Adios, Blogger

I've finally gotten fed up enough with Blogger that I'm migrating to Wordpress. This will stay here, at least for a while, but all new content will be posted elsewhere.

Some People Just Want to Watch the World Burn ... and Some People Are Just Idiots

So this image of President-Obama-as-Heath-Ledger's-Joker with the word "socialism" as a caption has been turning up pasted to various surfaces in L.A., and is now making the rounds on the intertubes (and there are plenty of variations on the theme).

I've written elsewhere about the stupidity of using words like "socialist" as insults, because it robs them of their usefulness as neutral descriptors. This, though, is a new (or a least different), stupider kind of stupidity.

The Joker, especially Ledger's Joker, is nowhere near being a socialist. I'd call him an anarchist, and in some ways he is, but he's mostly a nihilist bent on destruction for the sake of destruction. That is, as should be obvious to anyone who can think himself out of a paper bag, a far cry from socialism (even if one is of the opinion that socialism ≈ the destruction of all that is good and holy).

Some are calling the image racist - because of the "whiteface," I suppose - but that, I think, is giving the creator of the image too much credit. Calling Obama a socialist just to insult him is a Republican/Libertarian/Fox-news-ian trope these days, so it shouldn't be at all surprising that a defaced image of him ends up with "socialist" or "socialism" on it (the original image, apparently, was captionless). Whoever took the image and added the caption probably never stopped to think about the doublethink required to attach the word "socialism" to an image referencing an anarcho-nihilist hell-bent on burning the world down. That's an impressive level of stupidity.

Now, the creator of the original image? Probably some random /b/tard.

Harry Potter and the Mechanics of Magic

I recently re-read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (in anticipation of going to see the movie) and was reminded of something that bothered me the first time I read it: the Sectumsempra spell.

I don't read much fantasy - The Lord of the Rings being the major exception - so I'm not intimately familiar with the genre's tropes and conceits, but I've always been under the impression that magic was, for lack of a better term, a naturally-occurring phenomenon ("the bloodstream of the universe!"), and it would be best to not ask too many questions about how it actually works.

But in HP6, things are a little different. Rowling makes an off-hand mention of someone "inventing" spells in an early chapter, which isn't so problematic in itself - people invent new ways of using of using, say, radio waves, so inventing new ways of using magic is conceivable. But, well, I couldn't see the word "radio" in a book somewhere, throw some electronics into a cardboard box, call it a radio, and then have a functioning FM radio. Things don't work that way - unless, that is, they're magical things.

So Harry Potter ends up with an old, used, full-of-notes copy of a potions book, which formerly belonged to the titular Half-Blood Prince. Most of the notes are about, well, making potions, but Harry finds two spells written in the margins: Levicorpus and Sectumsempra. There are no explanatory notes (beyond "for enemies," which appears next to sectumsempra), and Harry apparently knows nothing about the pseudo-Latin which spell names are constructed from, because he has no idea what sectumsempra (always-cutting, ever-cutting) does (he'd seen levicorpus in action, sort of, in HP5). No idea, that is, until he decides to use it on fellow-student and insufferable git Draco Malfoy, who was totally pissed when Harry caught him crying in the bathroom, and suddenly there's blood everywhere.

This presents us with a problem (if, you know, you take YA fantasy lit seriously - to which I say, I take everything seriously): the textual evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that Snape (the Half-Blood Prince; sorry if I ruined that one for you) invented the spell; it didn't exist until teenaged Snape decided that a spell that cut people and produced fountains of blood would be, well, awesome, and did whatever it is you do to invent a spell - and then, magically, the made-up word sectumsempra (when said forcefully by someone brandishing a wand, anyway) would cause slicing and dicing and general carnage. But how do other people know it will do that?

Before Snape turned it into a spell, sectumsempra was just a collection of sounds that sounded mostly like Latin, a made-up word that was close enough to real words to have some sort of meaning. But after Snape turned it into a spell, it was a thing of power, and uttering it - even without any idea what it meant or was meant to do - unleashes that power. It went from being a word which had (no) power because of the (lack of) meaning assigned to it to being a word which was inherently powerful, a word whose meaning is derived from that inherent power. Words like that don't exist, except in fantasy stories, and Rowling has (inadvertently, I assume) drawn our attention to one of the genre's unspoken assumptions, one of the things for which we suspend disbelief, and pointed out the absurdity of it - and it's a little jarring.

