"They don't got no manners"

I love the Baltimore Sun:

"Guess I won't be riding the bus in Baltimore."

--reader comment on story, website feature "Talk about it: City Bus Attack"

THE BACKGROUND:

"The Dec. 4 attack on Sarah Kreager was the first of four violent incidents this month aboard MTA buses. Two passengers on a No. 64 bus in Brooklyn were attacked by five men Dec. 10. Eight days later, a girl was stabbed in the arm on a No. 51 bus near Mondawmin Mall. And on Dec. 26, a 14-year-old boy was shot and wounded on a bus in West Baltimore."

THE INCIDENT:

"According to her account, she sat in the rear of the bus and was threatened by a teenage girl who said her friend wanted the seat. Kreager said she went to sit an another part of the bus with Ennis and said to him, "They don't got no manners," causing one of the girls to take a swing at them"

THE AFTERMATH:

"The attack on Kreager in the 800 block of W. 33rd St. led to the arrests of nine Robert Poole Middle School students. The six boys and three girls, all 14 or 15 years old, were charged as juveniles with aggravated assault and destruction of property. Kreager, who has been put in a witness protection program, suffered broken facial bones and other injuries after being punched, kicked and dragged off the bus."

THE MISCREANT'S DISCONTENT:

'Yesterday, Ronald Brown sat slumped in his sister's West Baltimore house with an electronic monitoring device attached to his ankle. Brown, one of the juveniles charged in the attack, said he is not allowed to step outside. He said a tutor comes to the house three times a week.

THE FALSE COMPANION:

The youth said he was not involved in the fight. He said the students had been laughing at Kreager because she had a black eye. He said words were exchanged between Kreager and one of the girls, but he said he did not hear what was said. Kreager's companion used a racial slur, and a brawl erupted, he said."

THE HISTORY OF BALTIMORE:

Felicia Dorsey, Ronald Brown's mother, said she is upset with how the incident has been handled. She said she was never notified that her son was at the juvenile facility until he didn't come home that night, resurrecting memories of her 3-year-old son, who was fatally shot in 1992 in East Baltimore.

THE STATE OF CIVILIZATION:

Dorsey, 49, said she had to move out of her East Baltimore home to live with her daughter in West Baltimore because she has no phone service and couldn't hook up her son's monitoring device without it.

THE MORAL OF THE STORY:

"This is too much," she said. "These kids are young and under a lot of peer pressure. I believe my child, so yes, I believe it was [Kreager's] fault."

Hell of a lot of peer pressure these days.

Also Overheard in the Parker Household

Ted: (petting Wuvvy's snout) "Wuvvy you have a beautiful muzzle."

Hal: (petting Wuvvy's legs) "And look at her furry stalks."

Overheard in the Parker Household

Hal: "Ted, give me a jelly bean."

Ted: "Never"

Hal: "Ted, where's your Christmas spirit?"

Ted: "In this bag of jelly beans."

Three Things To Do Before I Die

1. Finish Proust.

2. Heroin.

3. I guess I thought there would be a third thing.

Everybody Loves Aphorisms

1. "Intellectual engagement" -- always spoken as if it were a novelty.

2. The road to Damascus goes two ways.

3. Oatmeal is the breakfast of hypocrites. It pretends to be healthy and fibrous, but everyone I know loads that sucker up with brown sugar.

Letter to a Young Orator

It is advisable that you adopt a position of the most uncompromising and stringent severity with respect to whatever field you adopt. Whatever your expertise, dispense it with the greatest authority you can muster. Your familiars will be invigorated by your forcefulness, and your opponents, who will assuredly react by becoming the more extreme, will find their followers dismayed.

Never imagine that your crowd is naked, in their underwear, or otherwise curiously arranged. Your powers of imagination, which you ought strengthen that your rhetorical flourishes may be the more impressive, will assuredly overwhelm you, and your well-reasoned speech on human justice will devolve into a tirade against leggings.

Part your hair on the right.

Develop a slight head tilt, and your left eye should be only the slightest bit more open than your right.

An observation

On my left: Dish soap and "A History of Orgies"
On my right: The Gonzo fist symbol thing.
In front of me: A function definition I wrote, named "cumActionUtility"
Behind me: A chair covered with dissheveled clothes.
In the air: The Hives playing Declare Guerre Nucleaire

Letters to a Young Debater

1. The way to handle your opponent is you take him into the desert, you take him into the desert and you leave him there to die.

2. Jesus, kid, why are you goddamn disputatious?

3. Shut up.

That is just stupid

What does "baby," mean, anyways?

