Thoughtfully, he sipped the hot, bitter liquid.
There’s a “Lyttle Lytton” contest! —Since 1983, the “official” Bulwer-Lytton contest has been awarding prizes for the best first sentences of the worst (thankfully nonexistent) novels imaginable, and while I still doff my hat in awe at the majesty of the very first winner:
The camel died quite suddenly on the second day, and Selena fretted sulkily and, buffing her already impeccable nails—not for the first time since the journey began—pondered snidely if this would dissolve into a vignette of minor inconveniences like all the other holidays spent with Basil.
—I think I’m starting to agree with Mr. Cadre: they’re really starting to go on too long. Granted, the ur-sentence is guilty as charged:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
—but recent winners in their flabbiness are nonetheless violating the spirit of the thing, all-too-consciously setting up tics to be mocked rather than aped, or devolving into the sorts of puns that are grounds for manslaughter in 17 states:
The corpse exuded the irresistible aroma of a piquant, ancho chili glaze enticingly enhanced with a hint of fresh cilantro as it lay before him, coyly garnished by a garland of variegated radicchio and caramelized onions, and impishly drizzled with glistening rivulets of vintage balsamic vinegar and roasted garlic oil; yes, as he surveyed the body of the slain food critic slumped on the floor of the cozy, but nearly empty, bistro, a quick inventory of his senses told corpulent Inspector Moreau that this was, in all likelihood, an inside job.
—as a for instance, or:
Paul Revere had just discovered that someone in Boston was a spy for the British, and when he saw the young woman believed to be the spy’s girlfriend in an Italian restaurant he said to the waiter, “Hold the spumoni—I’m going to follow the chick an’ catch a Tory.”
Ack. Please. (Though 2000’s grand prize winner is quite good: “The heather-encrusted Headlands, veiled in fog as thick as smoke in a crowded pub, hunched precariously over the moors, their rocky elbows slipping off land’s end, their bulbous, craggy noses thrust into the thick foam of the North Sea like bearded old men falling asleep in their pints.”) But! I, for one, applaud the Lyttle Lytton’s stern but fair restriction: craft the best first sentence for the worst novel imaginable in 25 words or less. You’ve got to admire the economy of the Lyttle Lytton sample sentence:
Jennifer stood there, quietly ovulating.
Tennis being much more fun with a net. —The bad news, I’m afraid, is that the cut-off for participating in 2004’s contest was midnight on Wednesday. The good news is the winners have been posted. Those who’ve heard me rant about my writing peeves will a) recognize the title of this entry and b) understand why I wish the grand prize had gone to this particular contestant:
“Tasty waffle?” Jim suggested alluringly, prodding me with the aforementioned breakfast food.
Glorious, ennit?
A complaint.
So I’m zipping through my Bloglines list on my morning break and The Minor Fall, The Major Lift has a squib pointing to a Guardian article or maybe an interview or something about that guy from the Brass Eye. I think. See, I followed the link and found this notice that, well, since MediaGuardian.co.uk has slaved away putting virtual brick on virtual brick to build its reputation as the UK’s leading media news website, and by golly they want to maintain this reputation come hell or high water, they are planning to introduce registration starting March 11. Now, I was not until this moment aware of said reputation. —And on the one hand, I usually click away from registration notices, since I find them tedious, an unconscionable impediment to my flitting about the web on a morning break looking for diverting nuggets of infotainment quickly consumed and easily forgotten, and actively painful. But it is a profile or maybe a puff piece about that guy from the Brass Eye, maybe. And they promise the registration will be as quick and painless as possible. So I give them my email address and I make up a password and I get this notice saying that I need to validate my account with them; they’ve sent me some email, and all I have to do is respond to it.
Sigh. This is more effort than I really want to put into skimming a mild rewrite of a BBC press release, even if it is about the guy from the Brass Eye, as I think it might be. But. In for a penny, etc. So I bring up my email.
Bupkes.
Okay. Fine. Maybe it takes a minute. Yahoo has its quirks. So I skim through a couple more links off Bloglines and then check my email again.
Still with the bupkes.
I think you can see the punchline from here. My break is pretty much over and I’ve still not heard anything from the Guardian and I still don’t know what’s up with an as-yet unnamed person who might have had something to do with the Brass Eye once, and by the time the email does show up in my in box I’ll be all, what? What is this about? The MediaGuardian what? Why do they have my email address?
Yeah, I know. You should have such problems.
300 pieces of a certain length, loosely joined.
