Month: August 2003

Roger, Houston. Entering blackout now. Catch you on the flip-side.

As noted, this is my last day of posting until next Monday. (Yes, I’ll be posting on Labor Day. That’s so all you disgusting people with jobs fine working citizens have something to read at work on Tuesday.) I’m not going anywhere special; in fact, I’m not even abstaining from the computer. I’ll be checking e-mail and reading all the blogs I usually read. I’m simply taking a breather from generating new material for this place. However, the fact that there will be no new material here for the next four days in now way absolves you all, my Constant Readers, from the responsibility of loading this page at least once a day just to keep my hits from dropping through the floor. And yes, I watch these things like a hawk. Don’t fail me again. (insert sound of Vader-breathing here)

But, if you all really need some added incentive, here are some links to some fascinating stuff from the archives, selected from roughly a year ago to the time when we left Syracuse. (Fascinating to me, anyway. At any given moment, I feel one of only two emotions toward my own writing: loving fascination, and outright horror.) There are the Notable Dispatches over in the sidebar, and for random browsing, many of the Images of the Week are still functional (i.e., not suffering from link-rot).

(It occurs to me that I should look into the archives of some of the more recent bloggers I’ve discovered. There tends to be a lot of good stuff, languishing on some server at Pyro or Hosting Matters or wherever, only memorialized as a list of date-ranges in someone’s sidebar. So, if you find someone you like, look through their archives! And I’ll do the same.)

Writing and Procrastination

It’s All In The Details, part one

How I Remember 9-11-01 (Written on 9-11-02. I actually like everything I posted on that day; I chose everything for thematic effect.)

My Essential Reference Library

Syracuse: The Experiment Begins (My God, how distant that day now seems, and it’s not even a year later.)

Writing: When It Sucks

Review: Alan Jay Lerner’s The Street Where I Live (This book has the single greatest first sentence I have ever encountered, and that includes A Tale of Two Cities.)

It’s All In The Details, part two (I should get back to doing these, especially since I’m watching a lot more movies these days.)

Where the Hell I Get My Ideas

War Thoughts from Way Back When

A Proposal for Addressing the Shortage of Military Buglers

Fantasy: the Genre of Champions

French Impressionism in Music, Reconsidered

Thoughts on The Grapes of Wrath

Russian Romantic Composers: Part One, Part Two

My Fair Lady: An Appreciation

The Kennedy Center Honors: Who’s next?

Movies With Great Last Lines

Pauline Kael and the Critical Quest for “Objectivity”

Review: Spiderman

Big Chain Bookstores Kick Ass

Review: The Two Towers

Roll On, Columbia.

Post-Super Bowl Thoughts and NFL-2002 Redux

More on Columbia

Weirdest Job Interview Ever!

Events I Recall With Startling Clarity

Great Romantic Scenes from the Movies

How Dare SDB Hate Attack of the Clones, part one and part two. (BTW, I should retract my speculation about SDB’s approach to fiction and movies and such. Clearly I was wrong there. But on nothing else. Harumph.)

Why Do the Bad Guys Get All the Great Lines?

Digital Distribution of Art

Theme Restaurants Kick Ass, Too

Recipe: Pastitsio (Greek Lasagna)

Listening to Music: A Lost Art

Attack of the Presidents: Part One, Part Two, Part Three. (This series of posts, about a couple of comedic aliens who thought that the fictional US Presidents they saw on Earth TV and movie broadcasts were actual heads of state on our planet, was never completed because I couldn’t figure out how to incorporate President David Palmer of 24 into it correctly, and it kind of fell by the wayside.)

My Favorite Things, as of this past April.

That’s probably enough for now. I’ll come up with another such list next time I take a break. Aside from that, have a fine Labor Day Weekend, everyone. Drive safely, drink responsibly, and never go up against a Sicilian when Death is on the line!

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

A gilded dragon from the Tang Dynasty, China, (A.D. 618-906).

