A Fool in the Forest

It's Alive!

2003-12-31T08:55:00.000-08:00

Somewhat sooner than expected, the renovated TypePad version of this site is on the air. Follow this link to A Fool in the Forest Mark II, which comes complete with a rudimentary banner, categorization of posts, comments (shudder) and an expanded list of links. It's still in development -- such as working my way back to categorize all 200+ prior posts that I imported from here -- but you're welcome to peruse it.

This page -- perhaps to be renamed Fool in the Forest Classic -- will remain for the foreseeable future, if only so that all the old links will still more or less function, but I'll be posting new matter on the TypePad version.

Dare I suggest you should Update Your Favorites if you are a regular visitor?

Dactyls, On The Double!

2003-12-31T08:35:00.000-08:00

This is what comes from reading through the John Hollander-edited American Wits, the American Poets Project’s new collection of light verse, all in one go: I’ve become suddenly enamored of the double dactyl.

The particular rigors of the form are nicely explained here, and a Googling of the phrase “double dactyl” will lead you to more, and better, examples than the three of my own composition that you’ll find below.

The double dactyl requires two quatrains, each consisting of three lines of dactylic dimeter and a concluding choriamb (or, if you will, another dactyl with an extra syllable tacked on.) The final lines of the quatrains must rhyme. In pure form, the first line should be a nonsense phrase -- “higgledy-piggledy” is the classic example -- the second line should consist of the name of a famous real or imagined person -- “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” fits -- and the sixth line ought to be a single, six-syllable dactyllically diametric word -- such as “phantasmagorical.”

I’ve elected to disregard all but the metrical rules and I’ve tossed in an extra rhyme (lines two and six mostly). So sue me. The double dactyl is a fine form for glib political comment or just for a lark, and no one will ever get the impression that you take yourself too seriously when you use it. So, with that, let's have at it:

Back Channel

Colonel Qadaffi to
One of our diplomats:
“Zounds! What a trouncing you
Handed Saddam!

Allah’s enlightened me.
I took the tip: so that’s
Why I’m renouncing my
Quest for The Bomb.”

Affront Runner

Candidate Dean (he’s a doc-
tor from Burlington)
Flaunts his technique: “My rhe-
torical pow’rs

Consist in this method: I
Run about hurling con-
tempt, then retract it in
24 hours.”

Simplicity Itself

New York Times, Guardian,
Standard and Telegraph,
Lib’rals, conservatives,
Gog and Magog.

Wond’ring, through each ana-
lytical paragraph,
Where lies the truth? Read it
Here on my blog!

Happy New Year, all!

Moving Day Approaches

2003-12-30T08:41:00.000-08:00

In the not-quite-six months I have been generating this weblog, Blogger and Blogspot have been behaving remarkably well on the whole. Still, I have grown fond of the richer feature set available on TypePad, which hosts my more purely Legal posts on Declarations and Exclusions, and I have been planning to migrate the Fool to that platform. The time has come to be on the move: My plan now is to begin the New Year on the new platform. Naturally, glitches are to be expected, but I'll be trying to have things up and running over there (subject to further improvement and revision) by this coming Friday, January 2. Links to the new locale will be posted here when I Make My Move.

Time, Gentlemen!

2003-12-30T08:25:00.000-08:00

Lest anyone should think that I am not merely a Fool, but an irresponsible Fool, I feel a moral compulsion to steer you to this colloquy on excessive indulgence in the Demon Alcohol. Think of it as a corrective to my immediately preceding praise of cocktails, if you will, or better yet as a reinforcement of the virtues of moderation in all things. (I recommend the comments to that Crooked Timber post as well, and the link that Chris Bertram has kindly provided to Hogarth's Gin Lane.)

Gyre and Gimlet

2003-12-29T14:04:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking -- slowly, slowly and over many weeks -- of posting something on wine and aesthetics: why it is that, to my mind, wine is a supreme beverage precisely because of the occasion it offers for reflection on issues of beauty. That precis is sufficiently hifalutin' and self-important to scare me away from the task at least temporarily, but I expect to succumb in the end. (I have it in the back of my mind that the thing will somehow fall in to place once I make my much-delayed pilgrimage to the big William Morris exhibition at the Huntington Library, which has little to do with wine but a great deal to do with Beauty and its uses.) In any case, that piece is not the piece you are reading now. Instead, it is merely an introduction to my actual topic,

Cocktails.

Thousands of miles to our east, Scheherazade has discovered the joys of the Gimlet, and offers as her New Year's Resolution #1 an ambition to Drink More Of Them. Her musings on the subject remind me how enjoyable a good Gimlet is, and how long it has been since I last had one. [Note to self: pick up Rose's lime juice.] She also displays a proper attitude toward the Rituals of the Cocktail, of a kind in danger of being driven from our shores by the well-meaning but nonetheless sinister forces of public safety and neo-prohibitionist puritanism:

For no good reason, I have some strict self-imposed rules about my drinks. I observe the seasons and do not permit myself gin and tonics after September or before the balmiest days of late May, sticking generally to red wine, dark beer or stout, a Maker's Mark on the rocks or maybe some scotch when the flip flops have been retired for the summer. Martinis are permissible all year round.

These are sound rules indeed. Followed in moderation, and in good company, they lend savor and pleasure to life, which is all to the good.

The appreciation of the Gimlet here serves as a reminder that it was favored by the detective Philip Marlowe. In The Long Goodbye, the One True Recipe is specified:

A real Gimlet is half gin and half Rose's lime juice, and nothing else. It beats Martinis hollow.

As with the martini, the notion that you can make the thing with vodka is a mere popular delusion and should not be encouraged.

Update:While we're vaguely on the subject of Potables in Song and Story, I am reminded by a timely e-mail that back in September my chum Rick Coencas shared with us the none-too-surreal recipe for the Luis Bunuel martini. You should certainly try it at home.

And Now A Word From Our Goddess

2003-12-29T07:42:00.000-08:00

My holiday weekend reading wandered into an early Renaissance vein and I found myself reading Erasmus' The Praise of Folly. (John Wilson's 17th Century translation is conveniently available for your online enlightenment here.) The introduction to the edition before me remarked that many Americans seemed to confuse "Erasmus" with "Nostradamus." I thought that was a silly confusion at first, but I was wrong.

Behold the awesome prophetic powers of the wily wonder of Rotterdam! Speaking through the Goddess of Folly, it is beyond question that Erasmus foresaw the rise of the Blogosphere:

But how much happier is this my writer’s dotage who never studies for anything but puts in writing whatever he pleases or what comes first in his head, though it be but his dreams; and all this with small waste of [bandwidth], as well knowing that the vainer those trifles are, the higher esteem they will have with the greater number, that is to say all the fools and unlearned. And what matter is it to slight those few learned if yet they ever read them? Or of what authority will the censure of so few wise men be against so great a cloud of gainsayers?

Heh?

Christmas Cavalcade

2003-12-24T08:08:00.000-08:00

This Fool wishes to all his readers, whether regular, occasional or simply lost after a wrong click in Albuquerque, a most merry and auspicious Christmas. For the occasion, a random selection of seasonally apropos items posted by others:

♣ From deep in the Southern Hemisphere, Kieran Healy reports on "the uneasy Australian detente between the season and the Season". (A helpful commenter also links to the lyrics of an Australian Christmas song, "Six White Boomers," from the semi-legendary Rolf "Tie Me Kangaroo Down" Harris.)

♣ A C Douglas bemoans "the Great Wising Up" and the harm it has done to the Christmas season, which he declares to be "my most favorite time of year, and the one (and only) time I wished I were a Christian rather than a Jew."

♣ Brian Micklethwaite treats us to Raphael's Sistine Madonna -- complete with those ubiquitous eye-rolling cherubs -- and some quick thoughts on the relationship between quality and popularity in art.

♣ And haiku-crafting legal ethicist about town David Giacalone reminds us that even attorneys may once have been really cute kids. (He earns points for his post title, too.)

And now, if you'll excuse me, I will be off to honor the holiday in the midst of my family. Meanwhile,

Merry Christmas to All!

Ways and Memes

2003-12-23T10:52:00.000-08:00

The referrer logs tell me that I am keeping interesting and unexpected company.

In the middle of a "Howard-Dean-Is-Not-What-He-Seems" piece, Lowell Ponte of David Horowitz's Front Page magazine makes this statement:

During his 11-1/2 years as Vermont Governor, Dean turned into the back room wheeler-dealer today known as the 'captive candidate' for President.

The mid-sentence link is to my piece linked below, reporting on reports of Howard Dean's encouragement of the captive insurance industry during his time as Vermont governor. And as a Google Search will show, at the moment the only places in which Dr. Dean is "known as" "the captive candidate" are in the title of my post and in the sentence just quoted.

I'm happy to serve as a coiner of memes, but thus far "captive candidate" is not nearly so successful as lilexia.

Dubious Achievements in Legal Drafting

2003-12-23T07:59:00.000-08:00

Stanford law professor and intellectual property zealot Lawrence Lessig has put up a longish post on Wal-Mart's new online music venture. In addition to noting some technical glitches -- downloaded songs wouldn't play on his system -- he emphasizes the highly restrictive terms of the agreement that a consumer must accept before downloading, and the manner in which that agreement contradicts the expectations that consumers have historically had when purchasing music (e.g., the expectation that you can make "fair use" of music you have legally acquired, such as by using it as a soundtrack for home videos, incorporating portions into a personal mix tape, and so on). For connoisseurs of legal draftsmanship, however, the highlight of the piece has to be this splendidly self-contradictory sentence, drawn from deep within the Terms of Service agreement:

All Products are sublicensed to you and not sold, notwithstanding the use of the terms 'sell,' 'purchase,' 'order,' or 'buy' on the Service or in this Agreement.

This is cutting-edge stuff. Consider the possibilities if this approach to contractual language were to catch on. For example:

The Product will consist of a bag of small rocks and not an automobile, notwithstanding the use of the terms "automobile," "motor," "vehicle," "motor vehicle" and "BMW" in this Agreement and on signage at any facility at which this Agreement may be executed.

Or,

The Worker shall become the property of the Boss, to be dealt with at the Boss's sole discretion and transferable by sale to any other Boss of the Boss's choosing, and shall receive money, food, rest and shelter only when the Boss is so inclined, notwithstanding the use of the terms "employ," "employee," "wages", "benefits" and "freedom" elsewhere in this agreement.

Parse that, if you will, and despair.

Here, There and Everywhere

2003-12-20T10:22:00.000-08:00

Lacking an original thought in my head at the moment, I maintain weblogging momentum with this cavalcade of links catching my attention in the past few days:

♣ Denis Dutton, perhaps best known as the proprietor of Arts & Letters Daily, has launched a personal site, featuring his published articles and material of interest to students in his courses at New Zealand's University of Canterbury. Worth a look if only for the very fine Eadweard Muybridge animated GIF displayed in the banner. [Link via Virginia Postrel, who is herself musing on what Christmas lights tell us about the economy.]

♣ Yet another "upon closer inspection, homeschoolers appear almost normal" piece, this one out of central Virginia. [Link via Kimberly Swygert's Number 2 Pencil and, belatedly, Daryl Cobranchi.]

♣ Terry Teachout, in a rare feint toward matters political, takes up the engrained inability of politicians and other public figures "to say anything without spinning it":

Back in World War II, shortly before the greasy cloud of spin had settled on the land, Gen. Joseph Stilwell, whose nickname was 'Vinegar Joe,' met the press after having been forced to retreat from Burma by the Japanese. He said, 'I claim we got a hell of a beating. We got run out of Burma and it is as humiliating as hell. I think we ought to find out what caused it, go back and re-take it.'

The day any politician of either party makes so blunt a remark within earshot of microphones -- and declines to retract, moderate, or invert it before the day is out -- you'll know the barometer of cultural health in America is moving in the right direction. But don't hang by your thumbs waiting for it.

♣ Brian Micklethwaite urges us all to read The Economist's dissertation on the historically mind-expanding qualities of coffee and coffee houses.

My Covercraft is Full of Eels

2003-12-18T09:06:00.000-08:00

Rick comments on the preceding Armour Hot Dogs item, invoking the Oscar Meyer wieners commercials as well. Then, no doubt under the sinister influence of the pork product peddlers, he offers up a proper futurist wiener dog.

He is also getting "on the bandwagon"¹ in the debate over the best cover versions of songs, joining the growing ranks of those endorsing Devo's version of "Satisfaction." (A worthy choice.) I won't pick any favorites as such, but here are a few cover versions of which I approve that seem not to be getting much mention elsewhere:

Jeff Buckley - covering Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. [This version is clearly superior to the also quite good John Cale version, featured on the Shrek soundtrack; the late Mr. Buckley earns extra points for covering Benjamin Britten's Corpus Christi Carol]
Roxy Music - covering John Lennon's Jealous Guy
Johnny Cash - covering Nine Inch Nails' Hurt
Concrete Blonde - covering Leonard Cohen's Everybody Knows
The Clash - covering Bobby Fuller's I Fought the Law
Joss Stone - covering The White Stripes' Fell in Love with a (Boy)
Travis and Fountains of Wayne [tie] - covering Britney Spears' Baby One More Time (neither version readily available in legitimate channels). [Alternate Britney cover: Richard Thompson's version of Oops I Did It Again, also amusingly alluded to here.]
Brian Eno - covering The Lion Sleeps Tonight
U2 - covering Cole Porter's Night & Day. [Alternative for those who prefer Coward to Porter: Pet Shop Boys' cover of Coward's If Love Were All]
Romeo Void - covering Wrap It Up . [A good alternative version of the song can also be found on the first Eurhythmics album]

There, that should keep the conversation going.

¹ In a context entirely other, involving Flannery O'Connor, Mika Cooper asks parenthetically: "(isn't that a vehicle of convenience for instrumentalists too lazy to march, like me?). "

The Ad-Ternal Return

2003-12-17T11:08:00.000-08:00

One of the by-products of American consumer culture, and particularly of the ubiquity of television advertising, has been the Inescapable Jingle, the little ditty that becomes so implanted in one's mind that once reminded of it it is near impossible to stop it looping and looping and looping in the head. The half-life of some jingles is several decades at least, often long after the original has disappeared from the airwaves.

I have been suffering from this condition for the past several days, the culprit being the old jingle for Armour Hot Dogs. The stimulus, I think, was hearing a radio report describing the hot dogs found in the hovel beside which Saddam Hussein had gone to ground. It is bad enough to be haunted by a cheap advertising ditty, but this one has the added feature that it could not possibly be approved for broadcast today. Consider this litany of offensive images:

Hot dogs! Armour Hot Dogs!
What kind of kids eat Armour Hot Dogs?
Fat kids, skinny kids,
Kids who climb on rocks.¹
Tough kids, sissy kids,
Even kids with chicken pox
Love hot dogs!
Armour Hot Dogs!
The Dogs Kids Love To Bite!

What a parade of horribles: children with body image issues (the obese and the anorexic), children engaged in dangerous ascents of geological formations without appropriate state-sponsored supervision, children with aggressive tendencies or questions of gender identity, even children suffering from now-arcane and little seen diseases, all culminating in an outright endorsement of animal cruelty. Not to mention, of course, that the Center for Science in the Public Interest instructs us never to approach within a hectare of the product being sold. (Do you know how those things are made? Why, it's more frightening than the legislative process!)
Make it stop, please make it stop.²

¹ That portion of the lyric was quoted by the Agreeable Snow Man in Pixar's Monsters, Inc.. Fortunately, he only spoke the words; the accursed thing has to be sung to have its most pernicious effects.

² Perhaps, since it was his capture that made me think of it, this jingle can be of use in the interrogation of the deposed Iraqi despot? Assuming the Geneva Convention permits such things.

Things That Make You Say Ouch

2003-12-17T07:36:00.000-08:00

In the past few days, with little opportunity to post anything original here, it seems this page is becoming a mere portal to legal-oriented posts on my other site. Today: a cautionary tale.

Meanwhile, On The Other Weblog

2003-12-12T16:28:00.000-08:00

I have been avoiding politics as a topic here lately, but I was unable to resist posting the following item on my law related site:

The Captive Candidate? -- Howard Dean Criticized for Ties to Insurance Industry.

It's rather more interesting than it sounds, if you are a follower of presidential politics.

I Camembert It Any Longer

2003-12-12T08:42:00.000-08:00

Just when it seemed we would have to give up on them, the scholarly band at Crooked Timber nearly redeem themselves with a link to a long and unusually interesting review explaining the scandalous secret history of Camembert. Zut alors!

(Strange to say, this is not the first time that I've been intrigued by the place of cheesy comestibles in the arcane practices of international trade.)

How Do We Pronounce Thee, Let Me Count the Ways

2003-12-12T08:12:00.000-08:00

At this festive and giving time of year, my thoughts never fail to turn to . . . oddities of pronunciation. Riddle me this, if you will:

Premise: Throughout the year, we frequently hear of or discuss the State of Israel, and when we do we Americans tend generally pronounce its name with a long "a" sound and condensed down to two syllables: "Iz-rale". Regional variants appear to include "Iz-reel" and "Iz-ruhl."

