🎃

There may be a greater than usual need for release this year. For fun. So if Halloween has gone anywhere for the past few years, I think it's back.

Lot of college kids walking around in costume today. And some borderline cases. When you don't have all the cultural references it can be hard to tell who's wearing a Halloween costume and who just has unusual fashion sense. That's cool too, though.

I had coffee at a place where one lady behind the counter was dressed as the joker. I use the lower case "j" because with her jester's hat and big rosy circles of rouge she didn't look like the Batman villain. Instead she looked like the figure on a wild playing card. Or maybe she was Mr. Punch, but her posture seemed too good.

What a quartet

 

I just got Gene Wolfe's Free Live Free from the library and I haven't started reading it yet. I dearly love the cover, though. As with most of Wolfe it's a science fiction book but the art style looks much more like a 1970s reprint of a 1940s mystery novel. The jacket copy describes the four main characters as "a private detective, a witch, a salesman, and a prostitute." So let's see.

The witch, a definite Liz Taylor type in plunging neckline, is doing a perfect "raise the roof" move. While it's probable that she's supposed to be in a different scene, the prostitute appears to be checking her out. She also looks much more inviting than the vast majority of prostitutes.

Of the two men, I'm not sure which is supposed to be the salesman and which is the private detective. The guy on the left combines a sharp city slicker suit with a mustache that yells "yee-ha!" The guy on the right, in the tan overcoat, seems like the artist ("Enric") modeled him on William Holden but is a dead ringer for what Tom Hanks looks like today. That's serendipity for you.

Nothing but a pack of cards

Once again our government has chosen to prove its valor in the Middle East. And once more there's a hostile watch on people Not With The Program. But if anything things have gotten stupider since the early 2000s. Stupider and meaner. And the fact that we're coming off two or three moral panics from the other side of the political spectrum (sort of) makes it hard to know whom to trust.

The air of censoriousness comes so close to being amusing in the case of Greta Thunberg. The twentysomething eco-activist is an annoying scold, to be sure. But the post that got her in trouble was the most anodyne kind of protest, if Israel hawks could accept any kind of protest as inoffensive, that is. As to the supposedly well-known history of the octopus as an antisemitic symbol, well, first of all her octopus was a little plushie whose "tentacles" were the size of a pinkie knuckle. Also when I think of sinister octopi I associate it with the Spirit's nemesis. Does that mean Will Eisner was a raging antisemite? Huge if true.

Perhaps a more serious development is the University of Florida's shutdown of students for Justice in Palestine. According to Chancellor Ray Rodrigues the school system will use “all tools at our disposal to crack down on campus demonstrations that delve beyond protected First Amendment speech into harmful support for terrorist groups.” Is there more than a semantic difference between the former and the latter? Some of the group's materials regarding 10/7 are suspicious enough to possibly justify extra scrutiny, but the law is pretty clear on rights of speech and association.

On Sports Night the boss character, Isaac, had a good speech where he said, "If you're dumb hire smart people. And if you're smart, hire smart people who disagree with you." This ties into what may be Ron DeSantis's great failing as a leader. As he's launched his ambitions he seems to have shrunken his circle of advisors to true believers only. If you're DeSantis then someone like Chris Rufo isn't an internal critic, he's your id made manifest. This might be satisfying, but it's not always helpful.

Our oldest companion

Alfred, Lord Tennyson is the one who coined the phrase about naturing being "red of tooth and claw." Since then it's been used to illustrate the point about nature being cruel. It certainly is true that living beings in the wild can fall prey to any number of awful fates. And our own violent natures―more pronounced in men―has evolutionary roots.

Still, there's another side. The consolations of nature are constant. Rain remains rain, and continues to have that soothing sound. Different types of birds sing us to sleep and sing us awake. We can count on the different winds of the four seasons. 

In the end I think we live in a world that loves us and forgives us.

RIP Liberal Blogosphere: c. 2001-2016

Not long ago I figured I'd peruse the remaining liberal blogs to see what they had to say about the current sitch in the Middle East: Hamas atrocities, Israel leveling Gaza, and whatnot. It all had to give them something to talk about, right?

Except apparently it didn't. I saw a post Alicublog that made passing mention, but that's it. Nothing as far as I could tell on Lawyers, Guns & Money or the Rude Pundit. It just didn't register. Same with big liberal social media accounts.

