John & Belle Have A Blog

A Mysterious Old Mermaid

"Once upon a time there was a mysterious old mermaid named Spot the doggy. And then Spot put on spots."

That's the story Zoe told me this morning. I know, the ending needs work. But the mermaid figure is intriguing.

One of the funny things about these early toddlings into the realm of narrative is, frankly, how much the products resemble stories generated by crude computer programs. It makes me wonder whether my daughter is operating more at the level of syntax or semantics when she comes up and out with the stuff. I mean: is she just stocked with a fair selection of threads she knows how to snip and tie together in random but moderately rule-governed ways? She has a 'Once upon a time there was a mysterious old x named y' function, and sets of possible plug-ins for the argument slots: mermaid, witch, puppy, boy, girl, so forth. Or is she really thinking about a scene for a story and a character, only to lose track of it almost instantly?

Most of the time when she talks - constantly - she is obviously expressing fairly definite beliefs and desires. She could pass a toddler Turing test, no question. But when she decides to 'tell a story', she does appear to switch on a strange sort of syntax-only autopilot; then it's anyone's guess where we'll end up.

I suppose it just goes to show that Plato was right. Those mysterious old great poets have no idea where the stuff comes from. It's very cute.

Ask not for whom the admiral cooed

Belle is bedridden with a sinus infection, among other things, and reading bad sci-fi as comfort food for thought. She asked me to share a little something with all of you: the opening sentences of The Memory Bank (1951) by Wallace West.

"When I need your advice, Lieutenant Commander," cooed the admiral, "I shall send you a plascript!"

This sentence was obviously a big influence on Harlan Ellison's classic short story, "Repent Harlequin! Cooed the Ticktockman". I myself am planning on emitting dove-toned variations on it in everyday conversation. "Hey! Wait for the plascript!" "Do I have to send you a plascript?" "We don't need no stinking plascript!" And so forth.

"But sir," his husky, tow-headed aide ventured to protest ...

There ought to be a special critical term - if not a special place in hell - for the mad sin of shoehorning distinguishing physical characteristics (via Making Light) into sentences in which they have no proper business. (And exactly why have these specific terms - 'husky' and 'tow-headed' - fallen into such utter disuse in our day and age? Whither huskiness, eh?)

... "Lieutenant Pancrief can make it right in the lab. It's just a refinement of an ancient sniper-scope. Infra-red radiation from the bodies of the Siriuns - if they have bodies, of course - would register on microfilm. They need never know ..."

I guess I could quibble. Could you really know - concerning any creature that might, for all you know, lack a body - whether, in the event that it has a body, that body will ... oh, never mind. The admiral is in action again.

"Hah!" Admiral Mendez slammed a hairy fist on his empty desk top ...

I'm tempted to read the novel myself just to find out whose fist it was. But not, you know, that tempted.

Quadrophobia

Reading through the NYT listing of new DVD releases, I learned an unwelcome new word. It seems all four Alien movies have been released as "The Alien Quadrilogy." Quadrilogy. I ask you, people. Is something wrong with tetralogy that I don't know about? Here we have a perfectly good word, and so few opportunities to use it. Gene Wolfe's many tetralogies provide most of us with our only chances (and all of them are also teratologies, inasmuch as they're chock full of monsters, ha ha. OK, I thought it was funny.) We have to fight against the scourge of quadriolgy. It may seem quixotic, but if each of us can tell four friends...aww, this is a losing battle, isn't it. This is four kinds of lame.

Difficult Writing Again

I sort of missed out on this MLA-bash bash, so I'll just pick on some points made by Chun in defense of the much-maligned leviathan.

A larger point is that one of the reasons that people (especially journalists) feel like the MLA is an allowable target is because of what they perceive as the low barrier of entry. Anyone can (or should, at least) read novels, poems, short stories, etc. So why do these pretentious fops get up there and pretend they know so much better than the rest of us? Huh? HUH!?!? Relax. We do know more. It's only a delusion that makes you think that you know enough about the problems of literary interpretation to demand that its professional discourse make perfect sense to you. It's an understandable delusion, but one that you can cure yourself of quickly enough by reading everything ever written about, for example, Frank Norris over the next five or so years. Now write three hundred pages of scholarship on him that advances something new and takes into account the relevant developments in literary history and interpretation. After you've completed this exercise, which I'm sure any Chronicle journalist or average blogopath could do in record time, then you'll realize just how little is actually known about how literature works and the reason why professional attempts to analyze it are fraught with jargon and assumptions of prior knowledge.

