Parts of it are shrill. The ending, with Broderella looking up from the floor of the bowling alley to announce, "I am finished," is handled masterfully.
Download it, or have a printed copy made through Lulu.
January 24, 2008
For Your Reading Pleasure
The Editors at the Poor Man Institute have a new book out, their first, called "Liberal Fascism."
Parts of it are shrill. The ending, with Broderella looking up from the floor of the bowling alley to announce, "I am finished," is handled masterfully.
Download it, or have a printed copy made through Lulu.
Parts of it are shrill. The ending, with Broderella looking up from the floor of the bowling alley to announce, "I am finished," is handled masterfully.
Download it, or have a printed copy made through Lulu.
January 23, 2008
House at Pooneil Corners
I don't know if this bit of civic exuberance go the band in any serious long term trouble, but I do know that no one inhabited the glorious portentiousness of psychedelic music any better than Jefferson Airplane. From a rooftop in 1968:
[…]
Seas from clouds will wash off the ashes of violence
Left as the memory of men
There will be no survivors my friend.
Suddenly everyone will look surprised
Stars spinning wheels in the skies
Sun is scrambled in their eyes
While the moon circles like a vulture.
Someone stood at the window and cried
"One tear and I thought that would stop the war,
But someone is killing me. Killing me."
And that's the last hour to think anymore.
Jelly and juice and bubbles - bubbles on the floor.
Castles on cliffs vanish
Cliffs like heaps of rubbish
Seen from the stars hour by hour
As splintered scraps and black powder.
From here to heaven is a scar
Dead center - deep as death
All the idiots have left
[…]
January 18, 2008
Bobby Fischer, dead today in Iceland at age 64
Here's what came to be called back then The Game of the Century, the famous meeting of 13-year old Fischer and Donald Byrne played in New York City on October 17, 1956. If you go to Alexandra Kosteniuk's site and paste the moves of the game into the text field there you can use her nice player to watch the thing unfold.
1.Nf3 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.d4 0-0 5.Bf4 d5 6.Qb3 dxc4 7.Qxc4 c6 8.e4 Nbd7 9.Rd1 Nb6 10.Qc5 Bg4 11.Bg5 Na4 12.Qa3 Nxc3 13.bxc3 Nxe4 14.Bxe7 Qb6 15.Bc4 Nxc3 16.Bc5 Rfe8+ 17.Kf1 Be6 18.Bxb6 Bxc4+ 19.Kg1 Ne2+ 20.Kf1 Nxd4+ 21.Kg1 Ne2+ 22.Kf1 Nc3+ 23.Kg1 axb6 24.Qb4 Ra4 25.Qxb6 Nxd1 26.h3 Rxa2 27.Kh2 Nxf2 28.Re1 Rxe1 29.Qd8+ Bf8 30.Nxe1 Bd5 31.Nf3 Ne4 32.Qb8 b5 33.h4 h5 34.Ne5 Kg7 35.Kg1 Bc5+ 36.Kf1 Ng3+ 37.Ke1 Bb4+ 38.Kd1 Bb3+ 39.Kc1 Ne2+ 40.Kb1 Nc3+ 41.Kc1 Rc2+
January 17, 2008
The Song of Jonah, or, Merit Meets Its Match
You know what glib means. Unquestionably you've been subjected to its uses.
If Jonah Goldberg is a glibertarian, if William Kristol or John Podhoretz can be justly called that, then glibertarians include those who can and do in practice willingly talk just the sort of talk and walk just the sort of walk in public that libertarians recommend we all do for our own good, and make out just fine doing so, if libertarianism can be reduced to the rewarding politics of mining proven reserves of self-interest for a living.
With all of libertarianism's considerable nonsense about the free agency of the political monad of the individual filling their sails, glibertarians, to suit their purposes, uniformly support the selective dismantling of the state on the one hand and, at the same time, while presumably holding the state at an ironic distance with the other hand, but as long as they have the ear of who's in charge of it, publicly encourage the state's most autocratic uses as well. What the hell, it's a career. Say what works and move on up the ladder of success.
Jonah Goldberg has written a much-anticipated book called Liberal Fascism. It was already the fabled thing when first announced what seems like years ago, when the wags first lined up to bray about what turned out to be its long delayed arrival, and much hilarity ensued in the intervening months before publication as various sources took their turns swatting at the inviting piñata of Goldberg's conceit.
All during Liberal Fascism's gestation, Goldberg promised he was really going to bear down this time, to come up with a good one, to redeem in effect the glib in glibertarian by some studious research and solid argument.
