Learning Today: May 17th 2011. The Octopus Of Love And Death

When you love someone, what's better than giving them a little reminder of yourself? A poem. A picture. Something that reminds your lover of you when you are gone. The male blanket octopus has found the perfect gift. He gives his mate his penis.

Well, it's not really his penis. Male octopuses have a special sperm tentacle which they use to give lady octopuses their sperm sack. Sounds lovely, I know, but it gets the job done. When Mr. Blanket Octopus hands over his bag of squiggly octopod love, Mrs. Blanket Octopus gets a little something extra. He gives her his entire love tentacle. And then he dies.

Isn't nature great?

Source: Sex Drugs and Sea Slime on CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks, May 14th.

Learning Today: May 16th, 2011. The Eight-legged essay of China.

Welcome to Learning Today. I come across a huge number of facts in my daily procrastinating, and I thought--why not share those facts with the world? Or at least with the tiny number of humans and web-bots that read this blog?

Our inaugural bit of wisdom comes today from China's imperial examination system. Civil servants in Imperial China were chosen on the basis of their performance on a test. Hooray meritocracy, you say! Not so fast. This wasn't a test of actual practical things. This was a test of the Chinese classics. It was horrifically difficult. The leader of the Taiping Rebellion, Hong Xiuquan, failed his examinations over four times--despite scoring in the top one percent of applicants. People would spend their lives taking the exams. Makes GRE test prep look peachy, no?

Why were the exams so hard? For an example, look at the dreaded eight-legged essay. Not only did the eight-legged essay give strict limits on the word count, structure and expression, but it demanded that writers not mention anything that happened after the death of Mencius in 298 B.C. From Wiki:

Words, phraseology, or references to events that occurred after the death of Mencius in 298 BC were not allowed, since the essay was supposed to explain a quote from one of the Confucian classics by "speaking for the sage"; and Confucius or his disciples could not have referred to events that occurred after their deaths.^[1]

That's what I call learning.

Back!

So I'm going to be trying something new with this blog in the coming days and weeks, let's see if I can keep it up.

Entirely Subjective Reveiws: Shearwater

Shearwater perfectly expresses a certain feeling: you're sailing with some friends and at some point a quietness comes over everyone so you look over the prow. You listen to the waves lap at the boat. You watch the proud sea. A bird flies overhead and looks lonely and beautiful. And even though you're smiling and you know that actually you are quite content, you feel a deep and bitter sadness. Then for a minute or two nobody speaks.

Shearwater's Rook
Metacritic: 85
Amazon: 4 stars
Pitchfork: 8

Entirely Subjective Reviews: The Pacific

Like my grandma watching a Waynes Brothers movie, I can't tell anyone apart.

The Pacific is a beautifully shot TV show which tries to explode our heroic myths about war and I cannot understand it at all even though I tried really hard.

There's one big problem: I can't tell the characters apart. I know there's supposed to be an Italian dude and a southern dude, but after that--the characters are just all the same. Lots of men. Sitting around. And they are dirty and they eat food. And then there are explosions! IMPORTANT EXPLOSIONS! And then there are dead bodies and we feel bad because we know about the horror of war. But then there are explosions again! Whee! And we are in the past so we know that things are DIFFERENT.

I tried really hard to like The Pacific. I read episode guides to try to figure out which characters were which. But after about forty minutes through the second episode squinting trying to figure out whether there were two curly haired dudes or one and who the guy was who won the medal of honor and why he won it I put The Pacific on pause and went to do something else--and my life was not a single smidgen worse.

Metacritic Rating: 87
IMDB: 8.5/10
Amazon: 4/5

Octopus Kills Shark

Via my dad via HuffPo via Boing Boing.

Reviews in the Age of Aggregation

One of the most dramatic elements of the new internet age has been the rise of aggregation. Before the internet, data was limited. Now we have unlimited data, and the limiting factor on people's consumption of data is time. In the previous generation, important people may have been 'personalities' who provided interesting outlooks on the world. Now important people are collectors who organize data in useful ways.

I think that aggregation has fundamentally changed the role of criticism in our culture in a way which most critics have not yet realized.

First let's take a look at the role of criticism before the rise of aggregation. And here I am talking about friendly accessible newspaper criticism which people use to decide whether or not to consume a particular work of art. I do not care about ponderous useless academic criticism which people use to gain jobs as tenured humanities professors.

So here's how people's relationship to criticism used to look: You want to see a movie this weekend. So you open up the arts section of your newspaper of choice and you read the movie reviews. Maybe you pay attention to the byline of the reviewer, and certain reviewers--A. O. Scott, say, or Ebert--will influence your opinion more than other reviewers.

In this situation, the reviewer is trying to get at a kind of objective criticism of the work in question. Since the reader is only going to read one--or at most two--reviews of a given work, the reviewer will do his or her best to set aside their individual opinion and try instead for a more universal opinion. The reviewer does not answer the question "Did I like it?" but answers the question "Is it good?"

This stance was a result merely of a technological limitation. The collection of large sets of data about people's opinions was difficult and time consuming. So the reviewer had to take the position of the sole judge.

Yet now, with the rise of aggregation, that has all changed. Data is cheap and plentiful.

These days, if I want to judge a given work of art, I will look at a site which aggregates opinion. Sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes digest professional reviews into numerical scores which provide a good guess at how good a particular work of art will be. Other sites like Amazon.com and Imdb allow users to contribute their own reviews. Sites like Netflix and the iTunes music store use complicated algorithms to look at individuals' tastes and try to figure out what art and music will appeal to them. And then just look at the plethora of different top ten, top 100 and top 1000 lists out there. We love aggregation. Sometimes we might look at the reviews of a particular favorite reviewer, but that reviewer is no longer the only source we use to judge whether we give our time to a work of art.

So there is now no more need for the reviewer who positions himself as the sole arbiter of a piece of art. The reviewer can merely give his or her own personal opinion and then let the aggregation do the work of providing a more 'objective' criticism. There is no harm now in saying "I don't like this film because the actor reminded me of my brother-in-law." The peculiarities of individual opinion are leveled by aggregation.

But criticism has not yet changed. To show what I think modern criticism might look like, I will periodically post reviews of things on this site, giving the most biased and personal reviews possible. To balance out these biased reviews, I will also include as much aggregated criticism of the given work of art as possible--its Metacritic, Amazon, and if possible, Imdb rating. In this way I hope to show both sides of aggregation--the small-scale, personal and biased individual reviewer, and the numerical, sphinx-like and sage aggregated number.

Things Which Don't Suck, Part 1

Rhapsody in Blue




My first sip of coffee in the morning.

Jess' jokes.

Gordon S. Wood.

Dostoyevsky and Salinger.

Dorris Lessing and Laurence Durrell.

Tulips and Irises.

Squids and octopuses.

Miyazaki and Pixar.

Keroro Gunso





What else doesn't suck?

The Narrative Fallacy

We tend to look at the events of our lives as stories. While our stories will fit the data of the world most of the time, there will be rare but significant moments when our stories about the world will fail. These incidents are as distressing as they are inevitable.