But only, I guess, for people who take everything (too) seriously.

"What Should Girls Read?"

From the opening of William Dean Howells's essay "What Should Girls Read?", originally published in Harper's Weekly, May 16, 1903:

Whether men like it or not, women begin by being their daughters and sisters, they go on to become their wives, and end as their mothers, though of course there are exceptions to the general rule. Women are here apparently to stay; their good and their evil are the good and the evil of men; there is not one law for women and another for men. They inherit their fathers as well as their mothers, whom sometimes they resemble solely in sex; they mirror their fathers' minds in quite surprising measure, and they are often, fatally enough, of their fathers' moral make.

Freud, Fire, and Pissing

I'm reading Civilization and Its Discontents again; the first time was for a class as an undergrad (on Decadence in fin de siècle Europe and Japan), and this time for a graduate seminar on literary theory. I don't like Freud, and the things about his writing and thought that make me not take him seriously are all present in this, the best footnote I have ever encountered in any book, ever:

Psycho-analytic material, incomplete as it is and not susceptible to clear interpretation, nevertheless admits of a conjecture – a fantastic-sounding one – about the origins of this human feat. It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came into contact with fire, of satisfying the infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine. The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally phallic view taken of tongues of flame as they shoot upward. Putting out the fire by micturating – a theme to which modern giants, Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais' Gargantua, still hark back – was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct. Further, it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire. It is remarkable, too, how regularly analytic experience testifies to the connection between ambition, fire, and urethral eroticism.

(Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, Standard Ed., tr. James Strachey. Norton, 1989. pp. 42-43)

"What are we gonna do?!"

I'm starting grad school in a few months: six years of reading, discussing, thinking, writing, and trying to keep my head from exploding, at the end of which (God willing) I'll have a PhD in English Literature. I have, consequently, been thinking a lot lately about what the hell I'm going to specialize in. When I was applying to graduate programs (both times), I listed my probable area of study as 18th-century literature, mostly because I'd written an honor's thesis on Robinson Crusoe, and partly because the prospect of grad school was distant and unsure enough (especially during the second round of applications) that it didn't really seem like an important question.

Now that working toward a PhD has become a real and rapidly approaching fact, however, it's become a very important question. It's a question that will determine not only most of what I do over the next six years, but also the shape of the early years of my post-doc career (assuming, of course, that I'm able to land a job in academia).

The 18th century - especially the "long" 18th century - still looks appealing, for a variety of reasons. The novel was still a new thing, and there was a fair amount of experimentation with the form going on at the time. It was an incredibly turbulent time politically, which culminated in the American and French Revolutions. Significant shifts in British imperial policy occurred toward the end of the 1700s, the initial signs of which can be seen as far back as Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe, and which continue to have an impact today. Lately, though, it hasn't seemed interesting enough; it's seemed too much like work, though that may only be because Tristram Shandy took so long to slog through.

Charles Williams, who is one of my favorite authors, has recently started to look really appealing as a subject for study, largely because I just read a critical reading of his work in (sort of) Kierkegaardian terms that I found fascinating, as much for the questions it raised and the lines of inquiry it suggested as anything else. Of course, specializing in someone as obscure as Williams might not be a wise move, and reading as much of his work in as short a time as I'd have to might melt my brain.

What looks most interesting, though, is a set of narratives - not only novels and travel narratives, but also graphic novels and films - that are connected (at least in my mind) but lacking, so far as I can tell, a designation. This group includes, for example: Robinson Crusoe; Gulliver's Travels; The Road; probably The Man in the High Castle and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and certainly Dr. Bloodmoney; George Romero's zombie flicks, especially Dawn of the Dead (and Zach Synder's remake, despite it not being that good); Deep Impact (but not Armageddon); almost certainly Mary Shelley's The Last Man, Max Brooks' World War Z, and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, none of which I've read, to my great shame. The group would also include 1984 and We, and probably Brave New World and V for Vendetta (another one I haven't read); Lord of the Flies; possibly Lost, depending on what the final season holds; Heart of Darkness, Friday, and "By the Waters of Babylon." The Happening. Maybe the Foundation Trilogy, and maybe Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth, but I don't know. I could go on, but I won't.