Such a promise was never within his power to keep, apparently. Instead, the book is a standing appointment with all that is glib in the rhetoric of glibertarianism, the squaring of the Liberal Fascist circle in the Hitler Smiley Face on its cover the cleverest bit of glib in fact, the rest of it falling to the settled standard of Goldbergian glib familiar from his previously expressed views. I say that with confidence, having never read the book, but merely as a result of having witnessed Goldberg now loosed on the book tour supporting the thing, as in the edited interview with John Stewart found here.
If Jonah Goldberg is a glibertarian, if William Kristol or John Podhoretz can be justly called that, then glibertarians include those who can and do in practice willingly talk just the sort of talk and walk just the sort of walk in public that libertarians recommend we all do for our own good, and make out just fine doing so, if libertarianism can be reduced to the rewarding politics of mining proven reserves of self-interest for a living.
With all of libertarianism's considerable nonsense about the free agency of the political monad of the individual filling their sails, glibertarians, to suit their purposes, uniformly support the selective dismantling of the state on the one hand and, at the same time, while presumably holding the state at an ironic distance with the other hand, but as long as they have the ear of who's in charge of it, publicly encourage the state's most autocratic uses as well. What the hell, it's a career. Say what works and move on up the ladder of success.
Jonah Goldberg has written a much-anticipated book called Liberal Fascism. It was already the fabled thing when first announced what seems like years ago, when the wags first lined up to bray about what turned out to be its long delayed arrival, and much hilarity ensued in the intervening months before publication as various sources took their turns swatting at the inviting piñata of Goldberg's conceit.
All during Liberal Fascism's gestation, Goldberg promised he was really going to bear down this time, to come up with a good one, to redeem in effect the glib in glibertarian by some studious research and solid argument.
Such a promise was never within his power to keep, apparently. Instead, the book is a standing appointment with all that is glib in the rhetoric of glibertarianism, the squaring of the Liberal Fascist circle in the Hitler Smiley Face on its cover the cleverest bit of glib in fact, the rest of it falling to the settled standard of Goldbergian glib familiar from his previously expressed views. I say that with confidence, having never read the book, but merely as a result of having witnessed Goldberg now loosed on the book tour supporting the thing, as in the edited interview with John Stewart found here.
January 16, 2008
John Bolton Visits The Daily Show
John Bolton is taking a breather from the government work to do a book and tour. Last night he appeared on The Daily Show [Part 1.] [Part 2.].
Bolton's expressed policies have tended toward the utterly confrontational in every important public post he's occupied. Previously, Bolton confronted the threat of the UN as Bush's Ambassador to that body, and before that he confronted the threat of North Korea as chief instrument of Bush policy toward that squirrelly, pugnacious government that led directly to the resumption of its nuclear weapons program in response.
In the first part of the Daily Show video, Bolton namechecks Iran as the current big threat facing the United States. Oh, he'd wave a brisk policy or two at Iran if he had the levers of government again, no doubt, doubling down on the catastrophe his unleashed policies have contributed so far. Sure it's all in the book, from what I gather.
Bolton's expressed policies have tended toward the utterly confrontational in every important public post he's occupied. Previously, Bolton confronted the threat of the UN as Bush's Ambassador to that body, and before that he confronted the threat of North Korea as chief instrument of Bush policy toward that squirrelly, pugnacious government that led directly to the resumption of its nuclear weapons program in response.
In the first part of the Daily Show video, Bolton namechecks Iran as the current big threat facing the United States. Oh, he'd wave a brisk policy or two at Iran if he had the levers of government again, no doubt, doubling down on the catastrophe his unleashed policies have contributed so far. Sure it's all in the book, from what I gather.
January 13, 2008
CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA
In The Decline of Classical Languages Bill Posner at Language log quotes Steve Berry's The Alexandria Link (pp. 418-419):
Admittedly I don't know what CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA means. I do get that it's Latin and not Greek, because I know rerum is the Latin thing. I have that much Latin, and also guess English prudence may genuflect toward prudentia in some way. Custos, though, at first glance I'm not sure what it leads to in meaningful English, or even what that sentence would make of itself if my first guess were substituted, leaving me with the phrase C[custom]R[thing]P[prudence] to puzzle over. "Custom thing prudence" is not immediately a sensible sentence in English, and whatever its meaning, CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA was put there to make some sense to passersby by its makers, having taken the trouble to engage the chislers' craft to spell all the words right and line them up there just so on the rock.
