Made a day-trip of it after Saturday's con meeting wrapped up early, outside of Baltimore. Took a wander westwards through Carroll & Frederick Counties and points west. Drove through Boonsboro, Burkittsville, Harper's Ferry, and the drearier modern stretches of Martinsburg. Well, that was on the way - the goal was the passes of South Mountain, which I have read enough about, but never seen with my own eyes.
The big battlefields are much easier to get to than South Mountain - lots of signs, major highways, maps and all. For the longest time, I thought the point at which I-70 crossed the mountain was Turner's Gap - not so. In fact, the first run I made at Turner's Gap on Saturday, I missed it - the map I had been working from said Rt. 40, but another road to the north of that older road had been re-designated Rt. 40 since the map in question was made. I ended up in the outskirts of Hagarstown before I was sure of my mistake. I almost gave up, but I found a newer map and made my way back to Turner's Gap from the west.
The terrain is a lot more heavily forested than I suspect it was back in 1862. This might have something to do with the fact that the Appalachian trail runs along South Mountain, and the area's primary usage as camping/backpacking terrain causes something of tendency towards greenery and forest rather than pure preservation. I didn't find the place where D.H. Hill would have seen the marching columns of the Army of the Potomac advancing on his command "as terrible as a army with banners". What I did find was an out-of-period neo-Gothic church squatting in the gap, just east of the inn which was actually there in the fall of 1862. The church, according to the plaque, was put up by Admiral Dahlgren, the man who invented the naval cannon of the same name. I went on a sickening, wandering drive around the back-roads around the gap, trying to get a feel for the terrain. Found the Reno Monument after a few missteps. Fox Gap is more open these days, due to a farmer's field. You could almost see a battlefield, here.
Finally, I drove through Burkittsville, looking for Crampton's Gap. The town thoughtfully presents a pretty big marker for the Gap, sitting as it does right in front of the pass through the mountain. Burkittsville is better-known as the much put-upon location of the Blair Witch Project, which I hear the townsfolk are none too pleased about. On my brief wander through the town, I spotted a guy standing on the stoop of a general store dressed like a doctor or surgeon, circa 1862. Not sure if he was re-enacting, or just always dressed that way. At the top of the pass was another surprise.
At the top of Crampton's Gap is an enormous, anachronistic monument in redstone and bombast to "War Correspondents". Apparently a hack named G.A. Townshend bought the Gap long after the war, and built "Gathland" up there, crowning his architectural vandalism with the three-story tall monument right in front of the last stand of Troup's Battery and Cobb's brigade. There are a lot of signs scattered around the Gap, and they're actually better than average, although they tend towards happytalk about Cobb's rout having saved the Army of Northern Virginia, instead of opening it up to division and defeat. As with Turner's Gap, the pass is heavily forested, and I can't see how the gunners of Troup's guns saw far enough to fire their last-stand canister at the described 50 paces, let alone the rest of the rounds described. You can't see much of anything.
Most of the actual battle took place at the foot of the mountain, along a farm road running in front of a number of stone walls described in the accounts. Some of the positions in front of those stone walls are quite militarily impressive, but the southern stretch strikes me as presenting a ripe potential for worthless plunging fire, and I can't imagine anyone holding it for long, let alone the small force which actually held the position. It runs for more than a mile, and unless they were strung out like skirmishers, Franklin's two divisions should have easily have flanked them quickly on both sides - especially given the two beautiful roads which led behind the defensive position on both sides, like a funnel.
Such a perfect prospect for a textbook double envelopment is rarely offered - it doesn't make me think much of Bartlett that he planned a direct frontal assault instead of quick-stepping columns of attack for the flanks. On the other hand, given Franklin's long delay in ordering the advance, the direct attack was pretty much required to give the assault any sort of urgency, and who knows - maybe the rest of Cobb's Brigade might have gotten into a decent position if Sixth Corps had screwed around trying for a full flanking movement against the force at the foot of the hill.
Once the defenders of the pass broke, they were pretty much screwed, in much the same way as the defenders of Missionary Ridge were when *they* were driven from their strong position at the base of that mountain. The problem with putting defenders at the foot of a steep hill, is that if they're driven back, they've got as big of a hike in retreat as the enemy does in pursuit, and they won't be worth spit by the time they reach the top of the slope, assuming any of them make it. The force that gave battle at the top of the gap hadn't been involved in the rout at the foot of the mountain - they were reinforcements coming up from Pleasant Valley.
Oh, BTW - I should correct an impression given by the name "Crampton's Gap" - it isn't much of a pass. It isn't a water-gap or anything like that, more like a slight dip in the mountain where two roads meet after climbing up the north and south slopes of the east side of the mountain. Crampton's Gap was important because of the roads, not because of its nominal "gap"ness.
Afterwards, I drove down Pleasant Valley, which upon inspection was quite the trap for McLaws and Anderson once Crampton's was forced. Even today, the position to the west of Crampton's totally dominates the narrow valley, making a breakout attempt in that direction impossible given any sort of force in position, assuming they thought to bring artillery. I tried to find the road that supposedly runs from Harper's Ferry to Sharpsburg on the other side of Maryland Heights, but the only bridge over that side of the town is a railroad, so no joy. I'll have to take the writers' word for its existence. Harper's Ferry was jumping on Saturday evening - I wonder if there was something going on, or if it's always that busy?
Monday, May 23, 2005
Thursday, May 19, 2005
Saw a copy of a Cheeky Angel volume sitting in the cutout bins when i went in to the Comic Swap yesterday. That's a bad sign.
Bought that PVPonline compilation, the Dork Ages, mostly as filler. If there was ever an artist who ought to be working in the smaller manga-style page format, it's Scott Kurtz. He uses a cartoony style with few, economical lines. He's coming out of the newspaper comic-strip tradition. He doesn't *need* a big comic-book-style page layout. It detracts from the presentation, in fact, to blast his compositions up to that page-size. As for the content... mostly OK, but he needs to stay away from anime/manga/Japanese parody. He's not very good at it, and it's outside of his stylistic tradition. It didn't work, and felt like audience-abuse.
I finished the Nosworthy book the other day. His conclusions can be summed up as "Dimitri Rotov, distilled". No wonder Dimitri loved it so much. Personally, I'm a little suspicious of his conclusions in regards to infantry firefight ranges and lethality calculations. He hangs an awful lot of speculation on that single Mexican-American War lead-to-casualty datapoint. If that falls through on closer examination, then his overall data definitely supports higher lethality for the rifled-musket combat of the Civil War.
Nosworthy kind of pooh-poohs the increase in average firefight ranges from 90-some yards with smoothbore muskets to 140-some yards with the rifle-muskets. This is still an increase of more than half. Even these days, with laser-targeting and all the advantages of technology, firefight ranges average under 400 yards. (I thought I had seen some material on that, but I can't find it this morning...) This whole line of revisionism on infantry fire strikes me as likely to quickly get stuck in a cycle of the revisionists and counter-revisionists talking past each other, playing blind-men-and-the-elephant with the data.
Kind of wish he had dropped the sections on ironclads from the book. the Bloody Crucible of Courage has the feel of a number of monographs and papers bundled together without much attention paid to the connecting material. Kind of like this post. The sections on cavalry, however, are pretty interesting, though I'm not exactly sold on the idea that the late-war sabre blustering of cavalry instructions and doctrine represent anything more tangible than the bravado of aggressive display of leadership.
He had a lot of striking things to say about Jomini, about whom I may have been entertaining mistaken ideas. Namely, that Jomini represented a conservative, indeed, reactionary interpretation of Napoleonic warfare, with more in common with pre-Revolution linear tactics than the articulated, flexible innovations of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic French armies. His sections on European technological and tactical innovations are very useful, and put a dynamic face on the pre-War doctrine which I had viewed as a set, unmoving mass previously. That is, Nosworthy makes an excellent case that the ten years before the war were a period of rapid swings of doctrine and churning ideas about tactics, and that the equipment and tactics eventually used were a late-period reactionary upsurge of quite recent vintage, born of the French disillusion with the performance of the new technology and innovations in fire tactics during the 1859 war with Austria.
Bought that PVPonline compilation, the Dork Ages, mostly as filler. If there was ever an artist who ought to be working in the smaller manga-style page format, it's Scott Kurtz. He uses a cartoony style with few, economical lines. He's coming out of the newspaper comic-strip tradition. He doesn't *need* a big comic-book-style page layout. It detracts from the presentation, in fact, to blast his compositions up to that page-size. As for the content... mostly OK, but he needs to stay away from anime/manga/Japanese parody. He's not very good at it, and it's outside of his stylistic tradition. It didn't work, and felt like audience-abuse.
I finished the Nosworthy book the other day. His conclusions can be summed up as "Dimitri Rotov, distilled". No wonder Dimitri loved it so much. Personally, I'm a little suspicious of his conclusions in regards to infantry firefight ranges and lethality calculations. He hangs an awful lot of speculation on that single Mexican-American War lead-to-casualty datapoint. If that falls through on closer examination, then his overall data definitely supports higher lethality for the rifled-musket combat of the Civil War.
Nosworthy kind of pooh-poohs the increase in average firefight ranges from 90-some yards with smoothbore muskets to 140-some yards with the rifle-muskets. This is still an increase of more than half. Even these days, with laser-targeting and all the advantages of technology, firefight ranges average under 400 yards. (I thought I had seen some material on that, but I can't find it this morning...) This whole line of revisionism on infantry fire strikes me as likely to quickly get stuck in a cycle of the revisionists and counter-revisionists talking past each other, playing blind-men-and-the-elephant with the data.
Kind of wish he had dropped the sections on ironclads from the book. the Bloody Crucible of Courage has the feel of a number of monographs and papers bundled together without much attention paid to the connecting material. Kind of like this post. The sections on cavalry, however, are pretty interesting, though I'm not exactly sold on the idea that the late-war sabre blustering of cavalry instructions and doctrine represent anything more tangible than the bravado of aggressive display of leadership.
He had a lot of striking things to say about Jomini, about whom I may have been entertaining mistaken ideas. Namely, that Jomini represented a conservative, indeed, reactionary interpretation of Napoleonic warfare, with more in common with pre-Revolution linear tactics than the articulated, flexible innovations of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic French armies. His sections on European technological and tactical innovations are very useful, and put a dynamic face on the pre-War doctrine which I had viewed as a set, unmoving mass previously. That is, Nosworthy makes an excellent case that the ten years before the war were a period of rapid swings of doctrine and churning ideas about tactics, and that the equipment and tactics eventually used were a late-period reactionary upsurge of quite recent vintage, born of the French disillusion with the performance of the new technology and innovations in fire tactics during the 1859 war with Austria.
Monday, May 16, 2005
Dave got me back on watching Yawara again over the weekend. That show just keeps getting stranger the more often I watch it. For one thing, they don't make these sorts of multi-season sports anime much anymore. Hajime no Ippo (or whatever the hell it is they re-named it for the US release - Fighting Spirit or some damned thing, I think) is one of the few recent examples; I suppose you could count Hikaru no Go if you consider sitting around a go table with a phatasmorphic emotional five-year-old of a mentor a "sport". But the long-winded semi-serious semi-comedic multi-year non-fantastic anime is pretty much archaic at this point - they've been replaced by kids' collector-anime, ninjabait and dogboy dung.
Yawara is kind of strange even for a multi-year, semi-realistic sports anime. These things are almost always paced like shounen manga - the protagonist comes in as a gifted, total neophyte, gets inspired, gets beat about, learns a bit, gets beat about until s/he learns some more, lather rinse repeat. They're celebrations of accomplishment, of the can-do spirit. The main point is the rigid, repeated arcs of ignorance, trial, tribulation, and accomplishment. Both Hajime no Ippo and Hikaru no Go follow this formula religiously.
Yawara doesn't. When we meet our girl, she can already beat the hell out of most of the world. Her judo-god grandfather has been training her secretly and obsessively since she was three years old. The judo competitive world is portrayed as degenerate and feeble, and our Yawara is a god among men. Her mad little dwarf of a grandfather is crafting her as an object lesson upon the heathen judo world, which has fallen from the true faith. When we first meet Yawara, there's probably about five people in the world who are capable of even competing on a level playing field with her. She doesn't really have an accomplishment arc to work through - she is the finished product. Which is why she has almost no interest whatsoever in fulfilling her grandpa-given goal in life, going to the Barcelona Olympics and setting the judo world on fire.
Yawara wants to be a housewife. She's got a monster crush on a cute college boy, she wants to go to a two-year women's college and major in home economics, she goofs off with her girlfriends. Her aspiration is, in short, to be a empty-headed schoolgirl. She does her very best to be an average idiot. But the world, in the form of an obsessive sports reporter at a third-rate Tokyo daily, figures out what she actually is - a sports god in the making - and conspires with her evil-genius of a grandfather to force her into the fulfillment of her destiny.
We're put mostly in the position of the reporter, Matsuda, in that we're expecting a sports anime, and he's desperately searching for his hero, his champion. But it's repeatedly drilled into our understanding of Yawara's character that there's just not that much in judo for her. It's too easy for her. There's literally no-one in Japan who can compete with her to the extent of actually making it fun, excepting possibly her aging, unhinged grandfather. We go more than twenty episodes before somebody challenging shows up. It's a sports anime, but the narrative falls over and dies everytime the nominal central sport takes central stages. There's a line in the ADV translation of the first volume of Princess Tutu, something to the effect of "Those who accept destiny, find happiness; those who fight destiny, seize glory!" Yawara's happiness/glory algorithm is inverted - she's literally destined for athletic godhood; her glory is in trying to be small.
Yawara is kind of strange even for a multi-year, semi-realistic sports anime. These things are almost always paced like shounen manga - the protagonist comes in as a gifted, total neophyte, gets inspired, gets beat about, learns a bit, gets beat about until s/he learns some more, lather rinse repeat. They're celebrations of accomplishment, of the can-do spirit. The main point is the rigid, repeated arcs of ignorance, trial, tribulation, and accomplishment. Both Hajime no Ippo and Hikaru no Go follow this formula religiously.
Yawara doesn't. When we meet our girl, she can already beat the hell out of most of the world. Her judo-god grandfather has been training her secretly and obsessively since she was three years old. The judo competitive world is portrayed as degenerate and feeble, and our Yawara is a god among men. Her mad little dwarf of a grandfather is crafting her as an object lesson upon the heathen judo world, which has fallen from the true faith. When we first meet Yawara, there's probably about five people in the world who are capable of even competing on a level playing field with her. She doesn't really have an accomplishment arc to work through - she is the finished product. Which is why she has almost no interest whatsoever in fulfilling her grandpa-given goal in life, going to the Barcelona Olympics and setting the judo world on fire.
Yawara wants to be a housewife. She's got a monster crush on a cute college boy, she wants to go to a two-year women's college and major in home economics, she goofs off with her girlfriends. Her aspiration is, in short, to be a empty-headed schoolgirl. She does her very best to be an average idiot. But the world, in the form of an obsessive sports reporter at a third-rate Tokyo daily, figures out what she actually is - a sports god in the making - and conspires with her evil-genius of a grandfather to force her into the fulfillment of her destiny.
We're put mostly in the position of the reporter, Matsuda, in that we're expecting a sports anime, and he's desperately searching for his hero, his champion. But it's repeatedly drilled into our understanding of Yawara's character that there's just not that much in judo for her. It's too easy for her. There's literally no-one in Japan who can compete with her to the extent of actually making it fun, excepting possibly her aging, unhinged grandfather. We go more than twenty episodes before somebody challenging shows up. It's a sports anime, but the narrative falls over and dies everytime the nominal central sport takes central stages. There's a line in the ADV translation of the first volume of Princess Tutu, something to the effect of "Those who accept destiny, find happiness; those who fight destiny, seize glory!" Yawara's happiness/glory algorithm is inverted - she's literally destined for athletic godhood; her glory is in trying to be small.
Came in this morning to an avalanche of what looks like German neo-Nazi political spam cut with the usual array of garbage. It's confusing my spam filters. No, I don't want to hear about Dresden or the horrible Turk, Adolf.
