They Will Rise Again From the Tundra

I was rummaging through my electronic files last night, looking for inspiring crumbs—a chance thought hammered out during a spare minute , already crystalline in form and fully realized yet scribbled in some nebulous personal code I was sure at the time I would be able to decrypt upon later viewing—when I found a file called “Bullshit Criticisms.doc.”  In it, I had written this:

Always fear the reader who accuses smugness or arrogance simply upon coming across a quiver of big words or inaccessible references.

Is being cerebral a bad thing in writing?  Presumably this is a Master’s course and we should be aspiring to the intelligent.  If your primary criticism is that the author of whatever you’re reading is smarter than you, go pick up a fucking book, or a dictionary, and get cracking.

Are the points these people want our writers to make simply arguments to reinforce the

… Read more

Hitchens at The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas, NV (January 2007)*

This will be as useless and banal as any obituary or tribute, not only because memorializing a person’s life is, in its own way, an act of barbarism, but because I am limited in what I’ve read of Hitchens’s work to his last eight or so years’ worth of essays.  I’ve not read God is Not Great, nor have I read Arguably.  I will, but that’s not the point.  Reading one Christopher Hitchens essay should be enough for any reader to realize, without doubt, that they are drinking deep the work of a virtuoso, a true master of written English, and a wit unparalleled by any of his contemporaries.  When he died last night, the world lost perhaps its finest living prose writer.

I have always marveled at Hitchens’s fearlessness.  A person can be born with intelligence, … Read more

Carry on…*

A friend of mine posted a link to Adbusters.org, a site promoting a holiday season in which people buy nothing.  This season, of course, begins with Buy Nothing Day, today, Black Friday.  If you scroll down the page to which I linked, you’ll notice a number of, frankly, hilarious pictures of protesters criticizing the consumerist rampages of the day.  While I empathize with the anti-consumerist sentiment, while I think it utterly sick and disgusting that people are trampled and pepper sprayed in the mad rush for Deals, I have trouble with the idea of a Buy Nothing season.  (But I may drop “Everything is fine, keep shopping” a few times.  Some of these people do deserve it, after all.)

The ostensible aim would be to make our voices echo down the avaricious halls of corporate offices everywhere, to wrench the suits out of their greed comas just … Read more

I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Algier . . . a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.  Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

(This post is very closely related to this post, but it takes a bit of a different tack.  I may get some shit if any of my classmates happen across this thing, but it’s meant to open an honest, reflective dialogue about what the fuck we’re doing here.  Most of this advice, while addressed to “you,” is also addressed to me, and to be sure, there are classmates of mine who would not be included, like I would be, as “part of the problem.”)

I have spent most of my scholastic life studying English—writing, literature, pretense, ego—and, mostly, it’s all garbage.  The English degree should not impress (not that most people consider us English … Read more

Early 2011, sometime in the winter, as the author’s personal crisis worsens and grows deeper…

Cookie.  John Lennon

My smoking has kicked up again; and my mental health is easily at a five-year low.  Over the past month or two I have lost close to twenty-five pounds and averaged about one meal, three hours of sleep, five hours of stomach pain, fourteen hours of lumbago, and 0.7 grim and disappointing ejaculations per day.  Add to this hideous menagerie my various other physical maladies: an aching leg on account of a self-suspected deep vein thrombosis, constant tinnitus in my right ear, strange pseudoseizures on the left side of my body, an impinged peripheral nerve (or brachial plexus), and general physical atrophy.

The picture gets pretty bleak.  But things are about as well as can be expected.

It’s important that anything I say prior to and after this sentence be taken … Read more

From the top of the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima looking northwest. Frame buildings recently erected. 1945*

I’m taking a class on New Journalism, and our reading assignment this week was John Hersey’s famous article, published in The New Yorker on August 31, 1946, simply titled “Hiroshima”.  (You can access the article here, but it’s behind a paywall.)  Hersey’s piece  is a truly harrowing tale told from the perspective of a handful of citizens who lived through the bombing—their actions in the direct aftermath, and their struggles a year after.  Hersey’s prose is matter-of-fact:  he does not proselytize; he does not interpret; he simply tells the story and stays out of the way.

One passage in particular struck me:  Mr. Tanimoto, a Methodist pastor who has been ferrying the wounded and dying across a river for hours in a small punt, using a bamboo pole in place of an oar, … Read more

Competition can be a very a good thing.