Several of them are apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic, but not all of them; a few are dystopian; some are "unrealistic" (like Gulliver's Travels or anything with zombies), but more than a few depict events or situations that are actually possible. I'm toying with the idea of calling this thematic group "Kobayashi Maru fiction," as most of them contain no-win scenarios, or at least catastrophic upheavals requiring a new way of thinking and living. They explore human existence and human society in situations where what we consider "normal life" has totally ceased to exist. They attempt to discover the essence of 'humanity' by putting their characters in the hottest, most brutal furnace they can find, and burning off anything and everything they can.

This is where I want to work, in the crucible of the no-win scenario.

On "The Happening"

I finally got around to watching M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening the other night - less than a year after it came out, which is pretty good for me. If you plan on watching it, be warned that this post contains spoilers.

I should begin by saying that I have a soft spot for disaster movies: not Towering Inferno-type disaster movies, but "oh-shit-the-world-will-never-be-the-same" disaster movies. I will readily acknowledge that such movies are rarely "good" in the way that most people mean when they talk about "good" movies – with a near-total disregard for that different genres have different standards of "goodness" and that "motion picture" is a medium and not a damned genre – but that's another issue. Suffice it to say that I was inclined to like this movie, or at least to really want to like it. And, well, I mostly really liked it.

It opens in Central Park, where - all of a sudden - people start losing their shit and killing themselves. A few blocks away, construction workers start throwing themselves off a building like bankers in 1929. It's a great way to start a movie like this: with something terrible and inexplicable. (Even later, when Shyamalan has provided an explanation (mostly), the scenes of people committing suicide are fairly disturbing; the best one, though, is the scene out in the field where Elliot's frantic piecing-together of what's happening is punctuated by off-screen gunshots as folks in the larger group behind them, over a ridge, start offing themselves.)

The movie then cuts to a high school classroom, where Elliot (Mark Wahlberg) is discussing Colony Collapse Disorder, which gives us our first handle on what's happening, at least as far as you can explain one inexplicable event in terms of another, similar inexplicable event. The point we're supposed to get is that there are forces of nature beyond our understanding (let alone our control), and our attempts to explain them are little more than guesses.

Unfortunately, this kind of movie requires that the threat be at least identifiable, even if it remains inexplicable, and so we learn fairly early on that the mass suicides are the result of an airborne neurotoxin, and, later, that the neurotoxin is being produced by plants. Yes, plants. It's a goofy premise, I know - and the "ominous" scenes of trees and grasses swaying in the wind nearly ruined it for me. But if you can accept the plants as agents of destruction as necessary, because Nature as a concept is tough to visualize on-screen, then you can get at the idea behind the plants: the idea that Nature might, without warning, cease being our Mother and start weeding us out indiscriminately. That's kind of a terrifying idea, more terrifying than zombies or asteroids or even nuclear war, because it might actually happen.

Shyamalan described The Happening as a B-movie, but I'm not sure that's an entirely accurate description. Yes, the dialogue tends to be heavy-handed and expository, and the characters are underdeveloped, and some of the "emotional" moments feel off-key or manipulative (but, then again, some of them are really resonant) - but those things do not a B-movie make. It is, rather, a "movie of ideas" - as are all of Shyamalan's movies. The plot, the characters, the dialogue - everything is subordinate to the exploration of an idea. I have found most of the ideas driving Shyamalan's films intriguing and occasionally fascinating, which is why I forgive the awkward dialogue and (generally) flat characters.

The Happening did have one set of scenes that were genuinely terrifying, and a glimpse of what Shyamalan could do if he made a movie just to scare the shit out of people - the scenes beginning with Elliot, Alma, and Jess' arrival at Mrs. Jones' cabin, and ending with Mrs. Jones' suicide the next day. I thought, briefly, that everything that had happened up to that point was an excessively elaborate plot device whose sole purpose was to get them to that cabin, and that the movie was above to take off in a totally different, get-ready-to-shit-your-pants-with-terror direction. It didn't, and the film's actual ending - people losing their shit and killing themselves in Paris - is still appropriately ominous, but the "Mrs. Jones's Cabin" sequence is, I think, the strongest part of the movie, and that old lady almost upstaged the plants.

Alright, she totally upstaged the plants. Plants just aren't that scary.

