In Dreams

Just had a half-dream (still dreaming, drifting into a waking state) in which I received a letter that I couldn't finish reading. The part of me that was waking up tried to force my dreaming self to finish creating the letter, but one of us couldn't bring myself to finish writing it, or to finish reading it.

This Is Where It Is Going

Bad times in my head around here.

I'm tired and alone and angry. At the world and (some of) the people around me and at myself and at my life.

I feel like I'm straining to keep something from getting out.

I'm coming out of the most ridiculously compressed period of overwork I've ever experienced - 40 consecutive days in the office, working nonstop on one project, 5-6 hours a day on the weekends and 11-12 hours during the week - and by the end all that was keeping me going was my continually escalating contempt and rage for the work and the people making me do it (not the people in my company). By the end I promised myself that when the project was over, in the new year I'd commit to looking for another job because I hated the person I was becoming inside (and outside; I threw away a year of halting progress on my weight and am back to about 245 pounds). Instead I accepted a move to a different position and a fat raise (not yet in effect, sadly).

I have nothing I want in my life except a nice computer and a Fender P-Bass.

I'm smart enough and controlled enough that I'm not really afraid I'll do something stupid, but I'm living every day with the feeling that I'm approaching something precipitous.

I Hope He Burns In The Hell I Don't Really Believe In Anymore

It's not the sadly bigoted but predictable opening gambit here that makes me apoplectic; hostility to organized gay tourist groups is idiotic but I'm not so surprised. What puts me over the top is:

I consider if someone is homosexual, it is a provocation and an abuse of this place. Try to go to a mosque if you are not Muslim. It is abuse of our buildings and our religion because the church interprets our religion that it is not ethical. We expect respect of our church as we expect to respect that a person does not have to belong to the Catholic Church. If you have different ideas, go to a different location.

The Catholic Church I grew up in had a small leaflet with every hymnal in the pews, which in addition to providing the schedule of services and other such items had a few FAQs (before that was common parlance) in the back, one of the questions being something like "is it appropriate for me to observe or partake in a mass if I am not a Catholic?" The answer was something along the lines of:

Our church is of course welcoming to visitors of all faiths and creeds, whether they be guests of a member or simply exploring the nature of Catholicism. We ask that non-Catholics refrain from partaking in the Communion, as we consider it a holy sacrament, but are always pleased to have visitors to our church.

THAT is the church that I loved as a child, and if I were ever to return to Catholicism, that is the church of which I would be a member.

__________

Veteran's Day, né Armistice Day, is lately most notable to me for being the anniversary of my (other, paternal) grandfather's death. He himself was a veteran, during but not of World War II, as he never saw a foreign theater. Perhaps this is why, or some other reason, I was in a state such that, on seeing this image my eyes reddened and my throat swelled shut. "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" is one of the Oldest Lies, but I remain both moved and confounded by the service and sacrifice offered up by so many, both willingly and under duress, for causes noble, amoral, and wicked.

My faith in God is largely absent (so I should stay out of Bishop Kaleta's church) and my admiration of war long banished since boyhood, but the poetically simple message on the monument still moves me.

Here rests in honored glory an American soldier. known but to God.

Place Holder

I was going to throw up something rather substantive this weekend, but instead I was occupied with something I might write about in the future. Or not. (It was boring, don't worry.) Two quick thoughts:

(1) I generally get annoyed when people cross subjective and objective types of reaction to art - actually, it pisses me off to an unreasonable degree. I especially find it annoying when people express a strong subjective opinion as objective fact, especially immediately after someone expresses exactly the opposite opinion. This bugs me most, because it seems most misplaced, with acting. If someone's just said that Joshua Jackson is really good on Fringe, and your experience is that he's an unwatchably bad actor, shouldn't you consider the fact that lots of people disagree? Shouldn't you say "Jackson just doesn't work for me, for reasons x, y, and z, and I'm somewhat perplexed that people think he's really good?" Why would you say "Joshua Jackson is wrecking this show with a horrible performance"?