Reading Nosworthy's Bloody Crucible of Courage. Very interesting, but written in a very amateurish style - even more poorly edited and proofread than the Beatie - the author has peculiar and intense ideas about the use of the word "nonplussed" - and utilizes the single most annoying style of endnoting I have yet encountered. Instead of using the usual numbered superscripting, the endnotes are identified in the back of the book by the first three or so words of the paragraph to be noted, followed via ellipsis with the last three words or so. Deciphering which endnote goes with which paragraph is entirely too much of a puzzle for my purposes. Endnotes are supposed to clarify or cite, not confuse and occult.
Reading Nosworthy's Bloody Crucible of Courage. Very interesting, but written in a very amateurish style - even more poorly edited and proofread than the Beatie - the author has peculiar and intense ideas about the use of the word "nonplussed" - and utilizes the single most annoying style of endnoting I have yet encountered. Instead of using the usual numbered superscripting, the endnotes are identified in the back of the book by the first three or so words of the paragraph to be noted, followed via ellipsis with the last three words or so. Deciphering which endnote goes with which paragraph is entirely too much of a puzzle for my purposes. Endnotes are supposed to clarify or cite, not confuse and occult.
Thursday, May 12, 2005
Well, that was fun. History day judging is over; I think both the papers and the documentaries were better this year than last, at least on average. Jeffery Wert, the Civil War historian from Centre Hall, was one of the other judges I was working with yesterday, and we had a discussion about various CW writers and books in between the interviews with the students. He suggested I come to the next Civil War Roundtable meeting, and gave me the details - I think I will. There was a gentleman named Bruce Teeple who was talking about his research on bootleggers and moonshining in northcentral PA during prohibition, and a popular rogue named Farrington. He's working on a book, which sounds interesting - but a few years away from publication from what he was saying.
Went on a walk around campus before coming back. Campus continues to grow like a cancer. I got a closer look at those new residence halls on the east end of campus, and damned if I'm not tired of that slapdash applique-sheet style of fake-brickery. It looks like hell, and I can't help but think that the sheets are going to be peeling like tar-paper in twenty years.
Went on a walk around campus before coming back. Campus continues to grow like a cancer. I got a closer look at those new residence halls on the east end of campus, and damned if I'm not tired of that slapdash applique-sheet style of fake-brickery. It looks like hell, and I can't help but think that the sheets are going to be peeling like tar-paper in twenty years.
Monday, May 09, 2005
Prof Bainbridge mentioned that Geena Davis is going to be starring as a female President of the United States in some sort of TV series next fall, and I pictured to myself a deranged bottle-blonde femme fatale who's prone to ambushing her press critics in the West Wing and snapping their pencil-necks like twigs.
Why yes, The Long Kiss Goodnight *was* on cable yesterday. That has got to be the worst movie I absolutely love. I mean, it's objectively terrible. Renny Harlin's summer-blockbuster incompetence knows few peers - he's right down there with Michael Bay and Ted Demme. In fact, I think I may be doing Demme and Bay a disservice by associating them with Harlin's ham-handed horridity. The movie is particularly peculiar when you realize that it was, essentially, Davis and Harlin's cinematic honeymoon. Harlin took a cute, gangly, girlish actress who made Andie McDowell seem butch by comparison, and dressed her up as a chain-smoking, murderous savage who sleeps with most of the male cast, then either kills or flings them from moving SUVs. It's great!
Shame he had to follow it up with Cutthroat Island, which was just plain bad, and had far too many explosions for a movie set in the seventeenth century. And not in a fun way, either.
Why yes, The Long Kiss Goodnight *was* on cable yesterday. That has got to be the worst movie I absolutely love. I mean, it's objectively terrible. Renny Harlin's summer-blockbuster incompetence knows few peers - he's right down there with Michael Bay and Ted Demme. In fact, I think I may be doing Demme and Bay a disservice by associating them with Harlin's ham-handed horridity. The movie is particularly peculiar when you realize that it was, essentially, Davis and Harlin's cinematic honeymoon. Harlin took a cute, gangly, girlish actress who made Andie McDowell seem butch by comparison, and dressed her up as a chain-smoking, murderous savage who sleeps with most of the male cast, then either kills or flings them from moving SUVs. It's great!
Shame he had to follow it up with Cutthroat Island, which was just plain bad, and had far too many explosions for a movie set in the seventeenth century. And not in a fun way, either.
Quiet weekend. There are posters all over Allegheny Street in Bellefonte advertising some sort of Travelling Death Carnival, and they're pretty damned scary posters, with scowling clowns, frightened children, and panicked horses. If they didn't have the relevant information plastered all over them, I'd suspect the posters of being ironical indie-band advertisements.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Those girls are gone now. But to those who believe, maybe, just maybe, some of them live in homes in countries nearby, or across the seas. Maybe the girls have memories of families in villages they can never speak about. Maybe they sometimes dream in languages they can no longer speak aloud. Maybe they were once Kurdish girls, too beautiful to kill.
Michael Yon is doing some sort of tour through Northern Iraq, I'm having difficulty figuring out how or why. He seems to be a freelance writer/journalist, with at least one book to his name. From the blurb on that book, he's ex-Special Forces.
I found Yon via Wretchard of the Belmont Club, who is currently back on blogspot until he hammers out the problems with his other site.
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
The Pennsylvania primaries are coming up on May 17, if you haven't noticed the ripe crop of district attorney campaign signs all over the county - solely for the Republican candidates, mind you. Think it's a Republican county? For us idiot Democratic voters, it's a choice between assistant DA Karen Arnold and a Walker township lawyer named Erik Rutkowski who's apparently been supplementing his new practice with a part-time teamstering job. Geez, a choice between an experienced loon (Arnold apparently was a Kusinich elector last year) and a recently-arrived country lawyer. I *think* I'll vote for the hick over the hippie, but it's not much of a choice.
There don't seem to be any Democratic candidates for the Bellefonte borough offices. Wish I had known this before - I would have tried for a seat on the council or something, just for the experience of running for office. That, and I hate to see "no candidate" on the ballot. Maybe that's just a partial list or something. The Republicans don't seem to have a full slate either, not even for the tax collector, and I'm pretty sure that the borough has one - I just wrote out a cheque to her last month.
There's five Bellefonte School District candidates for four slots, which means we'll have an actual choice on this page. I'm thinking the new kid, Hope Boylston, is the odd woman out, given her habit of writing crankish letters to the Centre Daily Times.
Finally, there's a fairly substantial "Ballot Question", which I think is Commonwealthese for "referendum", asking if we want the state to borrow over six hundred million dollars for sundry environmental projects. I don't know about this one. I'm inclined to go with "no" on general principles - it's vague and expensive-sounding. I prefer my pork with better documentation, I think.
There don't seem to be any Democratic candidates for the Bellefonte borough offices. Wish I had known this before - I would have tried for a seat on the council or something, just for the experience of running for office. That, and I hate to see "no candidate" on the ballot. Maybe that's just a partial list or something. The Republicans don't seem to have a full slate either, not even for the tax collector, and I'm pretty sure that the borough has one - I just wrote out a cheque to her last month.
There's five Bellefonte School District candidates for four slots, which means we'll have an actual choice on this page. I'm thinking the new kid, Hope Boylston, is the odd woman out, given her habit of writing crankish letters to the Centre Daily Times.
Finally, there's a fairly substantial "Ballot Question", which I think is Commonwealthese for "referendum", asking if we want the state to borrow over six hundred million dollars for sundry environmental projects. I don't know about this one. I'm inclined to go with "no" on general principles - it's vague and expensive-sounding. I prefer my pork with better documentation, I think.
Ugh. I think the blogsphere is becoming a bad influence upon me. I just filled the margins of a fairly marginal paper with nasty comments about the kid's factual errors and goofier assertions. Luckily, I was using pencil, so I can probably erase the meaner bits. But really, if I can google your errors, you've got a problem with fact-checking.
We had an inventory for The Convention scheduled this Saturday coming up, where reps from the various departments would meet and empty out the storage pods to see what was left over from last year's event, and what needed to be replaced. Three people signed up, including me, and our logistics section head called it off, on the theory that three people wasn't nearly enough to get the job done in a single day. This trip would have been a six-hour drive for me; most of these people live within an hour or two of the storage pods. What the hell, people!
Pre-reg started, finally, late last week. This is the first year we've run with a membership cap - 22,000. They're running a real-time reverse-counter on the site. Since I'm running registration this year, I'm kind of concerned about how many at-doors we're going to see. There's a lot of theory floating around about what the new introduction of scarcity is going to do with the registration patterns. So far, we've got less than 20% of the cap pre-registered, but it's been less than a week, and you have to expect an initial rush as the people waiting for the online registration to open come pouring through.
The fewer slots left for at-door registration, the less we have to worry about cash-handling at registration. There'll still be merchandising and art show cash, so it isn't as if the treasury department can just shut down and go watch videos for the weekend, but still - the less cash, the less worry about the bad behavior that large amounts of cash tends to attract.
In previous years, we separated the at-door and pre-reg booths and lines in different lobbies. This tended to cause confusion in line-handling terms, and meant that the registration department was physically separated, and thus something of a managerial headache. Additionally, when throughput volume dropped after the Friday rush, we had to abandon the separate locations anyways, leaving the cattleshoots and booths cluttering up a central space in the middle of the convention centre for the rest of the weekend. A central space, I should add, which laid square across the flow-pattern leading into the dealers' room foyer for the past few years of operation. Now that they're expanding the dealers/industry area to include a secondary entrance *also* entering and exiting from the *other* stairwell in that lobby, you can see why I wanted my people out of the way. This is why I asked the guy doing the layouts and my section head to help registration move up into the big, half-empty, otherwise unused lobby that takes up half of the new section of the convention centre.
This will hopefully let me utilize the whole of our registration resources to clear the pre-regs in an intensive effort on Thursday night. Previously, we couldn't use the one-third of our booths which were stuck down in the main body of the convention centre, sitting idle until Friday morning. Now everything will be up in one single lobby, easily isolated from the inactive rest of the convention centre for the Thursday preregistration rush.
We're doubling the hired temps as well, so as to minimize the marathon demands on my registration staff. Historically, it's been hard to get people into registration, because it is, after all, something of an unrewarding at-con job. It's repetitive, relentless, stressful, and kind of boring. But somebody has to do it, and as we grew over the years, a whole lot of somebodies had to do it. I figured that peak staffing requirements for the set-up we're using will approach seventy, just counting registration needs. I don't control or staff the line people or the "special event staff" people (or whatever it is they're calling staff security these days), or even the tech ops and treasury staffers. Which reminds me, I have to talk to the new line control person. I can't figure out who it is from our table of organization. I'm clearly not reading it correctly...
Pre-reg started, finally, late last week. This is the first year we've run with a membership cap - 22,000. They're running a real-time reverse-counter on the site. Since I'm running registration this year, I'm kind of concerned about how many at-doors we're going to see. There's a lot of theory floating around about what the new introduction of scarcity is going to do with the registration patterns. So far, we've got less than 20% of the cap pre-registered, but it's been less than a week, and you have to expect an initial rush as the people waiting for the online registration to open come pouring through.
The fewer slots left for at-door registration, the less we have to worry about cash-handling at registration. There'll still be merchandising and art show cash, so it isn't as if the treasury department can just shut down and go watch videos for the weekend, but still - the less cash, the less worry about the bad behavior that large amounts of cash tends to attract.
In previous years, we separated the at-door and pre-reg booths and lines in different lobbies. This tended to cause confusion in line-handling terms, and meant that the registration department was physically separated, and thus something of a managerial headache. Additionally, when throughput volume dropped after the Friday rush, we had to abandon the separate locations anyways, leaving the cattleshoots and booths cluttering up a central space in the middle of the convention centre for the rest of the weekend. A central space, I should add, which laid square across the flow-pattern leading into the dealers' room foyer for the past few years of operation. Now that they're expanding the dealers/industry area to include a secondary entrance *also* entering and exiting from the *other* stairwell in that lobby, you can see why I wanted my people out of the way. This is why I asked the guy doing the layouts and my section head to help registration move up into the big, half-empty, otherwise unused lobby that takes up half of the new section of the convention centre.
This will hopefully let me utilize the whole of our registration resources to clear the pre-regs in an intensive effort on Thursday night. Previously, we couldn't use the one-third of our booths which were stuck down in the main body of the convention centre, sitting idle until Friday morning. Now everything will be up in one single lobby, easily isolated from the inactive rest of the convention centre for the Thursday preregistration rush.
We're doubling the hired temps as well, so as to minimize the marathon demands on my registration staff. Historically, it's been hard to get people into registration, because it is, after all, something of an unrewarding at-con job. It's repetitive, relentless, stressful, and kind of boring. But somebody has to do it, and as we grew over the years, a whole lot of somebodies had to do it. I figured that peak staffing requirements for the set-up we're using will approach seventy, just counting registration needs. I don't control or staff the line people or the "special event staff" people (or whatever it is they're calling staff security these days), or even the tech ops and treasury staffers. Which reminds me, I have to talk to the new line control person. I can't figure out who it is from our table of organization. I'm clearly not reading it correctly...
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Tim Reese, a local tour guide from the South Mountain area who's written a controversial, interesting-looking book on Crampton's Gap I'll have to look into one of these days when I have the time, has sent an email explaining that Mr. Harsh, although having planned to write a companion series of volumes on the summer 1862 "overland campaign" from the Union perspective, has suffered a debilitating stroke, and his plans have been curtailed by medical concerns. Both Mr. Reese and Dimitri Rotov have indicated that the projected trilogy is "in limbo". I'm very sorry to hear of Mr. Harsh's ill health, and wish him all the best.
Meanwhile, the History Day judging is coming up quickly, and I've got papers that I've got to be going over. This year's theme is "Communication in History: the Key to Understanding", and so far, it's produced an impressive tidal wave of Kennedy Administration papers.
Update: Dimitri Rotov's extensive commentary on Mr. Reese's book on the strategy of the Maryland campaign, High-Water Mark: The 1862 Maryland Campaign in Strategic Perspective, is here. Dimitri Rotov's blog output is so prodigious that I had trouble finding the reference. Thanks to Mr. Reese for the pointer.
Meanwhile, the History Day judging is coming up quickly, and I've got papers that I've got to be going over. This year's theme is "Communication in History: the Key to Understanding", and so far, it's produced an impressive tidal wave of Kennedy Administration papers.
Update: Dimitri Rotov's extensive commentary on Mr. Reese's book on the strategy of the Maryland campaign, High-Water Mark: The 1862 Maryland Campaign in Strategic Perspective, is here. Dimitri Rotov's blog output is so prodigious that I had trouble finding the reference. Thanks to Mr. Reese for the pointer.
Monday, May 02, 2005
Finished Harsh's Taken at the Flood yesterday, which is less satisfying than I expected it to be, largely because it's apparently the second in a series of three [possibly four] intricately connected volumes Harsh has written about or around Lee's Maryland Campaign, or, as Harsh puts it, the culmination of Lee's "Overland Campaign". A good third of the endnotes in Taken at the Flood are pointers to sections of the third volume, Sounding the Shallows, which apparently is the companion "fiddling little details" volume, full of the technical mucking about Harsh excised from the main volume for reasons of time and space. (The first volume, Confederate Tide Rising, is apparently a general consideration of Lee's summer strategy, but I get the feeling from Taken at the Flood that you get the high points of Harsh's thoughts of the subject in the latter volume.)
Harsh was the big news a few years back on the newsgroups, but I haven't gotten around to reading all the new work until recently. The big controversies are, as always, about McClellan, not Lee, and since Harsh's focus in all of these volumes is on Lee, I didn't find it as illuminating as I had thought on that subject. Harsh promises in the text yet another companion volume on McClellan's side of the story, but if he's finished it, I haven't heard of yet, and neither has Amazon.
Harsh does a good job of correcting my impressions of the campaign, which I have to admit were largely constructed from a reading of Paisley's the Antetiam and Fredricksburg nearly ten years ago. He makes an aggressive argument for Lee's early-campaign strength, and against the traditional "a third of the ANV never crossed over into Maryland" narrative, although I'm not sure I buy his argument entirely. To a certain extent, I get the feeling that in the absence of evidence, he tends to credit Lee with greater knowledge of his own strength than is properly speaking warranted, given the evidence Harsh himself provides.
