Never work with children or animals

Jonathan Lethem started strong. Has he continued strong? Definitely in some cases, maybe not in others. Well, that's most of us.

There are some books I'm looking forward to getting into in the coming weeks, but Gun, with Occasional Music was sitting on my shelf so I figured I'd revisit it. It's a mixture of hardboiled detective writing with science fiction of both the gosh-gee and dystopian variety. So in some ways following in the footsteps of Philip K. Dick, although the two authors are quite distinct.

I won't detail the case that lead character Conrad Metcalf works on in this book, because that would take all night and there'd be no point. But elements of the setting include "babyheads" who age into cynicism while keeping their infant bodies, evolved talking animals of numerous stripes, the legal abolition of the printed word, and deep freezing those who fall afoul of the law. "The law." Actually the last is connected to the eeriest aspect of this future, "karma", an artificial goodwill that can dip dangerously low if you step out of line in any amorphous way. Eerie because it resembles the idea of "social credit" that's taken hold in China and perhaps elsewhere.

Anyway, the book hangs together well, so I feel pretty good about liking it the first time.

NC

 

The above quote is indeed genuinely from Keats, which is not always the case with popular quotes. The idea of  negative capability is one that I first came across in college. It's stuck with me since. Fact and reason have their place, of course, and we do well to remember that. But in living a creative life, "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts" are the stuff of life. Best to learn to live with them, even appreciate them.

Dulcet tones

 

I was just reading about the celesta, a keyboard instrument that strikes plates rather than strings, as in the case of a piano. Okay, just go with it. I think I've heard something of the instrument before but felt like sampling it again. This is a piece by Debussy, a very affecting composer. I think it's more often played on the piano. But this woman's playing definitely works for me.

Jockeying

Tonight being Christmas Eve I spent the night watching a randomly selected movie that had nothing to do with Christmas. It's a 1952 sports/gambling movie called Boots Malone. William Holden plays a manager at a racetrack who takes a teenage runaway under his wing and trains him to be a jockey. Despite having Holden and some other interesting actors (Ed Begley, Harry Morgan) it didn't really work for me. But there are a couple of interesting aspects.

For one, give director William Dieterle credit. The jockeys in the movie look pretty much the way jockeys in real life do. Which means that Holden spends a good amount of time talking to guys who barely come up to his chest.

The kid is played by Johnny Stewart, who was only an actor for a few years. He is, not to put too fine a point on it, irritating. But the way he's irritating is revealing. At this point teenagers could be depicted as large children whose emotional tumult was pretty innocuous from an adult point of view. But it was 1952. That conceit wouldn't last much longer.

Vicious circle

There's a series of short ads that play before videos on YouTube. They're targeted to Rhode Island, and I assume there are equivalents for other states. They always end with an admonition to get vaccinated, get your kids vaccinated, mask up, and social distance. These steps are supposed to be meaningful in the aggregate, although it's self-evident that even proponents find them individually useless.

In related news we have an indoor mask mandate again. Which is especially fun because it's doubly removed from any kind of public input. Governor McKee gave the order yesterday without going through the legislature, and he was only elected to be Lieutenant Governor. Why should New York have all the fun? I guess.

Don't blow your top

I bought a new winter hat today. It's gotten to that part of the year where if your hat doesn't cover your ears, you'll be in for a fair amount of discomfort at minimum. The place where I got it sells stuff that the factories may have overproduced, so their prices are a lot lower than you'd expect. This hat is from a relative luxury brand, but only cost a few bucks. It also had a label on it, which I cut off when I got home. Just looked wrong.

What the Dickens?

I recently opted to fill in a hole in my reading history by taking on Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. He is one of the great voices of English-language literature, and I've enjoyed his books more than not. 

The library system has plenty of copies in various editions. And the "various" editions part is what tripped me up. The book I ordered turns out to be the "Great Illustrated Classics" version, greatly abridged and simplified in order to be read by grade schoolers.