I think I notice it here most because I often seem, on the one hand, less bothered by performances other people find bland or unconvincing, and on the other hand not especially impressed with performances other people thought were transcendent. This surely has to do with my own experience as an actor, which gave me lots of opinions (not necessarily any insight, though! - I wouldn't claim for a heartbeat to speak for other actors, or actors in general). So when everyone's bagging Anna Torv's performance in the pilot of Fringe, which I watched yesterday, I didn't feel one way or the other about it. And (uh oh!) when everyone was applauding Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, I wasn't especially impressed. I'm not going to be the "provocative" guy who claims that Ledger only got the acclaim because he died - I don't think that's true, except perhaps at the margins. And I thought the Joker character was very well portrayed/presented/whatever onscreen. It was very effective, and the thing that worked best about the movie for me.* But I felt a lot of it had to do with the writing and the costume and the makeup. Ledger's performance, in my opinion, was very very very good, and a lesser actor would have made a hash of it, but once you clear the hurdle of someone attempting to ham it up, I just don't think it was very hard. I don't think you needed to provide what the film required. There's multiple layers and complexities here - you could point out that much of the time a really great movie doesn't require Great Acting, and Great Acting in the way we understand it can seem kind of awkward and forced, which is how lots of people received, e.g., Sean Penn in Mystic River - but I just feel like whatever Ledger's considerable talents and potential, playing The Joker didn't sratch the surface. I have a suspicion that any of the other actors considered for the role would've evoked more or less a similar response. But all of that has to be filtered through my personal conviction that playing scary, creepy, and scarily creepily nuts isn't a particularly difficult thing to do, and that while Anthony Hopkins is enjoyable as Hannibal Lecter, he's just kind of dicking around artistically compared to something like Remains of the Day. (Which isn't a bad thing. Different movies have different requirements.)

*Which, incidentally, I liked more than the critics who hated it, but liked less than everyone who wrote hate mail to the critics who hated it; I thought it was inferior in conception and execution to Batman Begins. I have reasons for feeling that way, but they're incidental here and they don't add up to much that I would consider objective - well, I think my reasons are objective, I think it's a fact that the movie's plot doesn't work as well as its predecessor's, but whether that matters to you as much as it did to me is entirely up for grabs. The major reason I think The Godfather, Part II is better than The Godfather is because I think the sequel's story is infinitely superior in its construction - it's an artful structure, for one thing, and it manages to actually have a well-developed and coherent plot, as evidenced by one movie covering several months in some detail and the other one covering almost a decade in isolated scenes.

(2) I'm reading, and this will be entirely unsurprising, Bill Simmons' The Book of Basketball. Two things that I find kind of jarring: (a) typos. Multiple types in the first couple hundred pages. It's really kind of perplexing to me. (b) the book makes basically no concession to the notion that someone unfamiliar with Simmons' column might be reading. If you start reading someone's column it becomes clear, if they have a particular personality or schtick, that you've stepped into an ongoing narrative, sort of like picking up a TV show in season 3. There are things that aren't really going to be explained for you any more. I would've guessed that in writing a gigantic (and so far, very good) book, Simmons might've gone a little out of his way to be more accessible to someone who didn't read his stuff every week. I guess I shouldn't have thought that, since he's said on his press tour that it's basically the same voice he uses for ESPN, but R-rated. (So far I'd call it a soft R. Mild language, drug use, suggestive situations, brief nudity.) So he makes a gimmick of providing fake explanations of his pop culture references for readers in 2025, but much of the ephemera about Simmons' style really would be inaccessible to someone reading in 2025, and some of it would be inaccessible now. Given that one of the delights of the book is that some of the facts he dredges up about the pre-24 hour news era of professional basketball are the sort of thing that require footnotes to say "Seriously, I'm not joking," which make plausible other wild facts which require him to footnote that he is, in fact, joking, it's jarring to find him making other jokes that a somewhat less savvy reader might not realize weren't true. The subject of the book is intended to be somewhat timeless, and in its substantive approach I'd say it is, but a lot of the flourishes sort of float by weirdly; if in a column Simmons talked about the debut of the Ralph Samson Face, even if he had to explain the Sampson reference (which he does in the book), the general schtick is understood for readers of his column previously familiar with the Faces of Derek Lowe, Peyton Manning, etc. I mean, you can sort of work out what's going on, I presume, but it doesn't flow as easily as it does for the experienced Simmons reader. Just think it's an interesting choice; I wonder if it'll affect the perception of the book years down the road. (One of Simmons' reasons for writing the book is that he quite correctly feels that, compared to baseball, there's an embarrassing dearth of quality basketball books, and his pick for the best ever, John Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game, was out of print when I tried to buy it last year.)

