doing these things. I can't stand to see it sitting there, and I hate to waste it.

This year's vertical potatoes may meet some of my guidelines, but they're doomed from a financial standpoint, because I had to buy twelve bucks worth of dirt in which to plant my dollar's worth of seed potatoes, and it's hard to imagine recouping that cost. An aggravating development to be sure--buying dirt--but it has inspired my most brilliant outdoor project yet. Yup, the new compost bin is cleverly situated behind the woodpile (tree work and an ice storm--it feeds my fire pit) on a lifeless piece of forest floor behind the shed, where only the hated neighbors can really witness it's undesirable nature. It consumed the huge leftover beams from the shed, and I'm gradually tacking the sides up with suitable-only-for-burning (but free!) pallet lumber. It diverts a fraction of my natural waste stream toward consumption, making my household notionally more sustainable, and it makes the lousy microfauna work for me, dammit, rotting something useful instead of my precious roots, to ultimately turn my garbage into dirt I can finally grow vegetables in. I'm a genius!

Review: Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

Frankenstein is such a fundamental piece of Gothic horror (or Romantic literature, depending on your preferred classification here), reinterpreted and refaced in so many awful ways, that getting back to the source is much like knocking off generations of spackle and dirt to get a look at the original design with new eyes. Well, sort of new: I've held on to one passage of Mary Shelley's novel with suffient clarity to imagine it as one of my personally influential literary tidbits, a fact that is made odd by the mental blank I had for the rest of the story. None of the other plot and theme came back to me on a reread, and I must conclude that those five paragraphs where the creature identifies the lovely moon from a storm of unformed sensation is all that I had ever read. (I've also never caught more than a five-minute segment of any Frankenstein movie not made by Mel Brooks. So it all works out.)

As a whole, the novel suffers mildly from the literary sins of the period: it rambles, in terms of pacing, language and location; it's dripping with overwrought emotion of every flavor; and every character is a naturally gifted windbag with a rich command of adjectives and sentence structure, and is possessed of an uncanny skill to accurately recreate someone else's lengthy spoken reminiscences. The characters need this ability, because the novel actually employs multiple framing devices, nested within one another. The whole text is formally contained in an explorer's (Robert Walton's) letters to his sister during a failing arctic expedition. He finds Victor Frankenstein dying on an ice floe, and the record of the scientist's story of hubris and attendant consequences includes the creature's story, reported at length when he meets his creator. It's awkward, and it distracted from the book's more compelling parts.

The scientist, as we all know, fabricates a creature* but then abandons it in an epiphany of horror. Terrible events follow, perhaps invetably so, thanks to the character of man and, well, man. Shelley is subverting some of the conventions of her times here. Frankenstein is meant to evoke pathos. He's painted with such effort as sincere and empathetic (with one big exception), but he is also intentionally something less than noble. His neglected responsibility is not forgiven, and his family is ruined at the hands of it. He's the Prometheus of the subtitle after all, who has damned both himself and his creation by the act of granting knowldedge. His fervor, illness, and later misery are not symptoms of madness, as a hundred shitty knockoffs would have you believe, but workoholism toward a noble goal, that leads to personal tragedy. The introduction** made a reasonable case that this is an early feminist critique of the male-dominated field of science. Obsession is not the fatal flaw in the Greek sense, it's more like a gender problem. It doesn't undo the men (Walton is also on a consuming quest, and so is the creature), it infects their character at all levels. It's unfortunate for readers that Victor is given such an operatic streak, where even his happy emotions are expressed in the superlative. The book succeeds easily in evoking the sense of Frankenstein's self-involvement, but it took a lot of murders to register any empathy for the guy--I had no idea why all of the wonderful people he described ever thought to love him.

[Frankenstein is usually considered the first science fiction novel. Morality plays aren't foreign to the genre, and like her heirs, Shelley gets at her metaphysics by way of physics (or near-physics), taking the conceit that would eventually become the hallmark of nerd fiction: not "merely weaving supernatural tales," but relying on science that "affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions moer comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield."*** Well, and good, but it makes the above reading kind of an amusing chore for SF geeks. A science fiction novel that played to the usual modern sensibilties would have celebrated the devotion to craft a little, wouldn't have neglected the cool details about the project that kept the man going. Shelley hid the half-built creature on the table without description (it was evidently built bottom-up, and something much more interesting than stitched-together body parts), and begged off on describing the reanimation process (no wonder filmmakers would get googly with the lightning bolts). Frankenstein is perhaps better appreciated for the small handful of modern Promethei that eventually followed in the doctor's footsteps, but I don't see the scientist who turns his back on his success as the norm, really. In Frankenstein's case, creating life doesn't necessarily pass my test of soul-crushing horror--it's certainly not enough that he's ugly--and I don't understand the doctor's lack of empathy for the sad being on the table.]

It also took a depressing quantity of murder to make the creature fiendish. From the beginning, he is the most engaging member of the cast, forced to develop his consciousness and his morality unguided. Learning the art of being human from Milton and from surreptitious observation, hungering in obscurity for the familial acceptance that his appearance forbids him. His behavioral development may be called simple--he is motivated from hunger, loneliness, and anger--but his intellectual character is clearly more multifaceted than Victor's, and at least as capable. He's more honestly contemplative of his own nature, and his simpler desires are the more poignant because of it, and more sincerely lamented. His confrontation with the cottagers is the best scene in the book, as the creature lays his hopes of human kindness on a confrontation.

In his lesson from Paradise Lost, it is strange that the creature should reject comparing himself to Adam and put himself in the role of the envious Satan instead. Lucifer occupies a similar mythological space as Prometheus, which is to say, damned for effort. Adam, the being reasons, has the comfort of knowing his place in creation, of acknowledging a benevolent creator. And he's got it exactly wrong. The creature is unique in knowing where he came from (even if it's not fulfilling to know), and it's we poor bastards in Adam's role that must suffer along without a place in the universe, struggling with the ideas of inscrutable mythical beings. Frankenstein fits Prometheus well enough as a flawed shaper of clay, but bringing Paradise Lost into it, it starts to spell out the same implication or the big good Daddy Himself. In truth, both the man and the creature take on multiple matching roles of nobility, genius, and unfortunate capability. She does link their creative monomania, for example. "A frightful selfishness hurried me on," the creature exclaims over the body of dead Frankenstein, "while my heart was poisoned with remorse." It is interchangeable with his maker's lament about his project. There's one part Adam in there, torn up by the misery of his existence, and one part Satan, who acts on it. It's hard to be (hu)man.



* Really the right word here. He is not a monster, but he has been created. We might call him artificial, for similar etymological reasons.
** Walter James Miller, in the "Signet Classics" paperback edition.
*** from the preface.

Defense Budget

So there are new funding and procurement priorities for the DoD budget. They'll almost certainly affect the nature of funding for whatever exactly it is I do. A push toward more practical soldier-level defenses will probably favor the more dinky, nimble research outfits a tiny bit more, even while it rewards less basic research, which basically continues the trend toward ever more applied R&D that Defense has been going on for as long as I've been working.

But by the same token, I don't share the enthusiasm about seeing some of the big boondoggles go. I support budget innovations for taking care of wounded soldiers, addressing family concerns, and improving safety of the people on the ground, but it's hard to deny that they'd be even safer if they weren't fighting. The budget priorities reinforce a national commitment to soldiering, to warfighting as the parlance goes, and removes some of the comforting notions we like to tell ourselves about this big cash monster that is our defense budget. One of the appealing things about the technological military, much like the volunteer military, is that it diverts our attention from the things militaries actually do. I don't mean that just in terms of sanitizing the idea that people are getting killed out there when all you see are clean people in cold white rooms, but heavy investment into developing something that isn't likely to be used in war also keeps up the idea of a (relatively) benign standing army that is reserved for only potential threats, where we just dump that money into big piles of planned obsolescence without killing too many people in the meantime. God knows it keeps communities afloat, but defense contracting is a welfare program for eggheads too, where the big primes can soak up the excess semiconductor guys, and optics guys, and materials guys, and mechanical guys, and give them jobs and a place to use their skills. For the little league, the DoD and related entities are also supportive of anything that can be sold independently of Defense, which is a good thing. It may be wasteful, but in some ways I'd rather keep geeks working out advanced technical gizmos than releasing mindless leagues of shovel crews to the highways.

And this budget, if it's indeed repurposed toward warfighting (which is going to be hard to get past the representatives of boondoggle-rich districts) takes that fantasy away just a little bit more. You sort of wish the public sector would procure solar energy or something instead.

Five More Thoughts: Let Them Eat Cake Ed.