But, well, when life gives you lemons (because you mistakenly asked for lemons) make lemonade. I'll read this version and go back for the real thing later on. The differences might be educational in themselves.

Have yourself a merry little class war

From an interview with Newsweek opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon:

This was made worse by the arrival of Donald Trump. Trump was what liberals imagine a working-class person would be like if they came into money. They would obviously get a golden toilet and buy a model wife. Trump rejected all of their liberal mores. He was a perfect aesthetic encapsulation of white, liberal-elite angst about what the working classes are imagined to want.

I have interviewed hundreds and hundreds of Trump voters. All of them, apart from one, said to me that Trump should stop tweeting and making racist comments, and should stop being so undignified. They wanted him to focus on governing. The idea that working-class people were in it for all that gross commentary was just wrong – they were not. But the media, of course, could not get enough of it. So liberals totally missed what Trump was about and what made him successful, which was the hunger for economic populism among the working classes.

From the latest post by White Hot Harlots:

Stressing difference is no way to build a coalition. It is, by definition, the opposite of what you need to do to build a coalition. There is no means of understanding race as deterministic and inalterable that does not result in privileging certain groups over others. That’s the obvious, undeniable fallacy of so-called “intersectionality.” All this can possibly accomplish–and what it’s accomplishing right now, right before our eyes in an objective and measurable manner–is the splintering of the Democratic base, supposed allies pitted against one another as they strive to reach the top of the pyramid of conceptual victimhood. If anyone else gets help, they’re evil. Everything should go to me. Decency is zero sum. I cannot be happy unless everyone else is miserable. Your success is my failure. The problem is not structural. The problem is that the other exists. 

Ungar-Sargon and the pseudonymous WHH approach the same truth from slightly different angles. Namely, that American liberalism has gradually become its own antithesis. The political team that you expect to side with the poor and working classes has become disgusted by them and now sees them as the enemy. But there's no way to come out and say, "We need to put the poors back in their place," without sounding like a Bourbon. The race angle, ugly as it is, is also the most plausible cover story. Spend enough time vilifying white trash and their white trash ways and you can convince your cohorts that these chuds deserve whatever they get. You can also distract from the fact that you're also screwing over lower class people of color, who--to take one example--don't actually want their neighborhoods de-policed. 

Is this a recipe for electoral success? I'm not sure anyone cares. The upper echelons of the Democratic Party appear to have given up on governing and put everything into fundraising. The refusal to pivot from COVID makes much more sense from this vantage point. Almost two years in, telling your subjects that of course triple-vaxxed five-year-olds should continue to mask as they attend Zoom kindergarten will leave most of them cold. But a few will believe it, and you can tap them pretty hard for funds.

Hat's all, folks

Another non-YouTube video incoming, with this being the link. It's from (pretty sure from the name) a Polish animator. It's a study in contrasts. The magician figure is, if not realistic, at least pretty well detailed. Other characters are stylized to the point of all-out abstraction, and sometimes past it.

Look for a brief but unmistakable Devo reference.

gjhthelhahttwljtbjebtewuytbvnt

There have been nights in the past when I've written in this blog after taking the kind of cold medicine that knocks you out, and been well on the way to unconsciousness. And the next day I'd look at what I'd posted, and found it to be gibberish, whatever I'd had in my mind while writing it. That's not what I'm doing now.

Or is it?

Suppose what you were reading right now were just a random jumble of words. Suppose you had interpreted it so intuitively that you couldn't even tell that it was basically nonsense.

Wouldn't that be WEIRD?

♞

Instinctively, we looked to the Democratic Party, the only home we and our parents and their parents before them had ever known or seriously considered. But what we saw there—and in the newspapers we used to read, and in the schools whose admission letters once made us so proud—was terrifying. However we tried to explain what was happening on “the left,” it was hard to convince ourselves that it was right, or that it was something we still truly believed in.

Those are the words of Liel Leibovitz, writing in Tablet. Dramatic but astute. 

