Stupidity has compound interest

Yesterday morning I took my car to the gym as usual not that you'd know it by looking at me but I remain a regular even if I can't convince myself to swim eight miles a week anymore and anyway just like I always do I locked my wallet and other valuables in the car before I went in which is fine but little did I remember to take it out of the car later you see because I needed to take my wife's car which is bigger and has a moonroof but I didn't need it for the pre-morning routine but more for the afternoon to pick my cousin up from college in Boston where she attends or her stuff does and it was a pile of boxes that I really had to pick up to save the kid a few bucks on shipping two hundred pounds of near-worthless dormroom accessories to the Northwest and back again which would be a pretty pointless and expensive exercise so I don't mind stuffing the boxes in the attic for a couple months except that my wallet remember was in my other car and I didn't realize it until I got to work and I didn't have my id to get into her building and I didn't have the toll transponder either which also resides in the other car but not my wife's and I didn't have any cash for the ever-increasing fare to enter the city and so I gathered up the change under the seats and mooched a couple of bucks off of my co-worker worrying that I might not even have enough cash to get into Boston and quite confident indeed that I won't be able to drive out of it and I'd have to ask my cousin for a couple more which is embarrassing because she's just a broke college kid and what the hell I'd rather offer to buy her dinner out or something like that to show an example of how nice and responsible try to act which in essence is something other than mooching off of broke people and she's got an injured leg and had to bin up her crap and take it down herself because I can't sign in especially with my seedy badly shaven shaggy-haired thirtysomething maleness and don't I feel like an idiot but it's not like I have a credit card either to identify myself or an atm card to get toll cash and I beg my couple of quarters from my cousin and head out on the Pike thinking that if the toll adds up to more than $3.25 then I'm screwed because my absence of cash is going to make me more likely to run a toll which is going to make it more likely get pulled over which my absense of a license is going to really exacerbate to the level of court appearance and I'm humming along and failing to resist the urge to speed and my knuckles are pale on the steering wheel and I'm beating myself up for the minor error that added up to such a ineluctably dumb situation and I think back to the stupid things I did in college and since too for that matter and it comes to me that this near-panicked sense of intense embarrassment and belayed consequences all deriving from some trivial fuckup or failure to plan some minor detail isn't exactly unfamiliar and while it hasn't happened all the time it's still been a companion all my life and I figure I really have to re-evaluate but re-evaluate what exactly and what then?

Yes, But is it Good for the Druids?

So I've been reading The Archdruid Report lately. Druidry? Well, best I can tell it's a practice of spirituality in nature, and without any evident orthodoxy, doctrine, belief, or pantheon (whatever the original druids might have worshipped or practiced is long since lost after all), it seems benign enough. If I were going to invent a religion from new cloth, it might go something like that, but on the other hand, the world already has more than enough faiths for its own good. I am sometimes attracted to these sorts of big-picture environment-and-society blogs as a matter of general understanding of how people fill up the planet and what we do here, and because I like to imagine where it goes from this point. Also, it's good to remind yourself that life could be lived much differently than whatever it is you're doing now. For the future, assuming a whimper rather than a bang (or, unfortunately, a rocketship), peak oil is estimated within a five-year time frame (via), and one imagines that coal and uranium won't net more than a generation or two using it at this pace. What will we do?

So I like reading these sorts of blogs...with reservations. Although the field appears to draw good writers, the commenters often scare me. Dmitry Orlov has the benefit of being funny, and brings a first-hand perspective of the Soviet collapse of a couple decades ago. I think he understands better than most people what happens to society when political reach rapidly disintigrates (hint: it's violent), but enough calls of "yeah Dmitry, but don't forget the coming race war," in one comments thread was enough to get me to stop reading altogether. Jim Kunstler has a delightfully named blog, and writes well even if he sometimes borders on nutty, but he attracts assholes like a Turkish bathhouse, and the sanctimony that his rural Lake George upperclass writer's life provides for him makes me want to sock him in the eye. By contrast, the Archdruid is gentler than these other guys, and he thinks in that comprehensively generalist way that I sometimes aspire to, even if I find him to be casual with numbers. He had some discussion of Systems Theory, which I'd never heard of even though I spent two years writing about it, that really won me over. (And yeah, it's always these guys: men look forward to a collapse more than women do, for obvious reasons. Even the kindly druid got my blood boiling a little with suggestions that we'll have to revert to more traditional domestic arrangements. Maybe that'll happen, and maybe it doesn't have to be sexist, but it probably will be: some commenter opined that feminism will simply one price we have to pay. I'm sure it would be a big sacrifice for him.)

In this week's post, the Archdruid discusses modern economics vis a vis energy sustainability. I love his notion of economists as court soothsayers, suddenly finding themselves out of their depth as circumstances (appear ready to) change. Yes, the pursuit has been a good-faith attempt to describe human behavior that is deep-down based on observations, but it's also frequently been self-serving justification, and I don't believe the precision that some economists claim, nor the omnipotence that capital is attributed. Economics is a useful description of human activity, in other words, but it's still not a comprehensive one.

But it's important to realize that Greer is describing a few schools of economic thought, schools that have adapted to a political landscape that includes 200 years of amazing energy abundance. That's not how the study developed, however, and early modern economists were more closely concerned with the balance of resources, population, capital, and land. Malthus and Mill didn't have the numerical finesse (or tools) of the eggheads and sharks on Wall Street, but that doesn't mean they weren't sharp. We can say that this is the original basis of validity that he's talking about, just like a superstition started in observation, but that's still not quite right. Economics may not have the precision of a real science, but it's still based on observation and models of behavior that have evolved to fit it. Malthus' theory, as I've babbled about, was done in by some timely technological innovations. The underlying premises changed around him, and it wasn't a valid analysis anymore. Today's capitalists (not that they don't have a lot to answer for) are more or less in the same boat that Malthus was. They may find themselves outside the range of their base assumptions as well, at which point the study will adapt again--is adapting--still trying to describe the world accurately, and hopefully not forgetting the previous lessons. It's interesting how economic theory has supported governing or dominant-class interests (like mercantilism, or the capitalism of today) or opposed them (like Marxism, or Enlightenment-vintage capitalism) at various points in history, but it's pretty much always been some kind of explanation of known events and concerns, and that won't disappear soon.

A running theme of much post-collapse thinking is that old skills will become valuable again. Probably true, but I'm extremely wary of romantic views of the past. Oil's long twilight won't be a succession of porch-time family story hours and monthly community music, knitting on a dusky quiet eventing, surrounded by fireflies or crackling wood fires, miles from the nearest neighbors. Or it won't just be that. Frontier arts might become valuable knowledge, but they are still unlikely to make you top dog in the community, which won't just go away. It may be fulfilling, but that's a challenging life, harder still if your family's survival depends on the yearly whims of the weather. Or the whims of the local power structures. Romantics hope that the powers won't have all that much reach, but that sounds ahistorical to me. We imagine that the dominant culture will improve to something less coercive, but frankly, that sounds inhuman. One thing I'm sure of, is that the future won't be a return to the past, and certainly not to a fake, idealized past. I don't believe that humanity's been around anywhere near long enough to have exhausted the possible modes of coexistence. We may go somewhere worse, but it's safe to say it will be somewhere different.

Modern economics has brought plenty of new insights and methods, and if theories of agricultural production and land rents become important again, it's not going easily back to the pre-math days, any more than society is going to suddenly forget about the germ theory of disease, or of civic organization, or how guns work. If computation energy is harder to come by, then abstract knowledgable pursuits might divert themseleves into gentlemanly or monastic activities again, sure. (If my post-collapse descendents become bookleggers, my ghost will look favorably on them.) But even in the friggin' dark ages of the West, when the political means basically evaporated, practical technology still kept going, whether adapted from the achievements of the past or the achievements of the East. There were a number of important technological developments in the middle ages, which is why when European society gradually woke up (and gave birth to protestants, anti-monarchists, modern science, and new economics) it didn't look much like primitive Rome anymore. We probably shouldn't exclude political developments, either--ugly and violent, many of them, but they did stabilize society for long stretches.

So holding on to practical and frugal life skills? Sounds smart to me, but even if we find ourselves a hundred years out envying the 21st century third world, there's still no way we're going to discard the present. It'll loom over us like the past does today. We'll start from the current understanding, and adapt it (well or poorly) to meet the constraints of the day. Unlike the old Druids, or even the Romans, we've produced such a colossal quantity of recorded knowledge, it's hard to imagine it won't keep turning up for centuries this time.

Review: Who Rules America, by G. William Domhoff

Who Rules America: Challenges to Corporate and Class Dominance is the sixth edition of Domhoff's book, rewritten especially for our 2009 American political environment. It advances a class- and power-based framework to describe our society, goes into some details on how the networks the powerful form and how they operate in our society, and dismisses some of the more conventional interpretations of political science. I suppose I have to call it a necessary book, not precisely because it's some occasionally useful alternate viewpoint--although that might describe it's place in a saner political atmosphere--but more that the last decade or so has encompassed such spectacular failures of both the usual pluralist (the high school Civics version of representative democracies and the will of the people and so forth) and what Domhoff calls institutional absolutist (those who consider government as the only important power agency--throw a dart at the intertubes, and you're sure to hit in the eye some scold going on about the "state" or the "legitimate monopoly of force"--talking about those guys), that their inadequacy is hard to ignore. Neither political theory (I cringe a little to pair those words) has represented very well, for example, how we've managed to defend a handful of industries and insiders at any and all costs while our leaders hedge endlessly and ignore obvious favorable evidence when it comes to throwing the masses a bone or two. To put the financial bailout, say, or existing tax and regulatory structures, or the century-old categorical aversion to labor (I hate unions as much as the next salaried wanker, but I do try to apply my criticisms consistently) into a pluralist framework requires such a tremendous dose of ad hoc fallacious bullshitting--at least a whole blogosphere's worth--to make old Irv Langmuir weep. Somehow the answer is always to benefit a group that contains the deciders and to keep the rest of the unwashed out of the decision-making process (even if they occasionally benefit too).

