I See You (but not really) and Why I Write this Blog

[Music for this post: Ben Harper’s Fight for Your Mind; and Billy Bragg & Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue]

[Beer for this post: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale]

Stat Counter

So, to get right to the point, a little over a month ago I added a stat counter to this blog—you may have noticed the little “StatCounter.com” icon at the very bottom of each page (but I’d be surprised). Anne has had one up on her blog for a while, but I had been avoiding adding one, that is until something happened that made me decide I really needed it.

I was avoiding it mostly because I didn’t (and still don’t, for the most part, really) want to know how many page hits I was getting and where my readers were coming from. See, I assumed my only readers were probably my dad, Anne, and a handful of my friends, but I also harbored a very small, secret hope that maybe I was getting a few more hits from other friends and perhaps even the occasional stranger. What was important, and what I didn’t want crushed by the information from a stat counter, was that these were assumptions that I was happy to make and did not want tested. My fear was that if I installed a stat counter I’d learn that no one was reading this, that the five or so people I thought cared enough to check it out occasionally actually didn’t, and also that my little hope of the occasional extra was foolish. There are a lot of websites out there, a lot of blogs, and to assume that people would take the time to read my ramblings, most of which are relatively personal and not specifically designed to be of wider interest, requires a certain amount of arrogance that I guess I have but don’t trust and am not comfortable with.

But I decided to add the tool after Anne told me that someone from the federal courts in D.C. had come to her blog through mine. This was shortly after I had applied for a clerkship with a federal judge in D.C., one who interviewed me in 2008 and who I’d love to work for. [n.1] Now, this reader (or viewer, at least) could have been anyone, it could’ve been a coincidence, but if I had to guess I’d say it wasn’t. To get to my blog and then follow one of my links to Anne’s would require someone who was interested enough about me and my wife to bother with that. It could’ve been a mutual friend, but we couldn’t think of anyone we know who is currently in the D.C. federal court system. If I had to bet, I’d say it was either the Judge or (much more likely) one of her clerks. So, I decided to add the stat counter to see if this person came back to my blog.

What the stat counter tells me, if I go look at it: (1) number of hits in the current day, the previous day, the current month, and “total”; (2) the city, ISP, and IP address of each visitor; (3) how each visitor got there (a link from somewhere else, a Google search, et cetera); and (4) a bunch of other stuff that I don’t really ever look at. So, for example, if my dad views the blog today, and I go look at my recent activity, I’ll see that on April 29 someone in Montebello, California, using the network at Teac America, visited my blog by searching for “Howling with Mirth” using Google (Teac is my dad’s employer).

The information is very interesting. But if you’re reading this and are worried that I’ll figure out who you are and how often you read it, you shouldn’t be too concerned: first, because the information is usually too vague to make anything out of it; and second, because I don’t look at it that closely for the reason I talked about up above (I just don’t want to know). But when in scanning the thing I see something weird, I take note. Here are some examples of things I’ve discovered:

- I had a visitor from Qatar who viewed my post entitled “Catholic High School Girls in Trouble.” He (I’m confident it was a he) managed to get to it without a “referring link” (he didn’t directly follow a result from a search engine) which is kind of strange.

- I had a visitor from Saudi Arabia who viewed my “Reading the New Yorker with Me…” post and got to it by searching “Play tits” on Google. I blame James Cameron.

- A visitor from Tehran, Iran, got to my blog by searching “hymen break videos” on Google. I guess that’s what I get for writing about Bad Lieutenant.

- And, the most disturbing one by far, a visitor from Frisco, Texas, who got here by searching “pre school little lolitas.” Fucking sick bastard. I write about one of the most beautifully written novels of all time and I get this sort of traffic. If any law enforcement officers from Texas or the FBI are reading this, he (obviously) connected via Grande Communications and his IP address is 72.48.62.230.

Other, less disturbing things I’ve discovered:

- I’ve had visitors from every continent except Antarctica. If anyone knows anyone at a research station down there, please ask them to visit my blog so I can complete my tour of the continents.

- I have semi-regular readers in Australia, Ireland, England, and a few other places. Who knew?

- When Chris at Smart Football linked to my “Ten Books…” post my traffic jumped to about 100 people a day for a few days. Thanks, Chris!

