John Holbo

Brief thoughts about that Bill Keller op-ed on candidates’ religions, and the kerfuffle that kicked up. But only by way of kicking off in the direction of what’s really going on here. The religion stuff needs a more general frame.

Keller is just being reasonable. If candidates say ‘my faith is a private matter and all that need concern the voters is how I will conduct myself in office,’ fine. But if candidates play up faith, for political advantage; if they announce that their religious views and values inform their political views and policy proposals, then obviously that makes religion fair game. Because in politics, your politics has to be fair game. Keller’s critics suggest that arriving at any such conclusion is tantamount to proposing something like a religious test for public office. Or worse! It’s an attempt to ban Christians from public life! But no. He’s only ruling out one or another of a couple possible norms that are so absurd that no one would ever advocate them explicitly. That you can’t fault politicians for concealing their policy objectives, so long as the politicians favor the policy on religious grounds. Or that you can’t fault politicians’ policy proposals, period, so long as they advocate the policy on religious grounds. Something like that. That’s nuts, so Keller is just being reasonable.

But, like I said, I don’t think this is the right way to think about this issue. For one thing, it misses that the religious case is just a special case of a more general phenomenon. Let me switch over to a question Kevin Drum asked last week: why do Republicans get a free pass? He’s absolutely right that they do. [click to continue…]

I liked Season 1 of Fringe ok, and I liked Season 2 … somewhat less well. In fact, I almost gave up. The fact that the main characters are sort of one-note was getting more obtrusive. There seemed to be more stinker stand-alone episodes. But the overall story arc still seemed promising. Things really picked up in Season 3, so I’m glad I stuck it out. Sort of the same thing happened as in Season 3 of Lost, and for similar reasons: the ‘Others’ got more interesting. I think the characters in Fringe have less character, charisma, chemistry, something, than the assembled Lost crew. But that’s measuring by a pretty high standard. And Fringe has managed to be the X-Files all over again, without being about aliens, without just retreading Scully and Mulder. And Fringe doesn’t seem doomed to be dramatically unresolvable, as Lost for sure was. (I was so sure there was no way to end that series that I didn’t mind the ending. I’d already priced that in, as the finance guys always lie.) I think that the basic material is in now in place for original sf story-telling; for fun, Lostworthy twists and turns. With characters switching sides, changing in fundamental ways and landing very far from where they started. That would redeem the one-note weakness to date. Of course, what do I know? I haven’t even watched the season 3 finale yet, so I’m probably not even going to read the comments you write until after the weekend. (Sorry, man.)

Continuing the all-Yglesias all-the-time quality for which Crooked Timber is lately renowned, Matt’s post here could be stronger. He’s pointing out that a Grover Norquist tweet is nonsense (not an unusual circumstance, I surmise, but there is a point to be made.) “If Keynesian economics worked — shoplifting would create jobs.”

Matt points out that Norquist is committing what he calls ‘the broken windows fallacy fallacy’, which requires some explanation of the money supply in 19th Century France. There is an easier way. W.W. II ended the Depression. So Hitler is like shoplifting, only more so. [click to continue…]

The question came up in comments to the sf and fantasy top 100 thread: take such debates seriously? Or not so much? Admittedly, it’s kind of like comics fans arguing about which heroes/titles deserve a reboot. (via Comics Alliance)

UPDATE: to judge from comments, some readers may have missed the point of the comics forum post, or failed to click over. The lengthy thread consists entirely of comics fans arguing self-righteously, enthusiastically, angrily, but above all, knowledgeably, about non-existent comics. They really keep the ball going.

“Alls I know is that if they manage to bring back Captain Hayseed and the Ramblin’ Rangers, I’m gonna Freak. Out. Molterstein’s run on that in the 50’s shaped my childhood. Too bad they can’t bring back Tony Modigliani for art, but I heard after that fourth lightning strike, his art really went downhill.”

“If you look at the shifted continents promotion where it says “worlds will change” you can see Hayseed’s symbol of the Haymaker where Asia should be. I bet it gets tied into the Century of Peril series though and Jason Tooth is writing it.”

