Salon’s Tehran dispatch, “The regime shows us movies”:

In Tehran, state television’s Channel Two is putting on a “Lord of the Rings” marathon, part of a bigger push to keep us busy. Movie mad and immunized from international copyright laws, Iranians are normally treated to one or two Hollywood or European movie nights a week. Now it’s two or three films a day. The message is “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Let’s watch, forget about what’s happened, never mind. Stop dwelling in the past. Look ahead.

Frodo: “I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish that none of this had happened.”

Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”…

Who picked this film? I start to suspect that there is a subversive soul manning the controls at Seda va Sima, AKA the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. It is way too easy to play with the film, to draw comparisons to what is happening in real life…

On the television screen, Boromir, human of Aragon, falls. He dies an honorable death defending the lives of his compatriots.

“In edame dare.” This is to be continued. The phrase has become our hesitant slogan, our phrase of reassurance. “In edame dare.” People are not going to let up so easily.

God. Wait until they get to the Battle of Gondor.

A Continuation of Book I…

Now when the child of morning, rosy-fingered Two or Two-Thirtyish, appeared, Sanford rose and dressed himself. He bound his sandals on to his comely feet, girded his flag pin about his shoulder, and left his room looking like an immortal god. He at once sent the criers round to call the people in assembly, so they called them and the people gathered thereon; then, when they were got together, he went to the place of assembly comb in hand- not alone, for his two aides went with him, for his wife would not go for fear of looking like Silda Spitzer or Dina McGreevey. Minerva endowed Sanford with a presence of such divine comeliness that all marvelled at him as he went by, and when he took his place at the podium, even the oldest councillors made way for him.

Sanford rose at once, for he was bursting with what he had to say. He stood in the middle of the assembly and the good herald Pisenor brought him the microphone. Then, beginning in media res, “Sir,” said he, “it is I, as you will shortly learn, who have convened you, for it is I who am the most aggrieved. I had not got wind of any trip to Appalachia about which I would warn you, but I do love hiking there. I used to organize hiking trips, actually, when I was in high school. I would get a soccer coach or a football coach to act as chaperone, and then I’d get folks to pay me 60 bucks each, or whatever it was, to take the trip, and then off we’d go and have these great adventures on the Appalachian Trail…”

Here Sanford began to ramble. Finally, he returned to the matter at hand. “But I guess where I’m trying to go with this is that there are moral absolutes and that the law of the gods indeed is there to protect you from yourself, and there are consequences if you breach that, even if you tie yourself to the mast and plug your security detail’s ears with wax so you can hear the sirens’ song. Killing the sun’s oxen is a consequence. This press conference is a consequence.

“My grieveance is purely personal, and turns on two great misfortunes which have fallen upon my house. The first apology is to my excellent wife, who was chief among all you here present in being dicked around with by me. She was made to tell a ridiculous story about my going ‘to be alone,’ ‘to write,’ ‘to be away from my boys’ on Fathers’ Day.

“I would also apologize to my staff, because as much as I did talk about going to Argos, Rome, or the Appalachian Trail — those were each one of the original scenarios that I’d thrown out to Mary Neil, that isn’t what — where I ended up. And so I let them down by creating a fiction with regard to where I was going, which means that I had then, in turn, given as much as they relied on that fanciful song of the bards, let down people that I represent across the Peloponnese. And so I want to apologize to my staff and I want to apologize to anyone who took in a poor wandering stranger who was secretly a war machine, anybody who lives in Carolina, for the way that I let them down.

“But the last is much more serious, and ere long will be the utter ruin of my career. The press, all the chief men among them, who thought I might work in the White House someday, are pestering my chief of staff to verify that I am a real, live, Republican. They are afraid to go to Mitt Romney, asking him to choose the one he likes best, and to provide interviews to them, but day by day they keep hanging about my office, sacrificing our oxen, sheep, and fat goats for their banquets, never giving so much as a thought that someone may desperately need a break from the bubble wherein every word, every moment is recorded — just to completely break out of it, and go off and have adventures, just fly different places around the world; get myself a job; carry a hundred dollars emergency money, and either find a job there with the locals and come back, or come on home. This is not justifying, because, again, what I did was wrong, period, end of story. But still… I mean, hey. It’s a bubble.