- If you really want to know, and I don’t but I can’t delete it from my mind, my daily average is about 10 people (with spikes occurring during the two days after I post something new), which is more than I would’ve dared to guess.

Thanks for reading, it means a lot to me.

Why I Write this Blog

I don’t write it because I think I’m going to become the male version of Heather Armstrong, a “daddy blogger” who can support a family on blogging revenue. [n.2] I don’t write it because I’m arrogant enough to think lots of people who don’t know me care about what I have to say. This is probably going to sound sappy, or whatever, but I write it because it is good for me. I write this to share.

Those who know me well, particularly my wife and ex-girlfriends, know that communication is far from my strong suit. I’m intensely private about many things and I tend to keep to myself most of what goes on in my head (which has to sound strange coming from someone who writes a pretty personal blog, but it’s true). But for some reason, and I realize I’m not unique here, I can write things I can’t say. I can share things here that I can’t share in another manner. [n.3] Some might think this is an example of what’s wrong with people today, what’s wrong with the Internet, this distanced, impersonal, electronic communication. They’d say that surely a face-to-face chat would be better, and maybe they’re right, I can understand that, but some of this stuff I am simply not going to say otherwise. I can’t share some of the things I’ve shared here in one-on-one conversation. Call it a fault of mine—it probably is—but this is what I’ve got, and I can’t help but think this is better than nothing. And in my defense, sort of: on top of the limitation caused by my usual inability to expose myself in person (heh), I think there is a depth achievable in writing that is hard to match in conversation. But whatever.

I’ve written stuff here that has touched certain people very deeply, made them cry with joy, and I’ve written stuff here that has led to friends sharing important, personal things with me that I am confident they never would’ve shared otherwise. This is not boasting, it’s the truth, and it’s my point.

I write about what interests me, what pisses me off, what I care about, et cetera and so on, because I want to communicate with other human beings. I’m reaching out. I’ve had people tell me that I should be really careful about what I write online, that I should restrict my communication, that I should self-censor. And I am careful, generally (e.g., I removed the Facebook link that displayed my full name on this site), but there’s a part of me that refuses to restrict my communication, that recoils at self-censorship. The point here for me is to share, to open myself to others, and I’ll be damned if I cut that short because I’m worried about what someone who doesn’t even know me will think about it.

Every time I read something or hear someone say that you need to be careful about what you put online, I think, “If someone doesn’t want to give me a job, or whatever, because of what I write here, or my often strange and easily misconstrued Facebook status updates, then fuck them.” [n.4] But I have to admit, when I was faced with that idea more concretely, when it became clear that the Judge I applied to (or one of her clerks) was probably looking at this blog, I thought about what I’d written here and kind of regretted some of it. But I quickly came back to where I was before: if they want to make a hiring decision based on what I’ve written here, without understanding where I’m coming from, my perspective, my slant, my humor, et cetera et cetera et cetera, then screw them. This stuff is for people who care about me, in one way or another.

Note 1: My instinct suggests that second "who" should be "whom," but I figured it would looked forced if I put it there.

Note 2: But I am convinced that there’d be a market for a decent “daddy blog.” The problem is that it would require a much tighter focus on fatherhood, and I want to write about what I want to write about without being concerned about staying on topic.

Note 3: No, writing letters or private emails to the people I want to share particular stuff with is not a viable alternative for me. Trust me.

Note 4: But I should note that I am not one of those people that has many hundreds of pictures, many of which involve bodyshots and/or extreme drunkenness, of me on Facebook. Or anything of the sort.

The Census; the NFRC; and William T. Vollmann

The Census

Unlike my friend Neal [n.1], I’m typically not one to rail against government inefficiency and spendthriftyness. But I am somewhat baffled by the census mailings I’ve gotten in the last month. First, we got a letter that said little more than: “You’re going to get an official census form in a couple weeks, so keep a look out and please don’t throw it away.” Then we got the census form that informed us that our “RESPONSE IS REQUIRED BY LAW.” Then we got a postcard that said: “You should’ve gotten your census form a couple days ago, please fill it out.” THEN we got another census form, identical to the first one, with a note that says, not as directly as it could, that we shouldn’t send this one in if we sent in the last one.

