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* Reference: fun flick.
The Tiny Heart of Darkness
[I’m working on a seasonal offering with my co-blogger. But, as you can perhaps imagine, complications abound in working on anything with a gargoyle. Communication problems, for one — we’re still getting used to each other’s language. And no computer “hard”ware known is meant for handling by someone with fingers of stone and eyes incapable of focusing on anything but the vague middle distance. So in the meantime, there will probably be a couple of brief posts here — like the one below — just to keep the site at a low simmer.]
Among the many dramatic narratives playing across the pop-culture landscape of recent years, one of the most dramatic — from a certain perspective — has been the South Park saga. Not that there’s really a continuing story line (each episode stands more or less on its own), no; the “dramatic arc” such as it is comes from the tension between what the show is and does, and what the broader culture implicitly says it may say and do.
(The popular saying “pushing the envelope” seems a little lame to describe South Park. The envelope in question isn’t just being “pushed” from inside; it’s actually bulging, rippling, threatening at every moment to tear itself from the addressee’s hands.)
The chief source of this tension, as in many works of, umm, art and literature, is the antagonist. The villain. The… resident evil.
Eric Theodore Cartman.
Near-Misses: The Legend of 1900
The Missus roamed the aisles of the video store a few nights ago, not looking for anything in particular. (Which is to say, she’d ceased looking for anything in particular: it was one of those in-between times when all the “new releases” on our must-see list had already been claimed by renters with more disciplined calendars and schedules.)
Knowing me to be a fan of director Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, she brought home his 1998 English-language debut, The Legend of 1900. Which we (well, I) watched last night.
What an interesting premise, with all sorts of opportunities for metaphor and sentiment:
I Can Has Claus. Teef Too.
From the Associated Press, December 10, 2008:
Santa Claus posed with a very large kitty on his lap — and now, unfortunately, he might need rabies shots. Jonathan Bebbington was playing the jolly old elf during a Santa Paws photo event at a PetsMart store when he was bitten Sunday on the wrist and hand. The event was to raise money for Penny Angel’s Beagle Rescue group.
The cat and owner disappeared after the incident. At least one person thought it was a bobcat, said Joan Kerr, president of Penny Angel’s.
“It had absolutely huge paws, like 3 inches around,” Kerr said.
One person reported that the cat’s name was Benny.
Of course, anyone with even a nodding familiarity with common urban slang knows that benny is a nickname for the drug benzedrine. According to one description of their effects, bennies “hit users with a fast high, making them feel powerful, alert, and energized… pump up heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure, and they can also cause sweating, shaking, headaches, sleeplessness, and blurred vision… Prolonged use may cause hallucinations and intense paranoia.”
The AP story notes, drily:
The woman who brought it to the store told people there she bought the cat from a breeder in Wyoming for $1,500.
“Her last words were, ‘I have a permit and the cat has all his vaccines,'” Bebbington said.
Her last words. Right. Wanna bet that “have” wasn’t her only four-letter last word?
Some posts just write themselves…
Update, 2008-12-12: There’s been a flurry of conflicting later reports about this. One AP followup story, posted at the MSNBC site — including a video of Jonathan Bebbington, his (rather minor) wounds, and the cat itself — claimed that the cat, hallelujah, was not a bobcat after all.
Reporters for the Philadelphia Inquirer determined, specifically, that it was a special breed called a “pixie-bob” — domesticated, merely resembling a real bobcat.
Not so fast, says the Big Cat News blog:
…that is a bobcat. I have worked with bobcats for more than 20 years and have 47 of them at Big Cat Rescue. The cat is not a hybrid, not a Pixie Bob. The owner is lying. See dozens of bobcat photos for yourself at BigCatRescue.org Carole Baskin CEO of Big Cat Rescue
Pixie Bob breeders also commented at the site [where the blogger read the Inquirer story] that the cat in Santa’s lap is not a Pixie Bob.
We on the outside are left to wonder. We wonder about the cat, of course. We wonder about the cat’s owner. And we wonder what must have been running through Jonathan Bebbington’s mind when someone handed him 30 pounds of muscle, fur, fangs, and claws, and the first dog barked.
Happy Birthday, Mr. Milton
Wow — four hundred years, and (many) people still don’t even furrow their brows when you say the name “John Milton.” Most of us aspire to be remembered for one-fourth of that span, if that much.
Today, Milton’s memory is honored (if not read, exactly) principally for his epic works, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained — and, to a lesser extent, for his other poetry.
But in his time he was also something of a political gadfly. Wikipedia speaks of his “radical, republican politics and heretical religious views,” which — coming, as they did, before, during, and after the English Civil War — ensured either his popularity (during Cromwell’s Commonwealth) or his ostracism (during the monarchy).
Among the forward-thinking issues which Milton made a point of espousing was freedom of written expression (what we’d call freedom of the press, today).
“Can I Kindleize that Velveteen Rabbit For Ya?”
Like most writing and reading households, The Missus and mine has books way in excess of the available bookshelf space. We’ve lived in this house for more than eight years now, yet still — still! — somewhere around six or eight cartons and big plastic tubs of books take up space in our (mercifully dry) garage.
On the one hand, as The Missus soberly points out, we’re never going to (re-)read all the books we’ve already got. Why not donate them to Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or just sell the damn things in a garage sale or on eBay?
And yet, and yet…
In just the six or or seven months I’ve been writing here on RAMH, on probably 15 or 20 occasions I have longed to put my hands on a book. Not just any book but a specific one for a specific occasion. A book containing a quote I know, sorta, but don’t know. Or a book containing some random fact which I don’t quite have the words for.