Don't we all wish I could shut up about this stuff? If you're tired of sarcastic half-baked economic thoughts, skip to #4. If more suspicious foodie-ism isn't your bag, just go to the last one. If the antics of clueless fathers and husbands bore you too, then I guess I'll review another book eventually. Does anyone remember when these things used to be frivolous?

1. Warmed Over Red Meat
Like most Americans, I've developed a growing animosity toward the financial management of our country. In my case it's tempered by a certain long-term, big-view fatalism, but still, I look at the criminal Madoffs and whining DeSantises compared to my negligible prospects of ever getting out from the immobilizing weight of debt--never mind the prospects of ever getting rich--that a prescribed life of education, family and salary stick you with, and I can understand revolutionary fervor. Then I think about the sickening possibility of actual mob violence, and how the mob, when it has managed to win, has tended to produce mammoth injustices of its own, and I downgrade my smoldering class resentment into patriotic-feeling thoughts about the threat of the mob when the aristocracy gets out of hand, and, short of violence, how great it would be to put these motherfuckers in a position where they have to work to get by like the rest of us.

So I settle on the happier counterfactual where R&D is remunerative and finance is an exhausting niche for overspecialized geeks. Because that would be different, oh yes, the believers in reason would rule the world at last! Unfortunately, and speaking of working for a living, this leads to speculation about what exactly it is I'm producing, and then to the conclusion that I've spent nearly a decade leveraging my limited technical skills to a similar (over-)extent as the banks have with their finite capital reserves and debt obligations, selling the idea that someone down the chain will come through with the intellectual goods, or that my own skills will catch up in time to perform the increasingly unlikely stuff I propose. I suppose financially lucrative R&D would also attract a different kind of scientist, and companies like mine would be filled to the rafters with confident young men with more attitude than talent, and the halls would be thick with power ties and greasy smiles and stress. Even more marketing, in other words, to the eventual exclusion of any product at all. Then I sigh and go back to surfing the net.

2. Manna
One positive thing this finanical mess shows us however is that a gigantic shadow economy based on very little tangible value, can, in fact, exist, at least for awhile. The basic iniquity of this situation isn't that we have a high standard of living based on nothing much, it's that the standard of living is highly unequal within the same system. It doesn't have to be that way, or rather, it wouldn't have to be that way if humans weren't collectively such a bunch of assholes. If it could somehow enter our species' consciousness to do so, we could base an economy on nothing more than telling each other jokes, swapping files, gambling, and blogging. If "productivity" can just grow forever, then that's a logical enough conclusion.

Now, naysayers might argue that someone under that imaginary system would still have to grow the food, maintain the transmission lines, clean up, produce the pictures, and so forth, but the truth is that we have more potential workers than there are jobs needed to generate all the crap that makes us happy. This is true in the United States certainly, where for decades, we have been able to increasingly count on automation, an endless supply of willing menial labor overseas, and plentiful oil energy to make our society go at the pace we enjoy. At some point, we could get out of the "production" mindset entirely, and finally abandon the annoying pretense of distributing wealth by "working for a living," and instead share the sort of effortless ride that the fat cats have been on for generations, without even their ulcers and burgeoning self-importance.

You know, at least for a while.

3.Soylent Green
And hey, we've already solved the challenging half the problem. One thing our--cough-cough--free market economy does pretty well now is distribute the cost of the pesky externalities. Sure there are political ramifications to oil and electronics being produced in regions that live more poorly than us consumers of them. The cost of that delicate diplomacy or that ballsy belligerence (as the case may be) doesn't come out just in the prices, but is also spread out among all of the consumers that benefit from it by other means. (Profits, of course, are another matter.) Similarly, it would be alarming if all the costs of controlling the waste streams were included in the prices of all our favorite products. (Hey, the selenium all leaches downstream, and you can't prove anything.) Can you imagine if the price of invading Iraq went into our gas tank? If the entire cost of cleaning up the shit lagoons went into our hamburger (if, in fact, we thought so far ahead as cleaning up the shit lagoons)? If the entire cost of maintaining the banking sector came only from our retirement savings? If the entire cost of our consumption came from the value of the stuff we produced?

When we hit that fantastic Star Trek apogee of labor-free production worldwide (hey, we'll still have automation), then management of natural and political resources will be the only things left to worry about, and fortunately, that social machinery is already in place. Maybe by then we'll have it pointed the right way.

4. Cake
I had a fourth short rant puttering along when I realize I'd already written it six months ago, right down to citing Doghouse Riley (who you should read in general). While I disagreed with his main point this time around, his complaints about foodie magazine pretensiousness came through loud and clear. We subscribe to a handful of these recipe magazines in Chateau Keifus, which vary in articles from endless filler variations on mashed potatoes to boutique faux-cultural items presented for your envy (I'm convinced that the "busy mom" articles are engineered to be crappier than the "summertime memories of Montalcino" spreads), profiles of unaffordable or unavailable key ingredients, the celebration of a local food culture that never leaves California, or disappears from upstate New York from October to May, to the column on how J. Random Celebrity eats better than you.

And it's reasonable to assume that the pretty people do eat more fashionably than I do: they have more cash, wider travel, and more opportunities to get tired of fine dining. There's a lot going for the skill in preparation, but I suppose you'll never get Mom's meatloaf either. Or something. The foodie-tainment industry has to strike some sort of balance there, but I don't like it when they rub in how hopelessly provincial I am.

5. Spicy Meatballs
While we're on the subject of celebrity food...

"Hey, Keifus, do you know who you look like with your hair pulled back like that?"

"Uh, no."

"Mario Batali!"

"Are you shitting me, dear? The dude is half my height, and at least twice as big around. He wears clogs. Mario Batali? You wound me."

"Well, he does have a beard. And with your hair pulled back..."

"He looks like a giant friggin' pumpkin."

"I don't know what your problem is. I'm giving you a compliment. He cooks great food."

And to be fair, doing something as well as Mario the Red appears to do is sexy. Maybe someday I'll afford to take my wife to one of his restaurants. It'll be payback for years of general relationship cluelessness.

The story might end here, but in the pretend genealogy of housecats I find myself unwillingly Marioed again, and since the children must be the parents of our cats, that leaves me, chillingly, as the grandfather, or "Grandpa Mario," as it works out, thanks to some passing resemblance to the curly proprietor of a famous Japanese-Italian plumbing and pest control firm.

"Mario? Are you kidding me? He dresses like Mickey Mouse."

God, I'm shallow.

Hunching Back: A Couple of Tangents

An online Spanish/English arts and literature magazine called Yareah--a myth-and-legend, cultural-roots sort of thing--is evidently hungry enough for material to Google certain occasional book reviewers and solicit them for contributions. They've asked to reprint my review of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in an upcoming issue (April 1). Their theme will be ugliness in literature, and after all, who's uglier than that deformed little sprout, Quasimodo? I did take the trouble to modify the review a little for their theme, but they're still getting what they paid for it.

Looking back to Hunchback, I was struck again by a couple of thoughts, stuff that didn't get expressed very thoroughly in either the new or old version...

1. The tranlation of Notre-Dame that I read I had really annoyed me with its persistent use of the archaic English "you," filling up the book with thees and thous, which to my jaded ear, reads either like a half-assed effort to recreate the speech of the middle ages, or else a clumsy attempt to recreate the original French word flow. Since I was now submitting my crappy review to a bilingual magazine, I thought I might find something clever to say about the absence of a formal second person in English, which I've never decided is a blessing (given all the people I half-know, I'd hate to wrestle with vous or tu in every single greeting--it's bad enough figuring out who to grandma-hug among the people I know intimately) or a flaw (because after all, it does take away nuance). It's my understanding that the formal second person has been falling out of favor in the Romantic languages too for some years, to the irritation of traditionalists, something on par with how no one in America (not in the decadent North anyway) addresses anyone as sir, and everyone lets kids call adults by their first names. I'd always assumed that the "thee" cognates were the dropped formal forms, abandoned on Albion a few centuries before the continent got around to ditching them. This, it turns out, is flat wrong.

The T-V distinction in English (Wikipedia tells me) originated as a singular/plural distinction, and the weight of formality that it later grew stemmed from the early French habit of turning the king into a pluralized synecdoche for authority. In other words, the respectful use of vous comes from the French royal we,* and the old English plural "ye" took on the same pattern following the Norman injection of 1066. "Thee" is the old singular form, and it came into use as the informal second person for the next 600 years. Cast thee back, varlet!

