John Holbo

I was listening to NPR’s All Song’s Considered, because whenever life seems jittery, the dulcet tones of Bob Boilen make it alright. They played a track by Motopony which quite earwormed me into buying the album. Turns out it contains several excellent tracks, in my humble opinion, and a few duds. Belle, my Facebook wife (that’s sort of like a cross between a common-law wife and Tron, as I understand the legalities), likes them, too. So she checked them out on Facebook and, apparently, they need a ride from L.A. to San Diego. Hope that works out for them. I’ll link to two tracks I particularly liked. First, “Seer”. That’s the one they played on NPR. I can’t quite peg it. Like … Jethro Tull, “Cross-Eyed Mary” meets … something that’s … pleasantly cheesy/grungy/Queens Of The Stone Age in a non-Jethro Tullish way, and no flute? But in a good way. Definitely no flute. You tell me what it sounds like. I also really like “June”. Because my favorite album is Fleetwood Mac, Tusk, and “June” – especially the ‘Hold on’ chorus bit – has a very Lindsey Buckingham Tusk era thing going on. I like the moog-as-bass on a lot of the tracks. Is it moog? Some other vintage electric organ sound? (Oh hey: here’s a live version of “Seer”. And a live version of “June”.)

I got the new Bon Iver album and it, too, has got some solid tracks but also some that make me fear that, in 5 years, Bon Iver is going to sound like Bruce Hornsby and the Range. I hope I’m wrong about that.

I haven’t logged onto Facebook in, like, 5 months. (So if you tried to friend me or poke me or whatever, and I didn’t respond, it’s nothing personal, man.) However, when I got a request to marry Belle Waring, I figured I might as well accept. Sudden and unexpected, to be sure. But what have I got to lose, marrying my own wife? To keep a short story short: reader, I married her!

I woke up this morning, in my own bed, beside my sleeping wife. It’s working out great. I am a devoted husband, with no pending invites to stray. Now I don’t need to log onto Facebook for, like, 5 more months.

Of course, there’s more to life than stuff with big words aimed at early readers. There’s stuff with few words aimed at early viewers! Here’s a good deal on a nice, quite comprehensive collection of the very earliest silent films, Landmarks of Early Film, Vol. 1 [amazon]. I lectured about some of this stuff in my Philosophy and Film class last semester, because I focused on sf – crossroads of speculation and spectacle. It’s a common critical complaint that Lucas/Spielberg-style special effects blockbusters killed a lot that was great about American cinema, in the 1970’s. Then again, film was industrial light and magic from the start, pioneered by the industrious likes of Edison and Georges Méliès (stage magician). No film could be truer to the authentic roots of the medium than whatever Michael Bay is working on right now. Probably that new Transformers movie or something. Maybe that explains why so many of these early films are boring. But in a fascinating way.

What are your favorite early/silent films? What early cinema do you really, honestly, just love to watch. No grading on a curve or so-bad-it’s-good ironizing. I watched quite a bit of Charlie Chaplin, while I was reading Sunnyside. I liked it, but I didn’t love it. I’ve posted before about loving Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc. I’ve never watched any Buster Keaton; never watched The General, for example. Should I? I love Metropolis but I recently watched Fritz Lang’s Woman In The Moon and didn’t really get into it. It veered between dull and draggy self-seriousness and extreme silliness. Although Fritz Rasp (a.k.a. The Thin Man, from Metropolis) was fun.

Who do you think should get the moon gold, should it exist? Defend your answer. (Maybe that inter-title should be an inspirational poster.)