In my more jaded moments, I suspect a pluralist model has been cynically advanced by a secretive power elite as a diversion. More accurately it has evolved to serve some sort of institutionalized obfuscatory function in the policy and opinion networks that Domhoff describes. But I think the persistence of the pluralism argument, or of the idea of distinct separation of government and citizen, is based on our individual experiences. The general way to formulate an argument on these grounds is to try and extend philosophies about human nature to human institutions. It's a sort of first-principles approach, which is fine, but I think we tend to overstate the rationality of our nature, and I think the societal descriptions that come from these points of view tend to be more like a narrative, more anecdotal, with a sneaky tendency to proceed toward preferred conclusions. And I think these views are used more often to justify human institutions, at least lately. (God knows class theory has been used as justification too, but I wish some better blogger than me would take it on him or herself to pick on the Enlightenment thinkers now and again. I like the ideas to a large extent, but I am fairly sure that much of this business of the nature of property and the universality of rights also had something to do with a new class of wealthy people trying to explain why they deserved to be.) But it's also worth the effort to look at the empirical macro effects and try to think about how our behavioral tendencies might have informed them, and I'll be honest here: one reason I'm liking these class and power theories right now is that they support my bias that we are less philosophical deliberators than we are a bunch of self-congratulating pack-apes. I mean we do operate on principles to an extent, but I think ideologies fall far short in predicting the way we continue to organize ourselves. It seems more reliable to observe that we tend to look out for our section of the herd; we organize hierarchies on whatever scale, we seek to define our subgroup and are impressed with its contribution, even if we're fond of other groups. The reason politics looks like high school (or a fraternity of jackasses) is because they're both manifestations of typical human activity.

Now we may be able to create external conditions that restrain that, or fail to, and the collective knowledge and experience matters (the subject of about a million other posts of mine, written and procrastinated), and situations of greater real prosperity (1950-1970, say) appears to correlate with some democratization of power, but I deeply distrust either claim of causation on that one. While I'm at it, let me dismiss my own generational myopia too. I see a lot of willing suspension of disbelief in the past ten years only because I was living them and trying to pay half-attention. Not only was the American power distribution more unequal 100 or 150 years ago, it more blatant, more obvious, better understood by the public, and more vigorously resisted. Noted.

Okay, so Domhoff's thesis is that the dominant power network in the U.S. isn't military or theological, but economic. The first contentious part is that a class-based power structure exists here in the first place, and he gets to it by defining class and power with semi-statistical data: cross-referencing influential memberships (who knew graph theory was useful), analyzing wealth and income distributions, and describing power indicators (as Domhoff summarizes them: Who benefits? Who governs? and Who wins?). I like thinking of power as some kind of statistical variable, measuring, to the extent stuff in this field is quantitative, how power and wealth can be more concentrated or less concentrated in society. It's not a matter of arguing people must behave this way, it's a matter of observing that statistically, they do. Domhoff writes nothing to dispute these observations, really. The power people and the upper class people, as Domhoff variously (and I think uncontroversially) says, overlap to comprise a common group, and I guess what makes this a theory rather than just an observation is the argument that power indicators aren't chiefly achieved by otherwise neutral, unconnected means. It's hard to get status in the herd without plugging in to the powerful networks. That those networks will support the shared values of the people in them and the people underwriting them isn't a shocker either. (I spent some time thinking of the networks I'm plugged into too, a future post if its boringness can be somehow contained.)

A barrier is that it feels very strange to talk about a "class" of people comprised of individuals I might know or meet, that are basically like me. Not aliens at all, even if they (we?) aspire to some shared experiences. And some people who win, even with the networks, fought to get there. The upper class isn't some cadre of moustache-twirling archvillains promoting a pluralist viewpoint because it disguises their true goals. They probably believe in the pluralist model too. And there's a trace of validity that when corporations succeed, they're helping their employees too. (A lot depends on the corporations, what they do, how they distribute revenues, and whom they employ!) Looking at the distribution of power indicators as a property of a given society, then the extent to which typical people (let's not say "you") are in charge of their destiny through effort and training (or whatever other narrative) can be thought of as a measurement the power structure.

Although the book radically opposes the usual descriptions of our economic hierarchy (and uses a lot of liberal PoliSci jargon to do it), and although Dohmoff's judgements can be discerned in there, the viewpoint can still be read as remaining fairly neutral on the broad questions of "is it good." If there weren't a loosely defined group of corporate and upperclass interests running things, then it'd be pro bureaucrats, or labor representatives, or soldiers, or priests. Not exactly uncommon in other places and times. The corporate community owns more than its share of evil, but I can't convince myself it's more inherently nasty than the other avenues though. The biggest problem Domhoff implies, and I tend to agree with him, is that power is currently overly concentrated in one small sector that doesn't like to give it up, and it'd be better to have an environment where status was less a foregone conclusion. (Or which was more attendant to our long-term survival, but that's another hobby horse.)

Right, so obviously it took me three weeks to read a couple hundred pages. How does Who Rules pass as a book? It's an undergrad text, and typically, it's simultaneously audacious, dull, and didactic by design. Mostly I got some useful terms defined, and my prejudices were confirmed in a richer depth than usual. Domhoff has a good supply of supplemental info and a companion web site (I think all textbooks do this now--what a pain in the ass), and I found the supporting material more informative and to provide the depth and convincing information that the text sometimes lacks. Since we're only talking 50 or 60 pages added to a relatively short book, I wish they were supplied as written appendices, it would have worked more nicely by my bed.

This edition of the book was written shortly after Barack Obama was elected to office, and Domhoff took pains to leave an open-ended critique of the new administration, noting that there are slightly fewer board members in the president's cabinet than in preceding ones. He offers a checklist of signs for hope, which, in 2009, were speculative: how will Barry handle the financial bailout, the promises on healthcare, corporate lawsuits, and the other things mentioned up there in the first paragraph. A year later, and it's not very encouraging.

Review: Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

[Note: I'm not sure it's possible to spoil this book, but I do talk about events near the end of the story in relation to the rest of it.]

Lolita, of course, doesn't occupy a savory moral place, and might as well get that right out of the way. There's no forgiveness there, not on my part and not on Nabokov's, when it comes to an evaluation of the novel and its characters. If you could distill it from the language (second language? No fair!), it's a story about the serial rape of a minor by her stepfather, and concludes in a jealous murder, and unlike some recent selections of mine in which inhumanity is hidden by humor and shifts of emphasis, Nabokov never lets Humbert Humbert's depravity out of the reader's sight, and not all of the humor is of the sort that can soften the blow. Lolita is a cousin (though the thought must have the curmudgeonly literary Humbert spinning in his grave) of the Hollywood staple of the colorful and emotionally complex hit man, and it's the beloved daddy of novels about amoral time-traveling torturers and the like. Nabokov is not just manipulating assumptions that the reader makes with respect to the language and the form, he's doing it in a variety of very conscious ways, maybe working up an understanding of those relationships.

The story is told in the first person, and it's hard to sum up narrator Humbert in a paragraph, even if there's a temptation to try (Martin Amis takes a shot or two in the introduction*; the protagonist's fictional executor estate has some words; Humbert himself tries frequently; and Nabokov offers a summary or two of his own in the afterword). He's got a great writing style, a sarcastically lyrical twist, as given to unintentional irony as the intentional sort, full of both self-aggrandization and self-pity. He's the sort of tireless villain that, when easily thwarted, returns to his lab to double down on his calculations (or in Humbert's case, his words) with comic fervor, clamping down on defeat with forced dignity and sarcasm. (Could Peter Sellers have played Humbert? Could Alan Rickman maybe?) His self-regard (with all of its obvious but unspoken doubts) is amusing; his jealousies are comic; his moral double-standards are ridiculous. We spend a lot of time laughing at Humbert, which does help distance us from his predilections, but there's Humbert's power of words for us to contend with too, and so many of his barbs find purchase, and we sometimes laugh with him too. Nabokov pokes at the character in much the same way that Humbert cruelly invests his attention in everything around him.