So in English, the informal/singular form is the one that eventually disappeared. The whole thing is complicated by holding on just barely long enough for Shakespeare to intermittently use it, by later bad authors of archaism, and by persistent religious use (from bible translations which adhered strictly to the singular/plural distinction, and not the informal/formal one--it's interesting that the "thee" got that dignified sense round about the time of the Reformation, reducing God to an informal invisible Buddy maybe, or alternatively enhancing the status of the singular pronoun because, hey, you don't sing how great Thou art to just anyone) which lent the singular a new assumed solemnity. In any case, Victor Hugo's speakers were using their pronouns correctly in the 1482 French sense, and I have to conclude that the nameless translator did a fine job after all.

2. There's a lot of madness lurking around within nineteenth century writing. Mental illness wasn't particularly well understood in those days, but writers tend to be good observers, and a lot of those plausible conditions of human nature can be represented without understanding the mechanics of it very much. Those Dickensian crazies really told us more about the problems of the relatively sane anyway, and what shape sanity took in a heartbreaking time that was filthy with disease, religious injunction, poverty, and death looming around every corner, but still cursed with a modicum of badly enlightened hope. I'm not 100% content with modern descriptions of brain malfunction, either. Diagnosing depression or PTSD or ADD is useful, but absent any real neurochemical understanding, the expertise is less perfect than the guys in the white coats would have you believe. Worse, those sorts of behavioral pathologies seem to get around talking to the basic horrors and absurd beauties of our existence, which, for all their faults, those Romantic-era writers had down in spades.

Putting madness on the same spectrum as physical deformity and moral ugliness fits the Romantic ideas pretty well (and I'll review Frankenstein really soon now, I promise). I'm not sure that it helped their development that these ideas were tied into (if you'll forgive my philosophical naivete) the ideas of innocence and morality that had been recently getting hashed out by the likes of Rousseau and Hobbes, whose philosophies were slowly filtering down to practice for some captive subjects in the middle of the century. Quasimodo is given to us as developmentally disabled (I should stop joking with the word "retarded," but then it's the same thing that happened to "idiot" decades ago), and inhibited cognitively by his physical handicap, which is not a bad portrayal given what limited technical understanding Hugo would have had at his fingertips. The problem is that Hugo was playing with--mostly satirizing--themes of redemption, and even giving Quasimodo a partial transformation through beauty and love seemed a little too credulous to me.

Victor Hugo wrote Notre-Dame at an interesting time in the west's understanding of mental disability. Victor, the famous wild boy of Aveyron, was discovered near Hugo's boyhood home, but the idea that he was a template for Quasimodo is evidently apocryphal. Victor (whether he was really wild or not) was taken as a case study in the Enlightenment notions of mankind's natural state, and it's not surprising that Hugo would entertain similar ideas that his own unsocialized character could graduate to the more touted human qualities through some kind of personal moral Renaissance.

In the mid-1800s, the field of mental health was growing up a little too. The idea that a scientific basis for behavior could be sought led to a greater desire to understand the nature of the handicapped. Previously, and at various times, retarded people had been taken care of in the church, as Quasimodo was, or in the community, or by the public. The thought that idiocy could be understood, categorized, or even cured in some cases, led to a spate of study in Hugo's time, and France, though home of one of the more notorious asylums, was progressive about it in those days. The inmates of Bicêtre were unchained around 1900, and Édouard Séguin, who classified idiocy into four categories based on capability,** was advocating more humane treatment for these people while Victor Hugo was still writing.

Regrettably, early brain science wasn't much up to its hoped-for task, and Séguin's humanitarian notions gave way to awful pseudosciences like phrenology and eugenics, and eventually to a return to mere custodial care for "moral degenerates", giving the science a bad name for the better part of the following century. I wonder if the still considerably qualitative nature of some kinds of brain science slows down the more substantive research, or if it damages public perception, as it did in the later nineteenth century. (Not that I'm so very on top of the state of the art. Where the hell is TenaciousK when I need him?)

(Some google finds that informed this: 1, 2, 3)

UPDATE! Study questions for non-idiots.
1. Was Charles Dickens a Romantic-era writer?
[Well, if you concentrate on "era," then I suppose he was writing at the same time as the Romantics. If you stress the "Romantic," I think he may have shared some of the sensibilities, but was not in quite the same mold. I should be more careful.]

2. For that matter, were all those Gothic horror elements (which was closer to my actual train of thought) part of of the Romantic movement?
[I'd argue yes, although maybe it's an argument that needs acknowledging, since I don't really know how serious literature people tend to view the distinction. These handful of writers I've been reading lately were all about (violation of) beauty and nature, and had all of the melodrama. And even their ugly was beautiful, really.]

3. Did Romantic writers find life's beauty an absurd, unlikely sort of beauty?
[Probably not in the way I do, although it's fair to say they were also struggling to incorporate, or just struggling against, a growing scientific understanding of nature. Bad wording, though.]

4. Didn't a revolution in psychoanalysis occur around 1900, which is, in fact, "well into the next century" after ~1850?
[Well, my criticism of psychoanlysis even now is that it's still pretty qualitative, and in the early days, basically unprovable and possibly even in pathological science territory. But there's a lot of prejudice in that statement, and I don't really have the first clue how the Freud boys dealt with the more obviously physiology-based cognitive problems.

I don't feel too bad about more modern classification of behavior patterns based on observation, and I think categorization of them is more or less useful, although it still loosk pretty qualitative. What little I read now of cutting-edge brain science seems like a different world than these earlier twentieth-century views, even from only a couple decades ago, and also a lot more like actual science than all those behaviorist experiments I remember reading about in that one psychology class.]



* I really should have titled that post "The Royal Wii." Dammit.
** Not those four, Dave.

Domesticity

"Alas! Why does man boast of of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders them more necessary beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free..."
--Mary Shelley, in Frankenstein.

Currently, my cat Fartknocker (photo pending my getting around to iton the right) is under quarantine. Her sentence: 45 days in the oubliette. Her only crime: losing a fight with an unknown animal. Yes, it's harsh, but we don't accept that kind of failure at castle Keifus, not when such woeful lack of vigilance imperils us all. Now you might argue that this is really a result of my lack of vigilance, you know, letting that rabies vaccine get a month past due, not to mention the sort of vigilant husbandry that leads me to prefer random outdoor turds to cleaning the catbox every week (okay, yelling at the kids to clean the catbox every week, but what I'm trying to say is that it's Hard Work), but really, she should have known better. She should have been tougher than that.

And it's not like I'm not suffering here. I have to be the warden. Not once, but twice a day, I must crack the door to the dungeon (formerly our downstairs bathroom) and demonstrate my god-like powers to this lesser creature. I control the sun: a flick of my wrist, and it's day or it's night. I control the presence of food and (if I remember make sure the toilet lid is down) the supply of water, each brought in as mysterious bounty from the hypothetical spaces beyond the shadowy cave. I administer horrible potions as punishment for Pumpkin's uncomprehended sins, and bear moist treats as my arbitrary reward.

The cat, I'll add, loves me, or at least she is always happy to hear the warden scrape his rusty keys on the lock. She meows plaintively at the door sometimes, but she always bursts out with uncharacteristic affection when I push my body through. I dose her, pet her briefly, and then present the reward. (Incidentally, cat food labels are a new source of amusement to me. They all contain pretty much the same meat by-products with that same thick chemical nose, but they're packaged as individualized wholesome gourmet fare, reinterpreted in a peculiar cat-food-label advertising patois. And I keep wondering: who the fuck is swayed by cat food laced with "garden greens"? Whenever my cats have eaten greens, garden or otherwise, it's always required cleanup.) Often, guilt will extend my visit, but much as the little creature loves me, when she's given the choice between my affection and Mariner's Catch Salmon Dinner Now With More Savory Chunks, it's always the latter she prefers. Similarly, she'll inevitably scramble for Turkey and Giblets Classic Pâté instead of the looming freedom of the open door. I am sure that Fartknocker is being transformed, through boredom and regiment, into an institutional cat, which, frankly, is part of the plan. Soon, she'll be unable to make it on the outside. I understand that prison life can do that to you.

My cat's decision to bolt for the dish instead of the door is stupid, but in the greater sense, I think it reflects her species' relatively high intelligence. It takes some element of higher thought to accept training (even if the system is based on visceral punishments and rewards), and if Pumpkin isn't sharp enough to weigh the long-term benefits of increased freedom against the short-term thrill of highly processed meat animals, then the fact that she can anticipate results and modify her behavior according to those imagined connections tells me she's operating on a higher plane than, say, a hamster that chews through the walls of his cage to rut.