Every one of those books is in one box or another in the garage. I know exactly what their covers look like. Frustratingly, because some of them are in big translucent plastic containers, I can actually see some of them.
(Aside to The Missus: Don’t worry. I’m not about to start rummaging. We both know what will happen: I’ll find another book I wouldn’t mind having to hand, and then another, and then another… Within a half-hour I’ll have an empty box and even less space upstairs in the office for trivial activities like, oh, say, standing and sitting.)
Wouldn’t it be nice if I had all those books on… hmm… online, maybe? or digitized and placed on a little six-inch stack of Amazon Kindles?
A recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, by James Gleick*, tackles this problem. The piece begins by discussing the woes besetting the publishing industry (writers, agents, and editors as well as the faceless corporations themselves):
The gloom that has fallen over the book publishing industry is different from the mood in, say, home building. At least people know we’ll always need houses.
And now comes the news, as book sales plummet amid the onslaught of digital media, that authors, publishers and Google have reached a historic agreement to allow the scanning and digitizing of something very much like All the World’s Books. So here is the long dreamed-of universal library, its contents available (more or less) to every computer screen anywhere. Are you happy now? Maybe not, if your business has been the marketing, distributing or archiving of books.
If you’ve spent any time at all recently looking at the blogs of editors and agents, the angst will be familiar to you. It’s rampant not just among the bloggers and other opinion leaders, but among the commenters — often writers, nearly always passionate readers — upon their opinions.
Strangely, what is at stake — driving the panicky stampede over the cliff — isn’t the future of literacy, the real linchpin of civilization. It’s the future of books.
Mr. and Mrs. WS Go for a Walk
Yesterday would have been William Shakespeare’s and Anne Hathaway’s 426th anniversary. Whew.
Per yesterday’s Today in Literature newsletter, which I’ve just got around to reading, we have this excerpt from Chapter 3 of Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works, “Richard Nye’s fictional send-up of their marriage”:
When Mr William Shakespeare asked me that idle question as to whether I desired him to compare me to a summer’s day, and I said thank you no, we were standing together on the bank by London Bridge. I say together because together is worth remark in a marriage like ours was.
Himself had been picking his nose for at least five minutes, dreaming. As for me, I was counting the heads of the traitors up there on the poles. It was cold, I might tell you….
“Winter,” my husband said suddenly.
He swept off his hat with a flourish, as if he had just discovered some important new truth. I thought he’d read my mind about the day not knowing what season it belonged to. Then, from the green spark in his eyes, I knew there was worse to come.
“Winter what?” I demanded.
“Winter you,” Mr Shakespeare said. “Anne Hathawinterway with her,” he went on, grinning. “You’re more like a day in December,” my husband concluded.
I hit him.
Well, what would you have done?
What a great exercise: inventing dialogue — a whole life — for a famous person whose biography is documented poorly, or not at all.
Thought Music
What’s the deal with music, anyway?
Why does listening to music feel so much different from listening to anything else? Why does certain music make it easier to work — and certain music make it so much harder?
I’m not talking about coarse basics like volume, or instrumental-versus-vocal music. Apply enough volume, after all, and ANY music becomes mere (or not so mere) noise. No, I’m wondering about subtleties: rhythm, pace, melody, “feel.”
For the rest of this post, if you’d like, feel free to select one of the following three audio streams as your soundtrack. (Or leave them playing in this browser window or tab while you use another to go on doing something else.) They’re all instrumental. And there’s one for each of three genres: classical, jazz, and “post-rock,” a genre I myself wouldn’t have named (which probably just proves that I know nothing consequential about music).
Note: I also tacked on a bonus track; in the course of building this post, I couldn’t stop thinking of this number. It’s much longer than the others, though — 20+ minutes instead of only around six.
The Sum of All Fears
From an article entitled “Up and Then Down,” by Nick Paumgarten, in The New Yorker‘s issue of April 21, 2008:
The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs.
The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.
White would be stuck in the elevator for 41 — forty-one! — hours. A “security” camera captured his entire stay in the Hotel Car 30. Afterwards, he managed to obtain a copy of the tape:
He has watched it twice — it was recorded at forty times regular speed, which makes him look like a bug in a box. The most striking thing to him about the tape is that it includes split-screen footage from three other elevators, on which you can see men intermittently performing maintenance work. Apparently, they never wondered about the one he was in. (Eight McGraw-Hill security guards came and went while he was stranded there; nobody seems to have noticed him on the monitor.)
Here’s the video, the whole 41 hours viewable in about three minutes:
[Read more…]
I Can Has Library?
Somewhere within the last few weeks, I read a description of a dog’s-eye (or rather, -nose) view of the world. It went something like this: As a dog crosses the living room, it is reading the Doggy Daily News.
Pretty funny.
But since I’ve now had a few months’ practice walking a very olfactorily-oriented dog up and down the street, and around the yard, I think I’ve got to sharpen the analogy a little.
Here’s the way these walks go:
- Trot out front door.
- Sniff exploratorily at front porch.
- Canter briskly up the sidewalk or, if the mood strikes you, detour across the shortcut to the driveway.
- Trot up the driveway to the street.
- Stop. Sniff the air. Look left, look right, turn around so as to look over your shoulder, turn around again.
- Toss a doggy coin and face left or right, accordingly.
- Apply nose to ground.
- Go.
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