So, we got four mailings when one would’ve sufficed. I understand that the census is important and they want to get the most accurate count they can, but come on. Those that don’t respond to the mailing still get tracked down, in theory, by the census people, and for those people mailing them more things probably isn’t the best way to get them to respond. I’m assuming they sent four mailings—when one would’ve done the trick—to every household in America. (Number of households in America x 3 x pre-sorted first class mailing rate) + printing costs + cost of paper + other mailing costs + all sorts of other unnecessary costs = amount of money the Department of Commerce has pissed away. And on top of that, I guarantee you there are all sorts of confused people who sent in their form twice . . .

Every time one of my conservative friends talks about how a public health care option would be a disaster because of the gross inefficiencies of the government, I say it doesn’t have to be that way. But then I see things like this.

The National Fenestration Rating Council

I saw an ad for some window company and in it the guy bragged about their great rating from the National Fenestration Rating Council. I laughed hard. I decided I really wanted to look this group up. Here’s their website. I assumed they were a window rating group, and was all set to make fun of them for using “fenestration.” Much to my dismay, they define fenestration as “Products that fill openings in a building envelope, including windows, doors, skylights, and curtain walls designed to permit the passage of air, light, vehicles, or people,” and they rate windows, doors, skylights, and “attachments” (whatever that means). So I can’t make fun of them for calling windows fenestration, but I’ll still make fun of them if only because I got my mouth all set for some ridiculin’ and there’s just a swalla in the container. [n.2]

William T. Vollmann

. . . is an author and quite possibly a crazy man. This old story from the New York Times is a decent place to learn a few things about the guy. He published his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels, when he was 27, and it was considered Pynchonesque and the sign of an amazing new talent. He’s since written several very big books, including Rising Up and Rising Down, a seven-volume, 3352 page treatise on the history of violence. Yes, that’s right, seven volumes, 3352 pages, about violence. And he squeezed it in between writing his many novels.

Anyway. What I really want to mention are his research methods. Instead of just reading up on some stuff, he goes out and lives it. Some stuff he’s done for his writing:

(1) Ran with the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the early eighties.

(2) Immersed himself in numerous other war zones (Sarajevo, Somalia, Iraq, et cetera).

(3) Smoked crack more than 100 times to gain the trust of the prostitutes and street people he was studying.

(4) He’s been burned and beaten on several occasions in his effort to embed himself with street people.

(5) Slept with a great many prostitutes (he’s written about prostitutes in more than one book) (did I mention he’s married?)

(6) Kidnapped a child prostitute from a brothel in Thailand and then set her up in a school.

(7) Spent two weeks alone at the magnetic North Pole without a way to leave or cut the trip short. His gear was woefully inadequate; he hallucinated from lack of sleep (his sleeping bag couldn’t keep him warm) and nearly died.

And so on. That’s a man dedicated to his art, and who's probably at least a little crazy.

Note 1: Neal once sent a FOIA request to the U.S. Post Office to try to figure out how much money they spent when they had their Star Wars theme thing a couple years ago, including painting a bunch of mailboxes to look like R2D2.

Note 2: That was a rather forced Harlem Nights reference. Watch this (the whole thing is worth watching, but if you want to cut it a little short, start at 1:33, if you can’t spare even that much time, start at 3:30).

Dog-eared 11

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

2666 (again)

Every life, Epifanio said that night to Lalo Cura, no matter how happy it is, ends in pain and suffering. That depends, said Lalo Cura. Depends on what, champ? On lots of things, said Lalo Cura. Say you’re shot in the back of the head, for example, and you don’t hear the motherfucker come up behind you, then you’re off to the next world, no pain, no suffering. Goddamn kid, said Epifanio. Have you ever been shot in the back of the head?

From Roberto Bolano’s 2666 (page 511).

Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (three times)

“On purpose,” J.D. says, balancing his cigar on his heavy lower lip. “You don’t go to the client. You make the client come to you. That way the cap’s in his hand. Client comes a complex series of long ways to see you, has a tough journey, encounters bad roads and no maps and detours: client’s convinced already, en route, that your services have value, for him to be wandering all over hell’s half acre like this just to find you.” J.D. beams grimly. Mark notes that DeHaven can silently lip-sync his father’s whole speech. Plus his summation:

“A-very-wise-guru-at-the-top-of-a-tough-to-climb-mountain strategem,” J.D. says. “It’s no coincidence it’s the gurus on mountains who’re wise. You get to the top: you’re already theirs.”