“No national political career can stand such recklessness; we Republicans have now no Reagan to ward off harm from our doors, and I cannot hold my own against it all. I shall never all my days be as good a man as he was, still I would indeed defend myself if I had power to do so, for I cannot stand such treatment any longer; my house is being disgraced and ruined. Have respect, therefore, to your own consciences and to public opinion. Fear, too, the wrath of heaven, lest the gods should be displeased and turn upon you. I pray you by Jove and Themis, who is the beginning and the end of councils, [do not] hold back, my friends, and leave me singlehanded- unless it be that my brave father George W. Bush did some wrong to the country which you would now avenge on me, by aiding and abetting these rumors, which are all true. Moreover, if I am to be eaten out of house and home at all, I had rather go ahead and caress some erotic curve of the hips in Argentina, for I could then take action to some purpose, and serve Meet the Press with notices that I’ve split the country to get my Johnson wet, whereas now I have no remedy.

“And so I’ve been back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And the one thing that you really find is that you absolutely want resolution.

“And so oddly enough, I spent the last five days of my life crying in Argentina, so I could repeat it when I came back here in saying, you know, while indeed from a heart level, there was something real, there in Argentina with Calypso, it was a place based on the relationship I had as host of the feasts to the people of Carolina, based on my sons, based on my wife, based on where I was in my life’s journey, based on where she was as measured by the fates, a place I couldn’t go and she couldn’t go.

“And that is, I suspect, a continual process all through life, of getting one’s heart right in life. And so I would never stand before you as one who just says, by Zeus, I’m completely right with regard to my heart on all things.”

“But what I would say is, I’m committed to trying to get my heart right. Because the one thing that — (and here the goddess made his voice inaudible) — and all others have told me is that the odyssey that we’re all on in life is with regard to heart, not what I want or what you want but, in other words, indeed this larger notion of truly trying to put other people first.”

With this Sanford dashed his staff to the ground and burst into tears. Every one was very sorry for him, but they all sat still and no one ventured to make him an angry answer, save only Antinous, who spoke thus:

“Sanford, insolent braggart that you are, how dare you try to throw the blame upon us members of the press? It is the Republicans’ fault not ours, for they are very artful dudes. These eight years past, and close on twelve, they have been driving us out of our minds, by encouraging each one of us, and sending him messages without meaning one word of what she says. And then there was that other trick they played us. They set up a great tambour frame in the press room, and began to work on an enormous piece of fine needlework, with a picture of WMDs in Iraq. ‘Sweet hearts,’ said Rove, Cheney, and Bush, ‘Al-Qaeda is indeed dead, or at least sidelined; but still do not press me to marry again immediately, wait- for I would not have skill in needlework perish unrecorded- till I have completed an invasion of Saddam’s country, to be in readiness against the time when he might maybe attack us, or maybe someone else. He is very rich with chemical and even nuclear weapons, and the soccer moms of the nation will talk if he is laid out without a pall.’

“This was what they said, and we assented; whereon we could see them working on their great web of intelligence all day long, but at night they would unpick the stitches again, saying they were fooled by the CIA. They fooled us in this way for three years and we never found them out, but as time wore on and she was now in her fourth year, one of their aides who knew what they were doing told us, and we caught them in the act of trying to cover up their work with tortured confessions, so they had to get us to think that torture was actually okay, whether it really was torture or no.

“And when you’re not lying to us about war, you’re picking up undercover officers in airport bathrooms, frequenting prostitutes, having affairs with your staffers’ wives, or hitting on the underage interns. What are you guys, Democrats?

“The press, therefore, makes you this answer, that both you and the Republicans may understand-‘Quit dicking around with us, and we might not think that everything you tell us is a fucking lie’; for I do not know what will happen if you go on plaguing us much longer with the airs you gives yourself on the score of the accomplishments you made, and how you kept the country safe because Cheney is so clever. We never yet heard of such a Republican; we know all about Gonzales, Brownie, Miers, and the famous hacks of old, but they were nothing to Sarah Palin, any one of them. It was not fair of Palin to treat us in that way, making us think she was actually a serious national candidate; and as long as the Republicans continue in the mind with which heaven has now apparently endowed them, so long shall we go on calling you on your obvious bullshit; and I do not see why you should change, for you still get all the honour and glory, and it is we who pay for it, not them. Understand, then, that we will not go back to our lands in New York or Washington, neither here nor elsewhere, till you, your wife, your lover, your sons, your staffers, and everyone who knew anything about this has made their choice and given an exclusive interview and (we can hope) incriminating photos and juicy anecdotes to some one or other of us.”