I have my own arc, which has some things in common. First off, I've noticed over the past several years that new rules have been drawn up regarding who is allowed to say what. In some circles no one seems to talk about free speech unless it's dismissively. So my changing perspectives on that were gradual and mostly secret.

Then there are lockdowns, which are a total catastrophe. A catastrophe in which no one was prepared to address any tradeoffs, or even admit there were any. So that led to a quicker change for me.

Of course collapses and severe changes could make all this talk of ideology and allegiance moot. No one really knows and cares who was on the left and right in Fifth Century Rome, just before the sacking.

Tales from the ground

We live in an era where a cloak of obscurity is being drawn over science. Science is something that a few experts and institutions know about, and that the rest of us must accept when we're told about it.

We don't all have access to big numbers. But the essence of science is observation. Sometimes enhanced with experimentation, depending on the topic. The essential methods are in fact available to us all. 

Adrienne Mayor's 2005 book Fossil Legends of the First Americans gains a special relevance in this time. Mayor is a scholar of natural history folklore, a fascinating field that until just now I didn't even know existed. But the native tribes of the Americas have been finding and collecting fossils for centuries, well before the bulk of European settlement. And the stories that they came up with by way of explanation have in many cases been based on good, solid observation, leading to insights on the kinds of animals that lived in the Americas in the deep past. In general they haven't really gotten credit for this, as Mayor reports.

Yet much more historical and natural knowledge has been retained and for a longer time span than is generally appreciated. To find these nuggets of genuine knowledge, the Iroquois scholar Barbra Mann suggests that one should look for the "consistent elements" in the layered matrix of storytelling over the ages. Many scholars have questioned whether oral traditions are "real history." Anthropologist Robert Lowie, for example, who studied several Native American cultures in the 1930s, famously declared in 1915 that "oral traditions [have no] historical value whatsoever under any conditions whatsoever." But Lowie's grip is loosening: today many mythologists and historians would agree with Roger Echo-Hawk, a Pawnee historian, that oral histories should be treated as "respectable siblings of written documents," as valuable sources for reconstructing "ancient American history." The most recent analyses of the mythmaking process, drawing on modern linguistics with datable historical, astronomical, or geological events, are revealing that accurate geomythology can extend back over millennia.

The Americas have a rich natural history in terms of both dinosaurs and other large reptiles and--in more recent epochs--mammalian megafauna. As far as we know now, that doesn't much extend to paleoanthropology. There are no known humans or hominids before anatomically modern humans to have lived in the Americans. Of course if this state of knowledge changes, it will be a tremendous shock and will require large amounts of scrutiny. To understand it we'll need to look at all potential sources of knowledge.

D cell punk?

This past week I've been reading an anthology of Dieselpunk stories. Dieselpunk is analogous to Steampunk. Where on constructs a retro-futuristic view onto the Victorian Era, the other focuses a little later, mostly between WWI and WWII. This era had a very active science fiction field to begin with, so there might be some weird echoes. 

Anyway, some of the stories were better than others. I'd have to note that even in the very good ones, the science tends toward the soft. But the way I worded that previous sentence might seem to imply that that bothers me, which it doesn't.

зима

For all intents and purposes it's winter now. In fact winter seems to have started before November ended. There are still some days when I can get away with my spring/fall jacket, but they're few and far between.

Just a little earlier tonight I heard the wind howling outside. It's an evocative sound, one that I can appreciate it. Of course it's better hearing it from indoors.

In circles

Sigh. In a way I regret even exposing you to this. But apparently there's still a kerfuffle to be had over whether Susan Sarandon helped to elect Trump.

I mean, first of all, she probably didn't have that much of an effect, despite her high visibility. And also, it's 2021, so who cares? If Trump being President was the root of our problems then one would expect the quality of life to improve once he no longer was. Did I miss that part?

Anyway, just goes to show you that there's a big difference between talk and productive talk.

EDIT: Decided to sweeten this post with my belated hat-tip to Stephen Sondheim.