From David Foster Wallace’s “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” in Girl With Curious Hair (page 307).

It makes Nechtr feel special, true. But from special it’s not very far to Alone.

From David Foster Wallace’s “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” in Girl With Curious Hair (page 308).

[In making an absurd argument that Hawaii Five-O is pure entertainment free of politics] “Especially in reruns, syndication, that you’ve seen before,” Sternberg says, into it, feeling, feeling disembodied, other, flaccid. “Incredibly comforting. You know just how the universe is going to be for the next hour. Totally secure. Detached but connected. A womb with a view.”

From David Foster Wallace’s “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” in Girl With Curious Hair (page 317).

Lost in the Funhouse (two more times)

[Fat May is the large, grotesque mechanical lady at the entrance to the funhouse who projects recorded “laughs” through a loudspeaker]

Money spent, the three paused at Peter’s insistence beside Fat May to watch the girls get their skirts blown up. The object was to tease Magda, who said: “I swear, Peter M—, you’ve got a one-track mind! Amby and me aren’t interested in such things.” In the tumbling-barrel, too, just inside the Devil’s mouth entrance to the funhouse, the girls were upended and their boyfriends and others could see up their dresses if they cared to. Which was the whole point, Ambrose realized. Of the entire funhouse! If you looked around, you noticed that almost all the people on the boardwalk were paired off into Couples except the small children; in a way, that was the whole point of Ocean City! If you had X-ray eyes and could see everything going on at that instant under the boardwalk and in all the hotel rooms and cars and alleyways, you’d realize that all that normally showed, like restaurants and dance halls and clothing and test-your-strength machines, was merely preparation and intermission. Fat May screamed.

From John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” from Lost in the Funhouse.

The word fuck suggests suction and/or and/or flatulence. Mother and father; grandmothers and grandfathers on both sides; great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers on four sides, et cetera. Count a generation as thirty years: in approximately the year when Lord Baltimore was granted charter to the province of Maryland by Charles I, five hundred twelve women—English, Welsh, Barvarian, Swiss—of every class and character, received into themselves the penises the intromittent organs of five hundred twelve men, ditto, in every circumstance and posture, to conceive the five hundred twelve ancestors and the two hundred fifty-six ancestors of the et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera of the author, of the narrator, of this story, Lost in the Funhouse. In alleyways, ditches, canopy beds, pinewoods, bridal suites, ship’s cabins, coach-and-fours, coaches-and-four, sultry toolsheds; on the cold sand under boardwalks, littered with El Producto cigar butts, treasured with Lucky Strike cigarette stubs, Coca-Cola caps, gritty turds, cardboard lollipop sticks, matchbook covers warning that A Slip of the Lip Can Sink a Ship. The shluppish whisper, continuous as seawash round the globe, tidelike falls and rises with the circuit of dawn and dusk.

From John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” from Lost in the Funhouse.

Some Stuff I've Been Reading Online #2

An article in the New York Times about how for-profit colleges and trade schools are benefiting from the bad economy, and how they are all basically a scam.

A slideshow from The Huffington Post about what they're calling the Texas Textbook Massacre (ha!). The lede: "A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade."

An article from Daily Finance about how enhanced electronic versions of books are "a boon for readers, a headache for agents." Basically, there are copyright issues that come up when the enhanced features are added to the electronic editions.

A series of posts in the New York Times blogs by Steven Strogatz on math. I've particularly enjoyed the post about complex numbers and the one about the Pythagorean theorem.

A Roger Ebert blog post about how Glenn Beck thinks Jesus was a Nazi.

A very interesting article from the New York Times magazine about how to "build" better teachers.

An old interview with David Foster Wallace where he notes that the coolest bookstore ever is the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle. He had excellent taste.

A very interesting article from Michiko Kakutani about books in the digital age, touching on: fiction's loss of relevance; copyright questions; the Internet's cultivation of niche culture, or as Cass Sunstein calls it Cyberbalkanization; and celebrity as "the great new art form of the 21st century."