The most interesting thing I took from Taken at the Flood was Lee's disability throughout the campaign, having been incapacitated at Second Manassas in a fall from his horse, and confined to an ambulance up to the very evening before Sharpsburg. Such confinement would seem to my mind to limit Lee's ability to assess the conditions of his own forces, and to reduce his feeling for the tenor of the campaign.
Another thing I took away from Harsh's study is the opposite of what Harsh wanted to argue, which is Lee's rationality in strategy. Harsh makes the case that the Maryland campaign was the latest in a series of driving turning movements which characterized Lee's "Overland Campaign", and that Lee looked to fight another Second Manassas in the vicinity of Hagerstown. He makes a very good argument that, after a bad night on the 14th of September, Lee tried on three separate occasions to arrange for a northward movement out of the Sharpsburg position towards Hagerstown and the projected turning movement.
That is, he arranged his position at Sharpsburg, while waiting for the Harper's Ferry expedition to reunite with the defeated main column, in such a way as to allow a rapid debouchment towards the north; he ordered Jackson to organize a turning movement against the shaky Union right on the afternoon of the 17th in the same direction, and he evacuated the Sharpsburg battlefield on the evening of the 18th with the express purpose of moving the army via the fords back to Williamsport to return to his projected Hagerstown axis, and an immediate return to the open field in the Cumberland Valley. He only gave up on his extension of the overland campaign when the near-disaster at Shepardstown (where the Union vanguard managed to overrun the ANV's artillery reserve, and half the army had to deploy in order to restore the situation) revealed that his army was hopelessly shattered and in no condition to continue.
All three aggressive attempts were conducted after the reduction of Lee's army, by defeat, straggling, or whatever - of this Harsh is in agreement with everyone else. Now, either Lee was unaware of his army's infirmity, due to his own infirmity or the ANV's famed paucity of paperwork or for whatever reason, or else he was willing to continue to move in a violently aggressive fashion with a broken, shrunken army. No, more than willing - compelled. Harsh argues explicitly against the recent, revisionist notion of Lee as a beserker maniac, fanatically obsessed with the offensive. I have difficulty reconciling Harsh's insistence on this point when he implicitly contrasts Lee with the famously aggressive, remorseless Jackson, shocky and cowed, anxiously struggling for any way out of Lee's orders to find a way for that visionary turning attack around Hooker and Franklin's right on the afternoon of the 17th.
Harsh makes the case that Lee's driving relentlessness in the pursuit of his turning movements were the intellectual product of Lee's analysis of the strategic situation, that this wasn't instinctual or a product of character, but rather the result of pure reason applied to a desperate situation. Harsh's characterization of Lee's strategic behavior is "desperate" - he uses that term repeatedly, even in the discussion of the victorious flush in the period immediately after Second Manassas. I think that Harsh negects the intellectual component of beserkism, personally. Rationality itself can produce via the action of a strong will a condition which is practically indistinguishable from the thoughtless fury of the blue-dyed naked savage in the height of his rage. The difference between the fury of the Celt and Lee's mania for the turning left, is that when balked the Celt retreats with a celerity which matches the charge. Lee never broke for the rear, even when he should have. From the view-point of the soldier, Lee at Sharpsburg is an illustration of how purpose can become monstrous in the service of desperation.
Harsh was the big news a few years back on the newsgroups, but I haven't gotten around to reading all the new work until recently. The big controversies are, as always, about McClellan, not Lee, and since Harsh's focus in all of these volumes is on Lee, I didn't find it as illuminating as I had thought on that subject. Harsh promises in the text yet another companion volume on McClellan's side of the story, but if he's finished it, I haven't heard of yet, and neither has Amazon.
Harsh does a good job of correcting my impressions of the campaign, which I have to admit were largely constructed from a reading of Paisley's the Antetiam and Fredricksburg nearly ten years ago. He makes an aggressive argument for Lee's early-campaign strength, and against the traditional "a third of the ANV never crossed over into Maryland" narrative, although I'm not sure I buy his argument entirely. To a certain extent, I get the feeling that in the absence of evidence, he tends to credit Lee with greater knowledge of his own strength than is properly speaking warranted, given the evidence Harsh himself provides.
The most interesting thing I took from Taken at the Flood was Lee's disability throughout the campaign, having been incapacitated at Second Manassas in a fall from his horse, and confined to an ambulance up to the very evening before Sharpsburg. Such confinement would seem to my mind to limit Lee's ability to assess the conditions of his own forces, and to reduce his feeling for the tenor of the campaign.
Another thing I took away from Harsh's study is the opposite of what Harsh wanted to argue, which is Lee's rationality in strategy. Harsh makes the case that the Maryland campaign was the latest in a series of driving turning movements which characterized Lee's "Overland Campaign", and that Lee looked to fight another Second Manassas in the vicinity of Hagerstown. He makes a very good argument that, after a bad night on the 14th of September, Lee tried on three separate occasions to arrange for a northward movement out of the Sharpsburg position towards Hagerstown and the projected turning movement.
That is, he arranged his position at Sharpsburg, while waiting for the Harper's Ferry expedition to reunite with the defeated main column, in such a way as to allow a rapid debouchment towards the north; he ordered Jackson to organize a turning movement against the shaky Union right on the afternoon of the 17th in the same direction, and he evacuated the Sharpsburg battlefield on the evening of the 18th with the express purpose of moving the army via the fords back to Williamsport to return to his projected Hagerstown axis, and an immediate return to the open field in the Cumberland Valley. He only gave up on his extension of the overland campaign when the near-disaster at Shepardstown (where the Union vanguard managed to overrun the ANV's artillery reserve, and half the army had to deploy in order to restore the situation) revealed that his army was hopelessly shattered and in no condition to continue.
All three aggressive attempts were conducted after the reduction of Lee's army, by defeat, straggling, or whatever - of this Harsh is in agreement with everyone else. Now, either Lee was unaware of his army's infirmity, due to his own infirmity or the ANV's famed paucity of paperwork or for whatever reason, or else he was willing to continue to move in a violently aggressive fashion with a broken, shrunken army. No, more than willing - compelled. Harsh argues explicitly against the recent, revisionist notion of Lee as a beserker maniac, fanatically obsessed with the offensive. I have difficulty reconciling Harsh's insistence on this point when he implicitly contrasts Lee with the famously aggressive, remorseless Jackson, shocky and cowed, anxiously struggling for any way out of Lee's orders to find a way for that visionary turning attack around Hooker and Franklin's right on the afternoon of the 17th.
Harsh makes the case that Lee's driving relentlessness in the pursuit of his turning movements were the intellectual product of Lee's analysis of the strategic situation, that this wasn't instinctual or a product of character, but rather the result of pure reason applied to a desperate situation. Harsh's characterization of Lee's strategic behavior is "desperate" - he uses that term repeatedly, even in the discussion of the victorious flush in the period immediately after Second Manassas. I think that Harsh negects the intellectual component of beserkism, personally. Rationality itself can produce via the action of a strong will a condition which is practically indistinguishable from the thoughtless fury of the blue-dyed naked savage in the height of his rage. The difference between the fury of the Celt and Lee's mania for the turning left, is that when balked the Celt retreats with a celerity which matches the charge. Lee never broke for the rear, even when he should have. From the view-point of the soldier, Lee at Sharpsburg is an illustration of how purpose can become monstrous in the service of desperation.
Friday, April 29, 2005
I'm going to have to change credit cards. MBNA is promising all sorts of unpleasant changes to the terms of agreement on the expiration of my current card, and the credit card company has been doing its best to whip-lash me with unpredictable payment dates in a fashion clearly calculated to harvest as many late dates as possible. Since their change of terms includes a tripling of the late fee, I'm starting to think that I can't afford to do business with these people.
Anyone have a favorite credit card company - one that doesn't believe the ambuscade is a legitimate business tactic?
Anyone have a favorite credit card company - one that doesn't believe the ambuscade is a legitimate business tactic?
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Sorry about the long silence. My responsibilities at work have been somewhat expanded, and I have less time to putz around the internet. Except for moments like now, while I wait for a situation to resolve itself down the line.
I finished Beatie's first volume last night. Not much to report besides an amplification of my previous comments, which is to say that Beatie isn't exactly a sterling master of prose, but it doesn't get all that much in the way of the reading. His style is very anecdotal, stop-and-start, and he's easily distracted down long digressions, often in thick, meaty footnotes of dubious relevance. It's all good - he writes like a wargamer dabbling in history. It's comforting, in a way.
And how long has it been since it was acceptable to write actual, honest-to-God footnotes? They've been taxing my patience and my pinky-finger with those verkakte endnotes since the Truman Administration and I, for one, am tired of that shit. Let's hear it for old-fashioned, Gibbonesque, verbose, rambling, footnoting. Reminds me of the freshman summer I spent reading through Fall of the Roman Empire.
Surprisingly enough, given Dimitri Rotov's endorsement, Beatie is remarkably hostile to McClellan, Fitz John Porter and most of their works. The individual for which Beatie had the most unexpected praise, of a sort, was Simon Cameron, Lincoln's first Secretary of War, which he portrays as bumbling, ignorant, but well-meaning and terribly buffeted by the peculiar starts of the near-senile Scott. Previously, all I knew of Cameron was that he was a Pennsylvanian politician of importance, was known for remarkable amounts of corruption in the early War, and no-one had anything good to say about him.
Beatie's love for colorful stories tends to take him off on wild rambles through material that often seems a bit off the subject matter, but the color does offer some entertainment value, if nothing else. His extended discussion of the long formation of the First New York Cavalry Regiment, in all its comic-opera glory, is a particularly shining example of these digressions, both in its faults and its virtues. He spends so much time on the First New York Cavalry and its place in official early-war ignorance and hostility towards the cavalry, that we hear very little of the rest of the early cavalry regiments, which must have existed, given their later mention in the aggregate and a separate, smaller set of anecdotes about the excessively nautical First Maine Cavalry.
I finished Beatie's first volume last night. Not much to report besides an amplification of my previous comments, which is to say that Beatie isn't exactly a sterling master of prose, but it doesn't get all that much in the way of the reading. His style is very anecdotal, stop-and-start, and he's easily distracted down long digressions, often in thick, meaty footnotes of dubious relevance. It's all good - he writes like a wargamer dabbling in history. It's comforting, in a way.
And how long has it been since it was acceptable to write actual, honest-to-God footnotes? They've been taxing my patience and my pinky-finger with those verkakte endnotes since the Truman Administration and I, for one, am tired of that shit. Let's hear it for old-fashioned, Gibbonesque, verbose, rambling, footnoting. Reminds me of the freshman summer I spent reading through Fall of the Roman Empire.
Surprisingly enough, given Dimitri Rotov's endorsement, Beatie is remarkably hostile to McClellan, Fitz John Porter and most of their works. The individual for which Beatie had the most unexpected praise, of a sort, was Simon Cameron, Lincoln's first Secretary of War, which he portrays as bumbling, ignorant, but well-meaning and terribly buffeted by the peculiar starts of the near-senile Scott. Previously, all I knew of Cameron was that he was a Pennsylvanian politician of importance, was known for remarkable amounts of corruption in the early War, and no-one had anything good to say about him.
Beatie's love for colorful stories tends to take him off on wild rambles through material that often seems a bit off the subject matter, but the color does offer some entertainment value, if nothing else. His extended discussion of the long formation of the First New York Cavalry Regiment, in all its comic-opera glory, is a particularly shining example of these digressions, both in its faults and its virtues. He spends so much time on the First New York Cavalry and its place in official early-war ignorance and hostility towards the cavalry, that we hear very little of the rest of the early cavalry regiments, which must have existed, given their later mention in the aggregate and a separate, smaller set of anecdotes about the excessively nautical First Maine Cavalry.
Monday, April 18, 2005
Huh. A pair of Altoona boys stopped two large suicide truck bombs the other day from crashing into a Marine base. Let's hear it for the home team.
Since it's been so dry and sunny recently, I went for a walk up Shinglestown Gap on Saturday with my copy of Beatie on hand. Shinglestown Gap is an unmarked, unadvertised little parklet off of Rt. 45 on Tussy Mountain behind Boalsburg. As advertised, it's a gap, a place in the mountain where a stream - Rocky Run - cut through the outer lip of the ridge on its way into the Spring Creek watershed. They've got signs all over the front of the gap warning against fires near the creek, and fires in general.
There's a tiny, half-hearted parking lot at the end of the road, and it was pretty full. Families like to take their dogs and kids on walks up the creekbed trail, which is kind of an ankle-turner, but relatively flat, and cool from the rapid-running stream even in the heat of summer. For some perversity of character on my part which I don't quite understand in its entirity, I tend to take the ridgetop path into the Gap, instead of simply following the families along the gap floor. The outlying ridge, or spur, between which and the main ridge the stream cuts a path, offers a fairly fine view of the valley between State College and Mount Nittany, as well as the Bald Eagles in the distance, depending on the air quality of the viewing day in question.
There's a sort of path up the leading edge of the spur, if you want to call it so. In its beginning stages, it's as much a rock-climb as anything else - a scramble up a two-fifths vertical collection of tumbled stone, boulders, fine pine-needle dirt, and the occasional tree. It's the sort of path on which I feel most comfortable on three points, as the loose pine-needle dirt and the occasional wobbly rock makes for uncertain footing along stretches where a fall could and would take you several hundred feet down a jagged slope. I almost never go with anyone else up this path, as those who are in worse physical shape than I would never make it, and the vast bulk of humanity which is in *better* shape than I would never tolerate the half-dozen breathers I have to take in order to make it to the top of the ridge.
The Beatie was for entertainment purposes while I laid panting on said breathers; however, the bugs and flies had had an early spring, and were quite unbearable in the afternoon sun. Why is it that gnats and flies seem to prefer sun-scorched, tumbled high rocks over the cool and moist air of the creekside trails? I suppose it might have to do with how much time you spend laying motionless in either space - you're not about to lie, exhausted, by the flat and easy stretches of the creekbed trail. At any rate, I was exhausted enough by the climb that I took the first trail off the ridgetop trail back down to the creek, and thus back to the parking lot. This was still a mile or so from the initial climb.
I had disturbed the birds of prey from their preferred roosts on the ridgetop crags. Hawks and turkey buzzards are alarmingly large from three dozen feet away; the thermals didn't get them far enough away from my exhausted perch, not far enough for them, and not far enough for I, for that matter. The exhaustion was such that I didn't enjoy the walk and the view as much as I normally would.
At least I called and told somebody where I was going before I went off to risk my neck on a high walk. At about the same time as my ridgetop climb, our county district attorney turned up missing. He apparently called off work, told his girlfriend he was going driving, and disappeared. They found his Mini Cooper a county over, on the outskirts of Lewisburg.
Nobody's sure where he is, but there's a terrible lot of speculation. Some think he's just gone on walkabout - he's done similar disappearing acts during baseball season in the past. But then why would his car be abandoned? There's some paranoid speculation about drug gangs and/or the Mafia. First of all, the Mafia doesn't have squat for organization in central Pennsylvania. Secondly, drug gangs have better ways to deal with prosecutions than stirring up a hornet's nest by killing or abducting an obscure country prosecutor.
Personally, I suspect he either had a heart attack on a walk, or somebody did a hit-and-run, and they haven't found his body yet. Shame - he wasn't a half-bad district attorney.
There's a tiny, half-hearted parking lot at the end of the road, and it was pretty full. Families like to take their dogs and kids on walks up the creekbed trail, which is kind of an ankle-turner, but relatively flat, and cool from the rapid-running stream even in the heat of summer. For some perversity of character on my part which I don't quite understand in its entirity, I tend to take the ridgetop path into the Gap, instead of simply following the families along the gap floor. The outlying ridge, or spur, between which and the main ridge the stream cuts a path, offers a fairly fine view of the valley between State College and Mount Nittany, as well as the Bald Eagles in the distance, depending on the air quality of the viewing day in question.
