Comment Acknowledging Business As Usual for the Sentinel Goes Here

Sinead O'Connor Lets Her Hair Down

 
Blessed Sinead O'Connor, mother of four, weighs in on the recent distresses of the Catholic Church, via the Washington Post.
 

Werner Takes On A Plastic Bag

Local Angle

 
Two recent articles bring the Grateful Dead to mind.

One, in the New York Times, reports on a exhibit of Grateful Dead related memorabilia culled from the enormous archive of just about everything that passed through the band's office down the decades to be stored by Ellen Law, the perfectly postioned pack rat who worked for the band. Others may have advised her to off the stuff, but she remained undaunted down the years, resulting in the accumulation of an enormous archive which is now the property of the University of California Santa Cruz Library. The current exhibit at the New York Historical Society is culled from that collection of stuff.

The second article can be found in the Atlantic Online, and is titled, "Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead," and in fact resolves toward the end to a discussion of the curiously effective practices that eventually made the Grateul Dead one of the most profitable enterprises in the history of popular music. For the most part, though, the article is an examination of the gradual rise to a begrudged sort of respectability of the scholarly study of the Grateful Dead, a branch of inquiry that threatens to turn into a permanent field now that UC Santa Cruz has created a locus for the orderly interment of the band's cultural remains.

War Story Revisted

Once my mother and I were riding in an overcrowded train. It was Victory Day. The man sitting opposite us looked like a peasant and was crying bitterly, washing his tears down with vodka. Every once in a while he'd break off to tell the same story. I heard it many times and remembered it. Here it is.
 
During the war he and his sister lost everyone close to them. Their village was destroyed, and they took shelter in another village, in an empty house. They were very hungry, and went from house to house asking for something to eat. Then the sister got sick, and the boy went by himself. They stopped giving him anything. Just when things were getting really bad, a miracle happened: at one of the houses they gave him a piece of pork. The boy ate his fill for the first time in days, and there was enough left for the sister. They were able to hold out for a couple of days more, and then some distant relatives found them and took them to the town where he lived for many years.
 
On that day he had gone back to the village where the miracle happened, to find the people who had saved his life and thank them, even though he didn't know their names. He got off the train and found a big feast going on in the village. In the middle of the table was a ham, with bottles around it. He sat next to an old man. They drank. The old man looked thoughtfully at the table, then said: "I don't like this holiday. It's hard on me remembering the war, I have a great sin on my soul.
 
"During the war my son was sick. The doctor said he had to have meat. I sold everything I could and bought a pig. I slaughtered it, but the pig was sick. What could I do? In the village there was an orphan who went around begging. I decided I'd give him a piece, wait a couple of days and see what happened. If the beggar boy survived, I'd give my son the meat. I invited him to have some of the pork. But he didn't survive, he didn't walk around the village any more. We had to throw the meat away. My son died. It's a heavy weight on me that I killed those children."
 
The man took a swig from the bottle and started the story again.

—as noted by languagehat, who goes on to add:

Now, in the comments at the Shkrobius thread a couple of people said they remembered this story from an old magazine, and one of them found a link: it's Мелкие неприятности ("Little annoyances"), by Pavel Nilin. The plot is close enough that it would be surprising if the two were unrelated; the main difference is that in the Nilin story there is no sick son—the villager tests out the pork on the boy and sees it doesn't kill him; presumably he and his wife eat the rest. Either the fellow Shkrobius and his mother saw in the train (he says in the comment thread that it was in the early 1970s) had read the story (which is dated 1974) and was telling it as his own, or Nilin heard the same guy and made a literary story out of it. Or, of course, it could be coincidence. But the interesting thing is how much more effective the anecdote told by Shkrobius is; the Nilin story, with its careful scene-setting and description of neighbors and so on, just dissipates the power of it.

Somadeva's Kathasaritsagara is an old book that has all the stories in it, as far as I'm concerned. Admittedly, I've only heard second hand about Somadeva's book myself, so I have no way of knowing how accurate my characterization is. Nevertheless, not having read it allows me to continue to guess it has a story in it just like this story among all the rest, a story repeated over and over again not only on the train by the inebriated traveller, but also over and over again by countless other travellers in caravans all over Central Asia and beyond for millennia.

