Canada: Nation or notion?

I know, I know: this debate between Malcolm Gladwell (left) and Adam Gopnik happened a while ago. (Full coverage by Maclean's, the sponsor, here.) But they just played it on CBC's Ideas last night in its entirety, and I listened to it and drank, sitting in my green chair, two glasses of Cono Sur merlot, on sale this week for $10.47 a bottle at the LCB.

By their applause, the crowd voted Gopnik the winner—I think because he was 35 per cent funnier. Both were powerfully interesting, though, and, I have to admit, a touch whinier than I'd have hoped. Below are the two primary arguments; judge for yourself.

(In his intro of the two writers, Maclean's national editor Andrew Coyne used a qualifier in front of "unique." Yikes.)

Friday miscellany

I still read the magazine. These long absences as a sign not of a slackening regard for you, dear reader, but of a daunting work schedule. I know, I know: how long does it take to blog?

Anyway, the others are in a sales meeting right now—on the e-invite I was listed as "optional"; needless to say I'm still here—and so I've stolen a few moments, in the now wonderfully deserted digital media bullpen, to give you a few recent thoughts about New Yorker articles that come to mind.

—The one about CTGZ, the Chinese propagandist (above) with piles of books all over his dorm room ("Angry youth," by Evan Osnos; July 28th):

1) Why isn't Peter Hessler (one of my favorites, and a writer for whom I could work up [okay, already feel] a dark mixture of envy and admiration for) covering this story?

2) His video sucked; Osnos's description of it does it way too much poetic justice. It looks exactly like something you'd produce on Windows Movie Maker in a half hour's patriotic arousal—which isn't to say it fails as propaganda. I watched it with a Mainland Chinese colleague, who, as it ran its six minutes, more and more got a sheen of "See?" and indignation about her, even as I snorted at the amateurishness and paranoia, crescendoing drums and strings.

—The one about the surfer dude who may have cracked the Theory of Everything ("Surfing the universe," by Benjamin Wallace-Wells; July 21st):

1) Everybody loves the idea of the rogue intellectual who comes in from the hinterland and solves the unsolvable problem. I'd never given a full thought to the idea that, within an academic discipline, proponents of the ascendant theory—in the particle-physics case, string theory—hold sway and make things miserable for dissenters like Garrett Lisi, this article's central character. I have a friend in linguistics who says it's this way with Chomskians (Chomskiites?) and Universal Grammar at the moment. That debate harks back, of course, to John Colapinto's fantastic (top ten, easily) article about the Piraha, who live in the Amazon rain forest

2) The dude has a novel way of consoling himself: "When Lisi encounters a physicist of his own age whose skill he envies, he reminds himself that he is a better surfer. When he comes across a better surfer, he thinks, I’m much better at equations." And I suppose if he comes across an older, better physicist and surfer, he thinks, "I'm younger and hotter." Or if it's a younger, hotter better physicist and surfer, he thinks, "I am distinguished in my carriage."

We all play this handicapping game in our minds, though, no? What do you say to yourself? (Ashamed as I am to admit it, one of mine once had to do with proficiency at golf. Now it's all gerunds and how well I hold my liquor.)

—The one in which Paul Simms shows, once again, that he's far and away the funniest bastard doing Shouts & Murmurs ("Stump speech," July 28th), with occasional competition from Jack Handey:

"I’m talking about the young man—a boy, really; he couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve years old—whom I met in an online game of Halo, who said to me, 'Headshot! Suck it! Pwned! Be less gay!,' after he had killed me by camping a respawn point, which really should be illegal.

"I’m thinking and talking about a man I met in New Carsmell, Vermont, before my campaign even began. He had inherited from his step-uncle, after much legal wrangling, the family diner. I remember as if it were yesterday asking this man for a ham-and-cheese sandwich. And he made me one. But, before he served it to me, he smooshed it down in this hot-presser thing that sort of looked like a copy machine. So, when it was done, the sandwich was like a flattened-out grilled cheese with ham, which the man claimed was an Italian delicacy. That thing was delicious. I can’t remember right now what it’s called, but more and more places are starting to serve them, so, if you ever get the chance to have one, definitely try it. I think it might have been called a 'pannioli' or something. Something Italian-sounding."

Okay, back to work. I hope you're well.

For Roland

Barry Calhoun Photography

Dept. of the dangers of reading P.G. Wodehouse and then falling asleep, poolside, on the hottest day of early summer

You should see the raccoon eyes. I don't have the courage to show you.

Describing: Pascal Dangin

Dangin is on the short side, with a scruffy mustache and finger-in-the-socket frizz. He maintains the hours of a Presidential candidate; lately, he is a little tubbier than he would like. He was wearing, as is his custom, an all-navy outfit: New Balance sneakers, ratty cords, woollen sweater with holes in the armpits. He is not immune to the charms of things—he owns an Aston Martin, along with houses in Manhattan, Amagansett, and St. Bart’s—but, for someone who can pick apart a face in a matter of seconds (he once, apologetically, described his eyes as “high-speed scanners”), he is remarkably free of vanity.

—Lauren Collins, in "Pixel Perfect," a profile of Pascal Dangin, the world's foremost retoucher of photographs, in the May 12th issue.

[Extra: An example of Dangin's work, on the model who "needs the least help."]

It's a goddy god world

From Newyorker.com. I'm particularly fond of the dog.

Stooped and typing II

The title is a misnomer. As it happens, I'm lying nearly on my back, in a green corduroy armchair, feet up on a tufted leather ottoman. There's Frank Sinatra on the CD player, which is the only music to play with tufted leather ottomans. Laundry's going downstairs, so I've got 25 minutes or so. I'm going to pour out the remnants of the half-bottle of Bailey's Waterhouse gave me as a housewarming gift and try to reacquaint myself with the blogging instinct.

Women seem taken with this week's New Yorker cover, a painting of a cartoonishly wide-faced, narrow-eyed, and ivory-skinned woman whose hair and blouse both are converging thatches of vines and blossoms. Two made special mention of it. I think they think it's pretty.

In unrelated news, you'll see below that I was at Northern Voice, the "blogging and social media conference." (I include the quotation marks because that's the way I say it in my mind—the same as on the news, when you hear "Facebook, the social networking website" in each new report about the Filipino kid whose stabbing death on an East Van schoolyard provoked a flurry of RIP "wall" posts.)

I spend the day among the bloggers, and before I run down to secure my position among the dryers, let me tell you that they're smart, chubby, and casually dressed. That you could have guessed. Their defining characteristic, though, is more interesting, and more alien: an unqualified love of technology and, by extension, the future.

The belief seems to me to have an ominous underside, but I don't know why.

Dept. of stooped and typing

Um, if it's a cliche to be blogging in the Tim Horton's right next to a blogging conference, it's a new one.

Today is Northern Voice, which describes itself as a "blogging and social media conference." You'd think all these hip, connected people could come up with a name that sounds less like a souvenir shop at YVR, where tourists buy maple syrup, vacuum-sealed smoked salmon, and deep-green sweatshirts emblazoned with stylized loons.

Silly me, I woke this morning, ate a bowl of Raisin Bran, grabbed a coffee by the bus stop, and was out here 70 minutes before the thing started. I'm working on workaday time, obviously. I'm going to chill out here with a breakfastwich, or whatever they call them.

Oh, there's activity around the registration table now. I'll tell you what I see.

One overweight, bespectacled guy in a blue plaid shirt punching the air, animating a story. Star Wars blogger.

A half attractive girl in a black skirt with a slit, carrying a packing tape dispenser. She has a limp, though. Maybe she's a hot blogger.

An artsy-looking guy with tight jeans, bright orange Chuck Taylors, high feathered bangs, and a scarf. Emily Carr blogger.

Three girls behind folding tables: one's shifting from foot to foot, one's looking at a piece of A4, one's talking to the sort of older man that proliferate at Canadian universities (sorry, the conference today is at UBC)—kind bearing; red Gore-Tex windbreaker; longer hair, usually white; backpack with laptop inside. A kind of dorky intellectual yachtsman.

I gotta get over there. They're giving out the lanyards.

More to come.

Describing: Orlando Tobón

Tobón, who is sixty, is of medium height and corpulent. He has wavy, wiry black-and-gray hair and a mustache. His features are slightly askew: his mouth slants down to the left and the line of his front teeth is uneven. His eyes are dark and heavy-lidded, and his gaze is direct and comforting. Sometimes, he closes his eyes before he speaks, as if making an effort of memory or will. When he is seated, the desk appears to bisect him. He looks like a bust of himself.

—Alec Wilkinson, in "The Patron" (Nov. 26), a profile of Orlando Tobón, the 'mayor' of New York's Little Colombia.

This has been occupying...

...a goodly amount of my time. The Jew comment really hits the wrong key, though. I've seen it twenty or so times this week. My favorite bit is: "I scratch my mind, I think about life 'n stuff sometimes, but shit's ROUGH."

Hottest seat sales in Asia

I used to fly this airline regularly when I lived in Taiwan. It's the national carrier, and it's had four fatal crashes in the past 13 years. I know one of their pilots, and I'll pass on his advice: "Never fly China Airlines unless you absolutely must."



The cause of the fire was a loose landing-assembly bolt that punctured the fuel tank. It was a brand-new Boeing 737 and had just arrived in Okinawa after a 90-minute flight from Taipei. All 157 passengers and eight crew escaped alive.

On the Road

Cup of mint tea at my left hand and waiting for my diphenhydramine hydrochloride to kick in. Just finished Louis Menand's look back at Jack Kerouac's "On the Road." His piece ends with this lovely little Kerouackian riff:

It's fairly high above sea level there, in the lower ranges of the Berkshires, and I would stand at the pump in the dark looking at the stars in the cold clear sky as the semis roared past and with the wind in my hair, and I liked to imagine that I was a character in Kerouac's novel, lost to everyone I knew and to everyone who knew me, somewhere in America, on the road.

Then I would get in the car, and, bent over the wheel, while the trucks beat on past me, and the radio crackled, the sound going in and out, with oldies from the seventies, I began the long drop down to the lights of Boston, late in the night, late in my life, alone.

Nice, isn't it? Reminds me of when writing was easier, less an exercise of form and structure and grammar than of sustaining an impulse and going back to fix up the egregious errors later.
According to Menand, the book isn't about hipsters looking for kicks, or about subversives and nonconformists—rebels without a cause who point the way for the radicals of the nineteen-sixties. And it's not an anti-intellectual celebration of spontaneity. It's a sad and self-consciously lyrical story about loneliness, insecurity, and failure, which I think he captures lovelily in the last line.

It's also, as he says, a story about guys who want to be with other guys. I didn't get the homosexual bent (no pun) of "On the Road" at first, and I remember being shocked when I heard the theory propounded by a kind middleaged American backpacker woman, on a ferry chugging toward Gili Trawangan, in Indonesia. I was 22, reading the book at the time, and momentarily embarrassed for being enthusiastic about it.

Props also to Menand for working one of my favorite albums—Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely—into his lede. Anyone know where I can download it? I lost my cassette years ago.

(Click Jack's photo to see him reading from "On the Road" and here for a silent film of he and Ginsberg loafing around NYC, circa 1959.)

"My praise is so funky"

I'm trying to figure out whether this guy votes Democratic or Republican. Thoughts?



