Offense

Look, I realize most people who read this blog just want to see pics or something. Sorry, I don't have any of those. I am just not one of those guys who likes to take shots. Especially when I have to interrupt what is going on to compose some fake shot just so I can blog about it later.

I guess I am sort of an ideas man--plagiarized, hackneyed ideas that sometimes seem poignant to me. Today at church, after the speaker started talking about the condensation of God (sic), I checked out for a little bit. I hopped on the phone and read some stuff by my favorite 13th apostle--David Foster Wallace. He's crazy and maximalist and tortured and dead (by his own hand), but I like him. He speaks to me.

He warmed me up with this gentle "you think you are so smart, but self-conciousness is not always good" quote:

There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.

(Nervous inner laughter.) Yeah, I think I have had visits from those Bedouins. But then he jumps into a more serious critique of literature, which I have applied more broadly to just anyone who produces or appreciates any type of art.

The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.

Anyway, for all those who, like me, seem to be relatively gifting in tearing down, deriding, dismissing, and disproving, maybe we should produce a little more, appreciate as much as we critique, and, ultimately, be nicer.

So there you have it, scoffing "this Idaho bumbler is an idiot" to "hey, take what you can use, produce more yourself, and cut others some slack." That was my church lesson. I am pretty sure it had nothing to do with what he taught.

Cormac

Interview with Cormac McCarthy:

Wall Street Journal: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?

Cormac McCarthy: I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

I am putting Blood Meridian on my reading list.

Discoveries

So as I finished up my book tonight, I realized that I just finished what is pretty much a military history. I never thought I would be into that genre. I feel like King Bidgood playing with battleships in the bathtub. (Reading that phrase as a kid seems normal. Writing that phrase as an adult seems laden with euphemism.) Also, at key points in the narrative, usually when the pompous British author was making some obvious point about the evil of Hitler and the complicity of the German people, all I could think of was this dubbed youtube video. NINE! NINE! NINE! NINE!

Though I definitely like narrative and story and action, sometimes I underline the little details, even in library books. Amidst descriptions of atavistic rape on the Eastern front; 13-year old Hitler youths trading candy and killing Russians; Mongol comrades crucifying women to barn doors; women clutching long-since frozen babies walking bare-foot in a brutal Hungarian winter; and, what was very surreal to read, large herds of cows mooing desperately to be milked as they roved among 2.5 million ethnic Germans fleeing the Russian advance--amidst all this Doctor Graf Hans von Lehndorff stopped to write of his East Prussian home:

Whoever lived these last months with receptive senses must have felt that never before had the light been so intense, the sky so lofty, the distances so vast.

Somehow, seeing it at its worst makes me want to visit it so much more. Next summer. My European trip. I will hit the towns and villages where my family came from. In a cursory search, I couldn't find any alive during this period, although it seems I have some relatives that died fighting the French in WWI.


View Ancestors in a larger map

Prussia

Nothing like a bowl of Corn Chex and a history of WWII to keep me up until 3 AM. Max Hasting's Armageddon on the 1944-45 history of WWII (the companion volume to Retribution, the history of the Pacific War) feeds my interest in Eastern Europe and Russia these days. I just don't know what to make of "them" over there. One anecdote from last night's reading:

For fun, a soldier in Valentin Krulik's unit of the Sixth Guards Tank Army dressed himself one day in a German smock and helmet, then dashed into his section's bunker waving a Schmeisser [a German machine gun] and crying "Hande hoch" [hands up]. This was agreed to be extremely funny. But one of his comrades shot the cross-dresser before he was recognized.

Now, out of all the depravity of WWII, this is no where near the most cruel, but it is the most poignant for me. I would be that idiot dancing around in a dress with a machine gun. For that comedic genius born of desperation I would earn a bullet between my eyes.

So its the middle of winter on a giant flood plain between Poland and Germany (East Prussia, birthplace of several generations of my ancestors), you are some poor kid in a frozen wasteland in front of a professional German uber-army with a rifle to share with several other malnourished wretches from across the Soviet empire with tanks deployed behind you by Uncle Joe to mow you down if you run away. I just don't understand it. Why didn't their hearts just start beating like a hummingbird and explode from anxiety? I guess I am all the more curious because I feel like somewhere my family was caught up in the horror of it all.

Sports and Dogs

Two things that I am enjoying (at the same time, btw):

1. David Foster Wallace on sports:

It's hard not to notice the way this air of robotic banality suffuses not only the sports-memoir genre but also the media rituals in which a top athlete is asked to describe the contest or meaning of his techne.

"Kenny, how did it feel to make that sensational game-winning shoestring catch in the end zone with absolutely no I mean zero time remaining on the clock?"

"Well, Frank, I was just real pleased. I was real happy and also pleased. We've all worked hard and come a long way as a team, and it's always a good feeling to be able to contribute."

...

This stuff is stupefying, and yet it also seems to be inevitable, maybe even necessary. The baritones in network blazers keep coming up after games demanding of physical geniuses these recombinant strings of dead cliches, strings that after a while start to sound like a strange kind of lullaby, and which of course no network would solicit and broadcast again and again if there weren't a large and serious audience out here who find the banalities right and good.

