War is a force...

For some holiday uplift, I am reading War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges. It is truly frightening because the book was published in 2002, just as BushCo was beginning to beat the lie drums for the Iraq war. Referring mostly to the first gulf war and the Balkan Wars, Hedges predicts exactly how things have gone since the book was published. All wars, even "good" ones, tend to evoke the same powerful ambivalences in those who fight them. There's less ambivalence for the armchair cheerleaders, who avidly consume the myth of war, but never see the reality. The title of the book sort of says it all, but:

In mythic war we imbue events with meanings they do not have. We see defeats as signposts on the road to ultimate victory. We demonize the enemy so that our opponent is no longer human. We view ourselves, our people, as the embodiment of absolute goodness. Our enemies invert our view of the world to justify their own cruelty. In most mythic wars this is the case. Each side reduces the other to objects--eventually in the form of corpses. [....]

The potency of the myth is that it allows us to make sense of mayhem and violent death. It gives a justification to what is often nothing more than gross human cruelty and stupidity. It allows us to believe we have achieved our place in human society because of a long chain of heroic endeavors, rather than accept the sad reality that we stumble along a dimly lit corridor of disasters. It disguises our powerlessness. It hides from view our own impotence and the ordinariness of our own leaders. By turning history into myth we transform random events into a chain of events directed by a will greater than our own, one that is determined and preordained. We are elevated above the multitude. We march toward nobility. And no society is immune (23-24).

Isn't it interesting that the religious right, who claim to have so much meaning in their lives in the form of God and Jesus and the unwavering certainty of their own goodness--that these are the people who scream loudest for war, whenever the possibility even faintly appears? I thought we atheists were the ones who pathetically had no meaning in our lives, who were dangerous because of it. (We don't think God is watching us, so we naturally are immoral; even as adults, Christians apparently do the right thing only because they fear punishment.) Yet it would seem the fanatics are the meaning-starved ones. Their religion proves inadequate; they must have blood and sacrifice (of others), and still they aren't satisfied. Will someone please, please give these peoples' lives some real meaning? And is that what W, that empty shell of a human, is really craving?

Oh, and in case you were wondering, war correspondents and the press generally don't see their role as uncovering the realities of war. Hedges, who was a war correspondent for years, points out that the press is "eager to be of service" to the myth. The fact that we're now seeing more negative reports about Iraq is a reflection of American public opinion turning against the war. The press follows the trajectory of the myth, bolstering it till they can no longer credibly do so.

I'm grateful to the many bloggers out there who have kept the press more honest in this war than perhaps in any other. Though a lot of crap has slid through the cracks, war-myth making might be harder in years to come.

Giuliani and Bozo

Al Sharpton has said of Rudolph Giuliani (paraphrasing from this week's New Yorker): "He didn't bring us together after 9-11. Our pain brought us together. We would have come together if Bozo had been the mayor." I think that's true, but I have another take. Bozo was in fact the President on 9-11, and his failure is what made Giuliani look so good. On 9-11 Trev and I were at the Alisal resort, on our honeymoon. We watched TV most of that day and waited in vain for Bush to appear and say something. Cheney did (and I remember him saying Saddam had nothing to do with it because he was "bottled up"--does anyone else remember this?). Bush, as we all know, was darting around the country on Air Force One, landing here and there like a fly on a meatloaf. Very late that night, I think around 11, he came on and gave a short deer-in-the-headlights speech that even he didn't seem impressed with (how often has that happened?). The next day he gave a lurching press conference, looking like someone had physically shoved him in front of the camera. The highly touted Bullhorn Moment at Ground Zero came quite late, and, like Giuliani, only looked good in comparison to what had come before. Meanwhile Giuliani was on camera, speaking relatively clearly and eloquently (again: relative to nothing). He literally filled a void that should not have been there. For that the country canonized him, as it soon did with Bush, just for finally showing up.

When you feel global doubt

Richard Bausch, from Off the Page: Writers Talk about Beginnings, Endings, and Everything in Between (ed. Carole Burns):

I don't teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubbornness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thing is most of the things that stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the truth as to be nearly beside the point. When you feel global doubt about your talent, that is your talent. People who have no talent don't have any doubt. And it's figuring that out and learning how to put all that stuff behind you and just do the work. Just go in and shake the black cue ball and see what surfaces.