If you aren’t reading Snarkout every time Steve Cook posts a new entry, well: his archives now have a nice round 300 link-rich essaylettes on the unexpected origins of the seemingly mundane and the tantalizingly abstruse, and the surprising connections between them. What are you waiting for?
Congratulations, Mr. Cook—now get back to work.
Oh, God, I need a drink.
On the bus on the way home the driver was listening to The Press Conference. I couldn’t hear everything, but I heard enough: our president just said that we went to war in Iraq because we told Saddam Hussein in no uncertain terms to disarm, and he didn’t do it.
I’m so sorry. I’m so, so fucking sorry.
Billmon points us to criticalviewer’s Cliff Notes. I think I need another drink.
Braiding.
Perhaps the most singular thing about Tom Waits as an artist—the thing that makes him the anti-Picasso—is the way he has braided his creative life into his home life with such wit and grace. This whole idea runs contrary to our every stereotype about how geniuses need to work—about their explosive interpersonal relationships, about the lives (especially the women’s lives) they must consume in order to feed their inspiration, about all the painful destruction they leave in the wake of invention. But this is not Tom Waits. A collaborator at heart, he has never had to make the difficult choice between creativity and procreativity. At the Waits house, it’s all thrown in there together—spilling out of the kitchen, which is also the office, which is also where the dog is disciplined, where the kids are raised, where the songs are written and where the coffee is poured for the wandering preachers. All of it somehow influencing the rest.
—“Play it Like Your Hair’s on Fire,” Elizabeth Gilbert, GQ, June 2002
Here’s the thing:
So I read Crooked Timber last week, and Kieran Healy’s post on the problem of women in philosophy sticks in the corner of my mind: it seems there aren’t that many, not that many at all, and why is that? And some people say women just can’t argue in the rarified way that philosophy calls for, and others point out that’s bullshit—linguistics, say, and the cognitive sciences overlap philosophy in terms both of rarefaction and bare-knuckled barroom advocacy, and yet women aren’t nearly so underrepresented there. So why? What’s up? —Like I say, it sticks in my mind.
Then on Saturday, at our weekly gaming session, there’s a lull for my character, and I lean over and pick up a magazine. (I know I shouldn’t do this because it’s rude; when you’re not “on stage,” you’re effectively in the audience, but gaming as a medium is long on exposition and loves dialogue not wisely but too well, which is one of the reasons I do like it so, but when you’re not “on stage,” and you’re playing a rather dim or shall we say instinctual character and you don’t want to be tripped up by trying to forget stuff you learned when watching other people’s scenes your mind tends to wander and, oh, hell, all right, I picked up the magazine, okay! I just browsed. I still had an ear out for how making an open box was pretty much the same as making an open box.) —Anyway. The magazine: Discover, the September 2003 issue. (It was the one to hand.) And idly browsing the short and breathless pieces up front, my eye was caught by a title: “Girls Are Better at Math, But…” It was about some research conducted by Jacquelynne Eccles and Mina Vida at the University of Michigan, and you can read about it here, but that doesn’t have the punchline that caught my eye, so I’ll quote Mathematical Digest’s short, sharp summary, which does:
The data [based on interviews and questionnaires] indicate that girls’ math abilities outpace boys’ through high school, but the girls eschew math-oriented careers because they do not believe such careers are valuable to society.
Which bumped into Kieran’s post, still stuck in that corner of my mind. Ha! I said to myself. That’s why there’s so few women in philosophy! It isn’t valuable! It isn’t important! Y’all don’t rate, boys!
But then I started reading some of the posts that are littered about this issue, and it didn’t seem so funny, anymore. —And anyway, Michael Cholbi already made this point in the comments.
To find another life this century as intensely devoted to abstraction, one must reach back to Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), who stripped his life bare for philosophy. But whereas Wittgenstein discarded his family fortune as a form of self-torture, Mr. Erdős gave away most of the money he earned because he simply did not need it…. And where Wittgenstein was driven by near suicidal compulsions, Mr. Erdős simply constructed his life to extract the maximum amount of happiness.
—“Paul Erdős,” The Economist, 1996
Erdős (pronounced “air-dish”) structured his life to maximize the amount of time he had for mathematics. He had no wife or children, no job, no hobbies, not even a home, to tie him down. He lived out of a shabby suitcase and a drab orange plastic bag from Centrum Aruhaz (“Central Warehouse”), a large department store in Budapest. In a never-ending search for good mathematical problems and fresh mathematical talent, Erdős crisscrossed four continents at a frenzied pace, moving from one university or research center to the next. His modus operandi was to show up on the doorstep of a fellow mathematician, declare, “My brain is open,” work with his host for a day or two, until he was bored or his host was run down, and then move on to another home.
