the past is another country
Sunday, October 28, 2001
I'm now halfway through my original twelve-month plan for the Literary Year, and boy, writing book reviews is harder than I thought. I'm increasingly impressed by people like Jessamyn, Jeremy, or Cosma (whose site is worth exploring at great length; I first stumbled across it when I was in college, and I've enjoy stumbling across it ever since) who can write reviews of a significant percentage of what they've read; I can read the darn things faster than I can review them, as evinced by my dozen-book backlog. I still haven't managed to shame myself into finishing Gravity's Rainbow (although perhaps the public declaration that I'm trying to will help), and the fact that I'm clearly reading fewer books than I did is vaguely depressing. Still, it's a fun project; even if people don't stumble across something worth reading and I don't manage to polish up my reviewer skills, it still might be an interesting document twenty years from now as Older Me stares in awe at the incredible cheek and lack of discernment on the part of his younger self. These lists can be fascinating personal histories -- witness the amazingly voluminous What I Have Read (found via MetaFilter, of course).
6:32 pm 
Friday, October 26, 2001
Gloomy thoughts have been on my mind lately. While pulling down links for a MetaFilter post on the Civil Defense Museum (which you should read, as the links other people posted are golden), I came across a page on nuclear holocausts in popular culture and, from the same professor, a fascinating compendium of plot summaries for atomic war fiction. It's a popular story. The end of the world has always been with us. (more...)
10:57 pm
Tuesday, October 23, 2001
Last weekend was, I suspect, the last gasp of summer. Two days of driving to strip malls in my new used car, Walter Mitty; listening to Guided By Voices (remember: "I am a heavy drinker who enjoys The Who. You are fired. Now, a high kick."); heading to the farmer's market to buy lima beans and eggplant; buying books at the grungy used books store (two for me, one for V., and three as a swap to send to Judith); taking long walks in the warm sun; sitting outside the coffeehouse eating a cookie under a blue, blue sky. Goodbye, summer of 2001. We hardly knew ye.
11:41 pm
Sunday, October 21, 2001
For the last six years, I have had an October ritual: rooting for the Yankees to lose. For four of those years, I have been disappointed (and things don't really look good this year). I grew up rooting for the Orioles; the Yankees have beaten out my secondary rooting interest, the A's, the last two years; and I absorbed a healthy dose of Yankees antipathy from my grandfather, a Red Sox fan -- but I'm not quite sure why I like baseball so much. There's a tradition enjoyable baseball writing (from Roger Angell, most notably, but also from people like Mark Harris and W.P. Kinsella). There's the stat-hound factor; over the last thirty years Bill James and other sabermetricians (from SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research) have completely rewritten how many people -- ESPN.com's Rob Neyer being a prime example -- think about baseball. You don't need to get into real propeller-head detail, although I find that sort of thing interesting if it's short enough; after reading one Bill James book and seeing how he codifies baseball by studying the reams of statistics the sport produces, I honestly think you'll know more about baseball than most managers did twenty years ago (and more than some do today). But I think the thing that attracts me the most is the history -- the football greats of the '60s probably couldn't even make the practice squad of a modern NFL team, but I think that Josh Gibson or Lefty Grove or Rogers Hornsby would still be great. Baseball just hasn't changed nearly as much as any other American sport. You can compare Honus Wagner to Cal Ripken or Alex Rodriguez and have a meaningful arguement about which was better. When you see a game at Fenway Park or Yankees Stadium, the sense of history just boils off the field. I love making that brief connection to America's pastime from days gone by -- even if, then as now, the Yankees were probably winning.
11:36 pm
Saturday, October 20, 2001
Charles MacKay, in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, writes:
The reasons that thus lead mankind to believe the marvellously false, and to disbelieve the marvellously true, may be easily gathered. Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder's welcome.
That's wonderfully phrased, but why do some madnesses take root and others disappear unknown? (more...)
8:10 pm
Wednesday, October 17, 2001
The discovery that the anthrax sent to Tom Daschle's office was military-grade is rather shocking; anthrax is most deadly when made into a fine powder, something highly difficult to do. It had been thought that only the United States and the USSR had succeeded in creating aerosolized anthrax (which can be easily disseminated through the air and is more likely to be inhaled; anthrax is much deadlier in the lungs). I hope we find who did this and render them utterly incapable of doing anything like this again for a long, long time; I hope the yahoos who have been making fake anthrax threats enjoy the years they're going to spend in jail. Obviously, this is terrible and scary and we need to get to the bottom of it as soon as we can. But my irony alarm started ringing when I read Senator Charles Schumer's suggestion that generic ciproflaxin be produced immediately. (more...)
