I’m always a bit surprised by the amount of detail which some people are willing to divulge about their personal lives on the Net. The Date Project is a case in point. It’s a blog about a guy who is looking for love. I haven’t delved too much into this particular site, but the guy seems interesting. Of course, if he proves to be a fascinating blogger, do we wish for his quest to go unfulfilled — that he never find love — so the blog keeps going? Hmmmm….
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POETICAL EXCURSION #4
“The Measures Taken”, by Erich Fried (1921-1988).
The lazy are slaughtered
the world grows industrious
The ugly are slaughtered
the world grows beautiful
The foolish are slaughtered
the world grows wise
The sick are slaughtered
the world grows healthy
The sad are slaughtered
the world grows merry
The old are slaughtered
the world grows young
The enemies are slaughtered
the world grows friendly
The wicked are slaughtered
the world grows good
(Michael Hamburger, trans. From World Poetry.)
German poet Erich Fried was an Austrian Jew who fled that country following the Anschluss in 1938 after his father’s beating death by the Gestapo. Fried eventually became a prominent Socialist, and he also became a prominent figure in Germany’s anti-war movement during the Viet Nam era. This particular poem strikes me as being fairly relevant today as War reasserts itself as a force in human affairs. Fried uses the word “slaughtered” over and over, allowing its connotations to give the lie to the central idea behind war — i.e., that by making war on that which we consider undesirable the world will necessarily be better as a result. A “slaughter” implies a very messy affair, a certain ugliness. Consider a battlefield drenched in blood, cities demolished by bombing, rampant disease and starvation that seem to follow such devastation — all these are suggested by the word “slaughter”. Fried is telling us that war, by itself, never makes the world “industrious”, “beautiful”, “wise”, or anything else. Agree or disagree with Fried’s anti-war position, this poem is still an elegant summation of that position.
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A few offerings today from Slate:
:: This article on the worst nightmare that can befall a cat person: the acquisition of a dog.
:: This interesting analysis of the term “homeland”, which found its way into the American lexicon almost instantly following 9-11-01.
:: An obituary for Lew Wasserman, once head of Universal Studios, that is refreshing in that it blames someone other than George Lucas for the rise of the Hollywood blockbuster.
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So that’s it, then: the Mets have exacted revenge on Roger Clemens for his beaning of Mike Piazza (and later throwing a chunk of broken bat at him) two years ago. Mets pitcher Shawn Estes threw behind Clemens on his first at-bat (“My pitch got away from me,” he deadpanned) and then he actually homered off Clemens, the first pitcher to ever homer off the Rocket. Piazza, too, got into the act by hitting his own home run. So, now the Mets have officially gotten even with Clemens; maybe they can focus on something more important. Like, possibly, getting back into the NL East race now that the hated Braves have surged into their customary first-place spot.
(And the Pirates? Their stats are terrible, and though they’re hovering just below the .500 mark, I keep waiting for the shoe to drop.)
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This site appears to be featuring interesting commentary on Star Wars. At the very least, it makes for a nice antidote to the TalkBacks going on at AICN, where even the TalkBack devoted to the new Scooby Doo movie degenerated almost immediately into a series of ventings by people who hated Attack of the Clones. (Incidentally, the most prolific anti-AOTC poster on AICN right now is an individual who openly admits that he hasn’t even seen the film. Why devote so much mental energy to expressing hatred for a movie you haven’t even seen?! Surely there is some landmark psychological research waiting to be done on the mind of the lunatic fanboy.)
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Here is a blog that I discovered (well, actually Sean discovered it) that seems kind of interesting, and here are the author’s musings on the Statehood Quarters now that two-fifths of them have been issued. I agree with him that the Connecticut quarter is the best thus far, although I also love the Virginia design (the ships landing at Jamestown), the Tennessee design (musical instruments, in keeping with Nashville’s country scene and the Memphis blues scene), New Hampshire’s quarter (the “Old Man of the Mountain”), and the Vermont design (maple trees being tapped for syrup). I, too, find it odd that many of the states seem to be taking a “safe way out” by putting their state outline on their quarter, but in my own state’s defense, New York actually put a relief map of the state on the quarter, with a line cutting through the state demarking the Hudson River/Erie Canal. We didn’t just go for a simple outline, like our neighbors in Pennsylvania did.
By the way, will the District of Columbia get a quarter?
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A few miscellaneous links collected from some weekend Websurfing:
:: This article, from the New York Times, is about the current prevalence of fantasy films and the mainstream acceptance of fantasy that the glut of these films demonstrates. (Registration with the NYT is required to read their online content, but the registration process is quick and free.)
:: The MSN article about last week’s discovery of an apparently Jupiter-like planet in another solar system.
:: An intriguing new blog about food in New York City.
:: One blogger’s experiment with twenty-one consecutive days of posting about the front-page content of People Magazine‘s website.
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IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Freestyle motocross rider Caleb Wyatt, failing in one of his attempts to land a successful backflip.
I was checking baseball standings and whatnot online, and I saw this headline: “First motocross backflip completed”. Saying to myself, “Now there’s something I should have a look at”, I followed the link to the story and found this picture of one of Wyatt’s unsuccessful attempts at this particular feat. I know nothing whatsoever about the world of motocross, but I couldn’t resist a picture of a guy and a bike flying through the air toward a large pile of dirt.
(Click on the image for the article, which also contains a video clip.)
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It’s that time of year again: when the “Year’s Best” of short fiction begin appearing. The first of these, Year’s Best SF 7 edited by David Hartwell, is out now. Hartwell’s Year’s Best Fantasy 2 should appear sometime soon as well. Hartwell’s is one of the two big “Year’s Best” series; the others being Gardner Dozois’s annual The Year’s Best Science Fiction (the nineteenth annual edition of which will arrive in July) and my favorite, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow (the fifteenth of which should appear in August). These four books provide the best annual snapshot of the state of speculative and dark fiction in general — plus they yield tons of good reading.
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Sean posted a link to an interesting story about one possible means of future Martian exploration: a flying-wing style glider that would coast about the Martian atmosphere, landing in scientifically-interesting places and dropping small, mechanized experiments to the ground below. The article can be found here. I’m interested in two things about this project: first, is the Martian atmosphere sufficiently thick for the flying wing to generate enough lift to fly? And secondly, what will be done about the violent sandstorms that frequently wrack the Martian surface?