To be Continued…

“The odyssey that we’re all on in life is with regard to heart.” – Governor Mark Sanford, June 24, 2009

Sing, O muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the school system of South Carolina. Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own ass and bring his staff safely home; but do what he might he could not save his staff, for they perished through their own sheer folly in telling one lie after another to the Sun-god The Press; so the god prevented them from ever reaching better jobs in Washington. Tell me, too, about all these things, O daughter of Jove, from whatsoever liveblog you may know them.

So now all who escaped death in elections or by men’s room encounters had got safely home except Sanford, and he, though he was longing to return to his wife and country (on Fathers’ Day, no less), was detained by the goddess Calypso, who had got him in Buenos Aires, into a large condominium, and wanted to marry him. But as the days went by, there came a time when the gods settled that he should go back to Carolina; even then, however, when he was among his own people, his troubles were not yet over; nevertheless all the gods had now begun to pity him except Neptune, who still persecuted him without ceasing and would not let him get away with a bullshit story about just where the hell he’d been.

…

The press secretary was still singing, and his hearers sat rapt in silence as he told the sad tale of long hiking trip in the Appalachians, and the ills Minerva had laid upon the Republicans. Jenny, daughter of Icarius, heard his song from her room upstairs, and came down by the great staircase, not alone, but attended by two of her handmaids. When she reached the press corps she stood by one of the bearing posts that supported the roof of the cloisters with a staid maiden on either side of her. She held a veil, moreover, before her face, and was weeping bitterly.

“Douchebag,” she cried, “you know many another feat of Governors and Senators, such as poets love to celebrate. Sing the press some one of these, and let them write their stories in silence, but cease this sad tale, for it breaks my sorrowful heart, and reminds me of my lost husband whom I mourn ever without ceasing, and whose name was great over all the Carolinas and Sullivan’s Island.”

“Mother,” answered the governor’s son, confusingly also named Marshall, “let the douche sing what he has a mind to; staff members do not make the ills they sing of; it is Jove, not they, who makes them, and who sends weal or woe upon men according to his own good pleasure. This fellow means no harm by singing the ill-fated woes of the Republicans, for people always applaud the latest songs most warmly. Make up your mind to it and bear it; Sanford is not the only man who never came back from sex scandals, but many another went down as well as he. Go, then, within the house and busy yourself with your daily duties, your loom, your distaff, and the ordering of your servants; for speech is man’s matter, and mine above all others- for it is I who am master here.”

She went wondering back into the house, and laid her son’s saying in her heart. Then, going upstairs with her handmaids into her room, she mourned her dear husband till Minerva shed sweet sleep over her eyes. But the press were clamorous throughout the covered cloisters, and prayed each one that he might receive her exclusive interview.

Then Marshall the Younger spoke, “Shameless,” he cried, “and insolent reporters, let us feast at our pleasure now, and let there be no brawling, for it is a rare thing to hear a man with such a divine voice as this douchebag has; but in the morning, meet us at a full press conference that we may give you formal notice to depart, and feast at another family’s misery, turn and turn about, at your own cost. If on the other hand you choose to persist in spunging upon one man, heaven help me, but Jove shall reckon with you in full, and when you fall in Gannett’s forthcoming bankruptcies there shall be no man to avenge you.”

The press members bit their lips as they heard him, and marvelled at the boldness of his speech. Then, Antinous, reporter from the Washington Post, said, “The gods seem to have given you lessons in bluster and tall talking; may Jove never grant you to be a Presidential hopeful as your father was before you.”

To be Continued…

3000th post! This demands a party.

Just another seven light years to go!

If you hang around with me long enough that we get a chance to go to a fancy restaurant together, you might get to hear this parable. It used to be possible to be a professional waiter – one who thought of service as a career. And the service you received was service from a career professional. But as wages declined, so did service. A rotating cast of college students and twentysomethings can sometimes surprise you with their talent or enthusiasm, but they can’t make a career of it. You come in, you do your best, and you rotate out, and what you end up with are a lot of chain restaurants where it’s good to be a college student or twenty-something, good to drink a lot and eat a lot, but comparatively few places were you can feel like a gourmand.

The New Yorker’s The Book Bench tells a similar story about wage cuts among younger workers in the publishing industry. The impetus to the post are cuts at William Morris, where entry-level workers saw their pay cut from 13.50/hour to 9.50/hour.

Tiny salaries in the low ranks of publishing are miserable for the young workers, but they’re probably worse for literature (You can insert “movies” for “literature,” if that’s the prism through which you want to read this.) It’s a truism of the industry that most of these jobs are held by people who can afford them—people with some parental support and no student loans. Often they’ve had unpaid internships, that most pernicious example of class privilege. Their superiors are the same people, ten years later. They—we!—are smart, cultured people with good intentions, but it’s easy to see how this narrow range could lead to a blinkered view of literature.