10:00 pm
Sunday, October 14, 2001
Steven Baum over at Ethel the Blog is doing an excellent job throwing out links to articles I'm unlikely to stumble across on my own. I think many of the articles he links to are wrong, but they're almost uniformally thought-provoking. I have to disagree vehemently with this one, though. Steven links to a story in The Guardian describing the life cycle of propaganda. I'll be the first to admit that the U.S. has a long history of fighting a propaganda war; Richard Hofstader's essays on the roots of American imperialism are convincing. Propagandizing is not always shameful. Should the U.S. have held back from printing "Loose Lips Sink Ships" posters? Should Edward Bok have resisted turning the Ladies' Home Journal into an unofficial arm of Herber Hoover's Food Administration during the First World War? Should Hoover's government have locked up Eugene Debs and other war protesters? (Although the first one is innocuous and the second one only mildly disturbing, I'll side with Mencken on that last one; H.L., no friend of socialists, wrote that Debs was misguided and dangerous and foolish, but a gentleman and in his own way a patriot, then laid into Woodrow Wilson as only Mencken confronted with censorship could.) But beyond that, the article in the Guardian makes a few risky assumptions. (more...)
5:08 pm
Wednesday, October 10, 2001
What's an earworm? Well, it's a wee beastie or an obscure British record label. But in my friend Rod's usage, it's a song that get stuck in your head and doesn't go away. (more...)
11:17 pm
Sunday, October 7, 2001
Barry Bonds hit home runs 71 and 72. The Oakland Athletics won their hundredth game, which I hope will lead to more stories on their excellent starting rotation (including certified weirdo Barry Zito). I bought a block of Colby cheese and a pound of coffee at the store. I bought a used Honda to replace my beloved but aging and infirm Maxima. Sam Coomes of Quasi humped his keyboard at the Black Cat, while I (inexplicably stricken by a black mood) glared at various people in the crowd. I bought pears and apples and peppers and garlic at the farmer's market, then bought some vegetable pakora from a stall run by Hare Krishnas. The shooting war in Afghanistan broke out. I saw Neko Case and Her Boyfriends at Iota in Arlington, and they played my two favorite songs off Furnace Room Lullaby.
I don't know if it's good or bad, but I can now go hours, days, without the terrible reality of the present time seeming more real to me than anything else on a television screen, with the gaps in the New York skyline nothing more than a nagging ache, a faint tug at my attention. Everything changed. Everything continues to change.
9:42 pm
Friday, October 5, 2001
Giovanni Casanova was a preacher, a violinist, a secretary, a jailbreaker, an occultist, and a librarian. He was famously a lover, but the reason for that fame lies in his writing. La historie de ma vie wasn't published until twenty years after his death, and the French edition was butchered by the translator, one Prof. Jean Laforgue. But eventually more faithful translations emerged (the English edition, by Willard Trask, wasn't published until 1966), and it's a joy to read. Consider his account of how he lost the patronage of the Grimaldis:
One day after having all three of us dine with him he left, as he always did, to take a siesta. The Gardela girl, having to go for a lesson, left me alone with Teresa, whom, though I had never flirted with her, I still found attractive. Sitting side by side at asmall table with our backs to the door of the room in which we supposed our patron was sleeping, at a certain turn in the conversation it occured to us in our innocent gaiety to compare the differences between our shapes. We were at the most interesting point of the examination when a violent blow from a cane descended on my neck, followed by another, which would have been followed by yet more if I had not escaped from the hailstorm at top speed by running out of the room.
Innocent gaiety indeed. (more...)
11:40 pm
Monday, October 1, 2001
I can't do it any more. I can't think about Afghanistan and Bin Laden every single day. I need to start thinking about other things. It's not survivor guilt, or even (just) a sense of helplessness. It's that America is in a kind of phony war interlude; we know something is going to happen, but we don't know what or when. (And I hope it either happens soon or waits until the spring; if history has taught us nothing, I hope it has taught us that land wars in Asia in the winter are unwise.) And I think, and I worry. The phrase "NBC", for "nuclear/biological/chemical" is being tossed around. Paul O'Neill is reversing his previously stated opposition to a crackdown on money laundering in offshore banks, but Senate Republicans are still working on jamming Alaskan wilderness refuge oil drilling legislation through. War game planners are probably hard at work trying to figure out what's next, having already established (in the "Dark Winter" exercise, starring Sam Nunn as the President) that the government "currently lacks adequate strategies, plans, and information system to manage" a large-scale bioterror attack. And it's autumn. The moon is full. The air is getting a little more biting. The apples have started to come in. Half of all Americans support making Arabs carry identification, even if they are citizens.
Waiting is hard, but I suppose it beats the alternatives.
11:23 pm