Humbert's selective attention to detail is essential to the character, as well as the development of the story. He can recall (with a photographic memory, he brags), twenty pages of obsessive journal entries when he first meets twelve-year-old Lolita. He's got an eye for landmarks and names when they can take on a pun or a literary allusion. He remembers episodes of his travels for the poetic or storylike settings. But he's an imbecile when it comes to useful facts, chronologies, or detective-like connections. His pursuit of Clare Quilty, his rival and double, in the last quarter of the book gets a little bizarre, and it's because the intellectual performance it requires is outside of Humbert's skill set. It's remarkably self-centered, this outlook of his, and it also leaves no room for anyone else's humanity. Countervailing points of view are mostly invisible to the man, caricatured and bitingly mocked when Humbert can see them at all. (I really wish I'd encountered Humbert years ago. His spirit occupies a good number of online kooks, even if his writing ability is gifted to so few of them.  In the real world, it's furthermore clear that whatever could make professional monsters like Chuck Buckley or George Will tolerable was a certain Humbertness. What a fine epithet I've missed out on all this time.) It takes a while for the reader to gauge how much Lolita is suffering (or not suffering), because Humbert is incapable of perceiving it. It gradually comes out as he (comically) characterizes her complaints and apathy, or in the briefly-seen opinion of her educators. We can sense a trauma under there, a lost childhood that's eventually spelled out, but there's also a pervasive character that is adjusting to her circumstances regardless, a normal kid, who doesn't know better, dealing with it, sometimes better and sometimes worse. When Humbert is finally overcome with what he has taken from Lolita, he still doesn't get it.

Lolita herself, of course, is the star example of the chasm between Humbert's words and the underlying reality of their relationship. Humbert is furiously writing erotica onto the character. Lolita isn't "innocent" really, maybe a little precocious for a twelve-year-old, and she has heretofore approached sexuality in an age-appropriate fashion. In the moment when her proto-sexuality finally, briefly overlaps with Humbert's over-intellectualized lust, it's uncomfortable, it's a taken advantage and a disturbing rape, but (if Humbert is telling the truth) it's not completely incongruous. Quickly, the relationship returns to its normally skew character paths. Lolita continues as an insolent, indolent tween at every available reveal, and for all the abuse, she doesn't come a jot closer to Humbert's erotic portrait, nor does her stepfather ever approach her child-like level of sexual exploration. Humbert writes a great deal of plot and character onto her, but Lolita never ceases to be a young girl, as revealed by the details that Nabokov cleverly lets slip through Humbert's story. She is never womanly, never complex in a way that Humbert would understand.

The relationship between Lolita and Humbert is ultimately nasty and banal, but really there's a similar pettiness infusing everything that Humbert sees. It's almost embarrassing: the car trips; the shallow, simple people; the cheesy motels; my god, fucking suburbia. Humbert traipses through them like the proverbial Martian examining all the stupid details of existence and mocking them. The symphony of toilet flushes is entertaining, teenagers can be pustulent freaks, and middle age is relentlessly unflattering—it's mordantly funny stuff, but Humbert doesn't rise to assess life on higher terms for most of the novel. In the late scenes, among his imagined revelations surrounding the adult (boring, domestic) Dolores (she's only seventeen, but plenty of cause to grow up fast), she's no less misrepresented by Humbert's bathetic streak. Different subject, but more erotica, Humbert crying the fat hot tears of a poet, gifted with the ability to grant immortality. And the really brilliant part about the ending is that it succeeds in making this sad life beautiful, and fifty years later, Lolita is immortal enough. For all Humbert's evil, it does end up a beautifying sort of evil, which may be what sets him apart (even from the non-criminal but similarly degenerate Quilty).

I can run with this a little. We're reminded frequently that the novel is ersatz reality—there's Humbert as discussed, there's a distancing effect of the silly pseudonyms, there's the fact that most of the characters leave the novel to go off and perish offscreen, there's this obvious metafictional bit with the Enchanted Hunters play (a script fit to the events of the novel), there are revisitiations, doubles, and echoing scenes, there's the effort to sink the whole thing into a frame story. I hate to reduce the novel to some modernist experiment because it's too small a box, but let's imagine Humbert as Writer: is the reality of human existence always lesser and apart from the stories we build up to romanticize it? Is a writer's feeling both cheaper and more poetic than the scripts our lives proffer? Is it still beautiful when we inevitably get it wrong? Even though Lolita works plenty well as a novel, it's not about sexuality exactly, it's about language, observation and life.


*Wish I didn't read the intro, at least not until after I wrote this, but for a novel this famous, it's not very easy to act as an untainted jury. Amis makes a point about Nabokov's cruelty to Humbert (a bit beyond the "sarcasm" I was going with) but he's right and I'm going with it; he points out the significance of some of the where-are-they-nows in the introduction, that I indeed might have missed.

Review: Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart

'Take a large bowl,' I said. 'Fill it with equal measures of fact, fantasy, history, mythology, science, superstition, logic and lunacy. Darken the mixture with bitter tears, brighten it with howls of laughter, toss in three thousand years of civilization, bellow kan pei--which means "dry cup"--and drink to the dregs.' Procopius stared at me. 'And I will be wise?' he asked. 'Better,' I said. 'You will be Chinese.'

Of course, the tales of Master Li and Number Ten Ox are written with an audience of us pink-faced occidental barbarians in mind, a heritage (and, I assume, lineage) which Mr. Hughart shares. What we really end up with is a fusion of western storytelling (which playfully gifts some traditions and allusions directly to the older culture) and a Chinese setting and worldview that borders on mythic. I have no idea how Chinese it really ends up being, nor can I say precisely how deeply the history and folklore finally career off into the metatextual weeds. In the quote, a throwaway as far as the plot is concerned, the venerable but flawed sage Li Kao has just sold that Procopius a bill of goods with regards to silk production (so there's one early swerve). In terms of cultural history, Hughart is taking sudden turns and and liberally imbibing reality and fantasy, but who cares when it's such a fun ride. Kan pei!

I don't normally re-read very often, but this is probably my third time through this novel. I wanted something comforting for the plane ride to my most recent program crucifixion last month. Bridge of Birds unfolds wonderfully, riding along on that lovely re-imagined setting that has room for everything from ghosts to chemistry ("The supernatural can be very annoying until one finds the key that transforms it into science."), incorporating wild extremes of political horrors, human dignity, and real beauty. Hughart wrote a couple of sequels (one of which I reviewed), but you can only crack open the beginning of the story at the beginning. It remains pleasant to meet Ox and Master Li again for the first time. The middle of the story gets shaggy, and a little generous with ridiculous coincidences, but the ending remains sweet as ever. This is, at the end of the day, a princess story that can get even a guy like me a little sniffly.

As I read, my thoughts wrestled with similar questions as I found in the previous book (why do I love these drunks who wreck stuff and take liberties with the female students?) and, as it turned out, the next one (how can I take so much pleasure reading this Humbert monster?), which I guess makes it a surprise theme, and worthy of a review, comfort pick and all. Bridge of Birds has a spectacular body count, and yet it still goes down like a bedtime story. Not just talking historical bodies here, of which there are no shortage, but gory mass executions, unrepentant murders, torture and dissection, and bloody violent retribution, no few of which our beloved heroes are responsible for, or which occur with their sanction. For an explanation, I suppose we can start with the characters themselves. Li Kao is one of fantasy literature's finest rogues, and one half of one of its finest duos. Allegedly too bored with actual crime, he turned to detective work as a more worthy intellectual challenge. Apparently a decrepit alcoholic, he cavorts and argues like Father William (Lewis Carroll suffuses this fictional China), finding a curiosity, joy and satisfaction in life that is infectious to the reader. Master Li is sufficiently wise--and crafty--that he can distinguish the worth of others accurately, and apply the slight flaws in his character to only the deserving, letting (we discover to no great surprise) his affection for the gentle and the just survive unmolested. His counterpart, Number Ten Ox, we understand isn't the most reliable narrator ever, and much of his modesty is stylistic, but the big-hearted innocence of this character still manages to shine through in the pages, even when neck-deep in Li Kao's elaborate gambits of discovery.

This triumph of tone and theme over the bloody details is something that only happens in fiction, really, and children's literature and folklore has always thrived under that approximation. Bridge of Birds is explicitly intended as the marriage of these old forms with something like reality. ("Nothing on the face of this earth--and I do mean nothing--is half so dangerous as a children's story that happens to be real," says Li Kao) I mean, I've spent more than enough time reading books that explore that conceit, but Hughart does an exceptional job of embracing the unapologetic, eternal unreality of these old stories, and adding just enough cynicism and humor to give even deeper power to the simple ideas of love, justice, and beauty. It's doing something more elaborate than messing around with archetypes, it's finding the right adult setting for an entire storytelling form, and Hughart's imaginative view of China works brilliantly here. Injustice and superstition have rooted deeply in the old soil of its civilization, but human love has formed the bedrock, and in its most honest cases, becomes almost transcendent. The weight of the place is rock-solid and ancient, a seamless mixture of opposites, as timeless as a fairy tale.

The New Political Capital

Via multiple sources, I learned yesterday that there's a House proposal to put St. Ronnie on the fifty dollar bill, because, you know, an airport, an aircraft carrier, a dozen highways, another dozen schools, a think tank chair (presumably for doddering emeritus "thinkers"), a DC building complex, a hospital wing, not to mention the borderline necrophilic esteem of a whole generation of bow-tied opinionators, and it's just possible his legacy isn't getting all the attention it needs anymore. Seems like a fine time for a Facebook quip, right? They should, I reply, put the old bastard on a $50 treasury bill or some other debt instrument instead. (Another commenter adds: and they should put Ron Jr. on a three dollar bill!) Rather proud of myself, I hop on the hamster wheel and roll on over to find that Doghouse Riley and his commenters have already covered that, as well as a dozen or so other, better jokes than I'll ever come up with. The point? I'd better move fast. Don't let 'em tell you blogging isn't hard work.