Also, check out my latest interview with the winner of the New Yorker's Cartoon Caption Contest. His name is James Montana, he studies German, and he wears his hair in a side-part. It sounds like an alias you'd put on for a hot tub party, yes, but it's true, and he's got some interesting things to say, over at Emdashes.

Libel, American style

From a New York Daily News article about O. J. Simpson's recent robbery arrest in Las Vegas. Italics mine:

"They might actually nail him this time," said Marcia Clark, the Los Angeles prosecutor who bungled the Simpson murder case in 1995, when a jury let the Heisman Trophy winner walk in the slaying of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her pal Ron Goldman.

In this new drama, Vegas cops say The Juice led a group of pals - including a buddy who was in Sin City to renew his marriage vows - who burst into a hotel room Thursday night. Guns drawn, two of the men confronted two sports memorabilia dealers who were trying to sell some Simpson-related items as Simpson barked orders, Lt. Clint Nichols said.

"It was kind of scary," said Tom Riccio, another memorabilia dealer who tipped off Simpson about the sale and said he was there when the alleged theft went down.

Seems oddly sensitive, that second articulation, no? I suppose the reason that you can call him a murderer but only an alleged thief owes to the fact that the theft is still being prosecuted. To my Canadian ears, though, that first paragraph sounds presumptive and more than a little defamatory.

Of course, libel law here is much harsher than in the States. Canadian journalists are like that abused child from your primary school class—the one who, when the teacher raises her hand to fix her hair, recoils in fright.

On fruitful procrastination

This latest video project leapt out of an afternoon that should produced something else—namely, a job. But, well, you take your distraction where you can can get it. The outdoors have begun beckoning me less; summer is fading from my window, and I've turned the baseboard heater on, although just in the mornings, the last two days running. Take a look.

Moon Ascent


This one I assembled from a bunch of still photographs and an audio track I stitched together on Audacity, an excellent open-souce editing program. The song is Air's "Modular Mix," which has some celestial elements, although it's far from their best song.

All in all, it's the technically superior of the two "flight" videos, but to me it falls flat in the switchover from moon to earth, which is accompanied by a 16-beat song loop that feels like waiting. I may go back and edit it some more when I have my next burst of industry, but I probably won't.

(To potential employers reading this blog: After that first burst of industry, do the smart thing and hand my projects off to a closer.)

And Then So Clear


This second one is more crudely rendered, but it seems to hit a chord. I made it six or seven months ago, while in the blush of my first contact with YouTube, and then, after watching its meagre return of hits (200 or so after two months), forgot about it.

To my surprise, the video began to pick up momentum (and generous comments from viewers), and it now has nearly 16,000 hits. Of course, teenage girls' mugging for their digital camera generates seventy times that traffic in the same amount of time, and that can only mean that the world is spinning at the correct velocity. I think the market for tenderly-wrought electronica may be just about at its saturation point.

Dept. of Stevie Wonder's Sweater

Just in case, like me, you hadn't given these songs much thought this year.


O, Canada just refuses to be outdone.

Dept.of Morning Light

It's six forty-two a.m. Just finished a bowl of granola and non-dairy "soygurt"—the latter a leftover from my aborted attempt to make a cilantro curry for someone who doesn't eat dairy. A half-cup of coffee left. The crows are squalling on Nelson.

70
My words are very easy to understand and very easy to put into practice. Yet no one in the world can understand them or put them into practice.

Words have an ancestor and affairs have a sovereign.
It is because people are ignorant that they fail to understand me.

Those who understand me are few; those who harm me are honoured.

Therefore the sage, while clad in homespun, conceals on his person a priceless piece of jade.

Italics mine. Eastern opacity aside, I'm back, and I'm considering my comment John McPhee's excursion (why does it always have to be a synonym of voyage?) onto Oakmont, the site of the just-past U.S. Open, won by this man.

Dept. of Juxtaposition

I never read thrillers growing up, unless you count the Hardy Boys. And no spy novels, apart from "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," by John LeCarré, which I had to read for a fourth-year class on espionage (Humanities, o how I miss you!) at Simon Fraser—the class I was in, incidentally, when the attacks of September 11th took place. I didn't play with G.I. Joes, and, frankly, never understood the ecstasies my Egyptian friend Kareem found in them, flinging himself, and the figurines, around the pool deck at his Toronto home, spittle flying from his mouth—rat-tat-tat-tat-tat, Snake Eyes, noooo!!!

So I was unprepared, at least in a literary sense, for Jon Lee Anderson's ducking, barrel-rolling, ricocheting account of American opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan, "The Taliban's Opium War." About midway through the article the prose turned all And then we heard an explosion over the ridge; there were shell casings and bone fragments all around. We poked our head out of the foxhole, and I had to remind myself that I wasn't reading a paperback I'd found wedged between two bus seats. And just seconds after that admittedly disparaging thought, I had another: Shit, the guy got shot at, for four hours, in Afghanistan. He's got more street cred—field cred, whatever—than Fifty. (Audio here.)

I had two more thoughts, too:
1) Invite more goateed, tatooed DynCorp employees to my next barbecue. How cool would it be to get them all hopped up on Bud and amphetamines and pair them off in human cockfights?

2) Save a little of that opium juice from the knocked-over and broke-open poppy, fieldworker Khalil! I'll swing by around eight. You can show me what to do—we'll make some tea, rub it on our gums, whatever.

Ah, I was going to write more about the insouciant little article that followed Anderson's (hence the post title), but I've run out of time for the moment. It was Ian Frazier's "On Impact," the tale of a meteorite (or perhaps something more sinister) that recently fell into the New Jersey home of Srinivasan Nageswaran. Although I know Frazier's name, I can't call to mind another of his articles. In this piece he's delightfully breezy, and he has a fine ear for slang. Tell me you don't love the guy who could write three opening sentences like these:

"People get excited when strange objects fall from the sky. We seek portents and meaning, we venerate the object, and we horripilate at the uncanny scent of our beginnings, or end. Even wised up by science as we are, we tend to freak."

("Horripilate"—I looked it up—means "to cause one's hair to stand on end and get goosebumps," as in "I horripilate at the sight of blood," or "Hitchcock movies horripilate me.")

Dept. of As It Is Lived

Woke this morning and rolled over to read the last two columns of a David Denby film review. It's my fifth morning in my tiny new apartment.

My curtains are drawn, but the windows are open, and on Nelson Street I can hear the cars and fire trucks, of course, but also bicycles and four kinds of birdsong—a squall, a hoot, a gurgle, and a pinched whistle—and pedestrians and their low conversations, footfalls, and pockets jangling with change.

The Denby review, of a film called "Evening," had a beautiful line, and I very much like the idea behind it:

"The two women look at the past, compare marriages, and make an accounting of their mistakes—which turn out to be merely life as it is lived, not as is hoped for."

I'm going out for a coffee, as it is drunk and not hoped for. That means a choice between the 7-Eleven and the better, pricier cafe, with something existential hanging in the balance. You want anything?

Dept. of Our Home and Native

I spent my Canada Day on Mayne Island, in the company of two old friends. I took a ferry to get there; it was slow and the passengers were few. There's something about an empty ferry—the expanse of vacuumed carpet, the odd reassurance of the cafeteria and its fixed-seat tables with raised edges, the whole enterprise heaving and shuddering like a fat lover. The diesel and creosote of the car deck. A cup of coffee and a magazine.

The Sunday run from Victoria hits Pender Island, Saturna, and then Pender again before getting to Mayne's Village Bay. I got a good ways into this week's New Yorker, but I stalled in the middle of John Cassidy's article about the hedge-fund machine. With 45 minutes left in the voyage, I reclined on a moulded plastic bench, flipped the magazine over my face, and began promptly to snore.

Thanks to Finnigan, late of Playa del Carmen, for the illustration, which has Ontario in a bit of saucy contact with Michigan. Does this mean Canada is a Red State? Quick—what's the past tense of "drag"?

Happy Canada Day, all.

Dept. of the Sultry Look

Many thanks to Roland for pointing out that Cat Stevens's conversion to Islam has nothing to do with hair, hair products, or envy, at least not in the formal, obvious sense. But he should bear in mind that everything is connected to everything else—Buddhism reduced to a sentence, or so an old humanities professor told me. I mean, it isn't a huge leap from religion to hair. I myself wore a goatee during my experiment with Seventh Day Adventism. Neither suited me. Photos to come.

Work has been hectic, so my posts have been thin. I may yet have to resort to pilfered photos and free association to get something up on New Yorker Comment each week, but consider it a sorbet between the heavier courses of whatever the hell else I'm thinking about.

This current issue, the one with the Lou Romano cover of newlyweds in a taxi, looks so good I can't believe I haven't got around to reading it. If you're a newsstand buyer and not a subscriber, let me whet your appetite. It contains:

• Calvin Trillin on psychos in Nova Scotia
• Seymour Hersh on the shunned US Army General Antonio Taguba
• David Owen on the crazy-ass-looking National Stadium in Beijing
• Nancy Franklin on "John from Cincinnati," a show that smart people who like TV are rumbling about
• Anthony Lane on [movie name here]

"None of this fits together? How very true!" —Albert Camus

Lustre, envy, and Cat Stevens's conversion to Islam

Isn't her hair lustrous? Doesn't it shine? How much shinier, would you say, are her infinity-symbol-shaped locks than your damp, lank, rapidly thinning ones? Fifty percent? Seventy? Eighty?

The number is hard to judge, but the result isn't—Pantene makes your hair jaw-droppingly shiny.

How to get free potato chips

It seems all you have to do is suffer a moderate injury and write a letter. Read on.—JB

Dear Old Dutch,

I'm not one of these cranky shut-ins who, deprived of ordinary human contact, resorts to writing angry letters to transnational corporations. But I have to say something: your new Rave chips burned the crap out of my mouth. For your reference, the offending flavor was Salt & Vinegar.

Here's how it went. I bought a large bag and had an absentminded three or four handfuls before I noticed an intense stinging sensation on my tongue. You know when you're washing the dishes and you stick your hand under too-hot water, and how all you can do is just clench up, squint, hiss, and wait till it's over? That's what happened. In my mouth. Because of your chips.

If I had to compare it to another physical sensation, it would be this: putting salt in your mouth and then electrocuting yourself, with the mouth-salt finding most of the current.

Here's the kicker (and please bear in mind my first sentence): it's been two days, and my tongue still feels strange. Seriously, was there demand for this kind of flavor experience from the snacking public? My tongue-tip feels abused, like I dragged it on pavement, and there are little red spots where there weren't before.

Needless to say, I'm never buying Rave chips again. I've always bought Old Dutch, though, and would love to hear from you guys that your pumping up the acid content of your S&V chips wasn't just a spiteful joke by an ex-employee or something. If you wanted to send me a coupon for a big bag of Ketchup, too, that'd be cool.

Yours in mild physical distress,

John Bucher

Old Dutch, to its credit, sent me two coupons for free product, along with an apologetic letter thanking me for my "phone call."

(Extra: Another flavor of old Dutch rave.)

Dept. of Big Apple Accolades

Emdashes has made it onto the blogroll of The New York Times. In addition, Manhattan User's Guide has named it one of the 400 websites that make a distinct contribution to life in New York City.