A short thing from the Wall Street Journal entitled "The Romans of the New World?" about an exhibition at the Getty Malibu Villa (which is beautiful and great, by the way) of Aztec stuff. Apparently the Getty is playing up the comparison of the Aztecs to the ancient Romans. The article is short and doesn't say much, but the comments . . . man the comments. Apparently you shouldn't compare the Aztecs to the Romans on the Internet, because the crazies will come out and go off about how barbaric the Aztecs were, how they sacrificed babies, et cetera, etc, and so on.

A story from NPR about "linguistic pet peeves." The author is of the opinion that a peeve cannot be pet unless it is rather unusual. But the whole thing is kind of fun.

Gail Collins on how jacked up Illinois politics are. My favorite part:

"Then there was the No. 2 slot. In Illinois, the candidates for lieutenant governor run all by themselves in the primary. Then the winner is yoked to the gubernatorial nominee on the ticket in November. Would-be lieutenant governors tend not to be household names, so the results of these primaries can be peculiar. (In 1986, Democratic voters nominated a 28-year-old follower of the extremely strange Lyndon LaRouche. This happened on a night that the Chicago LaRouchians were busy holding a mock exorcism in front of the home of a religion professor they had decided was a warlock. The gubernatorial nominee, Adlai Stevenson III, was so horrified that he bolted the ticket and ran as a third-party candidate. Everybody lost.)"

The March 27 Best Seller lists from the New York Times. I'm very pleased that Michael Lewis holds the #1 spot in both paperback and hardcover nonfiction (undoubtedly aided by the movie for The Blind Side, but whatever). Not so thrilled that Nicholas Sparks is the current king of fiction paperbacks.

My friend Marco's five-part series about Krzysztof Kieslowski's film White. It's loaded with spoilers, FYI.

The Awl's take on a new acid-trip-like commercial from Friskies.

OK, no reading involved here, but this Teletubbies video is amazing. I've never taken hallucinogens, or whatever, but I imagine the effect would look something like this. Either that, or the Friskies commercial.

And a New York Times Book Review essay about the rise of bad parents in Young Adult Fiction.

Oh, I almost forgot. Also an epic interview of David Lipsky about his forthcoming book that is essentially a five-day roadtrip with and interview of David Foster Wallace. It includes a question from a very cool guy with the same name as me.

Reading The New Yorker with Me: Notes from the Late February Issue

My observations from the February 15 & 22 issue of The New Yorker, some of it at least:

And the Oscar Goes to . . .

The Comment in The Talk of the Town is about the Academy Award nominations, primarily the best picture battle between Avatar (or, Pocahontas in Space) and The Hurt Locker. A contextless excerpt:

Cameron knows a lot about science, but he’s happy to bag it when necessary, as suggested in this colloquy, from a recent interview with a men’s magazine:

Playboy: How much did you get into calibrating your movie heroine’s hotness?

Cameron: Right from the beginning I said, “She’s got to have tits,” even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals.

Oh, where to start? How about here, at the first thing?

First: James Cameron is a loathsome and contemptible man. I have felt that way for a long time, but this just gives me more proof.

Second: Why does The New Yorker refer to the interview in “a men’s magazine” just to call it Playboy in the excerpt? What’s the point in keeping the magazine title secret just to disclose it on the next line?

Third: Cameron thinks only placental mammals have “tits”? Has he never seen a chicken or turkey? They have breasts. Oh, wait. He must mean teats. Nipples? But marsupials have nipples, last I heard, and marsupials aren’t “placental” mammals. So why talk about “placental” mammals, Mr. Cameron? Just to sound smart, or what?

Fourth: OK, Mr. Science (Fiction) guy: What difference does it make that, according to you, only “placental mammals” have “tits”? We're talking about aliens, or extraterrestrials, or whatever. So what difference does it make which Earth animals have “tits”? None. No difference. What’s the point of making up alien civilizations if you’re going to bind your vision to what makes sense on Earth? God I hate James Cameron.

Irony 101 (at Yale)

A group of current Yalies and alums working with the Yale admissions office created a 16-minute video entitled “That’s Why I Choose Yale” that has created quite a stir among those who care about such things. Apparently it’s kind of ridiculous. Here are some bits from the article, with commentary in brackets:

Three minutes into watching [it] Christopher Buckley, Class of ’75 . . . paused to pour himself a “stiff one” and dashed off an e-mail to another alumnus: “OMFG!” On the screen an actor dressed as an admissions officer had begun singing generic collegiate propaganda in bouncy rhyming couplets. (“Of course you’ll get a first rate edu-cation, / But also thrive on classmates’ conver-sation!”)