There was a time when I might have attributed this to Islamophobia―a term I might deconstruct in a future entry―or kowtowing to same. But that's really not it. 

The truth is that "issues" aren't really the blogosphere's thing anymore. There have been other public matters like the East Palestine spill, Lahaina, Ukraine. Areas where someone in the left-to-center-left could make their mark and maybe change some minds. But they're just left sitting on the table. 

It was a long process of decay, but the election of Donald Trump was probably the final blow. When the unthinkable happened the world was cleaved into Left and Right. In practice, though, that just meant Democrat and Republican. So now with some sui generis exceptions like columnist/cartoonist Ted Rall―who very much does address issues of substance―they can only focus on Benny Hill-level stuff like the GOP tossing out the House Speaker and failing to select a new one. In a year no one will even remember, which seems to be part of the point.

A Tale

 

One Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island, runs down the street of a strange city, a haunted look on his angular face. He comes to a structure of stone and glass, a building he has never seen before, except perhaps in an obscure dream. Finding the door unlocked, he enters and rides the lift to the top floor.

Once ascended, he walks down the corridor and comes upon a door. The one word inscribed on the door which his weary mind can comprehend is "agent." This is good. A man of action is exactly what his situation requires. He knocks. Sounding put out, a man inside bids him enter.

The man, balding and Hebraic, gazes at him in puzzlement. Could he really be the confidant Lovecraft requires? But there is no choice, no time left. He ignores the dubious splendor of the office and speaks.

"I must tell you of the goings on I have seen in Arkham, Massachusetts and elsewhere."

"Go on," the agent prods him.

"Fiendish rituals, held by the seemingly respectable in conjunction with the obviously base. The chanting of blasphemous and obscene hymns, some in a language never meant for human tongue. Hideous beings are brought forth. There are gods that have been sleeping since before the dawn of time, and they are hungry. As their time renews, ours becomes ever more tenuous."

The agent rises to his feet, intrigued.

He whistles. "That sounds like a hell of an act. What do you call it?"

Lovecraft claps his hands in sheer delight.

"THE ARISTOCRATS!"

Who you calling a liar?

This song was originally by Argent, a hard rock band formed by former members of the Zombies. I like Three Dog Night's version. It's catchy, and Danny Hutton's raspy growl suits the lyrics well.

The visuals are quite the time capsule. Full-fledged videos were still rare at this time, especially in America. So you get largely live performances, but with this weird blue screen acid trips going on in the background. .It's a relief when the band isn't washed away by it.

What inning is this anyway?

Without too much ado here are a couple of thoughtful pieces on the recent fracas in the Middle East: one from Sam Kriss and one from Freddie deBoer. de Boer doesn't mention it, perhaps because he thinks it's common knowledge, but Amy Schumer is the cousin of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, which adds an extra level of absurdity to her Instagram whine.

On a personal note I also have to say that I have more patients with Israelis―a large number, to be sure, but not all―who crave vengeance than with westerners who think that life's winners should have license to kill the losers. If you like that kind of jungle law try it in your own country first. And make no mistake, it's the latter who enforce the loyalty oath. Statements that would pretty much make you a person of interest if you made them about any other group become mandatory in some circles when they're applied to Palestinians.

EDIT: This column from Jonathan Cook is also good, and raises interesting/disturbing questions about what kind of options other governments in the world want open as regards their own people.

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter

From The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics by Christopher Lasch:

When the British liberal L. T. Hobhouse objected that pragmatism―with its confusion of truth and "cash value," its cavalier indifference to principles, and its preference for action over thought, as Hobhouse saw it―could easily encourage collective irrationality and mob rule, James tried to correct this "travesty" of pragmatism ("by believing a thing we make it true," as Hobhouse put it) and then added, in effect, that the quarrel between Hobhouse and himself arose out of differing assessments of the modern predicament. For Hobhouse, the victory of the Enlightenment was precarious and the danger of relapse into barbarism always imminent. For James, on the other hand, the victory of the Enlightenment was so complete that it had almost eradicated the capacity for ardor, devotion, and joyous action. "We are getting too refined for anything," he wrote elsewhere, "altogether out of touch with genuine life." Accordingly, he told Hobhouse, "Your bogey is superstition; my bogey is desiccation."