In the other book I look to see if CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA is a common Latin phrase, and find that custos is guardian or watchman, a word in Latin whose sound heads for custom in English, but is in fact the name for the other thing entirely. My surmise about custom was wrong, and I can discard all the bother about trying to make sense of what "Custom thing prudence" might entail in English.
But still, that leaves C[watchman]R[thing]P[prudence], and "Watchman thing prudence" doesn't offer up much of a sentence to my kind of English either.
When I first looked at CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA I had zero confidence in my knowledge of the meaning of the word custos, and, say, 95% confidence in my knowledge of the meaning of the word rerum, and as for prudentia, well, I have to admit it's a coinflip between prudence and prudent, the noun of the quality or its readily applicable adjective for all I know, leaving me with at most middling confidence that my initial substitution was appropriate. I went with the noun prudence for no good reason. But if prudentia shades toward prudent then C[watchman]R[thing]P[prudent] says "Watchman thing prudent," and that, if spoken in the stiff-voiced phrasings of Frankenstein's monster, which for all I know was the Roman way as well, would be a readily understood if admittedly gothic way of warning the public to keep an eye out in English.
My confidence in my knowledge of the meaning of custos is way up, having found a quick fact about it, athough my confidence in my knowledge of the meaning of rerum is greater still, having here and there seen the confirmed thing in rerum this and rerum that many times over the decades. As for prudentia, I'll admit to the sort of equivocation in my confidence that only further study might resolve, not that I will.
These words were chiseled into the granite below.
CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA
"Prudence is the guardian of things," he said, translating, but his Greek was good enough to know that the first word could also be read as "wisdom". Either way, the message seemed clear.
Admittedly I don't know what CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA means. I do get that it's Latin and not Greek, because I know rerum is the Latin thing. I have that much Latin, and also guess English prudence may genuflect toward prudentia in some way. Custos, though, at first glance I'm not sure what it leads to in meaningful English, or even what that sentence would make of itself if my first guess were substituted, leaving me with the phrase C[custom]R[thing]P[prudence] to puzzle over. "Custom thing prudence" is not immediately a sensible sentence in English, and whatever its meaning, CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA was put there to make some sense to passersby by its makers, having taken the trouble to engage the chislers' craft to spell all the words right and line them up there just so on the rock.
In the other book I look to see if CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA is a common Latin phrase, and find that custos is guardian or watchman, a word in Latin whose sound heads for custom in English, but is in fact the name for the other thing entirely. My surmise about custom was wrong, and I can discard all the bother about trying to make sense of what "Custom thing prudence" might entail in English.
But still, that leaves C[watchman]R[thing]P[prudence], and "Watchman thing prudence" doesn't offer up much of a sentence to my kind of English either.
When I first looked at CVSTOS RERVM PRVDENTIA I had zero confidence in my knowledge of the meaning of the word custos, and, say, 95% confidence in my knowledge of the meaning of the word rerum, and as for prudentia, well, I have to admit it's a coinflip between prudence and prudent, the noun of the quality or its readily applicable adjective for all I know, leaving me with at most middling confidence that my initial substitution was appropriate. I went with the noun prudence for no good reason. But if prudentia shades toward prudent then C[watchman]R[thing]P[prudent] says "Watchman thing prudent," and that, if spoken in the stiff-voiced phrasings of Frankenstein's monster, which for all I know was the Roman way as well, would be a readily understood if admittedly gothic way of warning the public to keep an eye out in English.
My confidence in my knowledge of the meaning of custos is way up, having found a quick fact about it, athough my confidence in my knowledge of the meaning of rerum is greater still, having here and there seen the confirmed thing in rerum this and rerum that many times over the decades. As for prudentia, I'll admit to the sort of equivocation in my confidence that only further study might resolve, not that I will.
January 12, 2008
Santa Cruz Standard Time
Our conception of what makes night is the precisely the same as theirs, as is our conception of what makes day. From that persective it would seem we might work to reach fundamental agreement on the issue, accomodating our differences into one harmonious truth. And yet in the East they say, "It is night," just when we in the West say, "It is day." We are bound to our experience, not to our helpfully accommodating conceptions. It is day. So there.
January 08, 2008
Sometimes a River Storms Through It
This picture of the San Lorenzo River passing through Santa Cruz was taken in the aftermath of a particularly dramatic storm that battered Northern California last Friday.
