Grad Student Madness

1950s comedy

2012-01-10T12:31:00.000-08:00

(I just noticed he's carrying prison clothes, which makes the joke a bit more clear.)

Note on The Day After

2012-01-10T12:20:00.000-08:00

In November, 1983, the ABC network aired the television movie The Day After, depicting the effects of a nuclear war on the Midwestern United States. Viewed by an estimated 100 million people, the film was considered deeply affecting, not to mention horrifying, and may have inspired President Reagan to sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in Reykjavik three years later. Prior to the broadcast, ABC distributed half a million viewer’s guides and classrooms around the country worked to help traumatized children deal with their feelings of terror afterwards. (Here is the attack sequence.)

I was a nine-year-old boy, however. So my views on nuclear war were probably not as somber as they should have been. Me and my friends had been raised on a steady diet of post-apocalyptic action movies in the Mad Max mold, and our understanding of the Russians was that, after they bombed and invaded the country, we would be forced to fight them to the death using our cunning, preadolescent physical prowess, and lawn darts. Like all little boys, we believed in the Peter Pan myth: being removed from civilization would set the stage for untold adventures. The nuclear bomb would be the world’s loudest school bell.

Looking back, I’m not remotely ashamed that we manipulated other people’s apocalyptic nightmares. There’s something egotistical about all apocalypse scenarios, appealing as they do to our resentment towards the existing reality and our deeply subconscious feeling that it’s a bit unfair and unimaginable that the world should outlast us, carrying on after our death. The existentialists understood the truth- every death is the end of a created world. The apocalypse is a fantasy that our death will be epic and transfiguring and deeply meaningful; all of us will die alone and the apocalypse is a fantasy of dying together. Nine-year-old boys have no interest in such things, busy as they are with being alive.

(X-posted at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen)

Spam Wars 2012

2012-01-01T15:00:00.000-08:00

Believe it or not, I think I've killed most of the spam that has sprouted here over the last year or so. One post in particular had an inexplicable 300+ comments of Chinese spam. Man this was exhausting work, but I do want that "no spam shall live" line to be honest.

Let's all go Insane at the Movies

2012-01-01T09:23:00.000-08:00

Over at Forbes, E.D. Kain shares Roger Ebert’s suggestions as to why movie theatregoing is declining. As avid cinephiles, one might expect me and the missus to go to the movies more frequently, and yet our attempts to do so this holiday season reminded us once again that, for adults, moviegoing is not all beer and skittles.

Here follows a chronicle of our holiday moviegoing crusades: the first was a children’s movie we saw with our friend and her kids. Unfortunately, the multiplex went suddenly and unexpectedly “offline” that evening, forcing us to pay cash; also, me to frantically scour the neighboring mall for an ATM machine and dash back to the ticket line, which snaked around the block as the pitiable teen cashier had to write out “tickets” for everyone paying. Luckily, your heroic narrator arrived ridiculously early and saved the day for the others, allowing us to make our way to the theatre for a pleasant evening of children crying and kicking our seats like they were filled with candy and needed only to be cracked open to spill their delicious sweets.

Undaunted, our hero returned a week later for a friend’s birthday outing. We were all fairly sauced after a brewery tour, which made the blaring children comfortably tolerable as we waited for the theatre staff to figure out how to get the movie to project- a puzzler that lasted until well over an hour after the movie was scheduled to begin. In apology, the theatre manager gave everyone free passes to a multiplex film of their choice. And lo, the second crusade ended in a draw.

The next week, the knight and his lady returned for a third time to cash in that free pass. Alas, we were thwarted by an officious 16 year old martinet who insisted we return to the meandering box office line to verify that my free movie pass was authentic. The line delayed us further and when we got to the front we opted against attending the movie (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) for which we were now thirty minutes late or any of the other films at the multiplex, all of which were made for and aimed at teenage boys and their girlfriends, perhaps explaining the self-importance of the teen usher. A bit sauced this night as well (she drove) I blared to the manager, “That kid should be fired!”, which my wife has laughed about for days since because I am usually a mild milquetoast. The third crusade ending in failure, thus ends the chronicles of pain and struggle.

Today, they'd be considered starving.
Roger Ebert speaks for us. Living in the boonies, our theatre choices are limited to multiplexes, “cineplexes”, and sataniplexes. At some point, theatre owners opted to put all of their eggs in the basket reserved for teenage males of middling intelligence and bulimics who prefer to binge on elephantine popcorn tubs, since these groups buy the mostest, and lo they arrived in hordes with cell phones blazing in the night, ready to chat loudly throughout even the most bombastic and insipid Hollywood product. Film distributors, meanwhile, charge so dearly for distribution rights that theatre owners are probably shrewd in not exhibiting too many films that would be only popular with groups as inconsequential as adults or women. Finally, they have mutually discovered that teens will pay twice as much to see one dimensional plots in three dimensions. The business model is apparently to focus all of their attention on demographic groups with the largest market share and the rest of the consumers can go hang it. In the homogeneoplex, the kiddie matinee reigns supreme.

So why are huge swaths of the filmgoing public staying home and watching a lot more movies on Netflix than are being viewed in the theatres? Goodness me, I couldn’t say!

Two types

2011-12-13T15:06:00.000-08:00

A woman at the bar said to me last night: "There are two kinds of people in this town: the ones who will talk about you and the ones who will talk to you." It's a perfect description of the small town where we live. Also, it's a pretty good description of most places.

How would you historicize sexual repression?

2011-12-06T09:23:00.001-08:00

This question came to mind recently when discussing the subject with a friend who is trying to reduce her feelings of shame around sex and sexuality. I’d discussed similar topics with other friends recently; it probably says something that they were all females; and I’ve gotten the feeling that it’s not at all abnormal. In fact, there seems to be a consistent discourse of sexual repression running as a thread throughout history. The common theme seems to be that sex is healthy, even good, but only in small doses. A high sex drive is associated with some sort of intemperance or selfishness. There is something offensive or repulsive about a female voluptuary. The problem is that “too much” lust is roughly the normal level for human beings.

As a history geek, I wonder how you would historicize what likely amounts to an oral discourse. There are manuals on sex from the Renaissance that warn about overindulging. Rudolph M. Bell wrote a delightful study of these manuals, where we learn that sexual “overindulgence” can lead to: “headaches, nervousness, chest pains, kidney problems, backaches and sore legs; facial paleness ensues, along with rapid aging and even death”. If that wasn’t bad enough, it “damages the eyes and all of the five senses” and causes, “loss of memory, tremors, aches in the extremities, especially the legs, along with kidney and bladder problems,” “causes loss of appetite, shortens life span, destroys natural virtue, makes bones brittle, and brings on senility”. Unfortunately, the manuals agreed that married people should be having sex regularly and did not actually specify how much was too much. Apparently, you’d know by the facial paleness.

I’ve never met anyone who worried about an early death, but the fear of sexual overindulgence still seems to be common. There’s something irresponsible and self-indulgent about non-procreative sex that rubs against our need to be “productive” at all times. I’ve had female partners ask me if I thought they were “abnormal” in their sexual desires. The answer was always no.

But the official story, if you were to judge by our books, movies, and marriage manuals, is that we’re none of us sexually timid. This is one area in which I agree with the college chastity movement: the mass media gives the impression that every young person is indulging in largely meaningless sexual experiences with whoever comes along (not to say that meaningless sex isn’t its own form of repression). You watch these programs especially and nobody ever seems to suffer from sexual hang-ups or insecurities and you would have the impression that ours is an age of Sex and the City style freedom, as opposed to one of the most fearful, conservative, and repressed cultural eras since the 1950s.

People talk about the “pornification” of society with widespread access to hardcore pornography on computers. And yet, this is not sexual behaviour, which requires the interaction of two people. Logging on and jacking off is a salve for sexual repression that makes it easier to endure. It’s not an indication of sexual freedom; much the opposite. What seems to have happened is that sexual behaviour was once private and scorned in public, leaving a nice, neat historical record behind; now, it’s much the opposite: sexual behaviour of all sorts is publically celebrated and repression is something shameful and private. In other words, the “historical record” should be expected to lie.

I'm back

2011-12-06T09:13:00.001-08:00

In the sense of living with my wife since the late summer and doing well at that. Probably going to post here a bit more frequently than every half-year too. Maybe back to normal, whatever that might mean.

Record Store Day

2011-08-23T01:07:00.000-07:00

As someone who spends, and has always spent, a great deal of time in record stores, I have not been able to avoid hearing about the fast approaching “death of the record store” after a long and heroic battle with the Internet. There are now documentaries on the subject and an international Record Store Day to which several musicians and record labels lent their support. Nevertheless, in much of what is said or written on the subject, it is taken as sadly apparent that these shops are doomed if we just take current consumption patterns and project them into the future. Young people can buy music online, and that’s where they live now, so they will keep doing so into the future, which by the way will be exactly like today, only more so.

This argument becomes somewhat contradictory when it comes packaged in laments about the vanishing record store: to wit, record stores are doomed because music can be purchased easily elsewhere; but record stores, it is argued, offer consumers many benefits and meet many needs aside from mere music distribution. So, either future generations will lack those needs for no clear reason, or simply not recognize an obvious resource for meeting them. This shift in consciousness will either be universal or so widespread as to make the stores untenable and quixotic. It’s worth looking at the needs that record stores are supposed to meet.

The first such need is social: record store devotees describe the convivial pleasures of hanging out in record shops talking about music. Here we should note they’re clearly talking about independent record stores since the mall chain stores tend to actively discourage consumers from hanging out. They’re also oddly overlooking music related message boards where people can discuss music for hours. Perhaps though they are touching on the very different nature of face-to-face socializing from what we do here online- its off the cuff spontaneity, awkward pauses, body language, moments of boredom, funny off-hand comments, flirtations, and natural brainstorms. Possibly, the underlying fear is that socializing itself will die out. However, it seems highly unlikely that man will cease to be the social animal in the future; and certainly young people seem not to have lost any taste for hanging out together.

A secondary concern is that there is some sort of decline in music fandom going on. Record stores serve as a meeting place for the sorts of music fans that obsess over their favorite bands with a devotion bordering on cultishness. The era of groupies, magazines like Rock Scene, Deadheads and the like, and music appreciation as a lifestyle might be ending. And maybe the music just doesn’t demand that sort of devotion now. For all of the industry hype about artists like Lady Gaga and Kanye West as pivotal and their albums as epochal, it’s hard to imagine any of those albums as really being the Metaphysical Graffiti, Sgt Pepper’s, Exile on Main Street, Pet Sounds, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, or, hell, even the Rocket to Russia or Appetite for Destruction of 2011. Bands and labels now think primarily in terms of singles instead of albums, a trend reflecting how music is bought online, but strangely bringing us back to a 1950s style of marketing music. What this means is that many, if not most music fans are content to pick out those great songs if the band is not concerned with making a great album. Bands like the White Stripes recorded some excellent songs, but never really made a great album without filler. The people who bought only those songs were probably right.

In fact, it’s become a bit of a lame game among music snobs to ask what was the last great album. Nevermind? OK Computer? Back to Black? It’s a bit of a meaningless exercise, especially since we could probably think of a great album from the last few years; but certainly the old process of recording that reached its nadir in the 14 years and over $13 million to finish Chinese Democracy will most likely never be repeated. A scenario like Brian Wilson going mad trying to perfect Smile is one it’s hard to imagine anyone actually wanting to repeat, but the desire to create a monumental and lasting work of art in a recording studio is one that nobody has the time or money to peruse anymore. It is worth asking if the quality of pop music hasn’t declined in general and whether musicianship hasn’t been replaced in many cases with slick overproduction. But, contrary to the assumption, there still are plenty of music fanatics left and they would likely disagree with the question.

Finally, it’s often suggested that record stores offer the benefit of expertise, which might be devalued in the age of Wikipedia. A good record store clerk can point you in the direction of great music you’ve never heard of and away from junk. Expertise is increasingly taken as “elitist” (along with many other things that threaten an individual’s inflated sense of self-importance). “Why should anyone tell me what to like?” Regardless, wide, repeated, thoughtful, and extensive exposure to any art form will cultivate expertise over time. A music fan of thirty years will have better informed tastes than a newcomer, even if their tastes might lack the freshness of the newcomer. What is elitist is instead how they express those tastes. While the “stuck up record clerk” is nowhere near as widespread as rumored, I’ve certainly met some music fans who dismissed me as a “poseur” for expressing enthusiasm about the same music I’ve been listening to enthusiastically for the last twenty-two years. With so many independent record stores closing though one would imagine that store owners would discourage such behavior. (Also, I’ve yet to meet an aloof record clerk who didn’t brighten when I either expressed enthusiasm about the music they were playing or just asked if they had anything by the Pretty Things.) Besides, the flip side of the surly record store snob is the cute store clerk who gushes about the record you’re thinking of picking up that she just loves. Little can top that.

What seems more likely to happen than a total extinction of record stores is an end to the widespread local stores but plenty of stores surviving in more dispersed locations as specialty shops; more a winnowing down than the shopocalypse. I’m also curious to see if independent shops will start selling books, music, magazines, and DVD rentals in the same location. A friend’s weird little DVD rental place has actually morphed into a movie rental/antiques/records/books/fine hats store! Buying music online is certainly convenient and many of the benefits of hanging out in a record store can be obtained elsewhere. But a point I’ve not heard made yet is that a world in which music (not to mention movies and books) could only be purchased online would be briefly novel and eventually very boring. It’s not that a good number of half-assed local record shops won’t close, but the shopocalypse argument rests heavily on the idea that whatever a lot of people are doing right now is what they’ll all be doing in the future and nothing else. Record stores will thus go the way of burlesque dancing, roller derby, and records themselves, all of which vanished as expected and no longer exist. As someone who has been buying vinyl records for about twenty-six years, and had people much hipper than me tell me for twenty-six years that nobody would be manufacturing records by the following year, I’m skeptical.

Or, perhaps, human beings, particularly the young ones, will continue to seek out novelty, variety, new experiences, and kicks- what leads young people to music in the first place. You never can predict what teenagers and music fans will do next year- Rolling Stone has consistently embarrassed itself by trying to make such predictions. For all we know the next generation might even go so far as to “tune out” from the internet- just to piss off their parents!

Nurseploitation

2011-02-16T12:13:00.000-08:00

Nunsploitation is a genre unto itself. I remember once entering the abandoned home of a hoarder who had passed away and her family didn't want her stuff. Every single room of the house required you to walk hunched over because the "floors" were about four feet of stuff above the actual floor. Anyway, she had bags of nurse romance novels in there. There were more pulp fiction versions of the genre however, such as this one.

Going "home"

2011-02-07T14:02:00.000-08:00

Done with an exhausting, but rewarding, day of instruction. Now, I'm going to sleep in my new place. Le sigh. I went with the house full of dudes renting a small, cheap room. Was going with a place that is a bit thrash really a good idea? No idea. I'm still trying to figure out if getting my own place was a good idea.

2011-02-06T09:23:00.000-08:00

Oh, how I wish I could join...