So, if you’re sick of coming-of-age novels about comfortable young men, a little solidarity with the lowly assistants might help.

Although now I’m scratching my head: the privilege thing I get, but are publishing companies and talent agencies overrun by dudes? I’ve never gotten that vibe.

Caleb Crain (from Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, The New Yorker, etc.) has self-published a collection of his blog posts, titled The Wreck of the Henry Clay:

With all the time and energy you’ve squandered on that blog, you could have written a book. So goes the self-reproach, and indeed, the book in question turns out to be 449 pages long…

All of the posts and essays included in The Wreck of the Henry Clay are available free already on this blog, so why should you buy it? I have no idea! I have given up trying to understand the internet’s economics, but maybe it’ll be like buying ringtones versus stealing MP3s? Who knows. It took a surprising amount of time to turn several hundred blog posts into a several-hundred-page book, so perhaps some of you will be willing to pay me for my PDF-creating skills? As I said, no idea. Let’s not call this “self-published,” by the way. That has a kind of disreputable sound. It’s a chapbook, all right? Why am I doing this? I saw not long ago that someone had published a book of his Twitters, and I felt I was in danger of being behindhand. I am hereby restored to the bleeding edge. Also, now, when the electromagnetic-pulse device is detonated, I will be the only blogger in America with backup. And of course I’m looking forward to kicking back while the cold, hard internet cash at last streams in.

Of course, Snarkmarket, too, has its own experiment in meatspace self-publishing on the way…

My new favorite blog is Gary Dexter’s How books got their titles. Dexter gives the biographies (nomographies?) of famous books according to the following criteria:

1) the title should not be explicable simply by reading the text of the book itself;

2) each title should be the title of a book or play that has been published as such (rather than e.g. a poem or story that appears as part of a collection);

3) no quotations as titles.

Here’s the story of Freud’s The Ego and the Id, part of the title and concept of which was adapted from George Groddeck’s The Book of the It:

In the early years of psychoanalysis, practitioners were very anxious to establish their respectability as legitimate medical men. This was still an age of sexual puritanism, in which the sexual organs and sexual functions were not generally mentioned in polite conversation, and in which sexual categories as we now know them, or think we know them — homosexuality, bisexuality, transvestism, transsexualism — were still at an early and controversial stage of development. In this atmosphere, George Groddeck delivered a notorious speech to the congress of psychoanalysts at The Hague in 1920, opening his address with the words: “I am a wild analyst.” This was somewhat crass. Analysts were regarded by the public as “wild” already: it was exactly the image the profession wished to avoid. In his speech Groddeck went on to develop the idea that unconscious forces were the rulers of the human organism: even bodily diseases were caused by unconscious conflicts and neuroses. Groddeck moreover insisted on bringing his mistress to conferences and was the author of a risqu

For my money, the best movie about fatherhood is Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard’s Paris, Texas:

Travis (played by Harry Dean Stanton) emerges in the deserts of West Texas without any memory or speech. A doctor contacts his brother Walt, and driving back to California, Travis slowly begins to open up. Walt likewise reveals that he and his wife Anne have been raising Travis’s young son Hunter since shortly after Travis originally disappeared. Travis and Hunter then go to find Hunter’s mother, Jane (Nastassja Kinski), who’s likewise vanished.

Here’s a favorite exchange, taken from the screenplay [lightly formatted by me]:

Walt: Trav, I need to talk to you a little bit about Hunter.

Travis: How old is he now?

W: He’s eight in January.

T: He’s seven, then.

W: Yeah. [Pause] But see what I want to talk about is uh … Well, he’s-he’s like part of the family now. Anne and me are like his parents now.

T: Anne’s your wife?

W: Yeah. You remember her, don’t you?

T: No. [Pause.] Does he think that you are his father?

W: Well … Anne told him you were coming.

T:Well who does he think I am?

W: I-I told him you are his father. But see … Well, you’ve been gone a long time, Trav.

T: How long have I been gone, do you know?

W: Four years.

T: Is four years a long time?

W: Well, it is for a little boy. It’s half his life.

T: Half a boy’s life. [Pause.] I remember now!

W: What?

T: Why I bought that land.

W: Oh, Why?

T: Well … Mama once told me that uh … that’s where she and Daddy … first … made love.

W: Oh, in Paris, Texas?

T: Yeah.

W: She told you that?