Art Imitating Life, or Vice Versa

Working in a library, I encounter strange books fairly often. A few days ago, SPASM: Virtual Reality, Android Music, and Electric Flesh, by one Arthur Kroker, crossed my desk. It was exceedingly weird, postmodern and "futuristic" but really dated by the fact that it was written in 1993. I posted a quote at random as my status on Facebook:

"Art is now a quantum fluctuation: a phase shift where all the old classical certainties dissolve, and where everything can finally be uncertain, probabilistic, and indeterminate. ...art can finally become a violent edge..."

...along with the comment that I didn't know what to think about the quote (or, for that matter, the book). A friend of mine responded:

The dissolution of Western Culture. Art following in the footsteps of Ethics. First definitive truth passes away, then definitive goodness, and finally definitive beauty.

To which I responded:

Maybe. Assuming that Western Culture exists as a singular entity. And I think I would say you've got it backwards: Art, then Behaviour, then Ethics.

Now that I've had a day or two to stew on it, I'd like to modify and expand my answer. Firstly, I think "Western Culture" (or "Western Civilization") can be a useful concept, so long as one keeps in mind the obscenely tangled mess contained within it. Whether western civilization is declining or dissolving at present, and, if so, whether that's a bad thing or a good thing, are questions I'm not going to address at present, mostly because I have no idea how I'd answer them. The question that interests me is whether Ethics changes first, followed by Behaviour, followed by Art, or the reverse, or whether Behaviour changes first and Art and Ethics change to match.

Of course, when you lay it out like that, it seems very Hegelian and deterministic, which ought to be a sign that we're headed in the wrong direction; so let's stop now and try a different approach. First, let's reduce our scale to something a bit more manageable: the individual. And let's leave out Art for the moment, on the grounds that most individuals don't create (or don't think they create) Art; but everyone does things and believes things, even if they have no idea why they do what they do or what they believe.

So: does my behaviour determine my beliefs, or do my beliefs determine my behaviour? Well, yes. If I believe that consuming alcohol to the point of drunkenness is bad, I will endeavour to only consume it in moderation. If I believe that drunkenness is bad, but drink myself stupid four or five (or six or seven) times a week anyway, I will either change my belief or ignore it (or, maybe, change my behaviour). And, of course, there are a variety of other internal and external factors which affect both belief and behaviour - and Art is one of them.

Art is a dangerous thing. It is dangerous precisely because we don't expect it to be; and if we've encountered enough Art to have learned that it is, in general, dangerous, we can very rarely defend ourselves against it, because it never attacks where we're looking for it. Art is dangerous because it affects (and sometimes totally alters) our beliefs and our behaviours without announcing that it's going to, and usually without our noticing it until it's too late.

Of course, we can't really enalrge our scale to the level of a whole culture again and hope this model will still be useful. Even so, a culture's Art is a fairly reliable guide to its Ethics and Behaviour, and if I had to back one for the instigator of cultural decline, elevation, dissolution, or apotheosis, I'd back Art.

Cleaning the Soundboard, Part Two

After a not-really-adequate night's sleep, and a morning of yardwork, I returned to the church to resume my battle with the soundboard, armed with a better pair of needle-nose pliers from the house (lesson #1: any ad hoc toolkit should include a pair of needle-nose pliers).

And, what do you know, the pliers from home worked like a charm - they have a more even gripping surface, all the way down to the point, which is where the action was happening. And the bolts seemed to have learned a lesson; it only took about a quarter-turn with the pliers for each, and they were loose enough to unscrew with the allen wrench the rest of the way. I made short work of those 45 bolts.

Unfortunately, it did me absolutely no good. Those bolts, I thought, held the top plate down, and if I removed the bolts I could remove the plate, and get at the part of the board I wanted to clean: the place(s) where the knobs and sliders make metal-on-metal contact with the guts of the board. But, as it turns out, the bolts don't hold the plate down; they hold the guts up. The plate is attached to the rest of the metal box housing said guts. To get at the part of the soundboard's interior that I wanted to, I'd have to take the entire fucking thing apart, which I'm certainly not qualified to do, and not stupid enough to attempt (almost, but not quite).

