A post on "Alas, a blog" (good name) about Kurt Vonnegut and his recent death quotes at some length from his novel "Cat's Cradle." I'd say it's worth re-quoting:
God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!"
"See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars."
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait...
To find out for certain what my wampeter was...
And who was in my karass...
And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.
Also worth re-quoting is this rather touching comic bit from "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater":
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies -- "God damn it, you’ve got to be kind."
Incidentally, my pediatrician for a time while growing up in Milton, MA, was Mark Vonnegut, Kurt's son. I must say that I didn't know until now -- and neither did my parents, I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts -- about the details of Mark's, uh, colorful personal history, recorded in his very own Wikipedia entry:
He briefly worked at Duthie Books and was also briefly chief of a twenty-man detachment of special state police that provided the security for Boston State Hospital. During the Vietnam War he filed an application with the draft board to be considered a conscientious objector, which was denied. After taking the physical examination, he was given a psychiatric 4F classification and avoided conscription into the U.S. Military.
He is the author of The Eden Express, which describes his trip to British Columbia to set up a commune with his friends and his personal experiences with schizophrenia, which he attributes in part to stress, diet and heavy marijuana use.
As home offices go, here's a sweet setup: Anthony Grafton, a historian of early modern Europe at Princeton, has one sophisticated information-management device on his desk ... and another just behind him:
It's a book wheel, a contraption first made use of by erudite scholars in the late 1500s. Grafton's was built for a museum exhibit on early book culture that he curated, and he decided to hang on to it. (Disclosure: I wrote the profile accompanying this photo.) It's stocked with Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and even astronomical reference works. The Washington Post's Joel Achenbach also found this illustration striking, as did his readers, who get off a few good riffs in the comments. ("Grafton considers himself an intellectual, and yet he only has eight shelves on his reading wheel," one writes. "Mine has sixteen.")
What would you put on your reading wheel? Achenbach's first thought is "The Baseball Encyclopedia."
You know the Dodge slogan "Grab life by the horns" -- right? (It was originally created for the Dodge Ram pickup, but it became the all-purpose Dodge slogan.) Next month, according to Brandweek, the carmaker will shorten the slogan to "Grab life." Why? Because Paul McCartney and other animal rights activists complained that bull-jumping (or whatever activity requires you to grab animals by the horns) is cruel?
Nope. Because it's too masculine, supposedly. Dodge wants to extend the appeal of the brand to women and families. Not sure what part of life you're supposed to grab onto now, but it's no longer the horns.
I guess that means that Dodge won't be running this sort of ad in the future:
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about whether Vice President Dick Cheney or President George W. Bush issued an order on the morning of Sep. 11 to shoot down commercial aircraft that were unresponsive and threatening to crash into occupied buildings or areas.
Norman was the sole government official in a position to know who seemed to testify that Cheney or Bush did issue the order. (He was in "the bunker" below the White House, aka the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, with Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and other top officials.)
Lee Hamilton [of the 9/11 Commission]: I wanted to focus just a moment on the presidential emergency operating center. You were there for a good part of the day. I think you were there with the vice president. We had that order given, I think it was by the President, that authorized the shooting down of commercial aircraft that were suspected to be controlled by terrorists. Were you there when that order was given?
Mineta: No I was not. I was made aware of it during the time that the airplane was coming into the Pentagon. There was a young man who'd come in and say to the vice president, the plane is 50 miles out, the plane is 30 miles out and when it got down to the plane is 10 miles out the young man also said to the vice president, "Do the orders still stand?" And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?"
I mentioned before that Mineta's testimony was left out of the final 9/11 report. It has been pointed out to me since that Mineta's testimony stood in contradiction to that of FAA, NORAD and Pentagon officials, which might explain its exclusion from the report. Simply because he was outnumbered, I mean. But it's worth noting, and some conspiracy-minded folks do note it, that if Mineta was right -- that is, if there was a shoot-down order in place "during the time that the airplane was coming into the Pentagon" -- that would put those responsible for our air defenses rather squarely on the hot seat, because several sensitive questions are therefore raised.
If the Pentagon was tracking Flight 77, the Pentagon plane, for some time, why didn't they shoot it down? If they and NORAD didn't have jets or ground-based missiles close enough to do so, and that seems clear, why weren't they close enough? It had been about 45 minutes since the first WTC tower was struck, during which time jets were scrambled (from Cape Cod) to intercept any New York-bound hostile aircraft. (Those jets arrived minutes too late to catch the second WTC attack.)
Reader J.H.M. writes in to alert me that there is a book that presents a key criticism to Hawking's "top-down" or "backwards" approach to cosmology. (Hawking uses both terms.)
I'm not anywhere near qualified to say who's right, but in an intriguing book by Palle Yourgrau, "A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel And Einstein," he argues that Mr. Hawking has done some convoluted theorizing in an attempt to prove that our universe is not a so-called "Gödel Universe," which would imply that one could theoretically travel a path which would return you to the same place you started, only before you left. The book has much more on the philosophical background to turn of the century physics, and is fairly short.