It takes an extra crinkly cortex to be able to drown out those survival and pleasure impulses, that collection of urges which is rather condescendingly called our animal nature. I don't recall if J. M. Coatzee covered this angle, but animals clearly have a spark of cognition too, and the poor beasts most capable of an anthropomorphic-style self-control are the same ones that can suffer the misfortune of being domesticated. Creatures which had heretofore evolved just fine into hunting and scavenging machines, content with the pack or the herd, sniffing assholes with happy abandon, they met man, and sadly let that silly upright quadruped twist their simpler minds toward his own. The beasts continue to suffer under a generations-long experiment to be bred and broken for our consumption, companionship, and entertainment. They live dependent lives, and learn to trade the dignity of their own species for behaviors that will please their masters, or else suffer the oubliette. And for what gain? A rationed taste of Fisherman's Platter with Brown Rice and Garden Greens?

As an institutional man myself, I'm sympathetic to their plight, even if my balls aren't literally cut off. It may seem that I'm comforting myself--okay, martyring myself--with the idea that my lofty capacity to reason, that the majestic mind which puts me so far above the brutes, is the source of my quotidian misery, that it's my evolutionary pinnacle that suffers me to the life of a bespectacled desk jockey, but that is not the case. No, brains are good, but it's the defiency of our impulsive nature that's the problem here, at least when it comes to hunger thirst and desire (I still find brute violence to be terribly overrated, damn that rational mind), and, of course, freedom. And for us poor domesticated bastards? Well, there's still the cat to keep us company.

The Royal Wii

[formerly titled, Family Time with the No-Friend-O]

At some point recently, I mentioned that I wish I had more time for video games. It was a lie. Well, not a lie, but not really true either. I crave the opportunity for distraction, but I'm ambivalent to offer up yet another hour of my precious breathing time to the unflinching gaze of the big glass basilisk in my living room (the one in my office is obviously another matter), not unless it's entertaining enough to face addiction over. My relationship with gaming is sporadic--now and then something will grab me and I'll immerse myself in that virtual world at some extended leisure--but the finitude of experience hangs over me like a gigantic fantasy sword. Games feel like a healthy distraction for a while, and, if it's the right kind of game, good enough, the pleasure turns to a sincere focus, and then, before very long really, it's an unrelenting quest to probe the pixellated secrets of the game writers, and with enough time and nervous lip-trembling sweat, I can find gratitude, satisfaction of the weighted sort that leaves my sorry person spent and more than a little bit disgusted at the wasted hours, and chastened, packing away the whole damn console to moulder unloved into a couple generations of obsolescence before I start to miss the experience again. So yeah. Gaming.

I am, of course, in the middle of a binge right now, which is just one reason for the posting lull. I find myself scouring the world of Hyrule for its hidden elfin treasures for the second time in 20-odd years. Twiffer will tell you that the original Legend of Zelda was the perfect video game, and it's hard to disagree with take on that. Zelda had exactly the right combination of scope, pacing, charm, engaging puzzles and amusing cartoon violence. I have fond memories of taking contested turns on my buddy's (Jay's) NES, pushing imaginary boulders and striking out with a pudgy sword at bats and monsters, stinking up his family room with popcorn farts and unwashed teenage B.O.. (Good times.) Zelda is still going, and the newest Nintendo console gave us Twilight Princess three years ago, and it's like I'm playing the exact same game, but now with incredible backgrounds and smooth 3-D effects (on a TV screen worthy of a spoiled modern adult), surprisingly intuitive control from those silly Wii remotes (swordfights!), and a complicated and fun assortment of gizmos to address the many minor-league brain teasers. It even has red-assed monkeys, and I think we'll all agree that there is no higher humor to be found in the natural world.

Now you may think that video gaming, taking on a single-player quest epic, is a selfish act. Not so. Most of my hobbies (playing music, blogging) are annoying to the other people in the house, representative of supsiciously independent thought, which must be relegated to my private hour or two a week, driven off to the porch or to the after hours, or else stolen. When I pick up Zelda, however, it's different. The family hushes as I swagger over to the front of the screen, and unfold my chair placing in the middle of the empty space, carefully aligning my position with the sensor bar. C. scuttles over to the gadget basket and fishes out the remote, enjoying a second of interaction, calling up the game screen, loading the file, before she relinqueshes it to me. I think she's the only one that gets the tinge of injustice from this situation, and it's transitory. Well, she's the only other one. I feel like a self-conscious king in the middle of the room, propped up in my throne, waving my arms around like a buffoon, dressed up in robes and displayed for entertainment. My wife pours a glass of wine and sets it at my side. As one, we breathe deeply and accept the warnings against seizures. It's not like they've gotten us yet.

C. is the least inhibited, and has a gift, if you want to call it that, for color commentary. Normally she goes through her day tamping down that monologue that's flying by at ninety miles an hour even when she's not speaking, and when Link starts jogging across the screen, she turns into my little John Madden, complete with non-sequiturs, obvious points, savoring her own contribution, and nostalgia for the game (which we've been playing for all of two weeks now). "Oh Daddy, do you remember when I said you'd get two claw shots? Remember when I told you where to look for the heart container? Ha ha. That was good. Lookout daddy, lizard men! Aww, he hit you..." She gets genuinely sad when the cartoon avatar falls off the bridge for the tenth time in a row. As for my wife, I turn to her and ask if she really wants me to play. She nods affirmative, every time. I realize it's entertainment for her too, but when she's yelling at the screen, it's not at some football player in another state, it's me, right here. "You going to let him hit you like that? Move! Go there!." It reminds me a lot of driving, actually. My other child, M., cracks jokes. I love her.

Zelda is as fun as ever, but there's an awful lot of pressure to perform, and it's thrusting me square in a role I've spent my adult life understanding the injustice of. It hypnotizes my children, makes my wife yell at me, and makes my ass hurt. And yeah, I know what I'm doing when I get home. I can sense C. batting her eyes at me even now. "Daddy, will you play Zelda tonight?"

Review: The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson

The Devil in the White City arcs through the life of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair--the white city--from conception to abandonment, and follows it along with the story of the first big serial killer to emerge from the nation's headlines. It's non-fiction, but it's told in the human scale of a novel, not presuming quite so far as to invent dialogue and carry on with the narrative authority of an novelist--it's not fair to call it fictionalized but it does develop the story with some familiar thematic elements, in a fashion that reads like a plot advanced through the usual means of witnessing human conversations and travel, and revealed in descriptive passages of what a narrator might have seen were he present. When possible, he includes actual first-hand impressions, from letters or diaries, and this fills out the details pretty nicely. The prose styling felt a little too conscious to me, Larson peppers in some undergraduate-level wordplay here and there, and it reads a little like a weekend news magazine piece, but it's not meant to be a deep meaningful novel, and fine for what it is (and it's not like I don't sympathize).

I think he's got a bigger problem with filling out the character of the serial killer, one (pseudonymous) H. H. Holmes. He admits (his notes are very considerate) that he took some liberties about Holmes' motivations and mannerisms, basing it largely on modern criminology. And that's just it: pretty much anyone who's read a mystery novel, watched a movie about one of these monsters, or cringed at yet another expert profiler (like a police psychic, but with university credentials) offered as a resident experts by an ever-hungry news cycle exploiting the horror du jour, and you sort of realize that even if this Holmes guy coughed up the first sick nugget, this is still the exact same vein of twisted criminal psychology that's been artistically mined for a hundred years now, readily identified even to someone like me who normally goes far to avoid this kind of crap.

And Larson had an opportunity to make him something different too, maybe something scarier, because this was one industrious psychopath, a man who carefully worked in a crematorium and laboratory space within the hotel and retail space he creepily and inexpertly engineered. The views of the facilities got to me a lot more than the customary(!) psychological portrayal of a mass murderer. In terms of a physician's curiosity he was not really that far afield from the popular concept of the ghoulish efforts of the earlier Victorian medicos, with the important caveat that Holmes hastened the cadavers to his studio. He couldn't have been good at it, and here I'm left wondering what lies this sick motherfucker told himself as he donned the apron. His amorality and his obsession were the scary parts; his oily smoothness and whatever frisson he might have attained from a murder was less convincing, absorbing too much from popular research. I am not grateful for imagining these things.

I'll give Larson some credit, though: the horrifying spectacle of our first signature serial killer seems to grab something essential about late nineteenth century America, as does the sensation of the 1893 fair. The world's fair, chock-a-block with corporate exposition, artificial landscapes, Bowdlerized history, inaccurate ethnicity, and engineered marvels, feels like it's catching the modern American mindset at its source. It's like the lies we told ourselves were fresh enough to be charming, a fake paradise designed with real integrity. Reading about the world's fair is like witnessing the arrival of a beautiful throwaway culture developed before injection molding made it reproducible and ubiquitous. We get a great tour of the architectural and engineering* talent of the day, all management and salesmen with big ideas and an eye toward the grand. It took big imagination, persistence, and a hell of a work ethic, pulled off at great expense and just in time. People a hundred years from now will doubtlessly be curious about our quaint optimism about, say, the digital age, and marvel how it belies the horrors of our time. They'll see their own culture in here too.