Next week in my Philosophy of Literature module I’ll be talking about pareidolia and theories of how and and why it works. How and why pretty much any closed loop with three dots in it is a face, because it ‘looks like’ one. The occasion for burdening my students with this is discussion of overly-linguistifying (in my view) theories of how literature ‘works’ and, more grandly, linguistifying theories of what Aristotle called mimesis, a.k.a. that whole ‘poetics’ ball of wax. I posted some of my thoughts about pictures and pictoriality before: it’s important to realize that even though a smiley face is an utterly conventional icon, it doesn’t follow that it works by convention.

Anyway, I thought it was a nice coincidence that Andrew Sullivan linked to this today, for his Faces of the Day thing.

Also, I just stumbled on a real sparklepop/powerfolk earworm of a tune by Vetiver, “Wonder Why”, which turns out to have a a pareidolia-based video. Great track. Get it free from Amazon.

The maps and the video are good examples for me because they preemptively emphasize something that is often raised as an objection to efforts to ‘naturalize’ the pictorial function: namely, it’s a learned process. By the end of the map series, and the video, you are more sensitized to faces and figures in maps, mailboxes and trashcans than you were at the start. To that extent your responses are ‘conventional’, in the sense of learned (when you could perfectly well have been learning something else, so the result is somewhat ‘arbitrary’). Fine, fine. But the point still stands. From the fact that a result is path-dependent, it may follow that it is conventional (in a perfectly good sense of that word). But, again, it does not follow from the fact that something is conventional in that sense that it ‘works by’ convention in some other senses that tend to be carelessly bundled in. The mechanism by which we recognize things as faces is cognitively distinct from the mechanism by which we recognize that ‘faces’ denotes faces. My target here is Nelson Goodmanian thinking, which tries to explain pictorial resemblance and representation on the model of linguistic denotation. He doesn’t say it works exactly the same, all the way up and down; that would be pretty obviously crazy. But he pushes the line that, in order to theorize how pictures work, you have to build on a kind of denotational foundation. I think the opposite: theories of linguistic denotation need to rest on a foundational theory of pictoriality. But enough about me. Enjoy the video and the song. Great song, I think.

Here’s NPR’s list. (Kevin Drum is musing about it, among others. He points out: no Pohl, Bester, Delany.)

The Silmarillion beat The Hobbit? Fer reals? (Drum is wondering about that, too.) And a D&D Forgotten Realms book is on the list. So it, too, beat The Hobbit?

No Greg Bear or David Brin? Seems we need at least one of those hard sf ‘killer B’s’. No Uplift books? No Forge of God/Anvil of Stars or Moving Mars? (I understand why Larry Niven is on the list, but couldn’t we drop a Niven/Pournelle book to make room for Bear or Brin?) No Bova neither.

No John Crowley, Little, Big? Seems a crime to omit that one.

No Fritz Leiber?

I’m trying to think what multiple Hugo and Nebula-winning authors have gotten the boot on this list.

Take it away!

Here’s a contrarian take from a studio exec:

“A tentpole film is one where you can seed the desire to see the film to everyone in every distribution channel. It’s the only kind of film you can spend $100 million marketing,” he said.

Hendrickson’s talk was mainly focused on solving problems in digital production on tentpoles, but he began with an “Econ 101” presentation on the movie business.

“People say ‘It’s all about the story,’” Hendrickson said. “When you’re making tentpole films, bullshit.” Hendrickson showed a chart of the top 12 all-time domestic grossers, and noted every one is a spectacle film. Of his own studio’s “Alice in Wonderland,” which is on the list, he said: “The story isn’t very good, but visual spectacle brought people in droves. And Johnny Depp didn’t hurt.”

Visual spectacle, he said, drives attendance in a film’s first few weekends. And unlike years past when a movie like “The Lion King” might stay in theaters as long as a year, almost all movies are out of theaters quickly now. “Once you’re out of theaters your maximum profit potential is over,’’ he said.

I went to see “Cowboys and Aliens” last weekend, so I’m feeling fairly tentpoled myself, and I don’t really like it. Terrible story (as all the critics said. I know, I know. I don’t know why I wanted to see it.) [click to continue…]

NPR has an interview with Terry Pratchett about his early onset Alzheimer’s, his advocacy for assisted suicide, and his forthcoming Discworld novel, Snuff. There’s a short excerpt from it as well, which is pretty funny.