One Punk Under God

One Punk Under God was a miniseries on the Sundance Channel about Jay Bakker, son of Jim and Tammy Faye. He's a preacher himself and founder of the Revolution church, which is in many ways the anti-PTL. Where PTL (his parents' infamous ministry) was enormous, cheesy, Disneyfied, televised, and ghastly, Revolution is low-tech and--I guess you could say--punk. In Atlanta the church met in a bar. Judging from the show, Jay Bakker's preaching seems mainly to consist of him working out his "dad" issues in front of a supportive crowd. Maybe that's what preaching is these days, or it's always that way and I just never realized it. Anyway he goes around putting stickers on lampposts that say "as Christians, we apologize for being self-righteous bastards." He decides during the course of the show to make Revolution a gay-affirming church. He's a dead ringer for David Cross, and his wife is extremely colorful--an odd inverse of Tammy Faye. He'll never bag me as a convert, but things could be worse. They mostly are.

Rosebud story

The issue of Rosebud with my story, "The Temp," is out.

Ratatouille

I finally saw this film, which sent A.O. Scott of the Times, among others, into paroxysms of praise. Never before has an animated film, etc. It's the story of a rat who dreams of being a great chef, and succeeds with the help of the goofy young garbage boy (who does the actual cooking since the rat can't, or shouldn't, use kitchen tools). Apparently the tale was sincerely uplifting to many sophisticated critics. The animation is state of the art, though marveling at how realistic something looks seems less and less like a meaningful aesthetic experience. And overall I found the movie incredibly dismaying. Pardon my Berkeleyism, but:

--There is one female in the entire film, not counting possibly a few shadowy diners who never speak. The female is an ambitious underling who expresses rage about the male-dominated world of restaurants by slinging her knives around. (Male viewers laugh nervously and knowingly.) She is supposed to be great at her work, but her role in the film is to step aside while the rat-and-boy team climb to the top in a matter of weeks. There are no female rats in the entire large "clan." Maybe the filmmakers thought this was a compliment of sorts, but note this: both the garbage-boy, Linguini, and the rat-chef Remy are motherless. Linguini's mother is dead; I don't remember what happened to Remy's mother, if it's even explained. Yes, that's the usual Disney Bambi terror/fantasy, but the overall impression is that the filmmakers like this boy's world just as it is.

--The villain in the film is a dark-skinned North African type. There is one other dark-skinned cook in the kitchen who plays a minor role, and all the other humans are white. Yes, I hope we've moved beyond the tentative Deep-Space-Nine Star-Trek-Enterprise universes, where the writers are so afraid of offending that the black characters are not only moral paragons, they have no personality whatsoever. But in an animated film, skin color is a very specific technical choice. They are not working with a specific actor's appearance, but assigning the exact appearance they want to the character. Villain = dark person with heavy accent.

--It goes without saying that the "good" people have American accents, and the "bad" people have either English or French accents. The film is set in Paris and all the characters are supposed to be French. (The female love interest does sound vaguely French, but we've already dealt with the fact that she's female and therefore second-class. She can afford to have an accent.)

--Finally (as Trev pointed out) several characters insist over and over again on the most important moral principle in the world: Do Not Steal. Not even if you're starving can you steal a chunk of bread. It is OK to kidnap and tie up the dark-skinned man and the health inspector and throw them in a closet. But Do Not Steal, especially from companies; it is Wrong. So don't even think of illegally downloading or copying any Disney products, kids.

If this movie is our current inspirational message to the young, I'd say we have gotten exactly nowhere since the 50s. The progress in animation technique may even serve to disguise the retrograde message--and it is a message, believe me.

Compulsive revising

How do novelists stop themselves from endlessly revising the beginning pages of their novels? I gather this is a fairly common problem. By nature beginnings get more work since they're around the longest, and you see novels that seem better crafted in the beginning and more scattered as they go on. However if you aren't all the way through a first draft, as I am not, revising makes little sense. It's likely I will end up throwing out the beginning, or cutting off the diving board, as someone said at the Tin House workshop a few years ago. But how can I stop? Do I really need to open a new file every day, as I've tried in the past, so I can't look back at what I've written? Should I take what I have so far off the computer and store it on disk in the Nevada desert? Here's the thing: I still feel I need to understand what happens in the beginning before I can write what happens next. The rewriting is part of figuring out the characters' motivations. But maybe I can figure those out as I move forward, and revise the beginning later. Perhaps I don't trust that I will remember how things have changed, so I feel I have to go back right away. But then things change again, and the beginning gets messier and messier and covered with claw marks. So I am actually not even making the beginning better, let alone progressing.