There's a sort of path up the leading edge of the spur, if you want to call it so. In its beginning stages, it's as much a rock-climb as anything else - a scramble up a two-fifths vertical collection of tumbled stone, boulders, fine pine-needle dirt, and the occasional tree. It's the sort of path on which I feel most comfortable on three points, as the loose pine-needle dirt and the occasional wobbly rock makes for uncertain footing along stretches where a fall could and would take you several hundred feet down a jagged slope. I almost never go with anyone else up this path, as those who are in worse physical shape than I would never make it, and the vast bulk of humanity which is in *better* shape than I would never tolerate the half-dozen breathers I have to take in order to make it to the top of the ridge.
The Beatie was for entertainment purposes while I laid panting on said breathers; however, the bugs and flies had had an early spring, and were quite unbearable in the afternoon sun. Why is it that gnats and flies seem to prefer sun-scorched, tumbled high rocks over the cool and moist air of the creekside trails? I suppose it might have to do with how much time you spend laying motionless in either space - you're not about to lie, exhausted, by the flat and easy stretches of the creekbed trail. At any rate, I was exhausted enough by the climb that I took the first trail off the ridgetop trail back down to the creek, and thus back to the parking lot. This was still a mile or so from the initial climb.
I had disturbed the birds of prey from their preferred roosts on the ridgetop crags. Hawks and turkey buzzards are alarmingly large from three dozen feet away; the thermals didn't get them far enough away from my exhausted perch, not far enough for them, and not far enough for I, for that matter. The exhaustion was such that I didn't enjoy the walk and the view as much as I normally would.
At least I called and told somebody where I was going before I went off to risk my neck on a high walk. At about the same time as my ridgetop climb, our county district attorney turned up missing. He apparently called off work, told his girlfriend he was going driving, and disappeared. They found his Mini Cooper a county over, on the outskirts of Lewisburg.
Nobody's sure where he is, but there's a terrible lot of speculation. Some think he's just gone on walkabout - he's done similar disappearing acts during baseball season in the past. But then why would his car be abandoned? There's some paranoid speculation about drug gangs and/or the Mafia. First of all, the Mafia doesn't have squat for organization in central Pennsylvania. Secondly, drug gangs have better ways to deal with prosecutions than stirring up a hornet's nest by killing or abducting an obscure country prosecutor.
Personally, I suspect he either had a heart attack on a walk, or somebody did a hit-and-run, and they haven't found his body yet. Shame - he wasn't a half-bad district attorney.
Thursday, April 14, 2005
Ugh, the new Full Metal Panic sequel is a real sequel, and not another season of Full Metal Panic Fumoffu!. The author of that blog thinks this is a good thing. You wouldn't be misled if you took away the impression that I don't join him/her/it in such a sentiment. I thought the original Full Metal Panic was an unutterably cliched lump of undigested shit - nuggets of fish-out-of-water high school hijinks suspended in the midst of pseudo-Gasaraki mecha drama.
The half-sequel Fumoffu pretty much forgot about mecha melodrama, in favor of a true fish-out-of-water type of comedy in which said fish was unapologetically insane. This was Fumoffu's genius - that series refused to credit Sosuke with sane motives. He was a figure of chaos operating on his own, rigid, internal code of behavior - and that code was absolutely, objectively nuts. He made a perfect foil for Chidori's precarious straight-man routine. His lunacy was just operative enough to be horribly seductive - his high-explosives, heavily armed approach to high-school comedic problems *worked*, more often than not. And after all, every school girl must be tempted at times to spit on her hands, raise the black flag, and start slitting throats.
The original series, on the other hand, took Sosuke, and by extension, itself, seriously. We're talking about a teenaged non-com who grew up as an Afghani guerilla piloting a battle-mecha, for the love of Nagai. It surely didn't help that his main antagonist was killed not once, not twice, but three distinct times. The writers just resurrected him from the dustbin whenever they needed to re-start the melodrama machine. I don't *want* more of the original Full Metal Panic. It was a stupid show. I'd prefer more sequels which agree with me on the subject, like Fumoffu.
Oh, BTW? Use permalinks, people. Makes it a pain to link to you, otherwise.
The half-sequel Fumoffu pretty much forgot about mecha melodrama, in favor of a true fish-out-of-water type of comedy in which said fish was unapologetically insane. This was Fumoffu's genius - that series refused to credit Sosuke with sane motives. He was a figure of chaos operating on his own, rigid, internal code of behavior - and that code was absolutely, objectively nuts. He made a perfect foil for Chidori's precarious straight-man routine. His lunacy was just operative enough to be horribly seductive - his high-explosives, heavily armed approach to high-school comedic problems *worked*, more often than not. And after all, every school girl must be tempted at times to spit on her hands, raise the black flag, and start slitting throats.
The original series, on the other hand, took Sosuke, and by extension, itself, seriously. We're talking about a teenaged non-com who grew up as an Afghani guerilla piloting a battle-mecha, for the love of Nagai. It surely didn't help that his main antagonist was killed not once, not twice, but three distinct times. The writers just resurrected him from the dustbin whenever they needed to re-start the melodrama machine. I don't *want* more of the original Full Metal Panic. It was a stupid show. I'd prefer more sequels which agree with me on the subject, like Fumoffu.
Oh, BTW? Use permalinks, people. Makes it a pain to link to you, otherwise.
Busy week - the spring planting season is well under way, and even up here in the valley, they're plowing while the sun shines, and Rockview has work gangs out in the fields, doing their annual rock-patrol in the fields. You'd think that after two hundred years of cultivation, the fields would be pretty well free of rocks, but you'd be wrong...
The first volume of Beatie's Army of the Potomac history arrived last week, and I've been cruising along when I have the time. It seems like my kind of history - not so much with the narrative, true, but more like an ambling series of anecdotes. Since I find the anecdotes amusing, it's all good, I suppose.
The first volume of Beatie's Army of the Potomac history arrived last week, and I've been cruising along when I have the time. It seems like my kind of history - not so much with the narrative, true, but more like an ambling series of anecdotes. Since I find the anecdotes amusing, it's all good, I suppose.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
This sergeant has collected four Purple Hearts since 2002 and is almost certainly headed for a fifth, given that he's been shot again. Infantry armor has definitely been a blessing.
Looks like the Iraq Coalition Count page has added a civilian/police/Iraqi military section, now that foreign coalition and US casualties are trending strongly downwards. To be honest, they should have had it from the point that the Iraqi armed forces and police were properly re-formed. But that water under the bridge having flowed, the Iraqi military are definitely part of the "coalition", so I suppose it's all good.
Looks like the Iraq Coalition Count page has added a civilian/police/Iraqi military section, now that foreign coalition and US casualties are trending strongly downwards. To be honest, they should have had it from the point that the Iraqi armed forces and police were properly re-formed. But that water under the bridge having flowed, the Iraqi military are definitely part of the "coalition", so I suppose it's all good.
Monday, April 11, 2005
I bought a half-off copy of Ikebukuro West Gate Park to fill out a credit card purchase at the Comic Swap which I didn't feel was quite justified by a volume of Bleach alone. The blogsphere reviews of IWGP weren't exactly compelling, and the general fanboy audience didn't exactly seem to rally to the cause, either, to judge by how fast said copy sailed into the cut-rate bin. I suppose the plastic-wrap didn't help matters - who wants to buy an obscure manga you've never heard of, sight unseen?
All that aside, it wasn't quite as terrible as I had expected. The story was passable, the sexual content largely unexceptionable, the art was plastic and rather manufactured in feeling and tone. Very over-inked, very generic. All that aside, the writing wasn't half bad, and the characters were kind of compelling. I liked it more than I thought I would. Not nearly as offensive as, say, Club 9.
Beautiful weekend, wasn't it? Saturday was a great day to spend at work, doing my taxes and catching the weekend planter-logging entry request rush. Sunday? I spent playing computer games.
I really am a hopeless, sunless urban mole.
All that aside, it wasn't quite as terrible as I had expected. The story was passable, the sexual content largely unexceptionable, the art was plastic and rather manufactured in feeling and tone. Very over-inked, very generic. All that aside, the writing wasn't half bad, and the characters were kind of compelling. I liked it more than I thought I would. Not nearly as offensive as, say, Club 9.
Beautiful weekend, wasn't it? Saturday was a great day to spend at work, doing my taxes and catching the weekend planter-logging entry request rush. Sunday? I spent playing computer games.
I really am a hopeless, sunless urban mole.
Friday, April 08, 2005
Saw the end of Mai Hime the other night. Two words: "Reset motherfuckers". Bah. Comedy and high-drama tragedy/melodrama can co-exist - look at Buffy the Vampire Slayer in its salad days - but the writers have to be damned careful with the reset button. Mai Hime was a rather lack-luster fighting-girls comedy which developed a hard, harsh, nasty second half - and did well with it. Sadly, the last episode blew through that treasury of merit like a cardinal with an unlimited spiritual line of credit and an out-of-control faro habit. I'm not generally a tragedy kind of guy - I'm all for happy endings; I'm an American, after all. But certain story-lines demand bitter tragedy as a purgative, and Mai-Hime's emotional middle-late themes really ought to have been left be as-is. Fuck the reset button.
Oh, I thought this was amusing. It's apparently from the website for the new Victorian maid anime, Emma. I can't imagine what water could be drawn from that blasted heath of a premise, but it's getting good buzz, and the character-designs and backgrounds in the screenshots I've seen rather remind me of Witch Hunter Robin, which I'm fond of.
Bleach continues to rock sedimentarily, metamorphically, and igeneously, to steal a phrase. Volume 6 wasn't the pitch-perfect fighting-shounen-schoolkids brilliance that was volume 5, but it was still the sort of gemlike wonderful which leaves you buzzing and giddy afterwards. I've been warned that it gang aft agly after this volume, but I'll have to take that as it comes. For now - wooohooohohoo!
Oh, I thought this was amusing. It's apparently from the website for the new Victorian maid anime, Emma. I can't imagine what water could be drawn from that blasted heath of a premise, but it's getting good buzz, and the character-designs and backgrounds in the screenshots I've seen rather remind me of Witch Hunter Robin, which I'm fond of.
Bleach continues to rock sedimentarily, metamorphically, and igeneously, to steal a phrase. Volume 6 wasn't the pitch-perfect fighting-shounen-schoolkids brilliance that was volume 5, but it was still the sort of gemlike wonderful which leaves you buzzing and giddy afterwards. I've been warned that it gang aft agly after this volume, but I'll have to take that as it comes. For now - wooohooohohoo!
Thursday, April 07, 2005
But this book is not aimed primarily at fellow experts or readers of my previous books. I have intentionally and with substantial effort kept it very short in order to reach a new and, I hope, wider audience.
Preface, the Fate of Their Country, Michael F. Holt.
Goddamnit! I ordered the blasted thing in the hopes that it was an extension of his Whig study, the Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, since I haven't yet found a similar study of the early Republican Party that was worth a good goddamn. Instead, I managed to buy what the author himself identifies as a book with fucking training wheels.
Oh, BTW, Wen Spencer's Tinker is a bit of all right; she has the occasional issue with the limited-third-person, and it's essentially a wish-fulfillment escapist romp, but hey - that's what I live for, wish-fulfillment escapist romps. As rumor and possibly C.S. Lewis has it, the only people who oppose escape are critics and jailers. And hey - Tinker has elves in Pittsburgh. What's not to love? Other than the apparent fact that Spencer *was* working on a sequel, but seems to have dropped off the screen.
Monday, April 04, 2005
Lance Morrow's The Best Year of Their Lives: Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in 1948: Learning the Secrets of Power was one of the books I ordered from Amazon the other week on a blog recommendation; it was also the first to arrive. When I ordered it, I had not noticed that the author was that self-same Time columnist whose work was part and parcel of the bland uselessness which has always kept me from reading the modern incarnation of that publication.
I suppose I wouldn't be spoiling any expectations by noting that I was less than impressed with Best Year of Their Lives. I had ordered it sight unseen because the idea sounded promising - a treatment of the freshman class of 1946 in a pivotal political year. I suppose I expected a detailed historical narrative demonstrating political and intellectual connections in that no-doubt epochal period. That's what I get for having expectations, no?
What was delivered was not that promised book. Instead, the UPS deliveryman deposited upon my doorstep a sattershot, dizzy, dazzled, addlepated tangle of loosely connected anecdotes and great heaping piles of amateur psychoanalysis at a distance. The author demonstrates the patience of a hummingbird, and the attention-span of a sugar-addled ferret. He is incapable of maintaining a thought for more than a page at a time, and is fully capable of dropping a line of argument in mid-sentence for yet more pages of ill-considered, highly redundant, airily comparative psychological guesswork. At one point in an otherwise narrational passage, he drops the first part of a fact - something about Elizabeth Bentley's testimony before HUAC - and goes haring off on a five-page biographical diversion about Whittaker Chambers. He never returns to the subject of Bentley's testimony. The reader is left ignorant of what she told the Committee. Such abandonments of actual informational explanation in favor of psychobabble absolutely litter the text.
The book is supposed to be a treatment of why the year 1948 was so terribly, terribly important in the formation of the political characters of the three primaries - Kennedy, Nixon, and Johnson. The fact that all three became presidents seems to be the only reason behind this grouping of subjects. Kennedy and Nixon were essentially comparable political characters - freshmen Congressmen of the 80th Congress, recent Navy veterans, debate partners, clashed over the Taft-Hartley Act, knew each other socially, etc. Johnson, on the other hand, was a very veteran legislator of a previous generation, whose only wartime service of note was a sickening showboating joke which resulted in a utterly unearned Silver Star. Johnson didn't apparently socialize with either Nixon or Kennedy.
Even so, the author at least makes a case for the year 1948 being of some political importance for Johnson. I still don't know why Kennedy was a principal in this narrative. To judge from what is given in the book, he lost a sister, nearly died, and had a debate with Nixon in McKeesport. Every other word in the book on the subject of Kennedy is dedicated either to a very short (if interesting) passage on the social scene in Washington, or to Kennedy's interior life. Kennedy acted as Nixon's foil. That's why 1948 was important to him. Oh, and he almost died the year before. Not in 1948, mind you - 1947.
Most of the book is dedicated to endless ruminations upon the impenetrable psyche of Richard Nixon. Some parts of these digressions are actually interesting, in brief passages and interludes. When, that is, the author isn't chasing off after long, belabored allegories derived from various films. I wish I could say "various films of the year in question", but Morrow's lack of discipline betrays itself once again, and much chatter is spent on out-of-period pieces like Around the World in Eighty Days and Blazing Saddles of all goddamned things.
Really, truly, the Best Year of Their Lives can only be described as a comprehensive failure. Its best characteristic is that it is a very quick and easy read, if you don't destroy the binding from one too many high-velocity discards at the nearest vertical surface.
Now, if you'll excuse me, Stross's the Atrocity Archives await, and I really must say, that I heartily wish I had spent my Sunday afternoon reading that book, than wasted my weekend with Morrow's indulgence.
I suppose I wouldn't be spoiling any expectations by noting that I was less than impressed with Best Year of Their Lives. I had ordered it sight unseen because the idea sounded promising - a treatment of the freshman class of 1946 in a pivotal political year. I suppose I expected a detailed historical narrative demonstrating political and intellectual connections in that no-doubt epochal period. That's what I get for having expectations, no?
What was delivered was not that promised book. Instead, the UPS deliveryman deposited upon my doorstep a sattershot, dizzy, dazzled, addlepated tangle of loosely connected anecdotes and great heaping piles of amateur psychoanalysis at a distance. The author demonstrates the patience of a hummingbird, and the attention-span of a sugar-addled ferret. He is incapable of maintaining a thought for more than a page at a time, and is fully capable of dropping a line of argument in mid-sentence for yet more pages of ill-considered, highly redundant, airily comparative psychological guesswork. At one point in an otherwise narrational passage, he drops the first part of a fact - something about Elizabeth Bentley's testimony before HUAC - and goes haring off on a five-page biographical diversion about Whittaker Chambers. He never returns to the subject of Bentley's testimony. The reader is left ignorant of what she told the Committee. Such abandonments of actual informational explanation in favor of psychobabble absolutely litter the text.
