Tag: Literature

TBC: Morning Musing 6.2.15

I have 4 articles for you this morning!

First, a sad but needed project The Guardian is undertaking:

The Counted: People killed by police in the US

The Counted is a project by the Guardian – and you – working to count the number of people killed by police and other law enforcement agencies in the United States throughout 2015, to monitor their demographics and to tell the stories of how they died.

The database will combine Guardian reporting with verified crowdsourced information to build a more comprehensive record of such fatalities. The Counted is the most thorough public accounting for deadly use of force in the US, but it will operate as an imperfect work in progress – and will be updated by Guardian reporters and interactive journalists as frequently and as promptly as possible.

Jump!

Trans News Dump

Every so often I find there is a series of stories which just aren’t likely to get their own diary…even though they very well may deserve one.  Time is a limited quantity after all and it’s about to become a much more limited quantity quickly, what with the new semester about to run us over.  Syllabi are due next Thursday and classes start the following week.

So you can think of this as a Friday trans news dump…stories with not enough lurid interest to grab bigger headlines given short shrift on a Friday evening…or you can think of it as the news from the transgender community on a reel.

In One Person by John Irving

I doubted a couple of times if it would happen.  But it did.  I managed to slog my way through John Irving’s In One Person.  It wasn’t easy…and not just because of the tendency to jump back and forth through time…which made “plot” an almost extraneous element, at least for me, and was annoying as hell.

But what bothered me the most…and I suppose, at the same time, kept me reading…was the treatment of the author’s main theme, which appears to be, at least for me, transsexual women.

Now I am not a book reviewer by trade, so I shall probably commit a major faux pas by giving away the plot…but I don’t really know that the novel has one.  It is mostly 448 pages of character development.  Well, at least some of the characters develop.  Some others we wish would develop, but seem to come up lacking.

If you plan to read the book, you may not wish to read further.  I will be giving away a lot that happens.  I hesitate to call it “the Plot”.

Huck Finn and the Hunger Games

The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1)The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Are you a teacher upset by your school’s resistance to allowing the original version of Huck Finn?  I may have the solution–The Hunger Games.

I admit, I read the first page and thought I would hate it.  The book is written in first-person present tense, has simplistic prose and starts with a huge load of back story. After the first chapter, though, I was hooked.  The novel is bullet paced and winds through twists and turns that, for once, I did not anticipate.

So what does that have to do with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?  Well, Mark Twain’s 127 year old classic has racism as its theme: A young white runaway realizes he has more in common with a runaway black slave, than with affluent whites.  The problem is that Twain was a product of his time and uses the “N-word” liberally throughout the text.  Although class struggle and racism don’t bother school boards at all, the N-word apparently does, and the book is frequently banned from school libraries, English classes and social studies.

Enter the Hunger Games–a modern book with the theme of class warfare and imperialism that has an almost spooky resemblance to the Jasmine Revolution. (No small feat given the book’s copyright in 2008.)  Because it is a futuristic novel, the N-word is no where to be found.  In fact, there are no black people at all. That takes care of that.  Instead, the former US is split into 12 Districts that are pitted against each other in a reality show that is must see TV.  I mean the government makes you watch. Two children ages 12-18 are chosen by lottery from each district and forced to compete in a kill or be killed game for the benefit of the inhabitants of the Capitol district.  Throw in media control, massive government spying, police state, and the exploitation of the periphery districts by the Capitol district and the themes of this modern novel should provide more than enough material for a discussion of the problems of modern society and how they are portrayed in literature.

And if you still miss the racism aspect of Mark Twain, well how about talking about the foundation of racism–artificial adversarial relationships that keep those without power from forming solidarity for the benefit of the powerful.

View all my reviews

Popular Culture 20101015. The Who. A Quick One While He’s Away

It seems that I get the most response from this series, which I enjoy writing immensely.  However, entertainment is sort of trivial compared to science, so I urge everyone to read the series about science and technology that I post on Sunday evenings, Pique the Geek.  No matter.  The Who are one the most important bands to release music, and I am glad to write about them.