No offense to the "Greater Toronto Area" or upstate New York, but they're not exactly hotbeds of unusual people. Sure, Toronto is a creative mecca in Canada, but let's be honest, Canadians are sort of beige people anyway. You know what I mean? Quiet, polite, and conventional.

So where do you go to find abnormals? And don't say the Internet! Talking shop with a weirdo in Desmoines, Iowa is not the same as, well, hanging out in a living room, knitting and smoking cigars with other abnormals. If you're strange, do you eventually have to move to San Francisco?

2011-02-04T20:17:00.001-08:00

I guess this is the best pulp novel cover I've found.

Rate this

2011-02-04T17:01:00.000-08:00

Wow, teaching is hard. This is my first time teaching my own course and it's a bit like watching your kid play little league baseball- thrilling, nerve-wracking, very rewarding, but you could also rip the lungs out of the naysayers. Of course, here, I feel a bit guilty because the naysayers are the one or two 'difficult' students in the class, and I was once a difficult student myself. Well, in high school anyway.

This reminds me that the website "Rate Your Students" just shut down. I didn't much like it. The idea was to respond to sites like "Rate Your Professor" in which students bitch about their profs. Here, instructors, adjuncts and profs would anonymously post stories about terrible students in order to blow off steam. I guess they ran out of that steam eventually.

The problem I had with the site was the weird power imbalance- students are already being 'rated' by their instructors, so why rate them again? Part of why students can be so insufferable is that they're stressed out, frustrated, worried, and not really enjoying college in the first place. They all seem to want to be in grad school, which is probably a mistake. So, they bitch and complain. And some of them behave insufferably in class. The answer is not to behave as childishly online.

Of course, with universities phasing out tenure and replacing profs with temp workers, being liked by the students is more important for people's continued employment, so the stress goes both ways. To be honest, what would be best overall would be to do away with grading and rating for everyone and just have salons and discussion groups and learn together. But that wouldn't prepare the students to face the same stupid shit in the working world that they now face in college.

Lots of Questions, Not A Lot of Answers

2011-02-04T03:52:00.000-08:00

I came across this article about the effects of porn consumption on relationships, and I found it interesting. It's incomplete, and very biased, and not at all scientific. But it articulates, from the male point of view, something I have observed myself. Namely, the bond between a man and his porn can damage the bond between a man and his woman.

Also... the pictures cracked me up.

2011-02-03T18:09:00.001-08:00

Depression humor

2011-02-03T18:00:00.000-08:00

Been feeling down, so I called the suicide prevention hotline. Apparently they're outsourcing now. I got a guy in Mumbai who told me if I killed myself, I'll be reincarnated into a lower caste.

I went and told the priest I was depressed. He reminded me that, if a man commits suicide, God does not allow him into the kingdom of heaven. He then suggested some ways I could make it look like an accident.

The Invention of Dating

2011-02-02T19:01:00.000-08:00

So my friend broke up with his girlfriend recently when he found out she was cheating on him. And I felt bad for him, but still, you have to admit that we men got away with murder on his whole monogamy concept. How did we ever convince women to go along with that?

Imagine the first man that ever proposed this idea.

Some caveman talking to a cavewoman...

"Okay, so here's the thing. As a woman, you're going to be strikingly atttractive to every single man you meet. Pretty much every one of them is going to turn into a Tex Avery cartoon wolf if you wear anything slightly form-fitting. Every one of them would crawl across broken glass for the chance to have sex with you. A surprising number of girls would too. And you know, eventually we'll create magazines and movies to try to convince you that it's only like that for the really hot women- but, the truth is, all of you women are beautiful and could have sex with about 60% of the other human beings you encounter. Sound good?

"Okay, now here's the next thing- you can have multiple orgasms- you can come like 12, 15 times in an hour and be fine. Meanwhile, men have to take a nap after jerking off. And, unlike men, you'll reach your sexual peak as you get older. So, you're sexually superior and attractive to about half the population. Hypothetically, you could spend all day having all sorts of sex with all sorts of interesting individuals or groups of individuals."

"Okay, now don't get so excited! Here's what we were thinking: instead of having all sorts of incredible sex with lots of different people, how about you commit yourself to one man for life and he'll just get older and fatter and balder as the years go by and eventually want to pop off on you about once a week. All this could be yours! What do you say? I'll get my secretary to get the paperwork together.

"You don't want this? Oh, boy. Let's go to Plan B. If you do anything else, we'll call you a 'slut'. Slut? It's a word we just made up for a woman who does what any man would do if he had breasts and a vagina. It's terrible. You don't want to be called that.

"Oh... you're not worried about being called a slut? Oh, boy...

"Hey, Larry! It's not working! Why don't you start writing that Bible we were talking about!"

2011-01-30T17:10:00.001-08:00

Seriously, I think this is the shit that's keeping me going right now.

Today in Pulp Novel Cover Art

2011-01-30T13:48:00.000-08:00

Beautiful women

2011-01-30T10:32:00.001-08:00

And here's the thing about beautiful women: they're all beautiful. Every last one of them is strikingly, ridiculously gorgeous. If you took 1,000 women in our society and put them all together in a big room, you'd be hard-pressed to find one who isn't gorgeous. But, the majority of them will believe that they're not- that they would be beautiful if only they spent more time at the gym, or ate better, or had better skin.

We were at a party the other night and I made a comment to my wife and friends that a girl there was really sexually attractive. And this was an objective fact I was stating, as controversial as saying, "Man, the sky is big" or "this milk tastes really milky". But our friend says, "You guys should tell her that she's attractive because she thinks she isn't and she's trying to lose 40 more pounds so she'll be attractive."

And, you know, I realize that, on the scale of terribleness, a majority of women not knowing how attractive they are is maybe not as important as a majority not knowing how smart they are- although plenty of them don't know that either, it's just our society doesn't value intelligence.

But, how do people live in a society like this without losing their shit about it.

Status Update

2011-01-30T08:03:00.000-08:00

Okay, so, here's the thing about being married: we're not good at it. At least, not like you're supposed to be. Oh, we love each other passionately and we don't fight or bicker. We're not bad at it that way. We're best friends. Yep.

But, when you're married, you're part of an enterprise- Married Couple, Inc. So, you have to work on that full time. And, if you want to work on your shit, it's not so easy to do that without rocking the boat. I think that's the issue with us. My wife wants to work on her shit, figure out who she is, and get her life together. Which she probably can't do with me. So, we're splitting up. Probably. The thought is painful for us, and the reality probably will be too. But this isn't working anymore.

And what if she does get it together? I don't know. She has no idea if she will, and I just can't see waiting around for her, frankly. So, I have to start over my life again, which isn't what I feel like doing at 36. This doesn't feel good. But, what can ya' do?

Ahem.

2011-01-27T19:06:00.000-08:00

Is this thing still on? I might start posting here again. My life is in a state of turmoil- teaching my own course for the first time, clumsily; trying to shape my dissertation into something worthwhile, also clumsily; and likely reshaping my marriage, painfully. So, plenty of things to get off my chest, here, in a less public forum than the other places I write. Blogging here is a bit like writing on water. Right now, that is inviting.

In case you were low on time-suck...

2010-10-29T21:55:00.001-07:00

portland fire hydrant
Originally uploaded by petescully

Came across a fantastic blog (http://www.urbansketchers.com/) filled entirely with pictures of sketchbooks, most of which are sketches of city scenes in varying degrees of detail.

This is a direct link to a Flickr image from a Brit sketcher who is (was?) fascinated by American fireplugs, as they've not got them in the UK, but most of the sketches are wider street views, with a little story of what was going on at the time, whether the person was traveling or local, etc. Many of the photos link to the artist's personal collection of images. Hard to go wrong.

Why to write.

2010-10-28T21:18:00.000-07:00

When you can do nothing else, write.

Writing is the profession of the unprofessional, the calling of those who couldn't hear God even if He retained any interest in them. Writing is what keeps the half-dead from being buried. Poetry is what lies beneath the wreckage of hope. Writing is the canary in the psychosexual coal mine. Writing is how the impotent throw a fuck into the rest of us. Writing is the demonic, barbaric yawp of the inarticulate, the angry scream of the animal that stupidly stepped into a leg trap that they figured wouldn't snap this time.

So, spare us your wit. Spare us your well-wrought verse, your clinical analyses of the ills of society, all rooted in a dream that things could be better, if only humans might recognize their true potential. You haven't lived long enough. May you have no hope before you get old. And then have hope for this reason- sometimes strangers surprise you. Sometimes women open their legs for you. Sometimes friends aren't embarassed by their friendship. Sometimes jokes are funny. Sometimes conversations are enough to live for. If you want utopia, that's where you'll find it. Not in politics or parties. Not in marriages or families. Not in anything enduring. We have no idea what we're doing. Nothing man-made is "sustainable". We do nothing higher than worship. And, if you must worship, then two minutes of human contact is surely worth a mass.

Don't walk, Run...

2010-10-03T11:36:00.001-07:00

Just watched this last night, I can't think of any better reason for the existence of the internet. This is such an excellent film, on so many levels, and were it not for the internet and this slippery beast of electronic media distribution, I would never have seen or heard of it. In Russian, from 1986. IMDB shows a Japanese release in 1991.

After you've watched it, and asked yourself where it's been all your life, and how people on Earth ever know who to squat to and how many times, next ask yourself if you know of a better way to get gems like these out and about.

Just so you are forewarned, the film is a bit longer than average, although it does have an intermission, complete with visual break, calming music, and glossary of alien terms. Since YouTube has it in sections, that won't be a huge problem, although they may have started a thing that makes the next section start playing automagically when one ends, so keep an eye on that. It's about 2h10m, all told.

The Problem with the Culture Wars

2010-09-30T22:02:00.000-07:00

Ross Douthat tweaks the noses of liberals, who he says enjoy the culture wars after all.

"Can we officially retire the notion that liberals don’t like the culture war? That it’s something foisted on them by knuckle-dragging conservatives? That they would prefer to only talk about Very Serious Economic Policies, and that they hate the way the right wing keeps dragging the conversation around to sex and God and all the rest of it?

With Christine O’Donnell, as with Sarah Palin before her, American liberals have been confronted with a politician who’s vulnerable to all sorts of possible attacks, and whose record and qualifications and positions provide plenty of fodder for either a high-minded, issues-based critique, or a more no-holds-barred assault on her honesty and integrity. And what do liberals want to talk about? Why, her decade-old comments on masturbation, of course!"

The liberal response would be that the culture wars shouldn’t matter in theory; however, since conservatives hope to legislate morality, one is pressed into active service. Gossiping about Christine O’Donnell’s nutty views on masturbation is hence a defense of liberty, as she’d likely make it illegal if she could- bad news for the justice system since most of the public are repeat offenders.

I’ve never quite sympathized with those on the left who believe that cultural struggles are a “distraction” from the economic issues that “really matter”. Unlike the Marxists, I don’t understand culture as “epiphenomena”, deriving only from the material forces that shape our lives and history. Certainly, our material situation affects the course of our life, yet, so does the culture in which we find ourselves. Culture provides us a rough guide to how to live a meaningful life, and most of us will find that, in spite of our free will, numerous existential potentialities strike us either as realistic or off-limits due more to culture than our intrinsic nature.

The real problem with the culture war, then, is that the stakes are so low.

Gun control? Liberals have mostly abandoned that impossible dream. Abortion laws? Nobody expects Roe V Wade to be overturned, nor should they. Controversial art? The art scene is the province of the super wealthy, effectively removing it from public discussion. Radical professors? Universities are already fazing out tenure, making academics, already some of the most boring people on earth, into timid functionaries. Gay rights? We’re one step away from enshrining them, ending the debate, and finally reducing the fluid vagaries of human sexuality to two boxes on a census form- the monosexuals won.

What’s left? Arguing about whether mall greeters should be made to say “Merry Christmas” or an Islamic center in New York shouldn’t move elsewhere in the interest of sensitivity. There’s same sex marriage, but again the question seems to be whether or not society as a whole will accept one subset of adult middle class couples. Between the right’s hurt feelings about elite condescension and the left’s yearning for widespread tolerance and celebration of diversity, one would think Americans are united in that insipid bourgeois dream of being liked by people that one doesn’t know. To dream the uninteresting dream…

None of these things is a debate about the terms of existence as much as the sorts of trivialities insecure suburbanites worry about. People say that the battles of the culture wars are symbolic of “larger struggles”, and really the largest struggle here is the fight against the collapse of cultural meaning as the last embers of a once dynamic society sizzle out and the inky night triumphs. It’s hard not to feel that there is no space of radical possibility- political or divine- remaining. Another world is no longer possible.

I mean think about it. In terms of love, Americans went from a radical discussion of potential relationships- saving patriarchy or doing away with it, whether open marriages or monogamous ones are more in keeping with our nature, whether divorce is liberating or purely destructive, if free love is even possible- to a tacit siding with conventionality and an argument about whether gays can call their square relationships “marriage” without hurting anyone’s feelings. In terms of faith, we went from an important discussion about the role of the divine within modernity- do we lose some aspect of our humanity within secularism, does a godless universe remove the possibility of free will, is a wealthy nation with no space for spirituality ultimately empty, and has God lost interest in us- to a debate about how not to hurt the feelings of knee-jerk Christians without hurting the feelings of knee-jerk atheists. In terms of labor, we now discuss whether avoiding Wal-Mart is solidarity or snobbery. As for the environment, we choose to shop at Green Incorporated. Feminism, once radical, now does little more than maintain the abortion status quo. Racial debates now involve “visibility” on television shows. It’s not that these things don’t matter. But none of this poses any questions how you, or I, live our lives. All of these debates are about whether our own particular version of the status quo will be flattered or not. It’s hard to be passionate about matters of decorum.

The mythos about the sixties culture wars is that they resulted inevitably from the conformist fifties culture, and yet it’s hard to see Eisenhower’s America as any more conformist than Obama’s. It’s hard to imagine that the generation that embraced television was somehow more stultified or less inspired than that which embraced the Internet. As then, the truly important questions are inappropriate for mixed company. To each his own “lifestyle”.

The problem with the culture wars is that they distract from the culture wars we could be having.

Movie Notes: Emmanuelle (1974)

2010-09-16T17:07:00.000-07:00

Emmanuelle is famous for being a sexually graphic (but not pornographic) film released by a major studio with an X rating and subsequently making a lot of money. It’s not a masterpiece in any sense, although it’s certainly better than most films of this sort; and it is, in many ways, a product of its time (the mid 70s). There’s also a debate about whether it’s a ‘feminist’ sex film. I think it is, but not in any way we would be quick to recognize, which I think says more about the feminist movement than about the film.

Based on the novel by Emmanuelle Arsan, the movie tells the story of a French diplomat’s wife, played by Sylvia Kristel, who moves to Bangkok with her husband and settles into the life of the consular community. This life apparently involves great boredom and diplomatic wives cheating on their husbands. This is not an issue for Emmanuelle, however, because her husband encourages her to take lovers; he’s not jealous but is French.