Computers are tools. A tool is measured by its effectiveness. Provided someone is able to accomplish their tasks without difficulties, and reasonably quickly, what is being "babied"?

Perhaps you are referring to Apple's penchant for what, to somoene whose eyes grew up on MS products, appear to be cutsy or somehow un-serious graphics. This is a reasonable complaint, I do in fact find a lot of things on the Mac unenjoyable to look at. But, for general artistic style, I think Mac does have the upper-hand... certainly people will 'play' with their Macs much more than with their PCs, which, while I think they have a cleaner and more useful interface, are decidedly un-fun to use.

But, again, baby? All that could possibly mean is that they let you do complicated things without exposing the complexity. But that's impossible. You can't hide the complexity of a truly complex task, if you can, then the task isn't complicated. You might, perhaps, complain that a Mac "hides" all the good stuff, and to my eye it does, but I'm sure someone who is very well acquianted with the Mac knows where to find all the appropriate system settings. And the CLI is close enough to bash that I've never had any trouble with it (or is it bash? They did get Leopard certified as a Unix, so it may well be. I dunno).

Macs Baby U

Macs baby you.

Why? They just do.

'nuff said.

Roland, blow your horn!

Recently a number of people have been talking about this article. It's good; you should read it. Every few years an article like it appears. People talk about it. Nothing happens.

One of the things mentioned in the article is how the Bush administration recently shelved virtually the entire statistics-gathering arm of its drug program. Literally and figuratively, the war on drugs has become a policy divorced from results -- whose effects, success, and failure are immaterial to its rationale.

This struck me because a number of years ago, I wrote an op/ed for the Prince (yeah I know) saying some similar stuff. Looking back it, I was amused to see some of my writerly tics in action. Tics, however, is like the understatement of the century. Let's take a look.

A sentence about Nixon's escalation of the drug war:

He wanted a comfortable and reassuring mass of facts stamped with the imprimatur of experts and organized under a hypotaxis of preconceived conclusions advocating the continuation of current policy — proscription, prohibition, punishment and propaganda.

Alliterate much? Four 'p''s in a row was, shall we say, pushing it. "Hypotaxis"? I'm guessing I had read Auerbach like the week before; the word figures prominently in his work. Hypotaxis refers to a grammatical-semantic (grammatico-semantic?) instance of subordination, typically linked by phrases like "in order to" or "although" To use it metaphorically as I did is to suggest that the ostensibly neutral nature of data-gathering was compromised by the ideological persuasion of those who wanted the data for their own preconceived, nefarious use.

It is true that smoking one joint is the carcinogenic equivalent of smoking four cigarettes (due to respiratory technique), but this also means that to duplicate the familiar metric of the pack-a-day smoker a single marijuana smoker would have to smoke five joints — a feat so rare as to be commendable.

..."a feat so rare as to be commendable." How was this published?

In the almost thousand years since Le Chanson de Roland appeared on the planet, countless things have been written and spoken about it. This is the stupidest:

The reigning prohibition of marijuana has nothing to speak for it save the aborted cries of its historical and contemporary failures — as if any abatement or discontinuation would send "the wrong message." Such thinking recalls the behavior of Roland in the 11th century French epic, "La Chanson de Roland." Under attack by vicious hordes of Moors, Roland could not bring himself to blow his famous horn whose sounding would instantly bring help. Impelled by pride and a bizarre code of honor, he delayed use of his instrument until too late, and so perished albeit bravely (albeit foolishly).

A bizarre code of honor, eh? Way to get at the essence of what motivates Roland.

And at last the stirring peroration:

It behooves us — ethically, pragmatically, medically — to legalize or decriminalize marijuana. End this unjust prohibition. Cease this absurd war. Break off this long extenuation of an abject failure. Dissipate this malign ideology. Roland, blow your horn!

I actually still really like the ending EXCEPT the sentence, "Dissipate this malign ideology." It's such a ridiculous thing to say -- I imagine a sorcerer stretching out his hand and incanting Latin as he impressively "dissipates" some dread "ideology" -- that it sort of ruins the whole thing. Dissipate is a weak word in an otherwise strong series of verbs ("end" "cease" "break off"). The Roland tie-in, though, is great -- who would have foreseen such a thing?

Why I didn't like I'm Not There

I almost never advance much of an opinion about a movie because I really don't have valid opinions about movies. But after having this movie floating around in my head, and then reading Anthony Audi's pretty solid review of it in the Nass in the Anti-Issue, I figured out what bothered me about it. Or, things that bothered me about it. The movie isn't really a single entity, nor are my gripes with it.

In short... it's not that it's bad, it's that I don't even know what it was doing. And that might have been a good thing, but it wasn't.