In the spirit of this historic proposal, Keifus Writes!, in collaboration with the Franklin Mint, the U.S. Mint, environ-mint, firma-mint, and, by means of excuse, a few mint juleps, offers an exciting new investment opportunity in commemorative currency representing United States icons and luminaries. The Reagan 50-spot is only the beginning. Don't miss out on the entire collection:

The George W. Bush Memorial War Bond.
Two series of these hot items began printing in 2001 and 2003. Although the debt has been running over the trillion mark, hardly any of these fascinating collectibles have been put in the hands of American citizens. This is a perfect graduation or christening gift. Be sure to let your kids own a tiny portion of the debt they'll enjoy paying off for their entire lives. The Bush War Bond will help them remember that it was all worth it. (Long-term yield subject to inflation.)

The Carly Fiorina Dollar-Peso
It's difficult for lay people out there to understand the complicated deals of economic transactions, and that's why decisions are left to the serious political thinkers, such as Ms. Carly Fiorina, California Republican senatorial candidate currently challenging Barbara Boxer's seat. Fiorina also served as John McMaverick's economic advisor last year, and she's most famous of all for leading Hewlett-Packard as CEO, bringing on a merger with Compaq in those heady days when the internet was approaching peak profitability. Why is she a brilliant economic mind? Because shut up, that's why!

Technical people of a certain age might remember HP as a top-line electronics powerhouse that used to employ people and make stuff. (Even older people probably remember the whole country that way.) The Dollar-Peso was established in the spirit of the fabled HP-Compaq merger.

The Sandra Day O'Connor Commemorative Decision Quarter
If your eyes, dear reader, glaze like mine whenever supreme logic drifts onto the scene, then rest assured that SCOTUS opinions are merely lengthy rationalizations to confuse the uninitiated and keep lawyers employed. The actual decision-making process can be much more perfunctory. This limited edition quarter is inspired by the famous swing-voting justice's real-life deliberations in Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger. Heads, and Affirmative Action lives another day. Tails, and it's time for lunch.

The Gen. Stanley McChrystal Video Game Token
In honor of our ninth year of whistling past the Graveyard of Empires, we're proud to announce this beautifully minted coin. On the front is the highest Afghanistan commander's face, and the opposite side depicts an unmanned aircraft gliding through beautifully engraved mountains. Drop one of these in the machine, and imagine that you too could control a Predator drone, delivering fiery death from the comfort of your armchair. (And really, celebrating a wedding outside and firing Kalashnikovs? What did you expect, you fucking barbarians?) No one develops eye-hand coordination like an American, and now it's a strategic national asset. Someone pass the Cheetos.

The Al Gore Carbon Chit
If the 1990s taught us anything, it was that energy assets can be made even more valuable by dicing them up into marketable shares, and, much more importantly, trading them creatively and without close scrutiny. With new innovations, the cost of emissions can be disguised and swapped too (which may be better than ignored), and polluters can buy off honest farmers and ranchers to plant trees or some other hard-to-verify mitigating activity.

The best part about capping and trading is that conservation that you must trust, can't verify, and can no longer understand will now become valuable. It's a great investment opportunity, that can only grow! Trust us. This America.

The Hank Paulson Cigar Lighter
The rich, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, aren't like you or me. After all if they let us riffraff date their daughters, pretty soon they'd have teachers and toolmakers in their network, and how lucrative would that be? We hoi polloi are in no position to influence the free market. Only people that run financial firms can craft the policy by which financial firms thrive or die.

Now, for an investment of only a hundred dollars, you can directly keep Henry Paulson, or one of his associates, in the lifestyle he deserves. Cough it up, peasant. It's your patriotic duty.

The New Barack Obama Five Dollar Bill
The historic election of Barack Obama has changed the way we think about everything. Our parents always said that any kid could grow up and be a powerful centrist president, but we never thought they actually meant it. Obama proves it all wrong; it's the dawn of a new era. Warmaking will be different; new economic priorities will come into force; a focus on the disadvantaged will become prominent; and of course a constitutional law professor has brought a new emphasis to the Bill of Rights.

Through a bloody war, Abraham Lincoln freed slaves in both the north and the south, and in honor of that, his portrait will remain on the new Obama five dollar bill. The note can buy as much product or capital as it used to. It's printed on the same paper stock, on the same machines, and is backed by as much full faith and credit of the U.S. government as it ever was. For a limited time, this revolutionary new bill can be yours for the low cost of $5.00. It's all about change!

Five More Thoughts: Tweet-Worthy Ed.

They didn't quite rise to the level of thoughts, but I kept the label. All I need to do is figure out how to drop about 10,000 characters, and these would be perfect for a Twitter account.

1. Hey, you're Tony Randall!
It didn't happen in my adult lifetime, and our nation has a fine history of masquerading propaganda as fact in the available publication vehicles, but within the living memory of a lot of us, there reside the stolid anchors of yesteryear, the talking haunts of a then-new visual medium, reporting world events and worldly understanding based on their honest best guesses of what was important, as a trail of cigarette smoke rose up beside them in beautiful black and white. The early teevee news is remembered fondly; it didn't cater to the average schlub sensibility as transparently as the news does now, and it'd take the advertising model a few years yet to turn audiences into products instead of consumers. It was certainly smarter and more serious than today, or so they say.

But eyes to the screen was the growing need, and most people blame the corresponding advertising psychology (speed! visuals! drama! only we can fulfill your inadequacy and need!) for the inevitable dumbing-down of the news medium. Not me, I blame the wise-cracking kid of the News family, the weather reporter. Okay, the pre-broadcast meteorological tease and the goofy handwaving and scienticousness that ends up consuming about 25% percent of the show was covered in How to Watch TV News, and it remains annoying. My problem--the one I link to the whole decline of the news industry--is that these little bastards are utterly unaccountable for their weather reports. I mean, it's the weather, and we all understand that prediction remains an inexact science even with impressive modern data and models. And we also understand there's a marketing incentive to hype every drop of precipitation that ever threatens the broadcast area. But since you failed to predict the generational New England blizzard again, and as usual, the roads got plowed and people eventually got to work, you'd think some humility might be in order. You're the same guy who brags when you predict the temperature within five degrees, and today, you're acting like have the Delphic wisdom of friggin Apollo himself, when you just blew it yesterday.

When Johnny Forecaster is caviling around like Mr. Short Term Memory every day, how can we expect the other newscasters to recall important details of last year? Well, we don't anymore. And it's his fault.

2. So I'm sure they'll summarize the last 50 years accurately
Tom Brokaw reports: Boomer$. All I've got to say is finally that age group will get some attention.

3. More nostalgia
Warm, dry escapes from drenching weather always make for pleasant memories. I don't love driving, but driving in the rain can be a kind of solace. The traffic noises die out behind the roar, and you're in a private island of warmth and color in a gray, cold world. I remember driving along with my Dad on a few occasions, watching big, fat raindrops splatter on the windshield of his '72 Blazer, flattening out to viscous wet rings, like liquid spaghettios spread along the glass. Whump go the wipers, plocka-plocka-plocka repeats the rain, making circles on the glass. The heat's on, and there's some urgency that I'll have to get out in this stuff again when we get wherever it is we're hurrying to. I've been watching rain fall on windshields ever since, watching the rings form.

And here's something: it doesn't wet the glass like it used to. It could be my faulty memory, but in the thirty-mumble years since that ride, the essential rain/windshield interaction has changed. I'm puttering home through yesterday's downpour, and huge drops splat and spread, but instantly bounce back to a drop, roll away. These are not the raindrops of my youth.

Obviously the difference has to be the windshield. Mine is more hydrophobic than the one on Dad's Blazer was, reluctant to let the water spread. I think I need a better history of car care products to really address the depth of this, but nowadays, silane-based surface treatments are pretty common, and I don't think they were in the 70s. If I never got around to doing it myself, it's a safe bet that my car was Rain-Xed on the dealer lot at some point. When I was a little kid, automotive wax products were certainly around, which would have similarly repelled water, but I don't know if any were appropriate for the windshield, and the fact that Dad's windows were hydrophilic suggests that he didn't use it there. A year of road filth would lower the surface energy of factory-fresh glass too, and Dad bothered to wash every now and then (as well as hand wax the rest of the car), and maybe that's all it is.

Regardless, progress is disconcerting this way. It erases the intimate moments of the past, sets them in no other medium than our fragile memory. This isn't always bad, but there are also times, when we're stranded warm and dry, that I want to look at the window and say to my daughter, "see the way the rain makes circles on the windshield like that? I remember driving with my father at your age..."

4. Conditioning
Massachusetts is currently trying to pass a texting-while-driving law. It's ridiculously specific set of behaviors to target, but on the other hand, I'd hate to leave a law against general motor assholery to the snap decision-making capacities of the cops.

Anyway, everytime the local NPR affiliate spurts out this legislative drivel, my instinct is always to reach for my Blackberry.

5. Boo-eee-EEEEP!
Any of you still have a landline? Here's what bugs me most about this service: if the technology is sufficiently advanced to inform me, following that 130-dB screech in my ear, that I failed to dial "1" before the number, then why is it incapable of going ahead and placing the goddamn call already? The cell phones have figured a way around this issue, and it's the same provider. So what if I can't push the buttons that well! Stop rubbing it in!