Emily Gordon, take a bow.

Dept. of The Skill-testing Question

“When you’re finished here, Spencer, we’ll need you on the bridge-to-nowhere project.”

Congratulations to New York’s Richard Hine for winning this week's New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest with the above line. Head over to Emdashes to see my full interview with Richard; we go deep, discussing death, religion, the pestilence of procrastination, amphibian life, midwifery, and Taoist self-agnegation—and he gets off one of the best one-liners in recent Internet history. The guy's got it going on.

Dept. of What's She Reading

The pixellation doesn't do this fine Adrian Tomine cover (June 11 & 18) any justice, but I knew immediately—didn't you?—what this tourist-bus cutie was reading.

What is it?

(Is it me, or do Tomine's lines have an Asian look?)

Dept. of Telecommuting

The astute among you will recognize that 'telecommuting' is a misnomer. I'm not at home here, but, instead, at UBC, which is empty save for me, the iMac upon which I took this picture, and the second-year guy who's taking the summer to write his thesis because that's the way his scholarship works.

My expression is intended to convey the pain of telecommuting, as least for me, an ENTP terribly suited to working in boxers, next to an open window, checking e-mail every ninety seconds, with a fridge of food downstairs and a million uninvestigated Web nodes spread out before him.

What's your Myers-Briggs type? I don't know. Why don't you take the online test?

Dept. of Boredom and Desire

Once again, James Surowiecki is writing things I already knew but hadn't got around to saying. This week, in "Feature Presentation," he argues that we consumers habitually choose electronic devices that have many more features than we want or use, and that, after the blush of first contact, we grow bored with them. Our addling by gizmo he calls "feature creep," and he describes it this way:

"...fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle. This spiral of complexity costs consumers time, but it also costs businesses money."

Side note, James: "Spiral," unless you're talking about footballs, confuses me. If your fortunes are spiralling, which way are they going? "Either way," says the OED:

spiral, v.
a. intr. To wind or move in a spiral manner; to form spiral curves.
b. To fly an aircraft in a spiral path. Also with down, downwards.
c. fig. To move rapidly in one direction (usu. upwards), in a manner considered to resemble a spiral; to increase or decrease in response to the same movement of another quantity or other quantities. Cf. sense 2d of the n. above.

I've got a Sony-Ericsson that cost me something like 400 bucks when I bought it in Taipei, three years ago. The only reason I got it was that the PVC-skirted saleswoman in the FarEasTone was keen to sell me one of their house-brand phones (the telecommunications equivalent of Safeway-brand corn flakes), and I was keen to show her I wasn't gullible. So I bought a 400-dollar phone.

Its features have come back to earth since, but at the time it was flash. I had Bluetooth, for sending anonymous messages to intriguing strangers (never happened); Internet at my thumbtips, for those formerly unproductive cab rides (never happened); and the ability to shoot videos. The latter was cool exactly three times: in Bangkok during Songkran, when I filmed some girls dancing on a loudspeaker; here, when I witnessed a "near plane crash" (YouTube commenters can be so cruel); and here, when comic-relief Taeho came to my ESL class with a fresh perm.

The picture is poor because the camera lens has been damaged in my pocket—three years' of rainwater, chewing-gum residue, key scratches, and coin thrashings. The phone now sits on my bedstand, uncharged and alone. I'm going through a Luddite phase.

Cell-phone designers, if you're listening: I'd like something indestructible, in brushed aluminum, with great reception. I'm tired of designed obsolescence and "#" buttons that stick. I don't need photographic capacity, video games, or DJ-mixing programs. Make it like a Zippo lighter—something that warms against my leg, something I can spin on a table.

Dept. of Been There

Not as sexy as it sounds.

The story of my experiments with coolant

My sister gave me a 1986 Honda Civic. It overheats like a mofo. Today, trying to fix it, I scalded my hand with radiator fluid and dropped a pickle into the cooling fan.

Two days and $93.00 invested—still undriveable.

Dept. of Cloppier Times

In a Talk of the Town piece, you don't see the writer's name until the end, set off discretely behind an em dash. When an author's reputation succeeds him in this way, you can work up all sorts of funny feelings before you figure out who he is.

"Horsepresence took another hit last month, when the ancient Claremont Riding Academy, on West Eighty-ninth Street, closed its doors, reducing our equines to that redolent line of tourist-pullers on Central Park South. A few older city types (this writer among them) can remember cloppier times."

Horsepresence? Tourist-pullers? Cloppier times? Who the hell is this huckst—oh, Roger Angell. I guess that's okay.


Angell, who would be the weirdest and most affected 45-year-old in New York, turns 87 this year, as it turns out. That forgives him some of the anachronistic phrasings.

Plus, he's the stepson of a great writer. Until I read his intro to the new edition of the semi-sacred "Elements of Style" (and again thought, Who the hell?) I didn't realize that his mom, a New Yorker editor named Katherine Angell, married the "renowned essayist" E. B. White. And that sorts out his pedigree, sort of.

The only real measure of a writer is his writing, of course—the only reason Paul Theroux is still invited to dinner. Angell's prose is admirable, ambling, thick with detail—particularly his meditations on baseball. I remember warmly his tidy comment about the Red Sox after they'd won the pennant, and a longer piece, further back, about a statistics whiz who'd reformed the team's system of scouting.

Tell me this: How do you pronounce his last name? It's one of those ones I'm always afraid of saying wrong, like 'deluge.'

Dept. of Things I'll Never Buy Again

Quick post, unrelated to The New Yorker, just to get it out of my system. This man—Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone—is an appalling dork.

I was at the newsstand to pick up a copy of Print—Emdashes's day job—and, instead, something made me take the fortieth-anniversary RS to the counter. It was the shiny silver cover, I think, with the sticker advertising interviews with Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Mick Jagger—interesting people I'm slightly too young to comprehend fully.

Wenner's lead interview with Bob Dylan—a Q&A, reprinted line for line—is a master stroke of shoddy, sappy journalism. It serves as a forum for the publishing icon, whom Salon calls "the star-fucker who traded up," to 1) coo over and scold Dylan, 2) speak nearly as much as him, and 3) induce the singer to speak about Wenner's contribution to the culture.

An excerpt:
Do you think it's gloomy on the horizon?
In what sense do you mean?
Bob, come on.
No, you come on. In what sense do you mean that? If you're talking about in a political sense...
In a general political, spiritual, historical sense. You're talking about the end of times on this record, you've got a very gloomy vision of the world, you're saying, "I'm facing the end of my life and looking at all this..."
Aren't we all always doing that?
No, some people are trying to avoid it. But I'm trying to interview you, and you're not being very helpful with this.
Jann, have I ever been helpful?
What can I do to get you to get you to take this seriously?
I'm taking it seriously.
You're not.
Of course I am. You're the one who's here to be celebrated. Forty years...forty years with a magazine that obviously now has intellectual recognition. [Gulp.—Ed.] Did you ever think that would happen when you started?
I was taking it seriously.
Look how far you've come. You're the one to be interviewed. I want to know just as much from you as you want to know from me.
* * *

It goes on for another two pages. He makes Dylan look like a mumbling old man, collecting pop tins on the beach. Seriously—do they not have editors? The Kwantlen College Beacon could have done better.

On the positive side, we now have something to say whenever anyone is giving us a hard time. Try it with me:

"Jann..." [Pause, purse lips, hold the 'n.'] "Have I ever been helpful?"

(Extra: Idolator pans the anniversary issue.)

New do for summer

Is that hairline getting a little high on the sides? No—can't be.

That's me with Aeisha, my Iraqi barberess. Her shop on 4th Ave. (not a salon, as you can see by the Barbasol receptacle at bottom right) is one of the few places in Vancouver where you can still get the hot-shaving-cream-and-straight-razor treatment, although, to be honest, you can do better in five minutes with your Sensor and some intention. She says some guys make jokes about Iraq while she's scraping their throats with the razor. Reckless, say I.

The reason for the grooming is my temporary leap up the blogging food chain. Today I—drum roll set off in em dashes, please—started a summer internship at Emdashes, which is, as I explained to my family, the Internet's première site about The New Yorker. In no time, I'm sure, Mom will be telling everyone at work that I got a job at the magazine, an elision we should discourage.

I'm working from Vancouver, so the haircut isn't strictly necessary—Emdashes is based in NYC—but with a Kerouackian huzzah and a fit of '20s optimism I decided to make an offering of sideburns to the writing gods. You'll be the first to know how it goes. God, 'Kerouackian' has got to be my favorite name-based adjective.

I spent way too long labouring over my introduction, which, it's not hard to see, comes over as a weak slider for a ball. Give me time, though; it's a comfort zone thing.

Extra listening
Now that we're on the subject, Jack Kerouac reading from "On the Road," in a way both cool and strangely not—your call.

Harry Crosby reading John Updike's "On the Sidewalk," a spot-on Kerouac spoof first published, I believe, in The New Yorker. (I've got it in "Fierce Pajamas" a humor anthology edited by David Remnick and Henry Finder.)

The way home

The path to the Student Union Building.

An oil spot in the sun.

An empty Friday 44.

Describing: Paulo Coelho

"Coelho is almost sixty. His name, which has been given to a suite at the Hotel Ambasciatori in Rome and to a hot-chocolate drink at Le Bristol hotel in Paris, is pronounced Co-el-you. He is solid and short, with the capable, roughened look of someone who makes his living out-of-doors, and he dresses in black cowboy boots, black jeans, and black T-shirts.

"His hair is white and shaved short, except for a little ponytail that sprouts from the back of his head. On his left forearm is a crude tattoo of a butterfly, which he and his wife...got in 1980, as a 'wedding ring.'"

—Dana Goodyear, in "The Magus" (May 7)

Paulo Coelho (b. August 24, 1947) is a Brazilian novelist who has sold almost 100 million books. His most popular book, "The Alchemist," which was written in two weeks, is a comfort to the feeble-minded and innocent.

* * *

Goodyear does a good job here. She never condescends to her subject, loathsome though he is, although, amusingly, she includes the following quote by Mario Maestri, "one of the few Brazilian critics who does not reflexively dismiss Coelho."

"In spite of belonging to different genres, Coelho's narratives and self-help books have the same fundamental effect: of anesthetizing the alienated consciousness through the consoling reaffirmation of conventions and prevailing prejudices. Fascinated by his discoveries, the Coelhist reader explores the familiar, breaks down doors already open, and gets mired in sentimental, tranquilizing, self-centred, conformist, and spellbinding visions of the world that imprisons him. When he finishes a book, he wants another one that will be different but absolutely the same."

I have a new favorite Brazilian literary critic.

My only grudge with Goodyear is the second sentence of the article: I kept getting lost (and still do, reading it for the dozenth time) in the grammatical chasm between 'story' and 'of.'

"It is a story, told in 'A Thousand and One Nights' and in Rumi's 'Masnavi' and later adapted by Jorge Luis Borges—the version that Coelho, who is Brazilian, first read—of a man who dreams that he must leave home to find a treasure, and upon arriving at his destination, discovers that the treasure is in fact buried in his native land."

Hmmm, it's easier to follow with wide margins, but still...

Hockey morning in Taipei

This is Dave Hartwell. He's on a 50cc scooter called a Sniper. The light is on, and the left-hand mirror is twisted. Behind him is the restaurant across from his Taipei apartment where you can get good peanut-sauce noodles.

