the past is another country
Saturday, March 31, 2001
V. jokingly suggested that I make my next entry all about Caliban. "You'll only have to buy one new letter!" she said. Little did she know.
Back in college, I was reading an editorial of some sort that complained about the ideologues who have taken over the university. (I'm not sure why this subject surged forth, because by the time I was in college the great PC wars of the early nineties had largely flared out.) The editorial asked, in a mock-astonished tone, if we knew that The Tempest was really a work about colonialism. And I sat there and stared at it, just as I had stared at a George Will (I won't tell you what I think the "F." stands for) editorial when he announced in a recap of the year's leftist buffoonery that a coven of witches had gotten tax-exempt church status. Well, of course you have to give all religions, even ones you think are daffy, tax-exempt status. Well, of course a post-colonialist reading works on The Tempest!
The usual -- and often perfectly valid -- criticism about post-colonial criticism, feminist criticism, what have you, is that it reads back modern attitudes into a work of the past and critiques, say, Marlowe for not viewing Jews through our enlightened modern lens. But The Tempest wasn't written in some misty prehistoric England where people couldn't imagine but that the earth was flat; it was inspired by an account of the shipwreck of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers in Bermuda, where they were stranded for ten months. To assert that Shakespeare, by that time in his career a man of means and some political consequence, wrote with no awareness of the world around him is an act of revisionism greater than the most trendy of historicist readings. (more...)
9:11 pm 
Thursday, March 29, 2001
Like most people, I'm appalled by the Taliban's destruction of priceless Buddhist statuary. But as reprehensible as the Talbian's willfull destruction of their Afghan history is, I'm sorry that this is what it took to bring the regime to the attention of the general public. The Taliban-led Afghan government is reportedly among the worst violators of human rights in the world. The State Department report has such cheerful factoids as: "Prison conditions are poor. Prisoners held by some factions are not given food, as normally this is the responsibility of prisoners' relatives, who are allowed to visit to provide them with food once or twice a week" and "There were reports that Hindus are now required to wear a piece of yellow cloth attached to their clothing to identify their religious identity; Sikhs reportedly were required to wear some form of identification as well." (more...)
12:25 am
Monday, March 26, 2001
First off, congratulations to our beloved host for the speedy completion of his experiment; theeel.com has been moved from a FreeBSD box to a G4 Cube running OS X.
On MetaFilter, someone posted a link to an amazing Transformers site. (When I was wee I had a Grimlock. Me Grimlock am angry!) Last week, we got a David Broder column in favor of subsidizing political ads. (Broder will be appearing at the Brody Public Policy Forum at the University of Maryland in a few weeks; until then, I'll have to mull over this attack on his perceived tunnel vision as regards the supremacy of the political process. A cheery Post article on Sunday began "President Bush is quietly building the most conservative administration in modern times...", and thousands more sheep and cattle have been killed in England in an attempt to slow the spread of hoof-and-mouth disease. On the other hand, Maryland's in the Final Four and -- say what you will about the Oscars -- this year the Miramax PR machine was finally unsuccessful, so one can't be too dour. Can one?
9:19 pm
Friday, March 23, 2001
Holy cats! Some kind soul willing to suck up the dizzying losses caused by printing an obscure writer's obscure books has taken it upon him- or herself to bring R. A. Lafferty back into print. If you haven't heard of Lafferty, do yourself a favor: read one of the paeans (1 | 2) to him out on the web or read the pure product itself, as represented by his story "Nine Hundred Grandmothers". If you didn't find those at all interesting, thanks for trying them solely on my say-so, and please check back on Sunday for my next thrilling installment. (more...)
11:30 pm
Thursday, March 22, 2001
I was doing well at penny poker night, until V., perennially scornful of the game, showed up like a god of gamblers. "I don't like poker," she said. "Only losers play poker." And with that, she drew for another full house, her third of the evening. Well, yes, we're all losers now.
(And hey, go Terps!)
