the past is another country
Monday, March 31, 2003
According to the New York Times, Michael Drosnin has been briefing intelligence analysts at the Pentagon (link via Charles Kuffner). Drosnin is the author of The Bible Code, the 1997 bestseller which asserts that the Torah contains specific predictions about the future hidden in equidistant letter sequences.
Gematria, reducing the words and letters of the Torah to numbers, is a kaballic exercise with milennia of history behind it, but I sure hope that nobody's putting too much weight into Drosnin's methodology. Drosnin arranges the letters into grids of arbitrary width; unfortunately, the method is flexible enough that one can produce almost any result one chooses. Responding to a throwaway comment by Drosnin (who asserts that the Torah predicted the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin), skeptics have produced assassination prediction in Moby Dick. I'm sure if they wanted, they could produce textual evidence predicting Saddam Hussein's death or the appearance of SARS or Marquette upsetting Kentucky. Given enough lattitude, anything that a researcher recognizes as a pattern can be considered a valid result. The whole thing resembles nothing so much as the attempt to find anagram's proving Francis Bacon's authorship of Shakespeare.
10:26 pm 
Wednesday, March 26, 2003
I don't write about politics very often. There are two reasons, neither of which is a lack of interest. First, there are enough dabblers in the subject on the Internet; the world doesn't need to hear from another person who mistakes smarts for political insight. Second, I generally feel that one's political beliefs are best left out of conversations with strangers, a rule that tends to protect both participants. (If you, Dear Reader, are not a stranger, I apologize heartily. Email me and I'll willingly rant away.) My misgivings about the long-term effects of America's disregard for our allies, my disgust with what I see as the Bush Administration's deliberate attempt to blur the issues surrounding the conflict in order to gain domestic political capital, and my discomfort with what I see as reflexive and ill-thought-out anti-war stances on the left are political issues. I'm not going to talk about them. There are fine writers (and decent people) who seem to share a great many of my beliefs and concerns, and if you're looking for that sort of thing, I recommend you visit Kevin Drum's CalPundit and find your way from there. Discussing the war -- be it my concerns about a looming Turkish-Kurdish-Iranian conflict, the breakdown of Donald Rumsfeld's "Afghan model" (which worked so very well in Afghanistan), or simply mourning the dead -- is not a political issue. On the other hand, whereas I'm as knowledgable about politics as anyone else who reads The Economist and the Post, that level of familiarity with matters of war is rather useless. I can't tell how the war is going, no matter how much I read the excellent coverage at the BBC or the rather astounding news roundup provided by the Agonist, it's not going to really make me better informed. Misinformation and disinformation are the bread and butter of wartime journalism. I can read the comments over at the left-leaning Daily Kos or the right-leaning Tacitus. Kos or Tacitus are veterans and know viscerally what Army life is like, but I'm not sure anyone who's talking really has any idea what's going on. This is the live television coverage war, but if there's a 21st Century Ernie Pyle out there, I don't think he or she has been revealed yet. So it's a diet of worry and obsessive reading. I feel useless and stupid and disconnected from the people runnng the country, but there's nothing to do but hope and pray that this ends as well as it possibly can (and from my stance on day seven, it's pretty clear that "as well as it possibly can" is not going to be the same as "as well as it possibly could"). We're going to win the war one way or another, but I want this to be as bloodless as possible, for our men and women to get home safely, for it not to stretch into years of occupation and guerilla war or turn into a multinational bloodbath. Someone has made a giant mistake, and I want it not to have been America. I want the long-term outcomes of this war to be a free and prosperous Iraq, not fascistic nations getting ideas about how to discourage war (or, for that matter, a shattered U.N. and a series of new American client states). I don't want to turn on the news tomorrow and find out that three hundred Marines have died. I don't want for it to be accepted wisdom some day that they died in vain.
People don't always get what they want. War is hell. I'll keep my fingers crossed.
11:52 pm
Thursday, March 13, 2003
Even were it not one of the busiest public transit systems in the world, transporting 19 million passengers annually, the London Underground would surely be among the most famous. It has appeared in dozens of British films from the '20s onward. It's inspired artwork in the Tate, fan weblogs, and its own museum. The history of the Tube, which began as several independent lines, is often fascinatingly tawdry. The Bakerloo Line, for instance, was begun by British industrialist Whitaker Wright in the 1890s; when Wright's commercial empire collapsed he was put on trial for fraud and committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill, leaving American subway magnate Charles Yerkes, himself having been convicted and jailed for misappropriation of funds in the 1870s, to finish the line. But the fact that a subway system an ocean away from me is instantly recognizable has nothing to do with skullduggery in its past; it's the result of the creative works of two men, Edward Johnston and Harry Beck. (more...)