—The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, Paul Hoffman
His language had a special vocabulary—not just “the SF” [The SF is the Supreme Fascist, the Number-One Guy Up There, God, who is always tormenting Erdős by hiding his glasses, stealing his Hungarian passport, or worse yet, keeping to Himself the elegant solutions to all sorts of intriguing mathematical problems] and “epsilon” [children] but also “bosses” (women), “slaves” (men), “captured” (married), “liberated” (divorced), “recaptured” (re-married), “noise” (music), “poison” (alcohol), “preaching” (giving a mathematics lecture), “Sam” (the United States), and “Joe” (the Soviet Union). When he said someone had “died,” Erdős meant that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had “left,” the person had died.
—ibid.
Don’t get me wrong. Paul Erdős sounds like he was a great guy, fucking brilliant, had a devastating effect on mathematics, there’s the whole deal with getting your Erdős number and what that means.
But he wasn’t just moving from one university or research center to the next in a restless quest for mathematical talent. He was on the move so much because he was holy hell as a house guest. —He “forsook all creature comforts—including a home—to pursue his lifelong study of numbers,” the blurbs will tell you. Bullshit. He forsook the bother and worry of creature comforts. Other people cooked his food. Other people washed his clothing. Other people kept him from wandering into traffic. Other people woke him in time for his “preaching” appointments. Other people filled out his paperwork. And he was an incredibly generous man, gave money away like water, was always available to poke and prod at somebody’s truculent problem till it gave up its mathematical beauty, then collaborate on a paper and on to the next, but to pretend he was somehow above the domestic fray, divorced from the daily grind, is to mistake his suitcase and his orange shopping bag for his home; to fail to note that women are underrepresented in mathematics is to miss who might well have been doing a lot of the washing and the cooking and the picking up after when he showed up suddenly on the doorsteps of married colleagues saying, “My brain is open”; and if you don’t pick up on that, you’ll miss the ugly little subtext in all that talk above about “bosses” and “slaves” and “captured” and “liberated,” for all that he did notable work with a number of female mathematicians.
That sort of domestic obliviousness is something men (as yet) find a lot easier to get away with than women. Where’s the toilet cleaner? What did you do with the light bulbs? Do I put the liquid bleach in before or after the rinse cycle? I couldn’t find the baking powder—I thought baking soda would work just as well. Don’t you like your shirts folded that way? —And this has nothing to do with hunting giraffes on the veldt and what that did to our brains, either, and it has everything to do with who does what chores when, growing up, and who’s expected to keep things clean and fill the glasses, and truth be told there’s more than a little of that trick where you break a couple of plates and they never ask you to wash dishes again in there, too. And the extent to which men (broadly) are allowed to get away with this and women (broadly) are expected to pick up the slack is the extent to which men will (broadly) have an edge in fields that call for such extended grinds of rarified, abstract thought, best left uninterrupted by more mundane concerns such as paying the electric bill on time, and women will (broadly) be more inclined to seek out fields that are more, or are at least perceived as being more connected with day-to-day life. (Like linguistics, and cognitive science? Well, keep in mind we are talking philosophy and mathematics, here. Everything’s relative, and anyway, all generalizations are wrong, etc.)
Now, I’m not here to set Waits against Erdős in some titanic battle of the shambling weird old geniuses, art versus science, specialized compartmentalization versus kitchen Zen holism. For one thing, Elizabeth Gilbert never saw the kitchen she waxes so rhapsodic over, up there at the top of this thing. She interviewed him in the dining room of an old inn “somewhat near the mysterious, secret rural location where Tom Waits lives.” And if that kitchen Zen is nonetheless something that lights up my heart when I think about it (“Come on up to the house,” he’s singing somewhere, and I smile: there’s the secret, the mystery, the answer to how to get more women into philosophy: it’s a trick question), well, Gilbert never meets Kathleen Brennan, Waits’ partner in crime, the life he doesn’t consume: “I know nothing for certain about her,” writes Gilbert, “except what her husband has told me. Which means she is a person thoroughly composed, in my mind, of Tom Waits’ words. Which means she’s the closest thing out there to a living Tom Waits song.”
And Erdős lived by all accounts a rich and happy and fulfilling life, and Hoffman’s book, a sort of oral history of everyone, mathematicians and not, who hung out with him and solved problems with him and cooked for him and cleaned up after him, is full of love and joy.
