Is that the sound of dueling banjos I hear?

Thanks to Chris for pointing out the outrage du jour, Human Events Online's list of the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries. A list which features, among others, Das Kapital, The Feminine Mystique, and Dewey's Democracy and Education. Chris has posted his own counter-list, which includes both the OT and NT.

Andrea notes that if you include Human Events' "honorable mentions" the list becomes really a great summer reading list that could easily be mistaken for a Great Books course syllabus.

Conversation snippet

Andrea: Apple is now moving to Intel processors, did you see that?
Me: Really?? Wow, the Mac people must all be wearing black armbands.
Andrea: They're getting into the bathtub with their laptops.

Synecdoche

One of the reasons I wanted to come to DC right now is that I have a 16 year-old niece who has been struggling (my extremely euphemistic way of describing how life is going for her right now).

Yesterday morning she left to go on the road with the traveling carnival.

I was happy to be informed that she brought her journal with her. I look forward to the future memoir: My Years as a Teenage Carny. Sometimes that's the best you can hope for from life--good fodder for future art. (I come by it honestly; that's all I'm trying to say.)

Mid-flight realization

Flying from Ft. Lauderdale to DC last night, I was seated next to a couple I can only refer to as "typical Washingtonians." They were clad in those studied casual clothes--currently stylish in a preppy way. The woman's handbag had to have run at least $500, and they were both sucking water out of those nipple bottles that disturb me a great deal. The woman was reading Money magazine (and Body and Shape) and the man was reading Men's Health. I was reading a book on oral history research practices and thinking about how Washington and Wall Street are the only two places on earth where they can even sell copies of Money magazine to women (okay, you can slam me for that comment, but it does seem true to me). In LA, after all, the distinction between money and shape/body is obscure at best.

So yes, they were reading their magazines. Woman began doing the word search on the children's puzzle page of the airline magazine. Man was correcting her work and helping her over her shoulder. "Doesn't that look like an 'o' to you?" I moved on to the NYT crossword puzzle and tried not to feel bitter about the distribution of wealth.

Woman began menu planning, showing Man recipes for low-fat salads (sigh) running in side-bars to the Cabo vacation ads, as they both moved from nipple water to bloody marys with gin.

A snippet of conversation:
Woman: We definitely need to tip the dog sitter since she came through at the last minute.
Man: Hmm.
Woman: And I think we should think about the whole dog thing again.
Man: Hmm?
Woman: I mean, we said we weren't going to let having a dog get in the way of living our lives.
Man: But you want children.
Woman: That's an entirely different matter.

This was the point that I realized people in LA are really no more shallow than people in DC. They are just differently shallow. And they own it better.

Love is the drug....cont.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the news that love affects the brain like drug addiction is getting international attention (thanks to S for the link). Australia's Fairfax Digital opens their story with a reference to Emily Dickinson, a choice that would get my attention, as an American lit PhD, under any circumstances, but one that seems even more striking in the face of this weekend's NYT fruitfly story hook:

When it strikes, romantic love can feel like a kind of madness. Infatuated people act irrationally. They lose concentration. They feel giddy, wretched and wonderful. It is one of life's most powerful experiences. Emily Dickinson described it as "a perfect--paralysing bliss--contented as despair".

For centuries, we've looked to philosophers and poets to parse the mysteries of the human heart. Now it is science's turn.

When Dr Helen Fisher, of Rutgers University in New Jersey, reads the Dickinson poem, she sees passion, certainly. But she also detects signs of high levels of dopamine in the poet's caudate nucleus.

And here, of course, they lose me. God help those scientists with their understanding of Dickinson's caudate nucleus. It must suck to go through the world seeing things through that particular lens.

The story's close?

Because, as Peanuts' Charlie Brown said: "Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love."

Kudos to any journalist who manages to open with Dickinson and close with Charlie Brown I say.

I know I should quit smoking

I'm not trying to make allowances for a bad habit that is a social annoyance--I'm really not--but I do want to point out that there's something wrong with security policy that allows you pack an unloaded gun in your luggage but not a lighter. You know?