Oh God

They are coming. From all angles.

Sometimes You Didn't Know What You Were Looking For

I'm very glad my RSS reader came pre-loaded with a feed to the Wired website. It's been very interesting and informative over the past few months.

This one, about what we're finding at the border of the solar system, is just cool.

This one is really up my Alley of Pet Subjects; it's about how new studies appear to demonstrate that succeeding or failing at activities like field goal kicking, or putting, or shooting a basketball, may directly revise your perception of the size of whatever it is that you're trying to put the relatively small object through. It's a cliche for basketball players who are shooting well (there's another line of inquiry that suggests there is no such thing as a "hot streak" in sports - I tend to come away from reading about the subject with the opinion that people are variously over-interpreting the data or the concept of a hot streak) to say that the hoop starts to look bigger; this is taken as a metaphor for confidence, but it may actually be marginally true! I'm ever fascinated by, and influenced by, information about how the brain mediates our experience of the world. I've remarked recently on several occasions, in several contexts, that I think I'm probably much more likely than the average person to distrust the evidence of my senses, and I have been ever since my 11th grade physics teacher had the class do an exercise which revealed our blind spot. After that, everything I've read or heard about how the brain is interpreting sensory data rather than just opening a window to it has stuck with me. I haven't dragged this back around to metaphysical issues (I was rather unfocused and directionless as a philosophy undergrad, and my nascent interests lay in the realm of ethical and aesthetic inquiry), but this all goes to some very basic Problems of Philosophy shit that I'd probably love to read about.

(Shooting a basketball is funny; you're far enough away that very minor divergences in technique can have disappointingly large effects on the trajectory of your shot, but any experienced player - or a novice with a cheesily inspirational coach - knows that the hoop is actually quite big, big enough to fit two basketballs simultaneously with negative space left over. This isn't as big a ratio as trying to throw a football through a tire swing, but shooting a basketball is easier than putting a spiral on a specific target, or at least that's what I think as someone who knows how to shoot a basketball but throws a wobbly pigskin.)

When the people around me at work became aware of the plight of Falcon, The Auspiciously Named Balloon Boy, I was in the middle of trying not to explode for work-related reasons. People started making funny word-noises, I turned around and saw a colleague was displaying on her computer some streaming video of a big puddle of mylar traveling to the left, and I said something like: "Whu?" I was briefed on what was then thought to be the situation (poor Falcon!) and then I made an exasperated noise and returned to my work, feeling at the moment as though the Balloon Boy was an enemy agent sent to try and provide auxiliary annoyments to hamper my productivity. I would like to think, though, that had I been in a newsroom while this story was being covered for HOURS, without the troubling distraction of new information to interrupt my mylar-obsessed musings, that I'd have started to wonder about some of this.

To Be Clear

Apparently various "moderate Democrats" are concern-trolling that President Obama should reject the Nobel Prize as a gesture of humility and/or to try and mitigate the negative reaction from the sort of people who are going to be affirmatively upset that he won it in the first place.

That's not at all what I was on about; the sort of people who are affirmatively upset aren't the sort of people who can be mitigated. It's also unnecessary for him to demonstrate any more humility than he already has in his remarks on the subject. Outright giving your award to someone else is kind of a weird maneuver.