“One of my favorite local dishes is huo tway dan,” Hartwell says, breaking into fluent Mandarin. “Mmmm, hao chr!” he laughs.

Then he translates: “Ham and egg sandwiches: good.”

Dave's not worried that the Vancouver Canucks will be eliminated from the NHL Playoffs tonight, in Game 5 against the Anaheim Ducks.

Okay, he's a little worried.

(Hartwell's profile at Canucks.com: "Cheers from Far Away.")

Parkour

David Belle, the protagonist of Alec Wilkinson's "No Obstacles," vaulting through London.

Below: the vertiginous, parkour-inspired opening chase of "Casino Royale," starring Belle's childhood friend, Sébastien Foucan.

Go tell it on the mountain

Not sure why I chose that title: the song brings to mind my sister's squinted-up face at a Christmas party somewhere in East Vancouver, singing because the adults asked her to. It just came to me.

Good news: I've shifted the pile of schoolbooks on my floor—the ones I had to triple-jump through to get to bed. Twenty-one of them have to go back to the UBC library by June 15, and I can only find 18. The cleanup has excavated several magazines, most of them New Yorkers, all bent open to random pages.

Apparently, I dropped:

• a Walrus in the middle of an article about an overcoat made of aluminum window screening;
• a New Yorker in the middle of Denby's review of "The Wind That Shakes the Barley," a film I'd never heard of;
• a New Yorker at the outset of one of those high-spirited Patricia Marx pieces ("Emotional Baggage") in which she prices everything;
• and a New Yorker just at the end of that profile of Gordon Ramsay, the English chef who's sublimated his raised-on-a-council-estate class fury into truffle and morel preparations. (This one I remember; it's taken me three pre-sleep reads to this point.) What the hell is a morel?

I did read Adam Gopnik's gun-control screed this week, and, fan though I am, I did a thick swallow after his last line—something about how oh, the cell phones of the dead Virginia Tech students are ringing still. Brrr.

Also, Malcolm Gladwell on The Colbert Report: I wanted to listen to one man or the other, not both. Malcolm was a touch earnest, and Stephen kept cutting him off with ersatz jokes like "What, you need a degree for that? A piece of paper?" although he did get in a good bit about honorary degrees. I give it a six point seven.

Describing: Jeff Koons

"Koons, who is fifty-two, looks very much the same as he did at thirty—trim and boyish, with neatly barbered brown hair and the sort of unfinished features that seem to be peculiarly American. He was eager to show me around."

—Calvin Tomkins, in "The Turnaround Artist" (Apr. 23)

Jeff Koons (b. January 21, 1955) is an American mixed-media artist noted for his use of kitsch imagery. His works are among the most expensive in the world for a contemporary artist.

Describing: Gunter Sachs

"Only liquids were consumed. I celebrated with him. The last thing he said to me, at five o'clock the next morning, was that I was a girl, a coward, because I insisted I had had enough.

Hundreds of eager young men tried to emulate Rubi's manner, accent, and way with women. No one observed him more closely than Gunter Sachs, a hollow-eyed German with a protruding lip and a cowboy gait."

—From "Princes, Playboys, and High-class Tarts," by Taki Theodoracoupolous.

Fritz Gunter Sachs (b. November 14, 1932) is a German mathematician, photographer, and multi-millionaire industrialist.

Morning breaks on the newsroom

Backlog of three New Yorkers to read, plus the one retrieved from Waterhouse's car. Huge paper on 'representations of masculinity in the media' due Monday. I'm drawing a line from a colonial pamphlet, The Boys' Own Paper, to modern-day lad-mags like Maxim. While I'm spouting sociologica all weekend, I want you to do something that makes your cheeks ruddy.

Father taught French

Check out my new links section—Where the Wordy Are.

Bloody irony

I went to my first ballet

Yesterday, on the very day I was carping about men's clothing with Stephen Connolly, an invitation to the ballet flung me into the great generational sartorial divide—What belt goes with what?

Me, showered, in a navy suit and white shirt: "Help, everyone, I'm a little confused about belt selection."

Girlfriend, on the phone: "Don't listen to your father—black never goes with blue. Wear the oxblood belt and shoes."

Father, truculently: "If I took you to any men's shop in the city in a blue suit and that belt, they would think you'd walked off a farm."

The ballet? A thrill ride for the ages.

The clothes? I split the difference—black belt and oxblood shoes—and tried to keep my jacket buttoned. Wrong, I know: you shouldn't compound error with indecision.

I'm leaning toward dressing the way that young women prefer it, but I think it may set a bad precedent.

Glad for any guidance here.

(JJB Photo: "Bag.")

On Tarantino

I think the issue I lost contained a review of "Grindhouse"—that new double feature by Quentin Tarantino and the other guy.

I'm working hard on an article about funeral music (by the way, you can still vote for your song), but I'm going to go and seek the review out later, and treat it like a sorbet for my brain. In my heart, I hope it's by Denby, and that he does Tarantino a little ultraviolence, but I'm willing to accept another result.

Having seen the TV commercials for "Grindhouse," though, I'm bracing for another queasily masturbatory homage to a 1970s schlock-action genre. I've never resented a director so much as I did Tarantino, after watching "Kill Bill I."

Anyone disagree with Denby that "Kill Bill" was "what’s formally known as decadence and commonly known as crap"? Taipei Davey?

(JJB Photo: "9 Alma.")

What would Remnick do?

As you can tell by the previous post, New Yorker-philes, I'm reading Gigi Mahon's "The Last Days of The New Yorker." I need something while I'm jonesing: I left the latest issue of the magazine in Waterhouse's car on the way out to PoCo and I'm three days from a new one in the mail.

The book, as you'd expect, refers to the magazine frequently. There's a quirk of capitalization, however: Mahon capitalizes the "the" only when citing the name of the magazine by itself.

At The New Yorker there was mixed reaction to the news.
They discussed the New Yorker's business prospects.
He presided over a New Yorker annual meeting.
He was leaving The New Yorker to take a job at Hearst.

I have to admit, I'd never thought about the article this way. I'd always assumed it was ponce and chauvinism that compelled The New York Times or The Economist to uppercase the "the." Of course, I'd never seen nine permutations of a journal title on the same page of text before.

Is this the way you wield the article, or is it just a thing between Mahon and her editor?

(JJB Photo: "Sinkmaster.")

Describing: William Shawn

"Shawn was a small, dignified man with a balding head, large ears, and rosy cheeks who spoke in a high-pitched, wavering voice. He took great care to select the correct words when he spoke, and his speech was filled with painful pauses, especially when he was in front of a group. He was unfailingly polite, courtly, gracious, and formal in manner. He dressed in dark suits and ties, which he neither shed nor loosened during working hours.

Everything about him was unobtrusive. His shoulders slouched some and his chin seemed to tuck toward his chest. He gave the appearance of a man who would prefer to be invisible."

—Gigi Mahon, in "The Last Days of The New Yorker" (1988)

William Shawn edited The New Yorker from 1952 to 1987.

Describing: Paul Wolfowitz

"Wolfowitz, who is sixty-three, has jug ears, hazel eyes, a furrowed brow, and thinning gray hair that he combs to the right. He is a rumpled but unflappable traveller, seemingly oblivious of bad weather, uncomfortable transportation, and lack of sleep, as well as of the antiwar protesters who tend to appear wherever he goes."

—John Cassidy, in The Next Crusade (Apr. 9)

Paul Wolfowitz, now the president of the World Bank, was a primary architect of the war in Iraq.

My last six Google searches

A modern Rorschach test, yes. Make of it what you will.

• Haber Bosch
• "best-connected"
• "most well-connected"
• "blood sweat and tears"
• "blood sweat and tears" nhl
• "infant hats" "knife play"

And yours? (Waggle your cursor over the 'entry' field.)

Can an editor dazzle?

You judge. Is this Coldcut mash-up full of sharp cuts or just cheap hacks and misquotes?

You don't need to be an anarchist to find it cool, but it doesn't hurt.

This end of term is like a long car accident. I'll be back soon.

Cast your vote

Yes or no on the new look?

Vows and covenants II

I now understand my grammarian streak as something I abhor in my father, namely, his desire always to know where his hammer and screwdriver are, and to have his electrical cord, the one that attaches to the Weed Wacker, rewound perfectly after each use and returned to its home behind the extension ladder.

His lust is for the placement of objects; mine is for punctuation. Until recently, I didn't realize they are essentially the same thing. It was an unhappy discovery.

But, hey, if the giddy nihilism of your twenties isn't followed by sad realizations, then you're not really dying, which means that you weren't really alive.

Caring about grammar and keeping a tidy workbench are both moral, of course—something goes here, not there, for no reason other than that it should, and the pursuit is driven by a fear that the world would unhinge if people didn't care about these things.

All of this, gentle reader, is preamble to my point. I went to a lecture last night with Trois Heures. We heard a woman speak about Iran. Interesting talk, blah blah blah, then thoughtful questions and one denunciation from an intense bearded man.

All night the speaker—Deborah Campbell, a writer and UBC prof of literary nonfiction—used "media" as a singular noun. The media is growing in influence. The media is censored.

To my ear, it's ugly in the same way as "There's three chairs over there"—forgivably, avoidably, uglily. Then there's the question What does 'media' actually mean?

Here's what the experts say:

American Heritage: Maybe "media" refers just to the press and broadcasters...
Dictionary.com: The singular use is now common in mass communications and advertising.
OED: "Media" is the plural of "medium."

In this fractured and fizzing information landscape, can we really get away with thinking of the media as a monolith?

Next, we tackle he, she, they, ze, and, gulp, hir—unassigned singulars. Let's wait till we're drinking wine.

By the way, have you seen the Phillips-head? It should be in the cupboard in the garage.

(Illustration: The shield of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. Is that a pen?)

What is language? (II)

Nothing to do with the New Yorker, but this deserves noting. In Canada you can now be sued for using the words "friend," "top," and "winter," among many others, in an advertisement. Unless, that is, you are a sponsor of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Bill Cooper, the commercial-rights director of the 2010 Organizing Committee, says that the organizers aren't trying trying to stifle debate.

"We owe it to Canadian athletes and the Canadian public to police the brand, and we take that very seriously," he says.

I'm glad my 'you'd better police the brand' letters to VANOC aren't falling on deaf ears. Oddly, though, my application to a communications position did.

Other words that will fetch you a phone call from a lawyer:

• See You in Vancouver
• See You in Whistler
• See You in Beijing
• Let the Dreams Begin
• Sea To Sky
• 2010
• '10
• We're Next
• Road to Beijing
• Driven by Nature
• Road to Vancouver
• Driven by Dreams
• Celebrate the Impossible
• Vancouver '10
• Gold Medal
• Game Plan
• 2000
• 2002
• '00
• '02
• It's Our Time To Shine
• For The Fire Within

As Michael Geist reasons, even a balanced implementation of this law still represents an extreme example of special interest legislation. Myself, I'm just looking forward to having a Coca-Cola, shutting up, and watching some luge.

Classmate Emily is keeping an eye on the run-up to the Games: check her out.

(Alf, please skip.)