. . . more collegians bursting into song, accompanied by “Up with People”-style dance numbers, and even some electric-guitar shredding in the art gallery . . .

[James Goodale, Class of ‘55] added, “My God, if you’re a hockey player, you think, I’ll go to Princeton.”

[Undoubtedly loathingly uttered “PRINCE-ton.” And, what the hell?]

“Halfway in, I said, ‘These people are kidding,’” the former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, Class of ’56, recalled the other day. “Then I realized, ‘No they’re not.’ And I was depressed.” IvyGate, a college blog in the Gawker mold. Noted the video’s debut with the headline “‘That’s Why I Chose’ [sic?] to Ram a Soldering Iron Into My Ears.”

[Tony Award-winning librettist Doug Wright, Class of ’85] mentioned Yale’s “underground reputation as ‘the gay Ivy’” . . . and said that, either way, “with this, the admissions office has all but planted the flag.”

[Ha! Is it homophobic, or whatever, to find that funny? What about enjoying the fact that it was the theater guy who made the ”gay” comment?]

“Milton would be absolutely and perfectly appalled by this,” Professor Rodgers [Yale’s English Department’s resident Milton scholar] said. But he thought the video might be effective with kids today. “It says to a younger generation, ‘Yale is saturated in an ironic mode that your parent’s can’t understand,’” he said. “This is aristocratic and privileged irony—an aristocracy not of moneyed fathers but of generational ironic sensibility: “I can speak with more quotation marks than you.’”

[Great. Just what we need, more irony. I’ll let my son go to school wherever he wants (as long as it isn’t USC, Notre Dame, or Ohio State), but I’d rather he not go somewhere “saturated in an ironic mode.” And it isn’t because I’m too old or uncool to get it.]

Count Dick Cavett, Class of ’58, among the enthusiasts. “It sounds sappy, but I thought it was delightful,” he said, adding, “I wondered if it really was made in America, because there are no fatties.”

[ROTFLMAOQXZ!!!!!!1!! (While “LMAO” would be an accurate description of my reaction, this is meant to be “ironic.” And there is at least one “fatty” in the video.) [n.1]]

I kind of like the video. But, as far as I could tell, most of it is spent praising the awesomeness of residential colleges, something that is not unique to Yale. Hell, my beloved undergrad school, which is awesome in many ways but is certainly no Yale in many other ways, has ‘em. I think it’s a great way to structure a University, by the way, but it’s not terribly unusual.

Someone in the article mentioned that the video producers were probably trying to play off the "Glee" phenomenon, which is probably right. And: maybe this isn't fair, but it creeps me out when someone of Christopher Buckley's age writes something like "OMFG!"

A Thousand Days

So, some dude named Reid Stowe is setting a record for the longest non-stop ocean voyage (a record he broke more than year ago). There are probably many things I could say about this, but I’ll just write about this: He had a crewmember, his girlfriend, for the first 306 days, but she disembarked after she realized that her vicious seasickness was actually morning sickness. She got off at sea, met by another boat off of Australia, and has since had their baby. Reid, the father (obviously), has continued to sail around by himself ever since. I’d think that he might abort the mission to be there for his girlfriend and the birth of his son (born in July of 2008), but no. I mean, he was less than a year in, it's not like he was weeks away from setting the record or something. Maybe his backers/advertisers would've been pissed.

Taking Names

Suzanne Vega, long since dropped by her record label, has been recording acoustic versions of her songs on her own dime. She notes that other artists have done this so that they have something they can own (they don’t own the originals—the record companies do). Her career has been like a parabola—she started by working small shows, taking names and contact info for the people that are interested in her stuff, and she’s back to doing that again. Good for her. Solitude Standing was a great album, and one that meant and continues to mean a great deal to me. [n.2]

The Trial

[These are going to get shorter than the discussions above, because I’m getting tired and am starting to realize how long this issue is.]

Take 1: I don’t envy Eric Holder. He’s currently in a shit-storm over how and where to try alleged terrorists. Take 2: My God, people who should know better really are stupid, or at least disingenuous.