Review: A Stupid and Futile Gesture, by Josh Karp

First of all, my apologies for the light, even for me, level of posting lately. I had to go on another field trip for work, which included an attempted salvage of December's conference performance, demanding no shortage of analysis (much of it from me) of my flaws as a scientist and a speaker. The stress from this crap I think has been affecting me badly. As one antidote, I've been trying to minimize the time I spend staring at screens. It's been applied with limited success, but in terms of bug-eyes and headaches, the internets can be pretty ennervating. I also had a kid's party to plan and attend (roller skating! I have moves!). I'm as sick of looking at that guy's manjo as you are, but the truth is that I'm less inclined ponder the human condition when I'm feeling a bit off, or when I'm able to enjoy childish things. Either one makes the miserable collective reality we create seem that much more farcical.

The world needs satire, doesn't it? Something to offer a good clinical bleeding, to bite us where we forget we hurt, snap us out of shock or fatigue and let us know the wound is still there, needing attention? If it wasn't for the internet, I'd have lost hope on a cogent contemporary social critique; if it weren't for Colbert and, sometimes still, the Simpsons, I'd have given it in for the popular media too, which is otherwise even worse the closer you look. I don't believe that poison pens are missing from the world--I find them once and a while!--more that my parents' generation's acid vintage gradually got blandly subsumed into the mainstream, and with all the information today, what fraction that rises above pure juvenilia or sheer meanness, we don't yet have the benefit of hindsight to tell what has been the underground phenom. Or I don't anyway, even though I'm reading some of it now. The subtitle of the book is How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever, and I guess what I'm getting at, circuitously, is that I have a fairly good idea of what Kenney and the magazine changed comedy into, I have an incomplete mosaic of what it changed from, but I missed the actual magazine in its heyday, and I rely on Josh Karp to tell me what it meant in its time. I'm left with the impression that it was to a too-long, humorless current Saturday Night Live sketch (or for that matter, the embarrassing walking corpse of the NL college humor franchise) much what every piece of crap slob comedy for the past thirty years has been to Animal House. I wish I knew for sure, though--I might well find I hate it.

Karp confirms my suspicion that the sitcom was the apotheosis of 1950s comedy writing, and the simmering reaction to that sort of spackled-over social conformity was concomitant with other cultural revolutions. (The lack of outlet was probably anomalous. Prewar humor, Karp notes, was more cutting and suggestive. The removal of class, race, and dirty politics from the national dialogue that Mom, Dad, and Doug Kenney heard in grade school was a tad premature.) Kenney's bit (or at least the bit that was focused on in the biography, and certainly mirrored in Animal House, which he co-wrote) was nostalgia for that past at war with a contemporary reality. There's some genuine love of the past, but it's trumped by the knowledge that, as much as the present, it's constructed from the purest bullshit. He understood that you had to know institutional dignity in order to mock it. It's clever in that he could take nostalgia and humor to soften the anarchic picture he was painting. Those fraternity kids were loathsome too, but they were also responding logically to their absurd times. Well, sort of.

The biographer places the tone of National Lampoon about halfway between the sophisticated humor of the prewar New Yorker essayists and short story writers (limited familiarity here), and the budding subversive satire of early MAD magazine (considerably more). It's the pure essence of "sophomoric," base ribaldry put forth by highly educated minds, not shy to put literary jokes amongst the farts, simultaneously knocking down pretension and lending gravitas to their own immaturity. It's egg-throwing at a deserving establishment by smart young white people with at least enough self-awareness to realize the position that lets them hurl in the first place. Possibly it includes the realization that you can't respect yourself either. Not exactly alien territory for me, but again I want to emphasize that any such judgement of National Lampoon magazine is necessarily the author's. Here's Karp discussing the early aesthetic vs. the downturn that eventually came due:

"[T]he [earlier] panels gave off a whiff of self-parody and mocking obsession with sex.[...] Distinguishing sexual material and exploitive sexual material is a tricky business, and [Sean] Kelly believed that they were crossing the line. [...] [T]here was a shift--as with the treatment of sexuality--from commenting on hatred, atrocity, and stupidity to making fun of its victims as well. It may have been splitting hairs, but there was a new sense of rage within the pages that lacked the righteous indignation, sophisitication, and wit that marked the first five years.

I prefer to believe I can judge that line too.

Doug Kenney seems to have been a good guy in the early years. Karp has him as straddling worlds of conformity and personal isolation, with conflicted feelings of self-wroth. He was a kid who grew up around class but not of it--more the outsider looking in or the actor playing a role. The guy who played Stork was good-looking and sharp, indiscriminate in the people he befriended, and used humor to relate to the world. I feel I've always known people like him--they're not the centers of attention, but are the foundations of the party. The sorts of people who could always manage to keep the attitudes small, and the punks lovable. For all the dichotomies that his biographer sees in there, it doesn't seem an unusual bunch of traits, although Kenney was also uncommonly bright. To hear Karp tell it, he eventually made it as everyone's friend in the ferocious personality battle at the magazine because he was smart enough to command respect in his own right. It lasted as long as he could stand it.

I liked reading how the publication developed from whole-minded but half-assed notions to something of a high-functioning bastion of brilliant disgruntlement. National Lampoon collected errant personalities like a magnet in a scrapyard, but put together the things somehow ran. For some reason, I found myself identifying with the burnouts and corporate misfits that managed to find a career there, more than the ambitious misantrhopes. Karp makes the point that there wasn't anywhere else to go for a comedy writer--it must have been like a haven, if you could take the hours, egos, and negligible pay.

Kenney burned out on the magazine after a couple years, and after a hiatus, survived as an emeritus writer. Thanks to shrewd early dealings with the publisher and the success of the movie, Kenney did hit it big, which didn't agree with his personality. He moved from recreational pot to cocaine abuse, and watched his world crumble, culminating in an untimely death. Arguments remain whether it was a suicide, but the inner conflict was tough on him, according to Karp. I don't read a lot of biography, but I'm still sensing some common literary themes here: youthful talent, meteoric rise, tragic fall. I'm not sure I trust the presentation, but one consolation for flaming out young in this way, is that you get to have a denoument. As an artist, Doug Kenney didn't have to suffer a slow descent into age and unfunniness like any number of his peers. As a human being of course, it's another loss.

Review: Beloved, by Toni Morrison

[Fuck it, I edited the post. Does that bother anyone? I can revert to the clumsier original if it does. I am upset by a comment obviously, but it was a fair one in the sense that an anecdote and a bunch of adjectives on my part are not sufficient to communicate my understanding of the novel. And I'm looking at it this way too: some sophomore is going to find this post sooner or later, and for the purposes of my self-respect, I'd like that turned-in copy to at least look like it was plagiarized.]


It's not like the shitty old cliché needs any more mileage, but the cover of a book really does offer a small basis for pre-judgment, at least in the sense that it tells me what the publisher thinks of this book, or what hints to content the company thinks will entice people to buy it. Books convey all kinds of suggestions like this. For a sufficiently famous or worthy work, you'll find a few pages packed with one-sentence blurbs, which are probably better thought of as recommendations from famous authors you "know" rather than reviews. (I like to write out my mental blather, but I'm not usually comfortable to go and tell people to read stuff--friends' recommendations are probably the biggest shapers of expectations for this sort of thing.) So with Beloved, I picked up the shiny red trade paperback, with the metallized cursive, which looks like it's meant to be somebody's "book of gold," deeply meaningful and touching. And of course, there's the Nobel prize. What Beloved is, however, is a ghost story, a haunting that's used as a vehicle to carry the unspeakable past into the present. Now, I often like a good haunting, especially when it's plotted with sensitivity to the deceased, and Beloved is, on one level, that sort of book, although it took me a few chapters to realize that, and I wasn't clear whether it was the marketing that governed my expectations. Anticipating one of the best novels of the twentieth century, I felt a bit let down to find just a great-in-parts one. Did the publishers affect me more than they usually do? Irritating if true.

I feel like such a Philistine, especially considering it's little things I kept bumping up against. I stumbled over missed metaphors (this annoyed me most--for example, when the hell is a cloudy sky white hot?) and I had a difficult time pinpointing the authorial voice, which drifted from dialect to a sort of generic third-person academic tone, and sporadically included repeated descriptors as you'd find in oral traditions (Baby Suggs, holy...), to streams of consciousness. I don't have any problem with any of the narrative styles on their own, I just wasn't sure they synthesized into a neat voice. As I mentioned, this novel is a ghost story, but even though we're introduced to the spirit on the first page, the tension is not the mystery of its origins, or rather, it's not the raw fact of them. It's not until the Beloved character returns a couple chapters later, fey and needy, that I began to worry what's going to happen to the living as much as what happened to them. Then, the novel got going for me.

[One issue may be just how much Beloved reminded me of Octavia Butler's novel, Kindred, published in the seventies. It would make a good paired reading. Both use a fantasy trick to bring the modern reader to face the troubling psychological depth of the slave past. I remember Butler's as the better novel, but it's been at least ten years since I read it, so who knows. And it may be that Butler was a science fiction writer, and I was anticipating such a mechanism. There's also a case to be made that it's an easier entry point for cracker douchebags like myself.]