The film, then, is a story of innocence coming into a world of experience and into her own as a sexual woman. The film has a dream-like and languid tone, and seemingly everyone she encounters is more open sexually than Emmanuelle, from Marie-Ange a young girl who masturbates in front of her to Bee, the bisexual archaeologist who seduces and leaves her, from her husband who encourages her to have sex with others to Mario, an older European decadent who introduces her to opium, underground boxing matches and being sodomized before a crowd. His philosophy holds that all of the limits of bourgeois morality must be transgressed and he becomes sort of a tutor to Emmanuelle. In the end, however, she seems to have graduated and no longer needs anyone in particular to fulfill her sexual desires. Sitting before a mirror in the last shot, she has passed from innocence to experience. Or it was all a dream.

Of course, none of this is particularly realistic or even always coherent. Emmanuelle is clearly a fantasy about female sexuality, and yet it’s strange to think of how rare films like this- an erotic film about a woman coming into her own as a sexually liberated adult- have become. It really is a product of its time. Current mainstream cinema generally portrays adult women as having few or no sexual desires of their own, while pornography is much more often about female degradation than liberation. The sort of argument the film makes is not often heard anymore, especially not in cinema.

That argument: that in order for a woman to be sexually liberated and self-actualized she must have several sexual partners, and so monogamy is anathema to female liberation- well, let’s just say it’s still shocking. Is it feminist? I think it is a valid feminist argument in the sense that it’s a radical statement about female liberation and self-actualization. It is not feminist in the sense that it is not an argument that has been widely embraced by the feminist movement. Some feminist thinkers have said as much, but the feminist movement has tended far more generally towards renegotiating the terms of monogamy than arguing for its abolition. Emmanuelle has more often been read, by feminists, as a male fantasy (written by a woman), since women naturally desire monogamy. Mais, bien sûr!

I think maybe it’s most interesting to see Emmanuelle as a path not taken. Its case is totally valid, in my opinion, but it’s also not one that many people- feminist or not- are willing to side with. At least, not outside of fantasy.

Movie Notes: Piranha 3-D (2010)

2010-08-23T17:56:00.001-07:00

Okay, let’s clear this up: Jaws (1975) was a big budget major studio version of a Roger Corman Beast at the Beach B-Movie; it made a lot of money, so in response, Corman produced Piranha (1978), a low-budget Jaws rip-off that was more entertaining than it ever deserved to be thanks to director Joe Dante; and now, we have a big-budget major studio remake of Piranha that will, inevitably, be ripped off by Roger Corman for the Sci-Fi network. It’s the cinematic cycle of life my friends.

The tag line for this movie should be the Pieces classic: “It’s exactly what you think it is.” The scenario is dumb beyond belief- Mesozoic era piranha that survived under the earth in a subterranean lake surviving through cannibalism- yes- for millions of years. How did they manage that? I have no idea? Why do various characters in the movie disappear for no apparent reason? No idea there either. How do our heroes get dragged underwater through rocky shoals via powerboat without dying slightly? No clue.

But you go to see these films for gore and nudity, and the film delivers a ton of both. The third-act massacre is one of the bloodiest things I’ve seen outside of war films. The director has compared it to Girls Gone Wild meets Saving Private Ryan, and that’s about accurate. Dozens of idiotic partying half-naked teenagers go from drunken to eaten in about twenty minutes. Eli Roth shows up and plays a douchebag- really most of the kids in these movies are like the “bad guy” in wrestling- they show up, annoy the shit out of the audience, and get triumphantly massacred. It’s a formula that works.

And, goodness, do they get massacred! The levels of nudity and gore in the film make me wonder if the MPAA was given blow before rating it. I can’t tell you if it’s better in 3-D. I hate 3-D and saw it in 2-D because this was the format playing at our drive-in. This is the sort of movie you should see at a drive-in.

Let's class the place up a little.

2010-08-10T01:21:00.000-07:00

Ty Segall - It #1

2010-07-10T22:29:00.000-07:00

Boy, did this one make me happy!

More about that Sex Book

2010-07-09T14:04:00.000-07:00

Further to that… Dan Savage is promoting that book Love at Dawn pretty hard and, in the process, pushing back against certain attitudes that I’ve actually expressed here. So, in the interest of fairness…

Mr. Savage:

"The point of Sex At Dawn—and my point in drawing your attention to it—isn't that monogamy is unnatural and therefore no one should attempt it and that people have license to break the monogamous commitments they made to their partners. And for the record: I'm happy to acknowledge that there are lots of good reasons to be monogamous or very nearly monogamous.

What the authors of Sex At Dawn believe—what they prove—is that we are a naturally non-monogamous species, despite what we've been told for millennia by preachers and for centuries by scientists, and that is why so many people have such a hard time being and remaining monogamous. I'm not saying that everyone everywhere has to be non-monogamous; the authors of Sex At Dawn don't make that argument either. (Lots of monogamists, however, run around insisting that everyone everywhere should be monogamous—and the monogamists get a pass because, hey, they mean so well and wouldn't it be nice if everyone were?)"

So, okay, I see what they're getting at. It seems to me that, rather than criticizing monogamy as such, Savage and the authors are criticizing the bad reasons that people choose monogamy, or even just the bad ways that they look at monogamy and the lousy expectations they put on themselves as a result. And, okay, I think he’s right on this.

I’ve now read a number of message board comments about this book and it’s pretty clear that we’re in the minority at GSM because we’re all pretty level-headed, open-minded, and somewhat liberal about sex and love, regardless of our relationship status. Many people, evidentially, are not. They believe that love and sex are the same thing, so that, if you are in a committed relationship, it will be monogamous- not only in practice, but even in thought. You simply won’t consider fucking the girl at the coffee shop or the fellow at work. And, if you do, it’s a sign that either something is wrong with you: you’re a “dog”, a “slut”, you don’t respect or love your partner, etc; or it’s a sign that something is wrong with your relationship. Some people have even suggested that, if you’re flirting with or thinking about someone else, “your relationship is already over”.

I think their point is that, if you’re thinking about these things, it probably means you’re Homo sapiens: that members of our species desire sexual novelty, difference, and multiple partners by nature, even if it’s not right for our lifestyle. And so we should be less hard on ourselves for exhibiting the traits of our species. We can stay monogamous without feeling guilt about the fact that monogamy does not always fulfill our needs. I think they’re probably right.

For me, I often felt like I was wearing clothes that didn’t fit me in terms of relationships. It wasn’t that I dislike monogamy; it was more the expectation from males my age that I should be more hung up on my partner’s monogamy than I actually was. I remember having a discussion with a girlfriend, who was struggling with her desire for sex with others, and feeling, inside, completely unthreatened by that, but still socially restricted from saying, “Oh, go ahead. I don’t care” because that might seem ‘self-loathing’, ‘disrespectful’, or like I didn’t love her. And yet, I didn’t care. But I worried that something was “wrong” with me for not caring.

I eventually “came out” about not being jealous or even terribly concerned about what my wife does when she’s not home. But, that was only after we had mused about non-monogamy for six years, and indeed, I still worried that I might sound perverse or masochistic or lacking in self-esteem. It’s really quite the opposite- I don’t get jealous because I have a very high opinion of our relationship and of myself as a partner. I don’t see anyone else threatening that. I’m her man.

And, indeed, since she’s had another partner, jealousy hasn’t reared its ugly head between us at all. Actually, it was considerably easier than I’d expected. She feels closer to me because of my faith in her; and I feel just as secure in the relationship as before, and even a bit more so. And our sex life is the best it’s ever been, perhaps partly because the fact that I’m not the only one having sex with her has stirred her libido and my awareness of her sexual prowess. So far, it’s been a very positive experience and a good decision.

Now I don’t think this would be right for everyone, or even that it will necessarily always be right for us. However, having heard for years that, absolutely, it would not be right for any married couple, I do understand the urge to push back against the "monogamy or splitsville" crowd.

Is Abortion a Class Issue?

2010-07-09T13:56:00.000-07:00

Recently, I’ve been reading a number of articles by anti-abortion advocates discussing the “racial genocide” of legalized abortion. I think the argument is that, because abortion rates are higher in the black community, advocates of legal abortion are promoting the genocide of that community. It’s a problematic argument, for both pro-lifers and pro-choicers, for reasons that would seem obvious, but apparently aren’t.

I don’t know if it’s ‘epistemic closure’, but I suspect you have to be a conservative for the argument to resonate; or, more accurately, be anti-liberal, since the underlying message seems to be that liberals are glaringly hypocritical: they’re allegedly concerned about the black community, while accepting higher abortion rates in that community.

But I’m not entirely sure why pro-lifers are making this case, when the data they’ve highlighted suggests instead that both sides of the ‘debate’ are looking at the wrong issue by focusing on the laws. A few points stand out: 1. the black community has a fairly high level of Christian evangelical religiosity; 2. it has a higher poverty rate than the general population; and 3. it has a higher abortion rate than the general population. So it seems a logical inference that abortion is a social issue; that a woman who has very little means to raise a child might be more likely to have an abortion than one with means. This seems logical to the point of being common sense, and suggests that pro-lifers and pro-choicers are mistaken in focusing on the laws.

Curious about this, I looked up the statistics at the CDC and they claim about 73% of women who have abortions are living below the poverty level (earning $9,570 or less per year). According to a study by the Guttmacher Institute, 75% of women who have abortion cite lack of money to raise a child as one of their reasons for having an abortion. So, at the very least, class is an issue here. But, of course, it's not part of the discussion.

The problem I have with the abortion “debate” is that both sides are perfectly right, but discussing two completely different topics. Pro-lifers are right that abortion is tragic and ethically abhorrent. If you believe in a soul, it’s an obvious tragedy; even if you don’t, it is basic biological fact that every individual of our species is unique and unrepeatable. Therefore, deciding that one individual may not exist is clearly fraught with ethical problems that pro-choice people need to acknowledge more openly.

Conversely, you need only be mildly libertarian to think that the state shouldn’t be allowed to intrude into people’s private reproductive decisions. Shouldn’t people who champion individual liberties over state intrusion see Roe V Wade as a victory? More importantly, every study I’ve read on the topic says that abortion rates did not greatly increase after Roe V Wade, and that making abortion illegal does not greatly reduce the number of abortions. Abortions, or induced miscarriages, are very easy procedures to do. Much like setting a broken bone, you wouldn’t want to do it yourself, but if you had to, you probably could. There is a very long and sad history of abortion, induced miscarriage, ‘exposure’, and infanticide; typically correlating to times of material need. So it’s not inconceivable that making abortion illegal would do little to change the overall rate of abortion.

In other words, if you’re pro-life, and focused on the legal issue over the social issue, it seems to me that you’re not addressing abortion as such; just the social imprimatur: you’d rather that society not approve of abortions and they be clandestine- but not necessarily that there actually be less of them.

If you’re simply opposed to abortions as such, you need to focus on the social question: fight for a higher minimum wage, provide free day care and pre-natal care, improve living conditions for lower-class women, promote sex-ed for poor teens, and even think about establishing scholarships for the children born to low-income women who made what you see as the right choice. You need to add incentives to birthing and childrearing, because that’s what will reduce the number of abortions. Otherwise, you’re only addressing the visibility of abortion.

As for pro-choice people, if you’re focused on the legal issue and access, and ignoring the social issue, then you’re really only concerned with the ‘choices’ of one class. There is a difference between choices and options; a lower-income woman facing an unplanned pregnancy has options, but not actual choices. Until there is a much higher base level of income and living standards across society, the poor will lack real choices. And, in general, I think the left needs to focus almost entirely on the social question and drop the neo-liberal idea that doing so is impossible or “anti-capitalist”, when in fact it’s just the opposite.

Finally, here’s something fascinating: if the right addressed abortion as a social issue, they’d find common cause with the left. It is possible then to imagine a time in which abortion was legal, but almost nobody had them.

Love and Sex

2010-07-03T12:47:00.000-07:00

In a lame attempt to spark discussion, I'm linking to this Q&A with the authors of Love at Dawn, which argues that long-term sexual monogamy is not the natural state for human beings:

Biologists distinguish sexual monogamy from social monogamy. As DNA testing has grown cheaper in recent years, we’ve learned that most species formerly classified as “monogamous” (primarily birds) are socially monogamous, but not sexually so. In other words, they form pairs that cooperatively care for that season’s brood of young, but the male may well not be the biological father. Applied to humans, we argue that a more flexible approach to sexual fidelity can increase marital stability and thus lead to greater social and family stability.

The problem I have with this is that there are plenty of things humans do that aren't natural, but are all for the better. Such as not raping or pillaging, or other activities that primates excel at. Also, it's sort of hard to argue for any activity based on the fact that birds do it. Birds are cold. reptilian, beastly things with beautiful plumage. My other quibble is with the term "family stability" which seems to imply "married with children". I suppose I should mention here that my wife and I take a, um, "flexible approach to sexual fidelity", so I'm not really one to talk, but it's hard for me to think that people with children shouldn't be monogamous. Well, or be really good at keeping things from the kids, who likely wouldn't get non-monogamy.

This passage I find a bit irritating, for reasons I can't explain:

Another problem is that most people in the West marry because they’re “in love,” which is a temporary, blissfully delusional state we should enjoy, but not expect to last forever. As the German poet, Goethe put it, “Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing. A confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.”

Okay, well, I'll try to explain. It annoys me when people make the distinction between the initial thrill of falling in love and the day-to-day work of a romantic relationship and suggest the two are diametrically opposed. While that initial rush certainly fades, I find that it comes back in waves that are, let's be honest, much more manageable than the initial swooning and dizziness. Birthdays, weekends, anniversaries, other people's weddings: quite often I am blissfully and delusionally in love. The rest of the time, we're best friends who love each other deeply and like to screw. But I don't get where people get this idea that "love" disappears once you start doing laundry together.

Textbooks in Texas

2010-07-01T14:30:00.000-07:00

Recently, a hue and cry was raised about the bizarre reality that the content of US textbooks is ostensibly decided by a small board in Texas, who as it happens, are Christian fundamentalists. Hence, the Deist Thomas Jefferson is no longer considered a father of the American nation. Personally, I understand the distress; but as a historian-in-training, I tend to look at the controversy differently.

First off, history is quite often controversial. There are controversies about what facts are true, what interpretations of those facts are valid, and what events should be emphasized. History often clashes with tradition, its close relative. An Indian colleague recently commented that an advantage of studying Mughal history in America is that you needn’t fear writing something that leads angry mobs of Hindu nationalists to drag you out into the street. As with individual psychology, nations tend to know who they are by who they’ve been in the past. The need to whitewash is as pressing in terms of the nation, but as with individuals, the repressed always resurfaces; whether or not the second time is farce. We might not repeat the mistakes of the past, but we often approximate them.

Nevertheless, the second point is that, as an aspiring historian, I see historical study as worthwhile in and of itself. Studying the human past gives us a greater understanding of what it means to be human, a way of comparing the different paths taken by societies, and a neutral space to explore our own beliefs, values and ideas. It also provides a sense of the historical and civilizational contexts within which we find ourselves. It expands the ground of our being. It is good for you.