The San Lorenzo feeds enough water into the Pacific at Santa Cruz on a yearly basis to earn the name "river," but typically packs all its credentials into a few dramatic episodes each year. In the drier months between late April and late October less water flows in the San Lorenzo than in the average self-respecting creek. In those months its riverbed in Santa Cruz is a protobog of tule and willow and scruffy brush and lounging herons ankledeep in its midriver shallows, through which a narrow course of water meanders in the laziest possible way to exhaust itself against a sandbar that annually blocks the mouth of the river from contact with Monterey Bay.
But commonly in winter storms descend on Santa Cruz from the great weathermaking waters of the the Gulf of Alaska, enormous energetic things gusting with the rain that's the year-round lot of the continent's coast from Juneau to Mendocino, but which in winter pulse vigorously south to engulf as well the coast and inland parts of California during its customary rainy season, whose middle innings reach from November to March.
There's a ridge in the distance in the picture above, and a high point on the ridge from which it drops off to the right. That's the western side of the notch in the mountains through which the San Lorenzo River pours its waters onto the floodplain where Santa Cruz is built. The green berm in the picture on the far side of the river is one of the levees over which the San Lorenzo will manage to flow some day, so prodigious at times is the volume of water transferred from from cloud to watershed north of Santa Cruz in the healthiest of winter storms. Prior to the existence of Santa Cruz the San Lorenzo would just sort of blurt out all the water rushing from that notch in the mountains onto the mile or so of floodplain and let it seek its own sweet way to the ocean, from storm to storm rushing in whatever arbitrary direction it might so incline to reach the beach here or there in any given year.
This is fundamentally uncivil behavior from the point of view of a city which insists on inhabiting the river's floodplain, which is the longstanding and often enough inundated plan of the makers of the city of Santa Cruz.
Fifty years ago a previous version of the plan failed to prevent the San Lorenzo from inundating downtown, much of which, fronting the river, was scraped away and replaced with parking lots and newer buildings in that flood's aftermath. It was determined that what Santa Cruz needed was a storm drain instead of a river running through it, a storm drain of the sort championed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in those days, and so it was built, a modern-made channel for the San Lorenzo. Twenty-five years ago that plan failed and the San Lorenzo flooded Santa Cruz again. The railing in the foreground, the levees on either side of the river, the new bridge connecting Laurel Street downtown to Broadway on the eastern side of the city, all of these are features of the newest plan.
January 07, 2008
A brief politics
Personally I'd prefer the politics of the magic sky fairy sprinkling the sparkling dust on everyone that calls all to a more commonly humane sort of humanity, a politics of instantaneous solutions to all the human bother in this world. That would be my preference, something quick and utterly agreeable. Ah, well.
In the realm of the politics of likelihoods, John Holbo at Crooked Timber asks if Hillary Clinton would be a suitable running mate for Barack Obama, and receives a largely negative response in comments, ranging from the mild demurrer to the thunderous denunciation of the idea.
It's early January, and in less than a month the Democratic Party's nominee will have been decided, the person chosen to replace George Bush as President of the United States. An inordinate number of states have decided for some obscure reason to push their primaries forward this election year, front-loading the primary season and making it likely that a pretty decisive number of delegates will be in the hand of one of the candidate months and months before the Democratic Convention, let alone the election in November.
After February 5, the balance of the primary season up until the Democratic Convention will reveal the play of the real and actual politics of the momentous transfer of power the United States is bent on this year.
In the realm of the politics of likelihoods, John Holbo at Crooked Timber asks if Hillary Clinton would be a suitable running mate for Barack Obama, and receives a largely negative response in comments, ranging from the mild demurrer to the thunderous denunciation of the idea.
It's early January, and in less than a month the Democratic Party's nominee will have been decided, the person chosen to replace George Bush as President of the United States. An inordinate number of states have decided for some obscure reason to push their primaries forward this election year, front-loading the primary season and making it likely that a pretty decisive number of delegates will be in the hand of one of the candidate months and months before the Democratic Convention, let alone the election in November.
After February 5, the balance of the primary season up until the Democratic Convention will reveal the play of the real and actual politics of the momentous transfer of power the United States is bent on this year.
January 05, 2008
House For Sale
Sculptor David Ireland's house is for sale.
Ben Backwell photographed a room of David Ireland's house for sfgate.com., the San Francisco Chronicle's website.
Oakland Museum once staged a major retrospective of David Ireland's work [Real Media steaming video from an episode of KQED's program "Spark" which aired in 2004. It features a few shots of the house in question].
Ben Backwell photographed a room of David Ireland's house for sfgate.com., the San Francisco Chronicle's website.