The dragon, central to many mythologies worldwide, is particularly important to Chinese mythology. I found this gilded figure quite striking. (From China the Beautiful.)

(I wasn’t going to do an Image this week, but I figured Aaron would complain.)

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I know that everyone’s buying the Two Towers DVD over the last couple of days. It seems like every store within a ten-mile radius that I’ve seen has some kind of great deal on the thing, from rebates if you buy the movie and an eight-pack of Duracell batteries to a deal at BlockBuster where you get the movie and five free rentals to boot, which is something like a $50 value. My approach? I’m just going to wait until the movie’s been out for a month or so, and then I’ll just grab one of the cheap-o previewed copies when BlockBuster or one of the other local rental outlets starts ditching them. So there. (This approach only works, though, for the BIG new releases. Smaller-run items, like anime DVDs, aren’t stocked in sufficient quantity at BlockBuster to show up on the “previewed” racks. C’est la vie.)

Oh, and here’s what’s wrong with the music industry: film music compact discs are often quite a bit more expensive than the DVDs which contain the films themselves. Ridiculous.

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According to Lynn, every Democrat at next year’s National Convention should be locked in the hall so Bill Whittle’s latest essay, a screed on responsibility, can be read to them. Well, fair enough…but only if Republicans similarly agree to hear David Neiwert’s magnificent Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism. I won’t hold my breath.

I have mixed feelings on Bill Whittle. He is a good writer, in the sense that he’s very good with words with a special flair for employing metaphor to illustrate his points. (His high point, for me, was the essay about courage and the shuttle Columbia. Aside from a predictable and dull section about why liberals are wrong about America, that essay was superb and, in its last section, utterly haunting. I still re-read it once in a while.) As an essayist, though, I find him to be really unfocused. The metaphors are always engaging, always fascinating; but when he shifts gears into his meat-and-potatoes, he basically derails into the same basic anti-liberal ranting that’s been the standard fare for folks like Rush Limbaugh, Dennis Prager and all the rest over the last decade. So whenever Whittle comes up with a new essay, I find myself enjoying and attentively reading the metaphoric stuff; but then he inevitably gets to “What’s wrong with liberals/leftists”, and then I shift to skimming, because really, I’ve heard and read it all before. (Especially the opening bit here, where he indulges in the usual “My side is diverse and fascinating, whereas the other side is monolithic and hates us all” bit.)

Aside from the weirdos at Democratic Underground, I know of few people on the liberal side who actually hold the simplistic set of beliefs that Whittle keeps attacking. This reduces a lot of what he says to strawman status: he keeps refuting points no one is making, or if someone is making them, they are not representative of any rank-and-file of the left of which I am aware. Consider his attack on Deconstructionism. Now, I am no expert on that subject, but I suspect that I know at least as much about it as Whittle does (I’ve actually read some Derrida, frex), and it’s a more complicated discipline and set of ideas than he lets on. The fact is, there are forces at work in a given author’s writing that the author might not even be aware of. It happens all the time. Can the idea be taken too far? Clearly…but it’s not something to be dismissed in three paragraphs. This reminds me of one time I was listening to Rush Limbaugh ranting on about the left’s adoration of moral relativism – – which doesn’t exist, but never mind – – and he cited as an example a Hindu religious text, the Bhagavad Gita. The only way that the Bhagavad Gita can be taken as professing moral relativism is if one hasn’t read it, or anything about it.

This, ultimately, is the overwhelming impression I get of Bill Whittle: he’s not a man arguing against liberals. He’s a man arguing against what he’s been told liberals believe by others. He also happens to do this very well, which is why he has a large following.