For instance, the tarantula crawling around Blanchett/Dylan. It's not exactly an inside joke that Dylan wrote a book called Tarantula. So what was the point of the reference? Just the visual effect of a tarantual crawling around the trendy white room in which Blanchett/Dylan is breaking down? It was cool, it worked as such... but why?

And, further, the whole Blanchett portion of the movie. She's fantastic, and it's in main good (I think the Ballad of the Thin Man montage was overwrought, but it's enjoyable), but it was weirdly and ineffectively self-referential. You have the Dylan-fanatics running around who have the songs and stories better memorized and more studied that Dylan had them, and Blanchett breaking down with the weird strain of satisfying the demands of an irrational public... ok. You could make a lot of great movies about that. But the weird thing is, isn't that exactly what this movie is? A weird, semi-obsessive, inside-jokey paean to a mythological Dylan? Or is the movie intended to be reflexive, to break down under investigation and questioning, just as it's not really the point to sit there freaking out about what the hell the hand-made blade or the child's balloon are, except precisely what they are?

But see, that's the problem. Dylan is seductive because there IS a depth to it, something brilliant and visionary and visceral in the music, the language. Blanchett's Dylan can't deal with the expectation of more, he doesn't know what the hell more there is to do, anyways. But the movie doesn't achieve that, at all, because, after all it IS a biopic. The tarantula running around on the screen is a cool image which would just be what it is, except that it's obviously also a reference to the book.

Anyways, so almost every little vignette of the movie is awesome, even the weirdness of the Richard Gere sequence, and it's extraordinarily well done (even the self-consciously over-wrought "going electric" at the Newport Folk Festival, replete with axe wielding, crazed Pete Seeger). But, in sum, what justifies the self-conscious references, the built-in absurdities? It's a biopic. It's about Dylan. But there's just not enough there.

Three Attempts at Aphorism

1. Philosophy -- the cure is worse than the disease.

2. Where there is perfume, there is syphilis.

3. Everybody loves sarcasm.

Apropos of Nothing, II

Chapter I of The Life of St. Teresa of Avila is titled,

"How the Lord began to rouse her soul in childhood to a love of virtue, and what a help it is in this respect to have good parents."

As soon as I read that it was like I felt a pang of boredom.

UPDATED: I spoke too soon. Looks like St. Teresa was feeling some "pangs" of her own.

"Beside me, on the left hand, appeared an angel in bodily form, such as I am not in the habit of seeing except very rarely. Though I often have visions of angels, I do not see them. They come to me only after the manner of the first type of vision that I described. But it was our Lord's will that I should see this angel in the following way. He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest rank of angels, who seem to be all on fire. They must be of the kind called cherubim, but they do not tell me their names. I know very well that there is a great difference between some angels and others, and between these and others still, but I could not possibly explain it. In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he pulled it out, I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is one's soul then content with anything but God. This is not a physical, but a spiritual pain, thought the body has some share in it -- even a considerable share. So gentle is this wooing which takes place between God and the soul that if anyone thinks I am lying, I pray God, in His goodness, to grant him some experience of it."

A Bittersweet Bowl of Memory

One of the canonical examples of wish-fulfillment happened when Freud observed his daughter Anna Freud, who later became an eminent psychoanalyst in her own right, cry out while sleeping, "Stwaberries. Anna Fweud. Puddin!"

In one of those leaps of brilliance at which we can only marvel, the brave scientist deduced that she was dreaming about strawberries and pudding.

When I was growing up, I had similar dreams that my family had finally purchased the "sugar cereals," as my parents called them, which I so desperately craved.

I would lie in bed thinking happy thoughts about the delicious bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch or Fruit Loops I would shortly be enjoying. Only to awake to the grim reality that it was just a dream and that there was nothing but Mueslix in this forsaken house.

Well I can buy all the sugar cereal I want now.

Sigmund died in 1939.

Eat your heart out, Anna Freud.

Three Memories by Hal Parker

[Note that this post was written as a prank by the other Hal, -HP, 2010]

1. North Carolina. Growing up in the rural western reaches of North Carolina exposed me to many of the hardships of the all but lost rural agrarian section of American society. The hard manual labor from sun-up to sun-down, grimly winning from an unyielding Earth only so much food as was absolutely necessary to feed ourselves and our livestock, and growing tobacco on every other possible inch of land. The locusts had emphysema for miles. But there were fun times, too. The locusts had emphysema.