So I’m here, now, and I’m lost. I’ve gotten sidetracked. It started as a joke, and became something darker, and—where am I now? I have paperwork to do and the cat has a thyroid problem and the back stairs need mending as soon as my elbow is better and I have no idea what I’m going to make for dinner tomorrow and I’ve got to figure out how I’m going to get the tabouleh set up for Wednesday what with the day job and the luncheon date that day and I don’t want to think about the dentist because all I want to do is write and yet.
Here I am studiously ignoring that tangled mess by nattering on about—braiding.
Maybe it’s just an excuse to quote Waits some more. Well, Gilbert, but it’s mostly Waits:
I ask Tom Waits who does the bulk of the songwriting around the house—he or his wife? He says there’s no way to judge it. It’s like anything else in a good marriage. Sometimes it’s fifty-fifty; sometimes it’s ninety-ten; sometimes one person does all the work; sometimes the other. Gamely, he reaches for metaphors:
“I wash, she dries.”
“I hold the nail, she swings the hammer.”
“I’m the prospector, she’s the cook.”
“I bring home the flamingo, she beheads it…”
In the end, he concludes this way: “It’s like two people borrowing the same ten bucks back and forth for years. After a while, you don’t even write it down anymore. Just put it on the tab. Forget it.”
Is our pundits learning?
Hey! Y’all parse this sentence real quick-like and tell me what’s wrong:
President Roosevelt waited until after World War II to put in place a commission to investigate what mistakes led to Pearl Harbor.
Now, go let the National Review know that this sentence is still to be found in Clifford May’s column dated 8 April, with nary a correction in sight. I know, I know: Atrios told them, Roger Ailes told them, Eric Williams ripped ’em a new one, and they’ve done nothing about it yet. Maybe there’s some postmodern dripping-with-“irony” “depends on what the meaning of ‘after’ is” defense they’re testing on focus groups. Maybe they’re lazy. Maybe they’re incapable of shame. But we can still have some small fun with the pointing and the sniggering.
Here when I passed the night on the slope of volcano during the eruption, here this was terribly! It is terribly gay and it is beautiful!
Yes, it’s one of those “which X are you” quizzes. But it’s about the characters from Tove Jansson’s beautiful Moomintroll books, and it was originally written in Russian, which means Babelfish’s translation engine renders it in an evanescent English that haphazardly tumbles fractured questions and answers together like some strange game of Exquisite Corpse, which all ends up fitting just so with Jansson’s air of impishly serious whimsy. It’s the most poetic thing I’ve done all morning—and I’m not going to dispute the results:
Yes you – Snusmumrik!!
Eternal wanderer and the uncorrectable romantic. You beckons entire unknown beautiful. For you always better place, where you are not. But you will look, can, where you already there is, it is much better?
Well, except we call him Snufkin in English. But other than that.
Who are you in the Mumi- portion?
—via sara
The banality of outrage.
Ah, the moral rot is clear: someone somewhere to the right of me is claiming the Japanese hostages taken yesterday were peacenik appeasers most likely working with their captors in a sort of Stockholm-on-the-Euphrates, so we don’t have to worry about it. We don’t have to worry about a thing, and I can puff up my chest and pontificate, I suppose, if I want. —What I want to do is watch another episode of Wonderfalls. We’d finally managed to catch an episode last week, and liked it a lot, and figured, hey, maybe we’d better make a point of catching this show before they cancel—
While it was on, though (and hey, you can still snag the theme song from iTunes: recommended), we did manage to catch a jaw-droppingly awful commercial for The Swan, “a new series where fairy tale turns into reality.” See, what they’re doing is—oh, hell, let’s let them damn themselves with their own press release:
THE SWAN offers women the incredible opportunity to undergo physical, mental and emotional transformations with the help of a team of experts. Contestants must go through an intensive “boot camp” of exercise, diet, therapy and inspiration to achieve their goals. Each week feathers will fly as the inevitable pecking order emerges. Those not up to the challenge are sent home. Those who are will go on to compete in a pageant for a chance to become “The Ultimate Swan.”
Each contestant has been assigned a panel of specialists—a coach, therapist, trainer, cosmetic surgeons and a dentist—who together have designed the perfect individually tailored program for her. The contestants’ work ethic, growth and achievement will be monitored. The final reveal at the end of each episode will be especially dramatic because it will be the first time that contestants will be permitted to see themselves in a mirror during the three-month transformation process. Two women will be featured every week and at the episode’s conclusion, one will go home and one will be selected to move on to the 1st Annual Swan Pageant.