Question: Why then is it that whenever the same word appears in the lyric of a traditional Christmas carol -- "The First Noel," for example, or "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" -- it is stretched out to three solid syllables and vowel-shifted to become something like "Iz-rye-ell"?

Just asking, just asking.

Update: Almost instantly upon posting this item I heard by e-mail from two of my longtime Jewish friends. First, Portland's own Bridget Hoch [who has no site of her own, claiming that she is "too shy"] writes:

[I say] IZ ree ill - although I went to Hebrew school where we pronounced it EESS ra el. I think the "rye" is the way the sounds "ah" and "el" blend, making it an elongated "eye". But when I say Israel, I sometimes think of the biblical character of Israel and possibly that's why I think of it in 3 syllables. I think the masculine name of Israel sounds lovelier with 3 syllables.

Then Rick Coencas weighed in on similar lines in the middle of an e-mail about something else altogether:

BTW, in Hebrew School we said Is-Rah-El and sometimes Is-Roy-El.

Actually, I've always assumed the three-syllable version to be closest to a proper Hebrew pronunciation -- which would make sense in all those Christmas songs, given that those that use the word at all tend to come from the 19th century, long before the founding of the modern State of Israel -- but saying so would have rather undercut the joke, which was pretty feeble to begin with, don'cha know?

Update with Working Link [Updated]

2003-12-11T14:00:00.000-08:00

The circuitous joys of dealing with the Internal Revenue Service -- tracking down a client's paperwork, which seems vanished into the depths of an IRS office at an undisclosed location in Pennsylvania -- have kept me away from other posting, but apropos of the post below about legal vs. non-legal blogging, I received an e-mail from Denise Howell with the news that the ABA article mentioned (to which I thought there was not a good link available) can be found on her firm's site, right here.

Update to the Update: Here's wishing a happy First Birthday to one of the catalysts for that earlier post, Carolyn Elefant's My Shingle.

And speaking of birthdays, as I seem to be doing with some frequency just at the moment, get a load of the merry band of on-line Saggitarians [Saggitaria?] identified by Scheherezade Fowler.

An Online Survey of Sorts

2003-12-10T15:14:00.000-08:00

A fine, Blowhard-inspired rhetorical question from the Futurballa Blog:

Perhaps we should do a survey of culture bloggers. How many are simply wannabe artists, poets, filmmakers, actors, novelists, or playwrites, who lacked the ego, drive, insanity, and 'rhinoceros skin' to pursue that career.

Me? I'd love to tread the boards again as I did alongside the Friendly Futurist in those bright college days¹ (or to get serious about poetry for that matter), but I already knew back then that the practice of law generally pays much more regularly.

¹A run as Touchstone in As You Like It has resulted decades later in the naming of this site.

This Fool Rushed In, and Intends to Stay

2003-12-10T14:05:00.000-08:00

Attorney Carolyn Elefant is responsible for My Shingle, a site/weblog devoted to the practice of law as a sole practitioner or in a small firm. That may not be terribly interesting to you, but it is a subject near and dear to me because I am (you guessed it) an attorney practicing in a small, 2-lawyer firm.

Recently, Carolyn mused aloud on the question, "How Long Can A Lawyer Sustain A Blog in an Unrelated Practice Area?." It is one thing to write about a field in which you have daily hands-on experience, but what about subjects further afield? Some of her thoughts:

But all of this has led me to wonder whether it's possible for any lawyer, particularly a solo or small firm lawyer, to sustain a quality blog, on a topic that is neither directly related to, nor offers any synergies, with one's primary practice area.

See, if a lawyer practices, for example, appellate law or intellectual property or high tech or ERISA/benefits law and runs a blog on those topics, then the blog, while perhaps a personal endeavor, bolsters the underlying practice. Sure, a blog won't write a brief or attend a hearing, but it gives exposure and serves as a mini-CLE, keeping the blogger current with new developments.

So should lawyers try to run blogs on topics of interest unrelated to practice and can they succeed? Will someone want to read a blog on a topic that's written by a non-expert anyway - in other words, perhaps the issue of blog-being-related-to-practice-area is self-selecting anyway.

I started this Foolish enterprise not quite six months ago as a sort of test run, intending to launch a law-related site once I had developed a little confidence in the format. The legal site, Declarations and Exclusions, went up about a month later. Decs and Excs was and is intended to address those business, practice development and professional purposes that Carolyn Elefant mentions. I suppose I could have shuttered or slowed this site once it had served its purpose on my learning curve, but the idea never seriously entered my mind. Each man in his time wears an array of headgear, and the cap and bells is as satisfying in its way as the barrister's wig.

At about the time both of my sites were tuning up, there was a bit of soul searching going on in the legal Web community over whether it was wise or advisable for an attorney to disclose, online, personal interests that he or she would otherwise never have reason to take up with a client. Denise Howell took up the subject (responding to an ABA piece for which her link seems no longer to function), and her observations bear on Carolyn Elefant's conundrum:

As far as the overall message of the piece, everyone is entitled to an opinion about what might constitute 'acid-rainmaking,' a great turn of phrase supplied by Perkins Coie Labor and Employment partner Michael Reynvaan. Not so great in my view is Mr. Reynvaan's suggestion that while writing about certain hobbies -- 'bridge, marathon training, sailing' -- might form a common bond with clients, writing about others -- 'professional wrestling or NASCAR' -- could be perceived as 'unlawyerly.' Maybe it's just me, but the adjectives such an approach brings to mind are 'elitist,' 'narrow-minded,' 'backward,' and 'out of touch.' While I'm not personally into NASCAR -- IRL is more my thing -- or professional wrestling, if I were, I assume from time to time they'd come up here. Then, to the extent any of the millions of people who contribute to the huge popularity of these pursuits -- who are bound to include clients, potential clients, and colleagues -- should stumble on a related Bag and Baggage post, it might just bring a smile to their face.

If you want an automaton as a lawyer, someone like me may not be your best bet. If, on the other hand, you would prefer your legal representatives to think, breathe, and have some grasp on the kinds of cultural and policy issues that so frequently affect the development of the law and the outcome of judicial decisions, that might be another story.

By similar logic, I see no reason that attorneys shouldn't write and post about legal topics outside the bounds of their usual practice area(s) -- or write and post, as happens here, on subjects altogether unrelated to legal theory or practice -- so long as they do it out of genuine interest or enthusiasm. Absent that enthusiasm, maintaining a weblog quickly becomes drudgery no matter what the topic. It is that aspect of the project -- just how interested the author is in whatever he or she is writing about -- moreso than the relation to the author's "day job" that will tend to determine how long an "unrelated" weblog can be sustained.

Many Happy Returns of the Day

2003-12-10T12:18:00.000-08:00

Happy Birthday, Mother dear. Enjoy this Capitol squirrel.

Welcome Professor Bainbridge Readers

2003-12-09T07:50:00.000-08:00

Having successfully hunted Snark here, Professor Bainbridge has gone the extra mile and rashly added this Fool to his blogroll. I'm blushing, of course. All Fool readers are hereby urged to return the favor and to read the good Professor early and often.

Duck! It's This Year's Christmas Wine

2003-12-08T13:30:00.000-08:00

One of the pleasures of this time of year chez Fool is the task of selecting a wine to serve with Christmas dinner. Each year, we spend several Saturday cocktail hours blind-tasting candidates. This year's process ended over the weekend, and our winner is Migration 2001 Anderson Valley Pinot Noir.

Migration is the second label of the Goldeneye winery, which in turn is the Mendocino County pinot noir arm of Duckhorn Wine Company. Dan Duckhorn has built himself a well deserved reputation over the past 25+ years for his Napa Valley wines, particularly his merlot (of which Professor Bainbridge approves), and his recent expansion into pinot noir has to be declared a success. The winemaker for the Goldeneye project is Zach Rasmuson, whose biography shows he has spent time with two other solid pinot producers, Robert Sinskey Vineyards in Carneros and Husch Vineyards in Mendocino County's Anderson Valley (which is darned fine pinot country, you can be sure), and that experience shows in the wine.

The 2001 Migration is notable for a luxuriant silky quality and a delicious cherry/berry fruitfulness with subtly earthy backnotes. In other words, it tastes and feels really yummy: this is not a deeply serious exercise in imitating Burgundy, but a satisfying and pleasurable expression of many of pinot noir's most enjoyable qualities. Not a "bargain" wine, really, but reasonably priced for what you get at around $25.00.

Christmas cheer, indeed.

Bed Scene/Bad Scene

2003-12-08T08:24:00.000-08:00

I am arriving late to coverage of the 2003 edition of the Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction award -- granted annually for the most "redundant or embarrassing description of the sexual act in modern novels" -- but I'm not about to let a little tardiness stop me. Those of you who haven't followed this year's competition can, depending upon your capacity for this sort of thing and your good taste, read either this summary report or the dread passages themselves. They are indeed truly awful (and both links are to be blamed on Arts & Letters Daily).

Sex being a common and natural human activity, it's hardly a surprise that novelists feel obliged to incorporate it into their fictions, but it has been the ruin of many a poor scribbler. I did a quick survey of the fiction on my own shelves and was reminded of how difficult a thing it is to pull off a sexual scene that will not either drive the reader away in dismay or, more likely, produce hoots of derisive laughter. From my survey, and from this year's award nominees, I derive three practical rules for the production of bad sex scenes:

1. A sex scene is doomed at the first mention of a brand name consumer product or the application of a "clever" simile or metaphor -- particularly one referring to a brand name consumer product.

2. Risibility of a sex scene increases in direct proportion to the degree of detail in which the relevant mechanics and hydraulics are described.

3. The better the writer is at everything else, or the better the writer's reputation, the more likely his or her sex scenes are to fail.

Finding examples to prove each of these propositions would make for a fun parlor game, if you keep enough books in your parlor.

John Barth in his first novel, The Floating Opera, captured what may be the root cause that renders it so difficult to write a sex scene that maintains any shred of the writer's dignity. Barth's narrator recounts the story of his first sexual experience at age 17 with a girl named Betty June. In the midst of the act, he catches sight of himself in a large mirror and is reduced to helpless laughter. Betty June does not take it well, declaring that she sees nothing funny in the situation:

I couldn't answer. I couldn't comfort the nervous tears that ran from her, though I swear I tried. I couldn't help her at all, or myself. I bellowed and snorted with laughter, long after Betty June had fumed out of my bed, out of my room, out of my house, for the last time. I laughed through lunch, to Dad's amusement (and subsequent irritation). I laughed that night when I undressed.

I have said that my experience in the Argonne, not very long afterwards, was the second of two unforgettable demonstrations of my animality. This was the first. Nothing, to me, is so consistently, profoundly, earth-shakingly funny as we animals in the act of mating. Reader, if you are young and would live on love;if in the flights of intercourse you feel that you and your beloved are models for a Phidias -- then don't include among the trappings of your love-nest a good size mirror. For a mirror can reflect only what it sees, and what it sees is funny.

Ask a Simple Question . . . .

2003-12-08T08:03:00.000-08:00

Thanks, I think, are in order to that Large Mammal, discriminating wine drinker and all 'round ornament to the faculty of the UCLA School of Law, Professor Bainbridge, for his having linked Footnote 2 below, declaring it the Political Snark of the Week.

A Leisurely Observation

2003-12-05T14:00:00.000-08:00

From Maine-based attorney Scheherazade Fowler, attending a bankruptcy conference near Palm Springs:

One of the things I enjoy about resorts is the concierges. They are like reference librarians for the frivolous and self-indulgent.

"Goodness is in me, and also grayness, and as well I loafing here am yet a poet"

2003-12-05T13:07:00.000-08:00

Terry Teachout and Our Girl in Chicago had an ongoing discussion recently on the subject of writers and artists who are clearly important/great, but to whom they have never warmed. I think the most recent round was here, and it in turn will link you back through the series. In a similar vein, I have been revisiting one of my own particular blindspots recently: Walt Whitman.

I have been trying to grapple myself into more enthusiasm for Whitman for more than a quarter century, without success. When I was an undergraduate English major at Berkeley in the 1970's, I took a poetry course taught by Ron Loewinsohn -- a gentleman notable for a number of things, but I'll confess that I took his course in large part because Richard Brautigan had dedicated Trout Fishing in America to him.¹ The class was an odd cross-pollination incorporating a survey of [mostly] American Poetry -- starting at Poe and Whitman and proceeding by way of Pound, Eliot, Williams, Stevens [Hart Crane was on the syllabus, but we never actually read him], before leapfrogging via (inevitably) Sylvia Plath to then-contemporary work by Ted Hughes, James Wright and Gary Snyder -- with poetry writing exercises thrown in. One of the running themes of the class was the notion that the history of American poetry is really the history of a competition between the approach of Poe (this would be the oft-maligned "school of quietude," I suppose) and that of Whitman. Loewinsohn was pretty squarely on the side of Whitman, but he tried to give the alternative strain a fair shake. For my part, I was happy the day we put Whitman behind us.

Then and now, Walt Whitman simply does not Work for me, and it is not because (as even his supporters usually admit) he produced as much really mediocre work in his career as any major poet this side of Wordsworth. No, my problem is with what most agree are the genuinely good poems he produced, and above all with the core of the Whitman oeuvre, the "Song of Myself."²

I can recognize lines and passages in which Whitman did very well indeed. That long line of his, with its wholloping caesura smack in the middle, can be a fluid and powerful instrument, and his wide-ranging vocabulary is often effective in providing the sort of "music" that might otherwise be provided by, say, meter or rhyme.³ But those lists, those lists! "Song of Myself" seems above all a List of Lists, and each item on each list seems to require a counterbalancing item within that list or in another list. And Whitman is constantly proclaiming how all-encompassing he is: Not only am I This, I am also That, And I am This Other Thing, and Something Else Again. And on and on. And on.

Just as including every possible frequency only produces white noise, Whitman's efforts to include everything produce the impression in this reader that his poem is ultimately about nothing . . . or it would produce that impression if one could only stay awake through whole wearying incantatory thing.⁴

There. I've said it and I'm glad.

¹ I revisited Trout Fishing over the summer, and found that it holds up surprisingly well. Whatever his weaknesses as a person (mostly relating to alcohol), Brautigan could turn out sentences that are a pure pleasure to read, even if they are not exactly freighted with deep significance.

² Digression and Speculative Exercise: Did it strike anyone else that President Clinton's List of 21 Favorite Books, so provocative of much comment else where, listed only Eliot and Yeats as favored poets, pointedly omitting Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a copy of which Mr. Clinton famously presented to a blushing young intern of his acquaintance? Would Leaves have made the President's list in, say, 1996 and, if so, which of the works currently included has replaced it?

³ I know that when I've written about poetry previously I have tended to focus on strongly metric or rhyming work, but I do not have a particular bone to pick with free verse as such. A poet who rejects the use of those tools is doing hirself no favors, but some at least have succeeded by other means.

⁴ Aaron Haspel quoting Yvor Winters, taking Yeats to task, provides a relevant observation:

'The bardic tone is common in romantic poetry; it sometimes occurs in talented (but confused) poets such as Blake and Yeats; more often it appears in poets of little or no talent, such as Shelley, Whitman, and Robinson Jeffers. For most readers the bardic tone is synonymous with greatness, for through this tone the poet asserts that he is great, in the absence of any (or sufficient) supporting intelligence.'

I am also reminded of God's complaint when he appears to King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

God: What are you doing now?
Arthur: I'm averting my eyes, O Lord.
God: Well don't. It's like those miserable Psalms -- they're so depressing. Now knock it off!

O, O, O, That Ozzy Man-Dizzyin' Rag!

2003-12-05T08:11:00.000-08:00

When will it end? Not quite yet, I'm afraid:

From the American Poets Project's new collection of light verse, American Wits, comes one more Ozymandias variant, this one by Morris Bishop:

Ozymandias Revisited

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Also the names of Emory P. Gray,
Mr. and Mrs. Dukes, and Oscar Baer
Of 17 West 4th Street, Oyster Bay.

Oh Show Us the Way to the Next Whisky

2003-12-04T16:12:00.000-08:00

And to think they call it The Dismal Science!

Gentle readers, I give you The Malt Whisky Yield Curve.

Revisionist Economic History

2003-12-04T07:45:00.000-08:00

This past summer, you may recall, there was a terrible incident at the weekly Farmer's Market in the city of Santa Monica. An elderly gentlemen somehow drove his car through the crowd, killing 10 and injuring more than 60. The incident received a lot of coverage, and inevitably led to innumerable editorials along the lines of: "Should the Elderly Be Allowed to Drive, or Should We Just Lock Them In Cages and Have Done With It?" You know the sort of thing I mean.

Today, the Los Angeles Times offers an update on the ongoing investigation here. The only reason I link to it is the headline. Whoever writes these things for the Times was apparently under the impression he was working on a story for the Business section, because he/she has offered a new and outlandish explanation for the bursting of the dot.com bubble. The headline?

Driver Error Blamed in Market Crash

Cross-Blog Traffic

2003-12-03T17:55:00.000-08:00

As does many another earnest scribbler, I am in the habit of checking my traffic and referrer logs many more times in a day than I can safely admit. I have had Site Meter running here for some six months. Last week, frustrated with the lack of detail provided by the tracking mechanisms that are incorporated into TypePad (a package with which I am otherwise well pleased and to which I keep telling myself I must get around to transferring my Fool-ish persona), I finally installed a meter on my TypePad-based legal site, Declarations and Exclusions. Now I have two sets of statistics to check on an ongoing basis, just in case I find myself with time on my hands.