The fitting counterpoint to the ideal of the white city was, of course, the dismal squalor of urban life, the reeking stockyards and fever and coal dust (which, I'll add, Larson portrays very effectively). To the theatrical fact of the fair, the criminal is a fine juxtaposition. I can't believe that this was the first serial murderer our country housed, but his was the first case to grow into a modern media circus, and probably the first such case to really get absorbed and solved. Maybe, oddly enough, it was a function of the growing value of life.


* And what the hell, here's Ferris and Roebling, and no mention of the college that positively owned nineteenth century engineering?

Housing Recovery

On the radio yesterday, I listened to snips of President Obama's speech about housing recovery. NPR had a streak of reports from boom towns now gone bust, and the president gave his speech from the home-flipping mecca of Phoenix AZ, offering a plan in which the banks would be forced to finance so that monthly payments don't exceed a third of gross income. Sounds like an entire circle of hell might fight over the details of that one, but it's possibly an equitable out.

(You know, I live in an unloved little burbclave too, and even paying a fifteen year mortgage in a pricey region I never quite got to a third of my net income. It was by choice, and it's why I don't live in a bigger house or in an even pricier region, as my means are not exorbitant. I still wonder: what the hell do all the palace dwellers do for a living?)

Anyway, it occurred to me that at least part of the problem is that there was suburban sprawl booming in waterless places like Phoenix. Is that a development model that's particlularly wise to recover? Probably not so much. Then I read this today, and it depressed the hell out of me.

American Idol Season 8

First of all, let's get the yearly apology back on the table, and then out of the way. I hate the show: it's transparently manipulative, it highlights an awfully narrow (and frequently awful) spectrum of musical taste, and the only judge that's not a simpering retard is the production genius that brought us Il Divo. Since, however, 3/4 of my household is comprised of young girls and moms--the precision demographic of the show--there's no escaping the chugging dawgs and the paint-peeling glory notes, not at that volume, and really, talking about it is my minor act of subversion. I've tried to follow Vote for the Worst, but it doesn't strike quite the right groove for me… I think I'm still a little itchy from last year's marathon Idol conversation with the excellent company on quiblit.

I watched this year's buildup of young talents, and the most remarkable thing about the pre-singing episodes is that they're really letting the talented clowns shine this year, going all the way to the feature stage, while downplaying the truly pitiable. As a captive audience, I support this both for it's entertainment value, and it's reduced malice (people really delude themselves, and AI scores ratings on humiliating them--someday I'll post a heartfelt lament for all of us untalented dreamers). From the show's perspective, I suspect that they want to send the message that yes, they need freaks and drama queens of ambiguous sexuality to show up and be exploited, but no, they're not what "America" wants. (Unless, of course, it is. After meddling in "country," "rock," and "soul," maybe they're now fishing for the next Fallout Boy or something).

Anyway, even with a few quality nutbars in the wings, Tatiana Del Toro with her starry-eyed neediness and her infectious SpongeBob-like giggle is already missed. But the thing is, Tatiana actually has singing talent, and she was a lot less painful to watch on the stage than that stumbling tuneless troll Michael Sarver, whose only talent appears to be the fact that he's really white. And a roughneck. On a real Texas oil rig. They have some kind of wildcard round this year, so maybe the judges will allow Tati to re-emerge in her scary, hungry glory. Anoop ("Noopsy") Desai also lost to Mikey Roughneck because he doesn't fall into a ready American ethnic stereotype. Also because the song he sang was boring as shit. He has a good voice though, and he seems nice, and he's been pimped madly by the judges, and I take this to mean he is sure to get wildcarded, even if they have to cheat.

A couple of teenagers were disposed of last night too, deservedly. One of them sang "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic" because it's so fun and uplifting, not that childish disconnection from the material is always a deal-breaker on this show. The thing about Sting (who now joins Whitney Houston on the AI verboten vocal list) is that he can't really sing, but in spite of this, he's able to communicate the emotion of the music, which is at least sometimes interesting. Our young tart got it wrong from both angles.

I've already forgotten the name of the girl who sang "Natural Woman," but I think she got a bad deal from the judges. I don't pretend to have a good ear, but her singing really felt like it clicked into the music, which I identify as a sign of good pitch and good time, and while it may not have been a star performance by any means, given the flailing of the other eleven, I felt that singing pleasantly in key should have counted for something in the judges' comments. In the car I was thinking how "Natural Woman" is to soul what "Whipping Post" is to rock or country. Would you ever want to hear anyone to a simple, straight take (smiling smugly, fingers snapping jauntily) on that one?

Finally, at what point did Danny Gokay turn into one of a pair of undertalented not-gay nerds (he looks like the creepy progeny of Robert Downey Jr. and Bud Bundy) to the next sure thing? (And why does my wife love the guy?) I know he's got a sob story, but his style is mediocre, and even though he sang better on Tuesday than I'd heard him before, I still don't want to hear him again. And . I thought the producers where playing him up so that he could face his best friend in a sing-off, but it looks like he's an anointed contender. Judging from the people who passed through, it's going to be a long dull season of this terrible show.

Review: U.S.A., by John Dos Passos.

U.S.A. is Dos Passos' landmark trilogy, containing The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money, and although they've been sold in omnibus editions at various points in their publication history, I bought each one separately. Now, I consider myself too old to fall for the trilogy scam: I read to slowly for one thing, and I'm just too damn judgemental to suffer an author who can't decide how to market his bloated epic. Write one book or write three, dammit. But anyway, this isn't formula fiction and U.S.A. is epic enough as it stands to bustle its way into timelessness. It feels almost like a Western War and Peace, a tale of class struggle honoring the oppressed but expressed lengthily through the intersecting lives of sympathetic middling elites, this one full of obnoxious quick-talking (quicktalking) American verve. It was, at a minimum, engaging enough to break my rule of reading the same author sequentially, which, given Dos Passos' technique of breaking the book into stylistically different sections, it half feels like I'm doing anyway, even in one book. Stupid rules.

The bulk of U.S.A. follows the characters, a rat-a-tat exercise in plotting, drawing them from childhood through their adult lives, a miniature life story pulled quickly this way and then that, actions and consequence, ongoing. What the plot narration lacks in introspection, Dos Passos brings out in a long series of highly subjective snapshot segments, "The Camera Eye," closeups of what are presumably his own experiences told in a kind of freely structured prose, heavy on perceptions. (Heavily influenced by Joyce, I understand, but can't personally assert. The Camera Eyes are not challenging to follow.) I find some resonance in this approach, it captures the dynamic of early memories, images and feelings caught in time, both lucid and dreamlike. Here and there a detail sneaks out of these restless memories into the general plot, which is interesting, but not so frequently done as to write an easy thesis about it. He reserves his more obvious social commentary for another separate section, a series of snapshots of historical figures, painted tragically, lovingly, with contempt or irony. These figures lead more stable and pointed lives than do his various characters. "Newsreel" is the fourth running segment, short sections made up of song lyrics, newspaper clippings, and headlines pasted together into bits of found art, which sometimes informs the story clearly and sometimes vaguely, and generally gives the external context of confusing stuff happening all around. I enjoyed the Newsreel segments a good deal, and they'd be a fun motif to adopt in a short format like this one (much as I try to avoid being topical), in the modern wash of low-quality information.

What the U.S.A. trilogy conspicuously lacks is a discursive narrative heavy on analysis, on interpretation, on assumed significance, on romancing the horrors and the joys of the human condition. Even the introspective sections don't appear to go after any deep parallels, and whether Dos Passos was attempting to reveal a grand arc with all of small pieces is really what kept me reading until the end. Leisurely descriptions are also missing from these novels, although short serviceable ones abound. (It's interesting to read the characters describe one another differently, for example.) There's a solid sense of place that evolves, which almost surprises me, and many places get highlighted, a good fraction of which I've visited. Dos Passos takes us through industrial Connecticut, suburban Washington DC, Seattle,* Chicago, California, Paris, Miami, Pittsburgh, and while New York City is frequently featured, it's blessedly not the center of the universe, and as a canonical experience, farm life is (thankfully enough) completely neglected. There is humor, although not much, and it's delivered in small patches like everything else. If Dos Passos' Wildean quips felt sort of tortured, he was in his amusing element when he let the plot and dialogue unwind with a quick-spoken huckster's absurdity. The sense of time is most poignant, and it wasn't lost on me that this is my great-grandparents' generation. The survivors of U.S.A. would have been checking out just as I was checking in. Tag.