2. Being the youngest of three brothers brought its own hardships, too. Most poignant was the time that my oldest brother told me that I killed Ma by being born and that he'd tried to treat me like a brother for all those years but he couldn't do it anymore, he just couldn't do it, and then he charged me with the rake. The rake's progress was happily arrested by the beatific vision of my mother's ghost. Or, anyways, that's how I remember it. I don't know why I was in the hospital, though. Or why I went away to school later that year.

3. I loved trains. Model trains, real trains, abandoned, rusty trains full of stray cats and pet snakes, the low pedal tone of a distant freight rumbling through the Appalachian foothills, coins flattened by a train's passing. I didn't much like the hobos, though. They would ask me funny questions, and their eyes were always a dull red, like they hadn't slept in days. Or maybe they were zombies. That would explain the time one chased me with a rusty spoon.

Three Memories by Hal Pratt

[Note that this post was written as a prank by the other Hal -- HP, 2010]

1. Evanston, IL. That's where I'm from. It's the place from which I set out and to which I may one day return. Where is Evanston? It's in Illinois, "The Corn State." When most people think of Illinois, they think, "That's the 21st state to enter the Union," but did you know we grow a great deal of corn? Soybeans, too. In my first grade class there was a picture of Abraham Lincoln on the wall. He looked so sad. As a youngling I swore I would get myself a hat like that. Years ago I saw such a hat on sale, but I didn't buy it. I had grown up.

2. The summer of 1999 was a summer of baseball and math problems. We ate corn on the cob and played with autistic children. Other stuff too, probably, but whatever. Of course not everyone ate their corn on the cob. Some people ate it on a plate with a fork, but we looked at those people askance, even the autistic kid. All in all, it was a really hot summer.

3. My favorite movie about corn? Definitely Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest. It's a bittersweet coming-of-age film about being on your own in the big city. It's a film about brotherhood and a film about America, but more than anything it's a movie about the wayward fortunes of the little vegetal bloodcult that could.

Here's a painting I made about my feelings toward the film:

Three Thoughts

1. Middlesex is a terrible book. It's a lifeless puree of Roth, Rushdie, and Marquez, and this is especially unfortunate since Eugenides' first book, The Virgin Suicides, was singularly brilliant. Middlesex takes up a challenging subject only to dispatch it in the most frivolous way possible. In my opinion, the really monstrous thing about Calliope Stephanides is not the wasteland of her insufficiently-developed genitalia, but the wasteland of her insufficiently-developed inner life.

2. Sweet potatoes are healthier and tastier than regular potatoes. Why, then, do we eat regular potatoes at all? I submit that we should make a total switch in our national diet.

3. The new advertising scheme for Herbal Essence boasts that it's, "so good it will put clean thoughts in your head." But does anyone remember the old advertising campaign with the beautiful woman in the shower washing her hair and making "orgasmic" sounds? That campaign was so good. Why on earth would they change it? It was the kind of thing for which people in the ad industry won awards and exchanged spontaneous back-slaps. The new campaign is, by contrast, reminiscent of some 19th century admonition against masturbation.

A Lichtenberg Smorgasbord

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) was, by all accounts, a pretty neat dude. A buddy of Kant and Goethe, he was an eminent physicist and mathematician, a formidable satirist and critic, and an all-around beau esprit. Kotzbue wrote a pamphlet denouncing him. Nietzsche praised him as one of the few Germans worth reading. He had many affairs. I've been reading his "Trash Notebooks" -- a collection of brilliant, cynical aphorisms in the tradition of La Rochefoucauld. The man is just pure gold. Here are some representative excerpts from the Sudelbuecher:

"I have always found that so-called bad people gain in one's estimation when one gets to know them better, and good people decline."

"There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking."

"The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it."

"Such people do not really defend Christianity, but they let Christianity defend them."

"Woe to the genius in countries where there are no earthquakes."

"Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams."

"Of all the animals on earth, man is closest to the ape."

"People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers; simply because they are unfit for any other station."

"What you have to do to learn to write like Shakespeare is very far removed from reading him."

"The metaphor is much more subtle than its inventor, and so are many things. Everything has its depths. He who has eyes sees all in everything."

This one particularly applies to precepts in my experience (Overhead in PHI 302, Girl: "I think Aristotle was kind of a snob"):

"A book is like a mirror: if an ape looks into it, an apostle is unlikely to look out."

Took me awhile to get this one:

"What leaning on your right elbow means after you have been leaning on your left for an hour."

Weird...

"Why are young widows in mourning so beautiful? (Look into it)."

I don't get it:

"She stood there beside him like an Etrurian lachrymatory, a Dresden milk-jug beside a Lauenstein beer-mug."

For Willem

"The ass seems to me like the horse translated into Dutch."
-Georg Christoph Lichtenberg