What Morrison has done very well, however, is to get into the heads of her characters and bring the dehumanizing face of slavery to an intimate light. [Quoting myself a little now...] The human cost, physical and emotional, of slavery came through loud and clear in the novel. The way it broke up the most sacred and basic bonds that people cherish was wrenching to read. And it answered the question it set out to answer: how could a mother who loves her children kill them? You leave the book thinking, what choice did she have? I admit that the degrees and depth of the mothering instinct was less intuitive to me than a man's struggle for self-possession (I think Morrison did a hell of a job with the male characters) or a living daughter's inward retreat, but it couldn't be missed.

And to the author's credit, I think it's a very difficult place to transport the contemporary reader, especially one of the aforementioned cracker douchebag variety. The backstory is based on the then-famous trial of Margaret Garner, who, like the protagonist Sethe, allegedly killed her children to prevent them from being dragged back into that life. As the characters look back, Morrison shows us lynching and murder, as well as some abuses that were more probably inventive than the story needed (although clearly written as an attack on Sethe's very motherhood), as well as some masters that were improbably decent. (The author doesn't come as far as forgiveness for a damn one of them.) I thought the everyday mistreatment was more compelling than the elaborately staged events, the cases where people were respected or treated about as well as valued livestock, not hated by whitey, but as people, beneath even his notice.

Part of the evocative success comes, I think, from meeting Sethe, Baby, and Paul D when they are no longer slaves, living what would almost be a happy domestic life, were it not for the angry scars and ghosts (real and figurative) intruding unwillingly from the disturbing past. The characters, up till the time Paul D walks into Sethe's home, have been living numbly, loving guardedly, suffering the expectation that another tragedy is ready to explode around the corner. Even if it was a better life, freedom in postwar Cincinnati meant demeaning jobs, no protection of (or from) the law, and a hobbled human network, which in Sethe's case had further abandoned her. By novel's end, it's clear that the grudgingly restored human connections will take generations for healing.

How Do You Get To Carnegie Hall?

I always knew that if I stayed in one place long enough, coolness would eventually catch up with me. I wonder if it's too late to actually learn to play the thing.

The instrument in the picture is called a banjolin (or a mandolin-banjo--why "manjo" didn't fly, I have no idea), and it was featured (okay, "present") at last night's Grammy awards.* It's evidently got your regular mandolin tuning and string set, as it has eight pegs and I recognized the chords. With the drum head and resonator, it's got to sound twice as obnoxious as your normal mando. The guy playing it is Butch Walker, an eclectic musical dude about whom I'll clearly have to learn more. Butch was just chopping along here, threw in a nice fill or two, made it easy to keep up.


[UPDATE: I found the photo with a google search, which ended up here. Will be happy to credit it properly if anyone happens to know.]


*For the record, the show was just background noise. My daughter was trying to stay up late enough to see AC/DC awarded. I only got up and looked for the spectacle of Stevie Nicks playing a duet with whatsername phenom Taylor Swift.

jane was here

It's disturbing enough to consider how tenuous a grasp on the globe we all have. What do any of us want from our short stay? To be loved, to have a little more time.

As a father, there's an extra pocket of black terror that I get to carry around at all times, knowing that I can only reliably provide one of those things. I'd rather avoid that sort of ultimatum at all, of course, and (not to my credit) I become guarded when the situation appears to surface in the waking world--I'd rather hold the walls in place around that terror. But this is a direct request, from a friend.

Here's a record of someone who was here too, and not as long as anyone would have liked. She was loved though. Read about their girl Jane.

The Big Game

Before the screens, clipboard in hand, the commander continued to pace. It had been nearly ten days of continuous occupation, and the space was now resembling a lair more than a conference room. Off-camera, food scraps cluttered yeastily around the bin, and combined with male sweat (and other eructations), they suffused the place with a positively feral aroma. The time was upon them, the suspense was knife-thick, expectations hummed, and a hundred other anticipatory cliches clamored for expression. Without warning, the general paused, eyebrows beetled into a contiguous, hairy V. He drew in a breath as if to speak, and the entire room inhaled with him. And held it.

His lieutenant spoke for them all. "Sir?"

"Hrrmf."

"Is it time to deploy the force-forward units?"

The general considered, as if this were a novel question. As if anyone might be thinking anything else. "We will coordinate deployment of the light mobile units with the enemy's first action," he said. He tapped the northwest corner of the map with his free hand, "almost certainly right here, if I know those Stanni bastards." He narrowed his eyes even more. "But we'll be on the watch for where they do in fact emerge."

"Er, yessir."

The general turned from the display, and faced the room of live and videoconferenced faces. "Needless to say, men, maintain maximum battlefield awareness. Watch the feeds. Record decisions of all units. This is war, after all." He resumed pacing.

"Yes sir!"

The general considered the way the patch of well-worn carpet kept receding in front of his polished boots. He knew, as did his lieutenant, that the actions in this room were largely formal at this point, close-up shots to be interspersed with live footage, or in the post-mortem. He may have set the process in motion, but field assets were sufficiently autonomous that even that impetus would be evaluated, optimized, and if necessary, countermanded before engagement. Training and programming was paramount, and winning, as one of the ancient forbears of his profession had once said, isn't everything...

Yes, he'd set the process in motion almost half a decade ago. By his estimation, the coming battle was nearly fifty-five full months in the making, and if in the final twelve, it finally developed that sense of its own existence as coding, production and transport finally geared up, as underlings bifurcated and responsibility metastasized, for all of the others it was only inevitable in his mind, and by his effort. What really brought this fight into being was his own--the general's--untiring efforts at marketing, networking and grooming. It took half a year to get the administration to finally agree to review his strategic proposals. Even if success was algorithmic now.

At the front of the conference room were three large screens. The center one, the largest, was a map view, lit up with icons, and was, in fact, a low-information representation of the display on his clipboard. The actual terrain was located somewhere in eastern Eurostan, covering a rough square of about 5000 square miles, with some shoreline on the east and west and mountains to the south. The region was largely depopulated but for some hardscrabble dissidents and primitives and so forth (the general was not entirely sure about these distinctions) in the plains. Forests, steppes, seas and mountains--it was perfect. On the left, the view switched between representative aerial and ground-based views provided by the remote drones, the first cut at the video feed which would be processed by engineering programs and broadcast after a suitable time delay. (In previous wars, the drones had been active units too, but ratings-rights were now protected by internatonal treaty. The general, like most modern men in his position, insisted on rudimentary defenses of the video feeds, in the unlikely event that any dirty tricks were employed by the enemy, but had no expectation of needing them.) Right now, the scene projected a village landscape as seen by a large ambulatory unit: craters lining a grubby street and bullet-holes blistering antique concrete. Standard stuff. The right-hand display was a confusing series of metrics and graphs presented for statisticians and for any citizens who were so inclined to analyze them. Much would be made of this information in the following days, but as with the map, it was designed for public consumption, and not particularly informative.

Suddenly, a red light started blinking on the map, and the supporting screens brightened and began to roil with activity. The general halted, his back straight. "Men, to your battle stations!" He took a moment to note to himself that the Industani attack had, indeed, come from the northwest.

#

"What I can't explain," thought John, "is why they're doing this to me now."

He had been spent his entire adult life around the level four growth vat. Over the years, he'd gone from fourth-class maintenance supervision, which involved trailing the low-level roombas with an assortment of shining cleaning tools to wipe or otherwise remove any errant trail of slime, ichor, broth, or medium that might have escaped their fastidious passage, to mechanical supervision, involving visual daily inspection of the vat-works and intubations, to catch any gross breaches of product that might have been missed by the automated ultrasonic, x-ray, or nuclear tomographic micro-analyses--never a single report to the central computer, he noted bitterly--all the way to chief human supervisor, which is to say that all the people working at the level four growth vat were personally monitored by him. He'd taken pride in his work, pride which even now, after everything, threatened to swell his heart. It took responsibility to recite the time clock instructions every day. It took skill to make sure people lined up properly. He clenched his fist and swung it at nothing, unbalancing himself for a moment. The memo advised that he was redundant, and indeed that a general electronic supervisory tool was replacing his entire division. If the propaganda feeds were right, and John tended to believe that they were, he was a victim of the newly touted Industani management model, which had been making their war effort as much as 2.4% more profitable. And now the powers were applying the enemy model to food production. As he approached his own sidewalk, he stopped to seethe a moment. He turned around a last time to look at the huge, smooth bulk of Ag Tower casting the town into an early sunset, and, wistful again, he tried to mentally map level four onto its light-absorbing exterior. "Will they still let us live here?" he thought. He wondered about the security of his wife's position in packaging. Maybe he'd finally be able to indenture one of the boys...if only either of them were more promising.

John opened the door to a smiling crowd. Behind his wife and children flew bunting and festive banners. One said 'TGIF'. Across another rolled cartoon artillery, dodging cartoon explosions. He could see that the kitchen table had been dragged into the entertainment room. "Wha--"

Kurt and John Jr. raced out to hug his legs, and his wife Sheila gave him a peck on the cheek, and pressed a Fortified Fungo-Brew into his hands. "Pre-game is going to start in an hour," she said, "and maybe while we wait..."

He grabbed the Forty, took a swig, and sighed. "Right. The game." He looked at Kurt and gave a small involuntary shudder. "Warmups going on now? Maybe some field reports? I could go for that." He tried to look past the table. "My chair still in it's spot?"

Sheila's eyes began to droop, but then perked up again. "Oh, and I have three days worth of appetizers, John. Is anyone up for Salti-Plax and Cheez to start? It's Crobia Cheez, Sweetie, nothing but the best for our family!" She winked at her husband.