Considering Dos Passos' abrupt sort of plot exposition, the length of it is impressive. Stuff happens, and then it keeps happening. I started out really digging the short-story-ness of this approach, motivation and character economically dispensed with, and then scenes unfolding and closing like a life does (and as quickly). After a few iterations, this mode of exposition gave an impression of a mixed-and-matched set of plotlines, tracking a life through a sympathetic childhood to a disagreeable adulthood, going through some benchmarks in between: young impressions, walking out on the home, making friends, drinking, having sex, business success, drinking, dealing with unwanted pregnancy and/or closeted homosexuality, and eventually getting older. When the lines start interacting with one another, it's actually surprising, it seemed till then that the intent had been to present slices of so many unrelated lives, and if that trick is bordering on tiresome by the middle of 1919 (when everyone is in Paris somehow), it grew interesting again as the third novel progressed, as if he were looking, like I said, for a broad point as similar life events got repeated under evolving circumstances.

Ultimately I see the trilogy as a critique of the times. People have similar impulses, and the scope of their consequences is directed by external stimuli, and it's the latter, the external, which Dos Passos is really commenting on here. The 42nd Parallel features bright young people making their way, following their short-term desires, and if there are ideals tied up in their motivations, they are more tied to their upbringing or their character than to any universal good. Though it's clear where the author's sympathies lie, their ups and downs aren't governed by anything more than their own shallow decisions, and for all the bad times, the trend is upward in the first third. It's weird--really weird--that we see so little of the war, but the war still feels like a turnaround. Some characters suffer more tragically (almost in a conventional literary way). History gets warped as a consequence of the conflict, and importantly to Dos Passos, the Labor movement becomes more critical and (he appears to hope) adversarial. By The Big Money, some of the big events are hitting the character's lives in an obvious fashion, there's influenza now killing people on screen, and the lives lived in the boom twenties brings are larger, the self-destruction is deeper into society and more personally deadly to the people we're supposed to relate to. We see, by the end, shots of hopeless mine-town squalor, and of idealists getting beaten down and shot. We see a movement rise, which I'll tell you, is impossible to advocate in historical hindsight. But it's a subtle picture that emerges from the whole, put together almost like a mosaic of similar pieces, and it's an epic one.







* For the first several entries, it felt like Dos Passos was following me around, and there are enough O'Higginses, Higgenbothams, and Higginses sneaking around in the margins to make me positively paranoid.

Drunkard's Walk: Ten Short Thoughts

1. More digital age obsolescence: Cars, at least until recently, still got sold listing AM/FM radio (yup, frequency modulated signals processed at no extra charge) and tape decks, and while I'm aware that you can get modern car audio at a premium, I am not willing to pay for it. It was a shock that my '06 had come so far as to include a CD player standard. I don't want the fucking bluetooth, nor do I want to drop an extra hundred bucks (forty more than my beloved little MP3 player) on that broadcaster that sends signal to my radio, but Jesus, let's ease the transition here. It strikes me that it would be a simple engineering matter to add one of those TRS style audio jacks that have been around since forever, and which every pocket audio device has sported for the last 30 years as a headphone connector. In a sane world, I could just use my car stereo as an amplifier for whatever, without necessitating hundreds of dollars of electronics in between. Is it not expensive enough a solution to add on every car radio? It'd sure make me happy.

2. Warpaint: When the Black Crowes' seventh CD came out last year, and some hack at Maxim took the opportunity to unload his pent up opinions about the band without wasting the time to listen to it, I totally put the album on my to-buy list. Naturally, it took awhile. Admittedly, the project is not terribly inspired: the tracks have the casual brio of a talented hippie-party jam band, and compared to Shake Your Money Maker, the whole thing sounds a little...optional. But still. Criticizing them for knocking off the Rolling Stones? I am pretty sure that the Rolling Stones (not even mentioning their more embarrassing efforts) are not even aware that you can put so many instruments in a band, and tired as the Robinsons may be, when they play the bluesy, weed-baked, countrified rock songs, it sounds like they're at least vaguely in tune with wherever it is they came from.

3. Via IOZ (and recycling my comment): I don't know much about running companies, but from my passing association with certain kinds of nerds, I'm pretty sure that Carly Fiorina is the reason why people now say "Hewlett ...what?". But at least you could call her an economic expert by dint of some ruinous joyrides through corporate America. What have George Will, Cokie Roberts, Sam Donaldson, or George Stephanopolous ever fucking done or learned? Check out the video. Paul Krugman looks like the tired foodie ringer they put in with the actors and celebrities that for unknown reasons make up the Iron Chef judging panels. At least there, people don't live and die by culinary art.

4. But let's not get carried away: But then, I don't fully accept economics anyway. No matter how furiously you model, how clever your mathematical simulations, even if you uncover some amazing truths about behavior in the ensemble, no matter how interesting it is, or how useful, and even if it can be an excellent approximation, economics ain't quite dealing with natural law. (Uh, probably.) How much people will pay for stuff is not, at the bottom of it all, a fact--it's an opinion. And let's face it, people's opinions tend to be stupid.

5. Anyway, we're still damned if we do: Speaking of economics, the new bailout is super (if you're creating money, then let's print a little for everyone) and so are green jobs, and maybe you can even change some of the deeply held public opinions about our relationship with energy (not that that's the intention), which would be awesome. But you can't trump physics with enthusiasm. No amount of legislated work projects is going to circumvent the usual conservation laws. If we're lucky, we'll keep ourselves from going too far or too quickly down the other side of the peak (and maybe economics will slow it naturally, provided we don't all lose the public faith), and maybe if we're far luckier than we deserve, we'll buy enough time for nuclear fusion to come on line or some such shit, but let's not pretend we're not limited by the rapidly disappearing black ooze. This is the second-biggest reason I hate American politicians, by the way, and if Obama's less aggravating than most of them, then, well, he's still going to molest my children sometime down the line. Maybe keeping up the infrastructure that connects the burbs with easy highway access shouldn't be the first priority going forward.

6. Bad Graphs: That said, while I buy into some version of peak oil, there are good and bad arguments going on there. The charts are famous enough, and it's easy to grasp how regional production peaks and then tails (pace Dr. Hubbert), and to picture that fact against how much many regions are still likely to be out there (e.g.). On the other hand, graphs that pretend to pinpoint the dramatic peak have to make their point by extrapolating heavily, and should therefore be regarded with caution. Penciling a line that tanks starting, always, one year from now (some more egregiously than others) is particularly inelegant. I believe you in the general sense, so please stop going out of your way to look like you're lying.

7. Spelling America with a 'K' are we?: Reading John Dos Passos (link forthcoming) got me thinking about the timing of anti-Communist sentiment in America. It Anti-Labor feelings had settled in pretty hard before the Great War, and a good historian would probably catalogue the movement as a response to conditions following the good ole industrial revolution, an answer to the new aristocracy and the condition of the filthy underpaid masses that grew out of those innovative times. Anti-communismlabor was, naturally enough, the response of that aristocracy, of the political and economic power. The Bolsheviks across the sea were hated by authority well before they earned it, and although they were conceived as anti-Capitalist, the notion of resisting Soviet geographic expansion came about somewhat later. That the Communist revolutions turned out to generate their own tyrants, that Communism turned into a competitor for big global authority...it all would be sort of funny if it weren't for the millions dead.

8. Last bit of radicalism, I promise: And you know, as a good technical guy (bourgoisie by way of Sallie Mae), I'm not a huge fan of labor unions, I'm unimpressed by their leadership, and have been occasionally miffed by their (okay: media-exaggerated) demands. If bad business practices must be countered with organization, then I still don't cherish the idea of yet another numbnut garnishing my wages in the name of alleged representation. This morning, WBUR's media analyst (now there's a job) John Carroll, showcased some ads on either side of the Employee Free Choice Act, featuring caricatures of both Labor and Corporate bosses, and I felt tempted to acknowledge a truth that might lie somewhere in between, if just this once. But if Communism was a disaster, limited Socialism didn't seem to tank Western Europe, and on a national or corporate level, either economic model can serve its people well or poorly enough. Democracy may be a bulwark against tyranny, but it's a temporary and often marginal one. The bottom line is not the vote and it's not the economic model--it's really more what we're conditioned, by ourselves and by experience, to expect. (You know, in the aggregate. I don't think any of us can just will our job back, at least if we don't work in marketing.) That can be changed in rare instances, sometimes surprisingly, and within some constraints, and for sure, it can be supressed.