The commercial makes a lot about how these “seventeen average girls” are all ugly ducklings being given a chance they never thought they’d ever have: competing in a beauty pageant! —Forget whether Bush manages to eke out (or seize) a victory in November: if there’s a Swan 2, I’m leaving the fucking country. Y’all can have it.
But that’s not the worst of what’s coming our way on “reality” TV:
Child-protection experts and media watchers are alarmed about an effort by a reality-TV producer to create a CBS show that attempts to find and recover abducted children with a team of former military and former law enforcement personnel. [..]
Individuals and organizations that work on behalf of missing children, including the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, say the show’s premise runs contrary to the commonly held principle of relying on legal authorities to handle recovery cases. They also were scathing in their criticism of using such cases for any entertainment purpose. [...]
Rick Smith, a former longtime FBI agent, said he thought using a private team to recover children was “a terrible idea,” but also he could see it working “if it was in conjunction with law enforcement and law enforcement had the lead role.” [...]
A story in the entertainment trade publication Variety, which included comments from Burnett, said the show has been under development for 18 months, but “kept under wraps so as to not endanger the secret rescue missions conducted for the pilot” episode.
I, um. Yeah. I know ragging on reality TV is something of a pasttime for bored, dilletantish pseuds (hence), but. I mean, I. Um. I’m honestly, I mean—
Hey! Look! Evil lottery!
Part of an online ad for playyourdebt.com. Oh, type it into the URL bar yourself, you want to go take a look at it. I’m not about to juice them.
So I go to Kevin Drum, forgetting he’s not doing the cat blogging anymore now that he’s hit the Big Time, and I discover he thinks it’d be cool to write off the fifth amendment if we get stringent about videotaping all police interviews. Which, minor little thing, hardly even merits a squabble, just a shrieked “You WHAT?” and, you know, we move on, but I’m dispirited. I’m in a Mood, now.
Luckily, the Three-Toed Sloth is there in a pinch.
This brief note describes the discovery of an apparent joint burial of a human being and a cat, c. 7200 to 7500 B.C. (Some of the details that follow come from the on-line supplementary material.) The human being was aged at least thirty, buried facing west. Whoever it was, they rated a lot of Neolithic swag: “a marine shell, a stone pendant, a very uncommon discoid flint scraper, two small polished axes (one of them broken), a pumice stone, a fragment of ochre, a large flint piercing tool, and several non-retouched flint blades and bladelets,” plus, in a near-by pit, twenty-four sea-shells from three species: “One shell of each species had been artificially pierced; the remaining 21 shells had not been worked. All the 24 shells had been arranged around a central raw fragment of a green soft stone used for jewellery [sic] (‘picrolite’)”. “This is the only burial with such a high number of offerings for the whole Preceramic and Aceramic Neolithic in Cyprus.” The cat was aged eight months, apparently buried at the same time, definitely buried in the same orientation as the human, and was definitely not butchered. —The significance here is that this pushes back the period for which we have firm evidence of the taming of cats considerably.
Ah. I feel better. —A bit, anyway.
Memery.
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 23.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
All right then:
And tell me whether any literary work whatsoever is compatible with states of this kind.
Context:
...the whole problem: to have within oneself the inseparable reality and the physical clarity of a feeling, to have it to such a degree that it is impossible for it not to be expressed, to have a wealth of words, of acquired turns of phrase capable of joining the dance, coming into play; and the moment the soul is preparing to organize its wealth, its discoveries, this revelation, at that unconscious moment when the thing is on the point of coming forth, a superior and evil will attacks the soul like a poison, attacks the mass consisting of word and image, attacks the mass of feeling, and leaves me panting as if at the very door of life.
And now suppose that I feel this will physically passing through me, that it jolts me with a sudden and unexpected electricity, a repeated electricity. Suppose that each of my thinking moments is on certain days shaken by these profound tempests which nothing outside betrays. And tell me whether any literary work whatsoever is compatible with states of this kind.
That is the twenty-seven–year–old Artaud writing to the editor of the prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française, the well-known poet Jacques Rivière, ten years Artaud’s senior. It is also the clearest presentation of the problem’s core we have from Artaud himself.
—“Wagner/Artaud,” from Samuel Delany’s Longer Views; meme via Elkins
Power to the people! Teeth for shrimp! Plato was a fascist!