11:15 pm
I spent some happy hours at work cranking out ColdFusion while listening to WFMU, freeform radio out of Orange, NJ, thanks to the sound-driver-twiddling skills of Brian in the cube next to mine. (I doubt that he'll ever read this page, but if so, thanks, Brian!) Listening to Terre T's shift as DJ, I heard not only a song by (Neko Case side project) the New Pornographers but also "Identity" by poppy brat-punk pioneers X-Ray Spex. Coincidentally, last weekend I went on a drag-me-out-of-the-store-before-I-spend-more-money shopping spree at Soundgarden in Baltimore and finally replaced my copy of X-Ray Spex's "Germfree Adolescents", which I've been lacking since someone walked off with about 20 CDs of mine in college. I don't know how I've done without it all these years; it's so damn exuberant and full of life that it makes being a teenager again sound almost fun. Poly Styrene makes those days of coding fly right by!
8:06 pm
Wednesday, March 21, 2001
Well, spring has officially arrived. Bring on the accoutrements: cherry blossoms, baby peas, the Sweet Sixteen, Cadbury Eggs, campaign-finance reform struggles in Congress. The farmer's market should be opening soon, which is absolutely delightful; cabbage, root vegetables, eggplant, and squash are all lovely things, but I'm craving some variety in my fresh produce, thank you very much. Soon there will be all sorts of lovely vegetables to experiment with.
Meanwhile, this generation's Will Rogers, Warren Buffett, has written an editorial calling for campaign finance reform: "The way to enshrine free speech is not to give each candidate a soapbox and a megaphone. Rather, we should require broadcast stations -- beneficiaries of incredibly valuable licenses, courtesy of your government -- to make available, prior to every election, modest amounts of time for political discourse. Let's add an ability to be heard to a right to speak." Nobody would listen to a populist lariat-twirler in the year 2001, so I suppose that (as with the William Gates-backed efforts to prevent repeal of the inheritance tax) we've got to rely on people with huge amounts of wealth to get the word out. Buffett doesn't say anything too shocking here, but as in much of his writing, he's droll and sensible. Makes me want to go eat a Dilly Bar and watch real reform get stopped dead on C-SPAN. Even if McCain-Feingold passes, I'm sure new and exciting loopholes will be found, and a few springs from now the same debate, with new names and new players, will be playing itself out again.
8:57 pm
Tuesday, March 20, 2001
The ongoing struggle between pharmaceutical companies and activists concerned with the spread of AIDS in the Third World entered its next stage, as the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization stepped in to try to hammer out some sort of deal. As leftist economist Dean Baker (of Economics Reporting Review fame) notes, "On previous occasions, the drug industry has made offers of low cost AIDS drugs that turned out to have very limited effect, since they applied stringent conditions on the countries receiving the drugs."
Nonetheless, there may be some hope for real action here, if only because the drug companies are up against a wall -- in the face of what is a crisis of huge proportions, the South African government may finally take the step of declaring a national emergency (which it has been reluctant to do, apparently afraid of alienating both international investors and the U.S. government) which would entitle it under the WTO TRIPS agreement to manufacture generic versions of AIDS drugs regardless of patentholder objection. More detail on the WTO and pharmaceutical patents, and some additional commentary, inside. (more...)
9:40 pm
I must confess to many, many bad habits, gentle reader. Along with biting my nails, humming the occasional tuneless little ditty in elevators, and chronically allowing the deadline for personal projects to slip past (the original mockups for snarkout.org were done in 1998, when CSS was but a meaningless acronym to me), I am a compulsive classifier. The world can be divided neatly into halves any number of wonderful ways: the Blue-vs.-Red political map Salon loves so; people who read for pleasure and those who would be caught dead before doing any such thing; cat lovers and dog lovers; pie people and their nemeses, cake people. Playing this game with food classifications makes a dandy little icebreaker, in fact, as it's one of those things -- like the Oscars or crimes of the century -- that almost everyone has an opinion on. Determining what people called a carbonated soft drink in their part of the country (soda, pop, soda pop, and, strangely enough, Coke) was one of the ways people in my freshman dorm started conversations, which is probably to be expected, as I went to school in a state where milkshakes are called "cabinets."
I'm a pie person, not a cake person. I'd like coffee, not milk, with my chocolate cake. Dr Pepper, not Mountain Dew. And I like salty snacks. (more...)
12:21 am
Tuesday, March 13, 2001
"The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope." -- Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel"
8:36 pm