I'm afraid of finishing. That's it! I'm afraid of finishing and finding out I have a disaster on my hands.

The Poetry of the Universe

I bought this book by Robert Osserman years ago at a used book store and finally started reading it on the plane to Cleveland last week. It is wonderful. For the first time, I feel I am starting to "get" spherical geometry. Not that I could do any calculations or anything, but Osserman explains it by starting with the basic problem of map-making: there's no way to make a two-dimensional map that is not distorted; the issue is how best to manage the distortion for the purposes of the particular map. He then translates this problem into mapping four-dimensional space using three dimensions. Apparently Dante's "map" of the earthly vs. heavenly spheres uses pretty much the same idea as the mathematical "hypersphere." If Osserman can even begin to get this across to a spatial illiterate like me, he must be onto something.

I wonder what would happen if math teachers taught this book or a similar one, along with the usual calculations and story problems. The students could read a chapter and they could discuss it for a half hour once a week or something. I understand there's no time in the high school classroom for this sort of thing, but it would be great. I never cared about figuring out when two trains would pass each other--but learning that I could use math to understand how the universe works would have hooked me a lot more.

Chancellor May

Congrats are in order once again to Brian May, who's now a university chancellor.
h/t to Amy

Props to the NYT

For vegetarian Thanksgiving recipes. I'm going to try this one for sure, the Pumpkin, White Bean, and Kale Ragout. I know from my experiments combining Vegan with a Vengeance and Tassajara Cookbook recipes that white beans and kale are great together, and you can't go wrong adding butternut squash or pumpkin. The ingredient list is in the middle range, not quite the 40,000 typical of NYT recipes (and Tassajara).

Here's another one from the same article, Curried Lentils with Sweet Potatoes and Swiss Chard. I've come a long way from the days I swore I could never be a vegetarian because all they ate was lentils, which reminded me of guinea pig food. The fact that I have a very strong sense of what guinea pig food tastes like might give you pause. But this recipe sounds good too.

I'm not so sure about the Corn Bread and Broccoli Rabe Strata, especially because of the "resting."

Anyway, good on the NYT.

Meteor shower

Trev and I went to Sea Ranch last weekend and scored the best room in the house--top floor, corner, with a 180 degree view of the ocean. We watched the Leonid meteor shower from the comfort of our window seats (Trev woke me up at 5 a.m., after it stopped raining, but I was surprisingly polite). We also watched the stars fade into daytime. It was somehow comforting to be reminded that they're always there.

Writers' strike

Joss Whedon has a great post up about the writers' strike and why it matters. And the guy really can write.

Strikeforce

Last Thursday Trev and I were sitting in our favorite "family restaurant" (it calls itself a "creperie" but has nachos and the occasional screaming kid), waiting for our clothes to dry at the laundromat next door. I reading Anthony Grafton's article on the library of the future in the New Yorker, when my eye was drawn to the television over the bar. A shirtless, heavily tattooed man was dancing under a spotlight. I thought it was some kind of dance-contest show, but then the man trotted down a ramp into a large octagonal ring surrounded by a chain-link cage. Another man appeared from the opposite direction, and the two of them started punching and then kicking each other in the head. I put Grafton down.

I studied karate for four years before destroying my ankle. These guys seemed to have some technique. Apparently they were engaged in a practice called Strikeforce, which I learn from Wikipedia is "an American professional kickboxing and mixed martial arts promotion based in San Jose, California." (At the time I thought that might just be the name of the company that made the mat.) The bout ended quickly, though I don't quite remember how, and then another bout started with two new heavily tattooed guys. These guys immediately went to the floor, wrapped their arms and legs around each other, and sort of scootched around the mat. Eventually the ref separated them, then they did the same thing again. They looked like a couple of brothers fighting, or a couple of drunks, as Trev said. It was impossible to tell whether they knew how to fight. The effect was hilarious and boring at the same time, suggesting that if no holds are barred, skill becomes irrelevant, and/or aesthetics goes out the window. Or perhaps they were really fighting. My karate teacher told us about a real fight that broke out during a sparring competition. The guys immediately dropped all their fancy training and started windmilling and slapping each other.