T: Yeah. [Pause.] So … I figured that that’s where I-I have began. [Pause] I mean me, Travis Clay Henderson. They named me that. [Pause.] I started out there.

W: Paris, Texas, huh?

T: Yeah.

W: So you think maybe you were conceived there?

T: Yeah.

W: You could be right, Travis.

T: Daddy always had a joke about it.

W: What was the joke?

T: He’s uh … he would introduce Mama… as the girl he met in Paris. Then he’d waited uh … before he said “Texas” till everybody thought that … he meant … he would wait before he said “Texas” till everybody thought … after everyone thought he was talking about Paris, France. He always laughed real hard about it.

This movie can (and should) wreck you, it’s that good.

In my back-and-forth with Robin about publishers’ web sites hosting blogs by their writers, I simply assumed that everybody had read these four pieces, forgetting that I hadn’t blogged about them yet! Here’s my background.

• Macy Halford, “Blogademia“
• Chronicle of Higher Ed, Forum on Scholarly Publishing
• Peter J. Dougherty, “A Manifesto For Scholarly Publishing“
• Benjamin Kunkel, “Lingering“

The Chronicle Forum is particularly worth reading, especially the section at the end on new trends in scholarly writing. Here’s one excerpt from Alan Thomas at University of Chicago Press:

There has been a welcome trend, still continuing, for scholars to use the security of tenure to frame book projects for wider audiences within the academy, and sometimes outside it. But for first books, things haven’t changed much: The habit of writing to satisfy a dissertation committee carries over into writing to satisfy later professional gatekeepers, without enough regard for the book’s potential audience. The peer-review process is sometimes to blame for that (well-meaning readers’ reports sometimes have the effect of re-dissertationizing a first book), and we as editors need to help authors sort the good suggestions from the bad. One trend I don’t see, but would like to, is greater attention to writing skills in graduate school. When I speak to groups of grad students, I always urge them to cultivate an ability to write in several registers (through book reviews, blogs, journalism, and so on), even as they write their dissertations.

Doug Sery at MIT press also notes that “[t]here seems to be a movement afoot to change the evaluation criteria used by universities for promotion and tenure. Specifically, there is a desire among some academics to allow participation in blogs, online journals, and other new media to count toward their promotion and tenure cases,” while Doug Armato at Minnesota writes, “I see the blog form moving into scholarship through more diarylike texts. There is also a more European-influenced urge to write speculative scholarly essays or meditations with minimal footnotes and apparatus.”

To me, the most natural way to convince tenure committees to count participation in new media is to get university presses to sponsor it, and the most natural way for university presses to help use new media to get better books is to help shape how it’s done. University presses hosting and publishing blogs is Pareto-optimal.

In fact, I think this is going in my own essay on academia in 2029.

I should have read Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist a long time ago. Jeffrey J Cohen’s excerpt at In the Middle just bumped it to the top of my list. Here’s Cohen:

Whereas C. P. Snow argued in 1959 that we require a third culture, one that bridge the noncommunicating realms of art and science, those scientists who have self-appointed themselves as this culture (especially Steven Pinker) carry a fair amount of animus towards the humanities, believing it enough if they communicate their science directly to the masses. Lehrer argues that not only does such a third culture misrepresent what Snow imagined, it often gets the humanists wrong (and misapprehends their artistic sources as well) by not having listened or read attentively. Lehrer therefore calls for a fourth culture, a space of true collaboration, and it is that call I’d like to quote this morning.

And here’s Lehrer (as quoted by JJC):

[A fourth culture] seeks to discover the relationships between the humanities and the sciences. This fourth culture, much closer in concept to Snow’s original definition (and embodied by works like [Ian McEwan’s] Saturday), will ignore arbitrary intellectual boundaries, seeking instead to blur the lines that separate. It will freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and humanities, and will focus on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual experience. It will take a pragmatic view of truth, and it will judge truth not by its origins but by its usefulness. What does this novel or experiment or poem or protein teach us about ourselves? How does it help us to understand who we are? What long-standing problem has been solved? … While science will always be our primary method of investigating the universe, it is naïve to think that science alone can solve everything itself, or that everything can even be solved … When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art … No knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge.

For my part — and it’s taken me a looooong time to come around to this view — I think one of the paradigmatic approaches to this problem of disciplinary edges is to spend a lot of time thinking about media. You simply HAVE to think about the brain, the body, culture, languages and codes, history, society, politics, commerce. Guys like Pinker want to settle old scores, spend a lot of time worrying about relativism. The people who are thinking seriously about media (inside and outside of the academy) have already moved on.