It occurs to me, in the end, that Bill Whittle is not an essayist, as much as he calls himself one. He is basically a preacher, and what he is writing are not essays but sermons. There’s not a thing wrong with that. Preachers can crystallize things and frame them in interesting ways, and the sermon is an amazingly old and rich literary form. I’ve heard many a boring Christian preacher, but I’ve also heard a number of them who were able to illustrate Christianity through words that made me think of things in new light. Maybe not convincing, but new. That’s Whittle’s strength. The problem is, he doesn’t stick with what he’s really good at; instead, he starts with it and then wanders off into territory that’s well-mined and well-established and well-explored. When that happens, the only people who will be moved are the already-faithful. Lynn says she finds it hard to imagine anyone reading a Bill Whittle essay all the way through and not being completely convinced. This seems to be suggesting that he needs the weight of a lot of words and metaphors to convince, because he lacks arguments, but I don’t think that’s what Lynn is getting at. For myself, I find it hard to imagine anyone reading one of Whittle’s essays all the way through and being convinced unless they were convinced already.

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Greatest headline EVER!

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Kevin Drum ruminates a bit about the NASA bureaucracy, which was fingered today as the main culprit behind the Columbia disaster. I think he raises an interesting question: Is NASA’s “culture” really significantly worse than any other large-scale, bureaucratic-type of “culture”? Or does it only seem that way, because when NASA goes awry, the poor results tend to be rather spectacular? I don’t know, really. But I do have to consider that of the many, many spaceflights we have executed, only three have resulted in fatalities to the astronauts, and one of those took place on the launchpad. (Hell, was the Apollo 1 fire even a mishap during launch, or were those three men merely doing a kind-of “dry run”? I’ll look this up later.)

Now, I do think that the Columbia disaster points out some shifts in philosophy that need to be made by NASA — not away from human spaceflight, but toward maybe actually coming up with new ships once in a while. I’m just guessing here, but I somewhat suspect that we could have come up with a better, and safer, launch vehicle than the shuttle at some point in the last 25-plus years.

I recall one of the several good lines in the movie Armageddon (yes, it had a few, as bad as the thing on the whole might have been): when the oil-rig workers are strapped in and awaiting lift-off, someone says something like, “Hey, we’re all trusting our lives and the whole planet to two machines that were built by the lowest bidder!” And I also think of how, whenever we see someone struggling with a task that shouldn’t require that much struggling, a common metaphor is rocket science, as in, “Hey, this ain’t rocket science! It’s not that hard!” So, it seems to me that maybe we should try to limit the histrionics when something bad happens to the people who actually are doing rocket science.

(Oh, and here’s another linguistic complaint: I hate the use of the word “culture” in the above context. It’s another appropriation of a word by the business-and-bureaucrat community to elevate something to higher importance than it should have.)

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I just checked the Realms of Fantasy slush-list to see if maybe the story of mine that’s in their possession has been read yet, and apparently, it hasn’t. That’s not terribly surprising. What is disconcerting is that apparently the slush-reader left some manuscripts in someone’s car. Aieee!

(BTW, for those wanting a numerical illustration of the odds one comes up against in writing fiction, drop down to the numbers on the lefthand side of the page. The current batch represents 301 submissions, of which 7 have been held for further consideration. Not purchased, mind you — just held for later. I must be insane.)

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Apparently, I’m not the only one with Frank Lloyd Wright on the brain. Lynn comments as well, and she’s responding to yet someone else. There seems to be a big disconnect between Wright’s apparent view of buildings as “walk-through sculpture” and the more general, public view of buildings as, well, places for stuff to happen, whether it’s lives being lived, business being done, or art being shown. From what I know about Wright (and that, really, isn’t much), he didn’t seem to consider function much in his designs.

But I still enjoy looking at his buildings.

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Dennis the Dastardly responds today to a checklist of things women think about men, or some such thing. I don’t have much comment of my own, basically because I think everybody’s full of crap.

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Continuing my tour through the wonderful world of Women Whose Toilets Britney Is Not Fit To Scrub, I find the luminous Kate Hudson.

Hudson was the best thing about the movie How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, a piece of pure sit-com fluff which somewhat captivated me nonetheless on the basis of the way Hudson glows whenever she was onscreen. And there’s one scene in which she takes a big bite out of a sandwich that….oh, never mind….

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