Pursuant of my previous post, the Wikipedia entry for The Big Orange Splot notes that the book uses big words, as books for 4-8 year-olds go. Yes. Words like ‘baobab’ and ‘frangipani’. This is standard Pinkwater operating procedure. Compare a passage from Irving and Muktuk, Two Bad Bears, likewise officially aimed at the 4-8 set. “FWOP! FWOP! FWOP! Oh no! It is the helicopter! FWOP! FWOP! FWOP! Adieu, Irving and Muktuk. Once again, you have failed to obtain muffins by stealth and subterfuge.” My limited acquaintance with the world of children’s book leads me to believe authors are typically editorially compelled to write much less trisyllabically. Pinkwater, being a big fish in this publishing pond, can get away with it. But surely he’s doing it right. Kids are engineered to pick up language from adults, who frequently talk to other adults, so if you write a bit over kids’ heads, they’ll just learn what ‘subterfuge’ means 5-10 years earlier than they might otherwise. Surely there is no harm in that. Kids find it interesting. What do you think? What are your favorite books for very young children that really pour on the vocabulary, apparently on the theory that little pitchers have big ears?

Quick thoughts in response to Yglesias’ ‘against character’ post. Zoning laws are a perfect example of an area in which it is hard to come up with good, principled, liberal answers – classically liberal, that is – that don’t reduce to absurdity. Richard Epstein philosophizes with a hammer about this, with the air of one delicately operating with a scalpel. Pretty much everything the government does should count as a ‘taking’. For a more winning defense of zoning libertarianism, see Daniel Pinkwater, The Big Orange Splot [amazon] – video here. It’s interesting that conservatives have never sought to open a permanent culture war front against zoning regulations. It seems like a perfect opportunity for a toxic mix of dog-whistles, pandering to bad actors, and all-around irritable gestures seeking to resemble ideas, while managing to be wedge issues. All this irritation, around a grain of truth, can produce scholarly pearls, such as Epstein’s classic book, which in a certain sense expresses an all-American conservative dream. Because, after all, Yglesias is quite right that it doesn’t make much sense, either in philosophic principle or economic practice, for zoning regulations to be so conservative a lot of the time (in the etymological sense of ‘conservative’, not the American political sense.) Possibly only the fact that Pinkwater’s Plumbean is obviously a Big Hippy has preserved us from an Epsteinian slippery slope, in polemical, culture war practice. Conservatives could do with astroturf Joe the Plumbeans, if only they could find them. Someone who can dump a big orange splot of pollution, while declaiming, like Walt Whitman, “My backyard is me and I am it! My backyard is where I like to be and it looks like all my dreams!” Take that, ‘neat street’ zombie liberal clones! That would substantially confuse the issue, in ways that are really philosophically unresolvable. (Bonus style points if you can somehow connect Plumbean with Pruneyard without looking like you are trying way too hard, as I clearly am.)

Defenders of Epstein will note, correctly, that his view is very nuanced and he wouldn’t by any means say everyone gets to dump whatever toxic splot they want, so long as it’s their land. Quite right! Epstein’s philosophy would give a much more sensible resolution to the ‘nuisance’ posed by the Plumbean case than probably any existing zoning laws in the land. Granted. My point is different. Epstein combines exquisite theoretical sophistication with crude anti-New Deal contrarianism (in my opinion). Given the bottomless appetite for the latter, among American conservatives, it’s interesting that there isn’t a dumbed-down, popular talk radio talking point version of Epstein’s philosophy, minus the intellectually worthwhile bits, in constant circulation. It seems like a missed opportunity for debasing the discourse. Again, maybe it’s just that Plumbean is a Big Hippy. What do you think?

UPDATE: I suppose I should have linked to the Wikipedia summary of the plot. For the busy, executive reader of CT who needs the bullet point version of Pinkwater’s classic children’s picture book.

Why not? It’s a great Kurt Vile song. You can download it free here. Here’s a video of a great live performance in freezing weather.

When I was but a callow lad, the Gormenghast novels were among my favorites. Now that I am grown into a strapping, callow man, they are still among my favorites. I do so hope that Titus Awakes [amazon] turns out to be good. It was written in the early 1960’s by Maeve Gilmore, Peake’s wife, and only discovered last year in an attic by their grand-daughter. Gilmore based it on notes and an outline by Peake himself. Here’s a Telegraph piece about the rediscovery.

It won’t be released for a few more weeks, but you can listen to the first bit of the audiobook here. Simon Vance is the reader.