The story as told on the train has neatly concentrated moral elements: we see the seeming bit of charity in the offered pig meat for the ploy it actually is on the part of the villager who, otherwise indifferent to their fate, only wishes to know if the starving children will sicken or die when fed the bad meat of a pig he otherwise plans to feed his own sick son to bring the ailing lad back to health. Shortly after eating the pork, sustained in the last moment before starvation by their fill of the meat given them by the villager for his own reasons, the boy and his sister are found by relatives and taken away to safety. But the villager mistakes the disappearance of the boy and his sister for a sign that bad pork has killed them, forbids his sick son the meat that might have saved the lad's life, and watches, wretched, as his sick son soon dies. The villager's act of inadvertent true charity has, misunderstood, inadvertently committed his son to death.

The great existential question posed by specifying the meat as pork is, "But would you eat that if your were starving?" Pork is the normatively forbidden thing, standing in for all the other forbidden tainted stuff avoided for all the reasons that might, yes, just might be consumed if it came down to it, which in fact it has come down to time and again down the ages for countless many people, people who have confronted the question in lean unequivacal terms, starving with but the arbitrary anything to chew on. Would you overcome your disgust and eat that? If it were truly distasteful? Even if you'd been told over and over again just don't? If it were made available, and you starving?

It's no secret about pork. The people who eat pork without qualm are conscious of the revulsion commonly engendered in others by the practice. Presumably the people who eat dog are equally conscious of the revulsion commonly engendered in others by the transgression of feeding on fido. And even the people who eat such stuff agree that it can go bad. So there's that in the story, the prospect of eating anything, yes, even the bad thing, when it comes to it.

In the story, the serving of pork adds piquancy to the threat of starving to death faced by the boy and his sister. Children will eat anything, and there's always a lot of keeping stuff out of children's mouths in the early going, keeping them on the path of the actual foodways of the culture they're emerging into and avoiding the pitfalls of the literal scenery chewing they are capable of early on.

By their nature as children and their condition as starvelings, the brother and sister in the story must eat the offered pork, swallowing with it whatever taint it may be said to carry.

"The boy ate his fill for the first time in days, and there was enough left for the sister." Note the brisk moral calculus revealed by the phrase "there was enough left for the sister." The starving boy eats as much as he can. Luckily for the sister, there's a surfeit, such as it is, of pig meat, and she lives too.

Note also the nested structure of the narrative. You're being told a story which was told (over and over again) on a singular train trip taken some time ago on Victory Day to the person telling you the story. And the person telling the story over and over again on that train trip on Victory Day to the person who's telling you the story proceeds to retell in his story another version of his own story as told to him by another fellow entirely in a village he travelled to, coincidentally enough, on yet another prior Victory Day. This kind of story nesting, being told a story about a story that has yet another story in it, isn't unheard of when it comes to storytelling. It's a prime sign that the formal events belonging to it, the forbidden food and its consequences, have been consciously arranged by a storyteller.
 

Spring Fashion Preview

 

 

Past Ball

 

 

Searle at 90

 

 

Papa's Got A Brand New Rickroll

 
Enter Here to Win.
 

News From The World of Saints

If you take the set of all Australians and put the criminals and Irishmen over here, the remainder over there is your first Australian saint, Mary McKillop ("Mother" to her confederates).

It's noted in the news that during the course of a lifetime of good behavior Mother Mary of the Cross ("Mama Marie Delacroix" as the francophone would have it) was excommunicated briefly by a bishop for insubordination. I wasn't aware that the power of excommunication had devolved to mere bishops. I always thought only the pope or his designated staff could strike people officially from the rolls of the organization, but that may be due to my admittedly insufficient attention to what I'm sure are the condign rulings of the Church on the matter. Perhaps any altar boy has the authority when going about his appointed rounds.

I remember the story of the ex-seminarian who pressed the Vatican for an official certificate of excommunication, which he recieved in due course from whatever tribunal handles those matters back there on the home acres of the Roman Catholic Church, although not without a measure of bother on his part. It turns out that perhaps all along he could have just chosen one of the local platoon of bishops in the San Francisco Bay Area to get the job done with authority. Even those who've sidled away from the Church without engaging in the formalities observed by the ex-seminarian will appreciate, however, the coolness factor of having a writ directly from the pope's own penmen recognizing the sundered tie.

In the case of Mary McKillop the bishop apparently retracted his act of excommunication shortly after he issued it, retroactively nullifying its effect. Thus, after three days or so, Mary McKillip rose from those listed as dead to the Church,  it being revealed to all that she had only seemed to be gone during that time, when in fact she had been present  continuously in substance and spirit within the folds of Holy Mother the Church the whole while.