The problem is that straight back to the nineteenth century German schooling model discussions of curriculum have seldom treated history as an end unto itself. And here is the rest of it.Instead, history has usually been instrumentalized as a means to some other end. Instead of studying history to gain historical sense, students are to study history because it provides “critical thinking skills”, or it inculcates certain “values”. Instead of developing a holistic and coherent picture of the historical context of one’s self and society, the goal is to make use of “lessons” from history to demonstrate how to be a good citizen, or an advocate for social justice, or a tolerant individual.

Universities make the same mistake. Read a course catalog and you’ll find that most universities justify their mandatory history courses by the appeal to “skills” instead of appealing to a vision of a good life. The result is an unjustifiable incoherence to their course offerings, and no explanation about why students should study history if they could gain “critical thinking skills” elsewhere. As a student once asked: “Why should I read this dialogue by Plato? It’s not like I’m not going to be a Greek historian.”

High School education, meanwhile, seems to have chosen “values” over a deeper and broadened selfhood. If we hope to offer advertisements for a particular value, in this case Christian faith, then Jefferson should go; if the goal is to gain a richer understanding of the American story and enrich one’s experience as an American, it’s both incomprehensible and abhorrent that this education would exclude the debate between Jefferson and Hamilton in the Federalist Papers.

So, this textbook controversy, while upsetting, is informed by a larger misguided belief that history is only worthwhile as a means to another end. When the Texas mandarins decided to remove Oscar Romero, it was entirely likely that Romero was there in the first place in order to inculcate a belief in social justice and removed to make more room to inculcate Christian and capitalist beliefs. In other words, if you see history as a means to an end, its use as propaganda is to be expected; the question is more about which propagandist will prevail.

Propagandists see all culture as a means to an end, and all knowledge as an instrument of power. Thus, they tend to write off scholars as “so-called experts”, pronouncing the word “expert” as if it was something they stepped in while walking through a public park. Let’s not forget that certain segments of the radical left spent a good part of the early 90s trying to remove the “right wing propaganda about dead white males” from university courses. Nevertheless, if all you see in Shakespeare is “White, Western male propaganda”, or if all you see in Jefferson is “godlessness” you are, to put it bluntly, a goddamned fool.

The argument from the Texas mandarins and the “Western Civ has got to go!” crowd is the same: all scholarship is propaganda, so why not have our propaganda? This is the Foucaultian argument that knowledge doesn’t exist outside of power taken to its logical conclusion. The corollary is that intellectual self-determination is impossible, so selfhood also can’t exist outside of power. When people make this argument, I generally wonder if they’re describing the state of things as existing or as they’d like it to be. And at some point, I think it’s possible to be troubled by all the havoc that “experts” have caused in bureaucratic societies over the last two centuries, while still recognizing that their critics are often really attacking the possibility of a neutral intellectual space outside of power. It’s often a short stride from kicking a scholar to goose stepping.

Nothing Heavy

2010-06-30T04:49:00.000-07:00

A cool dress, and a link to a much larger picture of it. Enjoy.

Facts Are For Losers

2010-06-26T23:20:00.000-07:00

Here were have an op/ed piece discussing re-versioning historical accounts to suit current social / political stances. It sounds kind of dirty to say it, but if you keep in mind that whatever version you have -- any version at all -- was written to suit a specific social / political stance, it's less dodgy and more like plain old disappointing. Perhaps what I found most interesting about this short article is that the author effectively compares the current educational agendas in Russia and Texas. Someone should probably feel at least a little bit weird about that.

It all becomes clear!

2010-06-25T11:33:00.000-07:00

I think I see how we can make the world a better place! Just go read this, and afterward, think about what tactile sensation translates into giving a shit about stuff that matters. Maybe everyone needs to spend some time every day touching unbearably fragile things, ephemeral things, gossamer things. Maybe everyone needs to spend a few seconds savoring something precious. Physically, tangibly precious.

Again with the generosity of the human spirit...

2010-06-23T08:35:00.000-07:00

As well as the way the Human Centipede really seems to stimulate the, uh... creative gland. It's a cat toy. You can buy it for your cat on Etsy. Right now!

Lest you despair...

2010-06-22T05:43:00.000-07:00

... of the generosity of the human spirit, there is fullbooks.com, a jumble of what the name implies. Some authors and titles you've heard of, some strangers. Some fictions, some non. Real grab bag.

And also a little rodent living in a tennis ball someone stuck in a tree for it.What's not to like?

Cornering the Untapped Foreign Film Market in North America

2010-06-19T09:20:00.001-07:00

Something just occurred to me: why isn't there a DVD rental-by-mail service that rents all the foreign movies that come out? Someone will clean up doing that.

I know the mail order DVD rental places will rent foreign movies, but only a few of them. There is a massive trade imbalance with movies: almost every American film made plays around the world, but only a few foreign movies ever make it to North America. Here in Canada, it's even worse- we get all of the American films, but most Canadian films never play in Canada, in spite of the fact that we fund them through taxes! It goes without saying that most Canadian films never make it to America and the ones that do are disguised as American films (Juno, A History of Violence, etc.)

A number of countries have thriving film industries that barely export anything. I was thinking about this while reading this Salon article about a French film from 2008 that is now playing in NYC and online. It's a very positive review and it occurs to me that there are a ton of French movies like this made every year. If you live in North America, however, there are only two ways to see them: 1. Watch the small fraction of French films that get released in North America, or 2. Download them from a file-sharing site. And it's the same with Japanese films, German films, Spanish movies, etc. etc. You have to get a multi-region player and find an ethnic importer store.

So, it seems to me that, were there a distributor who rented the movies through the mail in the North American region format, they'd corner an untapped market and make a lot of money. Am I right?

Slutting around on the Internet

2010-06-16T09:57:00.000-07:00

And, also, I wrote this thing over yonder about sex scandals and why people might not care about them. So, feel free to read that too.

I guess I could cross-post the Ordinary Gentlemen stuff here too. I do feel a bit like I'm being unfaithful to GSM.

Meanwhile, over at that other site

2010-06-15T19:25:00.000-07:00

If you would like to discuss Socrates, the Buddha, and the Dhammapada with me, please go here.

Been meaning to post this a while....

2010-06-15T08:09:00.001-07:00

When you care enough to send the very best (from your anus to the surgically-attached mouth of another)

2010-06-11T13:32:00.000-07:00

Wow! Elvis-fucking-Christ! Here is a Human Centipede necklace. You can buy it here. Just in time, too- our five year anniversary is fast approaching!

second verse...

2010-06-11T03:27:00.000-07:00

I know this will sound cynical, and I don't necessarily mean it that way. But I do find it interesting that we have already had this oil spill before. (For comparison, here's the current spill.) The quick solution doesn't seem to have many fans outside Russia, and the solution they went with on the Ixtoc I (the first Gulf of Mexio spill in '79) was to drill a relief well... that's not going to be a quick fix. What I'm wondering about is how quickly we will all lose interest in this horror. I actually have the sense that it is already kind of waning. Even shock photos of oily pelicans aren't really getting much more than a weak "awwww, that's a damn shame" from most people at this point. The Persian Gulf "spill" during the Iraq war, was several times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill, and never really subject to any clean up efforts. There's still oil blobbing up all over the place there 20 years later. Yet, mention it in conversation, and you're just as likely to get "oh yeah, that's right, that DID happen!" as anything else.

Do I have a solution? No. Nor am I here railing about how someone should do something. Mostly I'm mourning what appears to be a crapload of apathy. People forget so easily what happens, and I think that really contributes to these things repeating. Because when it comes time to set limits, regulations, safety measures, and so on, no one is truly shaken to the core by the horror of the things we do. We have become jaded and disaffected about our Sodom & Gomorrah scenery.

BP Spills Coffee

2010-06-10T09:26:00.000-07:00

Brilliant.

Fungus Power

2010-06-01T13:05:00.000-07:00

How in the world are they going to remove all that oil from the Gulf of Mexico? Paul Stamets suggests mycoremediation: using mushrooms to consume the spill. He's made it work surprisingly well on land- I'm not sure how it would work at sea. But it's worth a shot along with every other idea they can think of, right?

2010-05-27T16:06:00.001-07:00

Video for the Dreamlands exhibit at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

For Greg and Holly's amusement

2010-05-24T18:15:00.000-07:00

Probably this is true of most of the things I post here, but this is something that Greg and Holly would particularly enjoy: The Human Centipede Flash Game.

Note to Myself

2010-05-20T21:16:00.000-07:00

RedBubble: I like the idea of artists selling their art and tee-shirts of their art in one spot.

At least it's not another friggin' remake!

2010-05-20T21:05:00.000-07:00

Always follow your dreams! Like Quentin Dupieux, whose dream was to make a horror movie about a run-amok killer tire that blows people up with its mind. Yes- you read that right.

Today's Line Worth Stealing

2010-05-18T20:27:00.000-07:00

“He must have felt as though he had butted out a cigarette on his own soul.”
From Chris Jones’s beautiful take down of a fellow whose inner dickweed was recently unleashed by the Internet.

SLIME CITY MASSACRE - Trailer #1

2010-05-15T17:01:00.000-07:00

If you pause this at the end of the pan at 1:49, you can see me in a leather jacket. As if you needed any more incentive to watch this movie.

Book Notes: The Ethical Slut

2010-05-15T15:14:00.001-07:00

One of the minor irritants about being married is that, at one time, people assumed your relationship was unique and individual, but now that you've tied the knot, they assume you're married just like they are. Whenever I'm at married people parties, I find myself nodding and smiling along with gags about fighting over the remote control or the taking out the garbage for the wife, or whatever, and having no idea what the hell we're all talking about. I remember a memorable party with some of my wife's lady friends joking about how they'd 'keep an eye on her' and 'make sure she's good' while I was overseas for seven months. I bit my tongue not to say, "Aw, heck, just let her get laid for crying out loud".

I'd imagine people who actually are in "open marriages" must bite their tongues a lot (well, or someone's tongue anyway). The point of my anecdote is that everyone's married differently and if that sort of thing works for some people, who can say they're wrong? I get tired of hearing people say that those sorts of relationships are "impossible" because "everyone's jealous". I'm not. I was when I was about 23 years old and, admittedly, dating a girl who didn't much like me (and was a bit of a twat anyway), which tends to make one insecure. But, after we broke up, I decided that being jealous is sort of a worthless emotion- your partner eventually gets sick of it and dumps you and then you feel like a shitheel; if it wasn't going to work out, that would happen anyway, but you'd not feel like a shitheel. So I stopped. And it's much more relaxing just to focus on your own life and not worry about what your partner is doing. Jealousy is tiring.

Anyway, this is a book about how people manage to have open marriages without problems. It was pretty fascinating reading. One of the funniest bits of advice is that you need to have a daily planner if your marriage is open. I'd imagine you would! Also, make sure to prioritize the needs of your 'primary partner', so they don't feel threatened. Probably true in monogamous marriages too. And don't leave pubic hairs lying about. That, I'd imagine, becomes a whole other issue in open marriages. And how not to lose your temper when your wife's lover drinks the last of the milk?

Anyway, it sounds like every open marriage is different as well- some people have regular lovers or girl/boyfriends; others have the occasional threesome (according to Dan Savage, this is a normal part of gay male relationships); some just cruise; and some are in multiperson marriages. What I liked about the book was that it was not overly focused on polyamorous love relationships, like a lot of websites seem to be. That seems way too tiring keeping up two relationships. Don't some people just pop off for the occasional fling with a flight attendant? Actually, a lot do that, in what the book calls "non-consensual non-monogamous relationships", or dogging around. They're against cheating because it's unethical, which I suppose makes sense- it's really the lying that sucks with cheating, isn't it?

So I like that the emphasis is on how married people 'play' without causing strife. I like that they place an emphasis on reclaiming sluttery and the tone is fairly therapeutic. I can't really remember the last time I heard anyone use the term 'slut' as an epithet, but I'm sure some people do and it's worth turning the word into a term of endearment. As for open marriages, if it works for Bob and Carol and their 'play partners', more power to them all. I'd certainly much rather live near a nice married couple and their live-in lover than some fundamentalist dickweed cheating on his wife with a rent boy. I've certainly known open couples who made it work. For me, though, I have enough trouble keeping all of my appointments straight as it is.

Inflated bag monsters

2010-05-01T17:26:00.001-07:00

You've all probably seen this already, but I like it- it falls into the "why didn't I think of that?" category.

Pripyat Pool

2010-05-01T00:39:00.001-07:00

Pripyat Pool
Originally uploaded by Ch0jiN

J.G. Ballard was obsessively fascinated by abandoned pools. I sort of understand... Anyway, this one is up on flickr from a series of pictures taken in Pripyat, the abandoned city built around Chernobyl.

Springtime in Hamilton

2010-04-29T20:33:00.000-07:00

The Space Pen

2010-04-16T21:38:00.000-07:00

U.S. Patent # 3,285,228 is the AG7 anti-gravity pen designed by Paul Fisher, who founded the Fisher Space Pen Company. Not surprisingly, the AG7 is the same space pen.

An old urban legend holds that NASA spent a million dollars developing a pen that could be taken into space and would still function in zero gravity, only to find out that the Russians thought to use a pencil. Not true. Actually, NASA still uses pencils, or at least grease pencils. Regular pencils have the problem of being a bit too flammable.

Paul Fisher set out to develop a pen that could be sent up in space in the 60s. He had already made a name for himself by developing a universal refill cartridge- before this, there were several different types of refills that were not interchangeable between different types of pens, but his could be used with most of them.

He then set to work developing the space pen, had it patented by 1965 and gave it to NASA for testing. They first used the pen on the Apollo 7 mission in 1968. The space pen can write upside down, under water, and in extreme temperatures.

The pen uses a thixotropic ink: meaning the ink is a gel that is viscous until somehow shaken or stressed, as by the roller ball, in which case it liquefies. Fisher developed a thixotropic ink earlier for the Fisher universal ink cartridge. This allows the ink to flow only when needed.

Furthermore, the cartridge is pressurized by nitrogen, which is why it doesn't need gravity to work.

Fisher died in 2002, but they still make the pens. The factory store is located in Boulder City, Nevada.

Eagleman

2010-04-13T06:22:00.000-07:00

Look at those low rates!

Today in Great Headlines

2010-04-10T13:20:00.001-07:00

"North Face, South Butt settle lawsuit".

Heraclitus

2010-04-07T20:13:00.000-07:00

Hey, over at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, I also posted recently about the pre-Socratic Heraclitus, looking at a few of his fragments, including:
21. “You cannot step in the same river twice.”
108. “The way up and the way down are one and the same.”
&
118. “Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to acknowledge that all things are one.”

2010-04-07T19:51:00.001-07:00

For Claire. She knows why.

Movie notes: The Book of Eli (2010)

2010-04-07T19:07:00.000-07:00

A loopy movie that pulls the narrative rug out from under the audience on numerous occasions, The Book of Eli answers the question: what would you get if you combined the post-apocalyptic, Western, samurai, and religious epic genres? The answer is, The Good, the Bad-ass, and the Holy Man; or “all of the above”. I dug it for its gob smackingly over-the-top moments; but it’s hard to imagine a film that posits civilization will be saved by literacy that I would not like.