11:15 pm
Saturday, March 8, 2003
Japanese journalist Shun Akiba thinks he's discoverd a secret city beneath Tokyo. There are discrepancies in old subway maps; huge swaths of land seem to have disappeared off the maps. Could the Japanese have built some sort of civil defense structure beneath the city? The United States had a number bunkers from which the government could operate in case of nuclear war, Mount Weather and the Greenbriars being the best known. Those were kept secret for some time. And I can't say that I'm an expert in the post-war Japanese psyche, but if films such as Godzilla and I Live in Fear are any guide, announcing that huge, expensive shelters had been built to protect the Emperor and the government when bombs started falling on Tokyo might not have been a wise decision. So it's certainly possible that these shelters were built for perfectly understandable reasons but kept classified for decades. On the other hand, perhaps Akiba is making too much of some circumstantial evidence because he really wants to believe in the existance of a secret underground city. Who wouldn't? (more...)
11:45 pm
Tuesday, March 4, 2003
A number of websites I read (1, 2, 3, 4) have taken it upon themselves to create a guerilla celebration: Oulipo Day (or possibly Month or Year). It's no zanier than "For Pete's Sake" Day or Polar Bear Day or any of the other manufactured holidays from last month, so why not? Mind you, I haven't ever read any Raymond Queneau or Georges Perec. I have, however, read Gilbert Adair. Adair is something of a Renaissance man; he is the author of Love and Death in Long Island (which was made into a movie starring Jason Priestly, so it must have been good) and a noted film critic, as well as an essayist and theoretician (about such topics as the origins of Death in Venice and the poetry of Bruce Andrews). More to the point, he's translated a lipogrammatic novel by Perec; Adair's translation (called A Void in English) takes the plot of Perec's La disparition, a whodunit about the mysterious death of Anton Vowl and, more amazingly, also carries off Perec's trick of leaving out the letter "e". It's been done before in English, but the sections and reviews ("Arranging for many such omissions in this book is our lurking author, a lipogrammatic artist and assassin who both plots Vowl's doom and plucks his customary signatorial pictograph.") I've read make Adair's version sound like a good deal of fun. Poe's "The Raven" is the jumping-off point for "Poe, E.: Near a Raven", the most impressive exercise in the Oulipian vein I've seen to date (no slight intended to the authors of the Theory of Relativity as rendered in Made Apex Dean). An instantly recognizable poem with easily mimicked cadences must lend itself to Oulipo zaniness, because where Perec wrote lipogrammatic transpositions of Hugo and Verlaine, Adair does his own take on "The Raven":
"'Sybil,' said I, 'thing of loathing -- sybil, fury in bird's clothing!
By God's radiant kingdom soothing all man's purgatorial pain,
Inform this soul laid low with sorrow if upon a distant morrow
It shall find that symbol for -- oh for its too long unjoin'd chain --
Find that pictographic symbol, missing from its unjoin'd chain'
Quoth that Black Bird, 'Not Again'"
"The Black Bird", as rendered by Adair, is not by Poe, but by the lipogramatic Arthur Gordon Pym.
11:23 pm
Sunday, March 2, 2003
The Mauch Chunk Switchback, a forty-mile stretch of rail near Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, was meant for transporting coal. Its place in history was assured by the unknown genius who saved himself a walk down to the station by hitching a ride and discovering just how fun it was to hurtle down the mountain. When the rail was rendered obsolete by a tunnel in 1872, its owners switched it entirely over to thrillseekers. George Ferris' celebrated creation for the Columbian Exposition had been a huge financial success, and engineers began to refine the concept. Soon more intentional coasters began to spring up, including the Switchback Railway, built in 1884, and the Leap the Dips coaster, built in 1902 and today the oldest standing coaster in the world. The Switchback Railway was followed by a host of imitators thanks to its immense financial success and its location: the tony seaside resort and racing destination of Coney Island. (more...)
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