Rather I intended to suggest that by the lights of the award's purpose he does not deserve it (more in a minute) but also intended to imply, but then removed the text which would make it clear, that such rejection would be not an act of humility but an act of rejection. Indulge the idea that you've always disdained [award show of your choice] but that one day you are in fact nominated for such an award. Well, it's very nice of them to be so sweet, but presumably you might entertain the idea of not showing up because you really don't give a fuck about the [awards] and couldn't really respect it if you were to receive one. That's what I was intending to suggest by noting that the Nobels seem like the sort of thing you can't just politely avoid the way a musician might skip the Grammys.

Back to the issue of whether President Obama deserves the award; the prize-giving committee has noted that there is a tradition of giving the award in a hopeful spirit, and that this is what they intended by honoring President Obama. My response would be that if the Nobel Prize is intended to be more than simply a pat on the back and a speech - whether for accomplishments achieved or anticipated - it is squandered in this case. The Nobel prize comes with publicity and money, neither of which are any help to Obama: his profile cannot be made any higher than it already is, weight cannot be added to the force of his words (in this way the Prize functions as an acknowledgment that Europeans like him, which we already knew, rather than the pleasant revelation of same), and whatever agenda he chooses to pursue internationally could not be accorded more attention than whatever naturally pertains to someone who happens to be the President of the United States, and in particular a President who everybody knows is well admired by the sort of international set that might care about Nobel Prizes. And of course he's going to donate the money to charity, because he doesn't really have any other use for it; he can't particularly do anything with it during office (nor does he need to) and on leaving office the odds are that he's going to become very, very rich very, very quickly, and his fundraising capabilities for anything like the Clinton Global Initiative are going to vastly outstrip the value of the prize money, which I believe is about $1.5 million.

Instead, the same attention and money could have been directed towards someone who would actually be in a position to benefit from it, whose cause would gain notoriety and admiration on the international stage, who could use the funds productively in its furtherance, and whose voice, validated by the Nobel committee (for whatever that's worth), could be lent a weight it would otherwise lack. This is basically the same theory behind an argument in the jazz community that says people shouldn't give prizes to the likes of Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, because they're not going to benefit from the attention or funds involved, whereas a MacArthur Grant can make a huge difference in the life of a scuffling young musician. I don't know if it's actually true that Hancock and Shorter can't do anything productive with $500k (I have no idea how much money either one has, although both had a period where they approached mainstream commercial success during the 1970s), but I think the same logic applies, perhaps more forcefully, to the subject of the Peace Prize. (With exceptions noted perhaps for the recognition of truly astounding accomplishments by people who don't necessarily require the attention; I think it's the thin nature of the argument for Obama that lays bare the somewhat perverse logic behind so many Prize recipients to begin with).

Srsly?

It's pretty clear that President Obama hasn't yet done anything that makes it worth honoring him, so to speak, with the Nobel Peace Prize; it's frankly kind of embarrassing and possibly condescending that he's getting an award for basically showing up and maintaining bodily homeostasis for a while, especially since he's in the middle of not exactly doing everything possible to end the two wars he's currently conducting.

I suspect, however, that the rules for responding to a Nobel Committee invitation are much like the rules for responding to an invitation from a head of state; as I believe Miss Manners once said, there is absolutely no polite way to decline, because declining is the sort of thing that just isn't done.

Aw. kward.

(NB: I have no idea, and no interest in figuring out, how President Obama himself feels about this; I wouldn't be surprised at all if he felt the way I do, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if he thought he was totally deserving. Guys who run for President, even guys for whom I happily vote, are not guys with normally equilibrated egos.)

UPDATE TO ADD

Also, if the Nobel folks liked Obama so much and wanted to see him do Peace Prize worthy things they should've taken the twelve minutes to learn about American domestic politics and realize that he's about to gain a lot of negative attention for this. And be made fun of a lot, even though he had nothing to do with it. Visualize the facepalm graphic of your choice here.

But Alas, I Have Left The Life Of The Mind

Somehow I do not think that, had I become a graduate student and thereby a Teacher's Assistant, this would have happened to me.

Best line: "I had hoped you would have gotten the hint by now."