Comparing traffic patterns between the two sites has been intriguing. To my surprise, something like 95% of the traffic at Decs & Excs is generated by search engines (Google and Yahoo principally), while the percentage of search engine referrals here is closer to 50%. The other half of my traffic here either derives from those much-appreciated links on other sites or comes with no referral information at all -- which I take to mean that the visitor is a true hardcore Fool reader who came here directly and on purpose. While D&E is receiving somewhat higher traffic than this site, both remain small potatoes indeed in the larger scheme of things. Not that fame and glory have been the goals of these projects, mind you.

So what have we learned? Extrapolating from this admittedly unreliable statistical sample, I have to suspect that the overall audience for a legal weblog is moreso an "audience of opportunity," readers who arrive because they were looking for some sort of substantive information on some topic that happens to have been mentioned. The audience for a cultural weblog -- and I suspect this to be true for political sites as well -- is more likely to include readers who make a regular, perhaps daily, habit of reading either weblogs generally or, better yet, the pages of particular weblogologizers. And the readers in that latter group (you know who you are, bless you all) are the ones to be prized.

Ha! Who says attorneys have no grasp of the obvious?

The Links Ascending

2003-12-03T12:15:00.000-08:00

Warming up to posting something more original, here are some random items of note from the past few days to be found Someplace Other Than Here:

♣ There are hours of middlebrow family fun to be had with Mr. Picassohead. Hang them on your wall! Fool your friends! [Via Professor Volokh of UCLA School of Law, doing my alma mater proud as usual.]

♣ And speaking of UCLA School of Law, Professor Stephen Bainbridge explains what's going wrong at the Disney Company, what with Roy Disney's resignation from the Board and such, before displaying a bit of resignation of his own:

What's the solution? As a lawyer, I'm trained to find an answer to any legal problem. As a law professor, I'm trained to write articles that conclude with a proposed legal reform that solves some doctrinal or policy problem. As I get older, however, I've concluded that some problems have no answers and I'm ok with it.

The Professor's site is worth a regular visit because he offers not just corporate legal insights but insightful Wine Tasting Notes as well.

♣ Any number of others have linked it, but perhaps you have missed this spiffy profile of Bill Watterson, the J.D. Salinger/Thomas Pynchon of comics artists.

♣ A C Douglas trots out his remarkably convincing Herman Melville ventriloquism act whilst waxing all rhapsodic-like over Moby-Dick (as well he might).

♣ The P. B. Shelleyathon continues with K. Silem Mohammad's reconnaissance in depth of the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." Very few stone heads are in evidence, and nary a trunkless leg. [Link via Mike Snider.]

♣ A final note of gratitude: it's buried deep in a particularly thick and tasty "Elsewhere" post, but this Fool is thankful for his first-ever link from a Blowhard. One never knows who might be reading one, or what might catch their fancy, do one?

Neglectful Of His Post

2003-12-02T10:38:00.000-08:00

Begging your pardon, gentle readers, but a combination of deadlines for appellate briefs, court hearings and the like is keeping me on the jump. More substantive remarks will resume when possible, most likely sometime Wednesday. If you've an interest in that sort of thing, there have been a number of new items appearing on this Fool's law-related site, Declarations and Exclusions.

10 Brief Lines for Thanksgiving Weekend

2003-11-28T09:43:00.000-08:00

Hark! The festive season calls
Both faint of heart and bold to malls
To seek -- en pilgrimage, en masse --
To find the Very Thing. Alas!
This world's no place to seek perfection,
No matter what one's predilection
For the quest. Still, hope or stronger
Urges drive us to search longer:
Striving, struggling, plunging on --
With what success? We'll know anon.

A Word in Your Tufted Ear

2003-11-25T15:16:00.000-08:00

Word has just come in that I need to start a trial in San Diego in the morning, so posting here will be interrupted at least briefly.

Herewith a parting bit of advice. Take it from one who knows: when selecting a college, be sure that your choice offers a sufficiency of squirrels.

Wichita Ozymandian

2003-11-25T12:38:00.000-08:00

Les affaires Ozymandesque continue . . .

Mika Cooper has responded at length (interspersed with -- parents be warned -- a virtuoso display of old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon expletives) to Aaron Haspel's response to her take on Shelley's Ozymandias. She has also kindly linked back to my own frivolous paraphrase of the work in question, which she trumps with a rather more serious paraphrase (also rife with those Anglo-Saxonisms of which I spoke earlier) by Howard Nemerov (whose position as elder brother to photographer Diane Arbus will be of interest to at least one of my more loyal readers).

In her reply, Mika has offered links to a number of photos to assist those still wrestling with the phenomenon of Stone Heads That Frown While Sneering. In a fit of synchronicity, today's celebrity news provides a further example of such a face, in the unexpected form of singer Glen Campbell's DUI mugshot:

A "wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command" indeed.

A Low Culture Moment

2003-11-24T16:05:00.000-08:00

I know, this item really doesn't fit into the high moral tenor we try to maintain around here, but the following is hard to believe: Can it be that it has taken Hugh Hefner and Playboy magazine nearly five decades to present the first Jewish Playmate? Surely it can't have been for lack of qualified candidates.

[Link via L.A. Observed.]

Of course, one must always be aware that associating with Hugh Hefner can be dangerous to your status in the community. Take all appropriate precautions.

Epater Les Bourgeois Avec Moi Ce Soir?

2003-11-22T11:12:00.000-08:00

A cogent observation from Brian Micklethwaite:

As for the endlessly repeated claim that art is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable, I don't buy that. And I don't believe the people who say that they do buy it are being honest. I think that a picture which they have no problem with, but which they believe makes other people whom they disapprove of uncomfortable, makes them very comfortable indeed, and that that is the kind of discomfort (i.e. not discomfort at all, for them) which they like, and are referring to with all this discomfort propaganda. They no more like being genuinely discomforted by art than I do.

[This post has been edited to correct the link and to insert the italics I had inadvertently omitted from the original.]

Update 11/25/03: Megan McArdle and Stuart Buck endorse Brian Micklethwaite's assessment.

Stupid Poetry Tricks

2003-11-22T11:06:00.000-08:00

This is what comes of driving for hours to and from San Diego while thinking about the numerous comments (numbering at least 30 as this is typed) to Aaron Haspel's critique of the weaknesses disclosed upon examining P.B. Shelley's Ozymandias. Somehow those thoughts resulted in the following, a patently frivolous paraphrase of the poem that emerged in a style reminiscent of rap and Dr. Seuss, with a dash of folk ballad for flavor, and incorporates some of the commenters' principal themes:

Trunkless But Not Funkless

Before you get huffy or puffed up and pious,
Let me tell you a story ‘bout Ozymandias
That I heard from a fellow just passing though
From a land that’s distant and far from new.
He says: “Out on the dunes where the vipers lay their eggs
There’s an Olmec-size head and two smokestack legs
Been standing there alone for thousands of years
And the face on that head both frowns and sneers
-- not easy to do, but the sculptor was keen
To capture with his hands what his heart had seen --
And underneath his sandals on the plinth’s displayed
This motto: ‘Be afraid, be very afraid,
For I’m Ozymandias and I’ll take no guff
From you other despots who think you’re tough;
Just look at me, fools, you’ll never live up
To my power or achievements, so just give up.’
Now he lays in the dust in the dunes and the heat,
Just a cracked up head and two blasted feet.
I can’t say if it’s Shelleyan or faintly Byronic,
But the moral of my story is: ‘Ain’t that ironic?’”

Who You Callin' Slithy?

2003-11-19T08:43:00.000-08:00

The singular hallmark of all artifacts of high culture is their aspiration to transcendence; transcendence of the quotidian world of experience, of the culture which produced them, and even of their very selves as works of Art. And that singular hallmark is what's singularly lacking in all the artifacts of contemporary popular culture, their singular hallmark being an aspiration to the here-and-now popularly entertaining.

If you flee reflexively from anyone who holds forth in that vein, then you will not find much to like in the writing of A C Douglas. His views on matters cultural -- and most especially on the subject of classical music in general and the mature works of Richard Wagner in particular -- are firmly held to put it mildly. Personally, I find his certitude bracing, hence his presence on the links list to your left.

Mr. Douglas is in the habit of topping his page with a republication of an older post, and at the moment he is ostensibly on about the pitfalls of color photography. Photography's not my field at all, so I'll leave comment on that aspect of the piece to those more in the know, but photography is not the real subject of Douglas' post in any case. No, photography is merely the excuse to open up a test for determining a work's status as genuine Capital "A" Art, The Jabberwocky Test:

'Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -- only I don't exactly know what they are!' exclaimed Alice after reading Jabberwocky for the first time. The capacity of a work to provoke that feeling in an informed and experienced receiver is almost a very definition of genuine art, and regardless of its medium, any work absent that quality is most assuredly non-art.

The Jabberwocky Test in no way depends on the tester finding the work under test to be personally appealing. What it does depend on is the depth of the tester's knowledge of the domain to which the work belongs, and his ability to put aside his personal likes and dislikes, and make his judgment based on the qualities of the work itself.

For instance, I've a marked antipathy toward 19th- and 20th-century French music, but that doesn't in the least prevent me from at once recognizing that the works of, say, Debussy (whose works I particularly loathe) most decidedly pass Jabberwocky muster. My knowledge of music permits me to make that determination with some measure of confidence. Similarly, but on the flip side, I positively adore the Sherlock Holmes stories of Conan Doyle, but my personal love of that classic and enduring canon does not in any way prevent me seeing clearly that as literature it most decidedly fails Jabberwocky as enduring as that canon has been for the past 100 years or so (its endurance beyond its time of novelty due a certain nostalgia peculiar to the last half of the last century in particular which is fast losing its power). Again, my knowledge of literature permits me that judgment with some measure of confidence.

You can pack that in your quiver alongside the A. E. Houseman skin-bristling test, and much good may they both do you.

A question remains: Does Jabberwocky itself pass the Jabberwocky Test? Alice's reaction suggests that it does, except that we have no basis on which to conclude that Alice possesses the requisite "knowledge of the domain to which the work belongs." Her recollection and understanding of poetry is suspect at least, as witness her regular misquotes whenever she was called upon to recite while visiting Wonderland. Moreover, the "domain" of Jabberwocky is not merely poetry, but specifically looking glass poetry: Alice is only able to read it by holding it up to the mirror through which she has just entered the looking glass world, and her familiarity with that world is limited indeed. Jabberwocky, then, provides an inadequate tool for its own self-analysis and necessarily remains impenetrable. As Tweedledum and Tweedledee would propose: that's logic.

Update: A C Douglas is an active participant in the comments accompanying Aaron Haspel's response to Michaela Cooper's Ozymandias post (to which I linked in the two posts preceding this one). It's all very civil and erudite, but it's hardly the love feast of "self-congratulation and mutual admiration" complained of in Jennifer Howard's much-linked commentary in the Washington Post. (Drat! I'd promised myself I wouldn't link that piece. Curse you, Old Media!)

Further Update, 11/23/03: Congratulations to A C Douglas on the occasion of his becoming one of the Elect, having been added to the link list at Arts & Letters Daily. And my thanks to him for linking, through Aaron Haspel's comments, to my Ozymandias paraphrase, supra. Thanks as well to Aaron himself, of course.

The Sorrows of the Poets

2003-11-18T09:21:00.000-08:00

Just below her Ozymandias post [see below], Michaela Cooper links to this entry (from mid-2002) on the Suddenly Very Popular Cup of Chicha:

Those who suffer from mental illness tend to like the madness-art association. I'm one of those people. Here's why:

1. Depression creates the type of interiority that modernism worshipped and literature continues to value. Depression might not have created the language of interiority, but depressives, borrowing from that language to explain their illness, learn that language well.

Which triggered the urge to write something down on a topic that's been on my mind recently: the seeming disappearance, from contemporary literary and poetic circles, of The Elaborately Troubled Poet.

For a time, in the wake of the Second World War and through the 1950’s and 1960’s, Elaborately Troubled Poets [ETPs] were all the rage: Lowell, Sexton, Plath, Berryman and more raised their status as walking wounded to high art. Dylan Thomas flamed out spectacularly, drowning in his own handcrafted butt of malmsey. Hemingway and Fitzgerald occupied a similar niche among the novelists. There seem to be no comparable figures now -- creative artists admired for their artistry but at the same time watched by the public at large in much the way one would watch a particularly picturesque train wreck -- at least not in the literary realm. The nearest contemporary equivalent that comes to mind is from the realm of pop music: Kurt Cobain. It is too soon to tell whether Cobain will have the sort of staying power in the cultural imagination that the ETPs have shown; he has the advantage of having worked in a medium that commands a wider audience than poetry.

The ETPs have maintained public attention to varying degrees. Robert Lowell, with the publication at last of the Collected Poems, is enjoying a (brief?) vogue of renewed attention, and appears in danger of being declared overrated. (I've never warmed to Lowell myself, so I'll leave that judgment to those more knowledgeable than I.) Sylvia Plath seems never to have fallen out of style, and is getting a renewed push from yet another round of biographies (with and without Ted Hughes, not I think an ETP himself) and from being portrayed on film by, of all people, Gwyneth Paltrow. Anne Sexton seems not to draw as much attention currently, but at least managed to become the backhanded subject of a fairly good song ("Mercy Street") by Peter Gabriel. But what of John Berryman, my personal favorite of the sad sorry bunch? He seems not to have nearly the profile he once did. The principal poetry-bloggers make little or no mention of him -- although Henry Gould at HG Poetics mentioned him this past June whilst scorning one of Ron Silliman's recurring jabs at "the School of Quietude," Henry referring to "the bizarre 'quietude' of scholar-poet John Berryman (have you read his essays - or his poems - or is he just another running dog of the quiet establishment?), which made it to the cover of Time."

I cannot get enough of Berryman's Dream Songs, which I find myself pulling down from the shelf several times in any given year. While all 300+ Songs are written in roughly the same stanza, syntax is stretched and bent and meters are picked up and dropped on an ongoing basis such that monotony never sets in. (This despite the fact that large stretches of the poem grow out of Berryman's battles, in and out of hospitals and traveling around the world, with alcoholism and the depression that ultimately sent him leaping from a bridge over the Mississippi. His insistence that the poems were about ". . . an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry . . ." was never taken entirely seriously, nor should it be.) As good an example as any -- and a vivid portrayal of what the Puritan sermonizers would call "raging fleshly lust" -- is Dream Song 69:

Love her he doesn’t but the thought he puts
into that young woman
would launch a national product
complete with TV spots & skywriting
outlets in Bonn & Tokyo
I mean it

Let it be known that nine words have not passed
between herself and Henry;
looks, smiles.
God help Henry, who deserves it all
every least part of that infernal & unconscious
woman, and the pain.

I feel as if, unique, she . . . Biddable?
Fates, conspire.
--Mr Bones, please.
--Vouchsafe me, Sleepless One,
a personal experience of the body of Mrs Boogry
before I pass from lust!

Many poetical clubs being kept in the air there, metrically and syntactically. The first line of the final stanza, for example, odd as it is is nonetheless a nice bit of iambic pentameter. The inverted, near-Elizabethan diction of the opening stanza contributes to the cynical humor of its metaphor (the international advertising campaign). In fact, bleak humor is one of the hallmarks of the Songs, as when we are assured in Song 29 that Henry is not -- no, really, he isn't -- an axe murderer:

There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.

And there is one thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.

But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.

The Songs also serve to chronicle the passing of several poetic generations, with extended elegies on Yeats and Frost (also Faulkner and Hemingway), and even a somewhat grudging farewell to Wallace Stevens (Dream Song 219: "He lifted up, among the actuaries,/a grandee crow. Ah ha & he crowed good./That funny money-man.") The deaths, often by their own hand, of Berryman's fellow ETPs are a running theme throughout, as in Song 153:

I’m cross with god who has wrecked this generation.
First he seized Ted, then Richard, Randall, and now Delmore.
In between he feasted on Sylvia Plath.
That was a first rate haul. He left alive
fools I could number like a kitchen knife
but Lowell he did not touch.

(Berryman's advice to Plath in Song 187: "Them lady poets must not marry, pal.")

Somewhere -- I couldn't find the reference when I went searching for it -- Nietszche repeats the story of a Greek tyrant who constructed a brazen bull in which he roasted his victims; the opening at the bull's mouth was so formed that the victims' cries of anguish emerged as sweet music. That, he tells us, is where poetry comes from. For the ETPs' generation, at least, there seems to have been some truth to the theory.

Procrastination Rewarded

2003-11-17T13:19:00.000-08:00

Those of you playing along at home will be pleased to learn that Michaela Cooper has finally gotten 'round to posting her long-promised thoughts on Shelley's Ozymandias. It was worth the wait, especially for the choice invocations of Poe and Wallace Stevens. As an added bonus, she links back to a prior attempt at the project, in which she never got to Shelley but managed some kind words for this site.