Anyway. Here’s something I thought of on the bus today.

Since we understand the world in terms of stories, we judge the validity of particular storylines not only by how well they fit the world but also by how successful they are as stories.

This isn’t a huge problem when we have a lot of data (in our own life, for instance). Since we have a lot of data we’re probably constrained to make storylines which are a closer fit to the world.

Where this effect is really significant, I think, is in parts of our knowledge where we rely mostly on hearsay—where we don’t have a lot of easily available data to whittle down our storyline options.

Now tons of stuff we believe in relies on hearsay. Our beliefs about the nature of the universe, our beliefs about politics, and history are mostly formed by stories other people tell us rather than from our own observation.

In these situations since we don’t have a lot of data with which to falsify or verify these stories, we will tend to choose stories which provide more narrative satisfaction.

For instance, I am interested in the US health care debate, but I do not have time enough to adequately educate myself about it. But I still need some kind of opinion about it. So what opinion do I choose? I will choose a story which makes sense to me. “President Obama is selling us out because he is a liar.” Or, “President Obama is standing up for me and he will choose the best possible policy option.”
Now this problem is especially pernicious when it comes to journalism. The success of a journalist is dependent on his or her ability to construct meaningful stories out of the data of the world—not on their ability to construct more accurate stories about the world.

You can see this in reporting on the stock market. The condition of the stock market effects the well-being of many people, so it is a story which we have to tell. So when there is an unusual movement of the stock market journalists have to explain it. “The stock market crashed and then recovered very quickly today because of a computer error.” “The stock market rose today because of investor hopes of a change in the interest rate.” But the stock market is a notoriously complex system which defies easy analysis. The same conditions which are used today to explain a rise in the stock market will be used tomorrow to explain a crash in the stock market. The real reasons for these rises and falls are too complicated for non-experts to understand (and probably too complicated even for the experts to understand.) So we tell ourselves stories about these events which make sense but don’t actually convey the nature of reality.

This narrative fallacy can explain religious and political enthusiasm, too: having a particular storyline which can explain everything in the world is very comforting. “Everything would be better if people just followed Marx.” “The world is bad because nobody is a real Christian.” “America is corrupted by special interests.” All of these ideas provide very compelling stories which explain the world in narratively satisfactory ways. The problem is that they don’t accurately reflect the world. Since we don’t actually have a lot of commerce with data about politics, we are able to keep these inaccurate beliefs safe from recalcitrant experience. In our personal lives we are held to greater accuracy about our stories because we are more likely to encounter recalcitrant experience.

Here is Tocqueville talking about something similar. He's discussing how pre-Revolutionary France was led by its writers.

When we study the history of our Revolution, we realize that it was prompted by precisely the same outlook which inspired so many books on the theory of government. They reflected the same attractions for universal theories, comprehensive systems of legislation and an exact summary in the laws; the same contempt for existing facts; the same faith in theory; the same taste of the original; the ingenious and the novel in reshaping institutions; the same desire to reconstruct the entire constitution at one and the same time following the rule of logic and according to a single plan instead of seeking to reform it in its separate parts. A frightening spectacle! For what is a good quality in a writer is a failing in a politician and the very themes which have often produced fine books may lead to great upheavals.

If I was Malcom Gladwell I’d call this something like ‘The Storyteller’s Illusion’. But I’m not. So it’s ‘the Narrative Fallacy.’

ALL CAPS LINKAGE

MEMES FROM AN ALTERNATE DIMENSION

VIA WAXY

HAPPY ALL CAPS TUESDAY.

Time For The Times

Doing too much at the same time, even at the risk of failure, is a core American trait that built the nation. It’s as American as Benjamin Franklin, “Moby-Dick,” the New Deal and a double cheeseburger with all the toppings.

David Foster Wallace And Hypertext

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest just might be one of the most popular things on the internet. There are so many websites devoted to reading and re-reading IJ that I am refraining, right now, from linking to any of them, because it would just take too much time. There's a small irony here, because DFW's serpentine, infinity-recursive prose is just about the exact opposite of what you'd want you polished blog prose to be like, which is clean and concise. Anyway. I apologise if you've never read IJ; I encourage you to, and I also encourage you to join us here again tomorrow, when we might--MIGHT--talk about something interesting. Because if you haven't read IJ you just probably should stop reading this post right now, because it is inside baseball, at best.

My argument is that IJ is the first great novel of the internet age, even though it somewhat preceded it. Now. There's something interesting you can say about Infinite Jest's take on mass media, something very interesting, especially in the hypertrophied entertainment culture of O.N.A.N.ite USA. But that's not what I'm going to be talking about today.

I think that the densely allusive, footnoted prose of IJ is an almost perfect hypertext, in that original sense of hypertext which was an infinitely referenced network of texts, the ideal of the internet before the internet became real. I will show you what I mean. Here's just one paragraph, taken pretty much at random, which I have gone about and annotated as best as I could. It's from the brochure for the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed, as read by Madame Psychosis on page 187 of my book, for those of you at home, following along:

'Those with saddle sores. Those with atrophic limbs. And yes chemists and pure-math majors also those with atrophic necks. Scleredema adultorum. Them that seep, the serodermatotic,. Come one come all, this circular says. The hydrocephalic. The tabescent and chachetic and anorexic. The Brag's-Diseased, in their heavy red rinds of flesh. The dermally wine-stained or carbuncular or steatocryptoic or God forbid all three. Marin-Amat Syndrome, you say? Come on down. The psoriatic. The exzematically shunned. And the scrofulodermic. Bell-shaped steatopygiacs, in your special slacks. Afflictees of Pityriasis Rosea. It says here Come all ye hateful. Blessed are the poor in body, for they.'

Infinite Jest has the sort of hyper-referenced information overload that swamps all of us these days in 2009, those of us who read lots on the internet. Though Wallace wrote before the wide-spread popularity of the internet, he expressed well the information overload of us blog-seeped netizens. I see a fully-referenced hypertexted version of IJ as entirely possible, and I could encourage anyone with connections in the publishing industry to pitch this idea. Hard. Just give me some props if it ever comes true.

Am I Internet Famous Yet?

My Kickstarter project might get a buck from Choire.

Someone should convince him.

Now Is Time To Help The Starving Artist

So I've recently finished a novel, and I'm trying to get it published. Writing a novel is pretty easy, all things considered. Getting it published is hard. I'm also pounding away at another novel. It is really a beautiful life, writing, I assure you.

But there's a problem. You see, normal human beings use money to buy goods and services, including housing and food, which are considered by most to be necessities. Writing fiction--especially when it is fiction whose only laurels to date are some absolutely glowing rejection letters--does not provide much of this money.

Yet, there is a solution. It is called the internet.