For those willing to hack their way through the argument J.H.M. is referring to, there's this, which provides the following quote from Yourgrau's book:
Just as David Hilbert tried at first to avoid the consequences of the incompleteness theorem by inventing a new rule of logical inference out of whole cloth, so too the relativistic establishment, in the person of Stephen Hawking, tried to get around the embarrassing consequences introduced by the Gödel universe. If the annoying Gödel universe was consistent with the laws of general relativity, why not change the laws? Hawking thus introduced what he called the “chronology protection conjecture” (though a better name would have been the “anti-Gödel amendment”), which proposed a modification of general relativity whose primary goal was to rule out the possibility of world models like Gödel’s, with their awkward chronologies premitting closed temporal loops and causal chains with no beginning. Despite having, as Russell noted in a different context, all the advantages of theft over honest toil, Hawking’s chronology protection conjecture has won few adherents, its ad hoc character betraying itself.
MSNBC's Cosmic Log column carries a very interesting piece about Stephen Hawking, who is physically degenerating due to ALS ("Lou Gehrig's disease") but ever more fascinating as an intellectual figure, both in science and on the wider public stage. Hawking, in a talk in Seattle discussed in the piece, recounted the changes in his own views -- an admirable subject to address.
Hawking has gone back and forth about what happens to the things that are sucked into a black hole. At one time, he held that the "information" falling into the black hole is lost forever, but recently he has said that the contents of a black hole would leak out in the form of "Hawking radiation," until the black hole itself dissipates.
"Information is not lost, but it is not returned in a useful way," he said. "It is like burning an encyclopedia. Information is not lost, but it is very hard to read."
That's a good line. Hawking noted one consequence of his change of mind:
Speaking of encyclopedias, Hawking noted that his reversal caused him to lose a bet to a fellow physicist, with the payoff coming in the form of a baseball encyclopedia. "Maybe I should have just given him the ashes," Hawking joked.
Hawking also discussed his "backwards" or top-down approach to his subject. Without knowing a thing about the science, I like his comments:
We don't really know how the human brain works. I find women's brains a particular mystery. But it is reasonable to assume that humans remember the same direction of time as computers do.... We understand how computers work, unlike humans. And one can show that when a computer records an item in its memory, the total amount of disorder goes up. So computers and humans remember the past, and not the future. That is, because of the Second Law [of Thermodynamics], we usually recount history forward.
We say that later events are caused by earlier events, but not that earlier events happen in order to lead to the later. This "bottom-up" approach, as I call it, works well in situations in which we can choose the initial state and observe the outcome. But the bottom-up approach does not work in cosmology.
We do not know what the initial state of the universe was, and we currently can't try out different initial states and see what kinds of universes they would produce."
According to several sources (though I haven't found a transcript), Don Imus, appearing on the "Today" show on Tuesday, admitted to referring to Gwen Ifill as "a cleaning lady," while trying to explain it:
Calling her a "cleaning lady" was part of "a comedy routine, where we make up the news, which we’ve been doing since 1968 on the radio.... It was comedy,” said Imus.
On Fox News, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham debated the comment:
[HANNITY:] I want to bring the issue of his parent corporation, because everyone is acting like they're all shocked at this. We've got Gwen Ifill being, you know, called a "cleaning lady" by Don Imus.
INGRAHAM: That was in the Reagan administration [sic -- Clinton administration]. That was in part of a big comedy routine.
HANNITY: I'm just going through the history.
INGRAHAM: I'm not defending it, but it was a long time ago.
My favorite Vonnegut novel is his 1963 masterpiece "Cat's Cradle."
It's a great example of the pre-apocalyptic genre, of course, which is
probably why I first picked it up, but what stuck with me was the
fictional religion of Bokononism, particularly its concepts of the
"karass" (a group of people who, often unknowingly, are working
together to accomplish something important; the people can be thought
of as fingers in a cat's cradle); "granfalloon" (a proud yet
meaningless association of human beings, a false karass); and
"wampeter" (the object, or point of a karass).
Apparently I'm not the only one who appreciated Vonnegut's critical
insights into human association. According to Mark Feeney:
Mr. Vonnegut studied anthropology at the University of Chicago. His master's thesis was rejected in 1947, but 24 years later the university granted him a degree in recognition of the "anthropological elements" in his novel "Cat's Cradle."
Check out the lovely image on the Vonnegut.com homepage today.
In Tuesday's New York Times, Gwen Ifill wrote an Op-Ed about the Don Imus-Rutgers women's basketball story. She was very critical of Imus:
For all their grit, hard work and courage, the Rutgers girls got branded "nappy-headed ho's" -- a shockingly concise sexual and racial insult, tossed out in a volley of male camaraderie by a group of amused, middle-aged white men. The "joke" -- as delivered and later recanted -- by the radio and television personality Don Imus failed one big test: it was not funny.