Chris Bertram over at Crooked Timber brought up Harry Perkins, the fictional prime minister from A Very British Coup, in the course of a post that seems cheekily to suggest we Yanks are a bit more starry-eyed and less cynical than Brits when it comes to pop culture representations of our respective Fearless Leaders. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, mind. Do remember that the monolithic Left controls the entertainment industry in both realms.) Coup is a hardnosed political thriller, but it’s leftist, socialist, old skool Labour politics, and that makes all the difference. A great little fairy tale; highly recommended when you want a little dose of mightabeen. (I’ve only ever seen it up at Skook’s place, where I imagine it’s still a rainy-day security blanket..?)
Being reminded of Harry Perkins reminded me in turn of J Daniels’ bootleg Tintin comic, Breaking Free, in which the boy reporter, on the dole after being sacked from a dodgy construction job, joins up with the Captain and just about every worker in Britain in a popular uprising, peacefully overthrowing the corporatist state in favor of a happy anarcho-socialist people-powered muddle. It’s heartbreakingly hopeful and hoplessly naïve; another fairy tale that I adore. You can buy it, of course, but while trying to scare up the links I discovered it’s also available online. Enjoy.
Your assignment.
Nathan Newman’s “where I am and how I came to be here” post is the must-read of the day.
Other than that, I suppose, you could kick superheroes around over at Barry’s place. —Me, I’ll be back in a bit.
Oh, wait, just one more.
Early November we got back the blague.
As a religious practice, blogging acquired the same status as begging. Many theories have been offered to explain the phenomenon. It has been interpreted as a beating out of evil spirits, as beautification, and even—erroneously—as buffoonery. Sacred blogs were recorded on people’s backs or on animal skins. Blog-bearers were now called bloggellants. Consumption of animal blogs was thought to unite the devot with his godhead. The ceremony was often accompanied by ecstatic blog revisions and, not infrequently, by falling to bloggerheads. Arguments over blog exegesis were the major cause of schism.
In antiquity and among primitive peoples, ceremonial bloggings were primarily concerned with the writs of initiation, purification and fertility. Bloggings might or might not be self-inflicted. Those administered by masked inbloggators are a feature of many Nordic tribloggers. Ritual blogging was also known in classical antiquity in Blogygia and around the Straits of Blogforus. A sacred alphabet, Blogham, composed of 21 characters (blogletters) equally dates to that period. There are many myths, or bloths, related to blogging. One of them tells of Blog, the king of Blashan and an antediluvian giant, who was saved from the flood by his illiteracy: he floated on a blog with sacred inscriptions which otherwise he would not have touched. Another legend reports that Blog owned a big blogstead, wrought in iron, 9 cubits oblong and 4 cubits broad (Deut. 3:11). It will be noted that the Biblical account of Blog and Mablog is a corruption of the original tale.
—“On Blogging,” by Ela Kotkowska, via wood s lot
None of us is as dumb as all of us.
I’ve never been a big fan of the process known as “Fisking”; it’s a lazy and intellectually dishonest practice, and I refuse to accord it any legitimacy by lowercasing the “f,” as if it had somehow achieved common currency in our day-to-day language. (A quixotic, canutian gesture, to be sure; then, I do so love stubborn futility, except when I don’t.) And really, if we were to be honest with ourselves, go back to Fisk’s original, celebrated, storied report, and read what actually happened—
Kila Abdulla was home to thousands of Afghan refugees, the poor and huddled masses that the war has produced in Pakistan. Amanullah went off to find another car—there is only one thing worse than a crowd of angry men and that’s a crowd of angry men after dark—and Justin and I smiled at the initially friendly crowd that had already gathered round our steaming vehicle. I shook a lot of hands—perhaps I should have thought of Mr Bush—and uttered a lot of Salaam Aleikums. I knew what could happen if the smiling stopped. The crowd grew larger and I suggested to Justin that we move away from the jeep, walk into the open road. A child had flicked his finger hard against my wrist and I persuaded myself that it was an accident, a childish moment of contempt. Then a pebble whisked past my head and bounced off Justin’s shoulder. Justin turned round. His eyes spoke of concern and I remember how I breathed in. Please, I thought, it was just a prank.
Then another kid tried to grab my bag. It contained my passport, credit cards, money, diary, contacts book, mobile phone. I yanked it back and put the strap round my shoulder. Justin and I crossed the road and someone punched me in the back. How do you walk out of a dream when the characters suddenly turn hostile? I saw one of the men who had been all smiles when we shook hands. He wasn’t smiling now. Some of the smaller boys were still laughing but their grins were transforming into something else. The respected foreigner—the man who had been all “salaam aleikum” a few minutes ago—was upset, frightened, on the run. The West was being brought low.