I like this William James guy, and feel like I want to hear more from him. Is/Was he right in this dispute? It sounds like they both made some points.  But those who fear superstition above all else have gone out of their way to stop it at its source, and it's amounted to tossing the baby with the bathwater.

Sides

A lot of people seem to like taking sides. I guess it's the feeling of being on a team. All well and good, but if you take someone's side, you might be tempted to agree with them in all cases, even when what they do is stupid or in other ways not good. I prefer the freedom of being able to speak my mind, which might put me off anyone's team.

Am I talking about anything in specific that you would have heard about? I might be.

Clued in

Frequently after solving a crossword I'll hop onto the XWord Info to see if the creators or anyone else have anything of note to say about it. I did that with this one, which has a fairly clever gimmick of the long answers being puns for grammatical terms. 

Like I said, it's a good puzzle. The designer Joel Fagliano for some reason feels the need to publicly angst over one of the (non-theme) clues having "Ann Coulter" as the answer.

Now while I'm not a dedicated reader of Coulter she's an interesting figure. Like a number of prominent conservatives she's been critical of Donald Trump, but unlike, say, William Kristol, she hasn't bent over backwards to exalt the Democrats either.

More to the point, crosswords are about testing your general knowledge, often with a healthy dose of lateral thinking. Whether you, I, or the designer disapprove of a person or thing mentioned in it is immaterial. I don't need to like avocados to recognize them as an appropriate subject for a clue.

Kerfuffle

Columbus Day? Indigenous People's Day? Regardless of what you want to call it, this October holiday turns out to be an...interesting time to take the bus.

I was riding down Thayer Street and a guy making a turn cut off the bus driver. He turned out to be a DoorDash driver. He was still in front of the bus when he stopped. Stopped in the middle of the street and went into a Chinese restaurant. Got into a tiff with the bus driver on the way. Stayed inside for several minutes. When he got out and got back in his car, he still didn't move. The bus driver let a lady running late for work off the bus so she could go up to this guy's car and yell at him. To no effect. It wasn't until people further back in the developing traffic jam got out of their cars and started walking forward that he finally got the message. 

I swear to you I am not doing justice to how much mayhem was going on here. And at some point I had to laugh because this felt like a story that would make someone say, "Only in New York."

Well, not anymore.

Duet for a couple of instruments

 

I enjoyed this bit of music a lot. It's a real eye-opening performance from the bassoonist. I'd like to know what the percussionist is sitting on/playing. Is it a custom instrument or just a stool. I mean, he is getting a lot of tones from the front.

Awaiting instructions

Ah, the importance of flexibility. 

In general, manuscript formatting for publication is a pretty formalized practice. You use fonts and spacing and all the rest of it in the manner of Shunn. Aspiring writers get to know the rules and get comfortable with them. It's part of the process.

There are always exceptions, though. I recently sent a story off through email. When I looked through the submission guidelines right before sending it off I saw that they don't accept .docx files, which are now the default in Word. Even more of a surprise, you can't use headers with the page number, name, etc. I sent something to this place before and think I may have overlooked these rules the first time.

That's workable, though. The real nerve-wracking business is when they don't want attachments, just the document pasted in the body of an email. Sounds easy, but a 4,000 page story won't look good pasted in an email.

Minitrue Ltd.

To anyone paying attention, "misinformation" and "disinformation" are two of the slimiest weasel words in circulation. To be misinformed in the true and general sense of the word is to believe that you have reliable knowledge of something when you don't. But "misinformation" is wielded by government and media entities with less than no interest in seeing you well-informed. 

The Center for Countering Digital Hate is one of the groups allegedly dedicated to fighting all this malicious info out there. In effect their job is to provide talking points for those who want to censor. Often tied to COVID and vaccines, but it could be anything. How much they even maintain a façade of dealing with "digital hate" (fingers that don't like toes?) is open to debate. 

Founded by a British figure in the UK's Labour Party. This country can't even produce its own propagandists anymore?

Things to giggle at

 

I'm always up for humor that mixes high and low subjects, styles, what have you. Provided that it's funny, of course. The comics of R.E. Parrish are a good example. And an addictive one. She seems to be a generation younger than I am, so maybe the kids are alright.