I am in Fort Lauderdale airport, on my way to DC. Despite a glacially slow connection, the presence of free wireless in the terminal is probably keeping me from potentially actionable choices on my part. I have been here too long. (It's hard to plan a sensible itinerary when you don't know the event schedule until you get there.) It is also a very lucky turn of events that the small child who was singing "I've been working on the railroad" over and over and over and over in a monotone voice while hanging upside down on the chair in front of me (chin toward the ceiling, small almond eyes fixed on me typing) has been removed by some beneficent adult.

I would say something brilliant about the news, but the connection is so slow that trying to access anything worth reading is more frustration than it's worth. I'm sure everything continues to be messed up in predictable ways. I'll read the paper on the flight after which time maybe I'll have something more profound and less whiny to say.

Two random observations from Florida

1. You know it's humid when post-it notes don't really work.

2. It's not really a compliment if you have to say to someone, "That's a compliment." As in, "You remind me so much of Nancy Kulp [who played Jane Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies]. That's a compliment" (I am only slightly molified by the fact that she was the first out lesbian on TV.)

Update: In retrospect, I think that the Jane Hathaway comment was sort of like the queer version of "Are you a friend of Bill W?"

96 tears and 96 eyes

I have it on good authority (Mike) that this was the lead paragraph in a front-page NYT story today:

When the genetically altered fruit fly was released into the observation chamber, it did what these breeders par excellence tend to do. It pursued a waiting virgin female. It gently tapped the girl with its leg, played her a song (using wings as instruments) and, only then, dared to lick her--all part of standard fruit fly seduction.

After that sensational, opening, the story goes on to say that the fruitfly in question (the licker not the lickee) was, however, not a boy fruitfly but a girl fruitfly who had been "artificially endowed with a single male-type gene" (the lickee being a non-genetically modified girl fruitfly). And so, the researchers are arguing, sexual orientation should be seen not as a political matter, but a genetic one, since at least in fruitflies, it is the purview of our genetic code.

Putting aside the intellectual angles here (since it is 1:30am in Florida and I have to be up in a few hours), I just want to say that I think it's pretty noteworthy that the Times is telling us about lesbian fruitfly licking on its front page.

Also, let me say it is very humid in Florida.

Okay I have to go to bed. Enough about the playahs of the fruitfly world.

You can't be neutral on a moving train

I was going to title this post "Why I am not a Clinton Democrat," but that seemed too deceptive since I'm not really a Democrat at all. I mean, I'll vote for whomever they run in 2008. I have commented here more than once that I would have voted for Socks if he ran against W--and frankly, I might prefer Socks to the Other Clinton, but hey, I'll hold my nose and do it.

In any case, here are some excerpts from Clinton's appearance on Larry King yesterday.

On W:

KING: How do you explain the friendship with President Bush?

CLINTON: Well, I just like him. First of all, I've always liked him. I've always admired him. I mean, he gave his life to public service. He comes from a family who did. His father was a distinguished senator from Connecticut.

And so I share an interest in public service. He likes sports. I like sports. He likes people. And I think he's a genuinely good man. I like him. I like his wife. I like his family. I've liked him since I first met him in 1983, two years before you went on the air here.

KING: In fact, you're going to his house.

CLINTON: I am. He invited me to come up to Kennebunkport where I have not been for 22 years.

KING: Beautiful.

CLINTON: And to play golf with him and ride in his boat. And I'm looking forward to it.

He likes sports--I like sports??? Why am I reminded of that fictitious Kerry moment "Who among us doesn't like NASCAR?"

On Felt/Deep Throat:

KING: What do you make of the Mark Felt story? Is he an American hero?

CLINTON: I think he did a good thing. And I think it's -- it was an unusual circumstance. I think Felt believed that there was the chance that this whole thing would be covered up. Ordinarily, I think a law enforcement official shouldn't be leaking to the press because you should let criminal action take its course.