There's this neat website called Kickstarter, and I've started a project up there. The idea of Kickstarter is this: you give artists money, and you get stuff in return. If you give me five bucks--ONLY FIVE DOLLARS!--you will get an electronic copy of my novel when it is finished. If you give me seven dollars, I will chuck in a copy of my already completed novel. Wow! There are many other wonderful things you can get, including me being your personal writing slave, so I encourage you to check it out.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

A BRIEF SURVEY OF ALL CAPS LITERATURE

ALL CAPS HAS A BAD REPUTATION. ONE WISE IMMINENCE RECENTLY ADVISED ME THAT WRITING IN ALL CAPS SUGGESTS MENTAL UNBALANCE, ILLNESS, AND NOT AWESOMENESS. THAT IS WHY WE HERE AT RAISE HIGH THE ROOFBEAM, CARPENTERS HAVE PUT TOGETHER THIS BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO ALL CAPS LITERARY PRODUCTION, TO RAISE CONSCIOUSNESS AND ALL THAT, IN HONOR OF ALL CAPS TUESDAY.

MF DOOM



RAPPER MF DOOM'S NAME IS WRITTEN ALL CAPS. "ALL BIG LETTERS BUT IT ISN'T NO ACRONYM."

STEPHEN CRANE



BEST KNOWN FOR WRITING THE PERPETUALLY BOOK-REPORTED RED BADGE OF COURAGE, STEPHEN CRANE ALSO WROTE SOME PRETTY ALL CAPS POETRY. AND BY ALL CAPS, I MEAN LITERALLY ALL CAPS. CRANE'S COLLECTION OF POETRY, THE BLACK RIDERS AND OTHER LINES, WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ALL CAPS, THOUGH LATER EDITIONS HAD NORMAL CAPS, WHICH SUCKS. I THINK THAT THE ALL CAPS VERSION IS MUCH BETTER, EMPHASIZING THE STARK, POWERFUL IMAGES IN CRANE'S LINES. HERE'S THE THIRD LINE, MY FAVORITE SINCE I WAS A LITTLE BOY:

IN THE DESERT
I SAW A CREATURE, NAKED, BESTIAL,
WHO, SQUATTING UPON THE GROUND,
HELD HIS HEART IN HIS HANDS,
AND ATE OF IT.
I SAID, "IS IT GOOD, FRIEND?"
"IT IS BITTER BITTER," HE ANSWERED;
"BUT I LIKE IT
"BECAUSE IT IS BITTER,
"AND BECAUSE IT IS MY HEART."

THE TELEGRAPH



DID YOU KNOW THAT BECAUSE IT WAS AWESOME, THE TELEGRAPH SYSTEM WOULD ONLY SEND MESSAGES IN CAPITAL LETTERS?

DO YOU, MY FRIENDLY READERS, KNOW OF ANY OTHER ALL CAPS LITERARY PRODUCTIONS?

What Makes A Compulsive Song Compulsive?

Right now I am listening to Okkervil River's Calling And Not Calling My Ex from their latest album, the Stage Names. (The embedded YouTube vid above is, in fact, a live recording of the song.) I have been listening to this song a lot. And by a lot I mean maybe three, four, five times a day, whenever I find a spare moment.

Now it doesn't take a Master's in psychology to figure out the etiology of this compulsion. I have been thinking a lot about an ex of my own. But we might find some interest in the details. What first drew me to the song was the line "I'm feeling pretty stupid now for ever having said goodbye." Which is exactly how I feel when I'm feeling, well, however it is that I feel. The sympathy I felt at that line made me stop, rewind the song, and start to listen again. Now, one way of explaining great art says that great art expresses what we otherwise find inexpressible. That great art alone can express these feelings because those feelings are too refined to be explained by our own poor powers of expression. But the emotions I find reflected in the song remain unexpressed by me, not because they are too ineffable or complicated, but because they are too cliched, too mawkish. I miss you. I never wish I said goodbye to you. The beauty comes from a simple sentiment, expressed simply, but a sentiment that if I actually said it would encourage my friends wonder whether I had turned emo on them. (Maybe, perhaps, I have.)

This has led me to think about obsessional songs. My housemate is currently listening over and over again to a verse by the British hip-hop legend Jehst (his verse starts at 1.10). In my sophomore year of college I listened to Mirah's song Mt St Helens every single morning when I woke up, much to the chagrin of my roomate, who at first hated the song, then grew to despise it, silently, while still in bed, trying to sleep, every day. (The song's first lines, "From the morning when I rise from my bed / to the evening when I lay my head in slumber" outright encouraged obsession--indeed, the song was compulsive because it was about compulsion. I blame you, Mirah, for mornings of moody music-listening, and for the discomfort you caused my roomate.)

These songs, I think, are just proxy obsessions: in my case, I am trying to find some way to channel my care for girls who, for whatever reason, are far away from me. In my housemate's case, he listens to Jehst ten times in a row because he is obsessed with the sheer skillful exuberance of the English language, with hip-hop, with speech.

Which is a little healthier, perhaps.

I don't know if what I'm talking about here is the already much talked-about earworm, but I suspect there is some difference. The earworm comes into your head unbidden. These songs, you invite them in.

I had first planned these paragraphs as an introduction to an open thread, and so will conclude:

TL;DR: What songs are you obsessed with, and why?

And again, the Times

An interesting thing is happening in this Times article on Jackie Chan's inadvertent reactionary activism--there's a YouTube link! In the lede! Since when did the Times start including external links in its web versions of print stories?

I feel like I have missed the boat on this one.

And here's a funny sentence, for your pleasure:

As the storm gathered, words turned to action: the mayor of Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, dropped Mr. Chan as an ambassador for the 2009 Summer Deaflympics in Taiwan.

More Red Flag Words

1. "Let's catch up soon."

2. "Whatever does not kills you makes you stronger."

3. "My personal philosophy."

4. Gratuitous use of scare quotes.

5. Chocotinis.

6. "X pokes you!" (On Facebook.)

7. "I'm sorry but I just have to be selfish right now..."

8. "I finished writing my novel."

A Fact So True I Wish I Had Made It Up Myself

Detroit hockey octopus throwing tradition. It exists.

Via mefi (thread contains MANY more octopi links, like my new favorite blog [sorry, Brendan!] Today In Tentacles.)

HAPPY ALL CAPS TUESDAY

IT'S TUESDAY AGAIN, THE DAY WHEN WE RITUALLY HIT THE CAPS LOCK KEY, AND THE WORLD--SUDDENLY, MIRACULOUSLY, BECAUSE OF THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES OR SOMETHIN--BECOMES MANY TIMES MORE AWESOME THAN IT WOULD BE OTHERWISE. YOU GUYS KNOW THE DRILL. WELL, IF YOU HAVE NOT YET RECEIVED THE ALL CAPS MEMO, I WILL TELL YOU THE DRILL:

EVERY TUESDAY

ALL CAPS

SO, WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, HERE ARE SOME MEMES THAT I MADE.









ARE YOU ENOUGH OF A BADASS TO MAKE YOU OWN MEMES AND POST THEM ON THE ALL CAPS TUESDAY FACEBOOK GROUP? PROBABLY NOT.

I MADE THE DEPRESSION DOG AND ADVICE DOG MEMES USING THE TOTALLY ALL-CAPS MEMEGENERATOR.

A Papal Fact

Of all the popes, the most curious must of course be Gregory the Uncertain, who was pope for only three years, between 1012 and 1015.