Hijacked

2003-11-17T08:05:00.000-08:00

The usual list of links in the left column is currently missing, as I discovered this morning that the entire list had somehow been hijacked: every one of the links that used to be there had been replaced by a link to the mysterious "Laura's Blog." I've discovered a similar problem on other sites whose lists are managed through Blogrolling, and I've added my own inquiry to the presumed flood of e-mails seeking an answer to the problem. Assuming the original list has not been lost, the roll should reappear soon. Otherwise, there will be as vacancy until I can sit down and recreate/recode the list.

Pretty darned annoying, what?

Update: Whatever the cause, it seems to have righted itself now. A strange and hallucinatory way to start a Monday morning.

Home School Hysteria Watch: New York Times Weighs In, Contradicts Self

2003-11-15T11:58:00.000-08:00

An editorial in today's New York Times, under the title "Make Home Schooling Safe for Children" sets itself solidly on the same path as last month's much-criticized CBS News "exposé" on the subject. As did CBS, the Times finds a single case of authentically ghastly mistreatment of children -- here, four young boys being more or less starved to death by their adoptive parents -- and extrapolates it to support its chosen to the question of "how could this have happened?"

Part of the answer was that they had been home-schooled, and New Jersey is one of a number of states that provide no supervision over parents who decide to keep their offspring out of the public and private school systems.

"Most teachers," the Times adds in a marvel of straight-faced understatement, "would immediately have sounded the alarm" upon noticing the excruciating emaciation of these children. (Query whether the Times would care to identify the teachers who apparently wouldn't have sounded that alarm . . . .) A history lesson follows, as do some remarkable and unsupported innuendos and the Times' view of the relative merits of individual citizens and the State as guardians of those citizens' children:

New Jersey is not alone. Nine states allow parents to remove children from school without reporting that they are doing so. An additional 14 states require home-schoolers to report that they are keeping their children at home, but require very little else. These lax regulations stem in some instances from the old patterns of American farming communities [!], where parents needed to keep their children around to help with the crops. In some states, the rules remain unchanged because the groups that hold home schooling sacred [?!] have political muscle. In others, the desire to save money and avoid responsibility [!?!] obviously comes into play.

While parents have a right to decide how their children will be educated, the state most certainly has an obligation to ensure that every American child is learning basic skills. The [home] schooling laws fly in the face of compulsory education statutes that have been on the books throughout this country since the early 20th century, not to mention the new national push to raise standards and improve student achievement.

Diligent readers will have noted by now that whoever wrote the title for this editorial can't have bothered to read it first: our anonymous editorialist is clearly not interested in "making home schooling safe," except perhaps by eliminating it or intruding the monitoring powers of the state on a regular basis.

How soon they forget: can this be the same New York Times that only five days ago was praising the merits of the uniquely home-school-based experience of "conjugat[ing] French verbs while cuddling a kitten"? Meow, sez we. And harrumph.

Update: Joanne Jacobs has more, including the fact that the New Jersey children in question were visited by social workers some 38 times without any protective measures being taken. Further comment from Daryl Cobranchi can be found here.

Further Update (with extra sarcasm content): And what about those French-conjugating kittens, eh? Shouldn't PETA or some such be lobbying to require pet owners to deliver their animal companions to the shelter on a regular basis, so that the quality of their health and safety can be assessed by a duly qualified, publicly employed professional? Just asking.

The Rich Get Richards, or, Further Adventures of the Sussex Vampire

2003-11-14T13:26:00.000-08:00

Jesse Walker of Hit & Run links to a report in the Spectator revealing the Shocking Truth that the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards, about to turn 60, is actually . . . a rather conservative sort of a bloke.

Even at his leaden nadir as a smack addict, Keith was unabashedly proud of a past that would be branded imperialist in today’s Britain. His all-time hero was the second world war fighter ace Douglas Bader. He once named his two favourite films as Reach for the Sky and The Man Who Would Be King. Richards’s long-time former minder and friend Tom Keylock calls him a ‘very homegrown sort of rebel’. At no time in his rarefied Sixties existence did Keith ever lose touch with his mum, or with the simple pleasures of sitting in the back room of a pub playing dominoes. Much of his life was spent at Redlands, his thatched retreat in West Wittering, where he still likes nothing more than wolfing a large plate of shepherd’s pie with HP sauce.

Perhaps most shocking of all to Keith's many non-conservative fans will be the revelation that he "is also chummy with John Major." [Gasp!]

Some days back, I made some listening recommendations on the occasion of Joni Mitchell's 60th. I'll do the same for Keith Richards: if you don't know it, and if you have any liking for his work at all, you should most assuredly give a listen to his first solo album, 1988's Talk Is Cheap. In addition to "You Don't Move Me" -- a sort of "How Do You Sleep" with Mick Jagger playing McCartney to Richards' Lennon -- the album features "Make No Mistake," a creamy soulful duet that may be the best song about temptation since, oh, Squeeze's "Tempted." Keith doesn't need the money, but you know you could use additional good music in your life, so have a go.

Nourishing

2003-11-12T13:43:00.000-08:00

The ever-eclectic American Digest kindly satisfies your daily minimum requirement for Theodore Roethke, who himself was having a bad day 68 years ago today.

Dr. Williams, We Presume

2003-11-11T13:42:00.000-08:00

Ron Silliman has posted a long and interesting run through some 1941 lecture notes of William Carlos Williams on the subject of poetic form.

As is often the case -- and this is meant merely as description, not to detract -- Ron's commentary assumes on the part of the reader a fair level of prior knowledge of the various poets, philosophers and other figures whose names are invoked and his discussion almost inevitably works its way round to the ongoing "School of Quietude" vs. "Post-Avant" argument, with no particular doubts left concerning his views on which side has the better of it. His commenters, also true to usual practice, are not entirely in agreement with his assessment, and are articulate in support of their own. My own biases, as usual, are running counter to those of Mr. Silliman, but there's plenty of material here with which to be testing and tuning those biases.

I have two types of reader: those who care when we veer into questions of poetics and those who would prefer that we didn't. You know which you are and, based on that self-knowledge, you'll know what to do with the link above.

For Veteran's Day

2003-11-11T07:47:00.000-08:00

A Box Comes Home

I remember the Unied States of America
As a flag-draped box with Arthur in it
And six marines to bear it on their shoulders.

I wonder how someone once came to remember
The Empire of the East and the Empire of the West.
As an urn maybe delivered by chariot.

You could bring Germany back on a shield once
And France in a plume. England, I suppose,
Kept coming back a long time as a letter.

Once I saw Arthur dressed as the United States
Of America. Now I see the United States
Of America as Arthur in a flag-sealed domino.

And I would pray more good of Arthur
Than I can wholly believe. I would pray
An agreement with the United States of America

To equal Arthur's living as it equals his dying
At the red-taped grave in Woodmere
By the rain and oak leaves on the domino.

--John Ciardi

(From Poets of World War II.)

Homeschooling: It's Not Just for Ideologues Anymore [Updated 11/11]

2003-11-10T13:03:00.000-08:00

If it's in the New York Times, it must be true, eh? The popular conception of homeschoolers as ardent religionists or countercultural dropouts is put to the test and found to be . . . a gross over-simplification. Seems an increasing number of homeschool families really are pursuing it For The Children and in pursuit of Quality of Life. Thus saith the Times:

Newcomers to home schooling resist easy classification as part of the religious right or freewheeling left, who dominated the movement for decades, according to those who study the practice.

They come to home schooling fed up with the shortcomings of public education and the cost of private schools. Add to that the new nationwide standards — uniform curriculum and more testing — which some educators say penalize children with special needs, whether they are gifted, learning disabled or merely eccentric.

'It's a profound irony that the standards movement wound up alienating more parents and fueling the growth of home schooling,' said Mitchell L. Stevens, an educational psychologist at New York University and author of 'Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement' (Princeton University Press, 2001).

'The presumption of home schooling is that children's distinctive needs come before the managerial needs of the schools,' he said. 'And, it's easier to do than it was 10 years ago, because the ideologues were so successful in making it legal and creating curriculum tools and organizational support.'

Thank you, ideologues!

[Link via Joanne Jacobs.]

Update: Jesse Walker at Reason magazine's Hit & Run has picked up on this story as well. Plenty of interesting comments attached, not all of which I would endorse but nearly all of which are worth reading.

We're the Government, We're Here to Help . . . Convince You to Home School

2003-11-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

I haven't weighed in on homeschooling on these pages recently, but Professor Glenn Reynolds is thinking about it, inspired by a display of Zero Tolerance in Goose Creek, South Carolina:

Sadly, this sort of behavior is far from uncommon in government-run schools. But more and more parents are looking at private schools, vouchers, charter schools, and home schooling as alternatives. To a lot who haven’t made up their minds, I think that Principal McCrackin’s behavior may provide an incentive to move their kids out of public schools that are looking increasingly like prisons, and into more congenial environments. And the ranks of public-school educators who are unhappy about such a development will have only themselves — and McCrackin — to blame.

Pure Piffle for Now People

2003-11-10T08:56:00.000-08:00

Speaking of those Fabulous 60's . . . . This Fool found himself altogether too amused over the weekend by Down With Love, director Peyton Reed's pitch perfect rendering of what would once have been a Doris Day/Rock Hudson comic romance. It's arch, it's hip, it's been drinking a lot of coffee and very good martinis, it thinks that human folly is just the most amusing thing and that love will find a way, and it carries not a shred of irony about its person. Sophisticates will scoff, but I'm still grinning just thinking about it. A guilty pleasure with extra gilt, if that's what you're in the mood for.

The Work vs. The Reputation

2003-11-10T08:06:00.000-08:00

Rick at Futurballa, who knows more about these things than I, spent his weekend reassessing the work of Diane Arbus, "the Sylvia Plath of photography." His verdict is not unmixed, but basically favorable.

I wonder whether this might lead to a retrospective of the work of her husband, who gave her her start in the photography game.

Poetry Corner: Different Fools in Another Part of the Forest

2003-11-10T07:46:00.000-08:00

Although I have been reading, reading about and commenting on poetry here, it has been some years since I last tried my hand at it myself. Recently, through a longtime friend, I came back into possession of a collection of verse that I wrote in the mid- to late 1970s. (My own copy has gone missing for a decade or so.) My reaction to rereading my delinquent juvenilia has been a mixed one, to say the least, and it may or may not eventually be gone into in more detail on these pages.

Over this weekend, the combination of that old material and Mike Snider's ongoing sonnet project drove me to revisit a sonnet of my own, extemporized about ten years ago. I set about revising it, which is always harder than producing a first draft. Looking back over it, I thought that eight lines -- the first two quatrains in the original, rearranged somewhat here -- more or less held up, but that the remainder descended quickly into treacly greetingcardism. It still needs work -- I’m particularly dissatisfied with the closing couplet, which is only a mild improvement on its bathetic precursor -- but I’ve decided to post it in any case.

To paraphrase Neil Innes: I’ve suffered for my verse. Now it’s your turn . . .

When Bottom bore the donkey’s head and brayed,
Titania wreathed his upstart ears with flowers
‘Til -- disenchanted, open-eyed, dismayed --
She cast him from the comforts of her bowers.

Botanical elixirs were the tools
With which the weaver and his fellow rude
Mechanicals, with other mortal fools,
Were fuddled, led astray and misconstrued.

Old Athens’ misty woods and fogbound lovers,
Her naiads, pixies, fairies, sprites and elves
Are gone; but surely Puck still grins and hovers
As modern men make asses of themselves.

No spell but self delusion clouds their sight,
And leaves them pathless in the summer night.

Canadian Makes Worthwhile Music

2003-11-07T12:04:00.000-08:00

Good day, all: today this Fool sends 60th birthday wishes to Joni Mitchell, whose music is surely one of the finer things ever to come out of the vastnesses and fastnesses of the province of Alberta.

As good as Ms. Mitchell's early albums are -- which is very good indeed -- I remain most fond of her mid- to late 70's output as she ventured more toward jazz influences and as her voice deepened and mellowed: from the horn-inflected Court and Spark through The Hissing of Summer Lawns (my nominee for Best Overtly Feminist Album Ever) to my personal favorite, the spacious and sublime collaborations with Jaco Pastorius on Hejira. "Strange pillows of my wanderlust," indeed. It's all good; be sure listen to this music again, early and often.

The Free Things in Life Are Best

2003-11-06T17:53:00.000-08:00

All praise the Pasadena Public Library which, in addition to many other virtues, graciously offers its patrons free wireless access to the Net. This service permits one to, say, pick up a copy of Amphigorey and, emulating Our Girl in Chicago, post an accurate version of a favorite Edward Gorey limerick:

There was a young sportsman named Peel
Who went for a trip on his wheel;
He pedalled for days
Through crepuscular haze,
And returned feeling somewhat unreal.

Jurisprudence and Branch Water

2003-11-06T12:15:00.000-08:00

Working through some of the links I maintain over at my law-oriented site, the soon-to-be-redesigned Declarations and Exclusions, my aesthetic sense was tickled by the very attractive new title banner at Ken Lammers' CrimLaw site. Refreshing after a hard day of hitting the case reports.

Cruel to B Kind [Continuously, Even Incessantly, Updated . . .]

2003-11-06T10:14:00.000-08:00

There's nothing like a little genteel criticism to run up the hits, is there? Aaron Haspel's and David Sucher's critiques of my aversion to the "B" word* combined to drive the traffic through here to its second-highest level ever, overmatched only by those enthusiastic homeschoolers who dropped in when I was heaping scorn on CBS News a few weeks back. This Fool is still not a high-volume destination, but the future looks bright.

Still spending most of my time in courtrooms just now, but the quantity and, one should hope, quality of posts should be on another upswing shortly. Feel free to wander the archives while you wait.

Update: We seem to have come full circle. Those of you who are taking notes will recall that this line of discussion -- call it "the B line" or, more Homerically, Linear B -- began when Gideon Strauss, whose site offers up "worldview revivalism, neocalvinist unapologetics, & zeitgeist surfing," questioned my waggish reference to "blogging" as "archaic." The latest entrant into the scuffle is Aaron Armitage of (aha!) Calvinist Libertarians.

Is some sort of Calvinist conspiracy afoot? And if so, is it as complicated a conspiracy as the one recently spotted by Colby Cosh?

And Yet Another Update: Ah hah! Aaron Armitage has responded to my conspiracy theory with . . . a full confession.

*No, the word in question is not "Bryant" or "Bean." Have you heard? the word is "blog."

Son of Blibbidy Blahbidy Blog, or, I Started a Joke

2003-11-05T11:26:00.000-08:00

My post immediately below on "blog" and its variants has drawn comment and meta-comment, to which I have little to add beyond this:

1. I'm not so much shouting "Stop!" as I am asking for a do-over, knowing full well that no such opportunity is going to be coming my way. "Blog" and its variants are no doubt here to stay, and may well have more staying power than many other contemporary neologisms, e.g., broad swaths of the vocabulary sired by hip-hop or Derrida. I don't much like the word, but who asked me to? It doesn't take too much to see that the terminological opinions of two little lawyers don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. In our defense, I'll quote Fowler on neologisms in The King's English:

Most people of literary taste will say on this point 'It must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh'. They [neologisms] are Liberal-Conservatives, their liberalism being general and theoretic, their conservatism particular and practical. And indeed, if no new words were to appear, it would be a sign that the language was moribund; but it is well that each new word that does appear should be severely scrutinized.

2. For the time being and subject to the unencumbered right to be inconsistent and change my mind on the whole subject at some later date, I intend to stick with "web journal." It's an affectation, I know, but I choose to make it one of my affectations.

3. Lest I should be accused of any consistency at all on this issue, note that I only brought it up in the first place as a bit of a lark, in a piece in which I at least half-seriously praised Mickey Kaus for a neologism, "Gutenberging." That one, I predict, will not be catching on any time soon.

Blibbidy Blahbidy Blog [Updated 11/5/03]

2003-11-02T21:58:00.000-08:00

A truly beastly schedule lies ahead this week, and posts here will be far fewer than I would like. Before disappearing into the swamps of responsibility, another brief foray into the language:

In a brief note linking to this previous item (and we thank you, sir, for that link), Gideon Strauss writes:

George Wallace recommends 'a lengthy and articulate defense of the web journal medium (he uses the archaic term for it: 'blogging')' by Mickey Kaus in Slate. Huh? 'Blogging' an 'archaic term'?

Allow me to elucidate:

That term -- "blogging" -- seems to be here to stay, and I referred to it as "archaic" whilst my tongue rummaged about somewhat glibly in my cheek. Archaic in the literal sense it is not: it's hip it's hep it's happenin' and All The Kids Are Using It. That said, I have opted to adopt the term "web journal" in most circumstances, in lieu of "blog" and its variants. I was persuaded to make the change after reading the arguments in its favor launched by David Giacalone. I first mentioned the issue here , with links to David's original essay on the subject in connection with BloggerCon (here) and his further arguments on the subject at his own web journal, ethicalEsq? (here). As David wrote in the latter post:

Nurturers and caretakers of language do not have to accept the mindless process that begat the word "blog" and its progeny, even though it may be too late to keep teenyboppers, the hipster insiders, and the trivial users of web log technology from chronically belching "blog" and "blogging." We can still choose meaningful nomenclature -- terminology that best suits the actual format of our web sites and that actually communicates a meaning. "Blog" is the equivalent of slang: yes it belongs in the dictionary, but it should not crowd other (and better) terminology for the same concept.