Now it is true that writing good literary criticism is hard. The barriers to entry on the production side are high. But it plainly does not follow that barriers to entry on the consumption side should be correspondingly high. Why should reading good literary criticism be hard?

Ditto for knowledge: anyone who writes a good book on Frank Norris knows more about the man than your average journalist. It does not follow that a good book about Norris has any business whatsoever being too abstruse for your average journo.

Ditto for lack of knowledge: from the fact that the workings of literature are obscure, it does not follow that the inner workings of writings about literature have any business being obscure. (We are skirting close to Yvor Winter's fallacy of imitative form here: don't feel you have to write obscurely about obscure things.) In general, I do not see that impatience with obscurity has anything much to do with faith in easy or obvious answers.

Putting the point a slightly different way: if one has high hopes for achieving technicality eventually - and there is nothing wrong with that - that is still no reason to pretend to have achieved it yet.

Which brings us to my final point: it is just not clear that the jargony quality of much current literary criticism is mostly due to the difficulty of the subject-matter (which is not to deny that the matter really is difficult). Not to be too harsh, but it is reasonable - it seems to me - to take nothing on credit hereabouts. If something appears to make no sense whatseover, proceed on the assumption that it probably makes no sense whatsoever. To the degree that the professional discourse is obscure, distrust it. It is by no means clear this is not a sane heuristic.

Of course, none of this amounts to a license to judge MLA talks solely by their silly titles. (We bloggers are fond of silly, snarky titles for our posts, after all. We ought to understand how this sort of aesthetic can arise. A silly title is strictly consistent with the presence of genuine intellectual content.) I know it bugs Chun that he thinks cheap shots are getting taken, and I can sympathize up to a point. Certainly it is natural to vent some steam when you think you have been on the receiving end of cheap shots. But it seems to me Chun seriously understates the difficulty of making out the case for critical difficulty.

The basic question here is quite fundamental - and strictly detachable from suspicions about the decadence of the MLA. Since the dawn of time, man has wondered: exactly when, and for what reasons, is literary criticism justified in being too hard for the average Chronicle of Higher Education journalist to read?

Wherein consists cod-Wagnerian pomposity?

Timothy Burke has an interesting post up - interesting to me because I have been wondering whether the kid's book is any good. And because I happen to have blogged about China Mieville's anti-Tolkien screed before.

Chun has an interesting follow-up to Burke, in which he quotes some keywords from Mieville's original indictment:

Tolkien is the "wen on the arse" of Mieville's brand of fantasy. He has some cute descriptions of the Master: "cod-Wagnerian pomposity," "small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quo," and "belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity." I suppose one of the first questions that arises when evaluating this claim is to what extent these qualities are present in Tolkien's source material. Beowulf, to take one obvious example, does not have the "cod-Wagnerian pomposity," if I understand what Mieville means by this delicious phrase correctly, but it most certainly reflects a belief in "absolute morality" and a fondness for "hierarchical status-quo." Indeed it would be surprising if it didn't, considering its origin.

My reaction: cod-Wagnerian is indeed a fine brickbat. But it seems to me it ought to be stored for use against a more deserving target than Tolkien. (Yes, our fingers are itching, now that we have this new and vorpal weapon. But there's a new Robert Jordan novel out, like, every week. So what's the hurry?) But this does indeed depend on what the term means. I welcome proposed definitions/prototypes in the comments box.

Putting the Babble Back In Palpabable

Wow.

The Airplane Boys With the Questions of Being

I think I forgot to mention that we're staying with Belle's mom in DC for the holidays, hence my severe jetlag. (In our last installment, I believe I attributed its maximality to the size of our globe. As I slowly recover, it occurs to me rotational periodicity is a likelier culprit. Or something fancy like that.)