"He was always surrounded by paper"

Got halfway through "In the Now" on the bus yesterday—John Colapinto's snarky profile of Karl Lagerfeld. The most enjoyable article I've read in a while.

Click the portrait to see the award-winning commercial for Lagerfeld's clothing lines at the British discount chain H & M.

What is language?

The last minute and a bit is brilliant.

Panopticon

The lights keep you awake so you can study.

(Photo: "B.C. Place at Midnight.")

There is chaos under heaven

Priceless cartoon this week of Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-tung dancing cheek to cheek under a hammer-and-sickle moon, to the strains of an accordian waltz squeezed out by a hip-height Henry Kissinger.

The drawing accompanies Louis Menand's review of "Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World," a blow-by-blow of Tricky Dick's 1972 trip to Beijing.

Four highlights of the trip:

Mao takes Kissinger's measure: "Just a funny little man. He is shuddering with nerves all over every time he comes to see me."

Pat Nixon prevails over her handlers and arrives in Beijing in red, a colour worn only by prostitutes.

Nixon, prodded for his thoughts on the Great Wall, provides them: "This is a great wall."

A collective (not to say Communistic) whoosh of anxiety moves north from Taipei—the official capital of China for just seven years more.

Bloggers are not doing backflips over this article. The two I found are yawning and making meta-points, like you do in a pizzeria when you're coming down.

Pater Familias asks, 'What if Nixon hadn't gone to China?' (Someone else would have, apparently.) And Momentary Language wonders, not wrongly, about Menand's description of Nixon and Kissinger together:

"The couple was odd in many dimensions. Kissinger was a ladies' man (or cultivated the reputation); Nixon had trouble opening a bottle of aspirin."

I just found this question in the GRE practice questions.

27) Being a ladies' man : opening aspirin bottles ::

a) wolf : hound
b) soap : tallow
c) root : shrub
d) blazon : efface

What's your vote?

(Illustration: Edward Sorel.)

Into the chalk

John McPhee, who inadvertently screwed up Tom's writing career, returns this week in an absorbing wander through the Cretaceous chalk of England, France, and the Netherlands: "Season on the Chalk" (March 12).

McPhee is considered one of the pioneers of 'creative non-fiction,' a genre Wikipedia defines, flatly, as "using literary skills in the writing of non-fiction." I haven't known about McPhee for a long time, but the magazines containing his stories about river barges and coal trains were some of the few possessions that made it back from Asia with me.

The first paragraph of "Season":

The massive chalk of Europe lies below the English Channel, under much of Northern France, under bits of Germany and Scandinavia, under the Limburg Province of the Netherlands, and—from Erith Reach to Gravesend—under fifteen miles of the lower Thames. My grandson Tommaso appears out of somewhere and picks up a cobble from the bottom of the Thames. The tide is out. The flats are broad between the bank and the water. Small boats, canted, are at rest on the riverbed. Others, farther out on the wide river, are moored afloat—skiffs, sloops, a yawl or two. Tommaso is ten. The rock in his hand is large but light. He breaks it against the revetment bordering the Gordon Promenade, in the Riverside Leisure Area, with benches and lawns under oaks and chestnuts, prams and children, picnics under way, newspapers spread like sails, and, far up the bank, a stall selling ice cream. He cracks the cobble into jagged pieces, which are whiter than snow. Chalked graffiti line the revetment have attracted the attention of Tomasso, who now starts his own with the letter "R."

McPhee is one of the few writers who can take three delicious pages to describe a chef making a hamburger. I know what Tom means, though: You get sucked into a McPhee article, and, bright with admiration, you start affecting his style. But you lack his skill, his ability to fashion a garment from the pretty weave of detail and character. First your editors denounce you, then your readers leave you. And then you're not a writer anymore.

I had a similar brush with J. P. Donleavy a few years ago. All about dropped pronouns.

Enter the McPheeniacs:

Knight Science: "The profligately verbose John McPhee brings his usual, distinctive, mesmerising goulash of facts, asides, rambles, sketches, and odd rhythmic use of science jargon to a fixating tour of Europe’s Cretaceous chalk.

Branner: "I don’t know who else could mingle geology and terroir, geography and genealogy, the personal and the historic, all the while namedropping geologic time periods and stages like they’re a-list celebrities arriving at the Oscars."

NewMexiKen: This week’s New Yorker has an article by McPhee. What’s it about? you ask. Who cares? It’s by John McPhee.

Say 'profligately' three times fast. It's impossible.

Feel free to have a run at his first graf, too. I'd love to hear some dissenting voices.

Four poems

I'd like to buy her some toffee
but I don't have a daughter

as I pass a sidewalk store in autumn.

* * *

Exhausted
the mother has fallen asleep
so her baby is listening all alone
to the sound of the night train.

* * *

Frogs croaking in flooded paddies—
if there really is a world beyond,
echo far enough so my dead brother can hear.

* * *

A boat whistles in the night.
For a moment I too long to sail away

but merely pull the blanket up over the kids.

—Ko Un

Translated, from the Korean, by Brother Anthony of Taize, Young-moo Kim, and Gary Gach.

(Alf, please skip.)

Feed us, Seymour

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who, admittedly, looks a little like Jiang Zemin, is the most well-connected reporter in the world. This week he comes down from the mount with a freshly-chiseled tablet: "The Redirection" (March 5th).

Here's the premise: To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. The change brings the two countries closer to an open confrontation and propels the U.S. into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

Interestingly, the new strategy has American money flowing to radical Sunni groups, most of whom are avowed enemies of the United States. (Al Qaeda is one.) It also brings Saudi Arabia and Israel, who both see a nuclear Iran as an existential threat, into a clammy diplomatic embrace.

Here's Hersh, unfettered by his New Yorker editors, speaking with Bill Maher on "Real Time":

"This is, without question, the most dangerous Administration we've ever had. They don't understand the Middle East, they have a disaster on their hands in Iraq, and they are trying to 'fail forward' by pushing into Iran, saying, "Maybe we'll bomb Iran, maybe we won't."

We're running clandestine, covert operations with the help of the Saudis—in effect, we're outsourcing clandestine operations to the Saudi government, which is pretty amazing for an American government. We're outsourcing the most sensitive operations there are. We're not telling the Congress. We're disobeying the law. We're using money that isn't appropriated. The system is completely broken, and these guys are marching to their own tune."

'Fail forward': nice. I've been struggling for a catchphrase to describe my romantic life.

As you can imagine, Hersh excites a good deal of honking and spraying among conservative bloggers; many of them see him as a benighted wacko lefty with an Bush grudge.

Across the Bay: "Hersh's reporting is shrill, hilariously conspiratorial, thin, ideologically skewed, and based on dubious sources."

From Beirut to the Beltway: "Hersh, who rose to fame with his reporting on Vietnam, is only satisfied if the U.S. army is seen massacring innocent people."

That second quote deserves a couple of readings. Wow. There's some edifying discussion at Newsbusters, too—patriotic riffs on journalism, war, and liberal media bias. Two for your sampling:

"Well, goll-eeee! If the Bush administration would just listetn to Seymour Hersh, who DOES understand the Middle East, all would be hunky-dorey! Problem is, in his next spiel, he says NOTHING that shows he understands anything at all about the Middle East. He just describes what he sees happening...we're failing forward (according to him), we're outsourcing, Cheney thinks Iran is going to have a bomb....and then proceeds to hold up the head of Hezbollah as a reputable source of information on what's going on. What a joke. And he gets taken seriously."

"Ya know what I want asked to these dumb monkeys? I want a serious reporter to ask them if they have an anti-virus program installed on thier computers. If they really believe that if we just open are hearts, we wouldn't have any problems. Let's see if they would open up thier hard drives and test their theory right here at home. Go ahead, I dare you lefties to turn off your firewalls and disable your anti-virus software and show how open and honest you trust those people."

I hope you know, faithful blog reader, that I trust you open and honest. I allow anonymous comments, which opens me to attacks from strangers and my sisters. I'm not running antivirus on my friendship drive—that's the point. We are friends.

(Extra reading: A Salon profile of Seymour Hersh from 2000.)

How many have you said?

(Illustration: Harry Bliss.)
(Alf, please skip.)

Lexico II

This word has been blipping on my word radar recently: problematic.

From CBC's 'Ideas' last night: "This formulation of a 'spirit-based' tolerance is problematic."

Overheard at a UBC bar: "He has a problematic relationship with alcohol."

It's a usable word, I suppose—as good as worrisome, uncertain, or dangerous. And if my ear is right, it's now in critical vogue. But there's something I don't like about it.

I think it's that it steers the sentence toward thick nouns and adjectives; the verb is almost certain to be mute.

Thoughts?

(Alf, please skip.)

On talking and torture

Sorry for the spotty posting: I'm close to the end of reading week, and waist-deep in assignments due in the coming days.

It's no great leap from schoolwork to torture, so let's take another nibble at the ball Jane Mayer started rolling (ahhh, a week away from metaphors...) in her Feb. 18 article "Whatever It Takes," an examination of the televison show '24.'

Here, on a YouTube talk that repays watching, Mayer (above left, with Jill Abramson) discusses torture and television, with clips from '24.'

"It used to be, before 9/11, that it was just the evil people who'd use torture, but at this point, many of them are heroes who are representing America or working for the American government, which is the case of Jack Bauer."

Mayer is doing some important work these days. (She helped bring to light the Americans' use of waterboarding [demonstrated here] at Guantanamo Bay.) Writers like Mayer relieve, if momentarily, my worry that my journalistic future will be one of penury, alcoholism, and fractured relationships. I might do something useful. Then again, I might end up like Heather Mallick.

Heather Mallick is a Canadian journalist well known for her barbed, astringent style. She wrote for the Globe and Mail until late 2005, and now does a twice-weekly column for cbc.ca. She has, according to her bio, "a nice old-fashioned M.A. in English literature from the University of Toronto." Isn't that charming?

Some of Mallick's jaunty thoughts on torture in '24':

"If it weren't for bathroom breaks and my concerned, appalled husband luring me away from the television with Valpolicella and osso bucco ("You can have all the marrows, here's your fork, I'll put it in your trembling hand shall I?"), I would still be sitting there [watching the show] bleeding from the eyeballs."

"U.S. TV audiences have trouble distinguishing between fact and fiction. They are gullible and easily led. They are literal. They are insular and do not try to view their country through the eyes of others."

"Americans tend to be literal. 'I saw it on 24 so it works.' (This is why I never watched The West Wing. It pained me to think Americans actually believed it plausible that a highly intelligent president had been elected.)"

Mallick goes on in this vein. The gist: Americans are stupid, Brits are cynical, and Canadians are a nice blend of the two, with superior access to doctors.

Stephen Connolly: "It’s difficult to know where to begin refuting this insulting drivel."
Sandwalk: "The column is wonderful."

Where you come down on Heather Mallick has to do, I suppose, with your feelings about writing. E. B. White, a patron saint of the Plain Style (and of the New Yorker) had sure feelings about it. In 1935 he commanded us: Do not affect a breezy manner.

The volume of writing is enormous, these days, and much of it has a sort of windiness about it, almost as though the author were in a state of euphoria. "Spontaneous me," sang Whitman, and, in his innocence, let loose the hordes of uninspired scribblers who would one day confuse spontaneity with genius.

The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that comes to mind is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day.