The book is supposed to be a treatment of why the year 1948 was so terribly, terribly important in the formation of the political characters of the three primaries - Kennedy, Nixon, and Johnson. The fact that all three became presidents seems to be the only reason behind this grouping of subjects. Kennedy and Nixon were essentially comparable political characters - freshmen Congressmen of the 80th Congress, recent Navy veterans, debate partners, clashed over the Taft-Hartley Act, knew each other socially, etc. Johnson, on the other hand, was a very veteran legislator of a previous generation, whose only wartime service of note was a sickening showboating joke which resulted in a utterly unearned Silver Star. Johnson didn't apparently socialize with either Nixon or Kennedy.
Even so, the author at least makes a case for the year 1948 being of some political importance for Johnson. I still don't know why Kennedy was a principal in this narrative. To judge from what is given in the book, he lost a sister, nearly died, and had a debate with Nixon in McKeesport. Every other word in the book on the subject of Kennedy is dedicated either to a very short (if interesting) passage on the social scene in Washington, or to Kennedy's interior life. Kennedy acted as Nixon's foil. That's why 1948 was important to him. Oh, and he almost died the year before. Not in 1948, mind you - 1947.
Most of the book is dedicated to endless ruminations upon the impenetrable psyche of Richard Nixon. Some parts of these digressions are actually interesting, in brief passages and interludes. When, that is, the author isn't chasing off after long, belabored allegories derived from various films. I wish I could say "various films of the year in question", but Morrow's lack of discipline betrays itself once again, and much chatter is spent on out-of-period pieces like Around the World in Eighty Days and Blazing Saddles of all goddamned things.
Really, truly, the Best Year of Their Lives can only be described as a comprehensive failure. Its best characteristic is that it is a very quick and easy read, if you don't destroy the binding from one too many high-velocity discards at the nearest vertical surface.
Now, if you'll excuse me, Stross's the Atrocity Archives await, and I really must say, that I heartily wish I had spent my Sunday afternoon reading that book, than wasted my weekend with Morrow's indulgence.
Saturday, April 02, 2005
Ben talked me into going to see the Sin City movie last night. It was a rather unexpected experience. Another guy from work described the film as "terrible", and while he did mean that it had bad elements, he also meant it in the sense of "Ivan the Terrible".
If you've never read the Frank Miller comics of the same name, I suppose I should explain that they were a harsh, indie sort of affair, inked heavily in stark black and white outlines. In fact, the artwork of the comic was more bodies of black with blank default-white slashes and subtracted areas, than an additive accumulation of inked lines. Sin City art is instantly recognizable as such - very distinctive. It was suited to the material, the black and white slashings evoked the grimmest of noir atmospherics, of vast darknesses defined by unnatural lighting. The writing was overripe, apocalyptically cynical, and overwrought. All of the heroes were more properly anti-heroes - white, male, violent, and borderline sociopathic at best. The action is typically brutal, vicious, and savage. The overarching theme could be described as romantic nihilism - of an earth-bound masculine hell redeemed solely by the love of an idealized, hyper-sexualized young woman, and that only occasionally. The comics were stylistic landslides, all faults of writing and characterization and world-building buried under by the sheer artistic force of will. Miller's Sin City comics crushed all critical response under an avalanche of visual excess.
Robert Rodriguez's film adaptation of the comics are exactly the same. And when I say "exactly", I mean that the end product is clearly the result of a deliberate and awe-inspiring dedication to the perfect translation of the source material to another, somewhat alien medium. Miller was somewhat controversially given a co-directing credit, and the reasoning behind this credit is almost certainly that the actual director had used the comics on a panel-by-panel, page-by-page, layout-by-layout basis as storyboards for the film direction. The film seems to have been scripted almost entirely from four sections of the comic, from dialogue to voiceover to imagery to color-control to blocking and even camera placement. Somebody literally set out to recreate the comics in their complete affect, insomuch as that was conceptually possible. I don't think I've ever seen so perfect an act of mimicry. The result is uncanny.
The result is also horrifying, hilarious, sickening, and utterly impossible to ignore. The four portions of the comic replicated in the movie were as follows: the original volume (which has since been given an actual name, but which I can't help but remember simply as "Sin City"), the Big Fat Kill, That Yellow Bastard, and a short bit which I kind of remember as a bit of filler on one of the other volumes, which was used as the pre-title bumper sequence. Now, these sequences were clearly chosen for their violent and purient pulp qualities.
The part of the movie which works the best is clearly the early-middle third, starring an unrecognizable Mickey Rourke as a monstrous, troll-like, nearly indestructible, sociopathic force of nature named Marv. After he's framed for the murder of a call-girl named Goldie, we follow his quest as he murders his way to the truth. It's something of a shame that that particular story wasn't long enough to sustain an entire picture, because it works. Like a house on fire, really. The middle-late segment starring Clive Owen as a slightly unhinged knight-errant for the whores of Old Town, is pretty much Kill Bill Lite, and is easily the most laughable portion of the movie. Miller's vision of an armed People's Republic of Prostitution, a sort of Whore's Soviet, was borderline ludicrous even on paper; the scenes as filmed and the lines as spoken out loud elicited more than the occasional snicker and guffaw among those in the opening-night audience. The final section, continuing the initial story starring an aged Bruce Willis as the disgraced police detective Hartigan, is sort of a repeat in a lesser key of Marv's story. It's easily the most maudlin and underwritten of the three sections.
Sin City is definitely an exciting movie, and it's the sort of thing which you can't turn away from, even if you might wish to do so, really, honestly. The comics were sort of half-parodies of hardboiled detective stories, and noir. That sort of half-parody which is also half-dead-serious - where the style is ladled on so thickly and comprehensively that it blows past contempt right back into the intent of the original material. The sort of high-mannerist stylism where style supplants story and substance and becomes a sort of substitute substance of its own. Some of that stylism collapses into a sort of music-video silliness when brought to life on celluoid, and this rather keeps the movie from being something I'd call truly great. The script is, if anything, too loyal to the writing of the comics - there were a lot of lines which could have done with a bit of editing, or at least, re-writing. The rubbish about "valkyries" in the "Big Fat Kill" sequence, most especially.
I suppose I ought to emphasize for the record just how exploitative the movie really is, since I seem to have underplayed that a bit. Lots of people die. On screen. In graphic, pulpy, savage fashion. At great length. Characters are chopped to pieces. Eaten alive by dogs. Impaled. Eviscerated. Tortured. Decapitated and used as bookmarks. Hanged. Mounted like deer's heads. It's about as brutal as you can really get within the bounds of stylism. I mean, it doesn't have the impact of, say, the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan, but then, Sin City is a sort of cartoon, and that tends to buffer the sensibilities in a fashion that a straight-forward war movie is simply incapable of providing.
Oh, and there's a lot of nudity. That seems to piss off more people than the evisceration and the cannibalism. God knows why.
If you've never read the Frank Miller comics of the same name, I suppose I should explain that they were a harsh, indie sort of affair, inked heavily in stark black and white outlines. In fact, the artwork of the comic was more bodies of black with blank default-white slashes and subtracted areas, than an additive accumulation of inked lines. Sin City art is instantly recognizable as such - very distinctive. It was suited to the material, the black and white slashings evoked the grimmest of noir atmospherics, of vast darknesses defined by unnatural lighting. The writing was overripe, apocalyptically cynical, and overwrought. All of the heroes were more properly anti-heroes - white, male, violent, and borderline sociopathic at best. The action is typically brutal, vicious, and savage. The overarching theme could be described as romantic nihilism - of an earth-bound masculine hell redeemed solely by the love of an idealized, hyper-sexualized young woman, and that only occasionally. The comics were stylistic landslides, all faults of writing and characterization and world-building buried under by the sheer artistic force of will. Miller's Sin City comics crushed all critical response under an avalanche of visual excess.
Robert Rodriguez's film adaptation of the comics are exactly the same. And when I say "exactly", I mean that the end product is clearly the result of a deliberate and awe-inspiring dedication to the perfect translation of the source material to another, somewhat alien medium. Miller was somewhat controversially given a co-directing credit, and the reasoning behind this credit is almost certainly that the actual director had used the comics on a panel-by-panel, page-by-page, layout-by-layout basis as storyboards for the film direction. The film seems to have been scripted almost entirely from four sections of the comic, from dialogue to voiceover to imagery to color-control to blocking and even camera placement. Somebody literally set out to recreate the comics in their complete affect, insomuch as that was conceptually possible. I don't think I've ever seen so perfect an act of mimicry. The result is uncanny.
The result is also horrifying, hilarious, sickening, and utterly impossible to ignore. The four portions of the comic replicated in the movie were as follows: the original volume (which has since been given an actual name, but which I can't help but remember simply as "Sin City"), the Big Fat Kill, That Yellow Bastard, and a short bit which I kind of remember as a bit of filler on one of the other volumes, which was used as the pre-title bumper sequence. Now, these sequences were clearly chosen for their violent and purient pulp qualities.
The part of the movie which works the best is clearly the early-middle third, starring an unrecognizable Mickey Rourke as a monstrous, troll-like, nearly indestructible, sociopathic force of nature named Marv. After he's framed for the murder of a call-girl named Goldie, we follow his quest as he murders his way to the truth. It's something of a shame that that particular story wasn't long enough to sustain an entire picture, because it works. Like a house on fire, really. The middle-late segment starring Clive Owen as a slightly unhinged knight-errant for the whores of Old Town, is pretty much Kill Bill Lite, and is easily the most laughable portion of the movie. Miller's vision of an armed People's Republic of Prostitution, a sort of Whore's Soviet, was borderline ludicrous even on paper; the scenes as filmed and the lines as spoken out loud elicited more than the occasional snicker and guffaw among those in the opening-night audience. The final section, continuing the initial story starring an aged Bruce Willis as the disgraced police detective Hartigan, is sort of a repeat in a lesser key of Marv's story. It's easily the most maudlin and underwritten of the three sections.
Sin City is definitely an exciting movie, and it's the sort of thing which you can't turn away from, even if you might wish to do so, really, honestly. The comics were sort of half-parodies of hardboiled detective stories, and noir. That sort of half-parody which is also half-dead-serious - where the style is ladled on so thickly and comprehensively that it blows past contempt right back into the intent of the original material. The sort of high-mannerist stylism where style supplants story and substance and becomes a sort of substitute substance of its own. Some of that stylism collapses into a sort of music-video silliness when brought to life on celluoid, and this rather keeps the movie from being something I'd call truly great. The script is, if anything, too loyal to the writing of the comics - there were a lot of lines which could have done with a bit of editing, or at least, re-writing. The rubbish about "valkyries" in the "Big Fat Kill" sequence, most especially.
I suppose I ought to emphasize for the record just how exploitative the movie really is, since I seem to have underplayed that a bit. Lots of people die. On screen. In graphic, pulpy, savage fashion. At great length. Characters are chopped to pieces. Eaten alive by dogs. Impaled. Eviscerated. Tortured. Decapitated and used as bookmarks. Hanged. Mounted like deer's heads. It's about as brutal as you can really get within the bounds of stylism. I mean, it doesn't have the impact of, say, the first twenty minutes of Saving Private Ryan, but then, Sin City is a sort of cartoon, and that tends to buffer the sensibilities in a fashion that a straight-forward war movie is simply incapable of providing.
Oh, and there's a lot of nudity. That seems to piss off more people than the evisceration and the cannibalism. God knows why.
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
I've been going mad on Amazon, blowing all sorts of dosh on books. Some of it is just that the anime scene has gone sort of stale in the last six months or so; some is that I'm taking more recommendations from various blogs. I've got the first volume of the Army of the Potomac on order from a rec. from Dimitri Rotov over at Civil War Bookshelf, who's finally inspired me to look into his political-military revisionist viewpoint. We'll see if all these books join the pile of half-read "virtue purchases" sitting in my otherwise-empty kitchen, along with that Spanish Inquisition book and the deathly dull survey of Illyrian history and the horribly-written book on the Grand Armee.
A private airplane crashed in the field next to the new county jail on Saturday, killing everyone on board. I didn't notice this until Tuesday, even though I was probably three hundred yards from it when it happened. The perils of not reading your local paper, I suppose. It was a family flying in to watch their son's sports match at the university, and they iced up and crashed on approach to University Park Airport. Imagine what kind of hell that poor kid is going through?
A private airplane crashed in the field next to the new county jail on Saturday, killing everyone on board. I didn't notice this until Tuesday, even though I was probably three hundred yards from it when it happened. The perils of not reading your local paper, I suppose. It was a family flying in to watch their son's sports match at the university, and they iced up and crashed on approach to University Park Airport. Imagine what kind of hell that poor kid is going through?
Came across these TWoP-style recaps of American history while on a livejournal crawl:
....
Link via Anna S., aka "elide".
Update: yet more, here.
ENGLAND: You know, that's a really big ocean, the Atlantic. And it's a really long way around Africa. And, you know, we've got this whole savage island right next door.
IRELAND: Hey! All right! Let's go get those fuckers -- oh. You meant us, didn't you?
ENGLAND: Yeah. Yeah, we meant you, you crazy Irish.
IRELAND: Goddamnit, England.
....
PHILIP II: That'll show that bitch Elizabeth. Like she could take me, anyway. I mean, who's ever heard of the BRITISH navy?
FUTURE GENERATIONS: ... dude, are you serious?
PHILIP II: STFU! Hindsight is always fucking twenty-twenty!
ELIZABETH: Hey, when you're done with those people from the future, I just thought I'd tell you that's a real nice city you got there at Cadiz!
PHILIP II: Sure is, isn't it?
ELIZABETH: Yeah, the guys I sent to raid it said it was great!
PHILIP II: GODDAMNIT, ENGLAND! IS PHILIP II GONNA HAVE TO CHOKE A BITCH? *sends Armada to attack England*
ELIZABETH: OH NOES! *continues to taunt Philip II*
Link via Anna S., aka "elide".
Update: yet more, here.
Thursday, March 24, 2005
Damn. Check out these two livejournal posts about the layout flow of Fruits Basket, and how the strong layouts function as teaching guides for the beginning reader, unaccustomed to reading comics, especially those not used to the manga-style right-to-left style. We're talking some serious Scott McCloud style kung fu, here.
Via a link from PreCur.
Via a link from PreCur.
I read Sokora Refugees last night. It was... not bad, not great, middling average. Artwork was solid Japanese-influenced American; ziptone was kind of brutal and a little flailing, which tempered my enthusiasm. Plot was OK, if a bit shapeless. Not an embarrassment by any means, but not rave material, either.
You want raves? Go read Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki. If it wasn't for Kittyhawk's budget-busting color-work brilliance, I'd be yelling about why she wasn't getting published instead. But color pages really are something of a high-ticket publishing show-stopper, so she's missing out on that payday... not that the American artists who sign with TokyoPop are seeing much of anything, if the rumors of rotten contracts are true.
You want raves? Go read Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki. If it wasn't for Kittyhawk's budget-busting color-work brilliance, I'd be yelling about why she wasn't getting published instead. But color pages really are something of a high-ticket publishing show-stopper, so she's missing out on that payday... not that the American artists who sign with TokyoPop are seeing much of anything, if the rumors of rotten contracts are true.
Precocious Curmudgeon had a comparison of the manga Cheeky Angel and Fruits Basket, asking why the latter consistently tops the sales charts, while the former bumbles along, never really attracting much of a following. I started this as a comment on his blog, but decided that it was getting too long for a comment, so I'm just linking it over here.
One theory forwarded on the question of the sales advantage in question postulated that the successful Fruits Basket anime gave it a leg up. Cheeky Angel did have an anime, a full-year-length 50-ish episode extravaganza, in fact. It's extrodinarily faithful to the manga, and I couldn't understand why it was never picked up in the states.
Part of it has to be the art. The art in Cheeky Angel, anime and manga both, is wacky-shounen ugly. It's a school-punk action comedy, at least in presentation, and that dictates a certain harshness and ugliness which tends to come out in the goofy facial designs. Once you get used to the design aesthetic, it's funny as hell, but it is something to *get past*. Especially if you're familiar and trained in the standard shoujo aesthetic.