9. Thought experiment: It's hard for humans to avoid identifying with one another according to sex or tribe, but the average opinion seems to be a little bit malleable vis a vis inclusivity. I'd argue that with some good marketing, and without longstanding systemic barriers (slavery, complicated pregnancy, and a good justification for the division of labor come to mind--admittedly I'm talking a sort of frictionless spherical social paradigm here), racism and sexism would likely relax to some inclusive equilibrium within the American tribe, such as it is. Unfortunately, homogenization still appears to be an ugly, generations-long process, walking toward uniformity according to some slow-ass rate law, a few hundred million individually diffusive events, human bumping into human. In this experiment, I think sexism would let go of its hold on public opinion sooner than racism. Why? Because we all have at least one parent that's of the opposite gender. (We could outgrow racism the same way of course, but I haven't had the nerve to even mention the Bulworth plan to my wife.)

10. My tribe didn't even make the playoffs: I'm rooting for the Steelers next week because it reinforces my long-held notion that the Arizona Cardinals are a clown factory of football, a perennially laughable franchise where stars go to underperform, and where playoffs are best viewed from a drunken self-loathing stupor. And it's not that it should have been so much different this year, with a 9-7 record going in, but, like, there they are. It took getting to the conference championship to match the win record of the New England Patriots. Now there may be some irony to take this position as a New England fan--you want to talk about your decades of quasi-football--but I point out that the Pats earlier Super Bowl appearances (even under that douchebag Parcells) were hard to imagine too back then too. On purely aesthetic grounds, if this be Arizona's 1997, then the world remains fathomable. I can live with however well or poorly they perform afterwards.

Layered Roasted Goodness

It's not a good week when you come home too tired to drink. It's depressing when you're so damned important that by Thursday, you've already suffered through three late lunches with the boss, and skipped the fourth. Job security in tough times, sure, but if I really must work, then the whole enterprise is a lot more bearable when I have my daily allotted hour to hole up in my office and eat the food I cook as I dejectedly denote my inconsequence.

So all week, my fabulous leftovers--roasted vegetable lasagna--have been gathering mold in the nasty, crowded corporate fridge while I scarf free sandwiches on the fly. The original recipe below comes from my wife's chef, as a rough outline. It's one of those where the exact quantities are sort of flexible, at least as far as satisfaction goes, but we're still working out some of the ratios to get the flavors and textures we like best.

Roasted vegetables are one of those food items that are just great, so use a lot of them. Almost anything becomes distinctive and delicious when roasted, even things most people tend to hate. Roasted Brussels sprouts rule, as do roasted turnips. My Dad grew up with a special loathing for parsnips until Wifey and I roasted them for him. If you start out with something that everyone already loves, onions say, then you roast them then the result is heavenly. For the recipe, I go with most carrots, onions, and mushrooms, fewer parsnips, turnips, maybe a little Brussels sprouts or fennel or green beans or sweet potatoes if they're kicking around. I recommend avoiding red peppers, or none at all--at least if you want taste anything else--and zucchini works, but it's not my favorite. Generally, I roast them at 350^o for an hour or so, but if you're cooking something else, you can do in whatever oven. Here, it doesn't really matter if they're crispy.

As for eggplant, I'm not, as a rule, a fan, but when you process it enough it enough to abolish the spongy mouthfeel and infuse it something like taste, then, hey, it's fine. My favorite eggplant preparations roast it to goo and then flood it with savory goodness. Someday (soon, if I keep finding nothing to say), I'll post a recipe for Indian "eggplant mush," which is where the idea of grilling whole eggplant comes from. Just poke a few holes in the skin so it doesn't explode, and then cook the whole squash over low heat on your covered Charmglow. (If it's January, you can do it in the oven with veggies, but there won't be that slight smoky taste.) It'll get soft inside and a little burnt on the outside, and that's when it can be most convinced to be delicious.

This lasagna recipe has no tomatoes, by the way, and a good amount of pasta, and it doesn't ever come out like soup. It's not as starchy as it sounds, and it tastes wonderful. Here's a recipe for approximately one large and one smaller lasagna.

Roated Vegetable Lasagna:
- about 4 cookie sheets worth of vegetables (carrots, onions, mushrooms mostly, and whatever else you like), cut up into ~3/4' chunks and spread in a single layer
- 3 good-sized eggplants
- 2 lb. marscapone cheese
- 3 lb. fresh mozzerella, sliced or grated as best you can (I get the soft packaged logs usually, but real fresh mozz is surely better. Whatever you do, don't buy the bagged shredded crap, not for this.)
- about 1 cup fresh grated paremsan cheese
- stale bread or dry breadcrumbs
- lasagna noodles (you know, "enough" noodles. Two boxes, maybe, I forget.)
- olive oil, salt, fresh pepper

Toss the vegetables in oil, salt and pepper, and spread them on their pans. Prick the eggplant. Roast the vegetables and grill (or roast) the eggplant, as discussed above--the veggies are done when they're a little black and crispy on the outside (and you can't stop putting them in your moth); they'll shrink a lot. About halfway through, turn or toss them (they'll stick to the sheets a little, which is fine), turn the eggplant every once in a while too. The eggplant are done when they're soft. Do this in advance and let the eggplant cool. Set out the marscapone too and let it come to room temperature, so it's spreadable.

Peel the eggplant and dump the pulp in a food processor. Add the parmesan and some bread/breadcrumbs. Process, adding bread until the mixture is firm but spreads easily.

Cook the noodles until almost done. (Usually, I leave them in the water and let it cool a little, pulling them out with tongs as I nee them: a venial sin probably.)

To assemble the lasagna, drizzle a little olive oil on the bottom, then place a full layer of noodles. (I leave a little extra noodle going up the sides, for the first layer anyway.) On top of this, I spread some marscapone, layer some mozzarella, then more noodles, then the eggplant spread, then the vegetables, then noodles, etc. I try to get two whole rotations. The top is a layer of noodles, and on that, I distribute more mozzarella over it all, maybe add a couple twists of pepper.

[You can prep this on Sunday, by the way, and leave it in the refrigerator to cook during the week. I freeze the second lasagna, and then thaw and cook it during a less enthusiastic food week.]

Bake the assembled lasagna at 325 ^o for an hour. The top will get a little crispy, but since there's relatively little liquid, you don't need to let it rest very long before you serve it. Dig in.

Five More Thoughts, LCD Ed.

1. I join the digital age, whining all the way
I know I talk a big game about the evils of consumerism, but the truth of the matter is that I really enjoy my technological comforts, and as such, I'm willing to devote some small fraction of my undeserved paycheck for the purposes of entertainment. My desire to get a flat television was actually less to bow before the alter of the great glass-eyed Polyphemus (I kid, please put that stick down), and more to float that gigantic old blown-speakered CRT box off the floor of my tiny living room. Like a good American, I got a big TV with all the latest available interfaces, which, unsurprisingly, is pushing my aging video equipment into obselescence, but if I ever get a signal that's good enough for this television, I tell you, it's going to be awesome.

So far, my biggest gripe is the aspect ratio. Naively anticipating cinematic film viewing and football games with enough resolution to pick out chipped teeth, I quickly discovered that all of my cable and DVD content is broadcast in 4:3 aspect ratio. Even the "widescreen" content coming from my cable and my two DVDs is still spaced 4:3 and keeps those letterbox stripes, which ends up giving me a box all around the picture, which in the end is about the same image as on my old TV. For the lo-res widescreen stuff, I can get fiddle the settings around to make it to fill the screen with approximately the right proportion, but it's imperfect (top and bottom edges cut off), and it's kind of a pain in the ass. When blown up, it acquires texture too, like a film projected onto burlap. Although the unit has some preset settings for different viewing environments (not to mention plenty of extra buttons on the remote), there's evidently no way to customize them, nor to toggle quickly between them.

To get signals that are meant fit in the viewing box, it looks like I need to spring for blu-ray or for HD cable, which I'm sure is part of the marketing plan. I half suspect they're intentionally blurring any picture riding an old style feed. And yet I'm sure I don't care to spend any more money to boast an additional six inches of picture. Damn you, Samsung.

2. The Wire, Season 1
Now that I have something to watch stuff on, I opted into a Netflix free trial to find out what all the stuff was about. I've seen The Wire advertised as the best show ever, the sort of thing that (to paraphrase some commenter somewhere) art historians will review centuries from now, and deem, disregarding everything else that has wandered pixellated space, to have made the invention of the medium worth it. Or at least good enough to justify owning a TV. Some praise. I decided to check it out.