Oakland Museum once staged a major retrospective of David Ireland's work [Real Media steaming video from an episode of KQED's program "Spark" which aired in 2004. It features a few shots of the house in question].
Belittling the Obvious Point
Obvious point: there’s a hell of a lot more kids listening to 40-year old music today than there were in 1967…
posted by tom hurka in a conversation at Crooked Timber
The point made by tom hurka is obviously mistaken.
Well, if he means by "music" only that subset of it which includes the permanent performances of pieces of music massaged onto some sort of easily replicable medium from which that particular performance can be retrieved and heard over and over again, then yes, as he says, many more kids are seeking out and listening to the Beatles today than listened to recorded performances of Rudy Vallee in 1967. I don't know how many kids were listening to recordings of Rudy Vallee in 1967. If I ever met any at the time, they were discrete about it.
I suspect, though, that Rudee Valee took a turn at most of the following songs and song just like them during his career in popular music, songs in every case overly familiar to anyone alive in America in 1967, songs for the most part 50 years old and more. I chose these titles as arbitrarily as possible from the index at Parlorsong.com, and I claim not only that they were universally known to kids in in 1967, but that they represent just a tiny fraction of commonly known popular songs at least 40 years old that kids had not only heard, but heard reworked and overworked and parodized to a faretheewell, all inflicted on their ears as their fair share of the burden of American Popular Music, howevermuch they may have preferred, times being what they were, to stick to the White Album (whatever tom hurka's current objections to it might be).
After The Ball
1892
Alexander's Ragtime Band
1911
All Alone
1911
The Band Played On
1895
Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey?
1902
Shine On Harvest Moon
1918
Sidewalks Of New York
1894
The Sheik of Araby
1921
Let Me Call You Sweetheart
1910
Aba Daba Honeymoon
1914
Rockaby Your Baby With A Dixie Melody
1918
January 01, 2008
Best Of, Slough Of Melancholy Division
In the early '70's Jackson Browne's Saturate Before Using traded in an exquistely fashioned melancholia of the kind explored around the same time so successfully by Steely Dan on its first album, melancholia of the kind so utterly attractive to people of a certain age just past their earliest thirst for the simply glorious rhythms of rock n' roll, who find in this sort of music rock n' roll's acute and beautiful expression of their own discomfitted sadness, which sadness, not to go all Young Werther about it, is common enough affliction at that age.
There is nothing that pleases a musician's desire to be heard more than an audience wanting music, and there is no want of an audience for a good sad song, its air identical to the freshly felt melancholia that tugs at the common many of them.
These days we have Nick Cave and Radiohead (from what I hear) and Wilco and for all I Know Arcade Fire and all the others from the unexhausted list of musicians attending to this recognizably inexhaustible willingness of people to hear out the good sad song. At Acephalous, SEK links to an album by The National called "Boxer," which is heavily invested in fashioning music out of just this subset of sadness.
I'm not convinced it's the best album of 2007, as SEK claims, although I don't pay enough attention to pop music these days in all its variety to say if this is or isn't the best thing coughed up in the past year. There may not be all that much to chose from. Romantic melancholy itself may have had no better expression, but I'd have to listen a to a lot more of 2007's crop of it than I'm likely to get around to to make up my mind about that. I'm still working on what the best album of 1965 was, myself.
Anyway, if prefer your sad song neat, your man the Irishman is your musician for that. Here's a distraught one linked to recently by Thers at Atrios's Eschaton:
There is nothing that pleases a musician's desire to be heard more than an audience wanting music, and there is no want of an audience for a good sad song, its air identical to the freshly felt melancholia that tugs at the common many of them.
These days we have Nick Cave and Radiohead (from what I hear) and Wilco and for all I Know Arcade Fire and all the others from the unexhausted list of musicians attending to this recognizably inexhaustible willingness of people to hear out the good sad song. At Acephalous, SEK links to an album by The National called "Boxer," which is heavily invested in fashioning music out of just this subset of sadness.
I'm not convinced it's the best album of 2007, as SEK claims, although I don't pay enough attention to pop music these days in all its variety to say if this is or isn't the best thing coughed up in the past year. There may not be all that much to chose from. Romantic melancholy itself may have had no better expression, but I'd have to listen a to a lot more of 2007's crop of it than I'm likely to get around to to make up my mind about that. I'm still working on what the best album of 1965 was, myself.
Anyway, if prefer your sad song neat, your man the Irishman is your musician for that. Here's a distraught one linked to recently by Thers at Atrios's Eschaton:
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