[snip]
As new formats and technologies are created, let's remember that we are also creating and sharing a verbal legacy. If the goal is better communication that leads to better understanding and wider use of the new inventions, jargon and lingo and four-letter neologisms just won't do.

And there you have it. Next question?

[Update: Well, hush my mouth: professional commitments kept me far away from computers through the day yesterday, so I have only just seen Aaron Haspel's comments. Thanks as always for noticing, Aaron. More articulate reply to follow.

Thanks too to Rick Coencas for being the first to bring my attention to Aaron's piece. And I see David Sucher has two cents to spare as well. At this rate, we'll be arguing over architecture at any moment, and that way madness lies.]

The Space "Between" My Ears

2003-10-31T14:41:00.000-08:00

Over at my law-oriented page, I'm offering opinions on grammar. There's more. "Indeed, you should read it all. Heh."

When Bad Things Happen to Good Wineries

2003-10-31T13:19:00.000-08:00

If you are in one of the markets served by the Trader Joe's chain, you currently have the opportunity to benefit from the misfortunes of others. De Loach Vineyards of Sonoma County is an established and reputable one, producing enjoyable Zinfandels, Cabernets, Pinot Noirs (and some well-regarded Chardonnay, if you really must drink the stuff). Unfortunately, De Loach is one of the victims of the slump in the California wine business, and was driven to file a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition this past May. One of the upshots of that filing is that Trader Joe's was able to purchase De Loach's entire inventory, and an array of those wines can now be found in Trader Joe's stores. I have not sampled most of them yet, but I will recommend them nonetheless based on the strength of the brand and the deep discounting for which the Trader is known. The price to quality ratio should be very favorable.

The De Loach wines are not about to disappear from the scene, despite the winery's woes. De Loach was the 15th largest winery in Sonoma County when it filed for bankruptcy, and the family has now entered into an agreement to sell the brand, the winery and the remaining inventory to the American subsidiary of French wine concern, Boisset . This is not the first time Boisset has picked up the assets of a good winery struck by trouble: it took over the Lyeth winery following the death of its founder, Chip Lyeth, in an aviation accident in 1988. At that time, the Lyeth winery was making progress toward establishing itself as a top flight producer of Bordeaux style blends, red and white, from Sonoma County.* The post-Boisset Lyeth wines are not up to that standard (and are no longer made exclusively from Sonoma County grapes), but they are still -- again contradicting the canard that such things don't exist -- good California wines under $15.00. Boisset's longterm plans for the DeLoach brand have not yet been disclosed, but should bear watching.

[*Someday, I will undoubtedly hold forth on the reasons why Sonoma County is to be preferred to its heavily hyped and, yes, oft-overpriced eastern neighbor, Napa.]

Tricky Treats for Our Readers

2003-10-31T09:08:00.000-08:00

Never let it be said that conservative opinion journalists are No Fun. Here are three Perfect Time Wasters, all linked over the course of this week by Jonah Goldberg and the Merry Band at The Corner on National Review Online. For your pointless pleasure, we've got:

Halloween Cat Bowling, and we've got

Clay Kitten Shooting, and in case you actually like cats (even cats made from ones and zeros), we've got

Dustbin Basketball.

This Fool is in a service profession. I am here to help.

Tiny Bubbles, Reasonably Priced

2003-10-29T15:33:00.000-08:00

One of this Fool's favorite subjects is affordable wine, as evidenced in various previous installments. Here, friends, is another disproof of the notion that there is no good California wine to be had for under $15.00.

Chez Fool, we look for whatever excuse we can find to partake of sparkling wine. True Champagne remains, regardless of your personal views concerning our friends the French, the class of the field. Sadly, there really is no such thing as a good inexpensive Champagne. California now has several decades' worth of experience in producing good quality sparking wine, often reasonably priced, but it generally tends to emphasize ripe fruity characteristics (not that there's anything wrong with it) rather than the more complex toasty-yeasty qualities that underlie much of Champagne's appeal. You can find that quality in California, but generally only at higher price points.

Recently, the celebration of our son's 16th birthday (he didn't partake in the bubbly in question) we had occasion to try Mirabelle, the non-vintage California sparkler from Schramsberg Vineyards.

Schramsberg is an old-line Napa Valley estate. Robert Louis Stevenson stayed on the property on his honeymoon and wrote about it in The Silverado Squatters, from whence comes his much quoted assessment of Napa Valley wines circa 1880 as "bottled poetry." In more recent decades, Schramsberg has been owned and operated by the Davies family, which set out to produce French-quality sparking wine in California. To a large extent, they succeeded. My chief quarrel with the Schramsberg wines, which are generally very good, has been that they cost too much. Enter Mirabelle.

While Schramsberg wines, and the property's top echelon sparkler J. Schram, have carried the Napa Valley designation, been drawn from the estate vineyards and been vintage dated, Mirabelle bears a North Coast designation and contains grapes from Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino counties. It is also non-vintage, allowing for blending of wines from several years, and the winemakers have included what tastes like a healthy dollop of older, more complex wine in the blend. The result is a readily enjoyable sparkler with a backbone of the toasty quality that comes from a longer time in the yeast.

The list price for Mirabelle appears to be around $14.99, and the Trader Joe's chain in southern California has it at the entirely acceptable price of $11.99. Worth your search if a festive occasion -- such as sundown or a day of the week ending in "y" -- should beckon.

Linkin' Logs

2003-10-29T14:04:00.000-08:00

In the increasingly frequent -- nay, immortal! -- words of Aaron Haspel, "Rick Coencas comments" on approaches to web journal-ism: "linkers" vs. "thinkers" and "portals" vs. . . . well, clever folks like Aaron and Rick who link, when they do, primarily to have a jumping off point for their own thoughts.

The subject has even driven Rick to the composition of light verse -- or shall I call it bloggerel?

[Any Fool with a Google can tell you that last is not original with me, but I'm sticking with it natheless.]

Update -- Here's a random example of the phenomenon Aaron and Rick are on about -- reading these sorts of sites to get the personal voice and insights of the site's author(s):

Kimberly Swygert of the education-related Number 2 Pencil is taking a poll on her site to see whether her readers are more interested in news about testing and education or Kimberly's opinions about that news. No particular surprise in the current results: opinion is solidly in the lead.

(As with most on-line polls, and as Kimberly acknowledges in her Comments thread, the sample is self-selected and the results need to be considered with that fact in mind. Since the poll is designed more as a means of collecting reader opinion efficiently rather than as any sort of properly scientific survey, the objection is a minor one.)

Hank Jim -- All the Golden Hits

2003-10-29T13:07:00.000-08:00

Over yonder at About Last Night, the well-read and mysterious Our Girl in Chicago has been holding forth on the subject of Henry James.* I've been reading my way through the James canon over the past few years, with an emphasis on the stories over the novels, and because I have this forum there's nothing to stop me from offering my own recommendations and caveats.

In conjunction with what sounds like a fine, albeit obscure, French film, OGIC mentions The Other House, which I endorse as "James for People Who Think They Don't Like James." It is a relatively short novel, written in the aftermath of James' disastrous foray as a dramatist, and he puts the lessons learned in terms of constructing an efficient but surprising plot to good use. No one other than James himself much liked it when it was first published, but its reputation seems to be growing. It features James' only on-screen murder (of a child, no less) and the to-be-expected well-drawn characters and revealing dialogue. Perhaps the great guilty pleasure for Jamesians.

Over 30 years ago during the first season of Masterpiece Theater, PBS broadcast a 4-part BBC adaptation of another James novella from the same period, The Spoils of Poynton, starring Gemma Jones as its heroine, who sports what then-host Alistair Cooke called "the unlikely name of Fleda Vetch." I was impressed with it at the time of the PBS broadcast, but only actually read it in the past month. (It features in the Library of America's latest James volume, alongside The Other House, the OGIC-commended What Maisie Knew (which I've yet to read) and The Awkward Age.) Ostensibly a battle of wills over the possession of a country estate and the beautiful objects it contains, Spoils comes well equipped with scheming, heartbreak and a "twist" ending. Oddly, it reminds me a bit of the harder-edged, "sorrow is only a step away" Jane Austen of Persuasion.

I have to take issue with the OGIC recommendation of The Princess Casamassima. James seems out of his element in that one, unsure whether he wants to be Charles Dickens or Dostoevsky. The joints and gears running the plot seem to stick out all over the place, and it is ultimately an unsatisfying book. More enjoyable from the same period (ca. 1890) is The Tragic Muse, which sports a young man giving up a career in Parliament to become a painter (happens all the time!) and the rise of an ambitious young woman to the heights of theatrical stardom, breaking hearts (of course) all along the way. It's soap, but it's really really good soap.

Now, if you take my suggestions and those of OGIC and Terry Teachout to heart, and if enough other web journal-ists respond, you will find yourself obliged to read everything James ever wrote. At the least, it will keep you off the streets and out of the pool halls for a good long time.

[* "Hank Jim, " get it? It's a puckish satire on contemporary informality. Someday perhaps I'll write about the eminent Italian composer, Joe Green.]

They're Educators, But Can They Be Taught?

2003-10-28T12:30:00.000-08:00

At California Insider, Daniel Weintraub continues to offer helpful suggestions to California's next governor. Responding to a rumor that former Los Angeles mayor (and almost-candidate in the gubernatorial recall) Richard Riordan may be the choice for California's next Secretary of Education, Weintraub suggests an alternative: eliminate the position altogether:

In California, the education secretary is a glorified adviser to the governor with few real duties and only a handful of education programs to administer. We already have an entire department full of bureaucrats run by an elected superintendent (Jack O'Connell). And we have a policy-setting state board of education whose members are appointed by the governor. The job of education secretary was created by Pete Wilson in 1991 to prove that he was a pro-schools Republican and to give him more bodies in the battle against the bureaucracy. The office has grown steadily since then, even as its authority remains fairly limited. . . . The move [to eliminate the office] would save only about $1 million and would be criticized by status-quoists who equate government departments with concern about an issue. But it would be a gutsy step showing that the new gov is not wedded to the old way of doing things.

Extra levels of bureaucracy are rarely a good thing, and public education is notoriously rife with such levels. Next exhibit: this Washington Post report on a study finding that systemic flaws in many urban school districts actively thwart the hiring of better qualified teachers for high-need schools. For example:

It was standard procedure to let impressive applications sit in file drawers for months, the researchers found, while the candidates, needing to get their lives in order, secured work elsewhere. One district, for example, received 4,000 applications for 200 slots but was slow to offer jobs and lost out on top candidates.

In some cases, the report said, big-city school boards -- with teachers union support -- approved vacancy notification policies that allowed veteran teachers to announce retirements or resignations late in the summer, long after many good potential replacements have given up and accepted other jobs. Three school districts in the study had either a summer deadline or no deadline for notification by departing teachers.

State lawmakers and budget officials also were notoriously late with the projections that school superintendents needed to figure out how many teachers they would be able to hire, according to Levin and Quinn.

And so on. Plentiful cooks credited with this unsavory broth. [Post link via Hit & Run.]

It is a continuing scandal that not one state requires background checks to determine whether their education administrators have a lick of sense.

Mickey Kaus, Unplugged and Unedited

2003-10-28T08:27:00.000-08:00

Mickey Kaus has posted a lengthy and articulate defense of the web journal medium (he uses the archaic term for it: "blogging") in the wake of Gregg Easterbrook's faux pas and ensuing loss of employment. The Kaus article is on its own page, so I can't even whine about it lacking permalinks. Worth reading on general principles, but particularly for the coining of the term "Gutenberging," as in:

And if there's a hubris of Weblogging, there's also a hubris of Gutenberging--the idea that you can routinely comment on current events in a way that merits permanent committment to paper. What's more arrogant than hitting 'send'? Hitting 'print.'

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, Mr. Easterbrook himself is practicing theology, thus bringing down a further shower of brickbats upon himself.

The Los Angeles Times, Splitter of Spouses

2003-10-28T07:51:00.000-08:00

Kevin Roderick of L.A. Observed reports that more than 9,000 Los Angeles Times subscriptions have been cancelled by readers irate over the Times' coverage of the California recall election generally and of sexual misbehavior allegations against governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger in particular. The paper may also be causing friction in some marriages:

Apparently some of the drops are starting to return -- according to one source, spouses are calling in to restart the paper, saying their husband/wife dropped in a fit of pique.

That should make for some lively breakfast table conversations.

Better Living Through Prosody

2003-10-24T15:01:00.000-07:00

I've previously noted Erin O'Connor's link to Canadian poet Tom Henihan's vigorous thrashing of poetry generated out of creative writing programs and workshops. I remarked on those posts chiefly to join those who posit that poets with their feet firmly planted in the day to day trenches of earning a living may have a leg up (if they can get those metaphorical feet unplanted from the goo) on those who soak their poetical toes in the reflecting pools of the academy.

I did not comment on Henihan's suggestion that poetry as such cannot be taught. Aaron Haspel, however, has taken up that very topic, with his usual relish. Aaron asserts -- and you may be sure that I agree! -- that while it may not be possible to learn the many intangibles that contribute to the very best poetry, the practical skills that lead to better poetry are available to all:

Doing original mathematics requires inspiration, creativity, a 'feel' for numbers, all the mysterious qualities that Erin posits for poets; yet no one would dream of saying that teaching calculus to a class of sub-Eulers and sub-Gausses is useless. Why, then, is there no point in teaching poetry to a class of sub-Jonsons and sub-Dickinsons? Poetry is every bit as technical as car repair, and poets, like car mechanics, need to know what they're doing. . . .

[* * *]

I've never attended a poetry 'workshop,' and I stipulate that they are as ghastly as Henihan says. My poem's OK, your poem's OK. The fact that poetry is often taught badly, however, does not mean it cannot be taught at all. If I had a two-week poetry workshop to teach, I guarantee that I would improve the poetry of everyone in the class. Or your money back, no questions asked.

Whereupon, he generously offers up the student's first three assignments, which are as good a starting point as one could wish for. (They also covertly disclose a bit more about our instructor's tastes, which in these instances favor "metaphysical" poets both distant (Jonson, Donne, Greville) and Modern (Stevens). Students take note: he's tough, but fair.)

By all means, do try this at home.

A Hit Spike Is Always A Lovely Gift

2003-10-24T08:25:00.000-07:00

No matter who you are or what your interests, go immediately to Futurballa.

It's m'best pal Rick's birthday, and this year I've decided to give him mindshare.

(For those of you keeping score on our ages: between the two of us we amount to approximately 4.842 average bloggers. And that number is increasing day by day.)

Statistics That Go Bump in the Night

2003-10-23T08:20:00.000-07:00

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and one of the few things that Michael Moore got right in his often entertaining but deeply muddle-brained Bowling for Columbine was the degree to which large-scale media outlets (television news in particular) build up unfounded fears and sow alarm among their viewers by their highlighting of "dramatic" stories of crime, disease and danger out of all proportion to the true degree of risk. Now the Guardian reports that the BBC is adopting policies directed to a more accurate reporting of risk. Among other things, the Beeb is concerned that disproportionate reporting of some stories results in (say it isn't so) misguided spending priorities:

Train crashes provide an example in which politicians, urged on by the media, are now spending £10m on safety measures to save each life, when a death on the road can be prevented for 100th of the cost.

Meanwhile, road danger (coupled with media hype over stranger danger) keeps children indoors, where they become fat and unfit - a trend likely to cost the country billions in future obesity bills. Child health experts want to see safer streets, but the multiple individual tragedies of kids killed or hurt by cars cannot match the news significance of a major event such as a train crash.

* * *

The Sars virus is a classic case. It posed relatively little danger, but it dominated headlines for weeks - partly because it became a symbol of the globalisation of health risk through air travel. The economy of Toronto lies in tatters.

The BSE-vCJD ["mad cow" disease] scare became a touchstone of Conservative government incompetence as journalists conveniently forgot that top independent scientists had advised ministers that the likelihood of BSE transferring to human form was less than the chance of being hit by lightning. Even now the vCJD boom predicted by doomsters has not happened, and over the next years the cost of preventing a death from vCJD will run into billions for each life saved. . . .

It is good to see the BBC trying to get a handle on this problem. Perhaps they will offer their American brethren of the press a few pointers, so that they might spare themselves further embarrassment.

[Link via The Edge of England's Sword.]

When Deep Thinkers Think About Home Schooling

2003-10-22T13:21:00.000-07:00

What happens when a political philosopher thinks aloud about the "permissibility" of homeschooling? Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber is doing just that. Interesting comments thread, too.

Agree or disagree, it's discourse at a higher level than you'll get from Dan Rather . . . .

Miles and the Impressionists: So What?

2003-10-22T12:56:00.000-07:00

So this Wall Street Journal critic walks into a lunchroom . . . .