Agree all around. Ifill also mentioned that she was told, though she didn't hear the show in question, that Imus once said, about her coverage of the White House for the Times, "Isn't The Times wonderful. It lets the cleaning lady cover the White House." This was reported to her secondhand, and Imus denies ever having said it. But two journalists, Lars-Erik Nelson and Philip Nobile, have said they remember the comment. (Is there an audio clip or transcript out there?) I have a few doubts, truth be told, because surely this would have been a big story at the time, no?
In any case, another interesting element of the Op-Ed comes here:
Why do my journalistic colleagues appear on Mr. Imus's program? That’s for them to defend, and others to argue about. I certainly don't know any black journalists who will.
It is true that many fine journalists appear on Imus, including most of the nightly network news anchors present and past. I have heard Ted Koppel, Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams, and I think Dan Rather and the late Peter Jennings on the program. Prominent politicians also can be heard, including Kerry, Edwards, McCain (Imus is a fan of his), and more. The quality of his guests is now likely to precipitously decline.
But back to Ifill's comment. What is interesting is that Jim Lehrer, Ifill's current boss, in a manner of speaking, on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, appears regularly on Imus. Oooh. That underscores just how hot a button Imus pushed.
I perused the Globe this morning for any mention of the n+1 event at Brookline Booksmith (7 pm) tonight. No luck.
n+1 comes to town
I mentioned the event last week in Brainiac, and also contacted my former colleagues at the Globe's Living/Arts, Calendar, and Sidekick sections. Alas, I see no mention of the event in the paper today! Cal Ripken Jr. signing copies of his self-help book today? Check. Kevin Weeks reading from "Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger's Irish Mob" today? Check. Anthropologist Daniel E. Lieberman lecturing tonight on why the human body evolved to excel at long-distance running? Check. But nothing about the n+1 event.
Oh well, Sidekick did mention the n+1 event briefly on Tuesday. (Note to self: Repeat "event" often enough and it sounds ominous, like the "Airborne Toxic Event" in DeLillo's "White Noise.") Also, today Sidekick reverse-published my recent Bruce Lee-as-philosopher post, illustrating it with a sexy photo of Lee, accompanied by the Best. Photo. Caption. Ever. "Did Bruce Lee die from drinking too many fluids? Josh Glenn thinks so." Clip and save, folks.
Here's something else. Yesterday, in a Brainiac item about Angela Davis and her fellow Brandeis bad girls, I posted a photo of Davis, her beautiful hair in all its glory. Today, I was interested to learn, from a Globe op-ed by BC professor Zine Magubane, who was commenting on Don Imus's "nappy-headed ho's" comment, the following:
In the late 1960s, after the FBI declared Angela Davis one of the country's 10 most wanted criminals, thousands of other law-abiding, Afro-wearing African-American women became targets of state repression -- accosted, harassed, and arrested by police, the FBI, and immigration agents. The "wanted" posters that featured Davis, her huge Afro framing her face like a halo, appeared in post offices and government buildings all over America, not to mention on television and in Life magazine. Her "nappy hair" served not only to structure popular opinions about her as a dangerous criminal, but also made it possible to deny the rights of due process and habeas corpus to any young black woman, simply on the basis of her hairstyle.
Good stuff. Anyway, come by Brookline Booksmith this evening! I will be there, possibly moderating the n+1 event, or heckling the editors, or something. After that, n+1 will be heading to a party in Cambridge thrown by the Harvard Crimson, and they're inviting readers along.
The Guardian reports today that the tourist agency for England's beautiful Lake District (I'm going there next visit, man, seriously) has hired the rapper MC Nuts to sing a rap video variation of Wordsworth's famous poem "Daffodils," dressed as "a zany red squirrel." (The poem was written in and about the Lake District.) This follows an updating of the agency, which has re-branded itself, in a very Internet spelling, GoLake.
Shameless pandering to youth, but I like it.
The video, whose Web site is headed "Wordsworth... for the YouTube generation," is here, but note that it has been giving my browser serious trouble.
Writing in England's Prospect Magazine, Simon Blackburn, a good popularizer of difficult philosophical ideas, has come to the defense of Jean Baudrillard, whose legacy has been heavily debated since his death last month, as discussed in a number of posts on Brainiac.
His short piece urges us to take Baudrillard's more outlandish statements -- like "le gulf war n'existe pas," referring ot the Bush I version -- with a grain of salt, since he was a provocateur by trade. Blackburn also critiques one of Baudrillard's central theses, while giving it a certain credit:
Perhaps nature has varnished and spun the pictures we receive. They too are commodities, bought in to provide sustenance. Perhaps, at the limit, we live in a virtual reality, unable to comprehend our real position, sentenced to a woeful life of dreams, myth, fiction and illusion. Baudrillard, the inspiration for the Matrix films, tried to distance himself from the trite opposition of one moment seeing through the glass darkly and then coming face to face with reality, yet he enjoyed playing with its ingredients. I do not think this was wise, since generalised scepticism implies that there is nothing especially wrong about America or late capitalism or consumer society -- and would any self-respecting culture critic want to draw that conclusion?