Gregory entered the papacy enamored with the fashionable superstitions of the time, such as miracles performed by holy men, the wondrous properties of relics, and the existence of and communication with demons. In fact, in his first year as pope, Gregory entertained a near-record number of pilgrims, con-men, and supplicants, who filtered in and out of the halls of the Vatican presenting the finger-bones of famous historical figures, odd growths on their foreheads that looked like cauliflower, and talking animals who got suddenly shy standing in front of the pope himself and would barely be able to talk about the weather. Gregory was quite amused by all these visitors, and was often seen clapping his hands and laughing.

However, Gregory was a weak-willed man, chosen more for his political connections to the powerful Florentine merchants the Snarkerellis than for his spiritual or organizational might, and he soon grew tired with his amusements and began in earnest to think of the nature of worship. This initiated what were known as the Months of Confusion, as Gregory would issue decree after decree, almost daily piling up new ordinances and suggestions, often confusing, mostly contradictory. For instance, on one day, Gregory, after studying some scrolls made the more obscure by his poor Aramaic, proclaimed that Christians should not keep cats. Duly, there were many devout families who, on hearing the news, tossed out their cats to the night and praised god for it. However, not more than eight days later, Gregory issued another statement proclaiming that the keeping of all pets, cats included, encouraged the love of Christ, and was a blessing, confusing all those who had so callously tossed our their family pets not eight days before. Gregory’s fiddling touched topics as diverse as haberdashery, accounting, archery, meteorology, cooking (especially the drying of fruits and fish), alchemy, the training and up-keep of house-squid, the naming of children, and a spectacular, daily, three-week-long clusterfuck of decrees relating to the wearing and washing of undergarments whose various twists and turns of argument are utterly incomprehensible to the modern reader.

Pope Gregory, however, ensured his obscurity when he pronounced his last bit of advice, in which he, in mealy-mouthed Latin, proposed that maybe the whole dogma stuff of the Catholic church should be taken as a metaphor or something, because it really makes more sense that way, right? He was found dead three days later. He was canonized in 1456, and is considered the patron saint of stutterers and the indecisive.

This pope fact was requested by reader Melanie Poole. Request any sort of fact in the comments, and there you go, I will write you one.

Metaphor

Can I Has Relaunch?

So. I am posting more in this here blog. And I changed the title image. What do you think?

Also--tell your friends! Drop some comments.

Carousel

via Mefi

Why You Should Want Higher Taxes

Check it out. My colleague Ilan Moscovitz at the Motley Fool proposes that the financial crisis was caused, in part, by investors focusing on short-term gain rather than on the long-term health of the businesses they were investing in. He proposes a tax on short-term sales of stock to provide an incentive for long-term rather than short term investing. But why am I telling you this? Go read it yourself.

Nine Red Flag Words

Here at Raise High The Roofbeam, Carpenters! we are committed to providing you with the most up-to-date in conversational technology. That is why we present you today with this handy list of red-flag words, phrases which lift a metaphorical red flag to announce the potential approach of conversational danger. When your conversational partner utters any one of these phrases, we advise you to take care, plan your escape routes, and calmly assess the situation. Remember: don't panic! If you are prepared and watch for the warning signs, you too can avoid the pitfalls of interlocutory disaster.

1. "I'm just at a point in my life when..."

2. "Deconstruction" to mean destruction or taking apart.

3. "Deconstruction" to mean "Deconstruction".

4. "Vis a vis", also, "qua".

5. "I don't mean to be [racist/insensitive/stupid] BUT..."

6. "Yeah, I know that X is an asshole, but he's really nice once you get to know him."

7. "I only [dance/sing/talk to girls/go out] when I'm drunk."

8. Anything to do with quantum mechanics or neuroscience (fMRI studies in particular) when the person's only source is "Some article I read..." or, in a more extreme case, "Some video my friend told me about..." that 'scientifically proves' [telepathy/time travel/the existence of god and/or the afterlife] ESPECIALLY when included in a discussion of recreational psychedelic drugs.

9. "Yeah, I wrote something about that on my blog."

Please suggest your own red flag words in the comments.

Local Media Me

I will be an audience member on SBS' Q&A tonight. I won't be doing any Aing, nor will I be doing any Qing, but if you tune in you might be able to see my interested, beautiful face.

Nostalgia

Right now I'm living in Canberra, where I went to high school. I left six or seven years ago. At the bars I crane my head around, looking for ghosts of people who knew me in high school, or who I used to know, and I often find them. Someone came up to me in the supermarket who used to buy my zines. People ask me when I cut off my dreadlocks (about eight years ago).

One of the questions people ask me is whether it's strange to be back, since so much has changed. The city center of Canberra, which is really the social heart of the city, and the only place that mattered to me as a kid, has changed dramatically. A mall has grown up around the edges of it, where once there were big thirsty parking-lots, and embraced the open square of Garema Place with a stone-face curtain of shops and movie theaters. That has changed, certainly. But the strange thing is more how everything has stayed the same. There still sits the same sleepy Vietnamese restaurant you never saw anyone eat in, that you were sure was about to go out of business, with the same faded plastic sign, the same sun-faded menu. The same streets and trees and the same faces. The same feeling of gentleness.

But for me this place is haunted. And each place has for me a memory. I remember driving by this empty lot nearing to the Braddon Club, heading up towards my home just a couple weeks ago. It was just gone autumn and the gutters were beginning to brim with leaves. And I remembered, so immediate that it hurt, walking down that very street, going home, in the cusp of autumn, with a beloved ex-girlfriend, just as we were beginning to court each other. The memory was so close, it was surprising that it was seven or eight years old. The fact that she wasn't next to me, that I couldn't call her, that our relationship had grown older, more complicated, and adult, just struck me for that brief moment as impossible--how could she not be waiting just outside of my vision, about to take my hand? how could it have changed. And yet I looked around and in the car were strangers, absolute strangers. (I had hitched a ride home with some acquaintances.) She wasn't there. Once I made it home I touched that place with my mind again, hoping to find her, but could taste only a dim memory, half-cold and unappetizing. For the twentieth of thirtieth time that day, I wished to go back in time, and wished at the very same moment to be right exactly where I was.

Robert Caro On LBJ On Charlie Rose

Something to chew on

Are we then not beasts to call the labor which makes us bestial?

...Perhaps we are right to condemn ourselves for giving birth to such an absurd thing as a man; right to call it an act of shame and the organs which seem to do it shameful.

--Montaigne, from On Some Lines Of Virgil

Hitting the gym!

Guys, this blogging thing is pretty tough! I'm gonna go training!

via waxy.

What's The Use In Talking?

So Thucydides is writing about the Spartans' debate about whether to go to war against the Athenians, treating us to pages and pages of arguments for and against, well-argued and cogent. Yet in the end the argument that wins the day is a quick paragraph so full of platitudinous cliches it makes a Hallmark Birthday card look like Winston Churchill. Thucydides says this:

The Spartans voted... that war should be declared, not so much because they were influenced by the speeches of their allies as because they were afraid of further growth of Athenian power....