Pitchers and Catchers Report Today!

Pinnipeds Spending More Time With Their Families, Study Shows

Rick, Lost, January 2009

A year gone now, looking back at that terrible news.

Rick had six months to live when I took this photo of him in June of 2008.

The Truth Untold vs. the Told Untruth

"I had myself been prime minister in the first Gulf war and I knew when I said something I was utterly certain that it was correct, and I said less than I knew," he said.

"I assumed the same thing had happened and on that basis I supported reluctantly the second Iraq war."

— John Major, former British Prime Minister, quoted in the Guardian, Jan 2, 2010

Mr. Major suggests that you wouldn't have found all the facts from what he was willing to let on in public at the time of the first gulf war. Being politic, he reserved some facts from what he was saying. Mr. Blair, contrarily, publicly suggested what couldn't be found in the facts at all.

Mr. Major suggests that he had a lot of verified information, not all of which he divulged in public, when he spoke as Prime Minister during the Gulf War. This is a testable proposition. A skim through the archives would quickly establish how much of the information claimed as verified by Mr. Major was actually verifiable in the event, and alternately, how much of it remains on inspection unverifiable or provably false.

Inevitably some portion of what Mr. Major knew at the time was the product of the sort of fundamentally weightless chatter forever emerging from Britain's military and diplomatic bureaucracy by institutional imperative, the sort of constantly offered muttering of what's politic to report that bubbles up to any PM's ear in confluence with any utterly certain facts on offer.


He, Major, doled out a subset of this avowedly true information ("I said less than I knew") when it came time to remark on the subject of the Gulf War, and assumed that Tony Blair, when speaking during the runup to the later invasion of Iraq, was operating under the same constraint, saying less than he knew to be true, but conforming his remarks to some urevealed verifiable something or other, not publicly contradicting that withheld yet verifiable something, or affirming some something that could not be found anywhere at all among the said and unsaid facts of the matter.

Mr. Blair's public statements surfed along on a forceful wave of potentially false but for the moment unprovably false rhetoric, stealing along on the imaginary axis bound by the magnitude of the existential threat posed to, e.g., oh, let's say Cyprus, by an arsenal of inexistent, potent chemical and biological and intercontinental weapons of destruction said to belong to evil Sadaam Hussein by Mr. Blair.

Mr. Blair willingly suggested many many things during the runup to the invasion of Iraq based on facts not in evidence, which, had they been true facts, rather than false suppositions, might have been used plausibly enough to justify the increasing militancy of his rhetoric, but which, being only potentially verifiably true or false as he spoke of them (and in the event proven thoroughly false), did nothing to advance the argument that it was ever truly a good idea to invade Iraq, however much his words advanced the actual invasion itself, which of course was the admitted reason for his rhetoric in the first place.

I'm pretty sure Mr. Major's statements, however circumspect at the time, were all in for the Gulf War. Functionally, they served precisely the same end as Mr. Blair's; each committed Britain to enlist in a major Middle Eastern military action being shopped by the US, delivering Britain's congenitally far-flung military into action when time came to war in the gulf or invade Iraq with that same famous verve, professionalism and alacrity recognized as hallmarks of British military adventurism down the ages.

Heavy Weather

National Weather Service Alert For Santa Cruz County, 2p.m. Jan. 20, 2010: 

TORNADO WARNING:

"IF NO SHELTER IS AVAILABLE...LIE FLAT IN THE NEAREST DITCH OR OTHER LOW SPOT AND COVER YOUR HEAD WITH YOUR HANDS."

I was planning on doing that anyhow after the Mass. Senate result.

Hot Stove

A few years years ago the members of a House Periodic Committee on High Dudgeon chaired by Tom Davis (R-Va.) called ballplayers and executives of Major League Baseball before it to go over all the accumulating evidence that ballplayers had been for some time freely conditioning themselves for the season-long rigors of baseball at the highest level with really sophisticated chemical concoctions, concoctions whose dissemination, for their recognized ill effects, had long been legally constrained by hopeful laws strictly regulating their handling, laws passed by that very house of congress!

!

In 1993, twelve years before Rep. Davis gavelled his hearing to order, the FBI had rounded up a bunch of people around the country who were in fact freely distributing these supposedly restricted chemicals to athletes of all kinds, and found looking into the thing that professional ballplayers at all levels were regular customers. The FBI gathered baseball names named by nabbed distributors. Mark McGwire's name was one of those names named, of course. In his appearance before Davis's committee twelve years later, McGwire curtly elided his past, relying on what must be the celebrated ballplayer's constitutional right when called before Congress to insist on talking about something else instead.