Heather Mallick makes a decent case against the redundant ticking-bomb plot of '24,' but, mired in nationalistic cliché and busy showing off, she is a poor advertisement for smart criticism.

Thank God that for smart criticism we have the comedian and Fox News analyst Dennis Miller, who once described his swerve to political conservatism this way: "You see, they give me these little pieces of paper with presidents' faces on them." Here are his thoughts on waterboarding, and, later, if you're still feeling him, his broader ideas about the war on terror.

Happy Chinese New Year

Republic of China (Taiwan) flag: 255 x 175 pixels.







People's Republic of China flag: 256 x 174 pixels.








To my friends on both sides of the Taiwan Strait: Gong Xi Fa Cai.

(Alf, please skip.)

Another Day On Earth

Unlike my mother, I'm not in the habit of reading obituaries. The pursuit overtakes you at a certain age, I suppose, when you're reading the paper and munching Cheerios and wondering how many times you've done that, and how many times you might still.

The man who illustrated this cover, Joseph Low, died at his Massachusetts home on Feb. 12, at the age of 95. That's a pretty good age.

Low had a successful career; he won the 1981 Caldecott Medal, which is for children's-book illustrators. He was known, according to the New York Times, for using "wild pen gestures" to create "glyphlike characters meant for both adult and child that were both sophisticated and accessible."

Ever wonder about what song you want played at your funeral? I have three, but they've been changing lately.

This one's been on the list for a while now: Brian Eno's "And Then So Clear." In another foray into iMovie, I've put together a video for it. Tell me what you think.



What's your song?

(Alf, please skip.)

Suckling, cigars, and state-sponsored torture

I feel bad to again mention Larissa MacFarquhar's recent philosophical excursion—filled as it was with endless paragraphs about the mind-body question and other quandaries you mulled in first-year arts, and, rightly, never again—but the piece did make me laugh, with this sentence on brain chemistry and sensation.

"Oxytocin is a peptide produced in the body during orgasm and breast-feeding; when it is sprayed into the nose of experimental subjects, they become more cooperative."

While on the subject of chemicals and cooperative subjects, let's make something clear: oxytocin is not OxyContin—aka 'hillbilly heroin'—the opioid painkiller that happens to be conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh's drug of choice.

Limbaugh (above) may or may not have been high while ranting about New Yorker writer Jane Mayer the other night on his show. (Listen to the audio and judge for yourself.) His bluster does have a druggy, dreamy savor, though; it's like jazz trumpet, with improvised phrases picked up, twisted, drawn out, and dropped. And, yes, it's also reliant on wind.

This, I gather, is Limbaugh's point: Mayer's Feb. 18 examination of the politics of '24' was an obvious attempt by the New Yorker to "discredit the military and shame the country." He goes on:

"There is an all-out assault on the US military. Inherent in this is some of the most righteous indignation among some of the most ignorant people about what happens in war. The idea that war is as highbrow and as clean-cut as a bridge game at the Harvard Club? Spare me!

And these people who are writing all this outraged, righteous indignation over torture haven't the slightest idea what is at stake on the battlefield with this particular enemy, and we never, we never hear about the torture they inflict."

Rush Limbaugh's close friend Joel Surnow (right) is the co-creator of '24.' "The military loves our show," says Surnow, whose office wall is draped with an American flag. "It's a patriotic show."

Mayer's central premise is that the show's frequent representations of torture (generally of 'bad guys' by government agents) may have injurious and genuine real-world effects.

Some important voices agree with her.

The dean of West Point Military Academy, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, met with the '24' creative team to express his worry that "the show's central premise—that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country's security—was having a toxic effect."

And Tony Lagouranis, a former Army interrogator in the war in Iraq, says DVDs of shows such as '24' circulate widely among soldiers stationed in Iraq:

“People watch the shows, and then walk into the interrogation booths and do the same things they’ve just seen.”

Just to orient this in the current American cultural moment: Before Sept. 11, fewer than four acts of torture appeared on prime-time TV annually. Now there are more than a hundred. '24' averages one every other show.

Okay, this is a scattershot entry, I know. But let's try to draw it all together; I can't help but feel there's a beautiful summation to be made—Limbaugh, torture, early weaning, Freud, cigars, oxytocin...

I can't find the killing phrase. Ah, forget it. I'm going to bed.

Hard-packed and stony

Pleasing bit of description in Larissa MacFarquhar's Feb. 12 profile of Pat and Paul Churchland, two Canadian philosophy professors who are, at the article's open, wandering at the California seaside:

"It's a little before six in the morning and quite cold on the beach. It's low tide, and the sand is wet and hard-packed and stony."

It's almost Hemingwayesque—terse and physical—but he'd have left out the "a little before" and the "quite." I'd prefer it that way, I think, but it still holds up. "Pack" is such a great word.

(Painting: Duane Murrin's "Low Tide.")
(Alf, please skip.)

Word of the Day I

I picked up a new word, courtesy of Kia, who writes:

"Gopnik's writing about art in the New Yorker in the 1990s had an almost emetic effect on the boyfriend I was living with at the time."

According to the OED:
emetic, a. & n.

1. Having power to produce vomiting. Also fig. sickening, mawkish.
2. A medicine that excites vomiting.

I'm thinking emetic sentimentality, emetic public figures, my unhappily emetic response to getting cleated in the groin on a third base somewhere in Etobicoke, Ontario, in 1986.

And, you'll be happy to know, I'm making no mention of Adam Gopnik for at least two weeks. The effect would be, well, grody.

(Alf, please skip.)

We heart the New Yorker

When I have a readership, I hope I think of things like this. At Emdashes, our prime source of New Yorkeralia, Emily Gordon has posted friends' virtual valentines to the magazine's contributors. See who gets a whip, who a standing invitation to dinner, and who the elixir of eternal life.

And, yes, you can see what I'm sending out, too.

(Illustration: Patricia Storms.)
(Alf, please skip.)

Dialing it down

There have been murmurs of demurral among some of the New Yorker faithful. Not all, it seems, were happy to be implicated in the gang thrashing of Adam Gopnik.

Emdashes makes clear that her linking to Wolcott's screed was not a tacit seconding of his opinions, although she "reveres Wolcott as a critic and likes him tremendously as a person"—something akin to what Gopnik himself must now be feeling. (She gives her final word on the matter here.)

Kia from Gall and Gumption voices unease at the attention Wolcott's linking to her has brought. Sure, she's got reservations about Gopnik's writing, but she takes pains to separate the words from the man, a distinction Wolcott giddily ignored.

But, so far, NY-based Canadian freelancer Jeff MacIntyre has had the sharpest, truest response:

"I've always found Gopnik precious, but he's got a great many talents that make him seem more a peacock for their unfashionable and rare status, such as the breadth and promiscuity of his interests.

The piece was ridiculously narrowminded, as much fun as it is to read Wolcott on a tear, particularly because Gopnik does not really espouse some unified theory of smug disregard for his reader or peers. With him I get a very real sense he's being himself, which is no big whoop nor any crime. I think for a writer to come in for that kind of hating, he has to be offending on some higher level than that."

So who is James Wolcott? "The King James Version," a New York Magazine piece from 2001, sketches in some background on our assailant célèbre. The piece begins:

"James Wolcott knows about envy. He's spent the past seventeen years holding two of the most sought-after writing gigs in America: Vanity Fair, of course, but also a four-and-a-half-year stint at Tina Brown's New Yorker. His salary is one of the highest in the business (as high as $400,000, according to Inside.com). And everyone pretty much agrees that he's got the most powerful pen in popular culture

It doesn't help matters, at least in the enmity-and-envy department, that Wolcott uses his pulpit—Vanity Fair as well as lengthy pieces in The New Republic and The London Review of Books—to deliver mordant, personal attacks. His columns aren't just critical reviews or clever commentary, they're laced with humiliating zingers.

Media heavies are favorite prey, but, for some reason, he's hardest on fellow writers. Gloria Steinem has "the nun-glow of a strict forehead"; Martin Amis was "the scowl of a new generation" who made writing look "insolently easy"; David Denby is "the boy who cried wolf. Easily excitable and always concerned." Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis write a "ticker tape of dropped names." On Richard Ford's taste for hunting: "Well, now we know who killed Bambi's mother. It was Richard Ford on one of his death strolls."

I may be missing the subtext of the put-downs, but none seems particularly glittering to me. I'll try one of my own: Wolcott is a "cheese-tray-hovering mouthbreather" whose "sublimated schoolgirl pique" has made his writing "a bile-ejaculation derby." Unremarkable, as I'm sure you agree. The hole of the Internet is deep, and, thankfully, such sentiments have weight. For insults, I like Roald Dahl.

More interesting than insults is what David Denby and Tina Brown have to say about James Wolcott. (Denby is one of the magazine's film critics; Brown was the editor from 1992 to 1998—a tenure during which, according to Salon, she was "either her generation's most adroit zeitgeist surfer or the lead zombie in a highbrow remake of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.")

David Denby:

"I don't think there's anyone smarter than Jim reviewing for the last twenty years. He can see the contradiction in things in a way that can be quite breathtaking."

"I admire him, he's a phenomenal autodidact. He's learned from literature and journalism directly rather than from professors, which left him without any sense of false piety—and he developed a very vigorous style that turns the surface of things into metaphor. He can describe a performance or a personality and gather it up into a superb visual caricature.

But there's a problem with that: he stays on the surface. He doesn't seem to me to make the next step. There is no cultural value to defend. The only terrible thing for him is to be boring. That's a pop aesthetic. He's got nothing to fall back on."

Tina Brown:

"I think he felt jostled at the New Yorker. He felt outclassed by Anthony Lane, Adam Gopnik, and David Remnick. At Vanity Fair, there's no one else to muscle in on his territory."

Ah, the male anxiety and territoriality... They're the reasons (along with, of course, sexual frustration) Camille Paglia says there's never been a great female lead guitarist in a rock band. Unfortunately, some of us take up writing.

Anyway, I've got to catch up on Wolcott. I know he's bodyslammed Gopnik and Denby, and now, tantalizingly, I've learned he's taken on Christopher Hitchens, too. Has he tried Lane, Remnick, or anyone else now at the magazine?

Has Wolcott ever got his?

(Extra: Elizabeth Kolbert on Tina Brown, circa 1993: "How Tina Brown Moves Magazines.")

Vows and covenants I

On another note entirely: Can we journalists all agree not to use the adjective 'hard-hitting' anymore?

(Alf, please skip.)

Gopnik gets curbed

I've been thinking about this entry since last night, when I made a surprising discovery: most New Yorker bloggers have a grudge against Adam Gopnik.

Initiating incident: James Wolcott (left), "the reigning monarch of the literary put-down," delivers a maiming review of Gopnik's "Through the Children's Gate," his collection of essays about New York.

"Finally," caws Gawker. "The Adam Gopnik takedown we've all been waiting for."

Here are Gopnik's primary flaws, in Wolcott's view. He

• was put on this earth to annoy;
• is a careerist with delicate antennae who wants to be encouraged, petted, praised, promoted, and congratulated;
• is forever soliciting the reader's approval with an array of cloying ploys that become gimmicky and self-conscious;
• and his friends are yuppie triumphalists who take pride and pleasure in their exalted taste buds and their little geniuses reflecting flatteringly on their own achievements.