This made me think of Lyndon Johnson, who in the position of Senate Majority Leader, saw the magnificence of public speaking much like the way you or I would look at a sledgehammer, that is, a blunt tool, to be used by someone else.

Eloquence on the floor of the Senate didn't matter because it was not eloquence that changed votes. It was Johnson with his promises, threats, and compromises. Even after hearing the most moving speech, a Johnson crony would still vote, not with his conscience, but with Johnson, for voting with Johnson was how people got things done. Johnson's early success as Majority Leader came by way of limiting debate on the floor: he made the entire Senate much more efficient by using a hitherto little-used parliamentary technology called a unanimous consent agreement, which forced the entire Senate to vote on particular bills at a particular time, clearing up the traditional speechifying logjam of Senates past. Indeed, the only real importance that speeches had on the floor of the Senate in those days was the threat of the filibuster, and comparing the filibuster to normal eloquence is like comparing a fancy dinner with a competitive eating championship.

This happens in the critical moment in the debate about the 1957 Civil Rights Bill:

Once, when Everett Dirkson of Illinois rose to support [House Minority Leader William] Knowland with his special brand of empty grandiloquence ('I have been thinking much of Runnymede'), Johnson half-yawned and lazily scratched his chest, in a magnificent gesture of casual confidence.

That was Stewart Alsop as quoted in Robert Caro's magnificent biography, Master of the Senate. Here's Caro's quick gloss on Alsop:

The speeches didn't matter; Johnson's every gesture made that clear. What mattered was the votes--and he had the votes.

And he had the votes not because of speeches, but because he appealed to practical things. Yet still I think rhetoric is important, speeches are important, eloquence is important. Why?

The Secrets of An Exclusive Secret Society Revealed

It's the first day of the Easter long weekend here in Canberra, and I am sitting in my bed with an espresso battling the cloying demons of memories of previous Easter long weekends. So, here I will give you a quick squib I wrote a while ago. Enjoy.




“Is that the office of some sort of a secret society or something, that ornate building you guys are exiting now?”
Me and Ronnie were dressed in lavender robes leaving the Osiris Temple. It was two in the morning and we were being accosted by some drunk too lonely to know not to talk to strange men late at night. Ronnie shook his head and told the guy that we were just renting the place out for a convention and so we didn’t know if it was a secret society or not, but wouldn’t it sure be funny if it was a secret society now, wouldn’t it!
And that’s one of the best things about being in a secret society: you get to tell people you are most definitely not in a secret society.

Conversations I get to have now that I’m in a Secret Society
GIRL: Wow, look at this, this guy at the Exclusive Hollywood Party, a photo of whom is in the tabloid entertainment magazine I am currently reading, he certainly looks a lot like you, isn’t that strange?
ME: Yes that is strange.
GIRL: And is that Scarlett Johannsen giving him a rather amorous kiss on his cheek?
ME: Yes. It appears to be so.
GIRL: That guy is very lucky, isn’t he.
ME: I agree wholeheartedly.

COLLEGE FRIEND: I didn’t know that you knew my (boss / girlfriend’s father / pastor) so well. Thanks a lot for getting me out of that jam I got myself into through of a startling lack of foresight and wisdom that unfortunately is well within character. If it wouldn’t have been for you I would have lost my (job / girlfriend / position in the church choir).
ME: It was no problem.
C.F.: And you know what’s weird, I just got my utility bill today, and there must be a problem with my meter, because now they’re actually giving me money. Can you believe that?
ME: Yes. Yes I can.

GUY AT A BAR, TO ME AND RONNIE: What was that elaborate, acrobatic handshake you guys just did? It wasn’t a secret handshake for some sort of secret society or anything, was it?
RONNIE: Of course not.
G.A.A.B.: Because whatever it was, it looked really awesome and I wish you could teach me.
RONNIE: We could, but then we would have to kill you.
ALL:
RONNIE: That was a joke. We wouldn’t have to kill you.
ME: We’d just have to poke out your eyes.
ALL:
RONNIE: Actually, we wouldn’t have to do anything. We have an army of thralls to do our dirty work for us.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: I bet you guys get up to some weird stuff. Probably with celebrities. And that it’s kinda gay.
And I’d say to you: The rituals of the Secret Society, while being continuously updated to reflect the changing times, are based on a proud tradition that dates back to the very founding of the Secret Society itself – which is a really mind-bogglingly long time ago (I can’t tell you how long ago, exactly, except that it pre-dated and was responsible for some pretty major milestones in the development of human culture, you’d be surprised) and while a few of these august rituals might seem a little, well, baroque to the outsider – even cruel – it’s still part of our tradition: and plus, they give the whole thing a sort of dangerous mystique which is so very integral to the proper coolness of a secret society.
And of course there are celebrities. But not the ones you’d expect. And they all go by their real names. And are a lot of fun at Charades, which, while not our official party game, is pretty close. Our official party game is one of our closest guarded secrets.

You know, the power, the celebrity friends, the parties – all of that is great. But it doesn’t make me happy.
What does make me happy is this. I get to go through the boring shit I have to do every day to keep up appearances and I know that underneath it all, behind the hours of work, beneath the restaurants and bars and strip-malls, lurking inside the television news broadcast smiles and the scientific discoveries there works a hidden but understandable intelligence. And it’s especially cool to know that I have some power over this intelligence. I live a parallel life in which the curtain hiding the truth of reality has been pulled back, and I can smile at the futility of it all, and the majesty. Which is pretty cool.

An Australian Fact

One of the most successful medicinal hoaxes of English-speaking history was perpetrated against the nascent Australian settlers in the mid-18th century. Posing as a Hindu yogi named Adulakar, the disgraced Scottish physician Dr. Sam Arkman sold a snake-oil cure for "recidivism, onanism, and malingering, used exclusively by the Hindoo Prince for upwards of three millennia, now for the first time available for purchase or barter to the White Man, whose industry has now made him a fit subject for this miraculous mixture, this potent brew, available for only 2d, or equivalent in goods or specie." Although the exact composition of Hindbrew, as the drink was called, is for the most part unknown, it was no more than a mixture of hastily distilled spirits, mud and tincture of semi-medicinal herbs. However, due to Dr. Arkman's intense charisma, and the penchant of the Australian people for drink, Hindbrew became a staple of the Australian landscape, only being removed from school lunches in New South Wales, for instance, in 1979. After a series of exposes by the Sydney Morning Herald, which bravely revealed the truth about Mr. Arkman and his popular cure in 1981, Hindbrew was quietly removed from the Australian marketplace, being replaced by an alcohol-free solidified substitute known as 'Vegemite'.

Books I Am Reading

Thucydides
David Mitchell--Ghostwritten
Jon Elster--Ulysses Unbound
Montaigne

Any other recommendations?

Daily posting will resume now.

Bad Metaphors Department

Wherever you go, money's the same color.