When he did that, he obviously believed there was a chance that the thing would be covered up. And there was some evidence -- we now know that there was also a problem with trying to use the FBI, and the IRS, and other agencies of the federal government for political purposes back then. So there's some reason to believe he was right.

I don't think that -- he always felt ambivalent about it, apparently. And I think that's good. Because, on balance, you don't want law enforcement officials leaking to the press, even the truth, much less some vendetta or something that's not true. But under these circumstances, I think he did the right thing.

So "back then" when federal agencies were used for political purposes, it might be okay to leak crimes to the press, as long as you feel guilty for it. Let me say, it is difficult to type with my eyes rolling to the back of my head this way.

On Hillary's propensity to stick by her convictions:

CLINTON: . . . You just look at her whole life. There's a remarkable consistency in her life. She decides what she believes. She'll change her mind, if the evidence warrants it. I mean, she's not a dunderhead or any -- you know, she's not...

KING: She was a Goldwater Republican.

CLINTON: Yes, but -- she was a Goldwater Republican. And Hillary used to joke with me that Goldwater carried her hometown 3 to 1 and the others thought he was too liberal where she grew up. But you know, and we liked Barry Goldwater a lot. We went to see him when he was ill in Arizona before he passed away.

But she has always been somebody who was just convicted. I mean, she lives by a conviction. And...

KING: Stays the course?

CLINTON: She stays the course, you know?

We liked Goldwater??? We liked Barry Goldwater a lot??? Hello? Do we even have a Democratic Party anymore?

The Mister Rogers moment:

CLINTON: I mean, you know, this idea that somebody we disagree with on economic or social policy or something we have to turn into some kind of ogre or demon, I think, is a mistake. I mean, it's like telling the American people or half the American people that don't agree with you they're all fools. That's just not true.

Most of the people I've known in politics, by the way, in this country and in other countries, before I became president and when I was in the White House, most of them have been good people. They'd been smart, hard-working, well-motivated, and they pretty well did what they believed was right.

He later mentions "adoring" Billy Graham because, "Whether you agree or disagree with everything, he is a man who lives his faith," and respecting Karl Rove because "he's a good grassroots politician." I need to cut in here and state a fact which is so flamingly obvious there should be no need to waste the energy typing it, and yet: Being a person of conviction doesn't make you admirable unless your convictions are admirable. Duh, right?

On the war du jour:

KING: You supported the president when he went into Iraq. Do you still support him?

CLINTON: Yes, I felt, as I said then, I felt that we should have let the U.N. inspectors finish their job. But once he made the decision to go forward, I thought all Americans should have said, well, we're in this thing now. We've got to back our troops and we've got to hope that the enterprise succeeds because there's no question that Saddam was a bad guy. The Iraqis would be better off without him, if we can build a coherent country here.

What to say?

All day I have been thinking off and on about what it must be like to live somewhere that 30 to 40 people die every day.

In sum, the transcript speaks to an ethical shallowness--a man for whom "liking" people is more important than standing for principle. Because if we can all just get together over a good game of golf, everything's going to be okay. Is it wrong for me to say that I think Clinton really, really needs alanon or acoa? I thought that through his presidency. He is like the coda poster child.

Anyway, I am going back to Woodward and Bernstein on Larry King. At least they aren't talking about adoring Billy Graham.

Why I would make a lousy Buddhist

Even were I able to lay to rest my struggle with the whole "desire is the root of all suffering" thing, I would make a lousy Buddhist. This is what I'm thinking about as I prepare to leave tomorrow.

Here's how it goes for me: Okay, it's past the first of the month, so I have to pay rent. But of course, to do that, I have to balance my checkbook. And then there are those other bills that are late... and the trash to take out... and I have to call the catsitter...

And then the work things: Do I have the projector? Does it work okay with my laptop? Did the boxes make it to the hotel? And those last minute adjustments to the session profiles--they need doing...