Fruits Basket's aesthetic is the very model of shoujo mannerism. The ziptone, the lines, the chara, the backgrounds - all high shoujo mannerism. It's the real deal. If there are funny faces, they're cute funny faces. If there's violence, it's beautiful, immaculate violence between pretty boys. There are no ugly characters. None. Even the assholes are merely average-looking. No punks, no sexually threatening older man, or gangsters, or real danger, aside from bishounen-in-the-shadows Akito. Even the gangs are girl-gangs. The driving spirit of Fruits Basket is kindness. The protagonist, Tohru, is just this side of an incarnation of Kanon.
Meg of Cheeky Angel, on the other hand, is a punk-shounen parody of shoujo girliness. She's got the proportions and lines of a shoujo female crush-interest, until you get to her face. There the lines are twisted, distorted - like a work of aristocratic art re-drawn from the view-point of a lumpen Mitteleuropan potato-farmer. Meg's ideal isn't kindness, it's justice. She's the feminine-shaped paragon of a comedic ideal of manliness - protector of the weak, prosecutor of the persecuting, brash, loyal, just, violent.
The two manga aren't similar. They are, in fact, soft opposites. Cheeky Angel is a broad shounen fighting-comedy. Fruits Basket is a pretty, light shoujo romance.
Personally, I prioritize Cheeky Angel over Fruits Basket when it comes to buying manga. There's a lot of shoujo light romance on the market right now, and Fruits Basket is merely a high-average example of the genre. There just isn't that many decent shounen fighting-comedies getting published right now, not that I'm willing to buy on a regular basis. At this point, it's basically Cheeky Angel and Bleach. Maybe I'm missing something else, something extraordinary, but if I am, I'm, well, missing it.
One theory forwarded on the question of the sales advantage in question postulated that the successful Fruits Basket anime gave it a leg up. Cheeky Angel did have an anime, a full-year-length 50-ish episode extravaganza, in fact. It's extrodinarily faithful to the manga, and I couldn't understand why it was never picked up in the states.
Part of it has to be the art. The art in Cheeky Angel, anime and manga both, is wacky-shounen ugly. It's a school-punk action comedy, at least in presentation, and that dictates a certain harshness and ugliness which tends to come out in the goofy facial designs. Once you get used to the design aesthetic, it's funny as hell, but it is something to *get past*. Especially if you're familiar and trained in the standard shoujo aesthetic.
Fruits Basket's aesthetic is the very model of shoujo mannerism. The ziptone, the lines, the chara, the backgrounds - all high shoujo mannerism. It's the real deal. If there are funny faces, they're cute funny faces. If there's violence, it's beautiful, immaculate violence between pretty boys. There are no ugly characters. None. Even the assholes are merely average-looking. No punks, no sexually threatening older man, or gangsters, or real danger, aside from bishounen-in-the-shadows Akito. Even the gangs are girl-gangs. The driving spirit of Fruits Basket is kindness. The protagonist, Tohru, is just this side of an incarnation of Kanon.
Meg of Cheeky Angel, on the other hand, is a punk-shounen parody of shoujo girliness. She's got the proportions and lines of a shoujo female crush-interest, until you get to her face. There the lines are twisted, distorted - like a work of aristocratic art re-drawn from the view-point of a lumpen Mitteleuropan potato-farmer. Meg's ideal isn't kindness, it's justice. She's the feminine-shaped paragon of a comedic ideal of manliness - protector of the weak, prosecutor of the persecuting, brash, loyal, just, violent.
The two manga aren't similar. They are, in fact, soft opposites. Cheeky Angel is a broad shounen fighting-comedy. Fruits Basket is a pretty, light shoujo romance.
Personally, I prioritize Cheeky Angel over Fruits Basket when it comes to buying manga. There's a lot of shoujo light romance on the market right now, and Fruits Basket is merely a high-average example of the genre. There just isn't that many decent shounen fighting-comedies getting published right now, not that I'm willing to buy on a regular basis. At this point, it's basically Cheeky Angel and Bleach. Maybe I'm missing something else, something extraordinary, but if I am, I'm, well, missing it.
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Well, damn, that was pretty good. Possibly better than Old Man's War, although it could do with a good proofreading. What the carthaginian hell is wrong with the publishing industry, that it couldn't get published except as a vanity press edition? I'm thinking strongly of buying in on the subscription on general principles. It's worth a re-read.
John Scalzi apparently wrote his first novel as an online shareware experiment: Agent to the Stars. I haven't read it yet, but hey - free ice cream!
The war in Iraq is still going, and in fact sounds like it's starting to heat up something fierce. I've been seeing reports of significant company-size engagments (here and here) on Rantburg all week. This is interesting and significant, because it represents a distinct degeneration of insurgent tactics. Attacking in multiple platoons, leaving cover to attack well-armed columns in what the media have been charitably calling "ambushes", standing and fighting - this is novel.
All the reports I've been poo-pooing about this Zarqawi associate or that minion or subordinate being captured - I think I may have been underestimating the importance of that string of captures, mostly because it never produced Zarqawi himself. But if they've rolled up the middle-management and the smart guys in the command structure, this sudden vogue for suicidal open-field attacks might reflect what happens when inept buffoons are left in charge of an insurgency. That training-camp raid - in a location which makes geographical sense, being half-way to the Syrian border, square on the smuggling routes - suggests that they're starting to work their way back up the infiltration lines, from Ramadi/Fallujah towards Qaim and the border.
Of course, the alternate theory, which I've seen aired on Rantburg, is that the insurgency is running short of IED materials, forcing them to fight with what they've got. As others have pointed out, whoever runs Iraq in the future will be finding lost and unknown Saddam-era stockpiles of munitions for the next thirty years - theorizing that an Iraqi insurgency is running out of explosives is like postulating that Pennsylvania might run out of coal. It's theoretically possible, but in no sense is it likely.
The Coalition casualty lists are shortening, which is heartening, but to a certain extent this just reflects the replacement of US and allied front-line troops with Iraqi police, special police commandos, and soldiers. The war's still very much hot, but it's starting to look like a winning fight.
All the reports I've been poo-pooing about this Zarqawi associate or that minion or subordinate being captured - I think I may have been underestimating the importance of that string of captures, mostly because it never produced Zarqawi himself. But if they've rolled up the middle-management and the smart guys in the command structure, this sudden vogue for suicidal open-field attacks might reflect what happens when inept buffoons are left in charge of an insurgency. That training-camp raid - in a location which makes geographical sense, being half-way to the Syrian border, square on the smuggling routes - suggests that they're starting to work their way back up the infiltration lines, from Ramadi/Fallujah towards Qaim and the border.
Of course, the alternate theory, which I've seen aired on Rantburg, is that the insurgency is running short of IED materials, forcing them to fight with what they've got. As others have pointed out, whoever runs Iraq in the future will be finding lost and unknown Saddam-era stockpiles of munitions for the next thirty years - theorizing that an Iraqi insurgency is running out of explosives is like postulating that Pennsylvania might run out of coal. It's theoretically possible, but in no sense is it likely.
The Coalition casualty lists are shortening, which is heartening, but to a certain extent this just reflects the replacement of US and allied front-line troops with Iraqi police, special police commandos, and soldiers. The war's still very much hot, but it's starting to look like a winning fight.
C-kun
“We have a problem.”
B-kun
“You killed the heroines again.”
C-kun
“Besides that. We need a way out of this.”
Best Kiddy Grade review ever.
Via Chizumatic aside, although I'm sure I've read it somewhere before...
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Dave mentioned that some friends were coming in from out of town on Friday and Saturday, with the possibility of getting together for some poker. I had to remind him that Good Friday is this weekend, and that the fairly religious guy who hosts poker nights at his place might not be amused at the notion of gambling like a pack of Roman legionaries on the evening of the day of crucifixion. Although it does appeal to a certain residual sense of blasphemy I seem to have retained from my upbringing...
Monday, March 21, 2005
A completely serious and totally non-satirical interview on why women cannot lead prayer in mosques:
....
...
Link via Norm Geras.
AF: Interesting. How were you able to isolate the right testicle as the point of origin?
An-Nutfah: This was arrived at through a matter of scientific deduction. Men and women are quite similar in their basic physiology with the exception of the sexual organs in which and men differ. Contrary to popular belief the brain is not the primary organ for thought. In terms of basic knowledge and reasoning, yes. But the brain is ill-suited for total religious thought. This is where the testicles come in.
....
AF: Why the right testicle and not the left one?
An-Nutfah: Well that’s the sinister testicle isn’t it?
AF: I was not aware of that. Moving on. If a woman were to hold a right testicle in her hand, could she then lead a prayer?
An-Nutfah: Only very briefly, because the testicle has to be warm. But then again where could she get the testicle? As a precaution, I have been wearing a specially designed testicle protector ever since the discovery was made.
...
AF: Is this testicle finding the scientific reason why men and women cannot pray side by side?
An-Nutfah: Precisely. Can you imaging the bloodbath if women were able to get so close to so much Quranic knowledge? The streets would flow red for days.
Link via Norm Geras.
Yikes. The writer for TokyoPop's new American "manga" Sokora Refugees is the graphic-novel buyer for Borders. I can't even begin to express how big of a conflict of interest that is. On the other hand, it seems like a decent title, to judge from the first couple chapters, and I had been planning on buying it when it comes out next month. Well, decent by American "manga" standards, anyways.
I will note that in my experience, Borders' manga shelves are considerably better stocked than Barnes & Nobles' are. The buyer/writer in question may have a massive conflict of interest, but he's apparently a pretty damned good buyer, as such things go.
News via Irresponsible Pictures.
I will note that in my experience, Borders' manga shelves are considerably better stocked than Barnes & Nobles' are. The buyer/writer in question may have a massive conflict of interest, but he's apparently a pretty damned good buyer, as such things go.
News via Irresponsible Pictures.
John Salzi's Old Man's War earned all of it's online praise, it would seem. I started reading it Sunday morning, and was finished by Sunday afternoon - your classic page-turner. The back-cover blurbs already cover the obligatory comparisons with Starship Troopers and the Forever War, so's I don't have to; more importantly, Old Man's War is an example of the social-didactic space-infantry genre which doesn't collapse under its own ennui and existential dispair. It is, in fact, funny in fits and starts, although it isn't a comic novel by design.
The basic plot of the story is that Americans (and presumably, other First-Worlders, although it isn't stated outright) can't emigrate to the outworld colonies without first doing a hitch in the Colonial Defense Forces, the CDF. Furthermore, the CDF has some sort of monopoly on life-extension technologies, which they will only extend to their recruits, who can join up starting on their seventy-fifth birthday. The back cover promises "Starship Troopers without the lectures", but in a fit of irony, I only noticed this after reading a lecture by an ex-politician private in favor of diplomacy over simply killing everything that moves. Oh, well, it's no great spoiler to report that he's quickly put down before we're exposed to more comically inept lecturing. I entertained myself by trying to guess which ex-Secretary of State he was supposed to be - my guess was Cyril Vance.
The novel is quick to the point of glibness, and too sharp to get a good grip on; in short, it goes by a little too fast. It's the author's first book, and he might have wanted to take a little more time getting where he was going, in my opinion. But it's still a pretty damned fine book on its own merits. This little experiment in taking blog recommendations on novels such as Weapons of Choice and Old Man's War seems to be a success; I will probably go on to look into the books from that Atrocity Archives fellow that Reynolds and Bainbridge have been going on about.
The basic plot of the story is that Americans (and presumably, other First-Worlders, although it isn't stated outright) can't emigrate to the outworld colonies without first doing a hitch in the Colonial Defense Forces, the CDF. Furthermore, the CDF has some sort of monopoly on life-extension technologies, which they will only extend to their recruits, who can join up starting on their seventy-fifth birthday. The back cover promises "Starship Troopers without the lectures", but in a fit of irony, I only noticed this after reading a lecture by an ex-politician private in favor of diplomacy over simply killing everything that moves. Oh, well, it's no great spoiler to report that he's quickly put down before we're exposed to more comically inept lecturing. I entertained myself by trying to guess which ex-Secretary of State he was supposed to be - my guess was Cyril Vance.
The novel is quick to the point of glibness, and too sharp to get a good grip on; in short, it goes by a little too fast. It's the author's first book, and he might have wanted to take a little more time getting where he was going, in my opinion. But it's still a pretty damned fine book on its own merits. This little experiment in taking blog recommendations on novels such as Weapons of Choice and Old Man's War seems to be a success; I will probably go on to look into the books from that Atrocity Archives fellow that Reynolds and Bainbridge have been going on about.
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Weapons of Choice, by John Birmingham, has been going 'round the blogsphere due to Glenn Reynolds' enthusiasm for the book. It's the first part of a trilogy, SF, sort of a post-9/11 Final Countdown scenario.
I'm of two minds on the book. On the one side, the writing is tight, well-structured, and the narrative holds together well. The theme - a consideration of the similarities and radical differences of the World War II generation and the Terror War generation - actually works well. Birmingham isn't nearly as inept as Harry Turtledove, and his purposes and ideas are different enough from the Baen collective and Steve Stirling to make what is in essence a "Nantucket in King Arthur's Court", unique and distinctive. It's well worth the time spent to read it, which is good.
The bad? The book shows strong signs of poor editorial decision-making at the outline level. The protagonists - the varied members of a Multinational naval task force from 2021 Indonesian waters - are flung by an accident on board a DARPA experimental vessel, into 1942. This is fine as it goes, but the narrative flings them *arbitrarily* into the middle of the American fleet bound for the battle of Midway, killing thousands in the world's largest blue-on-blue friendly fire incident. The time-travelers were nowhere near Midway at the time of transit, having been, as I said, in Indonesian waters. Why Midway? Why off Timor? It feels as if the author had originally outlined his catastrophe to disrupt the Battle of the Java Sea, or the Coral Sea, and that some well-meaning editor or beta reader told him "Nobody's ever heard of those battles! Pick something everybody will have heard of!" But the resulting plot is obnoxiously arbitrary. It happens because it's dramatically striking - not because it makes any internal sense.
The second source of irritation? The technology of our hypothetical coalition fleet of 2021 is preposterously advanced. For one, most of the fleet are operating with fusion plants. It took more than twelve years between the first controlled fission reaction and the maiden voyage of the first fission-powered military vessel, and nineteen years until the first capital ship. There are no current prospects for a successful controlled fusion reaction that I know of - controlled fusion is, as it has been through out my lifetime, at least twenty years away.
The ships operate with dubiously advanced AI - sufficient for autonomous battle operation, which seems unlikely given the current and projected state of AI research. The personnel are borged out the wazoo, with every member of the fleet apparently sporting spinal inserts. They use micronuclear weapons in tactical situations - something which we've been moving away from since at least the late Seventies. Worse, every member of the coalition other than the Indonesians have the same level of technology - Americans, Japanese, British, Australians and auxiliaries. This isn't the modern coalition force, in which the Americans are ten to fifteen years ahead of the rest of force. Somehow, in this future multinational military, our backward allies have been bootstrapped to the same insane level of military sophistication as the main force.
It's all rather improbable. They seem like they're from thirty years in the future, rather than fifteen. On the other hand, it's amusing to see UAVs, nanotube armor sheathing, electromagnetic railguns, F-22s and F-35s, solid-state small arms, combat lasers, and Metal Storm defensive batteries appearing contemporaneously with the improbable sci-fi elements. Those are all plausible elements of a military force of 2021, but they're equally scientifictional from the view point of the 1980s, let alone the 1940s.
I can't help but like the book, and I look forward to the next installment. But take it as a sign that I find myself feeling defensive about that liking. It's a book that requires more than a little suspension of disbelief.
I'm of two minds on the book. On the one side, the writing is tight, well-structured, and the narrative holds together well. The theme - a consideration of the similarities and radical differences of the World War II generation and the Terror War generation - actually works well. Birmingham isn't nearly as inept as Harry Turtledove, and his purposes and ideas are different enough from the Baen collective and Steve Stirling to make what is in essence a "Nantucket in King Arthur's Court", unique and distinctive. It's well worth the time spent to read it, which is good.