Nevertheless, says Blackburn, Baudrillard's radical doubt (recall Descartes) had its lasting value:
French postmodernism may be passing, but it had a point. Even if engagement with the world is the cure, the respite it gives may be short-lived. No sooner has the real moment gone than the work of memory begins, once more selecting, massaging, suppressing and spinning.
On March 31, alleged Kansas City gang leader Shauntay L. Henderson was arrested shortly after the FBI announced that they'd added her to their Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. Last week, Newsweek published a photo gallery of the other seven women who've landed on the FBI's Most Wanted list. Sharp-eyed bloggers have since pointed out that nearly half of these infamous women were graduates of Waltham-based Brandeis University.
Can you name all three? (No, pierced and tattooed American novelist Kathy Acker wasn't one of them.) Give up? OK, here they are:
Angela Davis '65
Police claimed that a shotgun used during a lethal 1970 attempt, on the part of the Black Panthers, to free "Soledad Brother" George Jackson during a court appearance in Marin County, Calif., was registered to Davis. Davis, a radical feminist and activist, and an assistant philosophy professor at UCLA, evaded the law for two months, before being arrested and charged with kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy. In 1972, the year that John Lennon's "Angela" and the Rolling Stones' "Sweet Black Angel" advocated for her release, she was exonerated. At Brandeis, she majored in French.
Susan Edith Saxe
Along with fellow radical feminist and Brandeis undergrad Katherine Ann Power, in 1970 Saxe robbed a National Guard Armory in Newburyport and a branch of the State Street Bank & Trust Company on Western Avenue in Allston. During the getaway, an accomplice of theirs shot and killed a Boston police officer. Saxe was on the lam until she was apprehended in 1975. She served seven years.
Katherine Ann Power
Power remained underground until 1993, when she turned herself in. She was released in 1999. She and Saxe were identified by the FBI as members of an unnamed revolutionary group. Police claimed the holdup, which netted $26,000, was carried out by five revolutionaries (two of whom were male prison inmates who were studying at the university under a special release program) to finance their antiwar activities.
I've never grasped why tap dancing hasn't remained a huge phenomenon. I mean who doesn't like it? Seemingly everyone has seen and enjoyed the percussive dance moves of either "Stomp" or "Blue Man Group" (Boston shows) or both, but tap has declined in cultural import, notwithstanding Savion Glover.
But wait. Have you seen clogging? You probably have, but not for a while, or not much of it. But I'm here to predict that clogging is going to explode.
This video, clearly recorded in a high-school gym, is headlined "Clogging... You think you know... but you have no idea..."
"Bifor Aprille was the cruellest moneth (whatever that meneth!), it was a moneth of coloures and cries, and pilgrymages," writes Geoffrey Chaucer at his blog. (Yes, Chaucer hath a blog; he also hath high cholesterol and a wyf who is glad he's dieting: "She seyd that ich was 'blowing up lyk post-Kevin Britney.' ")
There's a reason T.S. Eliot and Chaucer had different views of April, of course -- one of those reasons is bearing down on the Northeast even now. So if you prefer Chaucer's spring -- if you still can recite "When that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droght of March hath perced to the roote," and so on -- then hie thee to Chaucer's celebration of the month.
Chaucer asked his fans for poetic readings and tributes, and he got them. "FSJL" offered these lines on another aspect of April's cruelty:
Whan that Aprille doth March displace,
with weping, walinge, and cryes folk do disporte
for there beth ne shelter ne resorte,
The IRS doth every fotestepe trace,
and will nat grante even a minute's grace,
an ye paye not, thenne the kyng his courte,
shall distrain on ye, and ye shall falle shorte.
And Tremulus Aescgar responded with a translation of the Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales" in the English of two or three centuries earlier:
Hwæt! Ða Eostre-monaþ mid his regne swete,
þæt drygenysse of Hreð-monaþ þurhdrifode to þam wyrtrumum,
and baðeþ hwelce ædre on swelce wine,
fram hwilc gehwilce bloma bið weaxode.
If you worry that English is changing too fast, pity Chaucer's pilgrims, whose language had evolved in a comparative heartbeat. Unlike them, we can read centuries-old texts with barely a stumble; take, say, Swift's rhymes on rain in the first few lines of "Description of a City Shower" (1710):
Careful observers may foretell the hour,
(By sure prognostics,) when to dread a shower.
While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o'er
Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.
Over at the National Review blog the Corner, John Derbyshire has been lamenting -- to put it mildly -- the behavior of the British marines captured by the Iranians, both during and after their ordeal. (The youngest marine evidently told the Daily Mirror he "cried like a baby.")
Now an American citizen, Derbyshire was born in England. He says his mother told him wistfully, on her deathbed, in 1998: "At least I knew England when she was England."