Denzel Washington plays a lone traveler, named Eli, in an America that was devastated by a nuclear explosion thirty years prior, trying to make his way “West” for mysterious reasons. He runs afoul of a crime boss (Gary Oldman) in a small town who has big aspirations of ruling the world (what’s left of it) through the powerful language in a book that was burned after the war, and which Eli has the last copy on earth. The traveler, meanwhile, intends to get where he’s going and is quite prepared to kill anyone who gets in his way.

It’s probably not giving away anything to reveal that the book is the Bible and Denzel is something of a holy man. It’s sort of like the Hughes Brothers said, “Okay, let’s just fuck with the commonplace idea that religious movies can’t have lots of bloody kung-fu scenes”. And I guess your take on the film will depend on how you see this particular narrative twist. I enjoyed it because it’s just so weird: The Holy Road Warrior? Also, the film neither buries the religious message, nor beats us over the head with it.

And, besides, after watching so many movies, I simply crave “WTF?” moments. There’s a point here in which the baddies are firing thousands of rounds of ammunition into a farm house owned by an elderly cannibal couple and Eli receives the prophecy that our heroes will live and the old human-munchers will kick the bucket, which promptly happens; all the while, the camera is swooping between the house and the gatling gun, following the path of the bullets; and the scene was just so over-the-top and nutzoid that it was impossible for me to dislike the rest of the movie.

That said, the final narrative twist doesn’t really make a lot of sense in the context of the movie, it’s pretty hard to imagine that Eli read the Bible for thirty years and never got to anything like “Thou Shalt Not Kill a Massive Number of Bad Guys via Your Awesome Fighting Skills”, I never understood how human beings were supposed to survive if they have almost no access to water, and I’m guessing it doesn’t really take thirty years to walk across the American continent. Nevermind. I’m still a sucker for ultra-violent action movies with loopy narratives, and the final message: that civilization will be saved by book-readers and literacy, was truly righteous. Amen.

Trickster Tales

2010-04-07T18:30:00.001-07:00

Here's something cool: Trickster: Native American Tales: A Graphic Collection. Twenty graphic illustrators teamed up with twenty native American storytellers to bring to life tales of clever tricksters. One of the artists is our friend Evan Keeling, who let us know about it. From the art I've seen, it looks like a great collection.

Parmenides and non

2010-04-03T16:46:00.001-07:00

I'm still blogging the canon, today I wrote about the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides:

"First off, I’m not sure we can say the philosophy of Parmenides exactly “works”. That is, I don’t think we can take his ideas as precepts. Because, essentially, Parmenides speaks of the impossibility of speaking truthfully about things that do not exist. So, even this paragraph is a problem: Parmenides does not exist, so I can’t talk about him..."

(More here)

Movie Notes: Clash of the Titans (2010)

2010-04-03T12:46:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I had to see this movie. I saw it at the drive-in with my wife (who I no doubt annoyed by trying to explain all the mythology and how it was changed for the movie) and lots of teenagers. This is pretty much a standard kid’s movie, complete with sped-up CG battle scenes and faux portentous dialogue. Characters essentially yell out lines like: “Men. Will. Reign!” That’s not a real line in the movie but you can make this shit up in your sleep. “You! Will learn! The meaning of! Pain!!!” Add in really dramatic music and sweeping helicopter shots of landscapes and you have an epic movie. Or, at least, a commercial for one.

The reviews have been pretty lousy and it’s not entirely fair. Clash of the Titans isn’t a bad movie; it’s just really stock. Everything in it has been done in at least twenty other movies that came after Lord of the Rings. It’s more forgettable than bad. I think we’ve returned to the days of the kiddie matinee; it’s on that level. This one is the story of Perseus, a demigod as son of Zeus, who is leading humans in their battle to dethrone Zeus, Hades, and the other Olympians. If you’re a real geek, you’d ask at this point, “Why do they call it Clash of the Titans, if it’s humans fighting the Olympians who already overthrew the Titans? Where are the Titans in all this?” Okay, that’s true. But, Clash of the Olympians could easily be mistaken as the title of a movie about drunk athletes in Vancouver; you see where it’s confusing?

I barely remember the original at all, which people seem disappointed that this movie didn’t approximate. It was pretty cheesy though, right? There is a cameo by the mechanical owl in this one; it’s quickly put away, with a snarky line implying that this film will be more serious or intense, or maybe just more CG. It is, of course, also really cheesy, but it’s updated, cutting-edge cheese. I’d imagine, at this point, we’re about two years away from Hollywood making “Manimal: The Movie” and finally imploding.

Postscript:

From the Rufus Sketchbook

2010-04-03T10:46:00.000-07:00

Caricature of random woman in our local newspaper. (Hope she doesn't mind!)

2010-04-01T21:03:00.000-07:00

"The entire universe is the good soul's native land."
-Democritus

Useful Quote

2010-04-01T19:27:00.000-07:00

"(E)very one must bear his own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to bear theirs."
-Henry Adams

Over there...

2010-03-30T19:34:00.001-07:00

Okay, so I'm still 'blogging the canon', and I promised to add links to those posts, in case anyone would like to leave comments. Actually, I'd encourage, cajole, and beg you to leave comments, since in general, blog posts on Herodotus and such are not really that popular. Thus:

Prometheus Bound (sort of weird)
Two Poems by Sappho (you'd think this would be popular if only for the Sapphic aspect...)
Oedipus Rex
Me Bitching about Marketing Experts (basically)

Anyway, I'd also like to note that I'm about to blog about a few pre-Socratic philosophers, Parmenides and Heraclitus, who are exceedingly weird. I'll bring links to those posts, mostly because I'm curious about what my Graz friends think of Heraclitus.

2010-03-29T18:17:00.000-07:00

Isn't this supposed to be a desolate, snow-covered tundra?

2010-03-15T18:41:00.001-07:00

It's been a really weird winter here in Canada: "The Home of Winter". We had something like a week of snow here and that was about it. Otherwise, it's been really weirdly springlike throughout the winter, but with the usual gray skies nonsense. The problem is I don't know what to do with the rose bushes; you're supposed to cut them when they die so the new ones can come in, but they're now really tall and still green and living. The other plants are like still alive with buds coming through the ground. If I don't cut them, I imagine they'll fuse into some sort of hideous Siamese twin plants.

Anyway, my suspicions were correct:

"Environment Canada scientists report that winter 2009/10 was 4 C above normal, making it the warmest since nationwide records were first kept in 1948. It was also the driest winter on the 63-year record, with precipitation 22 per cent below normal nationally, and down 60 per cent in parts of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario."

"It's beyond shocking," David Phillips, a senior climatologist with Environment Canada, told Canwest News Tuesday. Records have been shattered from "coast to coast to coast."

Of course, he would say that. Damn lying climatologists. Also, damn the lying evidence of my lying senses. (All the comments on that story say basically that.)

I'm skipping the Academy Awards

2010-03-07T12:50:00.000-08:00

Tonight, the Academy Awards will be given out for the best films of the last year. I don't know if I'm qualified to make predictions, but I am struck by how lukewarm I am towards all of the nominated movies this year. I certainly liked Inglourious Basterds, mostly for the cinematography. And I really loved A Serious Man. I haven't seen Avatar, mostly because I keep being told the following by people who have seen it: "Oh, man, you have to see it for the computer visuals! It's about these blue cat people and, admittedly, the story is a little stupid and the dialogue is pretty cheesy, but it looks awesome!" Okay, I'll wait for the DVD, thanks.

Here are my thoughts on some of the nominated films:

Inglourious Basterds: Another mixtape of movie references from Quentin Tarantino. The cinematography is lush and the acting is highly entertaining. My only problem is that this is a "highly personal" film from a man who has no personal life. Woody Allen often has the same problem with "homages" that feel like rip offs, but at least he can draw from literature, New York life, philosophy, and his own neuroses; Tarantino has nothing else going on in his life aside from watching movies. Nevertheless, I do think we should encourage "talky" movies because I like actors and acting more than I like flying blue CG cat people.

Up in the Air: Hey, did you know that the corporate world can be impersonal? Or that it's psychologically unhealthy to avoid all personal relationships? Or that being fired sucks? Well, if not... Again, I was sort of meh about this movie. George Clooney is always good and everyone is good in it. Jason Reitman is a talented director. But it added up to less than the sum of its parts.

The Hurt Locker: I'm guessing the DVD chapters are something like: 1. Defusing a bomb, 2. Defusing another bomb, 3. Defusing two bombs, 4. A tense exchange, 5. Defusing a bomb... It's well-directed and certainly a tense movie. But, in the end, the Hurt Locker is just a stereotypical action flick: you have a crew of men doing a very dangerous job, and then they get a new guy; well, this guy is a real maverick! I mean, he's looked at the rule book and just thrown it away! So, this causes tension. And yet, in spite of the fact that he's a maverick who lives on the edge, he gets results, and you've got to respect that! But why does he live on the edge? Well, see, he's addicted to the thrill! Cue the hard rock.

Crazy Hearts: What's the easiest psychological problem to portray in a movie? Alcoholism! Just show the main character drinking in every scene and then, in the third act, either he stops drinking or doesn't. That's pretty much the movie. It's the tragic story of a singer who was once a megastar and has now fallen to being not as successful as another megastar, so he's a drunk. Nevertheless, the songs are pretty good and Jeff Bridges is as good as ever.

Up in the Air: Yes, everything Pixar does is amazing and this is no exception. But, if we're at the point that a pretty standard kid's cartoon gets movie of the year because of one heartbreaking montage in the opening credits, we're fucked.

District 9: Oh, piss off! A cheesy sci-fi movie can get nominated for best picture simply by shoehorning a political parable into its opening half-hour and then dropping it in lieu of video game violence and weird racism for the last hour?

A Serious Man: Only the Coen brothers could basically rewrite the book of Job as a comedy set in suburban Minnesota in the late 60s and have it work perfectly. A really funny movie about the mystery of faith and the meaning of life. Of course, it'll win shit.

Precious, An Education, and Avatar: I haven't seen these ones. I'm going to stay positive by assuming they're great. They're all about gay cowboys, right?

Seriously, I think we're being punished for having so many great films in the last few years. Movies like No Country for Old Men, Children of Men, Pan's Labyrinth, and There Will be Blood, I mean. Movies I wanted to see win. This year, it's like the Academy secretly knows the movies weren't very good, but had to nominate something.

BLOG SONG

2010-03-02T18:54:00.001-08:00

I think I'm missing the fun other people are having blogging.

Love Marriage: Wilbur Sargunaraj- Official Music Video

2010-03-02T18:41:00.001-08:00

I think this video marks the point at which auto-tuning went too far.

Bettye Lavette - Talking Old Soldiers

2010-02-28T17:39:00.001-08:00

Claire recently scored a load of second-hand CDs through her thrift store job that were all much better than the usual thrift store fare. It`s a bit sad, actually, because someone unloading such a good collection probably means a death in the family.

One of the great CDs was Bettye Lavette`s `Scene of the Crime`. Ms Lavette has quite a history. She started singing at age 16 with the hit `My man, he`s a loving man`. She soon recorded the soul classic `Let me down easy`and recorded for a number of Detroit labels before signing with Atlantic-Atco.

Atlantic recorded the album Child of the Seventies in 1972 and made the completely inexplicable decision to not release it. She kept singing for years.

In 2000, a French soul aficionado finally released Child of the Seventies as Souvenirs, which began her comeback. Things really got rolling with her 2005 album I`ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, which was hugely popular with critics and fans.

You might have seen her at the Obama inauguration, dueting with Jon Bon Jovi.

Here she is doing a cover of the Elton John song `Talking Old Soldiers` that is bang on. Enjoy.

Émilie Simon

2010-02-27T03:27:00.000-08:00

I have a confession to make. I'm 35 years old and have been a purchaser of music for about the last 23 of those years. Until last week I had never purchased an album by a female artist. I'm not exactly sure why that is. I have purchases some individual songs, but no woman artist has impressed me to the point where I felt I needed the whole album.

This changed when I bought Émilie Simon's The Flower Book. I've been at least dimly aware of her existence since 2006 when Holly gave me a copy of the Thievery Corporation album Versions. The song on the album which stuck most vehemently in my craw was Émilie Simon's Desert. It's highly agreeable trip hop, but the most distinguishing feature is her voice. If you were to draw a triangle and label the vertices "Ice cream sundae," "blow job," and "Raphael's The School of Athens," Émilie Simon's voice would be near the barycenter.
I know what you're thinking: "Greg, you're just a sucker for hot french chicks." To which I can only fairly respond touché. In point of fact, it has pissed me off to no end that people have had music careers because of their looks or what they'll do in a producer's office and not their actual musical acumen. That is not the situation here. This album is catchy, musically interesting, and at times highly emotive. Instead of degenerating further into embarrassingly incoherent yummy noises, I'll let the music speak for itself.
Flowers ◊ Desert ◊ Fleur de Saison ◊ Dame de Lotus ◊ Dreamland

My Life as a Pepsi Addict

2010-02-24T19:47:00.000-08:00

My name is Rufus and I am a recovering Pepsi addict. I was powerless before carbonated and caffeinated sodas, often blowing through five or six dollars a day on Dr Peppers, Mountain Dew variants, or my drug of choice, Pepsi Cola. Like a nerdy computer programmer, I was seldom seen without a soda of some sort, or as they call it here in Ontario, “pop”. When I went to France for six months, the closest convenience store went out of business, two events I’m convinced were related.

It all stems from my childhood. My mother drinks an incredible amount of Diet Coke each day, which is a step up from when we were kids and we always had Coke Classic in the house. I guess my switch to Pepsi was teenage rebellion, but I’ve probably had three “pops” a day, at least, since I was sixteen. I also remember regional variations, like “Teem”, and Claire will attest that I still mourn the loss of Surge.

I’ve heard for years about how sodas aren’t good for you; each one has four teaspoons of sugar, or more often these days, copious amounts of corn syrup. They give you cavities and make you fat and impotent. I used to find this very irritating. After all, I did give up cigarettes, binge drinking, and most drugs. What’s the problem with pop?

But, I’ll admit that living in a town with a great number of older diabetics (Hamilton has a diabetes center), has had an impact. I’ve been “scared straight”! Also one reaches a point when approaching middle age in which you either change your bad habits or live with them forever. I was more determined to change a habit than improve my health, frankly.

Compared to quitting smoking, quitting pop was a tremendous ordeal. I don’t believe that “cold turkey” works, and so I’ve really just weaned myself down to a single weekly Pepsi. Believe it or not, just the first day was miserable. Making it through 24 hours without a Pepsi, something I’d not done for about 20 years, was agony; my head pounded, my heart raced, and I pretty much felt like I was trapped in a closed elevator. After I did that, however, it was easier to add a second day, and a third, etc.