Terry Teachout offers some musings inspired by hearing Miles Davis' Kind of Blue being played as background music, noting how different the view of that recording is now than when it was new:

It's easy to forget that Kind of Blue was one of the most radically innovative jazz recordings of its time. For a generation of open-eared players, it was the passport to a new world of improvisation in which the meticulously interlocked tonal harmonies of the swing era were jettisoned in favor of spacious modal prairies around which the soloist wandered seemingly at will. So how is it that so Indisputably Important a recording has wormed its way into the pop-culture landscape of America? Kind of Blue, after all, is one of the very few jazz albums owned by people who know nothing else about jazz. (As I write these words, it ranks 132 in sales among pop-music CDs on amazon.com.) It's the record Clint Eastwood (who knows a lot about jazz) puts on when he comes home from a hard day of assassin-hunting in In the Line of Fire. A whole book has been written about its history and cultural significance. Now it's Muzak -- yet it remains as vital and listenable as ever. By what strange alchemy was this transformation effected?

The particulars in the case of Miles Davis I leave to aficionados of jazz, but the pattern here -- what was once radical is now just a comfortable part of the passing scene -- is one seen in other arts as well. What could be more commonplace in the last 50 years than exhibitions and reproductions of the French Impressionist painters, Monet, Renoir and the rest? They are the comfort food of serious art, but once they were as scandalous as could be, the very name of the movement meant to be pronounced with a superior sneer:

An outraged critic, Louis Leroy, coined the label 'Impressionist.' He looked at Monet's Impression Sunrise, the artist's sensory response to a harbor at dawn, painted with sketchy brushstrokes. 'Impression!' the journalist snorted. 'Wallpaper in its embryonic state is more finished!' Within a year, the name Impressionism was an accepted term in the art world.

If the name was accepted, the art itself was not. 'Try to make Monsieur Pissarro understand that trees are not violet; that the sky is not the color of fresh butter...and that no sensible human being could countenance such aberrations...try to explain to Monsieur Renoir that a woman's torso is not a mass of decomposing flesh with those purplish-green stains,' wrote art critic Albert Wolff after the second Impressionist exhibition. Although some people appreciated the new paintings, many did not. The critics and the public agreed the Impressionists couldn't draw and their colors were considered vulgar. Their compositions were strange. Their short, slapdash brushstrokes made their paintings practically illegible. Why didn't these artists take the time to finish their canvases, viewers wondered?

Indeed, Impressionism broke every rule of the French Academy of Fine Arts, the conservative school that had dominated art training and taste since 1648. Impressionist scenes of modern urban and country life were a far cry from the Academic efforts to teach moral lessons through historic, mythological, and Biblical themes. This tradition, drawn from ancient Greek and Roman art, featured idealized images. Symmetrical compositions, hard outlines, and meticulously smooth paint surfaces characterized academic paintings.

The process at work here could be analyzed at length, but I'll offer up one opinion. What Miles and Monet have in common is that, however radically new their methods and techniques, their goal remained the same as that of most successful art: not merely to capture a thought, musical idea, impression or amorphous concept but to successfully convey it along to the listener/viewer. It's a subtle variant, I suppose, on the idea of Selling It that I identified in Mel Brooks' The Producers: it matters not how clever your insight unless some audience is willing to receive it from you, and the essence of the art -- high or low, impressionism or schtick -- is in the communication from artist to audience. Miles' new music, like the Impressionists' new painting or the high Moderns' new poetry, may have been initially off-putting on its surface, but it was driven by an underlying desire to connect. Those artists' ultimate success in making the connection helps to explain why now there's no escaping the Impressionists or that astounding quartet of jazzmen.

What Links May Come (Wild Woman Edition)

2003-10-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

In my obsessive review of my referrer logs, I find that this Fool has been linked on Mikarrhea, the largely poetry-oriented site of Michaela Cooper. [Note: Parental Discretion is advised. Strong opinions are strongly expressed there, and matters sexual are rarely far away.] At the end of a lengthy post that starts out to be about Shelley's "Ozymandias" but turns out to be moreso about tracking down a quote from A.E. Houseman, Mika finds herself more than somewhat taken aback by my day job:

Who'd a thunk someone working in insurance law would have a single poetic bone in his body? Wild.

Thank you. We always like the element of surprise.

Home is Where the Press Is

2003-10-21T08:59:00.000-07:00

My, my my. Homeschoolers continue to be aggravated with CBS News' "Home School Nightmares" series of last week (on which my comments are here and yet again here). The Madame DeFarge of live from the guillotine has sent along an e-mail with a link to this site -- The Dark Side of Public School -- compiling just about everything you can imagine going wrong in the context of public schooling. Of course, as the late Warren Zevon observed, "Life'll Kill Ya."

Meanwhile, via Hit & Run, we find a link to a New York Times story that, with this paragraph near the top, might as well be called "The Dark Side of Home Cooking":

Restaurants of dubious legality, where food is cooked in apartments and backyards, abound across the United States. These underground restaurants range from upscale to gritty, and are born from youthful idealism, ethnic tradition or economic necessity. They lack certification from any government agency and are, strictly speaking, against the law. You dine in them at your own risk. If you can find them.

Bon appetit!

First They Came for the Misguided Sports Writers . . . .

2003-10-20T13:42:00.000-07:00

Although I followed it as it played out last week, I had nothing to add to the kerfuffle over journalist Gregg Easterbrook's remarks on his web journal at The New Republic Online that were broadly criticized as potentially or actually anti-Semitic. If you missed it, Easterbrook really really disliked Quentin Tarantino's new film Kill Bill, Volume One, and he used that film as an opportunity to go off on the broader subject of the penchant of American studios to generate innumerable films of which violence, often extreme violence, is the seeming raison d'être and which, in Easterbrook's phrase, present "killing of the helpless as a fun lifestyle choice." In the course of that piece, however, he launched a rhetorical fusillade at film executives "who worship money above all else," singling out for particular criticism Disney's Michael Eisner and Miramax's Harvey Weinstein and asking whether "right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence?"

When it was widely pointed out that to propose the equation "Jewish" = "worships only money" even backhandedly is to endorse one of the classic anti-Semitic tropes, Easterbrook promptly -- well, within three days -- posted a lengthy apology. That response may not have satisfied all the critics, but matters seemed to be calming down when I turned my back on the online world for a few days.

Imagine, then, my surprise on returning today to find that Easterbrook had been fired over the weekend -- not by The New Republic, on whose pages he had made the offending comments, but by ESPN.com where he posted his often-insightful and more frequently amusing football column, Tuesday Morning Quarterback. Why do I provide no link to an example of Easterbrook's football writing, which I have mentioned here before? Because ESPN not only fired him, it purged all evidence from its site that Easterbrook or his column had ever existed. Not even a smoking crater marks the spot. By the time I started following the story, nearly anyone with any interest in it had posted their response, many of which were compiled by Insta-prof Glenn Reynolds here.

Now, we are dealing here with the acts of private citizens (Easterbrook and his corporate employer(s)) and not with any sort of government action, so the First Amendment as such does not apply. Still, Easterbrook's original remark was being "cured" by the remedy traditionally endorsed under the First Amendment: the answer to "bad" speech is more and better speech in response, not forcible excision of the offensive speech or its speaker. [The troubling aspects of ESPN's action are only compounded if it was taken not so much in response to the charge of anti-Semitism as it was to Easterbrook's having singled out for criticism the CEO of Disney, corporate parent to ESPN.]

Colby Cosh makes the critical point while summing up the semi-innocent line of thinking that led Easterbrook into this morass in the first place:

But, in general, I'm not sure it's healthy to have a principle that we are, even in uniquely sensitive cases, going to insist upon the least generous interpretation of someone's public comments. Who amongst us will survive that sort of scrutiny for long? I suspect, having followed his work, that Easterbrook was really thinking, when he wrote what he wrote, of the Jews' special place in our history and our civilization; of the Jewish tradition of moral law and the pursuit of justice, and of the infinite debt owed to Jewry and Jewish thinkers by the West. He felt that Michael Eisner and Harvey Weinstein were letting down the ethnic side by bankrolling what he regards as violent crapola. This placed him in the position of appearing to propose a different standard of behaviour for Jews--an unexpected consequence, I think, of pursuing benign but mistaken opinions to a logical conclusion.

What seems to be at work in this case is an unhealthy combination of corporate power with the sort of "whatever might offend someone must be banned" hypersensitivity that drives draconian phenomena such as campus speech codes. Whatever its source, the firing of Gregg Easterbrook under these circumstances is hard to condone.

Postscript: It has been remarked elsewhere that this entire story has received virtually no mention in conventional print or broadcast media. As of the moment, a Google News search turns up a passing mention in USA TODAY (scroll down to final paragraph) and this scintillating analysis in the transcript of an online chat with Washington Post sportswriter Tony Kornheiser:

Richmond, Va.: Any thoughts on ESPN.com getting rid of Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column because of remarks he made in a column on another Web site? Seems like overkill to me.

* * *

I have no idea who Gregg Easterbrook is. I think there are far too many Web sites now including this Web site. I think you people who spend more than 1 hr a day looking at Web sites should be transformed into giant bugs and crows should fly over and eat you. Are you happy now? --Tony

Update: The New Republic has posted its own statement on Easterbrook and his remarks, which to its credit does not sound at all like a prelude to a firing.

Lockyer? Why, Ah Don't Hardly Know Yer!

2003-10-20T10:45:00.000-07:00

In the early days leading up to the California gubernatorial recall, I praised our Democratic state Attorney General Bill Lockyer on the occasion of his cautioning Governor Gray Davis not to engage in what he memorably called "puke politics" in order to hold on to his office. At the time, it was expected that former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan would run and would be the leading candidate to replace Davis if Davis were to be recalled. Lockyer threatened to throw his support to Riordan if Davis didn't keep to the high road in the campaign.

Ultimately, Riordan did not run because he was caught by surprise when his friend Arnold Schwarzenegger announced his candidacy. Now we learn that although he voted against recalling Governor Davis, Bill Lockyer voted for Arnold Schwarzenegger rather than for the principal Democratic candidate to replace Davis, Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante. And it is Bustamante, rather than Davis, who seems to have been the target of Lockyer's scorn in casting his ballot, as indicated in these comments to reporters:

You know the people in your profession really well. You know who works hard and who doesn't. You know who is honest and who isn't. Cops know that about cops. Doctors know that about doctors. I know that about politicians. The common thing to all these professions is none of them say it. That's all I'm going to say.

Lockyer is generally regarded as a leading contender for the Democratic nomination for Governor in 2006. He presumably expects some advantage from this disclosure of his vote on the recall. And his open hostility to Bustamante suggests that he sees the Lt. Governor as a man whose political clout is fading fast.

Making Such a Production Out of It

2003-10-20T09:36:00.000-07:00

Good day, gentle readers, and we are back on the air. First order of business, of course, is to offer up a few remarks on the Los Angeles production of Mel Brooks' musical, The Producers, which this Fool attended on Friday evening in the company of his indispensable wife and a Band of imported Zanies, old friends brought together for the occasion.

To sum it up, this show is a hoot-and-a-half, pure fun, not a sombre thought in its head. The entire cast, from leads Jason Alexander and Martin Short on down through the multiple-role-filling members of the chorus, works and works and makes it all look effortless. I laughed my Fool head off, and the rest of the Friday night audience did likewise.

Getting this show across in Los Angeles must pose a particular challenge, because the Pantages Theater is so big. The Pantages is a beautifully restored Art Deco movie palace and it is enormous, vastly larger than a typical Broadway theater. For a show to be readable in that cavernous space requires a high level of energy from the stage, and if the effort of generating that energy is too obvious it can be self-defeating. This cast managed the trick, to their collective credit.

I have been pondering what the musical version is "about." Those who are familiar with the original film will recall that it is essentially a morality tale: innocent neurotic accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) is led astray by the older, desperate and conniving producer Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel). The film ends with most of the major characters either maimed or in jail. It is plain that Mel Brooks was not really trying to teach any moral lessons -- his scoundrels are much too appealing to do that effectively -- but at least the outlines are there.

In the musical version, nothing resembling a moral lesson is to be found within at least a city block of the theater. Yes, Max and Leo wind up in jail, but they do so only after Leo has been allowed to elope to Rio with the pair's statuesque and limber Swedish receptionist Ulla and their stay in Sing Sing lasts all of one brief scene, whereupon they are released (as a reward for teaching musical theater skills to their fellow prisoners), open a new show on Broadway and, yes, Live Happily Ever After, successful beyond the dreams of avarice. I am left with the thought that the stage version is ultimately about nothing so much as the art of Selling It: Max selling Leo on the investment kiting scheme that will produce "Springtime for Hitler," Max selling little old ladies on buying into the show, various show-biz characters selling themselves to write, direct or appear in the play, and ultimately the ensemble right there in the Pantages selling the audience on their show about selling a show.

Back in July, I mentioned and linked to Terry Teachout's reflections on the occasion of his revisiting the Broadway production. After waxing nostalgic about his own discovery of Jewish comedy of the late 50's and 60's -- itself a part of that Ed Sullivan/middlebrow cultural milieu that he has elsewhere described so well -- he ultimately finds Mel Brooks generally, and this show in particular, to be a bit of a dinosaur:

To see The Producers is to be immersed one final time in that older style of pressure-cooker comedy, and for those of us who were born before 1960 or so, the experience is as sweetly nostalgic as a trip to the state fair, which I rather doubt is what Mel Brooks had in mind. My guess is that he still thinks it's titillating, even shocking, to put swishy Nazis on stage. It's no accident that he hasn't made a movie for years and years: Broadway is the last place in America where he could possibly draw a crowd with that kind of humor, and it's not an especially young crowd, either.

That seems too bleak a view to me. Unlike New York, Los Angeles does not have a preexisting "older audience" that traditionally or habitually comes out to the theater. If you want the audience to come, you either sell a lot of seats as part of a series subscription (as was done here with The Producers in the earlier portions of its run) or you provide a show that really delivers something that a large audience is drawn to. The Producers in Los Angeles seems to have succeeded at that, and it has done so by jettisoning completely the irony that is the hallmark of contemporary entertainment. There is not, I think, an ironic moment to be found in these nearly three hours of singin' and dancin' and schticking it up. Maybe the show has succeeded because of the nostalgic appeal of an irony-free zone. Or perhaps irony has just worn out its welcome for the time being and The Producers' lack of it succeeds on the principle that Everything Old is New Again. Whichever it may be, I can attest to the splendid time had by all and commend this production to anyone who finds themselves in Los Angeles between now and the show's closing in early January.

Meanwhile, as I've been drafting this, I find that one of my companions of Friday evening has posted a far less sententious report of the same event over at Futurballa.

A Southbound Soirée

2003-10-16T15:20:00.000-07:00

For a refreshing change, it is pleasure rather than business that will limit posting for the next few days. Old friends from points north, including Rick the friendly futurballist, are descending upon us for a long-planned weekend of merriment highlighted by a jaunt to the Art Deco recesses of Hollywood's Pantages Theatre for the west coast production of The Producers. At last, an opportunity to put Terry Teachout's assessment to the test! Reports will follow, as warranted and as opportunity presents itself.

Working and Collected Works

2003-10-16T15:03:00.000-07:00

Speaking of education and poetry, as I was in the next post down the page, one of my regular reading stops is Erin O'Connor's Critical Mass, which usually turns a jaundiced eye on the follies and ecstasies of the university-level humanities establishment. When I last checked in, however, I found that the subject was poetry, and particularly the deleterious effects of creative writing programs, a hothouse environment in which the Lake Wobegon principle -- "all the children are above average" -- is often the order of the day. The jumping off point for Critical Mass was an essay on poetry readings by Irish-Canadian poet Tom Henihan. You can get a sense of the flavor of the piece, smoking from a long, slow burn, in this excerpt:

Another ominous entity that is making a comeback in poetry circles is the term 'riff'. Of course everyone knows that the superficial connection between jazz and poetry has been 'on the road' since the forties or fifties. The trumpeter Wynton Marsalis has this to say about jazz.' It is the hardest music to play that I know of and it is the highest rendition of individual emotion in the history of Western music.'

Ironically, the use of jazz idioms where writing is concerned usually suggests a license to be careless. It is my suspicion that most writers who use the term riff when introducing a poem don't even listen to jazz. If they did they would know that a lot of hard work precedes those riffs and if they are not up to the mark, fellow musicians and jazz aficionados don't keep that fact a secret. With poetry however, its hugs and kudos all round no matter what kind of a show has been put on.

Poetry readings should not be afforded the same cozy protected environment of workshops and poetry groups. We don't invite an audience to the theater to watch the players rehearse. A performance is a lot more decisive if there is something at stake and poets should welcome the opportunity to face down a critical audience that responds with authority.

The thrust here is that good poetry, like the best in any other endeavor, is hard to create and rare to find. A secondary point, emphasized in the Critical Mass commentary, is that poetry may grow best from a writer who is engaged with the 'real world' by actively living in it, rather than within the sheltering arms of the academy. This is a point often advanced by Dana Gioia and Tom Disch, among others, and Erin O'Connor invokes, as examples of Poets With Day Jobs, T.S. Eliot [working at the bank] and Wallace Stevens [a vice president with the Hartford Insurance Company, dealing with surety bonds of all things] -- to whom we might add others, such as the good doctor William Carlos Williams -- as well as pointing to writers (Dickens, Trollope) who kept body and soul together (often tenuously) by writing, not by the teaching of writing. And to return to Tom Henihan's invocation of the theater: the most revealing test of any art, including poetry, is to place it before an audience that needs to be actively won over, to be convinced of its merit by the poem itself, in other words an audience that has no built-in incentive -- as one's teacher or fellow students do -- to declare the work a success.