Riding High

An article about the resumed use of mules by the military. Highlights:

“[A mule] will carry as much as three hundred pounds, seven hours a day, twenty days straight.”

“...[A] mule knows its limits. It is characteristic of the breed to have an inviolable commitment to self-preservation, which is often misinterpreted as stubbornness. In truth it is probably a form of genius. A horse will eat until it founders and dies; a mule will only snack, even if it happens upon an open bin of oats. A horse can be enticed to gallop, fatally, over a cliff. In 1942, the Army was researching ways to deliver mules to combat zones. Someone thought that teaching the animals to skydive would be a good way to do this. As an experiment, twelve mules were fitted with parachutes and taken up in a cargo plane. The first six, caught by surprise, were pushed out the door and immediately fell to their deaths. The next six survived. This is because they must have figured out what was going on and absolutely refused to go near the door.

The mule’s commitment to survival is interesting in a Darwinian context, because mules . . . have an uneven number of chromosomes and are therefore sterile. Every mule, then, is sui generis; it leaves no legacy beyond itself, no radiating gene pool to mark its visit to this world. It is as if each mule knew that it had one shot at being here on earth, and risky behavior, such as jumping out of an airplane at ten thousand feet, would interfere with that.”

“… mules did every sort of farm job: they pulled plows, dragged carriages, hauled loads, were ridden, and were happy to labor for a decade or two in exchange, as William Faulkner once wrote, ‘for the privilege of kicking you once.’”

Drinking Games

A Malcolm Gladwell essay. Gladwell is usually very, very good at what he does, which is to say, telling interesting stories tied to some research or findings or whatever. I’m not sure how good he is at getting the research right—I know people who think he’s really sloppy, or, worse, twists things to better fit his idea—but he is good at the story telling. No matter what he might be getting wrong, he sells a lot of books for a reason.

But this essay . . . this essay I just don’t get. The gist can be found in the subtitle and the caption to the artwork on the second page: (1) How much people drink may matter less than how they drink it; and (2) Culture and customs help shape the way alcohol affects us. I don’t know what to say, but I’m tempted to drop a “Duh.”

OK, so those two related ideas are interesting, but the essay doesn’t really do it for me. Over the course of a great many words (for a magazine article that doesn’t say much), he makes the following points: (a) There was this couple of anthropologists who went down to Bolivia to study something that had nothing to do with drinking. After the couple got back they met some guy from an alcohol journal and he wanted to know how the Bolivians drink, so the anthros write an article about it. It turns out that they, this subset of Bolivians, have these interesting parties every Saturday night (that sometimes last until Monday) where people tend to drink a lot. But! that's the only time they drink, and there is no alcoholism, no drinking related violence, no aggression of any sort. Also, the stuff they drink is 180 proof. (b) In New Haven the Italians drink quite a bit everyday, but it is relatively ritualized and is spread out over the course of the day. The Irish, on the other hand, are a bunch of crazy drunks (I’m summarizing here, but that was what I took from it). CONCLUSION: Repeat #s 1 and 2 from the paragraph above.

It just didn’t come together for me. Unlike some of my favorite stuff from Gladwell: his TED talk about pasta sauce and cola; and his New Yorker piece about genius.

The Guam Caper

OK, I’m seriously running out of steam here. So, a few quick points:

- St. Clair McKelway is an awesome name. It is also the name of an Army Air Corps officer who was stationed in the Pacific and worked with the B-29 squad. After going totally crazy he was quietly and gently pushed out of the way in the Army and contributed some amazing stories to the New Yorker about working with the Twentieth Air Force.

- B-29s are badass but a bitch to fly.

- Damn, B-29s killed a lot of Japanese people even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I knew this before, but I didn’t know the numbers. They are very high, more than 300,000 in less than five months, which is nearly six times what we lost over the entire course of the lengthy Vietnam War.

- Plus 1,000,000 points for use of the word "caper" in the title.

Done

OK, I’ve petered out here. I’ll just say, about the rest of the stuff in the issue: there is a nice spread of pictures of people who were involved in the Civil Rights movement; the short story takes place in Ireland and isn’t bad; and James Wood has a review of a couple novels about bankers and stuff, and it’s kind of boring.

Note 1: You’re the one for me, fatty.

Note 2: Tom’s Diner is, of course, a classic for people around my age, but Luka will always remain the most significant to me.