What does this mean for the library of the future?

Is Star Trek a religion?

Trev thinks so. Consider:
--It has dieties (it is probably polytheistic).
--It has rituals (conventions, role-playing games).
--It has relics and iconography.
--It has sacred texts (the original series, maybe Next Generation).
--Many Trekkers have formed groups that engage in social activism.
--All are welcome, misfits fit in.
--It has a utopian vision for humankind's future.

I would argue that Star Wars, while more blatantly religious, is not a religion, though it borrows from another one. The Force is just warmed-over California Buddhism. And I don't think Star Wars inspires in the same way.

When pondering this question you may wish to view the film Trekkies. (I notice Blogger underlines Trekkies as a misspelling, but not Trekkers. Interesting.) We first saw Trekkies at the Tanforan Theater in South SF, years ago. I don't know if it still exists; back then it was in post-apocalyptic decline, with upturned buckets of popcorn in the bathroom and drifts of it in the aisles. Not only did your shoes stick to the floor, they came off when you tried to lift your feet. The projectionist started screening the wrong movie, then the aspect ratio was off so everyone looked like an ET; finally they got the film going but never centered it on the screen and all the informative text (like who was speaking) was cut off. It was perhaps the greatest movie-going experience of my life.

Robot patient

If Sherry Turkle is right, that we attach to what we nurture, how do the nursing students feel about this? Also in the works: the first robot birth.

h/t Natalie.

You can never get away from yourself

From Constantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares:

Do you expect an actor to invent all sorts of new sensations, or even a new soul, for every part he plays? How many souls would he be obligated to house? On the other hand, can he tear out his own soul, and replace it by one he has rented, as being more suitable to a certain part? Where can he get one? You can borrow clothing, a watch, things of all sorts, but you cannot take feelings away from another person. My feelings are inalienably mine, and yours belong to you in the same way. You can understand a part, sympathize with the person portrayed, and put yourself in his place, so that you will act as he would. That will arouse feelings in the actor that are analogous to those required for the part. But those feelings will belong, not to the person created by the author of the play, but to the actor himself.

Never lose yourself on the stage. Always act in your own person, as an artist. You can never get away from yourself. The moment you lose yourself on the stage marks the departure from truly living your part and the beginning of exaggerated false acting. Therefore no matter how much you act, how many parts you take, you should never allow yourself any exception to the rule of using your own feelings. To break that rule is the equivalent of killing the person you are portraying, because you deprive him of a papitating, living, human soul, which is the real source of life for a part. (Trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. Italics in original.)

The Cleveland Indians

So I see that the Indians blew a 3-1 lead in the playoffs amid news that one of their pitchers is turning into a cow. My father would have been beside himself.

Someday I will have to write about growing up as an Indians fan. I remember going to a game on my birthday, watching the Indians pitching staff walk fourteen Detroit Tigers to the sarcastic applause of the 3000 or so fans. (The old Municipal Stadium held 80,000.) When the pitcher finally threw a strike, the crowd booed, but the catcher leaped up and pumped his fist--see, you can do it, he was saying. But that wasn't true.

The short story -- dead or sleeping?

A thoughtful response to Stephen King's recent laments on the short story, by Jean Thompson.

Their book deals ruined their lives

I don't know if I should be happy or sad about this.

It also says blogging is the literary equivalent of living in a trailer.

h/t Sara.

Bad Buddhist

I have not meditated in weeks, at least not on the zafu. I think it's because I've been doing yoga nearly every day instead (with my revered Rodney Yee DVD). Yoga is more fun. It also has the additional benefit of being exercise, which means one is multitasking, therefore not really meditating but doing the opposite. But because, in yoga, one has to fully concentrate on, say, not falling on one's head while doing a backbend, the mind clears wonderfully. Whereas if one is "just" sitting, one has to listen to the unending stream of annoying mental chatter that one has yet to let go of or thin out in any significant way. Of course having this goal of getting rid of the chatter is non-Zen.