ALL CAPS TUESDAY

TUESDAY WHEN YOU WAKE UP AND SIP YOUR COFFEE JUST HIT THE CAPS LOCK KEY ON YOUR KEYBOARD. EVERY TUESDAY. ALL CAPS. IT'S MORE AWESOME THAN ANYTHING ELSE YOU COULD HOPE TO DO ON TUESDAY DON'T EVEN WORRY ABOUT THINKING ABOUT THAT SHIT YOU KNOW IT'S TRUE BECAUSE I SAID SO.

HERE ARE SOME THINGS THAT ARE ALL CAPS THIS TUESDAY MORNING:

LBJ
FOOD THAT HAS A FACE (GUMMI BEARS, FISH, EASTER BUNNIES)
MULTI-VITAMINS

YEAH! WHAT DO YOU RECKON IS ALL CAPS?

SPECIAL ELECTION COMMENT

The Lost Years & Last Days Of David Foster Wallace

Finally printed in full on the internet, for all us slackers.

"He said when you're writing well, you establish a voice in your head, and it shuts up the other voices. The ones that are saying, 'You're not good enough, you're a fraud."

Perfect Sentence

Karl Rove, appearing as a convention panelist, was accosted on stage by a drunken hippie who tried to arrest him for treason.

The problem with anecdote

Anecdote is one of those things that we use to understand the world. But there's a problem, because while anecdote can help us understand stuff on the minor scale of our personal lives (to prove that a particular person is flighty, for example, we don't expect any more than one story of that person canceling a date*) anecdotes suck about things any larger than our own small circle of friends and relatives. There's always going to be an anecdote to prove both sides of any issue. More than that, it's just kinda an inane way of understanding the world when you get down to it, telling illustrative stories. Check out the latest Brooks column to see anecdote at its worst. The anecdote doesn't add any insight into the situation, and is, well, just kinda weird.

*We can believe something, of course, almost in spite of all evidence if we'd want to. Though we might decide a person's flighty after hearing a single story about them, it might take us three or four or ten or twenty instances of flightiness (or a whole three months' worth of flightiness) in our own experience to come to the same conclusion, because we are wedded to the idea that this particular person is much less than flighty, indeed that they are especially kind, we think, and very concerned about our well-being.

McCain Begins

After reading this New Yorker story about how Palin became McCain's VP pick, it struck me that Palin was kinda like Batman-Begins-era-Katie-Holmes. I mean you've got this product--McCain and the movie--and the product is trying its best to make its case for itself, but then on the sideline you've got someone charismatic, who the media loves, whojust keeps on sucking the juice from the main story. Coverage of Batman Begins was overshadowed by Holmes' 'association' with the sofa-jumping Tom Cruise. Coverage of McCain is similarly overshadowed by his bright-as-a-penny Tina Fey impersonator.

All Koans Are Broken

All koans are fixed.

Boring Stories

You know when you're hanging out with one of those profoundly lonely people and they start telling you a story, only it's about this ridiculously inane thing because they actually have no stories since they're so lonely? Like they start telling you about how they met a man once, right, at a bar, and he we really drunk. And then you're sitting there, waiting for the story-like information, the novelty to hit, but it never hits--that's it?

The worst part about being lonely is that you have the nagging suspicion that when a person spends time with you they will judge you to be just about as miserable as you feel. Like with teen-age self-hatred, the sad part is that this sentiment is, more often than not, justified.

Such as: That rosy-colored distorting lens

Ideology makes us biased. That's pretty easy to admit. We read newspapers that confirm our opinion, we focus on the stories that do not test our beliefs, and we presume the idiocy of anyone who is the other side of an idea. And while we're very comfortable affirming this truth abstractly, I am loathe to admit it personally. I know I read biased sources of information and that I read 'unbiased' information through the distorting lens of my own bias. But I think that I'm above the indignity of being wrong.

Now that's all fine and good . If we second-guessed our every interpretation for signs of bias we'd be closer to going crazy than we'd be closer to the Truth. But it's surprising the extent to which our ideology distorts our views of the world. And it's good to confront this distortion for two reasons. First, ideology's distortion of evidence can explain why reasonable people can so sharply differ in their opinions. The fact that people can believe in the sanctity of a religion or the free market, the sagacity of a particular politician and the saintliness of another , the mystical benefits of Tibetan Buddhism contra the Secret--it's always a bit of a puzzle to me. But such gulfs in opinion are not proof of maliciousness of stupidity (or need not be proof of maliciousness or stupidity), it's proof only that when you believe something you are more likely to see it confirmed. If you believe that prayer can heal diseases, you are that much more likely to read the newspaper story about the healing power of prayer. If you believe that Obama is a vampiremuslimterroristabortionist then you are going to treat news stories about Ayers and Wright differently than if you believe Obama is already President but for the graceful and ineluctable election. That's the first reason why it might be good to admit the distortion of our own ideology.

The second reason is more uncomfortable. Admitting the distortion of ideology we admit we are wrong. And when we are proven wrong we will be as stubborn and as bull-headed and as frustrating as those people who drive SUVs and proudly affirm that global warming doesn't exist. Their problem isn't that they are assholes. (They might be assholes.) Their problem is that they're human. And when you tell a human being they're wrong they are not going to admit they are wrong, as a first reaction--they're going to tell you why you're wrong, slopjob.

What got me started thinking this way was reading a piece by Camille Paglia. This thing stood out to me as one of the most obvious examples of ideologically distorted thought I've ever seen.

As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade), I am very used to understanding meaning through what might seem to others to be outlandish or fractured variations on standard English. Furthermore, I have spent virtually my entire teaching career (nearly four decades) in arts colleges, where the expressiveness of highly talented students in dance, music and the visual arts takes a hundred different forms. Finally, as a lover of poetry (my last book was about that), I savor every kind of experimentation with standard English -- beginning with Shakespeare, who was the greatest improviser of them all at a time when there were no grammar rules.

Many others listening to Sarah Palin at her debate went into conniptions about what they assailed as her incoherence or incompetence. I was never in doubt about what she intended at any given moment. On the contrary, I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse -- which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies). This is a tremendously talented politician whose moment has not yet come. That she holds views completely opposed to mine is irrelevant. [Emphasis mine.]

(And here to admit my own susceptibility to distortion, when I first read this I skimmed over the bits where Paglia supports Obama, and thought that she was just another conservative. When drafting this essay, I thought of Paglia in that mode, too, even though she is more complicated, certainly. I faced disconfirmation of my belief, and instead of throwing up my hands and admitting ignorance--I ploughed on.)

Now. I'm wondering now whether to mount a frontal attack on the meat of this quote, or to go from behind. First, the frontal attack, as quickly as I can make it. Sarah Palin's ineloquence isn't striking just because it's hilarious; it's striking because it reveals a lack of detailed thought filled--not with policy knowledge of a deep or shallow variety--but with sound bites. Shakespeare's English wasn't great because it was experimental, but because it more perfectly communicated the human condition. Sarah Palin didn't communicate anything. Her ineloquence is a secondary problem, just as Shakespeare's eloquence is only secondary to his charm.