Because My Parents Raised Me Right

2003-10-16T10:32:00.000-07:00

I was taught early on to use "please" and "thank you" whenever possible, and those skills have served me well over the years. "Thank you" is the first order of the day today.

The past 48 hours or so have brought this site its highest traffic levels yet, for the most part through the various kind links to my posts below on CBS News' mis-reporting about homeschooling. (I've tried to acknowledge them all in updates to the original posts.) This Fool is still just a tiny fish in a big, big sea, but today it seems possible to aspire, as Gideon Strauss put it recently, to "live quite happily with a nanoaudience of 250."

Thanks are also in order to poet Mike Snider, who actually read my interminable piece below on line breaks in poetry -- which is more than I expect even of my family and close friends -- and, bless him, has gone so far as to write kind things about it. It's enough to turn one's head.

In sum, my favorite classes of people today are homeschoolers and poets, which is not bad company at all.

As the Curtain Rings Down, The Sound of One Persona Posting

2003-10-15T11:29:00.000-07:00

The elusive Jack Cliente, who is suspiciously never seen in the same room with David Giacalone, has posted a last minute addition to David's farewell at ethicalEsq?:, including this sound bit advice to me and to all my fellow toilers in the fields of the law:

Don't send e-flowers to honor ethicalEsq?, but actively work for the consumer of legal services both out in the real world, and through the power of weblogs:

(1) help make bar associations at the local and state level client-oriented, instead of guild-oriented (e.g., improving the Discipline System would be a great place to start);

(2) harness the power of the web to make the self-help-law revolution a reality, and

(3) with or without new laws or ethical rules, get more information to consumers about their rights and options -- with enough information, consumers can create their own powerful competitive forces for innovation, improved services, lower prices.

Words to live by, and a worthy goal toward which to strive.

[Cross-posted to Declarations and Exclusions.]

What Links May Come [part of a continuing series]

2003-10-15T09:17:00.000-07:00

Checking in to my referrer logs yesterday, I discovered that this site has been added to the link list of Gideon Strauss, whose page proclaims its eclectic offerings of "worldview revivalism, neocalvinist unapologetics, & zeitgeist surfing". Calvin -- the theologian, not the small boy -- is indeed very much in evidence, and one can also deduce that the Strauss household, operating from its base in Ontario, Canada, is engaged in homeschooling two young daughters utilizing an extraordinarily detailed curriculum of their own invention (follow the link and scroll down to "The education of our daughters (4)"). There is a great deal of Jane Austen involved. [I'm a Persuasion and Northanger Abbey man myself, and thanks for asking.]

My main reason for noting all this -- apart from thanking Mr. Strauss for his kind link, in the category of "friday flânerie" -- is his post responding to Terry Teachout's remarkably popular piece on "middlebrow culture." (Follow the link and scroll down to "The future of middlebrow culture". My own comments on the original Terry Teachout piece were posted here, and other web journal-ists have commented on it just about everywhere.) Mr. Strauss concludes:

Here is my little prognostication: the epicentre of tomorrow's middlebrow culture is in today's homeschooling movement.

Discuss.

CBS News' Homeschool Hatchet Job, Part II

2003-10-15T08:39:00.000-07:00

I was not at home last night -- I was teaching my weekly insurance law course -- so I was not able to catch the second segment of the CBS Evening News' self-importantly horrified report "Home Schooling Nightmares." [Again, the link is to the network's print version of the story; a link to the video is available on that same page. My take on Part I of the series is the next post down this page.]

Not content with basing their first segment on a two-year old, entirely unrepresentative case, CBS used its second segment to expand its misleading parade of horribles, even going so far as to trot out the notorious Andrea Yates mass-bathtub-drowning case (and to feature Ms. Yates' photo prominently with the Web version of the story). Here's the passage in which CBS tips its hand to show its preferred solution to this supposed problem, which is -- what else? -- more regulation:

In eight states, parents don't have to tell anyone they're home schooling. Unlike teachers, in 38 states and the District of Columbia, parents need virtually no qualifications to home school. Not one state requires criminal background checks to see if parents have abuse convictions.

The logic of that last item is particularly odd: even assuming that criminal background checks for homeschooling parents -- as opposed to, say, checks of all parents or annual reporting to the local constabulary by every citizen -- made sense in the first place, how does CBS propose to "protect" an only child or the firstborn in a family, before whom these highly suspect parents had no opportunity to be convicted?

And while I'm on about this, the inner hobgoblin of my little mind asks: can anyone reconcile for me the distinction between CBS' attitude toward regulation of homeschoolers [ongoing investigation based on a presumption of possible guilt is a good thing] versus its attitude toward the post-9/11 Justice Department [ongoing investigation based on presumption of possible contact with genuinely guilty and dangerous people is the End of Our Constitutional Rights As We Know Them]? I'm just asking, don't you know.

I will mention here one other gap among many in the CBS story, which only serves to further misinform viewers who have no contact with homeschoolers: CBS implies that all or a large majority of homeschooling families "go it alone," retreating into their trailers, tents and townhouses to educate their children with virtually no outside contacts of any kind. This is a false impression. Most homeschool families have active lives in their community. Those homeschoolers who started the process out of religious conviction -- a large group in the homeschool world, but hardly the only one -- generally have a high profile in their church and in church-based organizations, if nowhere else. More secular homeschoolers also have lives in which they and their children constantly interact with the outside world. An ever-growing number of homeschoolers regularly send their children out of the home on a regular basis for at least some portion of their schooling, to attend classes in subjects that the parent does not feel qualified to teach him/herself. The number of homeschool support organizations that make such classes available, as well as the number of "outside" classes organized by groups of homeschooling families, increases daily, as does the number of families electing to homeschool one or more of their children.

I could go on, but we'd be here all day and CBS and its viewers would not be any better informed. But you, gentle reader, know better now, don't you?

Not incidentally: Welcome to Joanne Jacobs readers and thank you, Joanne, for the link. More on the CBS story, and more on homeschooling generally, can be found at Daryl Cobranchi's Homeschool & Other Education Stuff, Izzy Lyman's The Homeschooling Revolution (for whose link this Fool also says "Thank you") and at further links on those sites.

And to correct an inaccurate impression I may have created yesterday: to call me a "homeschooling dad" gives me too much credit. The day to day workings of our sons' education -- including tracking down the wealth of resources for assistance, curricula, classes and support that is out there in abundance when one goes looking for it -- has been the province of my indispensable wife. As I tell it to anyone who asks: She's in charge of curriculum and I run the financial services office.

Update: Additional comment on CBS and homeschoolers' response to its story, reported live from the guillotine, can be read here. And do I need to say "thanks for the link"? You bet I do: thanks for the link, O lively guillotinistes.

Just one more: Somehow the last time I passed through there, I failed to notice that Kimberly Swygert's Number 2 Pencil has also checked in with some thoughts about the CBS story. This now seems to have been pretty fully through the wringer as a "they're out to get homeschoolers" story. Someone -- perhaps I'll do it if I can find the time to say something worthwhile -- needs to consider CBS' performance from the standpoint of Journalism. It seems to me that the connections CBS was trying to draw are so tenuous that this would have been just plain Bad Reporting regardless of the particular subject matter.

A Little Learning Is A Dangerous Thing . . . for Journalists

2003-10-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

I am still spouting the occasional puff of steam from my ears over the incredibly irresponsible bit of reporting broadcast last night by the CBS Evening News, the first in an apparent series on A Dark Side To Home Schooling. [The link is to the print version of the story; to fully appreciate the tut-tutting, isn't-it-awful tone of the piece, click on the video link if you have a speedy connection.]

Here is what CBS delivers: yet another (genuinely) tragic tale of life in a squalid trailer in the backwoods with the Miller family of North Carolina, ending in the suicide of their teenage son after he first shoots and kills his brother and sister. So far, so lurid, but still largely within the bounds of respectable journalism -- although CBS gives no indication that these sad events unfolded more than two years ago. What can have been the cause of these deaths? To hear CBS tell it, it's not poverty, deprivation or terrible and abusive parenting. No, sir: it's the direct result of homeschooling.

Since it became legal in North Carolina in 1985, the number of home school students has jumped from just a few hundred to more than 50,000. But there's been no change in the number of state employees overseeing the program - just three for the entire state.

'I think there's so little supervision that they really are not protecting those kids,' Marcia Herman-Giddens, of the North Carolina Child Advocacy Institute.

Herman-Giddens is on the state task force that reviewed the Warren case. The conclusion: home school laws 'allow persons who maltreat children to maintain social isolation in order for the abuse and neglect to remain undetected.'

'They deliberately keep them out of the public eye because the children do have injuries that are visible, and they don't want them to be seen,' she says.

The logic at work here is interesting. Abusive parents can indeed be expected to keep their children away from those who might perceive evidence of that abuse, but that can be done without even the pretense of schooling. In fact, it would be more effective to simply move out to the woods without telling anyone, since the homeschooling statute in North Carolina provide that the parents must notify the state of the establishment of their school.

To suggest that abolition or tighter regulation of homeschooling is essential because some small number of homeschooling families are also abusive makes no more sense than to suggest that we should regulate or ban families taking care of their own aging relatives at home, because some of those households are prone to elder abuse. Given that an entrenched and ineffectual state bureaucracy is often one of the factors that drives parents to elect to school at home rather than through the public schools, the imposition of just such a bureaucracy on homeschoolers in the name of "child protection" is an undesirable outcome, not to mention an insult to the vast majority of homeschoolers who are responsible, caring and effective parents.

Part 2 of this story airs tonight. We'll see whether the network digs itself deeper into its self-important hole. Dear CBS: Please go to the board and write 50 times, "Correlation does not imply causation."

(A confession of personal bias: Our sons have homeschooled for the past several years, so I am not an entirely disinterested observer on this subject. I submit, however, that based on the evidence of this story I am more trustworthy on this subject than is CBS News.)

[Update:Coincidentally, since I was planning to write about education anyway, I found an e-mail awaiting me this morning from my compatriot Rick at Futurballa Blog, forwarding a link to these assorted educational musings by Kevin Drum. I've repaid Rick with a link about zombies, which he is using here as an excuse to discuss movie-endings. Any resemblances between zombies and broadcast journalists are strictly in the eye of the beholder.]

Ave Atque Vale ethicalEsq?

2003-10-13T08:42:00.000-07:00

David Giacalone has, sadly, concluded that he must end or suspend his invaluable web journal -- he swore off the term "blog" for reasons first stated here and here -- ethicalEsq?

I could praise David as "tireless," but that would be almost exactly wrong: his reluctant retirement from the field is driven largely by Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The ailment has, if anything, served to focus his mind and pen wonderfully, and the accumulated posts at his site (which will remain available for the foreseeable future) contain a wealth of cogent and often wry observation on his topic of choice: the need for lawyers to maintain their focus on doing right by their clients and doing so in a fundamentally honest and honorable way. This topic is especially relevant to me, as an attorney, but this world is so awash in lawyers and it is so hard to avoid us at one time or another in one's life that the subject is always timely and always an important one even (particularly?) for non-lawyers.

David represents much of what is best in this medium and in our shared profession. Go, read, browse his archive and profit from the treasures therein.

[Cross-posted to Declarations and Exclusions.]

"I Come From a Long Line of Effort-Benders" -- W.C. Fields

2003-10-11T14:15:00.000-07:00

Readers of my earlier posts on poetry will have gleaned that I am, to give myself as generous a characterization as I can, an enthusiastic well-meaning amateur. I cannot pretend to the marrow-deep understanding displayed by actual poets who blog (such as Messrs. Silliman and Snider, linked in the left-hand column), nor would I claim the skills of a seriously serious reader such as Aaron Haspel (also linked there). I know what I like, and I try to figure out why I like it (or why you should like it), using this site as a tool for thinking aloud.

And lately, I have been thinking about line breaks. I have not come to any fully satisfying conclusions on the subject, but I have decided nevertheless to post some of my thrashing about with it.

One of the stimuli for starting to think about this was a passage in a piece by Justin Quinn in Contemporary Poetry Review in which he considers several recently re-published collections by the late A. R. Ammons. I do not know Ammons’ work remotely well enough to venture opinions about it myself, and I’m not so much interested in Ammons particularly as I am in the broader issue to which Quinn addresses himself here [the emphasis in all of the exceprts below is mine]:

More generally, his [Ammons’] lines and stanzas, whether the protracted lines in tercets in Sphere, or in the short takes of Worldly Hopes (1982) have little integrity. By which I mean that many of the poems could be re-lineated in several ways without affecting their quality; the corollary of this is that 'only a person with an eidetic memory could learn one of Ammons’s poems by heart' (Helen Vendler). The point is a serious one. How serious is demonstrated by an exchange in Thumbscrew in 1999. Carol Rumens reviewing a book by Anne Carson suggested that the poetry was very close to prose and by way of demonstration she set one passage as prose (albeit with the line-breaks marked). Carson responded thus in the next issue: 'To print verse as prose is act of contempt that verges on falsification'.

I am not suggesting that Ammons’s poetry should be re-set as diaristic prose, but rather that there is a large difference between re-lineating a poem by, say, George Herbert, and one by Ammons. One of the main pleasures provided by Herbert’s poems comes from the skill with which he fits expression to his intricate verse forms, with their regularly varying line-lengths and rhyme schemes. Herbert’s negotiation of these difficulties is not just bravura performance, but connects with the themes of the poems themselves. So, to lose the lineation would be to lose a lot of what the poems are about and how they express it.

More generally, we invest a great deal in the idea of the line in poetry, especially as it has long been acceptable that poetry does not have to rhyme or scan properly. Carson’s over-reaction suggests an anxiety on this score. For some readers even now, free verse is not poetry. This is wrong-headed, but the free-versifiers also have to inquire about the border between their work and prose.

In his essay “Snapped Prose in Slim Volumes,” reprinted in The Castle of Indolence, Tom Disch commits the crime of printing verse as prose with relish, taking four passages from then-recent collections, eliminating the line breaks altogether and challenging the reader to identify any of it as poetry, or to tell the passages apart from one another. He suggests that the four poets

are in essential agreement both as to the craft of poetry and the service a poet may render his or her audience. Their craft is easily summed up, and its simplicity has made of poetry what Whitman dreamed of, the most democratic of arts:
Take any piece of prose you like
and snap it into lines of verse
like this, using the end of the line

as a kind of comma. You can create
a further sense of shapeliness
by grouping the snapped prose in stanzas, so.

When a poet is writing in a form with a line length that is fixed by the number of syllables, accented syllables or poetic feet -- iambic pentameter, to cite a particularly ubiquitous example -- there is virtually no discretion as to when the line must break. The challenge to the poet is to take that inevitable, mandatory break point and have it signify something, commonly through the conjunction of the break with a particular point on an ongoing phrase or sentence. Once one abandons a pre-set form or pre-set line length, how does/should a poet select the point at which a break will occur?

The passage in the Ammons essay quoted above drove me back to Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter & Poetic Form. Fussell’s chapter on free verse is illustrated with examples of poets (Whitman, Roethke and others) who, freed of any set line length, have nonetheless been particularly careful to justify the length of each line and the point at which a break will occur. He sums up:

[F]ree verse without subtle dynamics has become the received, standard contemporary style, as John Hollander notices: ‘At the present time in the United States, there is a widespread, received free-verse style marked by a narrow (25-30 em) format, strong use of line-ending as a syntactical marker, etc., which plays out the same role in the ascent to paradise as the received Longfellow style did a century ago.’ Or, we can add, as the received mechanical heroic-couplet style two centuries ago. But the principle of excellence in each of these styles is the same, and it can be perceived and enjoyed by anyone who will take a little time. The principle is that every technical gesture in a poem must justify itself in meaning. Which is to say that the free-verse writer can proclaim, with Ammons, that he is ‘released from forms,’ but he’d better not be. In free verse the abandonment of capital letters and punctuation must say something consonant with what the predications in the poem are saying. The sudden shortening of a line must say something. The degree of line-integrity or enjambment must refract the rhetorical status of the poem’s address. And any momentary deviation into meter must validate itself, must appear not a lapse but a significant bold stroke. For the reader to attend to things like these may be harder than for him to respond to, say, a skillfully reversed foot in a metered line. But he must learn to attend to them if he is to take a pleasure less doctrinal than artistic in the poetry of his own time.

[Apropos of Fussell’s reference to heroic couplets, you might take a look at Aaron Haspel's recent thoughtful critique of Alexander Pope, rich with examples of how a strict devotion to formal line-breaks can deaden the work of even a terribly clever fellow. A rigid worldview and an addiction to end stops will wear away at even a generous reader's patience.]

While this post was gestating, what should occur but that Ron Silliman himself addressed the question of lines and breaks at some length. In the midst of that discussion, he offers up an anecdote involving an earnest debate on the topic between himself, and fellow poets Denise Levertov and David Bromige in the ‘70s, from which he draws this lesson, which is not all that different from the one urged by Paul Fussell:

The mistake that David, Denise & I were all making wasn’t calibrating line breaks with “traditional” or “prose” punctuation elements, ½ comma vs. 2 commas, but rather the idea that, in the abstract, there could be such a thing as a correct answer at all. It is not that linebreaks are not meaningful, but rather that their meaning is not fixed. Like the use of rhyme, sound, metaphor, persona – any element you choose to pick – it depends entirely upon the context, the individual poem. Now, there may be obvious advantages for an individual poet to settle on a particular strategy so as to set expectations appropriately for her or his readers, but it’s not a requirement.