At the time, the NR contributor thought this was just the stuff old people say, but now he says he knows what she meant:
I even feel a bit the same way myself. I caught the tail-end of that old England -- that bumptious, arrogant, self-confident old England, the England of complicated games, snobbery, irony, repression, and stoicism, the England of suet puddings, drafty houses, coal smoke and bad teeth, the England of throat-catching poetry and gardens and tweeds, the England that civilized the whole world and gave an example of adult behavior -- the English Gentleman -- that was admired from Peking (I can testify) to Peru.
It's all gone now, "dead as mutton," as English people used to say. Now there is nothing there but a flock of whimpering Eloi, giggling over their gadgets, whining for their handouts, crying for their Mummies, playing at soldiering for reasons they can no longer understand, from lingering habit. Lower the corpse down slowly, shovel in the earth. England is dead.
Wow. Those two pregnant paragraphs sound like a tidy summary of the ideas the historian Peter Mandler explores in this new book, from Yale University Press:
Coincidentally I'd just ordered a copy, but now I'm all the more eager to read it. [The title, if you can't quite make it out, is: "The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair." Maybe "the Derb" can write an afterword for the paperback edition.]
Yesterday morning, as all vigilant Bostonians know, three black nylon drawstring backpacks were detected hanging from trees at Newton North High School. Another was detected hanging on a nearby fence. The parking lot was evacuated, and the State Police bomb squad was called in.
The bomb squad used a robot to inspect the backpacks, and discovered -- as we learned from a story in today's Globe by Ralph Ranalli -- "that they were filled with shredded newspaper and that they bore the logo of a social networking website called b4class.com." The website ("a combination of MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube") was founded by Sofia Loginova, a Quincy High senior. In case the police are looking for her, here's her photo. It's on every page of the website:
Shredded newspaper is kinda suspicious, I guess. But which newspaper was it? At 10 am this morning, Rachel Lebeaux, a blogger for the Newton TAB filed a "newsflash":
We just learned from police that it was copies of the Boston Globe, not the Newton TAB, that were shredded and stuffed inside the backpacks that sparked a bomb scare at Newton North High School Monday morning. A crucial clue in the investigation? Maybe not. But it bolsters our belief that every copy of the TAB gets read :)
This is no joking matter, Ms. Lebeaux! It's not going to be easy for b4class.com to pony up $2 million in costs and goodwill money...
A scholar at Brown University in Providence, R.I., Antoinette Pole, has completed a study of black bloggers and their interests and goals, a topic you don't hear much about. It appears she used a very small sample size of 20 but "conducted in-depth interviews."
Pole estimates that in the political blogosphere, less than 1 percent of bloggers are black. But she was impressed by the level of political engagement among the bloggers she studied. She said, "I assumed these bloggers were writing about politics and policy issues, but I didn’t realize the extent to which the authors mobilize their readers and use blogs as a conduit for political participation."
Her study found that black bloggers appear to have a greater desire and ability to motivate their audiences politically than do their white counterparts. This may be a sign of good news to those who speak frequently of the "digital divide" that separates the wired and unwired.
The production values of English TV shows are oddly low, to those of us raised on American TV. A soap opera set in a hospital, for example, looks like a high-school production of a play set in a hospital. And yet... English TV shows (and of course, the ads) are often better than their American counterparts. Maybe it's because most TV actors in Blighty aren't just pretty faces; they actually have talent?
I'm just speculating. Anyway, here's a British show called "Brainiac: Science Abuse" that's very amusing.
"Brainiac" premiered in 2003; it was going strong until hunky-witty presenter Richard Hammond sustained a serious brain injury in a car crash this fall. (He was filming another TV show, "Top Gear," at the time. Supposedly, he's back to normal now.) A spinoff, "Brainiac's Test Tube Baby," premiered this year.
Thanks for pointing out the Bruce Lee documentary, Evan!
Lee, of course, was not only a terrific fighter and charismatic screen presence, but a deep thinker. (He spent two years at the University of Washington in Seattle as a philosophy major, before dropping out to teach kung fu.) Alas, Lee's books are usually found in the martial arts section of the bookstore, but they belong in the philosophy section. Here's something I wrote about Lee-as-philosopher back in 1995.
"An artist's expression is his soul made apparent, his schooling, as well as his 'cool' being exhibited. Behind every motion, the music of his soul is made visible... A martial art is an unrestricted athletic expression of the individual soul." -- Bruce Lee, "Tao of Jeet Kune Do"
PS: There's been quite a bit of speculation, over the years, about Lee's mysterious brain swelling. How could a guy in tip-top physical condition die so suddenly? Was it a head injury, allergic reaction, stroke, acute liver disease, cardiac arrest, drugs, Chinese curse? Ever since 2002, when 28-year-old Cynthia Lucero died from drinking too much water during the Boston Marathon, I've had a different theory.
Hyponatremia is a sodium imbalance brought on by excess fluid consumption -- usually by Ironman types and marathon runners. As athletes absorb liquids while sweating out salt, diluted water floods the body's cells; swelling in the brain cavity can cause vomiting, confusion, seizures, coma, and even death. My diagnosis: Bruce Lee died of hyponatremia. You heard it here first.