I suspect that many of you will not recognize this excellent piece of music, since it was first released in 1966, before The Who became a sensation with the release of Tommy in 1969.  However, Pete Townshend always called it the parent of Tommy, and I think that it is just wonderful.

To make my point about how much influence that The Who have had in popular music, I have included several covers that many consider to be important bands these days.  Many of those are good, but no one could do it better than The Who did in the day, or even later.  In case you do not know, I will give you a lineup of the band from the first video.

Q and A from the Geek’s Mailbox 20100514

As you know, I get questions from time to time about things.  I keep the best ones until I have enough to post them.  Some of them are serious, some are funny, and some do not quite make sense.

This is a followup to the hugely successful (for me, making the rec list) post from a couple of weeks ago.  You have Keith Olbermann to thank or to curse for stimulating me to write in the Thurber tradition.

By the way, Docudharma.com gets the scoop on this one.  I will not post it to the big orange until tomorrow because of the severe time restrictions on comments, and you all know that the comments are the best part of my posts.

Q and A from The Geek’s Mailbox 20100529

Sometimes I get questions in my inbox, and sometimes they are they have more general application.  Here a few from the past few days.

Remember, anyone is welcome to send a question, and my profile has my email address.  If you would like a question answered, just ask one.

I hope that this is read in the best of the Thurber tradition.  Keith has stimulated me to writing very short, funny pieces lately.  Please tell me what you think.

The Natural History of Talking Snakes, a Fable 20100419

Once there were several Snakes who could talk.  These are related to the one mentioned in Genesis, but are even more devious.

Before we go any further, I want to let everyone know that I have no aversion to, and actually like very much, real snakes.  They are extremely useful reptiles, and keep the rodent population at an acceptable level.  Without real snakes, our ecology would be quite less tolerable.  The former Mrs. Translator has one in the classroom (not a venomous one) and we together kept a Ball Python until he became too big for safe handling, so we donated Kaa to a university.  Please in no way think that I personally dislike snakes, except for the metaphorical ones.

The Deer, the Ticks, and the Mites 20100416

Once there was a deer walking through the break between the woods and the meadow.  As ticks do, they climbed onto tall grasses and attached themselves to the deer as she walked through them.

They do this instinctively, almost like they were directed by some of the radio talk show blowhards.  As the deer walks past, they sense it and fall onto them.  The deer never realize that they are being bitten until the the itch starts.

The Dark Knight of the Soul: Part 1 (draft)

This is a draft of part one of a post I long promised to write here.  For a variety of reasons, it has been a long-delayed labor, which is already extremely long and broken into several sections.  I am posting this draft here because as this has become a piece of writing which is significantly larger than my regular blogging endeavors in both size and ambition, I would greatly, greatly appreciate feedback to let me know how it can be refined for maximum readability and comprehension, and indeed for intrinsic worth (meaning if you think this is stupid, uninteresting bullshit, let me know before I waste any more time and effort).  Thank you in advance for your time.

CAUTION: Spoilers, for the films “Watchmen” and “The Dark Knight”, as well as the books Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, The Killing Joke, and much of the rest of the Batman canon, abound in this post.

In contrast to the simplistic opposition of good guys and bad guys, spy thrilers with artistic pretensions display all the “realistic psychological complexity” of the characters from “our” side. Far from signaling a balanced view, however, this “honest” acknowledgement of our own “dark side” stands for its very opposite, for the hidden assertion of our supremacy: we are “psychologically complex,” full of doubts, while the opponents are one dimensional fanatical killing machines.

~ Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes

Truth is a well-known pathological liar. It invariably turns out to be Fiction wearing a fancy frock. Self-proclaimed Fiction, on the other hand, is entirely honest. You can tell this, because it comes right out and says, “I’m a Liar,” right there on the dust jacket.