Do I have enough cat food? Did I remember to pack my coffee and filters? Do I have time to vacuum my apartment? For that matter, I should probably do those twelve things I've been putting off for six months. Because even though they've been on my to-do list for six months, they really can't wait the eleven days I'll be gone.

Are you getting the picture? It's tough to be me--that's what I'm trying to say. Be grateful you don't have to carry my brain around in your cranium. You'd be an insomniac too.

And here's the really ironic thing: I'm actually a great spontaneous traveler. I've had enough traveling mishaps (and fiascos) that I don't stress much at all once I've locked my apartment door behind me. There's little that a credit card and a measure of patience can't extricate me from, I know this.

Anyway, so I'm going to Florida tomorrow for work, and then from there to DC and possibly NYC (if I'm feeling recharged enough and it's not pouring--yes, I know; I've been completely corrupted by LA). I'll be online sporadically and will post when possible, but will be spending most of my time interacting face-to-face in the fleshly world. If I go to the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibit or the National Museum of the American Indian, I promise to let you all know how they were.



(And if I go to New York, I'll post a picture the shoes I will inevitably buy on 8th Street.)

Chutzpah of the satanic variety

Rumsfeld on the Amnesty report:

No force in the world has done more to liberate people that they have never met than the men and women of the United States military. Indeed, that's why the recent allegation that the US military is running a gulag at Guantanamo Bay is so reprehensible.

. . .

Oh my goodness, there's so much transparency in Gitmo and so much oversight. There have been so many reforms instituted in the Department of Defense, and the oversight and the attention that's given to what's taking place at Gitmo is extensive. And the implication that it's a gulag is what's wrong -- not what's going on at Gitmo.

Well that's a relief. I feel better. Don't you feel better?

I may have to buy this

From Cafepress, of course

This modern world

...is very, very funny this week.

And the blog is rocking too

Geez. The Bush folks sure are pissed about Amnesty International's use of the word "gulag", huh? Perhaps Amnesty should just clarify things a bit by eschewing comparisons to the Soviet Union and making it clear that when they say "gulags", they simply meant "secret prisons in which innocent people have been tortured to death".

I am embarrassed to admit I've thought about this

More than once:

GENEVA, Ill. May 30, 2005 — A 46-year-old man allegedly set his own home on fire in order to get two visitors to leave, police said.

. . .

When authorities arrived at Craig's home, which is owned by his mother, it was engulfed in flames, police said. Craig and his two guests were not injured.

Craig allegedly had asked two visitors to leave, but when they refused, he threatened to light his house on fire, police said.

(From Corrente via Alternate Brain)

This explains a lot

You've got to appreciate a news story that begins "New love can look for all the world like mental illness, a blend of mania, dementia, and obsession . . . that could almost be mistaken for psychosis." Other good lines:

. . .researchers in New York and New Jersey argue that romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal.

It is closer in its neural profile to drives like hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states like excitement or affection.

And this

Dr. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and the co-author of the analysis. "And when rejected, some people contemplate stalking, homicide, suicide. This drive for romantic love can be stronger than the will to live."

Yeesh. I will refrain from interjecting the thousand personal anecdotes that seem frighteningly relevant here, except to say there is some limited relief in understanding that my ex-es were merely acting under biological imperative.

I know the personal is political, but...

So I saw The Interpreter this weekend. [Warning: spoiler to follow.] It didn't totally suck. But here's the thing that bugs me. Whenever H-wood tries to make a movie about politics--at least in this era--everything seems to come back to the nuclear family. I'm not naive; I understand that a big film demands a love interest. Paths of Glory just couldn't get made right now. I get that. But The Interpreter wasn't just marred by that (in fact, I credit them with making a film where none of the loaded guns go off, so to speak).