The bad? The book shows strong signs of poor editorial decision-making at the outline level. The protagonists - the varied members of a Multinational naval task force from 2021 Indonesian waters - are flung by an accident on board a DARPA experimental vessel, into 1942. This is fine as it goes, but the narrative flings them *arbitrarily* into the middle of the American fleet bound for the battle of Midway, killing thousands in the world's largest blue-on-blue friendly fire incident. The time-travelers were nowhere near Midway at the time of transit, having been, as I said, in Indonesian waters. Why Midway? Why off Timor? It feels as if the author had originally outlined his catastrophe to disrupt the Battle of the Java Sea, or the Coral Sea, and that some well-meaning editor or beta reader told him "Nobody's ever heard of those battles! Pick something everybody will have heard of!" But the resulting plot is obnoxiously arbitrary. It happens because it's dramatically striking - not because it makes any internal sense.
The second source of irritation? The technology of our hypothetical coalition fleet of 2021 is preposterously advanced. For one, most of the fleet are operating with fusion plants. It took more than twelve years between the first controlled fission reaction and the maiden voyage of the first fission-powered military vessel, and nineteen years until the first capital ship. There are no current prospects for a successful controlled fusion reaction that I know of - controlled fusion is, as it has been through out my lifetime, at least twenty years away.
The ships operate with dubiously advanced AI - sufficient for autonomous battle operation, which seems unlikely given the current and projected state of AI research. The personnel are borged out the wazoo, with every member of the fleet apparently sporting spinal inserts. They use micronuclear weapons in tactical situations - something which we've been moving away from since at least the late Seventies. Worse, every member of the coalition other than the Indonesians have the same level of technology - Americans, Japanese, British, Australians and auxiliaries. This isn't the modern coalition force, in which the Americans are ten to fifteen years ahead of the rest of force. Somehow, in this future multinational military, our backward allies have been bootstrapped to the same insane level of military sophistication as the main force.
It's all rather improbable. They seem like they're from thirty years in the future, rather than fifteen. On the other hand, it's amusing to see UAVs, nanotube armor sheathing, electromagnetic railguns, F-22s and F-35s, solid-state small arms, combat lasers, and Metal Storm defensive batteries appearing contemporaneously with the improbable sci-fi elements. Those are all plausible elements of a military force of 2021, but they're equally scientifictional from the view point of the 1980s, let alone the 1940s.
I can't help but like the book, and I look forward to the next installment. But take it as a sign that I find myself feeling defensive about that liking. It's a book that requires more than a little suspension of disbelief.
Friday, March 18, 2005
I woke up this morning thinking about the ideology of games. Since my thoughts on the subject are ill-formed and tenuous, I wanted to put together a set of links to brilliant thought on the subject. However, Google has failed me today, and all I can find is dim-witted Theory blovation and thoughtless leftist twaddle.
What I was thinking about was a friend of mine, who's playing a multiplayer beta called Pardus. It's a sort of war/economic blend of a game, where you can concentrate on war-fighting, or play the economic end of things. People can play at war, but if the economics aren't addressed, they'll be fighting with rocks and sticks, metaphorically speaking.
His alliance had gotten into bad relations with the big bad military machine of the neighborhood, and they couldn't face them militarily. Since the game is still a sort of beta, the designers are still changing the rules here and there, and my friend seized on a nasty new twist which opened up the big bad military machine to an economic vulnerability. He carefully set up a chain of conspiracy to financially eviscerate the big bad military machine through deniable cut-outs, and essentially starved off their economic base. Whoopie! Much celebration.
He was justly proud of his intellectual feat, and was clearly looking to repeat his brilliance again. I offered the example of Edward Thorp, who left Vegas after inventing card-counting, and went off to Wall Street to work on hedge strategy. Zero-sum gaming strategies are ego-boosting, but essentially dangerous. Thorp knew that he'd eventually get the hell beaten out of him, or find himself buried in some nameless pit in the deep desert somewhere. My friend's alliance was tearing itself up with paranoia about spies and the threat of retribution as of the last time I looked in on his gameplay. I told him to find a non-zero-sum strategy as brilliant as his act of economic sabotage. Better to be beloved than hated.
As brilliant as his tactic was, it was, in essence, the act of a griefer. Lots of folks, especially kids, get off on griefer tactics - destroying the hard game-work of others. But I have to wonder about the ideological and moral soundness of such behavior. As I said, the alliance which pulled off my friend's economic coup was tearing itself up. Bad acts breed bad feeling, bad karma.
My friend's literally a genius, and I hope he takes my suggestion to heart. I'm kind of interested by the clever work-arounds they used to get around the absence of true banking in the game-system. They've essentially replicated a crude pre-Renaissance-era financial network by manipulating the price of staples in long transaction-chains and de facto letters of credit. It would be very interesting if they can generate a true banking system from what is essentially a resource-exchange simulation.
Oh, btw - I've decided to ban the word "kerfluffle" from this blog. Kindly remind me of this if I ever use it again.
What I was thinking about was a friend of mine, who's playing a multiplayer beta called Pardus. It's a sort of war/economic blend of a game, where you can concentrate on war-fighting, or play the economic end of things. People can play at war, but if the economics aren't addressed, they'll be fighting with rocks and sticks, metaphorically speaking.
His alliance had gotten into bad relations with the big bad military machine of the neighborhood, and they couldn't face them militarily. Since the game is still a sort of beta, the designers are still changing the rules here and there, and my friend seized on a nasty new twist which opened up the big bad military machine to an economic vulnerability. He carefully set up a chain of conspiracy to financially eviscerate the big bad military machine through deniable cut-outs, and essentially starved off their economic base. Whoopie! Much celebration.
He was justly proud of his intellectual feat, and was clearly looking to repeat his brilliance again. I offered the example of Edward Thorp, who left Vegas after inventing card-counting, and went off to Wall Street to work on hedge strategy. Zero-sum gaming strategies are ego-boosting, but essentially dangerous. Thorp knew that he'd eventually get the hell beaten out of him, or find himself buried in some nameless pit in the deep desert somewhere. My friend's alliance was tearing itself up with paranoia about spies and the threat of retribution as of the last time I looked in on his gameplay. I told him to find a non-zero-sum strategy as brilliant as his act of economic sabotage. Better to be beloved than hated.
As brilliant as his tactic was, it was, in essence, the act of a griefer. Lots of folks, especially kids, get off on griefer tactics - destroying the hard game-work of others. But I have to wonder about the ideological and moral soundness of such behavior. As I said, the alliance which pulled off my friend's economic coup was tearing itself up. Bad acts breed bad feeling, bad karma.
My friend's literally a genius, and I hope he takes my suggestion to heart. I'm kind of interested by the clever work-arounds they used to get around the absence of true banking in the game-system. They've essentially replicated a crude pre-Renaissance-era financial network by manipulating the price of staples in long transaction-chains and de facto letters of credit. It would be very interesting if they can generate a true banking system from what is essentially a resource-exchange simulation.
Oh, btw - I've decided to ban the word "kerfluffle" from this blog. Kindly remind me of this if I ever use it again.
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Interesting DoE site on worldwide energy reserves and usages on a nation-by-nation basis. Among other things, I learned that recent news reports have exaggerated the importance of the natural gas reserves of Bolivia, and that the US relies much more heavily on nuclear power plants than I had thought had been the case. 20%? Damn, considering that they haven't started a new-planned plant in twenty years, that's a lot more than I had thought...
Hey! It's March 15th, International Eat an Animal for PETA Day! I'm going to be calling in a reservation at Outbacks for dinner. So far I've only got three people here at work for the party, but I remain optimistic. Today's the day for the biggest, most hedonistically oversized steak dinner you can swing on your daily dime. Eat up! Those critters aren't gonna devour themselves!
Monday, March 14, 2005
There's a bit of a kerfluffle over an obscure black novelist of the 1890s, who turns out to not have been black after all. Emma Durham Kelley-Hawkins was *not* an extraordinarily New Englandish African-American writer, but rather, was a very Caucasian, very undistinguished product of provincial Rhode Island.
The fuss made me wonder what the point of her initial inclusion into the black canon was, really? From all descriptions, her two novels were starchy, bleached affairs of propriety and decorum. I can't help but suspect that this was a sort of petty-aristocratic appropriation...
Much of the tenor of comment has been along the lines of "the only thing that made her interesting as an author was her biography", and complaints about the historicist imposition upon pure aesthetics. I suppose I'm somewhat sympathetic to this sort of outrage, but the counter-example of two authors weigh my hand and temper my enthusiasm.
Georgette Heyer was the most English of romance writers, a fabricator of a Regency England so detailed and expansive that it easily obscures and overshadows the brief historical period upon which it was nominally based upon. The irony of Heyer's reconstruction and appropriation of this lost England is that Heyer was actually the grand-daughter of converted Ukrainian Jews, that her own family spent the period in question in some nameless steppe shetl, before emigrating to the sceptered isle a generation later. You can enjoy Heyer's marvelous novels without ever knowing this fact; the knowledge does not, as far as I can perceive, seriously affect said enjoyment one way or the other. Her ethnicity is irrelevant to her feat of invention.
Joseph Conrad, on the other hand, was a Polish immigrant of the generation previous to Heyer, fleeing Russian oppression. He became an English subject, and spent his active life and career becoming as much of an Englishman as is possible for anyone not born to the land to be. His many novels are as much a part of the English literary tradition and the culture of the British Empire as any native-born Englishman or Scot. But Conrad's biography is inseparable from his literary product. How can you reasonably discuss his Heart of Darkness without reference to his operation of a riverboat on the Congo, or the Secret Sharer and Lord Jim without talking of his time as a tramp ship captain? Nostromo and the Secret Agent are comprehensively influenced and illuminated by Conrad's characteristic viewpoint as the imperial outsider.
If it were revealed that Conrad had not been the Polish immigrant that we thought him, but rather a well-traveled Welshman, then what would we make of his body of work? It would *utterly change them*. The author himself is assumed to occupy a particular viewpoint, a vantage. To change Conrad from a Pole to our hypothetical Welshman, or a lowland Scot, would be roughly akin to discovering that el Greco had perfect vision, and his distortions and elongations were artifacts of artistic intent entire.
Via the Instapundit, because I'm lazy that way.
The fuss made me wonder what the point of her initial inclusion into the black canon was, really? From all descriptions, her two novels were starchy, bleached affairs of propriety and decorum. I can't help but suspect that this was a sort of petty-aristocratic appropriation...
Much of the tenor of comment has been along the lines of "the only thing that made her interesting as an author was her biography", and complaints about the historicist imposition upon pure aesthetics. I suppose I'm somewhat sympathetic to this sort of outrage, but the counter-example of two authors weigh my hand and temper my enthusiasm.
Georgette Heyer was the most English of romance writers, a fabricator of a Regency England so detailed and expansive that it easily obscures and overshadows the brief historical period upon which it was nominally based upon. The irony of Heyer's reconstruction and appropriation of this lost England is that Heyer was actually the grand-daughter of converted Ukrainian Jews, that her own family spent the period in question in some nameless steppe shetl, before emigrating to the sceptered isle a generation later. You can enjoy Heyer's marvelous novels without ever knowing this fact; the knowledge does not, as far as I can perceive, seriously affect said enjoyment one way or the other. Her ethnicity is irrelevant to her feat of invention.
Joseph Conrad, on the other hand, was a Polish immigrant of the generation previous to Heyer, fleeing Russian oppression. He became an English subject, and spent his active life and career becoming as much of an Englishman as is possible for anyone not born to the land to be. His many novels are as much a part of the English literary tradition and the culture of the British Empire as any native-born Englishman or Scot. But Conrad's biography is inseparable from his literary product. How can you reasonably discuss his Heart of Darkness without reference to his operation of a riverboat on the Congo, or the Secret Sharer and Lord Jim without talking of his time as a tramp ship captain? Nostromo and the Secret Agent are comprehensively influenced and illuminated by Conrad's characteristic viewpoint as the imperial outsider.
If it were revealed that Conrad had not been the Polish immigrant that we thought him, but rather a well-traveled Welshman, then what would we make of his body of work? It would *utterly change them*. The author himself is assumed to occupy a particular viewpoint, a vantage. To change Conrad from a Pole to our hypothetical Welshman, or a lowland Scot, would be roughly akin to discovering that el Greco had perfect vision, and his distortions and elongations were artifacts of artistic intent entire.
Via the Instapundit, because I'm lazy that way.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
I don't know what to think of the pro-Syrian demonstration yesterday. I can read the Lebanese and Beirut blogs and reassure myself that it's just the old tyrannical mob-mobilization tactics at work, but it's pretty damn easy to coddle yourself with those who are telling you what you want to hear, isn't it? (Omar from Iraq the Model pitches in to describe the festivities as echoing the usual Baath tactics, but once again, what I want to hear...)
The fact remains that Hezbollah and the Syrians between themselves put at least 200K men in the heart of Beirut. That's a lot of bodies, and a lot of young military-age bodies at that. Even if they were coerced, ordered, shangaied, and shipped in, that still represents a capacity for crowd control and logistics which suggests that the weakness of the tyrants is exaggerated, suggests that the totalitarians can still totalize their masses against the will of the individuals of the whole.
Not good, not good at all.
The fact remains that Hezbollah and the Syrians between themselves put at least 200K men in the heart of Beirut. That's a lot of bodies, and a lot of young military-age bodies at that. Even if they were coerced, ordered, shangaied, and shipped in, that still represents a capacity for crowd control and logistics which suggests that the weakness of the tyrants is exaggerated, suggests that the totalitarians can still totalize their masses against the will of the individuals of the whole.
Not good, not good at all.
Friday, March 04, 2005
Yesterday's WWI color photos link went bye-bye, so I spent the lunch hour putting together a photo page on my old freeservers site to preserve the interesting bits. Any takers on how long it lasts before freeservers shuts my bandwidth-hogging ass down? Yeah, yeah - I know it sucks. My photo-handling skills can be contained in a thimble, with room left over for you and me.
Thursday, March 03, 2005
These French color photographs from World War I are weirdly nostalgic. Maybe it's the rural-forested-crumbled ruin aspect of it all, but I keep getting these feelings of deja vu from them. My mind isn't trained to expect pictures of World War I wreckage and ruin to be in *color* - and so very clear color at that! - so it keeps slotting in other experiences to fill in the emotional gaps. The ruins look like abandoned industrial ruins I've seen all over Pennsylvania - quarries, abandoned factories, etc. The gatherings of soldiers under tents and lush pine-forest canopies bring back memories of Boy Scout camp-outs. It all looks so - immediate. And strangely peaceful.
Via Bill at INDC Journal.
Via Bill at INDC Journal.
Oh, for the love of God... the US is in the process of destroying its last mustard gas stockpiles. Why the hell would we be using that noxious shit in Fallujah? Look around for pictures of Marines, troopers, and soldiers from second Fallujah. I challenge y'all to find me one of somebody in a gas mask, let alone a MOPP suit.
This report is coming from an Iraqi official from the Health Ministry. What the hell is wrong with the Iraqi Health Ministry? It seems to be the go-to place in that country for misinformation, enemy propaganda, and gross ignorance.
Ahh... maybe I'm overreacting. It's entirely possible that there are large swathes of Fallujah's citizenry with a history of exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons usage. Veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, the Anfal campaign, or just peacetime usage and exposure. Not to mention farmers and people living in contact with well-sprayed agricultural areas...
Via the Iraq Coalition Casualties Count page. Yes, I do check it on a daily basis, hoping that there's nothing new...
This report is coming from an Iraqi official from the Health Ministry. What the hell is wrong with the Iraqi Health Ministry? It seems to be the go-to place in that country for misinformation, enemy propaganda, and gross ignorance.
Ahh... maybe I'm overreacting. It's entirely possible that there are large swathes of Fallujah's citizenry with a history of exposure to Iraqi chemical weapons usage. Veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, the Anfal campaign, or just peacetime usage and exposure. Not to mention farmers and people living in contact with well-sprayed agricultural areas...