It's hard to get out of the way of Wolcott's critique—it rolls up, up, up off the beach and you find yourself looking for a palm branch or balcony railing to hang on to. I felt short of breath reading it, more so because the piece is frighteningly well written. (Wolcott, a Vanity Fair contributing editor, is gentler in the afterglow, however. He blogs his postscript here.)

Okay, fine: fratricide among the New York literati can't be new. But the shocking part was the response of bloggers, the ostensible fans: Yeah, he had it coming.

Hate, always quick to respond, finds one lonely dad sticking up for Gopnik. The others? Some avert their eyes. Most lap it up.

Emdashes: "Wolcott makes an omelette with some familiar eggs."
Penguins: "This is hilarious."
The Elegant Variation: "Lord, James Wolcott entertains us."
Biffles: "Gopnik filters the entire world through his upper-middle-class colored preciousness."
Jewcy: "Why is there a market for Gopnik's extravagant whimsicality?"
Gall and Gumption: "Gopnik manages somehow to distill experience down to pure vanity."

It all seems a touch cruel to me. I haven't read "Children's Gate," but I loved one of its pieces that ended up in the magazine, "Death of a Goldfish," Gopnik's rumination on meaning and existence. Wolcott claims to hear tinned laughter behind this, the essay's opening passage.

"When our five-year-old daughter Olivia's goldfish, Bluie, died the other week, we were confronted with a crisis larger, or at least more intricate, than is entirely usual upon the death of a pet. Bluie's life and his passing came to involve so many larger elements—including the problem of consciousness and the plotline of Hitchcock's Vertigo—that it left us all bleary-eyed and a little shaken.

"Let's try this," Martha said. "Let's tell her that, though Bluie did die, this Bluie [a replacement fish, a ringer for the original] is kind of Bluie reborn.

"I thought she might have something, and in the next fifteen minutes, we did a quick, instinctive tour of the world's religions. We made up a risen-from-the-grave Christian story: the Passion of the Bluie. We considered a Buddhist story: Bluie goes round and round. We even played with a Jewish story: Bluie couldn't be kept alive by the doctors, but what a lovely bowl he left for his family!"

More to come on this. Did he really have it coming?

Mailbag I

Unsolicited submission from a reader, who writes, "Hey journal-boy, what you make of this?"

"If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people— including me—would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

Objective, professional journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be corrupt for so long."

-Hunter S. Thompson, gonzo journalist (1939 - 2005)

* * *
I'm just trying to figure out how many people would rot in jail for the truth I know. A couple of hundred, I reckon, give or take. I can probably pad my stats if I turn friends in for shoplifting. Let's say 220.

Hunter's arguing little circuitously, but it's probably the speedball's fault. If those corrupt people aren't rotting in prison, it is because he's an objective and professional journalist. But, if he has only fear and loathing for objectivity and professionalism, then doesn't he fail as a truthteller and a journalist?

Sorry, wrong verb tense.

Thompson's suicide note:

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt."

We love the flameouts, don't we?

(Alf, please skip.)

Bringing sales back

Pop-music critic Sasha Frere-Jones returns this week to a favorite (and decidedly unmasculine) theme: making sure Justin Timberlake gets his due as an artist.

"Sales of CDs are sagging—pendulous, even—and in the Internet era anybody who can sell more than a million units is a superhero. Enter Captain Timberlake."

I used to think Sasha Frere-Jones was a woman, perhaps like the one above. I hoped for it; I rolled her name around in my mouth: "Sa-sha." It sounded feminine, I reasoned, and the hyphenated surname probably meant an unhappy marriage.

I scrutinized her columns for a giveaway "We gals...", all the while indulging a fantasy of sitting in her New York kitchen, sipping flavored coffee, our banter rife with razor-sharp similes. And when we fell onto the bed, it was beneath of fog of German electronica—sonorous, ambient, totally obscure. (Like this.)

Anyhoo, oops, nope, it turns out that, in addition to being the New Yorker's premiere music writer and possessor of Wikipedia's bleakest page, Sasha Frere-Jones (right) is a man. Moderntime was also confused and disappointed.

ZP from Hate will contest Frere-Jones's critical supremacy, I think, putting in a claim for Alex Ross, the classical-music critic. It's impossible, though: Ross makes me feel dumb, like I should have been paying closer attention to avant-garde Finnish composers, and what was I doing with my time anyway?

When you read Frere-Jones you think, Hey, it's okay I've been hitherto ignorant of this amazing hip-hop act because, well, there's Soulseek, and still time on the clock. When you read Ross you feel that someone is on a nearby rooftop, shooting sniper pellets of scorn into your shoulder blade.

Interesting: Frere-Jones, back in 2003, when he was writing for Slate, took Ross to task for exactly that—being a snot:

"Listen to Ross slag the kids in this efficient dig: Timberlake, for those who have let their subscription to Teen People lapse, is the blond, curly-haired twenty-two-year-old lead singer of 'N Sync."

"The New Yorker has a track record of approaching pop music with one hand holding its nose."

His defensiveness about Justin aside, Frere-Jones makes a compelling argument for the 'big tent' approach. This openness is his greatest virtue as a critic: he's certain that not all great music has happened already, no matter our desire to retreat to our room with our Brian Eno and forget about Janet Jackson's latest offering. Viewed the right way, the idea takes on existential implications.

(Top photo: Anggun, the Indonesian-French singer, who, herself viewed the right way, sounds all right.)

Gladwell, Prego, and true happiness

Quick hit for you. I've gotta write a profile of a reporter for Newswriting, so I'm researching Malcolm Gladwell, his trademark hair, and his 'ideas' beat.

Just found this this ten-minute TEDtalk he gave in September, 2006.

This is how TED—which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design—describes itself:

TED is an event like no other.
It brings together more than 1000 thought leaders, movers and
shakers...
...in Monterey, California every year...
...for four days of learning, laughter and inspiration.

Learning, laughter, and inspiration... Brrrr: the very recipe for a teeth-grinding first date. The site is cooler than it sounds, but the punctuation is yearbookish throughout. And they misspelled his name.

(Alf, please skip this one.)

Irony is dead

Like a lassi after the vindaloo, impressionist Rich Little (right), who does a spot-on Dr. Phil, will take the podium this April at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner.

“I think his brand of humor will be perfect for the night," said WHCA president Steve Scully, noting that he'd reminded the comedian of his goal: "to singe, not burn."

The annual dinner hosts around 3,000 of the most powerful people in Washington, and, unless you've been on a media fast in the Gulf Islands with Raffi, you know what happened last year.

Stephen Colbert (left), Comedy Central host and that night's keynote speaker, crossed the line, was mean-spirited and unfunny, performed the greatest act of moral courage in the history of the universe, sarcastically destroyed both the media and its masters, or was f**king pathetic and depressing. Take your pick.

(You know you need to watch at least 6:50-13:30 again, all the while asking yourself, 'Is it possible for a comedian to kill and bomb at the same time?')

Whether he killed, or bombed, or both, depends on whom you ask. But most can agree that Colbert's ironic speech left many in the room clenched and squirming. And angry: Laura Bush refused Colbert's hand as he exited the dais, under thin applause.

And there were some watching C-SPAN that night who didn't quite get it. From self-described 'reasonable conservative' Jon Swift:

"I had never heard of Stephen Colbert before this event but he seems to be a very articulate and sincere conservative. Some are even saying he is courageous for facing down the liberal media the way he did. I'm not sure I would go that far. Have we sunk so low that merely having convictions makes one a hero?"

In this week's Talk of the Town, Jeffrey Goldberg doesn't talk up Colbert's convictions; he reckons the comedian committed the "sin of humor" with President Bush sitting only a few feet away.

Surely, though, beside the Sloth, Wrath, and Pride of the roastee, humor is a venial sin.

Ten Hail Marys and an Act of Contrition, my son, and on your way.

Now collecting votes for the 1) funniest, 2) wickedest, and 3) flattest Colbert lines.

(Edit: Holy Christmas! Rich Little is Canadian??)

Al Qaeda's death-metal soldier

Adam Gadahn, the first American to be charged with treason in fifty years, used to be big into death metal.

The 28-year-old is now Al Qaeda's top English-language propagandist, having converted to Islam at age 17, left his home in rural California, and trained at terrorist camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Raffi Khatchadourian's Jan. 22 profile of Gadahn is full of rich ironies, like the fact that before he joined Al Qaeda, Gadahn (featured in all photos at right) rejected evangelical Christianity because he felt alienated by its “apocalyptic ramblings.”

Check out his thoughts on family:

“Allah warns the parents, siblings, offspring, and other relatives of the Muslim that their relation to him will be of no use to them on the day of judgment, if they have not themselves died as true believers.

So don’t be complacent, or let the Devil deceive you into thinking that your connections will intercede for you on that terrible day."

I can see how rambling turns him off. Everyone knows that succinctness gets you more bang for your psychotic-metaphysical buck.

Death metal, as you probably know, is identified by downtuned rhythm guitars, fast percussion, and dark lyrics that focus, Elizabeth Kolbert-like, on nihilistic metaphors. What you may not know is that metalheads revere Cookie Monster and imitate his singing style.

'I forget—how exactly does Cookie Monster sing?'

Rocknerd explains why the growling and ümlaüts preponderate in heavy metal, but he doesn't have much to say about how young Americans "pick up the sword of the idea" and go on to attack their own societies, even martyring themselves if necessary.

In Khatchadourian's article, forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman provides a profile of "homegrowns," as they're called. He finds that, as with most cults, the ideology is just window dressing for new recruits. The chief appeal seems to be finding community within a "bunch of guys."

Once within that “bunch of guys,” the men become radicalized through a process akin to oneupmanship, in which members try to outdo one another in demonstrations of zeal.

Sound familiar? Perhaps you see a parallel to young men who electroshock their own genitals.

Apparently, ideology and political grievance play a minimal role during the initial stages of jihadi enlistment. According to Sageman, the common thread is that "the future terrorists were isolated, lonely, and emotionally alienated.”

It won't be the last time I ask this: What happened to soft drugs and acoustic guitar?

(Extra reading: "My Year Inside Radical Islam.")
(Extra watching: Gadahn and Zawahiri appeal for your conversion.)

The sensitive atom

"A sparrow does not fall to the ground without God's awareness" (Matthew 10:29).

While Adam Gopnik has us on the subject of Matthew, Darwin, and human significance, let's look at another formulation of meaning and the cosmos.

Panexperientialism: the idea that everything—humans, dogs, mosquitoes, trees, blades of grass, and atoms—has feelings, or an inner life.

According to one of the "most decorated spirituality and ethics writers in North America," Vancouver Sun columnist Douglas Todd:

"There is an intimate correlation between matter, emotion and that elusive quality we now call spirit."

"When it comes to understanding the environment, panexperientialism is also crucial. Humans develop a closer kinship with nature when they recognize that everything on the planet is ultimately made up of things that feel."

"This is not to say humans and a blade of grass are equal. Humans are infinitely more complex, possessing all sorts of emotions, thoughts and aspirations of which a blade of grass, literally, cannot dream."