More international news of great import: China's national broadcaster, which like its government is never one to go half way, has begun filminga 40-part biopic on the martial artist nonpareil Bruce Lee. Lee was born in San Francisco but grew up mostly in and around Hong Kong -- until, says his bio on the Internet Movie Database, at 18 or 19 "his temper and quick fists saw him fall foul of the HK police on numerous occasions, and his parents suggested that he head off to the United States."
There began an unparalleled career in Hollywood as the face (and body) of martial arts, at least until Jackie Chan came along and arguably sullied kung fu with humor. Lee's signature move was to wipe blood from his lip, stunned, after receiving a hit, and then bust out his unstoppable moves until the enemy lay writhing in badly dubbed cries of pain. Perhaps you remember the movies from Channel 38?
I'm interested to see how the series will make 40 parts of Lee's life. He died at 32, of cerebral edema, or swelling of the brain. I might not be interested enough, however, for a 40-part series with subtitles if it ever airs in the US. Or would it be dubbed?
I was watching the Beatles movie "Help!" with my kids recently and noticed that -- instead of sheet music -- propped up on the organ (which rises from the floor of the Beatles' shared home) one spies multiple copies of the American comic book "(Superman's Pal) Jimmy Olsen." Which reminded of an issue of "Jimmy Olsen" I once read in which Superman's enemy, the space villain Brainiac, replaces Jimmy's brain with a computer -- the 1st cyborg!
So I did a little searching this morning, and naturally, somebody out there has memorialized this issue of the comic on their invincible super-blog.
How did we ever survive without the Web, I ask you?
James Parker's column in Ideas on Sunday about the intersection of the writer's guide and the self-help book made me think about a period in my life not long ago "when I was," as Luc Sante once wrote, "a writer more wishfully than in actual fact."
With considerable reluctance I bought at the time a copy of Julia Cameron's book "The Artist's Way," which has sold roughly a gazillion copies and which could not, in my view, be read on the subway. It's definitely self-help meets writer's guide, more in the former camp, with some spirituality thrown in. Its foremost piece of advice, not only for writers, is to write three pages every morning in longhand on any topic, the "morning pages," to clear the mind and start its creative rotors spinning.
Lo and behold, the book had some effect on my blocks of various kinds. So I went to see Cameron, who has become a successful guru for creative types, give a talk at a large, packed church in Manhattan. (The reluctance here was even greated.) She's a bit hard to take, truth be told, quite self-satisfied. But almost against my will I was refreshed and even inspired at times by what I heard from her. So I guess, gulp, I guess I recommend the book.
I'm still on the other side of the Atlantic, until Wednesday morning, when I report back to the Brainiac New York bureau. From today's read of the International Herald Tribune, which goes for 1.20 GBP for an 18-page edition in England, an interesting pairing of tech stories.
1) A number of governments have started converting their official documents to a universal format, similar to PDF but open-source, called OpenDocument Format, or ODF. But now Microsoft has stepped in and released an incompatible format, Office Open XML, also meant to be a universal, open-source product. Easiest translation for the article: headaches for all of us, maybe more money for Microsoft.
2) Someone's got a more pleasing tech idea, and I'd be happy to see Hewlett Packard make a profit from it. What if printing Web pages actually worked? Dare to dream. HP bought a small company called Tabblo. "Tabblo's software creates templates that reorganize the photos and text blocks on a Web page to fit standard sizes of paper. HP wants to make the software a standard by making it ubiquitous, like Adobe's Flash and Reader or Sun Microsystems' Java." That's the best international news I've heard all day.
Josh's post settling the debate about the Boston birthplace of Edgar Allen Poe reminded me of a recent debate in New York concerning a Poe house. In this one the location was not in dispute. Poe lived for a time in 1844 and 1845 at 85 West Third Street (then called Amity Street). It was a boardinghouse at the time, one of several Poe occupied in his early career, when he was failing miserably. But he lived at that address when he wrote and published "The Raven," to international acclaim.
I'm guessing this had something to do with his decision to move. To a country house in the Bronx. Yes, that Bronx. His cottage there is now a city landmark.
But in 2000 NYU announced its intention to expand its law school property and, in so doing, raze 85 West Third. The local Greenwich Village activists, still kicking, raised a ruckus. E.L. Doctorow and Woody Allen went public on the side of preservation. Allen wrote, in a letter to the editor in the New York Times, "It is hard for me to believe that a great institution like N.Y.U., which had the foresight and good taste to expel me many years ago, would be insensitive to this situation." The fight lasted over a year, but NYU won.
They did, however, make a compromise. They preserved -- well, more like reconstructed -- the Poe house facade, moving it down the block in the process, and built around it. The results?
This past Friday, the Globe ran a Ty Burr review of the Tarantino-Rodriguez movie "Grindhouse" in its Weekend section. In a sidebar, Burr explains that grindhouses were
tatty downtown theaters that showed exploitation movies: in Boston, the West End Cinema near the old Garden, and the Stuart, the Center, and the recently demolished Gaiety (its nom-de-plume was the Publix), all on Washington Street.