"I'm not here to talk about that, Congressman."

"[sputter] Yes you are!"

"No, I'm not here to talk about the past."

"You are too!"

"Nope."

"[Chair, dryly] The gentleman's time has expired…"

McGwire's absurd yet effective tactic kept him from having to say anything, true or not, about what he'd been up to without explictly taking the Fifth Amendment or perjuring himself right there in public. The tactic's effectiveness was restricted almost completely to the confines of the committee room, however. Outside, McGwire's performance before the committee was roundly ridiculed, and whatever fondness for the man may have lingered from the storied 1998 season when he and Sammy Sosa chased and then surpassed Babe Ruth's and then Roger Maris's single season home run record, curdled quickly following his appearance.

The realization that the grand celebrated chase of the two of them had been fueled by exactly those chemicals that were now the focus of the high dudgeon of the subcommittee brought a sneer to the lip of even the most circumspect follower of the game.

In 1993, at the time of the FBI crackdown, there were no workplace rules in place in Major League Baseball banning these newest concoctions, and Mark McGwire was one of any number of ballplayers known to be evangelizing for some remarkably effective chemical or other. The one he long championed was nicknamed "andro," (a substance unbanned even as late as 1998) which McGwire couldn't stop going on about at the time.

Belatedly perhaps, in angling for a job as hitting instructor with the St. Louis Cardinals ballclub (managed by Tony La Russa, whose continuing role in enabling McGwire's career in both Oakland and St. Louis is well understood), McGwire, perhaps as a condition prior to employment insisted on by La Russa himself, admitted publicly to doing what he had previously only been known to espouse publicly. He too had used the proscribed stuff himself, he said, straightforwardly enough.

Say in public as much of the uncomfortable truth as you can bear. This is the first step in the Rehabilitative Move of the Fallen Celebrity, which practiced motion we've all had chance to witness countless times. Mark McGwire fessed up to as much as he could in step one. However, when pressed on the question of exactly how much of the stupendous length of each of those remarkably many home runs he'd hit had been obtained as a direct result of a forbidden regimen of performance enhancing drugs, McGwire concluded that none of that length had been so affected, that the performance enhancing drugs he'd long espoused and used were false drugs in that respect, at least far as actual performance goes. As a counterargument to McGwire it is maintained by almost everybody else that performance enhancing drugs do too enhance performance. It remains to be seen whether those supporting this argument bother to press the point with McGwire, whose visit to hitting instructor purgatory in St. Louis may yet otherwise help serve to cleanse his self-stained name.

Werner on George

On the uncredited claim of the wangus from Wikipedia

The name of this fortress was derived from the Gothic word "wangus" and describes cutting down trees in an acorn forest.[citation needed]

Claiming the wangus capable of cutting down an oak is one of the oldest tropes of civil discourse. Sure it must have traveled to the Baltic ear frequently enough back in the times, this sort of boast, whether pronounced concisely "wangus" or gone on about at such greater length as might be deemed suitable to the characteristic path of just that sort of talk when engrossed in the occasion which requires it.

[There's no citation for the word wangus in the given dictionary around here, bedraggled bearer of the burden of  the 200,000  or so words most commonly taken to be English back when it was first bound — a large, somewhat dated sample of the language, in other words: hardly the whole of it by now. There's just no citeable basis for talk of wangus there. That will have to come from somewhere else: the actually rather than potentially self-correcting part of the internet, justifying what in other respects is the very model of the marvelous sentence from Wikipedia. This is not to say that I don't see the utility of Goths or anyone else forbidding the arbitrary logging of oaks in their area in an effort to preserve the bounty of freely available acorns, and can easily imagine a history in which a whole bunch of sloganeering to that effect boiled down to shouting "wangus" across the political divide.]

The Dictionary in Repose

Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, 2010.

Winter Hits Santa Cruz

Twenty-Ten

Implacably reliable sources reveal that the new year is to be referred to as Twenty Ten, not Two Thousand Ten or Two Thousand and Ten, as some might have it. It's not too early to fall in with the crowd on this, is what I'm saying.

I want a New Year Just Like The Old Year That Marred My Dear Old Dad

Merry Christmas

Waits

 

Spacious Thoughts from Anti Records on Vimeo.

 

Great Moments in Baseball