Now the attack from behind, which is more amenable to my thesis. Paglia approached the debate from the angle that Sarah Palin was "as powerful new [symbol] of a revived contemporary feminism." From that lens, what looks to me as Palin's idiocy looks to Paglia as Palin's brave stabs at unconventional communication. Now I don't get paid to express an opinion, which leaves me in an envious position compared with Paglia. I don't need to have an opinion, and if I do have an opinion, nobody really cares whether it's interesting or not. Paglia gets paid to have opinions that people care about, and so she cannot rest in the middle ground, this led her to servery misinterpret Palin's public performance.

Differences in interpretation are going to be so vast because we select which data to notice based on our beliefs, and so different people will be more or less likely to notice different information. Paglia's gush about Palin is akin to the review we would expect from the parents of Miss Teen South Carolina. Where we see indubitable failure, they, through those rosy-colored distorting lenses of affection, see excuse, interpretation--certainly they don't see a witless bimbo but a charming and nervous girl struggling through a stupid question--they pick out the evidence which supports their love.





Not that I'm ragging on just Paglia. No doubt I have committed far graver epistemic sins, only I'm lucky or unlucky enough not to have those sins survive in print. We all are guilty. If you have a crush on a girl you're much more likely to focus on the things she does which convinces you that your feelings are reciprocated. If you like a sports team you are going to think that their chances in a given season are so much higher than they really are.

The question is, when it comes time for us to face the moment when our beliefs do not match reality, will we go to the tribunal of experience kicking and screaming , or will we go bravely under the cowl of our own ignorance. It is far easier to kick and scream, and better for the ego. It is my personal hope, though, that when it comes my time I will be brave about it, bite my tongue, and agree that I can be every bit an idiot.

The Problem of Synecdoche

Poll question that popped up on my screen watching the MySpace coverage of the presidential debates (paraphrase):

Do you think that another 9/11 will happen on US soil?

I sure hope so. Every year, right after September 1oth.

Ponder this:

Why is it that when you're on a date, suddenly everything seems cheaper? Like two scoops of ice cream at Baskin Robbins is something like three bucks, which I'd never ever spend on my own. But suddenly I'm on a date and three bucks is nothing. Go wild! Put whipped cream and nuts on that shit if you want. I'll pick up the tab for everyone. Then when I'm alone again I will think long and hard about shelling out sixty cents for a candy bar.

The world is vast...

Question asked to me today at lunch:

"At what age do American students start to use mechanical pencils?"

LOLEXPERIENCE

A Fact About Our Bodies

Victims of Havenffeld-Snarksburg Syndrome, a congenital neurological disorder, are unable to understand or display self-deception. Otherwise normal HSS patients find simple statements like "Be honest with yourself..." or "He's pulled the wool over his own eyes," completely incomprehensible. Oddly enough, HSS seems to coincide with deep depressive tendencies. Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRIs) neuro-scientists studying HSS are trying to pin-point the part of the brain devoted to self-deception. Hopefully they will develop a drug to help those of us who are wholly or partially unable to slip into states of pleasant self-delusion.

My Financial Plan

Well, US 'Mericans, it's been a bad couple of weeks. DFW's dead, the stock market has officially come unloosed from any tethers that once held it to the Beachhead Of Empirical Evidence causing stock prices to do a fairly good visual impression of my emotional maturity level at a high falootin' party (unpredictable huge rises and falls, with a severe downward trend), and added on top of that people don't seem to want to buy books, which makes my dream of eating with the money people paid me for my books seem unrealistic, so there's little left to do these days but wait for the upcoming season of 30 Rock.

Given these circumstances, US 'Mericans, I give you my Brendan Mackie-Brand Financial Plan. If John McCain wins the election, that's it, I'm short selling the US. You heard me right. Naked short selling, too.

I'll put my short order in naked. Take that, disappointing 2008!

Snip From The New Yorker

The happy effect that Babar has on us, and our imaginations, comes from this knowledge—from the child’s strong sense that, while it is a very good thing to be an elephant, still, the life of an elephant is dangerous, wild, and painful. It is therefore a safer thing to be an elephant in a house near a park.

Indeed.

COME ON MEDIA

Okay, reading the Times' comparison of the campaigns' stances on science issues presented a moment which illustrates the frustration of this presidential election cycle. They compare McCain and Obama's climate change policies thusly:

In terms of 1990 levels of carbon emissions, Mr. McCain would ultimately have the nation’s output drop by 60 percent and Mr. Obama by 80 percent.

BUT THEY NEVER MENTION THE MECHANISM FOR CONTROLLING THESE CARBON EMISSIONS. Which is, of course, you know, KINDA IMPORTANT. And the candidates have very different plans. McCain, for one, favors the public auction of carbon credits, which, as I understand it, is just a huge money giveaway which won't actually help reduce emissions at all, in comparison to an actual cap and trade scheme.

It's not like explaining anything like this would take more than ten words. It seems disingenuous at best to compare the two candidates and yet somehow escape any actual comparisons between the two. Perhaps, when you get a detailed enough comparison of policies so that people can actually judge the merits of them it violates journalistic objectivity or something. Because the facts would obviously favor one side. How else do we explain the continued belief that Alaskan oil drilling would have any effect at all on domestic gas prices?

UPDATE 10/6: Umm , it seems that I got confused about the differences between McCain and Obama's plan. Obama does favor the auctioning of carbon credits. I know that there are substantive differences between the two plans, only I am, unfortunatly, unclear as to what those differences are. Also, somewhat lazily, I will use this ignorance to further bolster my original point: we need more policy information in our news sources.

David Foster Wallace Dead

As far as public figures go, this death feels personal to an embarrassing extent. Usually I am somewhat callous towards death, especially about the death of people who one does not actually know personally. But it's not just insensitivity to the public lamentations around Heath Ledger and Princes Di--barring it befalling close friends and family members, death fails to move me. Throw a friend in my lap, inconsolable that her sister's best friend died, and I'll look at them with the condescending incomprehension fitting the observation of forgotten and ecstatic religious rites of some minor deity of the Roman pantheon. But then I read that this author has died, David Foster Wallace--who I have never met and who I have had only the most tangential personal relationship with--I can't do anything but fall to my bed.

Enough of this personal stuff. Well, one more thing. In my senior year of college when I was worrying whether or not I should try to "make it as a writer" I wrote David Foster Wallace with a story of mine. I got a postcard back a couple months later, and he said that my style was "clear and unpretentious" (I can remember that) and he wished me luck in a way that I interpreted as meaning that he saw some promise in me. My number two most recurring fantasy about my novel (number one is having ex-girlfriends and -crushes call me and tell me how my they like me) is that I would get it published and sent it off to DFW and he'd read it and appreciate it and we could become friends.

Of course that's not going to happen.

But that brief brush with the man himself is not enough to warrant my feeling upset by his death. Even taking into account the place that DFW's writing held in my own personal story, his death is not enough to make me fall on my bed and not want to get up and, at a Korean Thanksgiving I was attending, invited by the Tae Bo teacher I have a ridiculous crush on, his death should not make me nearly sob over the tiggim that "My favorite author has just killed himself"--a sentence which elicited nothing but bemused glances from my dining companions, English- and non-English-speaking alike.