At the Globe's Movie Nation blog on Friday, Ty admitted that "I was in rural New Hampshire during the heyday of exploitation cinema, and even if I hadn't been, I was a late-blooming wussypants who preferred the old-movie revival house to the grindhouse."
Now, I was in elementary school in those days (the 1970s), myself. I did live in Boston, but didn't make it to the Combat Zone too often. So how was I supposed to know, when I called the Publix a "movie house of ill repute," in the Ideas section back in 2005, that I was unfairly conflating grindhouse movies with porn?
Defenders of the Gaiety, who were trying to stop its demolition, protested. I did some research and decided that they were probably right: The Gaiety (when it was doing business as the Publix) didn't show porn, just biker and kung fu movies, Italian horror flicks, splatter films, and other forms of grindhouse. So I retracted my comment, pending future discoveries.
Back in January, a Boston Globe article noted that the 198th anniversary of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe was celebrated in other parts of the country, but not in Boston, where Poe was born in 1809. Now, I've read plenty about Poe's relation to Boston -- I've written about the subject for Ideas -- so I just skimmed the essay, from which I learned only that
the house where most scholars think he was born no longer stands; the plaque commemorating his birth on Carver Street, outside Green's Luggage Shop at the fringe of the Theater District, suggests his birthplace is now an alley full of trucks servicing the State Transportation Building.... The house where many scholars believe he was born, at 62 Carver St., was torn down in the 1960s....
Carver Street was renamed Charles Street South in the 1970s, and the State Transportation Building is on the right-hand side of Charles Street South (if you're walking towards the Common), above Stuart Street. See map:
OK, so that's where Poe's house used to be... But then, in February, I noticed a letter to the editor written by David C. Van Hoy of Dorchester, who lived on Carver Street in the 1960s and '70s, and who wrote:
It is important to note that 62 Carver St. would not have been on the part of the street where the plaque is now.... Any structure at 62 Carver would have been on the other side of Stuart Street....
That is to say, 62 Carver was below Stuart, not above it. So is the Poe plaque -- on Boylston, between Tremont and Charles Street South -- in the wrong place? This morning, I finally got around to doing some armchair detective work. I contacted Historic Map Works, a company that offers Geographical Information System-linked digital maps of 19th- and early-20th-century North America. Historic Map Works is a subscription service, but they were nice enough to give me a guest log-in.
Here's what I discovered: According to the 1803 "Carleton Survey," around the time that Poe was born, Carver Street started at the southwestern corner of the Common, at the intersection of the streets we now know as Charles Street South and Boylston (then called Frog Lane, in 1803; note that Poe derisively referred to Boston as "Frogpond"), and was bisected by Elliot (also spelled Elliott and Eliot on other maps from the era; the latter spelling stuck) before merging with Pleasant (later renamed Broadway). No street numbers on this map, so I jumped ahead to the magnificently detailed "Boston 1938 Proper and Back Bay" published by G. W. Bromely & Co.
It turns out that Poe wasn't always snubbed by Boston. In '38, Carver Street -- now also bisected by Stuart, just below Eliot -- terminated at a square formed by the intersection of Broadway and Fayette. The square was called "Edgar Allen Poe Square." Here's a map, created by Boston-based historian Charles Swift, showing where Edgar Allen Poe Square used to be:
And what of no. 62 Carver? Was it above or below Stuart? Van Hoy is right; it was below. According to the 1938 map, if you walked toward the Common from E.A. Poe Square, you'd pass about seven residences on your right, before reaching the Hotel Stuart at nos. 76-82. Next up on your right would be a Boston Edison Co. Power House (nos. 70-72), and then what appears to be an Edison parking lot. Followed by residences whose addresses seem to begin at 60. Huh? Where's 62? A mystery within a mystery!
Oh, wait, maybe the mapmakers left every other number off. The residence immediately after the parking lot, belonging to a Lena Hanlon, seems to be unnumbered. So was Ms. Hanlon's building on Carver no. 62? How to find out whether, in the 1930s, no. 62 Carver abutted a parking lot? (Without leaving my chair, I mean.) Aha! The Boston Historical Society has a 1933 photo of 62 Carver on its website. Indeed, the building does abut a parking lot:
Mystery solved. Boston's Poe plaque should be moved from Boylston to Charles Street South, below Stuart. Get with it, Frogpondians!
In case anyone missed it, William Safire caught up with our own Jan Freeman, on the trendy new use of "existential" in terror-talk, in his column yesterday.
(Jan's take, which Safire appropriately cites and quotes, is here.)
Je ne comprends pas. What is this "existential threat," of which you speak?
In Jan's post below on mondegreens (should that be capped?), she links to The Archive of Misheard Lyrics, which is a great idea for a useless Web site, and I mean that the way I do when I say philosophy is useless -- with the greatest admiration.