My timing might be good. Last time I was in upstate New York, everyone was up in arms because the state wants to add a “sugary drink tax” to sodas. The voters are outraged. Of course, the state has a longstanding budgetary shortfall that everyone complains about too; while the voters rise up in outrage every time the state tries to raise taxes or cut any entitlements whatsoever. Last time I was there, people were protesting an idea to cut trash pickups to every other week. I guess my point is that American voters are crybabies.

But, as for pop, I’m on the wagon. Or, at least, I’ve become a “social drinker” instead of a “problem drinker”. I don’t know when someone’s going to give me a plastic chip, but it’s good to know that an aging dog can unlearn an old trick. Now, I just have to cut down my Internet usage to a reasonable amount.

Over at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen...

2010-02-18T07:25:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the absence. I've been quite busy establishing the League of Ordinary Gentlemen branch office. Here are some highlights:

Some of this stuff is repetitive of posts here, although I think all of them are rewritten and changed in some way. Over at the House of Horror, I reviewed Slime City Massacre, the movie we were extras on.

Oh, and there's still the matter of the dissertation. So, there's been no rest for the wicked.

Alexander McQueen (1969-2010)

2010-02-11T19:59:00.000-08:00

It's very sad to be noting this, but Alexander McQueen, who I've been raving about here for a little while, and following for the last several years, has apparently committed suicide. It's hard to explain why he was such an impressive designer. Fashion is a business that maintains an aura of innovation, while spiraling through about four or five basic trends over and over. So when a genuine visionary comes around, it's like firing a flare into a foggy sky. Sure, many of his clothes would be unwearable in the ordinary world; but then you might not want Dali to design your house either. There's still something exciting about a designer with a key to the dreamworld. It's too bad he's passed out of this less exciting realm.

Thinking like an Academic (and not)

2010-02-06T13:52:00.000-08:00

So far, I've been enjoying my trial period at League of Ordinary Gentlemen. And I think it's been going okay. It's hard to tell: they might be getting dozens of "cancel my subscription!" emails that I don't know about. I do have to say that I am enjoying blogging about "academic" topics without having to think like an academic. It's a bit like making a jailbreak from my day job.

Now, when I say "thinking like an academic", I don't mean a matter of being more intelligent than the average bear. In fact, I have not found that academics I know are significantly more intelligent than civilians. In some areas, of course, they're actually a bit less savvy. But, there is a sort of professionalization of thought that goes on when you're in academia. You learn to get your footnotes in order, so to speak. I don't know that your actual cognition improves; but you develop a certain amount of expertise on a particular subject and know when you are sufficiently informed to speak on that topic in a scholarly way, and when you should keep quiet.

Therefore, in "real life", there are really only about four or five topics that I would feel comfortable speaking about in a lecture hall or at a conference. When my area of research pulls me into a new direction (always happening!), I have to head to the library and nail down the 'textbook answer' about that new topic. If I had to, say, discuss Madame Bovary in an academic context, I'd really feel like I was obliged to first hit the stacks and learn about Flaubert, French literature, and what has been said and thought about the novel, before I wrote or spoke about it. I would probably feel guilty if I just read the novel and held forth on it based on my own responses. And I think that guilty conscience is what I mean when I talk about "professionalization". Academics tend to keep their intellect zipped up, if you know what I mean!

What's good about blogging on the Iliad or Plato is that I am a complete and utter novice; a pisher! A poseur! A beginner. I have to think about these books in a non-academic way, just in order to get anything done! My life would be a shambles if I was trying to learn ancient Greek right now, and I think I might be looking at the books in a different way. For me, reading the "great books" is like learning about a foreign culture through immersion. It's like being plunked down in the middle of a Moscow supermarket and having to get something done. The fun of it is taking stabs in the dark and getting to hear what other people have to say. On occasion, I've heard from actual scholars, although not as much as I'd like.

It's problematic, this academic habit of making people study everything for years before they can write on it, while teaching undergrads a little bit of everything. On one hand, this system has produced some of the best scholars in the world. But, there's a tendency for academic writing to be so narrow and specialized that you have to go through six years of grad school to read it! This causes there to be a gap between "popular" books and "academic" books, and it's hard to tell if that gap isn't really a matter of snobbery and university press protectionism. The end result, however, is that less and less civilians want to commit themselves to the humanities, which are really accessible to all people, but which we like to pretend require some specialized "higher" knowledge. The humanities seem arcane and obscure to people, when they actually take human beings as their subject matter.

I don't mean to bash academics once again- what I'm trying to suggest is that it's not a matter of snobbery or protecting a monopoly, as much as a matter of ingrained, professionalized insecurity. None of us wants to be called out for being ill-informed on a topic. But this makes it hard to achieve the sort of interdisciplinarity that everyone in the humanities talks about wanting; and it also makes it hard to relate to young people who often want to talk about academic subjects without first getting their papers in order!

If we're going to think freely, I think we need to spend more time thinking without first getting the proper scholarly clearance. The Internet seems as good a place to start as any.

(Note: Reworked notes on The Iliad here. Notes on Bach's cantata 82 coming soon, in spite of music being one of those areas in which I am a complete pisher.)

Milk in bags, eh?

2010-02-06T10:37:00.001-08:00

This video is currently going around the Internets and it perfectly captures the exotic and offbeat customs of Canadians- we can get milk in bags here. That's pretty much the extent of Canadian exoticism, if you exclude poutine. I do remember staring in wonder at the milk bags when I first moved here, or at least giggling. For the record, Claire and I usually buy cartons of milk. So, we're barely Canadian.

French for Today

2010-02-06T10:15:00.000-08:00

I haven't done these for a while because it's been a while since I learned a new one that I liked. However...

Biner (tr verb)
1. To hoe, to cultivate, to work over the soil.
2. To say two masses in the same day.

Over there...

2010-02-03T08:41:00.000-08:00

Consider this fellow I drew to be pointing in the direction of League of Ordinary Gentlemen, where I posted a rewritten and expanded version of my post on Aeschylus's "Suppliant Maidens". See what you think of it!

You know... for kids.

2010-02-03T03:34:00.000-08:00

Movie Notes: Crazy Heart (2010)

2010-02-02T19:31:00.000-08:00

I had never heard of this film when Claire suggested that go see it with our friends. Apparently, the film has sent "Oscar buzz" buzzing around Jeff Bridges, for his lead performance as an alcoholic, somewhat washed-up country singer. Indeed, he gives a remarkable performance in the film. I actually had to remind myself after the film that Jeff Bridges can usually enunciate quite well- I'd so accepted his slurred speech as normal. He's also quite believable as a singer. The songs, by T-Bone Burnett, are exemplary country in the 70s "outlaw" style.

It's hard to make a movie about an alcoholic; either he's dead or wrecked at the end, or he cleans himself up. Barfly is an exception in that not much changes for our drunken hero. This movie works because the hero pulls out of the downward spiral in an unexpected way. I also liked that the characters clash throughout the film, but none of them is really a bad guy. Maggie Gyllenhaall is especially good: as usual, she makes the world seem a bit brighter every time she's on screen. Robert Duvall is good as ever; he was also a producer on the film, which is based on a novel by Thomas Cobb.

I am always glad to see movies about human beings interacting with one another, as opposed to fighting zombies or blue alien cat people. If I have one gripe it's that the independent movie about a sullen loser facing his failings is becoming as much of a cliche as the vapid CGI blockbuster. I'm not sure how long Hollywood can survive making only huge "tent pole films" and small-budget portraits of dysfunctional people. Shouldn't there be something in the middle? What about something like Serpico? Do they make those movies any more?

Image of Hamilton

2010-02-02T15:51:00.000-08:00

For some reason, I found this decommissioned school building fascinating. You can't quite tell from this picture, but someone still mows that lawn, although the rest is falling apart. Why?

Today a blog, tomorrow the world!

2010-02-01T06:46:00.001-08:00

Heads up: I have introduced the canon-blogging project at Ordinary Gentlemen: "Allow Me to Introduce Myself..." Feel free to head over and make comments, even if they're of the 'cancel my subscription!' variety.

View from Hamilton

2010-01-31T15:45:00.000-08:00

Something went horribly wrong for this shopping cart.

Further to the New Digs

2010-01-29T21:24:00.001-08:00

I've been talking lately about expanding into greener pastures: in Internet terms, that would be a more active site. No offense to the readers here, lurkers and all. (And, of course, I won't abandon GSM!) But I'd like to try putting my thoughts up against a tough crowd of very active debaters.

So, in that vein, I should note that I will soon be entering a two-week trial period at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen. Things haven't been hammered out yet, but I'm thinking I'll extend the "blogging the canon" project there. After two weeks, we'll be able to tell if it's a good fit. If not, I will return with my tail between my legs. But, again, I will never abandon you here, my (very quietly) adoring public! I'm still Rufus from the block. (Oh God, I apologize for writing that.)

Actually, I highly recommend The League of Ordinary Gentlemen. The blog deals mostly with politics, but they do so with a goal of breaking out of the tired left/right dichotomy and boring culture war stances. To quote their masthead:

"The contributing writers hail from various points along the political spectrum, but all hold a deep and abiding commitment to the exploration of ideas outside the foray of rhetorical and ideological cul de sacs.

The entries are less posts than they are dialogues with an aim towards sustained discussion on topics and issues that lay at the foundations of our lives. This approach, we hope, will provide readers with a thoughtful and searching alternative analysis."

I believe that great art and literature should lay at the foundations of our lives. But this brings up a question: Rufus, what does "blogging the canon" have to do with politics? Not a lot really.

Admittedly, however, it's surprisingly hard to talk about "the Western Canon" in North America without politics entering into it. If your goal is the preservation of the cultural patrimony, it's assumed you're a "cultural conservative"; and of course, I am in that sense: I do want to conserve the culture! But that doesn't mean I want people to go vote Republican and defend "family values" or whatever. I like to think of myself more as a curmudgeon than anything else. I don't know who curmudgeons vote for; we just bitch about everyone!

Besides, the point is to start talking about culture outside of the culture war stereotypes. The most genuine "cultural conservative" I've ever known was a professor who was a political anarchist, and absolutely dedicated to convincing young people to make Plato, Homer, Moses, and Dante part of their mental furniture. I think that the "great books" should be a part of everyone's life. Because, ultimately, reading these books is good for you. They make you more fully human!

Anyway, the League of Ordinary Gentlemen outpost will either succeed, or it will crash and burn. Either way, feel free to visit me there and post questions, insults, or jokes.

2010-01-28T13:54:00.000-08:00

At the End of Yonge St from Fixinmytie on Vimeo

Yonge Street in Toronto- one of the longest streets in the world, and a good idea of what Southern Ontario looks like in general.

"The Suppliants" by Aeschylus

2010-01-28T10:16:00.000-08:00

"Hateful, and fain of love more hateful still,
Foul is the bird that rends another bird,
And foul the men who hale unwilling maids,
From sire unwilling, to the bridal bed.
Never on earth, nor in the lower world,
Shall lewdness such as theirs escape the ban:
There too, if men say right, a God there is
Who upon dead men turns their sin to doom,
To final doom. Take heed, draw hitherward,
That from this hap your safety ye may win."
- The Suppliants, Aesychles.

Aesychles is sometimes called "the father of drama". Of the great Greek dramatists, his plays are the oldest; although probably not the first in actuality, they're the oldest that still survive. I point out this potential answer to a Jeopardy question because Aesychles helps to illustrate something about the canon: he shows how it's surprisingly coherent, raising questions that have yet to be answered.

A digression: What got me interested in all of this in the first place was reading the French Romantics for my dissertation and realizing that these 19th century writers, who are so completely modern in so many ways, cannot be understood fully without having a good understanding of the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare, Kant and Virgil- to begin with. Entire generations grew up steeped in this tradition so, when they wrote, they were taking part in conversations that have outlasted any blogospheric debate. In other words, for people not so long ago, this was culture and it was a totally living thing, as compared to how most of us experience it- distant, dead, and something to cram for the midterm! For me, it was the shock of realization that these texts are still living, contrary to the impression I always got from my professors.

Which brings us to The Supplicants, once considered the oldest play we have (now the second), and still startlingly relevant now that everyone has the people of Haiti in their thoughts, because it asks: "Are societies ever in the right in turning away refugees?" Admittedly, the refugees here are in a somewhat bizarre situation: the fifty daughters of the prince Danaus, the Daniades, are fleeing Egypt where their Uncle, Aegyptus, is trying to force them to marry his sons, their cousins. They will eventually be claimed and forty-nine of them will kill their husbands on their wedding nights. But, in the play, they have arrived en masse on the shores of Argos and they want to be granted asylum.

We're introduced to the Danaides first and it's hard not to sympathize with them- they're fleeing being forced into marriages, and hence sexual relationships that they find morally abhorrent. Incest is the oldest human taboo and one every society has shared. All nature rises up against it, as the Danaids claim in the above quote: even birds would fain pollute their race. One notices that there is plenty of incest in the ancient creation stories, such as the Egyptian; but that's because the gods can commit incest- it's in those stories to prove that they're gods and not like us. Humans have always had a visceral repulsion towards incest- King Oedipus will gouge out his eyes before too long. The Danaides, all fifty of them, have decided they will either take asylum in Argos, or the noose.

In a sense, the Danaides face something women throughout history have faced when they say, "save me from marriage with a man I hate." Marriages are still arranged of course; there's not much talk of love when it comes to a woman's marital destiny. In fact, Plato suggests (in the Symposium) that true love is to be found outside of marriage. The historical norm was for virgins to be offered up to men they barely knew on their wedding night. Aeschylus's comparisons between predatory young men and birds of prey still ring true. Marriage was a woman's fate, regardless of her wishes. The Danaides, of course, face something worse. Nevertheless, there are young women in many parts of the world who will still relate to the Danaides when they say: "Never, oh never, may I fall subject to the power and authority of these men. To escape this marriage that offends my soul I am determined to flee, piloting my course by the stars."

(Rodin's Danaide statue.)

The King, Pelasgus, would seem to have a fairly easy choice to make here. Basic morality compels him to protect these maidens in need. In addition, he has reason to believe that Zeus protects them, and no one can go against Zeus and fare well. I think we still see granting refugee status as a simple moral imperative; we just cannot turn away victims to be further victimized, if we can protect them. Ah, but there's the rub- at some point, we cannot protect them. How much security can we provide before we compromise our own safety? In this case, Argos is a relatively small city-state and the fleet of fifty hot and bothered Egyptians are soon coming to claim their wives, and there's good reason to believe they will make war over this. ( Clearly, the pickings were pretty slim in Egypt at this time!) Will Pelasgus follow the moral imperative even if it means getting his own people slaughtered?

And what if this other culture simply does things differently? Does the law of Zeus apply to those who worship other gods? Luckily for the Danaids, they are not a different people at all, but are also of the Argive race, which is again important here, as it was in the Iliad and Odyssey. Descent matters for the Greeks, having one foot still in the tribal world. Kin and clan matter. The mythological background: Io, a priestess of Hera was seduced by Zeus. In order to keep his mistress on the down low, Zeus turned her into a heifer, but his wife Hera got wise and tormented Io with a gadfly. Driven to distraction, Io eventually wandered all the way to Egypt and Danaus is among her descendants. So, when they show up in Argos, the Danaides and their father are reconnecting with racial kin. Even these exotic foreign refugees are from the same family.