Quite a bit of Peake stuff is being reprinted right now, or has come back in print only in the past few years. Just in the next couple months: Peake’s Progress: Selected Writings and Drawings of Mervyn Peake; Mr. Pye; A Book of Nonsense. Poke around if you like Peake. I haven’t checked out Boy in Darkness and Other Stories yet. My daughters have enjoyed Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor, and my vintage copy is rather falling apart. So it’s nice to know new ones are available.

Let’s discuss our hopes and fears for Titus Awakes.

I’m doing some intellectual scratching about re: the nature of pictures and pictoriality. I think one of the best philosophy books on the subject is Flint Schier, Deeper into Pictures [amazon]. I’m not up for writing a full review, but, briefly, he advocates what is in effect a rehabilitated version of the bad old resemblance theory (the best refuted of all theories of the nature of pictures!) Here is Schier’s first draft of an account of iconicity. “A system of representation is iconic just if once someone has interpreted any arbitrary member of it, they can proceed to interpret any other member of the system, provided only that they are able to recognize the object represented.” (44) And pictures are icons, in this sense. [click to continue…]

Like everyone else, I’m glad Ta-Nehisi Coates got a NYT op-ed. Unlike everyone else, I haven’t seen X-Men: First Class yet. (Hey, I like comic books.) But I get the general idea, so I’d like to weigh in on the whole Magneto Was Right issue (part ii).

Thing is: it’s not just Magneto, it’s the government, going back to the first film. Everyone is right except Professor X. [click to continue…]

First, let me jot some thoughts about Ingrid’s peer-review post that also relate to Henry’s. Then, mongooses. [click to continue…]

The National Library of Ireland is on Flickr, contributing public domain photos to the Commons. If anyone is looking for an image for the cover of their new book on trolley problems – and is too shy to ask to use mine – this might be the ticket.

My daughters got interested in the Ramayana because we’ve been to Bali and seen some shadow puppets and golden deer dancing. (For the foreseeable future, the golden deer crown I helped Zoe make, for this thing she did at school, is going to be my signal achievement in the ‘damned fiddly art projects you help the kids with for school’ category.) We also watched Sita Sings The Blues, which they thought was great. They insisted on fast-forwarding through the ‘boring’ bits about Nina and her long-distance relationship, but they loved the bits in which the unreliable shadow puppet narrators offer inarticulate commentary and mis-assembled chat about Hindu religion, Indian literary history, so forth. The girls asked me to fill in the blanks.

I know my Greek mythology. (Norse? Of course!) Hindu religion and Sanskrit literature? Fortunately, I found a couple beautiful books suitable for kids of all ages, by animator/artist Sanjay Patel. The Little Book of Hindu Deities: From the Goddess of Wealth to the Sacred Cow; and, even better, Ramayana: Divine Loophole [amazon links].

You can see numerous page scans from the books here and here. Lovely pictures. [click to continue…]

Via the Corner, a spot of TV talking head with Eric Cantor.

“Everything is on the table,” he said. “As Republicans, we’re not going to go for tax increases. I think the administration gets that. But we’ve also put everything on the table as far as cuts.”

Imagine what the response would be if this were flipped around. Imagine a Democrat emitting the following, as a bold deficit reduction plan: “Everything is on the table … we’re not going to go for spending cuts. I think the Republicans get that. But we’ve also put everything on the table as far as tax hikes.” No one would say such a Bizarro Norquist thing, of course, because no one on the Democratic side is as bizarre as Norquist. But if someone did, it would be perfectly obvious the person saying this thing wasn’t concerned with deficit reduction. The idea that someone unwilling to contemplate spending cuts – anywhere – was a deficit hawk would not pass the laugh test. As Cantor’s statement does not. [click to continue…]

Ta-Nehisi Coates really likes Moby Dick, apparently the first paragraph in particular.

But not everyone feels the same. Reminds me of that great scene in Bone, vol. 5, when they are being attacked by the Stupid Rat Creatures … [click to continue…]