There was a way in which the movie said: Your country has been subject to revolutions and bloodshed, upheaval, betrayal of all that is precious--and we understand your passion because your family died. And the male lead really understands your passion because his wife died. Revolution...car accident. You see the difficulty here, yes? I don't want to be too much of a jerk. I mean, it wasn't a horror show like the remake of Manchurian Candidate; it was just disappointing. I get that the personal is political. I really do. But there are ways in which the political--and in particular, a sense of duty and justice--should be greater than the personal. This is why I dislike "victims' rights" statements in the courtroom, for instance. I believe the law should be something entirely different and apart from a personal plea of anger and grief. I think it's right that it be so.

For many of us, our role or actions in the political sphere are linked to our relationships with our families. I understand that, and in that way, I should probably cut the film more of a break. I think it was trying to say that about Kidman's character--that her politics and her family history were inextricably intertwined but that she recognized a deeper duty than family love. (Of course, if the Penn character had just been fucked up in some other way, it would have been much easier to buy that reading for me.) The fact that my grandfather came here to escape the pogroms, the fact that my dad was blacklisted, these things have much to do with who I am in many ways. But...if I had a relative killed in the towers on 9/11, that wouldn't make me any more in favor of the "war on terror."

And on the note of political duty and the role of family--crazy stuff with Deep Throat, huh? Vanity Fair [.pdf] has the full story. Within the same week, Deep Throat comes forward and Newsweek says it will toughen its policy on the use of anonymous sources. Funny world, huh?

Not dead yet

Okay, I am back. I apologize for the extended hiatus. As I mentioned, work became all consuming and then recovery from work took more time than I'd anticipated. So here I am, restored, renewed, and ready to return to virtual punditry.

It's Memorial Day. I have assiduously avoided cookouts and picnics today and have, instead, stayed in and gotten caught up on some things. I did buy a swimsuit this weekend, which means I should be congratulated on braving the crowds at the mall and that my denial about living in LA is finally breaking down. I've been here three years. I have a lovely pool in my complex, and yet, I have not owned a bathing suit. I am a gradual assimilator.

On a more somber note, it is Memorial Day and without meaning any disrespect to the men and women in the military and our veterans, this seems particularly problematic to me this year. It would be less vexed, in my mind, to memorialize our fallen soldiers if we weren't putting them in harm's way on a daily basis. Take NBC's Memorial Day page, for example. Flags and sympathy. Here is a sample card:



Here is what Bush had to say two years ago on Memorial Day:

Each Memorial Day, we pray for peace throughout the world, remembering what was gained and what was lost during times of war. From the bravery of the men at Valley Forge, to the daring of Normandy, the courage of Iwo Jima, and the steady resolve in Afghanistan and Iraq, our men and women in uniform have won for us every hour that we live in freedom. During this year's observance, we particularly recognize the courageous spirit of the men and women in our Nation's Armed Forces who are working with our coalition partners to restore civil order, provide critical humanitarian aid, and renew Afghanistan and Iraq. As we honor those who have served and have been lost, we better understand the meaning of patriotism and citizenship, and we pledge that their sacrifices will not be in vain.

It's just sad; that's what I'm saying.

Wage slave

Okay, so once again, I am preparing to descend into meeting hell. It is, in fact, the eleventh hour here on the west coast, so it's fitting that I just finished the prep for my three-day workgroup meeting that begins tomorrow. Which is to say--scant blogging ahead folks. Others, I know, will be offline because of vacations, beach trips, etc. Leisure is for sissies, that's what I say.

Truly, I am looking forward to the meeting, but it puts me off the grid for a while.

In the meantime, coming to us all the way from the emerald isle is the link to Penguin remixes. Don't we all have a thing for the hipster librarian type, after all?

Niche marketing at its finest

Have I mentioned that I love the Internet? I really do. Site of the day compliments of M, who forwarded it with the tag line, "For the discerning and morally sound cannibal in your life."

Who says irony is dead

Winning my time-waster of the week award (during a week when I have no time to waste) is the Contagious Media Showdown. Honestly, I don't know much about it. I only found it researching the panty hoax on After School Snack (because you know we at NMTE love to post about panties). But there's some fine surfing to be had following the links listed here. (You can find out more about Contagious Media on their homepage, which lists some of their other projects.)