In other words, if I understand him aright, Ron Silliman agrees that there are any number of things that a line break choice can signify, but it really should signify something.

Line-snipping that serves no apparent purpose can take several forms. One is the breaking of what is essentially prose (as criticized by Disch) into lines of more or less random length. Another is the breaking of lines into a reasonably consistent physical length, so that the poem on the page has the sort of foursquare visual quality that is associated with more syllabically formal poetry. If the break is meant only to contribute to the visual presentation of the poem,

A third questionable use of the break is to cut the line after a very small number of words or syllables, no more than, say, four being allowed to a line. There is nothing wrong with the Very Short Line as such. Poets such as William Carlos Williams have made good use of it, as in his famous:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

A poem that, by constantly breaking its lines before they gather any steam, illustrates its own point by focusing the reader’s inner eye with particular intensity on each detail of the scene on which “so much depends.” But the technique is not always so effective. I for one cannot see a particular point to the extremely short lines in this extract, to be found a few weeks back on Silliman's Blog, from a ten-section poem by Stacy Szymaszek (of which we are told this is the entirety of the sixth section):

game of
checkers

wood-
pecker

gazebo
lemon

marlin

wide
brim

song
belted
in a note
thought
mutineer

Ron Silliman sees the point of this passage as being “the continuing refocus of attention”, but to what end is our attention being refocused? To be fair, I found these very short lines to be more effective in some of the other segments of the poem that are quoted, but the overall impression is that they are more of an affectation or habit than they are a thought-through means of conveying a thought or producing an effect on the reader. And how is such a poem read/recited aloud? If all those breaks also indicate a pause or stop-- and it is hard to conceive any other purpose the might serve in an oral presentation of the poem -- the listener is likely to have forgotten how the section started by the time it reaches its end, a mere sixteen words later.

So I remain perplexed. Perhaps Ron Silliman is right in the conclusion to Friday’s post on this subject: “Now I do cringe when I see poets who haven’t thought through the line -- including (but not limited to) the line break -- it’s far too common, though how shocking is it really that not all poetry is the best?” True enough, but given the extent to which the typical hypothetical reader is invested in the significance of "the line" in poetry -- and the function of the line and break as prime delineators of what writing is poetry and what isn't -- one could hope that even poetry that is not "the best" would show signs of more attention having been paid to so fundamental a feature.

As If Terry Teachout Needs More Links . . . .

2003-10-10T15:02:00.000-07:00

Just about everyone on the culture-blog front has already linked to Terry Teachout's piece on the virtues of America's extinct middlebrow culture, but I am compelled to do it, too, for the benefit of the very few of you who may not yet have read it.

Terry does a terrific job of summing up the cultural atmosphere that I grew up in, in various suburbs of suburbs of Detroit, and particularly the central roles played by Time (especially the "back of the book" features) and Life magazines in keeping one's eyes open to the broader currents and possibilities. (This is closely related to the phenomenon I noted when I wrote about Bullwinkle's Corner, which is of much the same era.)

But dang it! did Terry have to disclose that he's a few months younger than I am?

For Your Pleasure

2003-10-10T12:05:00.000-07:00

So . . . Between legal skirmishes, I thought I would take a run at finishing the rather lengthy piece on line breaks in poetry that has been sitting on my hard drive in a state of uncompletion for these past two or three weeks. What should I find, though, in my morning rounds, but that Ron Silliman has posted today, at length, on that very subject? (I'll be incorporating a reference to that post in to my own -- which means it is still further from completion than when I began, right?)

The FCC's Equal Time Rules required me next to make a stop at Mike Snider's Formal Blog and Sonnetarium, where a link led me to Jonathan Mayhew's Bemsha Swing which in turn led me (for the first time) to Aaron Tieger's fishblog, at which are posted (which had not been my objective but which I was happy to find there) the complete lyrics to "Mother of Pearl," always one of my nominees for Best - Roxy - Music - Song - Ever.

I just thought you should know.

[Update: More Roxy Music appreciation to be had here. At least two categories missing from Rick's list, though:
Most Underrated Roxy Music album: Country Life
Best Overrated Roxy Music Song to Play Loudly While Driving a Fast Convertible: "Love is the Drug"]

Giving a Dam for Philosophy

2003-10-09T15:11:00.000-07:00

In the Boston Globe, of all places, philosopher Richard Rorty discusses the "undeservedly influential 17th-century philosopher" Rene Descartes, the presumably more deserving Ludwig Wittgenstein, the late (and seemingly also deserving) Donald Davidson and the nature of reality.

I can't vouch for the coherence of Rorty's argument -- Brian Weatherson of Crooked Timber is disdainful, while still calling the piece "a much better philosophical article than you’ll normally see in an American newspaper" -- but you should take a look at it in any case, just to discover more than you ever expected about the epistemological uses of beavers.

Stop! You're Killing Me!

2003-10-09T08:17:00.000-07:00

There is a major two-fer going on at David Giacalone's ethicalEsq?, featuring the knockout combination of lawyers, liars and the Bard of Avon®.

First, David dissects and elucidates the widespread view that lawyers have a somewhat . . . flexible relationship with the truth. He is particularly scornful of those Public Faces of the profession who insist that we are merely Misunderstood, and that the right public relations strategy would set things right. He is not buying what these worthies are selling:

"The profession acts as if it only has an image problem and not a fundamental crisis. . . ."

My message to the legal profession: You do need more PR, but it must be Professional Responsibility, not Public Relations. Image crafting only sounds like more deception to the average (and above-average) American. Like more lies. Lost trust has to be earned the hard way -- client by client, case by case, with the focus on competence, diligence, and loyalty toward the client; on responsibility toward society rather than toward guild and gelt; on vigorous overseeing rather than overlooking of ethical rules; and on service rather than self-importance.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! David goes on, in this same post, to rip the lid off a particularly scandalous deception: No matter what your lawyer may claim to the contrary, Shakespeare quite possibly did want to "kill all the lawyers."

I counsel you to read the whole thing.

And I, for one, will be watching my back next time I'm at The Globe.

There She Is, Miss Direction

2003-10-08T13:42:00.000-07:00

Superconductivity or a gap in the hoop? Did Occam live in vain?

Penn Gilette mixes his disciplines.

[Link via Hit & Run]

Post-Electum Triste

2003-10-08T13:34:00.000-07:00

Now that the California recall has been completed, I think I will be making a steering correction on this site to direct myself back into comparatively calm cultural waters, and away from the shoals of politics.

Politics, more than ever, has become a nasty, brutish business, no matter which "side" emerges the victor in any given contest. Republicans and conservatives [not necessarily the same thing] can be crass and chortling in victory, bloodthirsty and vengeful in defeat. Democrats and other self-described progressives [not necessarily the same thing] should not congratulate themselves on possessing one whit of moral superiority on that score, though, judging from some of the morning-after rhetoric that's floating about today. As a randomly selected Exhibit "A" we might consider the vitriolic, bile-laced acid bath that makes up much of the readers' comments to this post at CalPundit, itself essentially rational. There is rending of garments, there is gnashing of teeth -- and those teeth want blood, folks. *Shudder* And that material is mild compared to, say, this expletive-ridden post by John Scalzi, which comes complete with wishes for the violent death of those who don't see things as he does. (After suggesting that anyone who voted yesterday but does not vote in the next gubernatorial election should be "taken out and beaten to death with a pipe," he concludes that any who thought they were voting to recall Gray Davis rather than voting to hand the state of California over to "small inherently undemocratic groups" for all time would be of more help "by hurling yourself off the Golden Gate Bridge and smacking into the bay below with a nice, bone-powdering swack."

Great honk! as they say in River City.

Even relatively respectable liberal sorts like state Senator Sheila Kuehl are announcing, without so much as a single meeting with the man, that the new Governor will have to be actively ignored and thwarted in order to "save the state . . . from ignorance". (I wish I could recall who it was that posted the other day on the new prevalence of the idea that the only reason a person might have to disagree with one's own political views is that the person is a halfwit.)

Have done, good people, have done.

This election was a practical display -- the latest in a very long line -- of the dead end that partisan politics has become, regardless of which of the parties one personally favors. I am more and more persuaded by those such as Michael J.Totten or Roger L. Simon who see the American party system as a problem in itself, a bad dream from which the electorate of California just might have been struggling to wake itself in yesterday's balloting.

As for this Fool, for the time being I resolve for the sake of my own peace of mind to observe more (I can't look away!) and say less when it comes to matters political. We'll see how long that resolve will last, what with a Presidential election a-brewing, etc. For now, it's back to exploring matters of taste, That With Which There is No Arguing and For Which There Is No Accounting.

Nurse! He's fading! A dactylic hexameter, stat!

More anon.

Hey, Man! Vote's Happenin'?

2003-10-07T11:31:00.000-07:00

Still colossally busy, with barely time to run by the precinct to cast the vote in the California recall, let alone post about it. Fortunately, that life-long liberal/Democrat Roger L. Simon has done a good job of summing it up.

He credits the Internet for his decision, doesn't he?

Well, yes, I’m glad you asked that question—it’s the Internet and blogging especially. I think in the era of the weblog, we are all able to think for ourselves in a very particular way. Blogs are liberating us democratically (small d) and enabling us to throw off the yoke of political parties. In the future, they may help us form new alliances based on greater knowledge, not these old time beliefs left over from the days of Boss Tweed.

An Addition to the Blogroll [sic]

2003-10-06T16:19:00.000-07:00

Although I have linked and referred to him several times in recent weeks, I have been remiss in not adding David Giacalone's ethicalEsq? to the list of frequently-visited sites on your left. That omission is now corrected.

David keeps his attention on perhaps the most important aspect of the law -- the point at which attorneys interact with Actual Human Beings and should be expected to Do Right By Them -- does so with a wry and articulate personal voice. Even if you are fortunate enough never to need a lawyer, you will likely find something of interest in David's pages.

[P.S., It being October, I can't help but wonder: When Halloween rolls around, does David carve a "Giacalone-tern"?]

Gray Davis Courting Hybrid Constituency?

2003-10-04T12:52:00.000-07:00

Speaking as a Toyota Prius owner -- reconcile that if you can with some of the views expressed elsewhere on this site -- this policy proposal from Gray Davis to allow single-occupant hybrids to use carpool lanes is almost enough to redeem him in my eyes. (Here is a link to the Governor's own Press Release on the subject.)

Too bad my source for that story says it will never happen.

Google Is Our Friend

2003-10-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

If you search via Google to answer the musical question "Who is Declan McManus?"* you won't be led here. On the other hand, thanks to having at least once cited "WH" Auden, this site is the Number 1 Answer to the Google search: "wh is Declan McManus?"

It is always our pleasure to be of service.

*[Answer: He's Elvis Costello to you and me.]

Ernie The Attorney: Apologist for Evil? I Think Not!

2003-10-03T09:34:00.000-07:00

We attorneys are frequently a bit on the bellicose and argumentative side, advocates looking for the main chance to strike with a pointed argument. The more praiseworthy in the profession, however, recognize and take opportunities to display the virtues of reason and, above all, balance, as Ernie the Attorney does in his take on the Arnold Schwarzenegger führer furor.

Update 10/4: In light of an e-mail received from a good friend concerning this post, I wanted to clarify my point a bit. My purpose here was not to make any remotely approving noises toward Adolf Hitler. It wasn't even to defend Arnold Schwarzenegger's original remarks. Rather, it was to praise the mode of thinking -- systematic, reasoned, not purely reflex-driven and, for those reasons, likely to lead to more reliable assessments of people and arguments -- that I think is displayed in Ernest Svenson's original post.

I am not sure whether this was meant to be part of Ernie's point, but it seems to me there is an argument to be made that automatic revulsion to any mention of Hitler may actually reduce our perception of the depths of Hitler's ghastliness. He comes off as a far worse specimen of humanity when we look directly at the fact that he, and those around him, rose to power and implemented policies of such horror despite their possessing qualities that in anyone else would have been deserving of praise. The willful abandonment or misuse of their own virtues in a hellish cause only compounds their crimes. (Mel Brooks actually gets a pretty good joke out of this in The Producers, when Franz Liebkind endorses the führer as a really good dancer.)

As for Arnold Schwarzenegger's particular remarks, the fullest version I have seen is in New York Times' initial report, which strikes me as largely even-handed. Assuming he did say such things, they seem to be of a piece with Schwarzenegger's general oafishness in his youthful bodybuilding days, and not to suggest that he holds any current views even remotely in line with the policies of German National Socialism. (Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center apparently gives Schwarzenegger a clean bill of health on this.)

And now, gentle readers, I re-consign Hitler and company to the outer darkness, where they so thoroughly belong.

Things I'd Like to Share With You, If I Only Had the Time

2003-10-01T21:53:00.000-07:00

[Sounds like the title of a country song, and not a very good one. -- Ed. Thank you, Edgar; we'll take that to the Board.]

Mightily busy, so most online effort has gone to the other site these past few days. Still, here are some items spotted in passing that will fill an idle few minutes for you. (You have a few idle minutes, do you not, else why would you be here?)

♣ On musical matters, there seems to be a rash of justifiable fondness for the very early '70s going around. F'rinstance, engineer and Ken Layne collaborator Pieter K. is waxing all admiring-like toward Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin. And The Ambler is reminded of the particular virtues, and scary cover art, of the first album from Robert Fripp and King Crimson.

♣ I haven't managed to cobble another poetry post together, because it keeps wandering about in draft and new material pops up at such a furious pace that one feels passé before one even gets started. But . . .art is long and life is short, so while that next piece continues to percolate and stew, I'll note that Mike Snider has finally begun to write about The Enchanted Loom -- which you should read if only to disagree with it and which I previously noted here. Meanwhile, poet Ron Silliman (who has his share of quarrels with Snider, and vice versa) has spent a good deal of time and HTML color-coding a poem by Charles Bernstein that strikes this reader as something of a one-note joke that wasn't really worth his effort. On the other hand, in his continuing poem by poem cage-match between consecutive editions of The Year's Best Poetry, Jonathan Mayhew quotes one of Ron Silliman's poems printed in the 2002 edition, and it's intriguing enough to make me want to track down the whole thing. [What's striking me recently is how much poets argue among themselves and how little most people know or care about it. I really need to get my next purely amateur post on the subject finished, so I can join in the fun.]

♣ The first trailer for The Return Of The King is now available online. What impresses me on first viewing is the confidence of the filmmaking on display, perhaps best evidenced by the relatively leisurely pace -- compared to most action trailers, a la Michael Bay or the jerry Bruckheimer school -- of the editing. Cutting has become a thicker and faster phenomenon in mainstream movies, but this trailer seems positively stately. A good thing, that.

♣ And in conclusion, a question: Should the very term "blog" be abandoned as cliquish and self-importantly hip? David Giacalone serves up his thoughts; Denise Howell returns the volley.

More anon, whenever that may be.

Proposed for Inclusion in DSM-V

2003-09-29T17:02:00.000-07:00

Aaron Haspel provides practical time-saving advice on "What Not to Read". Among his suggestions: Avoid the blogs of women who write about their children.

Mother bloggers inevitably start writing about how the school bully is picking on little Eustace or how little Tiffany has been punished for posting nastiness in someone else's comments section and it was really her who wrote it, not me, no matter what you think, and how dare you call social services on me, and you must be deranged to imagine that I would do something like that. Follow the links if you must. The point is, you need not.

[The proprietor of this blog has omitted the links from the preceding excerpt, lest you should be tempted to follow them from here. The link in the following paragraph has been preserved, however, as it bears on the subject of this post. Mr. Haspel continues:]

The biggest spread on Wall Street is reputed to be between your current job and your next one. The biggest spread in the universe, mothers, is between your own and everyone else's interest in the doings of your precious darling. As for the Father of all Mother Bloggers, am I the only one who skips the Gnat parts?"

No, sir, you are not. I, too, have taken regularly to skipping those portions, although I confess Mr. Lileks' establishment remains a daily stop on my reading rounds.

May I propose we define a new syndrome, akin to Blogorrhea (alternative definition here) or Hitnosis? Perhaps it can be called Hyper-Expressive Familial Fondness Syndrome (Internet variant) or, for brevity's sake, Lilexia.

Separated At Birth -- Fictional Character Edition

2003-09-29T10:39:00.000-07:00

Triggered by a photo posted at American Digest*: How are we to explain the apparent resemblance between Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, of the original Grateful Dead, and Our Working Boy, the grandiosely fictional Ignatius J. Reilly?

Elsewhere, by a handy coincidence, Brian Micklethwaite is suggesting similar connections between Michelangelo's David and young Frodo Baggins.

[* The photo of Pigpen seems now to have vanished from the American Digest site -- replaced by a nice shot of the Wright Brothers -- so I've linked to its original source.]

UPDATE: Oh ho! The Pigpen picture is back at American Digest, right here.