What will be their fate? King Pelasgus chooses to let the people decide, a move that terrifies the maidens. Will the Argive people respond to the moral imperative, or will they seek to protect their own security? What do populations do when the two are at odds? Making the choice as a group, will they just find mutual support in taking the coward's way out? Will the maidens end up like Kitty Genovese: victimized because the onlooking crowd doesn't want to get involved? Does democracy result in heightened ethics, or do we sink lower together? If the choice is between turning a blind eye to the rape of these outsiders or having their own children get slaughtered, what is the right thing to do?

Aeschylus is responding to the stirring interest in democracy, which will be established in Athens two years later. He sets up the case for and against the Suppliants much like a courtroom drama. It's important to note that, for the maidens, it is not clear that democracy will lead to an ethical culture at all; they might well get thrown to the predators. For contemporaries, such as Aeschylus, it wasn't clear either. It still isn't.

However, for my money, Aeschylus screws up the play when it comes to the public vote, leaving it off-stage. This is the main source of tension in the play- a great way of staging The Suppliants would be to have the audience vote on the fate of these refugees. Instead, Aeschylus sets up tension about the vote and then has Danaus come on stage to inform us how it went: Good news! The maidens will stay. (Maybe I should have said "spoiler alert"!)

Of course, including the Argos public on stage would be extremely difficult. The play is already almost comically complicated- after all, the "Chorus" is made up of fifty women, who are also protagonists in the story. Drama is not yet perfected. Perhaps the reason that I've yet to see a performance of The Suppliants is that it's likely hard to stage it without it degenerating into farce.

Nevertheless, the quick denouement is a real let down. I'll admit that I felt a bit ripped off and yelled "What are you doing, Aeschylus?!" at the text. My wife has, thankfully, come to expect these sorts of outbursts; the cat was a bit frightened. It's still very disappointing to me how Aeschylus plays this off as a very easy choice, when the whole play argues that it's not an easy choice. Sticking our neck out to protect the weak and victimized is never as easy as it should be. Not in this life. Sure, the Argos democracy "does the right thing". But the point of the play is that these debates will take place in democracies for generations to come because it's seldom written in thunder what the right thing might be.

The Odyssey

2010-01-27T16:18:00.000-08:00

It seems that more students are assigned the Odyssey than the Iliad in High School; we see a lot of freshmen at Mall U who have read the former already and are now reading the latter for the first time. I suppose the Odyssey is just a more enjoyable story, with daring do, exotic locations, adventure and true love. It has inspired several later writers, most famously James Joyce, and is very accessible to a first-time reader. Knowing the mythology helps, but it's not necessary. The Iliad, in contrast, is intense, violent, and a bit dismal. Personally, however, I far prefer the Iliad. It's a more serious story, with higher drama, and the Odyssey reads a bit like a story for young boys.

The story itself takes place ten years after the end of the Trojan War, which means that there are most likely books missing in between the two stories. Achilles is dead, Menelaus and Helen have reconciled, and most of the soldiers have returned to their homes. All but one. The story begins in Ithaca, where Penelope and her son Telemachus are waiting for the long-overdue return of Odysseus. He has been gone for years now and the natives are getting restless. The local nobility are hanging around the house, drinking and making sacrifices, and trying desperately to woo Penelope, Odysseus’s wife. She is awaiting his return, but undecided about the suitors. On the one hand, she allows them to hang around; on the other, she has been tricking them into thinking she will marry once she finishes weaving a shawl, which she has been unweaving each night, perhaps the most creative example of cock-teasing in literature! She years for Odysseus, weeping each night; yet it seems likely that he will never return.

Telemachus is frustrated with these noble wooers and sets out to find news of his father. The local elders are no help, their sons after all trying to wed Penelope, so he sets off with the sailors for Pylus and Sparta to get news of his father. Or, at least, maybe his father. Descent matters here; it makes a difference if one is descended from the semi-divine race resulting from people and gods mating, or from the merely human race. It matters for Telemachus because, if he is not truly of the semi-divine race and the son of Odysseus, he likely won’t survive the ordeals he faces. In a striking passage, we are reminded that Telemachus does not know for sure who his father is because no man knows his parentage with absolute certainty. This is, after all, before Jerry Springer’s paternity test!

He has the help of Athena though and does the work of a dutiful son. Telemachus is sort of the ideal son of a great leader; loyal, brave, and able to manage the house while his father is gone. In Old Regime France, a famous and contentious novel fleshed out the story of Telemachus, giving good advice for the descendants of great leaders and, thereby, casting aspersions on the current King! It’s also noteworthy that Telemachus, if he finds his father is dead, will be responsible for marrying off his mother to one of her suitors.

In Pylus, King Nestor entertains Telemachus and tells him how the Greeks destroyed Troy and departed after the war. In Sparta, he is entertained by Menelaus and Helen, now reconciled- only fair, given that she was blinded by Aphrodite when she strayed. Menelaus tells him that his father is being kept on the island of the goddess Calypso, who has taken him for her lover, and cannot return. It has now been about two decades since his father left and Telemachus has never known him.

Athena begs Zeus, who sends the messenger Hermes with an order to Calypso to let Odysseus leave. She has him build a raft and set off, but soon Poseidon wrecks his raft, stranding him on the island of Phaecia. In a delightful scene, young maidens washing their clothes on the seashore discover Odysseus and take him to meet the king. He takes part in athletic games and recites stories of the war, including the story of the Trojan horse, and what happened afterward. A recurring theme is the importance of storytellers. The Iliad and Odyssey were recited by traveling storytellers, and such bards pop up throughout the story. When Penelope rages against a storyteller who sings of her husband, he stands up for the profession, telling her to hate the message, not the messenger.

Much of the story is told in episodes. Odysseus and his men are blown off course and visit the isle of the lotus-eaters, becoming intoxicated and wishing to stay. He leads them next to the island of the cyclops Polyphemus, who captures them and is, in turn, blinded by them. This is what sets his father Poseidon against Odysseus, and the god of the sea gets revenge by toying with the crew for years.

They next narrowly escape the cannibal Laestrygones and spend a year on the island of the witch Circe, who also falls in love with Odysseus. Finally leaving, they sail to the Western edge of the world and visit the land of the dead, guided by the spirit of the prophet Tiersias. Note the similarity to the older Mesopotamian story: Gilgamesh also sails to the edge of the world to be guided through the netherworld. Odysseus communicates with the spirits of the dead. His mother has died of grief, and now lives here in a world of darkness, devoid of joy. The Greeks had nothing to look forward to after death. Also of note is Agamemnon, who warns Odysseus of scheming women like the one who did him in. He assures Odysseus that he has a good wife in Penelope, but get home soon to kill the suitors!

Humans are toyed with by the gods in these stories and subject to fate. When bad luck befalls Odysseus, it is because he has angered some god, and when luck or good ideas come his way, they're sent by the gods as well. He is fortunate to have an advocate in Athena, but very unlucky to have angered Poseidon. Here we get a sense of the Greek religion: we make offerings to the gods in order to curry favor with a particular god who looks after us. Some of this carries over to the early Hebraic religion- the Israelites make frequent burnt offerings to God. In the Odyssey, we witness the sacrifice of a heifer in close detail.

Note also the importance of being a good host to travelers- things turn out very badly for the cyclops because he tries to eat his guests- always a bad idea! Hospitality is important in all the stories of this time. Often characters in the Old Testament make the mistake of maltreating angels or protected people of God and pay the price. Conversely, guests have to do right by their hosts: all of Odysseus's problems come from blinding his host. Throughout the story, he and Telemachus rely on the hospitality of the island-dwelllers they encounter. One interesting thing- often their hosts bathe and oil them! One would be advised not to ask for similar treatment today. But, in the world of 700 BCE, in which travelers often put their lives in the hands of their hosts, and vice-versa, hospitality is a paramount virtue.

Okay, that's enough for today. If I think of anything else, there can be a part 2 for The Odyssey. Spoiler alert: Odysseus gets home. Like I said, I'm not as fond of the Odyssey as the Iliad, but it's a nice way to spend some time reading.

The Iliad (part 2)

2010-01-26T17:18:00.000-08:00

Note: One reason I wanted to blog about "the great books of the Western canon" was that I've actually found very little personal writing about them on the net. A number of teachers and professors have posted their lecture notes, which are helpful for getting the academic background about these stories. Otherwise, the pickings are slim, and the notes themselves seem a bit too mannerly. Do academics actually pick up on how freaky and bizarre, violent and perverse most of these stories actually are? Or is that just me? I do worry a bit about lazier and less scrupulous students stealing from these notes. However, there is one thing that I think would make that a really bad idea: I'm a full-blown weirdo.The parts of these stories that interest me are salacious, ultraviolent, perverse, and inappropriate. And I tend to go off on rambling tangents. So, if you want to clip and paste these notes and turn them in to your teacher, you will probably fail.

Okay, so returning to the Iliad, I've laid out the storyline and characters, and I want now to talk about some of my favorite scenes in the text. The Iliad is the sweeping story of a world-changing war; yet, it's anchored by specific human incidents that are psychologically illuminating and fascinating. Here are some of my favorites:

1. The scene in which the old Trojan first witness Helen and say: "No one could blame the Trojans and Greek men-at-arms for suffering so long for a woman's sake. She is fearfully like the immortal goddesses." They do want her out of the city because they recognize what her being there has brought to Troy; but they also understand why this woman was worth fighting a war over. People often say that the Greek tragedies are great because the characters are so passionate. This scene comes to mind.

2. Aphrodite favors Paris because he gave her the golden apple and, in return, she has granted him the woman Helen. After he is nearly slaughtered in combat with Menelaus, Helen cools to the young stud. Aphrodite encourages Helen to go to his room and have sex with him to cheer him up after the battle and she openly defies the goddess: "Mysterious goddess, why are you trying to lead me on like this? You are plotting, I suppose, to carry me off to some still more distant town, in Phrygia or lovely Macedonia, to gratify some other favorite of yours who may be living in those parts?

Or is it that Menelaus has beaten Paris and wants to take me back home, me, his loathsome wife- so now you have to come here to try to lure me back to Paris? No, go and sit with him yourself. Forget you are a goddess. Never set foot on Olympus again but go and agonize over Paris, go and pamper him, and one day he will make you his wife or his concubine. I refuse to go and share that man's bed again- it would be quite wrong." Helen has no intention of being pimped out by Aphrodite again and openly defies a goddess- and is smacked down for it. I love the idea that it's the gods who make us horny and irrational, and the image of a mortal woman haughtily defying a deity. The gods play humans like instruments, but the strongest can hurl defiance at them and, in doing so, become a bit like gods themselves.

3. Hector takes leave of Andromache. The great warrior and son of the Trojan king, Hector, leaves for the battle and his wife Andromache begs him to stay home. This is a heart-rending scene. Hector has to go and fight- and die- in the war because his stupid little shit of a brother seduced and stole the wife of a King who treated them as guests. Hector has no respect for Paris, but he still feels compelled to do his duty and protect his city. He is obligated to fight to the death for an unworthy cause. Even worse, Andromache is asked to give up her husband and the father of her child because his brother Paris stupidly seduced a Greek king's wife. For one moment, we can all see the way out- Hector can, if he so chooses, leave to be with his wife and son; but instead, he will leave them alone with unguessable grief. He was born and raised to be a warrior and win glory instead of family and security; it's a lousy trade-off.

4. Achilles mourns Patroclus. After sending his comrade to fight in his armor, Achilles loses his closest companion and, even before he hears the news, the horses weep with the knowledge. When he does hear the news, Achilles collapses to the ground, pulling his hair out and pouring the soil over his head. His mother comes to him and Achilles tells her that now, "my dearest companion is dead, Patroclus, who was more to me than any other of my men, whom I loved as much as my own life... I have destroyed Patroclus." Now, Achilles no longer wants to live. But this is to the Greeks' advantage. Since he is fated to die in the War anyway, Achilles can return to avenge his companion without any fear.

5. Now on the rampage, Achilles is attacked by the River Scamander (pictured to the left) which rises up and tries to drown him for having clogged its waters with dead bodies! I love this scene because it's so totally bizarre and surreal, and I also love the idea of nature itself rising up in outrage against the horrors of human warfare. If only.

6. Achilles kills Hector and, in his rage and sorrow, won't allow anyone to claim and dispose of the body. This is an outrage in the ancient world- there must be a funeral. Finally, Priam, Hector's father, comes to Achilles and begs for his son's return. He tells Achilles that he himself is the age of Achilles's father, but will never see the return of his son after the war. Priam kneels down before Achilles- the man who killed his son- and begs forgiveness. The two of them break down weeping together. It is one of the most moving and startling images in the book, and the end of the story; two men broken by war and conflicting loyalties- Priam having lost everything and hanging on to his family duties; Achilles having avenged his companion's death, but fated to die.

When I read the Iliad in High School, it never really registered for me that it really is a great book. Homer is masterful in weaving together heroics, bloody battles, the imminent divine and the cripplingly human in a story that sucks you in and holds your attention. In doing so, he presents the full panorama of human types and behavior. I haven't a clue whether the academic approach keeps Homer with us as a living part of the culture, or simply turns it into a museum piece. But compare the Iliad to, say, Avatar or the latest Star Wars crapola, and it becomes crystal clear why it's been read for the last 2,700 year.

Art for Today

2010-01-25T19:41:00.000-08:00

"Achilles before the dead body of Patroclus" (1624) by Dirck van Baburen, acquired last year by Museum Schloss Wilhelmshöhe in Kassel. It seemed suitable for today.

The Iliad (about 700 BCE) (part 1 of 2)

2010-01-25T18:35:00.000-08:00

Western literature begins with the Iliad and, until very recently, it was assumed that no educated person in the West could have skipped reading the story. The story of a few days towards the end of the tenth year of the Greek war with Troy, the epic most likely refers to an actual war, remembered long after and filtered through a storyline of gods interacting with men, and men being undone by pride, anger, arrogance, and lust. Kierkegaard wrote that the Iliad was the perfect epic because it combined a great poet with a great subject matter. Even today, it stands up as a flawless story abounding in heroics, psychological drama, and ironic commentary on the lives of men.

The epic in fact begins with a delicious irony: we’re going to hear a song about the damage caused by Achilles’ uncontrolled anger, and yet it’s clear from the start that it’s the arrogance of his commander, Agamemnon, that’s causing all the trouble. Agamemnon, as leader of a Greek fleet besieging Ilium, has taken for his own concubine the daughter of the local priest of Apollo and his arrogance has moved the god to strike the Greeks with plague. Finally agreeing to return the girl, Agamemnon decides instead to take Achilles’ own slave girl, a direct slap in the face of his greatest warrior. The war has been raging for nine years already and all Achilles has to look forward to is glory after his death, and now his supercilious commander has insulted him in front of all the other warriors. In a sense, the Iliad begins with a question we can all relate to: what to do when your boss is a jerk?