The thing that makes Wallace's death so poignant is that it shouldn't of happened. First, we all wanted more. Wallace's was the kind of writing that was perfectly compulsive. The loss of his voice, of the chance of another novel, that's baffling to me.

But there's more, and here's where we might have to get a bit more personal again. Wallace seemed to have struggled with the demons that come with being a smart, sensitive person in the world. And he'd seemed to really conquer them. An aside that will make sense further in this paragraph: You know how you can tell the difference between someone who gets Wallace and someone who doesn't? Someone who doesn't get him will talk about his verbal acuity (or, pretentiousness) those footnotes, that flair. Someone who gets him will talk about his observational acuity. How he seemed to be able to frankly talk about the dark corners of life with such off-putting, shocking accuracy. Like he just peered into your secret, crazy thoughts, described them just right, and told you what to do about it. And so he peered into those crazy thoughts, understood them, and didn't like what he saw.

Is it a cliche to say that the choice of our lives is whether to live or whether to off ourselves? It's something I've thought about. Does the periodic bed-bound wordless sadness that sometimes strikes me--is it worth sitting through to get to the other bits? To get to those times that rank with eating chocolate cake or hearing that your friend gets promoted or sitting at Korean Thanksgiving and having the Tae Bo instructor who may or may not want to date you hold your hand. Does the banal difficulty of life merit the pleasures? Now, sometimes I haven't dared think about that reckoning. But most times I think, pretty solidly, that the pleasures by far outweigh the indignities.

But Wallace, who I respect, who I understand, who I thought got this stuff better than most people out there--he thought otherwise. He thought that life was just too painful to keep going.

And so Wallace's suicide makes me afraid!

I'm not angry at him. I'm not going to throw around any pablum about how it's grossly selfish to kill yourself or anything like that and I'm not going to try to call him crazy for doing what he did. Because if you can't understand why he'd do it, then you're not trying hard enough. And even though those things are true, that suicide is selfish and never the right answer, just saying that doesn't make sense of his death, it doesn't give any sort of comfort.

The tough part is thinking that with all his sensitivity and intelligence, this was his answer. Not another book, no more courses teaching students, not even an easy life reading somewhere eating cake. A rope around his neck. That was his answer. And it's that answer which hurts. Like if you hiked up a huge mountain to meet an enlightened master and asked him what you should do with your life and he turned his eyes towards you and slowly, proudly, asked you what brand shoes you wore.

HOLY SHIT

What's Liz Lemon doing with Colonel Tigh?

... Oh wait.

UPDATE: Huh? (via waxy).

How Training A Dog Is Like Teaching A Korean Schoolgirl

Check out this cool video from the perma-cool TED talks about... dog training. Not the most interesting subject ever, I know, but this must be the most genius dog trainer you'll see. Ian Dunbar, the dog trainer in question, has a really neat perspective on canine discipline. It's pretty simple, like all great things are. You have to make the dog's desires line up with yours.

This is great because I think we can take everything he says about dog training and apply it to the rest of our lives, translating the advice about teaching "sit puppy" to "now learn some English." So many times in the classroom do I find myself making the mistakes Dunbar ascribes to bad dog owners. I punish the kids by yelling at them. I fail to understand why the kids want to talk with each other instead of listening to me patter on in a foreign tongue. Dunbar's strategy is all about empathy--about seeing 'bad' behaviour as something logical and understandable, not as evidence of metaphysical malfeasance. This requires making a greater-than-usual effort to understand another being's perspective, but the pay-off is huge: instead of seeing my students as THE ENEMY who I must forge into a disciplined English-learning machine, I can see them as creatures with their own desires and needs--I just have to somehow shoehorn English learning in there. If he can understand why a puppy acts up, then I can understand why my students want to talk with each other instead of studying English.

Now, what's the practical upswing of all this rarefied theoretical bullshit? My biggest discipline problem teaching is that my (all-girl) students often want to gossip to each other in Korean. So if I can take their relentless social urge and somehow filter it into English learning, then my classes will be significantly easier, and more fun. The great thing about teaching a language which you won't get from teaching math or literature, is that language-learning is hard-wired in our brains. It is as natural as eating. The pay-off is instantly satisfying: communication. Now how to harness that communication, that's the hard part, but I suppose I will spend the better part of my weekend thinking this through.

Happy Happy Joy Joy

One of the reasons why I am the odd critter I am has to be hours of my most impressionable youth wasted soaking up Ren and Stimpy. I was always a little disappointed that real life was nothing like Ren and Stimpy.

THE POLLS ARE IN!

Horse-raceish campaign coverage reminds me of a guy tasked to cover the summer swimming hole who wastes his word count dragging his fat big toe through the water skittishly reporting "The water here at the swimming hole is still cold"--but who never actually girds his swimmers and swims, refusing to grace his exasperated readers with even the most cursory splash.

Times for a Quote

More alarmingly, a 20-year-old British tourist partied with her sister and a friend into the early hours in Malia also in July, then returned to her hotel room and — although she had denied being pregnant — gave birth.

Octopus Love

It's sweet. And no, I'm not thinking of the Dream of the Fishmonger's Wife.

(via Drawn.)

Wither?

I asked what he did for a living. He said he was a housepainter. He asked me the same question about myself.

“I manufacture opinions,” I said.

“Really?” he asked. “How do you know if you’re any good at that?”

“By the number of people who strongly agree or strongly disagree with me,” I said. “If a large number of strangers seem to think one of my opinions is especially true or wildly inaccurate, there is somehow a perception that I am being successful."

-via Fimoculous

Richard Nixon's gremlin.

From the obviously-beloved Museum of Hoaxes comes this story of Dick Tuck, a man who--for reasons which go unmentioned in the article, but will be readily imagined by anyone with a prime-time-television understanding of American history--decided to make Richard Nixon's life miserable and so dogged the pol with simperingly quiescent pranks. My favorite prank: a whole nursery of pregnant women, bellies bulging, holding signs outside a campaign appearance saying "Nixon's the one".

We should totally Tuck McCain.

Who is more dangerous? Bin Laden's driver? Or the guy on the corner smoking crack.

Today Osama bin Laden's driver was sentenced to spend the next five months in prison (he's already served about five years waiting for a trial.) Now this is big, front page news because it's a nice and tidy important judicial victory that comes tantalizingly close to global fear-or-ist number one himself. But one huge glooming thing stretches over this conviction for me. The man is being sentenced, really, for his proximity to bin Laden. The actual charge-this guy is now a war criminal for this-is "providing material support to a terrorist organization." This man was no terrorist mastermind, no idelogical firebrand. He was a driver.

But there's a double-take-worthy sort of twilight justice going on here. On the one hand, the courts declared this guy a war criminal. On the other hand, they don't see his war crimes as eliciting any more than five years in prison. Just to put that into perspective, that's the mandatory minimum sentence for the possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine. In fact, the average sentence for someone convicted of first-time trafficking of crack cocaine is ten years. So your local rock-slinger is TWICE as dangerous as Osama bin Laden's driver. Who is a war criminal. Isn't that a bit strange?

"Thought Experiment"

What if there was a gangster mystique about selling cookware instead of crack?