Via the Iraq Coalition Casualties Count page. Yes, I do check it on a daily basis, hoping that there's nothing new...
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Austin Bay writes that, though triumphalists have become quick to see in 2005 another 1989 in the offing, that this is no year for end-games. He's right - 1989 was a year of paradigmic shifts, a vast and sudden collapse. But the Cold War lasted for forty turmoilent years of ups and downs, and to look for parallels in every new year the ending-year come again is to build oneself a machine for disappointment. There were years of movement and apparent success whose offings devoured the optimistic and revolutionary.
Consider 1956, the year that Khrushchev's liberalizing moderation met the people's will, and recoiled in a great sudden withdrawing, like the waves from a Sri Lankan beach on a late December morn. The light dawning from under the foul and dark cloud over Tyrant Stalin's mouldering corpse, and Eastern Europe stirring from its ill dream.
Happy Hungary, her chains put by the side, stands from her crouch, back aching from long years of subjugation and toil. Democratic forces on the march. Then the counter-march.
Her border groaning under the tank's tread, and the gentle wave returns with tidal recruits, to sweep silly dreams of sudden liberation away in a crush of shattered masonry, molotov-fire and petrol-station flame-thrower desperation.
Not all years are miracles, and the tyrant has his own ballot, large-bored and heavy-calibred, unanswerable and uncontestable when backed by mushroom-cloud MADness. And 1989 itself ended in a massacre of silly hopes under grinding tank-tread roars and machine-gun fire before a paper-mache statue of Liberty.
Consider 1956, the year that Khrushchev's liberalizing moderation met the people's will, and recoiled in a great sudden withdrawing, like the waves from a Sri Lankan beach on a late December morn. The light dawning from under the foul and dark cloud over Tyrant Stalin's mouldering corpse, and Eastern Europe stirring from its ill dream.
Happy Hungary, her chains put by the side, stands from her crouch, back aching from long years of subjugation and toil. Democratic forces on the march. Then the counter-march.
Her border groaning under the tank's tread, and the gentle wave returns with tidal recruits, to sweep silly dreams of sudden liberation away in a crush of shattered masonry, molotov-fire and petrol-station flame-thrower desperation.
Not all years are miracles, and the tyrant has his own ballot, large-bored and heavy-calibred, unanswerable and uncontestable when backed by mushroom-cloud MADness. And 1989 itself ended in a massacre of silly hopes under grinding tank-tread roars and machine-gun fire before a paper-mache statue of Liberty.
Monday, February 28, 2005
Well, hell. Some poor kid from Kentucky coal-mining country got arrested for writing a SF-ish short story about a high school overrun by zombies based on a law against making terroristic threats against high schools. His grandparents turned him in. Is this typical behavior among coal-mining folk? If so, I start to see where Fred's coming from, on the subject. For some reason, I thought that one of the virtues of Appalachian hill-folk was clannishness - you know, protecting one's own. Not turning your grandkids in to the thought police.
Friday, February 25, 2005
Those rumors about Lynn Swann getting ready to run for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Pennsylvania appear to be true. A black conservative football hero as the Republican candidate. That ought to be entertaining, if it comes off. There'd be blood on the wardroom walls in Philly.
Via Professor Bainbridge.
Via Professor Bainbridge.
Jessica, I don't know if you've seen this, but I seem to remember that you were playing around with knitting a while back, and I thought that you might be amused by the notion of radical political knitting, and the idea of someone trying to show that knitting is transgressive and "erotic".
That last bit really cries out for illustration, doesn't it? No links to follow, sorry.
That last bit really cries out for illustration, doesn't it? No links to follow, sorry.
Thursday, February 24, 2005
Anime Jump is pretending to introduce an anime-con advice column called Con Nazi. Half amusing, half annoying. But the scalding hotness of the pink-haired girl in the "sign whore" photo has left me too busy drooling to complain. Much.
I just submitted a write-up for the year I was con-chair for the Big Anime Con Which Shall Not Be Named, only five years after it was due. The Vice Chair verbally spanked me for naming names in the manuscript. Hey, I'm still the only ex-chair to submit a writeup for his or her year's events, so pttpth. I'll link it when it goes up.
I just submitted a write-up for the year I was con-chair for the Big Anime Con Which Shall Not Be Named, only five years after it was due. The Vice Chair verbally spanked me for naming names in the manuscript. Hey, I'm still the only ex-chair to submit a writeup for his or her year's events, so pttpth. I'll link it when it goes up.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Jack Chalker died earlier this month. He had something of a reputation on the con circuit, and I haven't read one of his novels in years, but he was something else in his prime. I used to devour his novels as soon as they appeared on the shelves in the local bookstores. They got me through some fairly grim and lonesome years when I was a kid. I can't say I'm surprised that he died - he wasn't exactly the healthiest of individuals, even back in the days when I still went to SF conventions - but it's still a bit of a shock.
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Fred had something on his blog the other week about Mountain English, and hillybilly jokes. (Fred, I have difficulty telling whether or not the Daily Blatt is back or not. Sorry about delinking you for so long - thought it was in abeyance.)
I have to admit that I've told dumb-mountain-hicks jokes before, and played up the whole "mountain man" routine. To be honest, I'm not hill country - I grew up in the North Hills of Pittsburgh, which, while hilly, isn't Appalachia - more like yunzer territory, strained through a generation-and-a-half of suburbanization. But the full beard and the glower fool people into thinking I'm something I'm not - a local - and thus I'm in a position to play games with expectations. I don't know, is that a sort of blackface? If so, I apologize.
I don't generally have an ear for dialect - I can barely identify my own, let alone replicate that of others'. I do think that dialects are dialects, and t'heck with these goofy half-languages - I don't care if you have an army, you're still mostly English, or mostly Dutch, or whatever. Which reminds me of this highly amusing post about the trials and travails of "UlsterScots", newly-recognized minority-language of the EU.
But I never had to lose my yunzer accent, nor was I pressured to do so, aside from the twice-yearly finger-waving article in the Pittsburgh Press or the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about the horrors of sounding like a Arn City hunkie. In fact, when I remembered to, I often played up what little accent I had while I was at college, doing my best to drive the Philly folk bonkers. It still drives Dave Asher nuts whenever I propose to "worsh" some clothes.
I have to admit that I've told dumb-mountain-hicks jokes before, and played up the whole "mountain man" routine. To be honest, I'm not hill country - I grew up in the North Hills of Pittsburgh, which, while hilly, isn't Appalachia - more like yunzer territory, strained through a generation-and-a-half of suburbanization. But the full beard and the glower fool people into thinking I'm something I'm not - a local - and thus I'm in a position to play games with expectations. I don't know, is that a sort of blackface? If so, I apologize.
I don't generally have an ear for dialect - I can barely identify my own, let alone replicate that of others'. I do think that dialects are dialects, and t'heck with these goofy half-languages - I don't care if you have an army, you're still mostly English, or mostly Dutch, or whatever. Which reminds me of this highly amusing post about the trials and travails of "UlsterScots", newly-recognized minority-language of the EU.
But I never had to lose my yunzer accent, nor was I pressured to do so, aside from the twice-yearly finger-waving article in the Pittsburgh Press or the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about the horrors of sounding like a Arn City hunkie. In fact, when I remembered to, I often played up what little accent I had while I was at college, doing my best to drive the Philly folk bonkers. It still drives Dave Asher nuts whenever I propose to "worsh" some clothes.
I feel sick. Whenever someone goes on about tradition and honor, think about a young woman tied up in the back seat of a taxi bound for the empty desert. Murderous fucking lunacy. Don't let the bastards tell you it's their religion. This shit isn't about some atheist's projection of "sky bullies" or "bearded vengeance-demons", it's about the self-regard of miserable, selfish old men and their solipsistic and blasphemous worship of their severely over-extended egos.
These men are the same breed of bastard who become family annihilators in the West - those moral cripples who think of their families as literal extensions of their selves, so that when they commit suicide, they start with the outer-most extensions, and work inwards towards the core, eventually reaching their physical selves. Except the honor-killing traditions allow them to just stop with an expendable daughter, or sister - expunging the shame with the least loss to the collective self.
Via K.J. Lopez at the Corner.
These men are the same breed of bastard who become family annihilators in the West - those moral cripples who think of their families as literal extensions of their selves, so that when they commit suicide, they start with the outer-most extensions, and work inwards towards the core, eventually reaching their physical selves. Except the honor-killing traditions allow them to just stop with an expendable daughter, or sister - expunging the shame with the least loss to the collective self.
Via K.J. Lopez at the Corner.
"Josve novem svete, tak prohoba speak American!"
Ann Althouse, in a discussion of Greg Easterbrook's nth partial-ingestion of his footwear, on the subject of lingua francas and whether minority languages ought to be neglected or celebrated, linked to this impassioned Irish defense of minority and artificial-nationality languages. [I really ought to re-subscribe to the New Republic. I let my subscription lapse last year, but maybe it's time to go on back, yes?]
First of all, I don't think that Easterbrook would actually argue in favor of enforced monolingualism. He doesn't strike me as that sort of guy - but I will have to find a copy of the full, unexcerpted piece to double-check my assumptions. The excerpts seem to suggest that he's arguing for benign neglect - an absence of celebration of microculture. Musgrave, the irate Irishman, talks as if he's infuriated by this suggestion, but then proceeds to give an account of the Gaelic League, and Irish nationalism's obnoxious use of Gaelic, which does everything but march across a Pyongyang stadium waving flags in synchronized-uniformed-proletarian-crowd fashion to convince me that the politics associated with minority language and nationalities based on minority languages are noxious, fruitless, and scary.
There are two examples of modern nation-states which have used an artificially-resurrected language, reclaimed from the bin of history, as mortar for their new nationalities - Ireland and Israel. Israel's self-invention through the reintroduction of Hebrew makes perfect sense to me, really. The various Jews, Christians, and Muslims who transformed the bulk of the British mandate of Palestine into the nation-state Israel didn't share a common lingua franca. The local Jews, Christians, and Muslims spoke Arabic, as did the Sephardic Jews who fled the Arabic pogroms of the late 1940s. The European Jewish settlers, and later refugees from the Shoah and American Jewish settlers after the founding, however, spoke no such thing. They spoke Yiddish, or English, or French, or Russian, or whatever. The reintroduction of Hebrew, a liturgical language not used in daily life, anywhere, prior to the Zionist foundations of the late Nineteenth Century, provided a common difficulty - the learning of a new language which didn't politically advantage any of the linguistic factions involved in the founding. It was a common linguistic gathering-point for a polyglot collective defined not by language, but religion, ethnicity, and accident.
The Irish-Gaelic counterexample, however, is a completely different story. Here, we are presented by the example of a colonial population, mostly absorbed into the dominant culture, in which the original language is a rural remnant on the decline, even in the countryside. Everybody either speaks the lingua franca, or aspires to do so, for social and economic reasons. The political re-introduction of the remnant-minority was used as part of a non-rational program of cultural idolatry - ancestor-worship through a dying language. There was no need to cement together populations divided by language, because they were already speaking the same, dominant, imperial language - there was just a minority who spoke something else while at home. Note in Musgrave's account, that it wasn't the rural speakers of Gaelic who typically pushed the nationalist-adoption of the language, but rather, academics and middle-class revolutionaries and radicals who saw that adaptation as a form of exclusion, of definition.
The Irish use of Gaelic was not inclusive, but rather analytical - not centripetal, but centrifugal. The Israeli usage of Hebrew was to make Jews (and local natives) Israeli - to weld together a polity. The Irish usage of Gaelic was to make individuals not-English - to renounce membership in the Imperial project.
In many ways, the Gaelic project was compulsive - which rather explains why modern Gaelic is not a living, breathing language, but is rather more of a liturgical language in the Irish civic religion, and seems to be used primarily for official purposes and high-cultural demonstrations of linguistic virtue.
Really, if I had to deal with the Irish political culture on a day-to-day basis, I might find myself searching for a new Empire, a new Imperium, to sweep away the petty cultural fascisms. I might find myself jumping at the chance to drown the Irish state in the post-national universality of the European Union, no matter how idiotic or obnoxious d'Estang's phonebook of a constitutional draft might be.
First of all, I don't think that Easterbrook would actually argue in favor of enforced monolingualism. He doesn't strike me as that sort of guy - but I will have to find a copy of the full, unexcerpted piece to double-check my assumptions. The excerpts seem to suggest that he's arguing for benign neglect - an absence of celebration of microculture. Musgrave, the irate Irishman, talks as if he's infuriated by this suggestion, but then proceeds to give an account of the Gaelic League, and Irish nationalism's obnoxious use of Gaelic, which does everything but march across a Pyongyang stadium waving flags in synchronized-uniformed-proletarian-crowd fashion to convince me that the politics associated with minority language and nationalities based on minority languages are noxious, fruitless, and scary.
There are two examples of modern nation-states which have used an artificially-resurrected language, reclaimed from the bin of history, as mortar for their new nationalities - Ireland and Israel. Israel's self-invention through the reintroduction of Hebrew makes perfect sense to me, really. The various Jews, Christians, and Muslims who transformed the bulk of the British mandate of Palestine into the nation-state Israel didn't share a common lingua franca. The local Jews, Christians, and Muslims spoke Arabic, as did the Sephardic Jews who fled the Arabic pogroms of the late 1940s. The European Jewish settlers, and later refugees from the Shoah and American Jewish settlers after the founding, however, spoke no such thing. They spoke Yiddish, or English, or French, or Russian, or whatever. The reintroduction of Hebrew, a liturgical language not used in daily life, anywhere, prior to the Zionist foundations of the late Nineteenth Century, provided a common difficulty - the learning of a new language which didn't politically advantage any of the linguistic factions involved in the founding. It was a common linguistic gathering-point for a polyglot collective defined not by language, but religion, ethnicity, and accident.
The Irish-Gaelic counterexample, however, is a completely different story. Here, we are presented by the example of a colonial population, mostly absorbed into the dominant culture, in which the original language is a rural remnant on the decline, even in the countryside. Everybody either speaks the lingua franca, or aspires to do so, for social and economic reasons. The political re-introduction of the remnant-minority was used as part of a non-rational program of cultural idolatry - ancestor-worship through a dying language. There was no need to cement together populations divided by language, because they were already speaking the same, dominant, imperial language - there was just a minority who spoke something else while at home. Note in Musgrave's account, that it wasn't the rural speakers of Gaelic who typically pushed the nationalist-adoption of the language, but rather, academics and middle-class revolutionaries and radicals who saw that adaptation as a form of exclusion, of definition.
The Irish use of Gaelic was not inclusive, but rather analytical - not centripetal, but centrifugal. The Israeli usage of Hebrew was to make Jews (and local natives) Israeli - to weld together a polity. The Irish usage of Gaelic was to make individuals not-English - to renounce membership in the Imperial project.
In many ways, the Gaelic project was compulsive - which rather explains why modern Gaelic is not a living, breathing language, but is rather more of a liturgical language in the Irish civic religion, and seems to be used primarily for official purposes and high-cultural demonstrations of linguistic virtue.
Really, if I had to deal with the Irish political culture on a day-to-day basis, I might find myself searching for a new Empire, a new Imperium, to sweep away the petty cultural fascisms. I might find myself jumping at the chance to drown the Irish state in the post-national universality of the European Union, no matter how idiotic or obnoxious d'Estang's phonebook of a constitutional draft might be.
Friday, February 18, 2005
Sigh. Much better discussion of Steven Gould's Jumper and Reflex than my lame and halting blather. I suppose it might help if I would actually go and read the Count of Monte Cristo one of these days...
UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED.
Sadly, the actual post links seem to be dead. Where is my fix of Robert McElwaine madness?
Damn your criminal Armenian grandparents! Now I have to go look up Hasan B. Mutlu/Achmed Cosar/Serdar Argic.
Sadly, the actual post links seem to be dead. Where is my fix of Robert McElwaine madness?
Damn your criminal Armenian grandparents! Now I have to go look up Hasan B. Mutlu/Achmed Cosar/Serdar Argic.
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