"Yeah, look. About Crobia..."

"Is that the new infantry model, Daddy?"

"You know, let's check that out," he said, eyeing John Jr. appraisingly. He took another pull at the bottle and, perhaps already growing calm from the brew, worked himself around the table to where his favorite chair waited. He patted his lap for Sheila to join, a long-accepted compromise between them. "Who's ready for the big game?"

"And let's stick it to those Stanni bastards," he added to himself.

#

They, whatever "they" was left, called the village Pay Fyerma, and it was said to be as old as time itself. A handful of farms still dotted the countryside, even now. Barley and wheat grew in yellow patches, and sheep speckled the green hillsides like wildflowers. In the distance, the mountains loomed like magisterial old gods, witnessing the tragedies of the millenia. Local legend said that the first men worthy of the name walked in the hills around Pay Fyerma, and that the first empires of men fought here, between the seas, across the mountains. It was said that only a hundred miles away, peace was declared in the hemisphere. It was said that right here, a hundred years of war was brought forth in its aftermath. Without doubt, there was a sense of eternity to the landscape, that despite the vindictive movements of the ages, life and beauty endured.

Or so were Piotr's thoughts, as he watched one recalcitrant group of mammalian wildfowers. Up close, he considered, it was impossible to escape the notion of a sheep's insides, its stinking flatulent guts and, when circumstances so wrote, succulent flesh. (And were we vaunted men any different?) One of the great paradoxes of modern times, for those who cared to ponder it, was exactly that beauty of scale, how things got both more stunning and more disgusting the closer you looked at them. But then, how could Piotr really understand of modernity? He was practically alone out here. "Well," he thought, "the farther you got from it, the better you could see it." Another paradox maybe.

It was a difficult life, and an extraordinarily simple one (enough already!), what better for a human. A thought worth recording: he reached for his pocket computer, but headlines screamed at him from the other continent, and disgusted, he stowed it.

It was getting late as he wandered down the hill, and by the time the sheep were penned, it was dusk. By the time he got the methane pool seeded and warm, it was fully dark. Piotr offered a little generic prayer for another day fully lived. He pulled the door behind him, and considered turning on the generator. Charge the notepad? The world was abuzz with war, he knew--it was that time of year--and what the hell, maybe it even mattered who won. More importantly, his waffles were superior when he utilized a little electricity. He kicked open the back door and trudged off to the shed.

The generator normally had a small light, when it was working, but he hadn't opened the gas pipes as of yet. And this was bright--Piotr squinted at the outbuilding--and large.

And, he realized, not so close as he assumed. Silently, something blacker and much, much bigger than the shed, rose up on spider's legs. The red dot, an eye--no, an illuminator, he realized; this thing must have a NIR scope for vision--swung a great arc toward the sheep pen. It took a step forward on one of its improbable needle legs--

Piotr hadn't sensed the concussion, but his head, he realized, wasn't quite right. Recent: smoke was billowing from the sheep pen and rubble was smoking, steps from him, if he could step, something was still aflame. Discordantly, he smelled a roast, and within feet of him, was the upper half of a member of his flock, recently released of its glistening insides, flayed almost like dinner. It had its mouth open as if to speak warning, but its waist was seared and hairless. Piotr vomited, and tried to rise, failed. His thigh hurt too. When he looked at it, the panic set in.

Whistling, he heard, and his own eyes followed the red illuminator, possibly seeing as much. Explosions, and spindly legs gone the way of his own. A black mechanized hillside lurching and stuttering. Another whistle, another shock wave, and sound now, roaring. Old stones of Pay Fyerma raining. The red light was closer, on the ground vertical now, wrong. It was swinging his way again, noticing him another time. Crunch. Whirr. Roar. Red. Black. Silence.

#

The general looked at the screen tiredly. It was customary, he supposed, and he hoped the men didn't get nostalgic enough to dump a bucket of Fungo-Brew on him, which wasn't to say he didn't earn it. He looked at the summary stats on the clipboard: Industan withdrawn with at least twenty units; a surprising amount of collateral damage managed to surface on the video feeds; ratings topping even the historic slaughter of '98. It had been a long weekend, but the general was looking at national hero status. Medals, women, fame. He steeled up for a last moment, and for the benefit of the public, rose and faced the cameras.

"Thank you," he said. "And God bless our country."

A crisp salute, and it was done. A fadeout was palpable as he walked round the table to shake the hands of his staff. Good job, thank you, great work. He clapped the back of the lieutenant, and together, exhausted, they turned at last to the conference room door. A shower first, then makeup, and to the interview room. He had the speech prepared in his mind for months. A hero. He loved this game.

Random

1. Massachusetts
Well, the circle's complete. For the third consecutive time since I moved here, Massachusetts elected the empty suit over the girl. Granted, it couldn't have been easy to get worked up over Kerry Healey or Martha Coakley, although it didn't take much for Shannon O'Brien to look like a candidate against Mitt Romney, despite the best efforts of the press. (In 2006, I voted for Grace Ross, the Green candidate, who wiped the floor with both Healey and Deval Patrick in the debates--the libertarian kook was more compelling than either of them too--but in addition to being a third party candidate, she was worse than a normal woman, an open lesbian who eschewed pantsuits.) When I first signed the papers on the new place, the local media was in the middle of crucifying acting governor (never spoken without the adjective) Jane Swift for being a new mommy and governor at the same time. Maybe it's a series of coincidences, but electorally, it looks like the Bay State continues to wrestle with some daddy issues or something.

Refreshingly, and on top of the generic right-wing blather, our new guy (did I call it or what?) is a climate change "skeptic." (It's part of the Obama agenda, says this guiding intellectual light.) I wonder what his views on evolution might be? He's also the pro-war, pro-secuirty candidate [and as of his speech this morning, the man who will protect our Medicare] who's against government spending. He's the independent candidate unbeholden to special interests who somehow bankrolled an immense, well-produced ad buy in the last two weeks of the campaign. At least I'll have something to complain about and amuse myself with for the next six years. My best hope now is that he turns out to be yet another Republican closet case. At least get us some entertainment value.

2. Aphorism
War and peace, revolution and stability, misery and abundance, human assets and liquidity---all merely macroeconomic functions?

He was probably baiting me, but I responded. Here's how I wish I had phrased it:

Human behavior is described by macroeconomics, it is not governed by it. Social sciences, describing war and peace, politics, etc., are also descriptions of group human behavior. It's not surprising that they sometimes bump into one another.

3. Ivory tower silage?
Was I just singing their praises? I like working with grad students well enough: they're generally pretty motivated, and smart, and will work long hours doing the more boring, repetitive sorts of scientific tasks. But on the other hand, it's easy to get in a situation where they run in circles, and where inexperience leads them to unproductivity or to surprising conclusions. Very often, grad students do need to be led, and there's something to be said for wily veterans after all.

Although as with any other employees, it's great to get a good one (my advisor must have been as disappointed as my boss is now).

4. Hyundai
Mom's Subaru went off to auction on Monday. We would have sported the (at least) $3500 repair bill if we had liked the car better--turns out the exhaust noise wasn't so much a leak as an obstructed catalytic converter, which was building up some backpressure. The exhaust and the head gasket problem may well have been related (which is why you should maintain your cars, kids), although I can't guess which was chicken and which egg.

We replaced it with a Hyundai, whose all-wheel drive is some rpm-based power-rationing thing with, basically, automatic transmissions on each front/rear wheel pair. AWD was something we shopped for, but this version is far inferior to the Subaru drive mechanism, even if it gets the vehicle through the snow eventually. With the weather, we've had plenty of opportunity to compare this week both versions. On the other hand, it's comfortable, with some luxury features that please my wife, and Korean cars, despite serious improvements in the last 20 years, don't yet suffer the reputation of value that leads to the inflated prices of Japanese models. (How far we've come, eh?) Maybe that's how the American automotive industry catches up again, by manufacturing good bargains. I see some irony that the only car we had that really lasted was a Ford...built by Kia.

Review: A Lion Among Men, by Gregory Maguire

Okay, I'm getting tired of it now. If A Lion Among Men were the second book in "The Wicked Years," I would have probably liked it as much as I liked the actual second book in "The Wicked Years." It's a similar formula: take a not-terribly-sympathetic minor character and flesh him out in context. It's the Cowardly Lion's backstory this time. We saw Brrr (did Baum name him that?) in a couple of brief cameos in Wicked, and now it's an illumination of the life lived in between being a motherless cub and a surprised, chucked-aside adult member of the Dorothy team, as well as some events after. More engagingly, Maguire also fleshes out several of the bizarre bit players that have been circling the margins of the story till now.

And really, more of this and less of that, please. It starts off well, with a heretofore rare Yackle point of view, a scene from the scarred eyes of the old bat that's been pestering the characters with prophetic catcalls for a couple of books now. She demands her fellow nuns to lower her into the crypt, to hasten the end of the burden of her life and sweep her out after a year. The suicide is a near-comical, near-chilling failure. Deliciously macabre, ("wicked"), which is not my go-to place for entertainment, but a hell of an entrance in this case. The other secondary characters are almost this good too, but soon enough we're with the Lion again, and his personal history gets the, um, Lion's share of print. Some new folds in the character are revealed, and it wasn't badly done, but it more colored in the outline of his character than expanded it. And it costs us readers 200 pages of retreading old backstory, even while the author is telegraphing a larger plot and doing nothing about it. Now that these Oz books are a committed series instead of an entertainingly revisionist standalone, now that it's a story arc in other words, there's an entirely different pacing at play. Or maybe it was all fine, and it was just too soon to get back in.