In the larger sense, Achilles faces the dilemma of how the individual subsumes their needs to the collective good. It’s hard to live in society for any of us; but Achilles really is the greatest warrior and the son of a man and a goddess, Thetis. Even as a demigod, he has to stifle his will in order to live within an order of his inferiors. Agamemnon is an old fool, and nobody would fault Achilles if he killed him. This is a warrior culture in which the order of authority is not set in stone, but negotiated at nearly every minute. Agamemnon is the ruler because he asserts his authority and argues down anyone who challenges him. He is getting older and irrational. But, in order to win glory, Achilles will eventually have to fall in line under this old fool.

The Iliad is the story of how Achilles finally overcomes his own anger and follows his destiny; for much of the story, he just sits out the fighting and lets the Greeks get slaughtered. The gods have their favorites and fight as angrily among themselves as the men do. Zeus agrees for Thetis’s sake to let the Greeks suffer great casualties, which in turn angers his own wife Hera, who roots for the Greeks. Hera and Zeus are really one of the greatest feuding couples in Western literature. Meanwhile, the greatest warriors all experience divine interventions from gods and goddesses that often only they can see.

If the story of Achilles and Agamemnon revolves around their quarrel over a woman, the Trojan War is also fought over a woman: Helen. The wife of the Greek king Menelaus, Helen was seduced by the young Paris (again with divine help) and taken to Troy, triggering the Greek cities to band together and send a fleet of 1,186 ships and probably 100,000 men to attack the city. In one of the great scenes in the epic, the old men of Troy, when first seeing this woman who will launch one of the great wars of history against their city, say to one another that she was worth it. Helen’s is, quite literally, the face that launched a thousand ships.

Amazingly, we will discover in the Odyssey that, following the war, Helen and Menelaus got back together! Note the similar theme too: in the Iliad, the greatest war of prehistory is launched by a cuckolded husband and an unfaithful wife; in the Odyssey, Ulysses goes through hell in order to return home and prevent his wife Penelope from being seduced by her many suitors. In the Iliad, Homer’s view of women at first seems much more in line with Hesiod, his contemporary, and at odds with the civilizing harlot of Gilgamesh. Western literature, instead, begins with unbridled female sexuality as a force of destruction. It’s complicated though. As much as we moderns might wish to see the Iliad as a patriarchal story in which men are warriors and women are property (and it is that too); it still has to be remembered that one woman’s sexual sovereignty is powerful enough to destroy Troy and nearly destroy the Greek fleet. Consider the strangeness of this- imagine if Michelle Obama shacked up with the son of the French President and, as a result, the entire US military was sent to war with France! And yet, none of the Greeks find this strange! In other words, the flipside of patriarchy is the almost supernatural power it assigns to the very female sexuality that patriarchy exists in order to channel into marriage. This isn’t just the story of the face that launched a thousand ships; it’s about the pussy that sent thousands of men rushing to their deaths. I’m guessing most High School humanities courses don’t discuss this aspect of the story!

The other reason these men rush to their deaths, and a subject those teachers love to discuss, is kleos: the glory that survives after one’s death. It is known, almost from the beginning, that Achilles will not return from this battle. His life is destined to be short-lived and filled with combat. He literally has nothing to look forward to after death; the underworld is a place of forgetting that’s almost like endless suspended animation. These men jockey and clash with each other because all they really have to look forward to in life is being remembered as heroes after their deaths. Their lives are both short and intense. Achilles talks often about this glory and we, as well as Homer, know that he will be remembered as a great hero. But, in the end, he will become a hero by losing everything and sacrificing himself. He is the first self-sacrificing hero, of a great many, in Western literature. Part of being a hero in the West is willingly giving oneself over to death. Achilles is the first self-sacrificing hero in Western literature; and Christ is the utmost self-sacrificing hero.

The greatest loss, however, is that Achilles will ultimately lose his beloved comrade, Patroclus, due to his own anger and shortsightedness. In Greek literature, fighting men often have relationships akin to love relationships. One of the other themes in the story that likely goes unmentioned in those civ classes is that Achilles is effectively in love with Patroclus, a theme that Greek listeners would have easily picked up on. The death of his buddy is as devastating as that of Enkidu is for Gilgamesh. These are men who live together and fight together; they might satisfy their lusts with captive women, but they are emotionally devoted to one another in a way that the Greeks would have understood fully. In fact, it must be pointed out that this bond of love and devotion between the men is purer and more elevating, in this story, than all of the examples of heterosexual love, which lead to destruction. Now, in the Odyssey, Homer will write the story of a great love between a man and a woman; but here the story is of the great love between two men.

There is much more to the Iliad than sexual desire and male bonding, however, and Homer is downright cinematic in the way he blends the history of a decade-long war, epic battles, and the emotional lives and loves of individuals. There is enough, in fact, that the Iliad will have to occupy two posts!

Today in French

2010-01-24T13:07:00.001-08:00

One of the things that gets tricky with learning another language is that there are some words that sound and are spelled very close to English words, but have different meanings. For instance, actuellement in French is more like "currently" than "actually".

Here's one that tricked me recently: Spirituelle. It is an adjective that does, indeed, mean something like "spiritual" in French. However, another, more common, meaning is "witty".

We were watching a French film called Entre les murs (Called "The Class" here), and there are these snotty street kids in the movie who keep making their teacher miserable. Often, he responds to their jibes by ironically telling them they are "spirituelle". It took me a minute to realize that he wasn't insulting their religion!

The Epic of Gilgamesh (about 2000 BCE)

2010-01-24T12:01:00.000-08:00

(Welcome back to "Blogging the Canon"! For this installment, we jump back in time by more than a millennium and in space to ancient Iran.)

The Mesopotamians lived in a world that, at first, reminds one of the Ancient Greeks or even the Egyptians. There is the same interaction with a plethora of gods who guide men, but often remain indifferent to them. There is the same acceptance of hierarchy, kingship, and the priestly class as the natural social order and analogues to the Divine order. There is the same surprising acceptance of war and violence, and a taste for heroics. And there is the same world order that is both naively straightforward and surprisingly cruel.

Such is the case with The Epic of Gilgamesh, a story that was first recorded in Sumerian before 2,000 BC and in the most familiar Akkadian version about 1,000 years later, and which likely records the story of a real King from around 2600 BCE. And what a King! King Gilgamesh of Uruk was a huge and beautiful warrior who led the construction of the city walls; no small feat in Ancient Mesopotamia. We can assume this meant the use of conscripted labor from the citizenry and he soon earned the enmity of the people by his tyrannical ways. In desperation, they appealed to the gods to get him off their back. This, then, is an ancient story about good government, as well as a lesson for humanity. It suggests that the key to being both a good king and a good man is to know your limits.

The goddess Aruru decided to create a companion for Gilgamesh; from clay, she sculpted the wild-man Enkidu. Also huge and covered with hair, Enkidu lives in the woods and represents the first narrative of wild humanity being tamed by civilization. In this case, he’s civilized by the harlot Shamat who risks life and limb to couple with him. They screw for seven days and seven nights and Enkidu is left physically weakened but given the gift of reason. Sex leads to enlightenment!

Enkidu and Gilgamesh don't exactly "meet cute"; Enkidu is shocked to hear that Gilgamesh has been going to the wedding parties of his citizens in order to exploit his right as king to screw the bride before the groom (it's good to be the King of Ur, apparently) and chivalrously takes off to fight him. They clash, but as soon as it is decided that Gilgamesh is the alpha male, they become buddies. There are some who see this sort of warrior comrade culture as a euphemism for homosexuality; while others see it as the ultimate inoculation against feminizing man-love. I tend towards the former interpretation; harlots aside, Gilgamesh and Enkidu are emotionally devoted to one another.

The two heroes have adventures together, defeating the ogre of the cedar woods, Humbaba, and slaying the Bull of Heaven, sent after Gilgamesh rejected the sexual advances of the Goddess Ishtar. As punishment, the gods kill Enkidu, taking him to a bleak Netherworld. In general, the gods lives askance to humanity in the story, occupying palace-like temples and being treated as royalty, but playing less of a role than they would in religious scriptures. This is not a religious tale at all in fact.

It's more the story of human mortality and weakness. Gilgamesh is devastated by the death of Enkidu and rails against the unfairness of it all. Anyone who has lost a loved one can recall how unjust and inexplicable death is, how permanent and unyielding. The real success of the story, and probably why it's endured so long, is that, for all of its strangeness and extinct gods and goddesses, it's a story of friendship, love, and loss. Gilgamesh stays with his dead friend, grieving bitterly, until the maggots come forth from the body. Then, he sets out to find a way out of dying.

Gilgamesh sets out to find the legendary Utnapishtim and his wife, a couple who survived the Great Flood by building an ark and taking aboard animals of every species, before finally landing on the Mountain of Nimush and waiting until a bird returned with sign of dry land; in exchange, the gods granted him immortality. One might recognize (and many have recognized) the similarities to the Biblical story of Noah. It seems most likely that variations of the story existed for centuries, most likely referring to an actual flood in the region.

Gilgamesh eventually realizes that he will not be granted immortality and resigns himself to his eventual demise. As the story ends, we are reminded that he built the walls of Uruk, a task that will live on long after him.

Canadians Looking to try Democracy

2010-01-24T11:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, there were rallies across Canada protesting Stephen Harper’s decision to prorogue Parliament and marking the day that the Canadian Parliament was to have returned to session. I was a bit anxious about the anti-prorogation rally in Hamilton, mostly because the local radical left was taking part. If we were going to come out in the cold to gather, and most likely make the local news, I was hoping we would look very mainstream and dull. I dressed as square as possible in order to convey that we’re not the radical fringe. Meanwhile, the local collective info-shop was planning to have a “die-in”, just the sort of self-centered attention-grabbing stunt that makes a protest look like an elementary school play session. Happily, though, the die-ins and drumming circles didn’t come off and the crowd was older and very mainstream. It looked like a group of Anglican ministers actually.

The media outside of Canada is completely oblivious to this story (of course), so perhaps a slight bit of context is in order.Prorogation means suspending Parliament and essentially ending their usual session early; locking the doors and sending them home. The idea is to prorogate Parliament when they complete their legislative agenda early, in order to save everyone’s time and money. The Prime Minister calls for prorogation by contacting the Governor General (the Queen’s representative in Canada) and getting permission.

Prorogation is an option in all Parliamentary democracies; however, aside from Canada, it’s never really used because there’s a taboo about it. The first time that Harper prorogued last year it set a precedent because it was to avoid a no-confidence vote, which hadn’t been done since King James tried, failed, and lost his head. There is some argument that John A. McDonald pulled a similar maneuver in Canada about 90 years ago, but again, it’s pretty much unheard of. When Harper prorogued this time, the official argument was that Parliament should focus on the Olympics and the economy. The prisoner abuse scandal that is seriously hurting his party was not sited. Incidentally, this prorogation was announced over the Christmas holiday.

So, the fact that the crowd at the protest was made of people in their 50s and 60s is significant. Canadian baby boomers are pissed. The first prorogation was something that disturbed people, but they were willing to turn a bit of a blind eye. This time, mainstream Canadians are sick of paying people to work who can choose to stay home and get paid every time the political tides turn against them. Canadians value “peace, order, and good government”; as compared to the American, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; and so this sort of behavior offends their sense of uprightness. This sort of thing is why they voted out the Liberals in the first place.

The Facebook group was started by a handful of university students and, thus far, has only 210,000 members; this is, however, more than all of the other Canadian political parties’ Facebook groups combined. It is hard to judge by the protests- Toronto had about 3,000 people; in Hamilton, we had 300 at best; nevertheless, there were protests in over 60 cities. The fact is that Canadians are not rabble rousers; the country gained its independence by keeping quiet and not pushing for independence after all. So, for each protester, one could imagine a hell of a lot of angry Canadians who aren’t comfortable protesting. None of this bodes well for Harper.

Conservatives originally came up with the tone-deaf talking point that prorogation doesn’t matter because, after all, ordinary Canadians don’t care what their government does. Who even knows what prorogation means?! Come on! Let’s go watch hockey!

In the last three weeks, the Conservatives have dropped 15 points in the polls. If elections were held today, they would lose enough seats to possibly seat a Liberal government. Polls also show that Canadians, particularly baby boomers and the young, strongly disapprove of what Harper did. This is important because many Baby Boomers voted Conservative because they felt the Liberals were entrenched and corrupt and Conservatives offered a transparent, democratic, and functional alternative. In other words, they didn’t expect that Harper would start floating trial balloons on how far democratic government could be rolled back for the aggrandizement of the Prime Minister.

This brings us to the more recent Conservative argument, and I’m also not making this up: they did it to. The Liberals have prorogued Parliament, several times, when they were in power, and there was often a suspicion that they were doing it for nefarious purposes. Admittedly, they never actually declared that they were proroguing to avoid a no-confidence vote, but the suspicion is there. To me, this is sort of a stupid argument: I didn’t live in Canada until about the same time that Harper came in and I never heard of prorogation until last year. Having heard of it, the practice, when used this way, strikes me as profoundly undemocratic. Imagine if a President whose popularity was sinking was able to shut down Congress for months and send everyone home? Imagine if the pending bills all died at that point? 37 pieces of legislation in Canada are now dead. It’s absurdly monarchical.

And I’d like to now point to the ruling in the Canadian Supreme Court of Two Wrongs vs. A. Right, to suggest that this is the sort of shit that Canadians were sick of when they elected the Tories four years ago. Instead of following through, Harper explicitly modeled himself after noted egomaniac George W. Bush. He even does the same petulant pouting in press conferences, bitching about the other parties and the press instead of offering anything constructive. It’s only a matter of time before he’s bitching about the voters.

When I see people out in the cold on a Saturday marching for Democracy, I’m reminded of G.K. Chesterson’s line about Christianity: it’s not that it’s been tried and found wanting; it simply hasn’t been tried. The Canadian governmental system is as anachronistic as the steam engine, and as given to freezing up and failing. Ideas like the Prime Minister assigning members of the Senate, or kicking MPs out before they can gain real experience are so obviously wrong-headed that it’s a wonder they’ve remained the norm.

Canadians as such tolerate a clearly-dysfunctional government for a number of reasons: the American government is so clearly worse, Canada’s government is seemingly unimportant in world affairs, the parties tend to govern almost identically, and finally, there has been so much corruption and incompetence in Canadian government that people expect very little. Nevertheless, Canada is a large and important country, and after weathering the recession so well, it is more important than ever. It could be a role model for the rest of the world, but first Canadians have to realize that they deserve a better government than they have.

My sense is that Stephen Harper has pushed them to that realization.

Today in Canada

2010-01-23T15:08:00.000-08:00

Image: Canadian Press photo of anti-prorogation protesters in Toronto today. Thousands of protesters showed up in Toronto, and about 60 other Canadian cities to mark the date that Parliament would have gone back to work. Hamilton was one of those cities and I'll have some pics and thoughts about the protest tomorrow. Tonight, however, we're off to see Tafelmusik for their "Intimate Bach" show.