~Alan Moore  

Impossible Things, Things Like Health Care

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Jorge Luis Borges (photo by Diane Arbus)

Some of Jorge Luis Borges’s stories seem to be mined from that deep dream filled gap between being awake and being asleep. It’s a magical space: vivid events occur that are at once as real as they are impossible. If the sleeper wakes, sometimes the impossibilities are revealed. And then there’s wondering: how could anything that defies physical reality appear to be so real.

In “The Disk,” a story from The Book of Sand (El Libro de Arena)(1975), the impossible object is the “disk of Odin”:

“It is the disk of Odin,” the old man said in a patient voice, as though he were speaking to a child. “It has but one side. There is not another thing on earh that has but one side. So long as I hold it in my hand I shall be king.”

Ordinarily, objects are in three dimensions. Here one appears that has only a single side. Of course, it would be more or less invisible. And physically impossible on earth.

This, of course, is not entirely correct. The Moebius strip, discovered in 1858, has only one side and one boundary component. But that’s not important to the story.

The person with the disk eventually “opened his hand, and [the narrator] saw the gleam of the disk in the air.” But when he returned to where the disk was released, he couldn’t find it. And he’s been looking for it for years. In other words, the disk of Odin vanishes like a dream.

This kind of impossibility sometimes possesses far larger objects.

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Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino tells us of this “Invisible City”:

When you have forded the river, when you have crossed the mountain pass, you suddenly find before you the city of Moriana, its alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight, its coral columns supporting pediments encrusted with serpentine, its villas all of glass like aquariums where the shadows of dancing girls with silvery scales swim beneath the Medusa-shaped chandeliers. If this is not your first journey, you already know that cities like this have an obverse: you have only to walk a semi-circle and you will come into view of Moriana’s hidden face, an expanse of rusting sheet metal, sack cloths, planks bristling with spikes, pipes black with soot, piles of tins, behind walls with fading signs, frames of staved-in straw chairs, ropes good only for hanging oneself from a rotten beam.

   From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other.

Alas, the city is a two dimensional solid, another escapee from the chasm between waking and dreaming.

In the moments between sleep and wakefulness these objects seem tangible to me. The city is flat, but it’s a city. The disk glimmers. I know I’m dreaming, but I try to remember to hold onto the dream so that I will be able to examine it more fully when I am awake. But as I awake, as my sleep falls away, the fallacy arises, and the object I am clenching so tightly in my fist, disappears. What was it? I wonder, how could that be? What was that? But it’s gone.

All of this is so reminiscent of the Lankavatara Sutra, “Things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise.”

Which brings me ever so reluctantly to the elusive dream of a national, single payer health care system.  In the dream, I am drinking rum and playing dominoes.  Somehow, my empty glass falls off the table, lands on the cement walkway, and shatters.  Somehow, probably because of the drinking and the kidding around, I cut my hand deeply on the glass when I try to pick up the shards.  My hand hurts and it is bleeding badly.  My friends are surprised that there’s so much blood, so they wrap my hand in a bandage, and we head on foot for the emergency room which is luckily only two blocks away.  When we enter, a man sitting at a desk says to me and my friends, “I see you’ve cut your hand.  Please come with me so we can take care of it.”  And then, mirabile dictu, he does.  Just like that.  I’m out of the hospital in 20 minutes with 3 stitches and a nice, white bandage.  It seems strange to me.  Nobody asks me questions about insurance or citizenship.  They don’t ask me to pay for anything.  When I wake up, I realize it was a dream.  It was impossible. I must have been in Cuba.

—————

cross-posted from The Dream Antilles

The Night that I met Allen Ginsberg 20090616

Dr. Whitehead, Dean of the English Department in the Colleges of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas swung a pretty big stick in his heyday there.  He was able to get important persons of letters to come and give free (well, at least to the public) readings of their material.  Notable amongst them were Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg.  Mrs. Translator and I went to both of those.

The fliers had been distributed around town for a week or two.  They were pretty much generic, essentially saying “Famous poet to give reading at the U of A on such and such date at 8:00 PM”.  Well, Mrs. Translator and I decided to go, as we try to be cultured individuals and I was very familiar with Allen from reading.

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