But I digress.

Belle's mom collects boy's adventure books, mostly from the 20's-40's. So I'm reading The Airplane Boys with the Revolutionists in Bolivia, by E. J. Craine (1931). It's very Alan Moore, I am delighted to report. Pure-blooded descendants of the Incas dwelling in super-secret high-technology underground kingdom in the Andes. I'll just let you accompany our young aviators on the tour:

Strange Dream

I am as severely jetlagged as it is possible to be on a planet of this size. So let me tell you about my dream.

In my dream, I am reading Lileks, the Bleat. He is complaining, in his special way, about how the jokes in "Blondie" are never funny. Example: a strip in which Mr. Dithers orders Dagwood to come up with a joke or he's fired. Dagwood sits at his manual typewriter, sweating. A bright idea! 'What if inside my typewriter there is a tiny world of people just like us who don't know they are inside my typewriter?' Then, the final panel: Dagwood thinks to himself, in frustration, 'Aww, that could never happen." The joke: it's made obvious that it's tiny Dagwood-within-Dagwood's-typewriter who is thinking this. Get it? Now HOW is it made obvious that it's the tiny Dagwood who is thinking this? You might think it was just dream-stipulation. But no: it is because the tiny Dagwood is played by Richard Pryor.

Then Lileks complains about a stupid Christmas special he has just made the mistake of watching. It's an adaption of Dickens' classic tale. But here's the twist. In this new version, the ghost has a time-machine and actually takes Scrooge into the past and future. Lileks understandably regards this mixture of spiritualism and sci-fi as ill-advised. Also, young Scrooge is played by Aston Kutchner (sp? Guy from "That 70's Show", is who I mean.)

And then I woke up.

While I was coming up from under: you could make it worse by making Bob Cratchet (sp?) a lovably eccentric, impoverished inventor. When Scrooge sees the spiritual light, he funds Cratchet's bold project for a time-machine, and they travel back together and save Tiny Tim before he dies on Christmas. So there are two time-machines. The ghost's and Cratchet's.

Fruitcake Isn't Indenstible

Zoe has invented a new word: "indenstible." In both sound and meaning, it appears to be a combination of indefensible and detestable. She mostly uses it in connection with her new least favorite activity, to wit: weaning. Like, "Don't cover your bubbies with a shirt--it's so indenstible!" Since the meaning is clear enough, we've all started using it. Today's 1 o'clock episode of Law and Order was a repeat of last night's 10 o'clock, which I consider to have been pretty indenstible on TNT's part.

Now, I am aware that most people think fruitcake is indenstible. Many are; I can't deny it. For example, those nasty Claxton fruitcakes they sell in roadside fireworks/pecan log rolls/fruitcake stands in South Carolina really are gross. A gummy brick studded with implausibly colored cherries and bits of unidentifiable green stuff. In a word, indenstible (as well as indigestable). Even historic Italian fruitcake, like Sienese Panforte, can be a bit much (although I do like it in small doses). They say the crusaders took it with them as medieval power bars, and it does taste as if it could make it to Antioch and back in roughly the same condition it started.

Bring down the devil

It would appear the man is mad. Time spent down a hole with mice and almost a million dollars presumably isn't stabilizing, of course. But probably he was like this before.

It's a classic problem in moral psychology. Take the following remarks by Chalabi. Do you take the final sentence as evidence for the truth of the first two, or as a reductio on them?

Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, said: "He was quite lucid. He had command of his faculties. He would not apologize to the Iraqi people. He did not deny any of the crimes he was confronted with having done. He tried to justify them."

Has any villain, in the history of the political world, ever done the Shakespearean/super-villian thing and just said: I did it because I am a villain. Villains like doing evil.

Here is the most over-the-top villain-at-bay speech in all of Shakespeare. Coming from the man who brought you Richard III and Iago, that is saying something. The speech is from Titus Andronicus, a preposterous play. But it would hardly be enough to get Saddam started, would it, if he decided to take this sort of line? So I suppose: delusional justifications it will be.

LUCIUS Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?

AARON
Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day - and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,-
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men's cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.