And let's be clear, I could've cared less if I ever saw another police procedural. Opening up, here's yet another charismatic-but-rough-around-the-edges white guy in what looks to be the lead, putting in long hours, bending the rules for the sake of the case. I mean really, is police detecting such an all-encompassing job? Really the sort of thing that pulls in the top analytical (and intuitive) talent, staffing an assortment of geniuses that's willing to scrape every stain, yank every file, bend every rule for the sake of an infallible personal sense of public Justice? How much does a detective even get paid, anyway? I'm watching the first episode of The Wire, and I'm thinking, wow, it's the same old crap with bonus office politics. Cop drama written by Aaron Sorkin with a humorectomy. A first impression mind you: it took the introduction of the unlovable crowd of incompetents to warm me up to the environment of the cop shop, and the thin, human line the writers drew between the police competence and the actual underworld made it suddenly more interesting. I'm leaning toward buying in, at least for the sake of enjoying the drama. (But still, if the competent multiracial policewoman isn't (a) killed (b) a victim of violent crime or (c) addicted to drugs by the end of the first season, then I don't know television writing.)

The setting in the projects is more engaging from the get-go, even if they'll leave no metaphor untortured. (Will I ever see that chess set again?) We quickly find young murderer D'Angelo plying his trade with what, once he can get past the wretched necessities of the job, could almost be called decency toward his customers and employees. It shapes up rapidly to highlight the accident of birth and the arbitrariness of the law, and the way lives are accordingly shaped. I think the moment The Wire won me over was when D'Angelo noted that the inventor of Chicken McNuggets probably is not, in fact, rich, but is probably still shuttered in his bolthole in the nether reaches of the McDonaldland empire, concocting taste sensations for a pittance as the executives get rich and neighborhood kids juice up on corn oil and chicken by-products. I'm sure that bit would have hit home even more if I'd ever invented anything of value.

3. Burn after Watching
[Spoiled!] Okay, just after watching the last 15 minutes. The first 3/4 of Burn After Reading brought us through a series of comically unlikable people behaving like assholes to one another, and I like that just fine. Highlights include (an ever-more emaciated) John Malkovich taking his turn at indignant white collar anger mismanagement (would that Ted Knight were still alive), Tilda "White Witch" Swinton's bedside manner as a pediatrician, Brad Pitt in his most natural role since he played Floyd, horrifying geek intercourse, and a secret project that works up to a great sight gag. Some Netflix troll mentioned that the film would have benefitted from better dialogue, and I can't disagree. Even if the acting was top notch, a little repartee would have sold the comedy more. Quite possibly, it's one of those that works better on repeat viewings (like the Coens' other comic masterpiece).

Well and good as it went, right up to the point where it got splattered against the back of the closet wall.

I'll take my dark comedy with a mordant dose of cynicism, usually. But I can't get myself to laugh about the gray matter spewed across the back of the car--one fucking Tarantino is already too much. I mean, I make a plenty of exceptions to graphic violence, but the context is, you know, everything. We wouldn't have been too worked up had even the Malkovich character been murdered on screen, it's a common enough literary conclusion to fate-tempting, but taking the opportunity to dash the brains out of the two people in the film who could be called anything like "innocent" broke my amused suspension of disbelief entirely. Charitably, I could say it made me think about my assumptions about film violence, but so much for my entertainment.

4. Polarize me, sensitize me
Empirical evidence of the relationship between electrical currents and magnetic fields had been plugged away for a while by then, and the equations themselves look suspiciously similar to the famous Euler or Navier-Stokes formulations for fluid mechanics, and yet James Clerk Maxwell's contributions to physics sure feel like one of those lightning-bolt strikes of brilliance that changed everything. It's as if he took all that bizarre phenomenology, derived something like Newton's laws from it, and then instantly mapped the subsequent 150 years of post-Newtonian theoretical development onto electromagetics to bring it perfectly up to speed. Good stuff, and the mad genius part is that he also brought an explanation of light into the fold. Maxwell told us that light was an electromagnetic phenomenon, a coupled wave, and while it didn't quite resolve the physical argument (even Maxwell didn't believe it propagated without a medium, and there were still a few odd tricks it did with materials), it did offer a rigorous mathematical framework for electromagnetic theory, which, at least according to the hagiography in my old undergrad physics book, hasn't needed revision since.


So we all know that light can be thought of as an oscillating electric field, which jiggles up and down perpendicular to the line of the wave's propagation, and a coupled magnetic field also jiggles along at 90^o to the electric one, also along the line. The orientation of that single wave in the picture is up-and-down, but light from most sources is understandably going to have the orientation going every-which-way, made up of lots of little waves. The orientation of the electric field (for a given wave) is the polarization direction (when you're talking about visible light, pretty much all materials don't have any disagreement with the magnetic component and everyone just ignores it, but pretty much all the materials we see interact with the electric field).

When light is incident on a flat surface, some part will reflect, some transmit (and some absorb, but we don't have to go there just now). Where it all meets, the component of the electric field of light that's actually aligned with the surface needs to be the same. For light polarized parallel to the surface, that would be all of the electric field, and for light polarized differently, only a component of the electric field needs to satisfy those conditions. For all angles, a beam of light reflected off of a flat surface will be polarized a little more in a direction parallel to that surface (and for one special angle, it'll be completely polarized) than for other orientations. [Fresnel worked this all out before Maxwell was born, by the way, but I guess he didn't have to acknowledge any electromagnetic character of the light wave.] It's like a handful of skipping stones get thrown at the surface, and the ones that hit it flat manage to bounce off more often.

That horrible road glare is polarized a little more in the horizontal plane, which is why polarized sunglasses (that is, which will only pass light polarized in the vertical direction) are supposed to be better than just dark ones without any directional sensitivity. I got myself a pair of those this Christmas too, and I love them. I can't tell the difference compared to regular sunglasses, but it's a lot of fun walking around with a couple of polarizers on my head.

LCD displays use polarizers too. Depending on whether voltage is applied or not, the liquid crystal molecules will orient so as to pass light of one polarization or another. There's a polarizer on the front of the display which will either block the output, or pass it, and that's one pixel blinking on or off, depending on which way the LCs inside it are orienting the light. I've had a lot of fun this past week looking at LCD displays, including my spiffy new TV, through my sunglasses. Twist my head parallel to the output polarizer and it's nice and bright; turn at a right angle and it all goes black. Turns out that pretty much all LCDs are oriented 45^o from the vertical. Who knew?

5. Spoon!
My internal conversation is full of ridiculous little in-jokes, some of which were once shared with people, and some that no one gets but me. Now and then, they sneak out, and after subjecting my kids to apposite quotes from the olden days when cartoon binges were limited to Saturday morning and an hour after school, I finally thought to just buy the DVD and share the source of more than a little bit of my nonsense.

The Tick vs. Season 2 suffers from a missing episode, and also because the second season only ever gave a certain bomb-throwing anarchist a cameo and denied us scenes of the superhero night life, but still I'm watching it a dozen years later, with my kids, and I'm having giggling fits at the extended Doctor Strangelove outtakes, at blaxploitation star ShTaft (complete with funky theme music) working as an orderly where he dresses up to assist in a series of confrontation therapies, and I'm wondering to myself what the hell was this ever doing on Saturday morning? (And why did the Disney empire ever gets it's verminous claws on it?) To get it's place in the kiddie slot, a lot of adult humor had to be filtered through the G-rated personality of the infantile man of action, and the sensibility really had to target the silly to make the balance work. The bizarre part is that it did work, that it was such a winning combination. Unfortunately for the producers, immature college kids were the only demographic that would ever think to watch the show more than once. I guess it could have had a worse run than three seasons.

(It was also a comic book, one of several mock-superhero titles that I never read. The cartoon evolved into a live-action show, which was awful by any measure.)

American animation often suffers from the whims of marketing, shifting from adult to childish orbits, with more or less artistic effort, depending on the times and the people in charge. Some manages to break through to universality (good writing is good writing), and if I seem overly impressed by this, then you have to keep in mind that I grew up in the absoulte nadir of cartoon artistry. It's also a pretty common trick to pepper some adult jokes into kiddie fare, throw a bone to the parents forced to sitt through another jejeune pile of crap (or maybe the writers do it to keep themselves sane). It's rare that the adult and the childish humor manage to feed off of each, rounding out the simplicity of kids' tastes, and highlighting the basic absurity of adults'. I don't think I'd recommend it unreservedly, but The Tick did manage that silly synergy brilliantly, probably because it was forced to. Good times.


[Will append a screen capture if I can ever get it to work.]