So, in the end, all I was able to do was clean off the dust that had accumulated under the multitudinous knobs (there was quite a bit) and clean the contact point of the sliders indirectly, by squeezing a few drops of alcohol down the slider with a Q-tip and running it back and forth a few times. I could have gotten all that done last night, without ever unscrewing a thing. Lesson #2, I guess.

The good news is that the soundcheck I did - after replacing and realigning all the knobs - sounded fine (it's also good news that the board turned back on at all, and that all the channels still work). The real test will be tonight's service, but I'm (mostly) confident that everything will sound fine.

And I bought a towel to keep the board covered with. Lesson #3.

Cleaning the Soundboard, Part One

The soundboard at church - an old Mackie VLZ 24/4 mixer - needs a cleaning. The last time it was taken apart and cleaned was 5 years ago, and we haven't been very good at keeping it covered when it's not in use, and now, well, it's nice and dusty on the inside, and it sounds like it.

Because I am the way I am, I decided I didn't want to go to the trouble (and expense) of tracking down the person who cleaned it back in 2004 (when someone else was in charge of this stuff), and hauling it down to said person's house in the Metroplex, and either renting a board or cobbling something together with our two smaller boards for a week or two until the board was clean, and going to pick it up, and then putting everything back together. No, I decided I'd rather go to the trouble of taking it apart and cleaning it myself.

In my defense, I did some poking around online, and I'm not the first person to attempt this. And really, all we're talking about is cleaning off some dust. How hard can that be?

So at 9 o'clock this evening, having already acquired cotton swabs and isopropyl alcohol, I went up to the church and set about disassembling the board. I first wrote down, for each of the 22 channels, the positions of all the various knobs (trim volume, aux sends, 4-band EQ, submix assignment), as well as the positions of a few other important knobs and sliders. Then, I took all the knobs (280) and sliders (a mere 27) off. Then, after making sure they were all labeled, I unplugged all the cords from the back of the board, and set about actually taking the thing apart.

The parts I wanted to clean are underneath a metal panel held on by a few dozen hex-head bolts. Tiny little things; they take a 1/16ths-inch allen wrench, and that was the first snag. Not a big one, mind you; the 1/16ths-inch allen wrench was absent from the set I'd brought with me, which required a quick ride home to retrieve it. Problem solved.

Well, sort of. The 1/16ths (or 4/64ths)-inch allen wrench wasn't quite big enough (and, of course, the 5/64ths-inch was altogether too big, which was why I'd had to go home in the first place). Not wanting to admit the obvious - that the bolts had been removed and replaced one too many times, and their hexagonal indentations were now a tad too circular - I did a little standard-to-metric conversion and figured a 1.6 mm allen wrench would do the trick. As it was now nearly 11 (I'd wasted a half-hour removing and replacing a bunch of screws that I should have just left alone), I set out for the only plae in town where I could hope to acquire a 1.6 mm allen wrench, if such a thing even existed: Wal-Mart.

(I hate going to Wal-Mart. I only do it when I have to. And, yes, I realize I could've called it a night and gone to Lowe's in the morning, but I wasn't ready to admit defeat.)

If a 1.6 mm allen wrench exists, Wal-Mart does not stock them. They do stock 1.5 mm allen wrenches, which, at least according to Stanley, is equivalent to a 1/16ths-inch allen wrench, and therefore useless to me. As a last resort, then, I bought a pair of two-dollar needle-nose pliers, planning to unscrew the damn stripped bolts that way, and rode back to the church.

And, amazingly, my plan worked. In fact, it worked better than I expected: the first bolt I tried started moving right away, and once I'd loosened it with the pliers, I was able to unscrew it the rest of the way with my trusty 1/16ths-inch allen wrench. (Good thing I went home for it, after all.) Bolt number two came out easier than bolt number one. "Shit, yes!" I thought, "I might actually get this done tonight!"

But no. With bolt number three, my luck ran out. I couldn't get the pliers to grip it long enough to loosen it. I left number three to reconsider and tried number four. Nothing. Number five? A recalcitrant little punk. I tried a few more, at random. Bitches, all of them.

I was defeated. I came home, had a glass of wine, washed a few dishes, and now I'm going to bed. I'm going back tomorrow, and trying something new. What, I don't know yet. At the very least, I have to put the damn thing back together for the service tomorrow night, whether I get it clean or not.

You won this round, mack, but this shit ain't over yet.