Google+, after a little initial hiccup, rolled out a highly functional mobile app (Android’s was more functional than the iPhone’s, from what I hear) with resharing, user tagging, and a nice interface. Facebook now responds with v1.7 for Android  after a number of incremental updates, albeit slowly, with tagging, a photo swipe interface, and a slightly more functional design, the former of which features should have been available a long time ago. Maybe Facebook would have done this eventually anyway, but their app has been notoriously mediocre for quite awhile now, until  today.

The more users Google or any other social network can siphon from Facebook the better.  If Facebook continues to feel meaningful pressure from its competitors, Zuckerberg’s crew will continue to add features and improve their own service.

Now if Google would only integrate Reader with Google+ I’d be … Read more

What is the bridge from the water’s edge of inspiration to the far shore of accomplishment? Q, Wonder Boys

I can’t remember if the quote above appears in this exact form in Michael Chabon’s novel, but Rip Torn delivers it perfectly in the film adaptation.  Q, of course, is the pretentious, vocally flatulent writer “friend” of Grady’s who gives a speech to an auditorium of rapt students eager to lap up his every word.

No writer has cause for this sort of hubris or even confidence, really.  Writing is of very little worth to a practical person—at least fiction, certainly poetry, and most journalism.  Sure, writing was the primary driver behind just about every information revolution dating back to the Neanderthal, but when I consider my own forays into the art form, as well as my continuing formal education which revolves around it, I’m struck with a tremendous sense of … Read more

Fyodor Dostoyevsky in 1879

I’m a little over halfway through Notes from the Underground right now.  It’s a book I’ve started reading a number of times without ever getting past Chapter 3, not because I disliked it—on the contrary, I thought it was brilliant from the start—but, for whatever reason, something would always manage to distract me.  (It’s shameful, I know, that I’ve somehow passed twenty-seven years on this rock without finishing the bloody thing.)

Perhaps I was scared because his observations hit a little too close to home—remarkably close, in fact.  Reading Notes from the Underground makes me feel like a tepid facsimile:  the thoughts expressed therein, mostly in Part I, are almost exactly the same as those I’ve been wrangling with for the past year or so.  I am disgusted yet relieved, horrified yet overjoyed.  And while I have little else to say on the matter, there is … Read more

Water in the Pill

Pharmacist Scott Gavura reviews a paper titled “Against Homeopathy — A Utilitarian Perspective” from the journal Bioethics about when it might be ethical to use homeopathy in a clinical  setting.

Homeopathy is based on the “theory” that “like cures like.”  In essence, find a substance that produces symptoms similar to those of a cold, and that substance should help to cure the cold itself.  Furthermore, homeopathy states that the more a substance is diluted in water the  more potent it becomes, which is, of course, bunk.  Claims like these (and those of many other homeopathic fantasies) fly in the face of everything we know about basic physics.  (Here is a search for “homeopathy” from Neurologica Blog; Steven Novella has done more writing on the topic than anyone else I know of, and his blogs are a terrific resource for anyone interested in the evolving fight … Read more

Robin Hanson thinks sexsomniacs (people who have sex in a sleepwalking state) should be punished just like regular rapists when they (unknowingly) begin to have sex with someone who does not consent.  To be clear:  rape is a heinous thing and, along with murder, stands in my mind as an essentially peerless crime.  There are few, if any, more fundamental or horrifying ways in which to violate another human being. Perhaps it was Hanson’s use of the imperative in his title (“Punish Sleep-Rape”) that rankled me.

To justify his point, he devises two possible arguments against punishment of sexsomniac rapists:

1. We should punish premeditated or intentional transgressions more severely than we would unconscious transgressions.
2. The mind is comprised of two distinct states: the conscious and the unconscious.  Thus, behaviors emanating from conscious processes should be punished more severely.

Hanson goes on to summarily dismiss both of these imagined arguments, presumably without … Read more

The Mammoth Reads series is to be a (hopefully) regular to semi-regular shortlist of (hopefully) interesting things I’ve read recently.  (Hopefully) you’ll click a link or two.

Most of these lists will not have long, ridiculous, impossible-to-read titles like this one, but I figured I would kick this series off in irritating fashion.

You Are a Poor Scientist, Dr. Venkman

Prof. Andrew Gelman counters a few claims from a Weekly Standard editorial by emeritus professor David Rubinstein, formerly of the University of Chicago at Illinois, in which Rubinstein claims that professors are paid too much for their “cushy” jobs.  Rubinstein is of the opinion that the current system—namely tenure track—encourages laziness.  Gelman makes some interesting observations about the function of good salaries and benefits in luring top-notch professors, and seems not to buy Rubinstein’s impression that these are necessarily bad things.  Gelman also suggests that Rubinstein simply might be a bit … Read more