Jan mentions the URL of the site, kissthisguy.com. I would add, for those who don't know, that the domain name is derived from probably the most famous mondegreen of all time. In the chorus of Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze," many people hear "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy" rather than "kiss the sky." Easy mistake: they're almost perfect homonyms (try it), and besides, Hendrix had a certain omnisexual quality.
Some think Hendrix slurred the words or switched it up intentionally. They might just have a point, but that interpretation isn't as fun.
12nite (OC Girl in MA): "I would imagine that Easter egg hunts in New England take place indoors since it's still too cold to go searching for eggs outside.... I also find it interesting that a lot more establishments remain open on Easter in Boston than they do in California. Okay, this may sound very 'OC' of me, but not even the malls are open on Easter."
Waya (Who Asked You Anyway): "We had a pseudo-egg hunt yesterday... I say 'pseudo' because my hubbie is Catholic while I'm Buddhist, but in name only and not exactly practicing. Therefore, we don't celebrate Easter or any other religious holidays, just the 'perks' that go with it, like Christmas with just the tree and the presents underneath."
Podzol (Unicyclist Community): "We cooked the eggs wrong and they popped a bit... we made do as best we could." (Photo below.)
Big Mama (Big Mama): "Caroline and I went to P's aunt's house for an Easter egg hunt.... It always involves elaborate instructions that make my head hurt and this year was the pinnacle of egg hunting gone bad. As my brother-in-law read the instructions, I was listening intently, in between watching Caroline grind confetti into Aunt A's oriental rugs, when I heard him read, 'Each team will need to answer the pirate geography question found inside the egg to proceed to the next egg.' And I knew with all certainty, I would never have a better opportunity to prove my complete stupidity in front of my in-laws."
Joy Quillinan (VIP Glamour) reports that actress Reese Witherspoon took her children Eva and Deacon to a church Easter egg hunt in Beverly Hills: "Cuteness personified. Daddy Ryan Philippe however was nowhere to be seen." Photo below.
Jennywynter (Comic Mummy): "I was worried because in typical Comic Mummy style, I left all the easter-egg buying until the day before Easter. Ella insisted on coming in with me. She then insisted on putting all of them into the fridge when we got back to the apartment. Then at the crack of dawn, she bounced out of bed and jumped out to the eggs that awaited. She was super-excited, but then looked perplexed. She ran to the fridge and looked inside, then inhaled sharply. 'Oh NO!!!!!!' She looked up at me with genuine concern. 'The Easter Bunny took ALL our eggs out of the fridge!'"
In today's column on eggcorns, I only had space for a mention of mondegreens, those related (but different) misconstruals of poems and song lyrics.
The name mondegreen was coined by Sylvia Wright, in a 1954 Harper's magazine article where she explained her misunderstanding of an old Scottish ballad her mother used to read to her. "They hae slain the Earl Amurray / And Lady Mondegreen," Wright heard. As she pictured it:
He was lying in the forest clearing with an arrow in his heart. Lady Mondegreen lay at his side, her long dark brown curls spread out over the moss. She wore a dark green dress embroidered with light green leaves. . . She was holding the Earl's hand.
"They" had in fact slain the Earl of Murray and laid him on the green -- but Wright refused to correct herself: "I won't give in to it. Leaving him to die all alone without even anyone to hold his hand -- I won't have it."
I had often seen Wright credited with mondegreen, but I'd never seen the original article. Last week, however -- as Josh Glenn noted here -- Harper's put its archives online, all 157 years' worth, for the price of a subscription ($16.97 a year). So I zoomed back to 1954 and got acquainted with Wright's other mondegreens, like Good Mrs. Murphy (goodness and mercy), Pay Treats Day (that Massachusetts holiday), and the Donzerly Light of the Star-Spangled Banner.
(That same illumination, spelled "dawnzer lee light," would later puzzle Ramona, Beverly Cleary's beloved heroine, not just in English but also in French. In "Ramona la peste," the schoolchildren sing, "Oh voyez-vous, quand la lumiere de l'aube luit" ("Oh do you see, when the light of dawn shines"). But Ramona hears "l'aube luit" as the nonsense word "lobeluits," and decides -- as her English original did -- that it must be another word for "lamp.")
Popular songs, of course, have generated hundreds of mondegreens. In "The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything," a line from Elton John's "Philadelphia Freedom" -- "a piece of Mama Daddy never had" (for "a peace of mind that Daddy never had")-- beats out other famous mishearings like John Fogerty's "There's a bathroom on the right" and the Beatles' "a girl with colitis goes by."
When I double-checked the lyrics at Kissthisguy.com, though, I found that the "correctors" had themselves used an eggcorn: they gave the real line not as "a peace of mind" but as "a piece of mind that Daddy never had," as if Daddy were a few bricks short of a load.
But then, mondegreens and eggcorns are sneaky little critters. There's even one on today's Ideas front, in the tease for "The Word," which makes me suspect that one of my editors was wantin' Chinese food last Friday: The column topic was wanton, but the cover line came out "Want, wonton, wont."