Justin was being pushed around and, in the middle of the road, we noticed a bus driver waving us to his vehicle. Fayyaz, still by the car, unable to understand why we had walked away, could no longer see us. Justin reached the bus and climbed aboard. As I put my foot on the step three men grabbed the strap of my bag and wrenched me back on to the road. Justin’s hand shot out. “Hold on,” he shouted. I did. That’s when the first mighty crack descended on my head. I almost fell down under the blow, my ears singing with the impact. I had expected this, though not so painful or hard, not so immediate. Its message was awful. Someone hated me enough to hurt me.
—we’d have to agree: a process that fancies itself “logical” (or at least aiming to be; an “E” for effort, then?) doesn’t quite resonate with the all-too-human fury and outrage that lashed out at Robert Fisk, a pale mean substitute for the retribution it sought (yes, yes: how to find a mob’s IQ, none of us is as dumb as all of us, we’re better than that, honest—which is why we band together and jackboot anyone who dares suggest otherwise). —An individual administering “a thorough and forceful verbal beating of an anti-war, possibly anti-American, commentator who has richly earned this figurative beating through his words” by “quot[ing] the other article in detail, interspersing criticisms with the original article’s text”—that hardly rises to the rich metaphorical possibilities of chucked rocks and anonymous mob violence. (To say nothing of imposing a regrettably partisan spin on the procedure: can we on the monolithic Left not Fisk? Such a shame…)
No: it’s what’s being done to Nathan Newman and Kathryn Cramer that richly deserves the term “Fisking.”
(Meanwhile, that rough beast just keeps slouching: the American-trained Iraqi Civil Defense Corps opened fire on American troops; our Marines are being airlifted out by Blackwater “civilians”; it’s increasingly obvious that the folks nominally running the show have “no concept of how to manage the crisis, no plan in place likely to work”; and our President is as chipperly clueless as ever. “I mean, in other words, it’s one thing to decide to transfer,” he said. “We’re now in the process of deciding what the entity will look like to whom we will transfer sovereignty.” —I suppose that’s one way to spin a civil war…)
Oh, that wacky Shadout Mapes!
A few changes, here and there, to this blog-like apparatus: most notably, I’d like to direct your attention to the little Danegelt box there in the right sidebar (down a bit, past Achivery, past the Deltolographs, just above Permanescence, which you’ll find refreshed with links to pre- and non-blog content: Herschberg [now with discussion forum, oh my], that thing I wrote about Buffy, my second 24-hour comic [be gentle], and the somewhat-less-hiatused-than-last-week City of Roses). Recent linkage has bumped my traffic something fierce; I actually had to buy extra bandwidth last month. Not that I’m complaining much. Or making an overt plea. But: if you were so inclined, there’s a couple of tip jars on the edge of the pier, there: PayPal will let you slip some virtual folding green in (if not make an easy text-based permalink in the course of a blog post); BitPass will let you chuck in a nickel—heck, a penny, if that’s what you feel like. (It’ll also take nothing at all, yes. —It’s a micropayment system, if you missed the brouhaha: you have to put a minimum of I think it’s five bucks in, but you can spend that in nickels and dimes and quarters on mp3s and comics and prose and toys and tipping the occasional weblogger, wherever you see the BitPass sign.) —There’s also a link to the requisite Amazon Wish List, which is more so friends and family can find it easily than anything else, but hey: bait never laid traps no bears.
Other than that: an updated colophon, to reflect the broad array of syndication possibilities available (two flavors of RSS and Atom, whoo!) whose nuances I still haven’t a clue as to; also, I finally remembered to add a link to Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Accessibility, which is a good starting point for making your site better than it is if you haven’t yet. And I remembered to close some image tags and line breaks; the sort of stuff that you can’t see at all, but makes validators clutch their pearls and shriek instead of just tutting darkly over the same phrase being used as link text for more than one location. —But hey, it took up most of yesterday morning, so I figured, what the heck. Make a note. (I couldn’t mow! I’ve got a busted elbow!)
Altogether elsewhere.