I wished I had lived in the days of real journeys, when it was still possible to see the full splendor of the spectacle that had not yet been blighted, polluted and spoilt … When was the best time to see India? At what period would the study of the Brazilian savage have afforded the purest satisfaction, and revealed them in their least adulterated state? Would it have been better to arrive in Rio in the eighteenth century with Bougainville, or in the sixteenth with Léry and Thevet? – Claude Lévi-Strauss

Speaking of which, I watched Midnight In Paris on the plane, coming home from vacation, which seemed a fine occasion to watch such a film. It seems like a good idea for a film. But I don’t think it ended up being a good film. It’s too self-satisfied with the fact of it being a film with a good idea for what it’s going to be about. It kinda rests on its laurels before it even gets started. Owen Wilson is just walking around, giving a passable dramatic reading of his lines. All the actors playing the famous figures from the 20’s are having fun, but in a light sort of Hey Kathy Bates is pretending to be Gertrude Stein and Adrien Brody is having fun with his Dali accent kind of way. The direction was … fine. Paris looked like … Paris as filmed for a nice American Express ad or something like that. Competent evocation of a beautiful city. Is this what all Woody Allen movies have been like for the last 20 years? I really haven’t checked in for a while. Seems like lots of people really liked this movie. It was ok. Did you like it?

This one goes with the others. (Having posted two, it would be more strange not to post a third.)

In other news, I notice that Erick Erickson has some difficulty with the is/ought distinction. He reasons that, since Republicans in fact will not raise taxes under any circumstances, it follows that one can’t fault Republicans for not raising taxes. That would be like blaming the rain for raining. Or something. A nice illustration of the advantages and disadvantages of extreme intransigence for political life, perhaps.

I’m teaching “Philosophy and Literature” this semester. For one unit – Well Wrought Urns and Stuffed Owls, or somesuch subtitle – we’re going to read the really strong stuff. Like Irene Iddesleigh, Chapter 1 (not the whole book). But also more genuinely enjoyable incompetence: The Young Visiters. And Crippled Detectives. See this Village Voice piece for some – rather sad – background on the latter. Maybe a bit from A Nest of Ninnies. Who knows? Maybe even Ulysses? I’ve always thought of that book as basically The Young Visiters writ old. Bloom is Mr. Salteena, all grown up, but still a child at heart. [click to continue…]

Alex Tabbarok has written an odd post, whose reasoning, were it sound, would seem to license the following inference. Since, as Bastiat says, “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else,” John Cleese’s fatal mistake in this debate is to admit the existence of Roman aqueducts. (That really puts him on an ontological slippery slope to sanitation and education and all manner of entification.)

But seriously. I guess I can see arguing that tax credits aren’t, per se, social programs – but aren’t they social engineering, hmmm yes? (Wouldn’t it follow that they couldn’t be faulted for being the latter, if they can’t be credited with being the former?) But I find it hard to see how 529 plans could, strictly speaking, fail of bare existence. (If you think otherwise, I’ve got a Pentagon you might like to levitate.) Arguing that if something didn’t exist, the private sector could take up the slack is one thing. But arguing that because you could – oh, say, hire a private protection outfit – that therefore the police actually don’t exist … ?

Finally, I have a feeling that Tabarrok would not, if caught in another mood, express a preference for a tax code pockmarked with various and sundry breaks, giveaways and loopholes over one lacking these features, commonly regarded as unlovely by economists. But since Tabarrok’s stated position is now that such things are rightly regarded as precious islands of civil freedom, in a socialist sea of serfdom … oh I give up.

My performance/recording vs. oral/literary post has gotten lots of comments, so let’s see if I can drive you all off with a follow-up.

Two other books about the evolution of reading culture I read recently: Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, by Paul Saenger; and Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator, by Elspeth Jajdelska.

The Saenger book concerns the Rodney Dangerfield of punctuation marks: the space. (Why do you think that’s the largest key on your keyboard, hmmm?) Let me quote the publisher’s blurb in a way that makes Saenger’s point. Once upon a time, European scribes wrote like this: [click to continue…]

I just read two books back to back to good effect: Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy and Elijah Wald’s How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music [amazon]. (This post is stray book-thoughts, a bit weak in the conclusion department; only so-so in the adequate summary of what the authors are arguing department. Read on at your own risk.) [click to continue…]