The history of the Cowardly Cub picks up after his escape from the University lab, and he finds himself in the wilderness, subsisting without meat, and, Frankenstein-like, without language. He picks up the art of words by spying on humans, and boy, he's quick with that. The author isn't about to let inexperience get in the way of a few good puns or a little witty banter. Like Shelley's creature, or like old Quasimodo, the young Lion craves acceptance, and commits love straightaway, which, due to his disconnectedness from the world, has brutish results. Neither does he fit in with Oz's disenfranchised talking Animals, and his life flits between the spheres, from an uncomfortable society Animal, to an uncomfortable outcast. Poor Brrr isn't quite as likable as he might be. He has a tendency for vanity, self-absorption and conflict-avoidance, but it's clear they'd have only ever been venial sins were he not pushed around by circumstances. The tragedies aren't so much that people suffer for his failures to act, but rather that he keeps ending up in situations where his inaction matters. A hard thing to illustrate.

Maguire, incidentally, is as breezy with his allusions as he is with the language (as he is with his pocket philosophizing, his character development, his geography, his law, economy, and politics), and let's not forget the essential silliness of the setting either. It's his talent as a writer to balance that playfulness elegantly with outsized, but sneakily substantial, seriousness. I was on about it last time, but it's probably why he's so busy reinventing these classic and fairytale settings.

I don't know that any of his character arcs have been fully redemptive, but I'll go as far as to spoil you this: the ending of this one, however mild a poke to the implacable machinery of history and chance it may have been, is genuinely uplifting and satisfying. I felt good when I finished reading it--not all I want out of literature, but a hell of a nice thing.

Ad Hominem 3-fer

Too shrill! Too shrill! I am still surprised to find myself rising (or sinking) to the level of politically-motivated Tourette's blogging, never mind of the lefty stripe (hey, I used to think fiscal responsibility implied something fiscally responsible), which is why I keep apologizing. But it's the silly season, again already, here in the People's Republic of Massachusetts, and it's been getting to me. I'm purging this from my system, see, which means it has to end up somewhere. I'm just going to sneeeeeak it in here right before another book review. Yeah, just like that. Nothing to see here.

1. Scott Brown.
So a number of my acquaintances support this guy, out of some sense of contrarian spirit mostly. Maybe that's understandable in some sense. Ms. Coakley is evidently a solid Democratic functionary (with all that might entail), and doesn't lend much in the inspiring leader department (her message: Scott Brown's a Republican!). As with any election, we have differences in party, uh, campaign themes, and some corresponding differences in policy, how "minor" depending on whether they affect you, but there's a large amount of institutional resistance to any big issue ever getting changed, which is evidently insurmountable in those areas of policy where money has already collected. As always, and despite everything, the willing suspension of disbelief descends over the electorate like smog.

The more responsible voters are forced to guess which things the heretofore anonymous candidate is lying about, and which things he or she actually intends to (or is able to do), and keep their expectations low. Dispense your requisite bullshit if you must, but don't expect me to believe you can reroute the Alpheus and the Peneus into your own stables, even while you're adding so prodigiously to the steaming pile yourself. Anyone who's been through this exercise more than twice should realize by now that a budget-cutting Republican is as rare and phantasmal a creature as an anti-war Democrat, and with this in mind, all I ask is that they don't insult my intelligence too aggressively with their endless campaign. In Scott Brown's case, it doesn't help that he speaks in a bellowing mad-lib of conservative code words, proudly spouting them in that passive-aggressive, indignant tone of voice that you only find in political ads and empty-Senate C-SPAN harangues. Or in debates, evidently. (Doghouse Riley blames Nixon for this. I trust him.)

I listened to about five minutes of the debate. It's pretty hard to stomach these things at all, and while Scott Brown didn't "hold his own" in the following assessment as laughably as George W. Bush did back in the day, he didn't exactly come off as a shining beacon of wit, integrity and sensitivity. I mean, in the current political climate, it takes a special kind of belligerent obliviousness for a conservative to campaign like it's 1992, or even 2002. A good Republican is for the war industry, for unrestricting the finance industry (so is a good Democrat of course, but Republicans are the extroverts), and is ...anti-spending? This was insane back then, but after the last ten years? That takes some big brass ones.

You can come out against general spending, hard as it is to believe you can do it with a straight face, but let's list some priorities. Show me where you are pointing those scissors, asshole. In the light of undisclosed trillions for optional and privatized wars, for bailing out banking, for insurance industry deals, what pisses you off, what really grinds your gears, is Medicare? I mean, helping out sick old people is where you draw the spending line? Fuck you, Scott Brown, you shrivel-souled, pea-brained, terror-scared, bedwetting whore.

Sadly, he's an uptight white dude with light brown hair who fills out a suit okay. He'll probably win.

2. Bruce Bartlett.
I have some memory of not detesting Bruce Bartlett, probably for being soberly, anti-deficit. I don't think I ever bought into the supply-side economics he once championed, but back in a younger life, it was easy to imagine that wealth correlated strongly to the extent one could perform generally useful tasks, goods-n-services, renting excess capital, blah blah blah. Huge caveats implied, but I don't think most of us object on principles to some version of a do-more, get-more kind of economic system. The problem is that in terms of principles and surprising reality, like Madgie said, you're soaking in it.

Anyway, Bruce Bartlett. Those are some tired poses, moreso given the last thirty years. No, we can't expect helping out the rich to automatically benefit the poor, but look, the rising tide thing: are those especially buoyant arks benefiting from the swell (or suffering from the ebb) proportionally to their contribution to it? That might contribute to the "aesthetic," you insensitive shithead.

"[N]either does it follow that there is no limit to how much we can soak the rich without average people suffering some of the consequences. We really don't want the rich spending all their time figuring out how to hide their wealth from the tax man or engaging in conspicuous consumption; we'd rather that they invested their wealth in businesses that will increase their wealth but also create jobs and income for the rest of us, too."

And that's just it. Are we within miles of that limit? The U.S. government has been eagerly outlining an investor class and reducing their economic burdens (and we can include Mom and Pop's pension fund here if you want to) for three decades now, and it's not clear that investment in job-producing companies is where enough of it went. It looks like a good fraction of value got extracted from job-producing companies (or from the the labor generated at formerly-job-producing companies) through some combination of liquidation (hey look, if we get rid of payroll, share values go up a lot!), marketing (the old rules don't apply! your home value will only go up!), pressure (better let us manage your 401(k), we got our thumbs on Social Security's jugular), and taxes (sometimes directly transferred, whee). Some jobs and infrastructure emerged from the tech bubble, and I guess we got some extra buildings out of the real estate one, although a lot less real economy than advertised. And yes, Joe Homeborrower walked away with a big TV and a new pickup that came out of his HELOC, which will be hard to give back now, and for which he's still on the hook, theoretically. How's that stack against the billions in guaranteed corporate payola?

The argument isn't that economic transactions are zero-sum, and I'm unclear why zero-sum is particularly relevant to describing a fucked-up distribution anyway. In terms of the comparative advantage thingie, someone's adding less to the system than claimed, and reserving more of that somewhat-optimized (and inflated) sum for himself. This is the opposite of the do-more, get-more idea, isn't it? I won't tell Bruce Bartlett to fuck off without a better body of evidence: I'll take a thoughtful conservative if I can find one, and it's not really his fault he looks like a cartoon of an evil banker. You can at least catch him questioning his assumptions sometimes, which I guess is better than not doing so, but that column is a blatant fucking anachronism.

3. That "Ladders" Guy
I don't have a six figure job, but if I had self-confidence, motivation, or a talent for bullshitting, I could presumably pursue one with my credentials. (Those traits would probably also have made me "successful.") I'm a Phucking Dork with years of experience, and I get that job-hunting would be less depressing if I could weed out appropriate positions from the more frequent calls for recently-graduated ivory tower silage. Which isn't to say that those eager youngsters aren't often smarter and more useful than I am. They are, and it's the sort of knowledge that keeps me in this stew of vanity and self-loathing when it comes to employment, at least when I relent to its seriousness.

Maybe you've seen this ad. Here's some earnest-looking manchild, decked out in country club attire, just about to take his first swing at a tennis ball, when an athletic woman slams him out of the way to poach his shot. The court quickly swarms with the usual suite of office incompetents, humorously flailing at imaginary balls. Funny stuff.

And what a message. If that guy is six figure material, we don't know it, because we never see him actually swing his racquet. Evidently, to earn above $100k, it's who you are more than what you can do, and that person is well-represented by some preppie prick who stole John Cusack's girlfriend in 1986, the sort of guy that plays on clay, pays a pro for private lessons, wears pristine collared whites to match his peachy complexion, and, rather than doing anything corrective or competitive, casts whithering, beleagured looks at the dusky but unworthy officials when things aren't going his way. A six-figure man already owns the court, in other words, and deserves to have the riffraff and the underclass kept out.

And the really killer part is that woman, were she not barred from club like in the bad old days, would totally mop the court with that guy. So fuck you, you privileged, pencil-armed, Hugh-Grant-looking motherfucker. Learn to deal like the rest of us.