No, I haven’t said much about same-sex marriage of late. (No staying power, that’s me.) (If you’re curious about the progress of the only place in America where same-sex couple are accorded the same basic respect in the eyes of the law as differently-sexed couples, your best bet is the One True b!X; he is, quite literally, a one-man newsroom.) —I’ve also been remiss in not immediately telling you that my old friend S.K. Elkins has started up a journal; nor have I managed to sit down and patiently make the case that proves Elkins is hands-down bar-none the best writer I know, full stop. But hey: it’s my lucky day: today’s entry lets me pluck all those pesky birds from the bush at once and offer them up to you.
Perspective.
Muqtada’s words before he went into retreat in his mosque: “Make your enemy afraid, for it is impossible to remain quiet about their moral offenses; otherwise we have arrived at consequences that will not be praiseworthy. I am with you, and shall not forsake you to face hardships alone. I fear for you, for no benefit will come from demonstrations. Your enemy loves terrorism, and despises peoples, and all Arabs, and muzzles opinions. I beg you not to resort to demonstrations, for they have become nothing but burned paper. It is necessary to resort to other measures, which you take in your own provinces. As for me, I am with you, and I hope I will be able to join you and then we shall ascend into exalted heavens. I will go into an inviolable retreat in Kufa. Help me by whatever you are pleased to do in your provinces.”
The bit about going into a retreat (i`tis.am) and hoping to join his followers later so that they could ascend to the heavens shows an apocalyptic imagination at work. The US is facing another Waco, and what we know is that military sorts of force are the worst way to deal with apocalyptic groups like the Branch Dravidians and the Sadrists. That approach only confirms their conviction that the forces of this world are attempting to prevent them from attaining paradise.
US authorities in Iraq announced Monday that a murder warrant was out for a radical Shi’ite Muslim cleric leading violent anti-American protests, but his followers swore to fight back if he was arrested.
Dan Senor, a senior spokesman for the US-led authorities in Iraq, said an Iraqi judge had issued an arrest warrant for Moqtada al-Sadr several months ago in connection with the killing of another Shi’ite cleric last year.
Sadr, surrounded by armed followers, is staging a sit-in at a mosque in Kufa, south of Baghdad. Asked when he would be arrested, Senor said: “There will be no advance warning.”
No, the Islets of Bloggerhans Popular Front!
Personally, I think it’s all because Kos got his photo in Vanity Fair and Instapundit didn’t.
(Yes, the title’s an inside joke so tightly curled on itself that it pops Planck’s length, and weird sniglets of not-quite-meaning are left to straggle out of its quantum foam. Consider it the short form. I’m working on the long form. Here’s the medium, happy or not: when I launched myself into the blogosphere, I had a basic ground rule for adding links to my linchinography: if the site spent what I judged by my all-too-subjective criteria to be an inordinate amount of time slagging on the Greens for the 2000 debacle, I didn’t bother to add it. Say whatever you like, I didn’t need the grief, and so. —Which is why I never added the Horse, and why I never added Altercation, and why I never added Kos, and if I added a site or two or three that did spend an inordinate amount of time slagging on the Greens, well, there were probably extenuating circumstances, and would you look at that? I contain multitudes! —But this crap with overreacting to Kos’s reaction to the lynching of the mercenaries in Fallujah is just that: crap. He has very good and very strong reasons for feeling the way he does and you can say how he said it that one time was dumb or stupid if you like but pulling ads and yanking links and generally tutting about, fanning yourself over the faux outrage of it all because if we stoop to their level what makes us better than them, my God, is all just following the script, doing their work for them, biting a good man on the ankles and cutting a powerful posse off at the pass because, oh dear, there’s a little clay between the toes. If you’re going to cut and run over something like this, then fuck the shoulder-to-shoulder stuff: this is still the goddamn bush leagues. You know?
(So into the linchinography with the Daily Kos, an excellent site, community, resource that I’ve skimmed on a nearly daily basis for lo these many months, even if I never got over myself enough to reflect it hereabouts. —Like you care. Like he’ll even notice. Still. Sometimes the choir’s got to preach back. It’s not much, granted; then, I don’t have a radio station that can air wall-to-wall clips of Bill Kristol accusing the 9/11 widows of moral blackmail, and I don’t have a TV show that can rerun every sneering Fox report that compared our soldiers’ deaths with traffic accidents and murder rates in Washington, DC; I don’t even have tens of thousands of readers. [Not hardly.] But a link is pretty much the least I can do. The most, that I’m still working on. You got any ideas, hey.)
—One more thing: if you’re still all het up to get incensed at the deaths of four mercenaries and how dare anyone be angry at them, I suggest you get a new set of scales. Tens of thousands dead since 1991 that didn’t have to die, and where the fuck were you?