Dear Douglas Todd,

I'm glad I read your column in this morning's Sun: I was dreading sitting down to my Saturday homework, but your argument about panexperientialism so alarmed me that I rushed to the computer with a cup of coffee and here I am now at 9:15 AM. Thank you.

So, divinity is "embedded in the evolutionary process, which works through a combination of chance and purpose"? That sounds like intelligent design to me. By your disclaimer, I was hoping your exploration of panexperientialism was a gesture of charity to those readers who asked for it. But you seem to think it was "the most important part" of your column, too.

The notion seems a last-ditch attempt by religious people to affirm human beings' centrality in the universe. If Christians now concede that a dominion-style relationship with the bears and sparrows, rocks and trees, as laid out in Genesis, leads to environmental rape and spoil, they have two ways to even the balance:

• make everything meaningful
  
• make themselves meaningless.

Panexperientialism is the former choice: man, assured of his own importance, magnanimously accords it to everything else.

And that would be fine, as far as it went—humans on par with the world of things. But then the ugly notion of primacy creeps back in: "This is not to say humans and a blade of grass are equal."

Why do we need the special recognition for humans, Mr. Todd? Are we equal to the world or superior to it?

Here's a crazy idea: Yes, let's become peers with the atom, not by making it "feel," but by accepting that neither of us matters much.

Insisting on human importance will not, to use your phrase, "urge us towards beauty." Forgetting it will.

Best regards,

John Bucher

P.S. I've attached an excerpt of Adam Gopnik's recent New Yorker article about Charles Darwin. It applies to this question, I think, and you both refer to the same Matthew verse.

Dear John Bucher,

Thank you for your letter. We'll have to agree to disagree about panexperientialism. If you'd like, you can send your letter to the Letters section of the Sun, but I have no control over whether it gets published.

It's up to you.

Sincerely,

Douglas Todd

Deep time

Glaring and bescarfed Adam Gopnik sure sounds kinder than he looks. I caught half of his CBC Ideas lecture last night while driving into town.

In it (podcast due Feb. 5) Gopnik expounded a question he recently asked his kids: Do you prefer theatres, where you can sit? Or museums, where you can talk?

His point is that context is everything. Our experience of art, say, is "impure" because it is inseparable from our experience of the museum as a place of courting, of flirting, of surveying. Religions are the same: we can't tease the sanctified part from the ululating and the slaying of neighbors.

It's still early in this blog, so I'll be spare with terms like 'startling erudition' and 'searingly urbane,' mostly because 'sear' should always be followed by something something in a balsamic reduction. But Gopnik's got it going on. He's in the running for a golden ticket and a tour of the factory.

Luckily, I obsessed over a Darwin piece of his from October; I could see where he was cribbing it in his lecture. He read my favorite part almost word for word.

Bookworld, who also thought that section "very fine," quotes the last four paragraphs, although, for me, this part, about Time's relationship to Meaning, is the nut:

"In Darwin's work, time moves at two speeds: there is the vast abyss of time in which generations change and animals mutate and evolve; and then there is the gnat's-breath, humming-bird-heart time of creaturely existence, where our children are born and grow and, sometimes, die before us.

"The space between the tiny but heartfelt time of human life and the limitless time of Nature became Darwin's implicit subject. Religion had always reconciled quick time and deep time by pretending that the one was in some way a prelude to the other—a prelude or a prologue or a trial or a treatment. Artists of the Romantic period, in an increasingly secularized age, thought that through some vague kind of transcendence they could bridge the gap. They couldn't. Nothing could. The tragedy of life is not that there is no God but that the generations through which it progresses are too tiny to count very much. There isn't a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, but try telling that to the sparrows.

"The human challenge that Darwin felt, and that his work still presents, is to see both times truly—not to attempt to humanize deep time, or to dismiss quick time, but to make enough of both without overlooking either."

Brilliantly sly how, in the penultimate sentence of that second chunk, he buries the really earthshattering sentiment—life has no meaning—in a slippery grammatical structure. By the time you get to the "it" you've nearly forgotten he means "everything."

Here are three big questions:

• Are the things you love meaningful?
• Does your loving them make them meaningful?
• Would you love them if they were ultimately meaningless?

Platform agnosticism

A new piece of nomenclature that—like "backstory," perhaps—will rise from obscurity to common use in two weeks flat: "platform agnostic."

I first saw the term in David Denby's January 8th article on the future of Hollywood films. He uses it to refer to the viewing habits of kids, who will "look at movies on any screen at all, large or small."

(Photo: Thomas Huxley [1825-95], a great defender of Darwin, who coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his belief that it cannot be known whether or not god exists. The word comes from the Greek—'a' [not] 'gnosis' [knowledge].)

Denby, like most cinephiles (and old people), is not a platform agnostic. He doesn't like how the iPod rides up and down on his stomach when he's watching a movie. And holding it away from his body makes his arm tired. And his eyes hurt to focus. Besides, he's got better options.

"At the house of my friend Harry Pearson, I watched movies on what must be close to the ultimate home-theatre system, a setup priced at two hundred thousand dollars."

So, Mr. Denby, when I start my internship, I'm going to be polite at first. I'll swing by your office and be, like, yeah, no frigging way can we dispense with the Western canon. Nothing about Anthony Lane being funnier. But then...I'm going to get a little more insistent.

Let me put it out there right now: I'll watch whatever you guys are watching. I'll be really quiet. And I will bring the Stroh's.

Talk of platform agnosticism at journalism school is appropriate: the newspaper god is ailing, and journalists have begun to hedge their bets. We take something called Multiplatform Journalism (the 'multi' means print, audio, video, and online), which will help me a tonne when I give up on slackjawed Joe Public and go into advertising.

Dorky Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., who carries a stuffed toy moose around, also describes himself as a platform agnostic.

Still working on the link between the two.

Goodnight cruel moon!

The strain of doing such fine reporting on global warming may be showing on Elizabeth Kolbert.

I suppose there's only so much Bush Administration dormancy and mendacity you can absorb before your assignment editor asks you to review a classic children's book and you, um, turn it into a nihilistic meditation on death.

Her ultimate paragraph in "Goodnight Mush," from the December 12 issue:

"Time moves forward, and the little bunny doesn’t stand a chance. Parent and child are, in this way, brought together, on tragic terms. You don’t want to go to sleep. I don’t want to die. But we both have to."

Reaction from the blogosphere:

Lance Mannion: "I've read Goodnight Moon a thousand times, in a myriad of moods, and not once, not once, did I come away with an interpretation as dark as this."

Three Dot: "I thought I had a knack for reading disturbing messages into children's books, but I doff my hat to Ms. Kolbert."

Elf Sternberg: "Whoa. Heavy."

Play Library: "Ms. Kolbert’s piece is bizarre to say the least as well as overly analytical with a bitter taste."

Is the death fable a philosophical statement for Kolbert? She's gotta be an existentialist—the unfathomable universe, the human reponsibility, the slow, sweet march to a permanent void.

Consider the tone of her article beside the last paragraphs of Albert Camus's "Irony," his 1937 reflection on youth and death.

"None of this fits together? How very true! A woman you abandon to go to the cinema, an old man to whom you have stopped listening, a death which redeems nothing, and then, on other hand, the whole radiance of the world.

"What difference does it make if you accept everything? What you have here are three destinies which are different and yet alike. Death for us all, but his own death to each. After all, the sun still warms our bones for us."

And on that note, time for Multiplatform.

Orhan Pamuk on why he writes

Orhan Pamuk tells us why he writes in his Nobel acceptance lecture, reprinted in the Christmas double issue.

"I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion."

The piece pivots on Pamuk's opening a suitcase of old letters of his father's. It's a bit like a Sedaris short story where an ordinary object—a boil, say—is freighted with slightly too much metaphoric import.

Kelly Spitzer and other members of her Seattle-area writers' group are inspired, though. They try their hand at Pamukian declarations:

"I write because I believe in the power of fiction, of stories and ideas, to heal the world."

"I write because it makes me feel alive, it makes me feel grand and full of the world, full of language, story, the human experience."

"I write because I want people to see the world the way I see it. I write so I can understand the emotional undertones of living. I write because I enjoy seeing my insides come to life."

Oh, rescue us from the purple passages, the world-healing, the cozy self-regard of writers, George Orwell! Why do you write?

1. Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one.

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story.

3. Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

4. Political purpose—using the word "political" in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.

By the way, have you ever tried to make your surname an adjective? Pamukian is a mouthful of shards. I don't much like mine, either—Bucherian. Camusian? Nope.

And what the hell do you call a citizen of Dubai?

Ward the King

Stephen Ward, the big dog, the director of the School of Journalism.

I like the guy, let that be said—although it's not for peons to like kings. My feeling runs nearer to trembling awe, so different is the power we wield.

Which is why I've started compiling a list of the weird words he uses. They sound correct, but each time I hear one, I mouth it mentally to myself and promise to look it up.

There were five in our first Press and Society class:
—"issue," pronounced to rhyme with 'miss you';
—"genre," pronounced ZHAHN, like 'John' in French, without the fluttering 'r';
—"propagandic," which should be the name of a hip hair salon;
—"periodicy," which I suspect is missing a couple of letters; and
—"censorial," which I think should be "censorious"—'in a mood to censor.'

It's hard enough getting through the dense vocab in academe without your profs riffing, Miles Davis-like, on the language, no? Then again, maybe he's Cajun or something.

Let's see what the OED says.

Issue
((j)u, sju) Looks like he's on solid, if slightly poncey, ground on this one. Pushing out that 'y' sound purses your mouth. One for the bossman.

Genre
(r) Nope, he should definitely be licking the 'r' at the end. One-one.

Propagandic
(Rare) Pertaining to a propaganda or to propagandism. Bugger, thought we had him here. The more common usage is 'propagandistic,' which the OED has as "given or inclined to propagandism; devoted to the propagation of doctrines or principles."

Funny, I'd never noticed the 'pagan' right in the middle of that word. I wonder what pagan propaganda would look like. "Barbecuing ON A SPIT is a SOCIAL GOOD," maybe. Two-one, Ward.

Periodicy
There are no results. The nearest alphabetical match is displayed in the side-frame. Good. I think he was looking for 'periodicity,' or "the quality or character of being periodic; the quality of regular recurrence; tendency to recur at (esp. regular) intervals. 2. Recurrence of a woman's periods; menstruation." Two-two.

Censorial
1. Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of a censor; 2. Of persons: Like a censor; censorious. Wow, I was almost sure that was a mistake.

I'm undone at the end, and the professor snakes the victory, three-two.

Screw it: I've heard him say "orientate" twice. Call it a tie.

Out of the blocks

Welcome, welcome.

This blog will be unlike the two others I've begun—I'll log more than six entries. Why, John, after an explosion of energy, does your blogging fall fallow?

Trade in my opinions is slow. Faithful blogging, as I'm sure you've noticed, requires vanity and a punishing commitment to honesty. (Thankfully, I exorcised both in a mercifully brief, early twenties, wee-hours-of-the-morning romance with writing blank verse, drunk, in my parent's kitchen.) And I'm an ENTP: ingenious, decisive, spunky (not in the British way), incapable of completing tasks.

Those three characteristics have served me well getting into relationships, though obviously not out of them. And a blog is a kind of relationship. So let's sit down here on the couch and I'll pour you a glass of wine.

Whatever happens, I promise I'll call you in the morning.