All right, so the obvious point: Great athletes usually turn out to be stunningly inarticulate about just those qualities and experience that constitute their fascination.

2. Puppy attacking a weed:

Men! Hrmph!

I didn't feel like a particularly oppressed man, until I read this article by Michael Chrichton.  Now I am not so sure. Some quotes:

There is no question that men feel under attack, and psychologically beaten down. All sorts of horrible qualities are attributed to us: we are unemotional, we are brutal, we are violent, we are uncaring. ... We've been hearing this for more than twenty years. There are young men who have grown up in America who have heard nothing else.

Refuting the hard truths:

Are men inarticulate? Sure, sometimes. Expressing deep feelings is difficult, especially if you've been told—as most males have, even in our postmodern age—that to express your feelings is unmanly.

But I don't really see women able to express their feelings any better. Women like to talk about feelings, as men like to talk about football and computers. But when it comes to talking about your own feelings, I find that women suddenly stumble. In the workplace, around the dinner table, on that big date, I am not aware that a woman has an easier time expressing the hard truths: that her feelings are hurt, or something made her feel bad, or that she feels weak or sad or inadequate.

Fear of commitment:

Men won't make commitments? Let's face it: commitment is hard for anybody. ... One of the great ironies today is that women who aren't ready to settle down are doing a good thing: pursuing their careers and fulfilling themselves. Whereas men in the same situation are doing a bad thing: they’re unwilling to commit.

Men are individuals too:

It may be true that most men differ from most woman in some statistical way. But we don't have relationships with "most men" or "most women." We have relationships with individual men and women. And when we apply the group stereotype to an individual, we are guilty of prejudice.

It's no longer acceptable to talk about shiftless blacks, mincing gays, or drunken Irishmen. Why is it still acceptable to talk about intimacy-avoiding men?

Women, we may tolerate you out of necessity:

But if you don't want to live alone, you'll have to put up with another person. And that other person just isn't going to be the person you want them to be.

At least, not all the time.

That's just the way it is.

So how can it be anybody's fault?

Women--controlling, scapegoating, revengeful, tragic:

Fault-finding through male stereotyping has some unpleasant aspects that should be mentioned. The first is this: if you can adopt the position that you're inherently skilled in some aspect of relationship—say, intimacy—and the other person is inherently deficient, then you have an unbeatable position of power. The other person is always on the defensive. He will always have his hands full trying to prove he isn't the way you say he is.

This is a control dynamic.

The second is this: if both men and women have trouble expressing real intimacy, then both men and women experience tension in this area. A convenient way to get rid of that tension is to blame it on the other person. Everything would be fine if he'd just talk, or listen, or make a commitment.

This is a scapegoat dynamic.

The third is this: if you treat another person as a stereotype, he will feel it, and sooner or later he will pay you back.

This is a revenge dynamic.

The fourth is this: if you treat another person as a stereotype, you will miss a great deal of delight and richness in your association with him.

This is a tragic dynamic.

By the way, Chrichton knows his audience.  Did I mention this was originally published in Playboy magazine?  Way to stir things up.  Speaking of things that anger women, Who Stole Feminism is also on my list of things to read.

Quotes

I often want to keep track of little "stuff" I find in books or on the web--quotes I find interesting or writing samples I want to plagiarize. For example, a while ago I was reading a blog about a guy who works for a major oil company building oil and gas infrastructure on Sakhalin Island on the Pacific coast of Siberia. You don't expect to find jokes in such a place. But I found this when he described working with Russians: "In English, I was supervising a group of Russians whose enthusiasm often took the form of suicide." Lol. Copy that sucker down.  Anyway, I thought I would put it online, in part because I just want access to it when I need it.  My collection here.

If you are curious, I use this self-contained html file as a wiki. Adding on TiddlySnip in a Firefox browser let's you right-click any selection of text and adds it to that html file. Then I just wrote a small automator script on my mac to take that local file and ftp it to my hosted space. Voila!

Joseph Smith on Letter Writing

Mr. Sharp, Editor of the Warsaw Signal:

Sir - You will discontinue my paper - its contents are calculated to pollute me, and to patronize the filthy sheet - that tissue of lies - that sink of iniquity - is disgraceful to any mortal man. Yours with utter contempt,

Joseph Smith

P.S. Please publish the above in your contemptible paper.

The Joseph Smith Papers, p xxix

Ha!

"Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt."
-Herbert Hoover

Dreaming

I took a nap this afternoon and woke myself up when I said out loud: "The only aphrodisiac you will ever need is math."

Lol Quotes

From the latest episode of 30 Rock:

Liz: I'm feeling pretty drunk.
Jack: Well, it's business drunk. It's like rich drunk, either way it's legal to drive.

And (speaking of choosing a successor for NBC East Coast TV & Microwave division):

Don: You've got to choose someone you trust.
Jack: Well I guess that rules out the Federal Reserve.

TV

"However much TV you watch, watch less."

Striking A Blow for All Naturally Conceived Children Against Their Genetically Superior Overlord Brothers

"You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton: I never saved anything for the swim back." -- Ethan Hawke