Other Deaths

I love the Mouse and his Child but I think it is the single saddest children’s book i have ever read.

I get slightly irritated by all this “scoring-by-issues” stuff. Great or no great, Havel was a human being, so he got it right sometimes and he got it wrong sometimes. If he stood out so that his death inspires commentary by outsiders that did not know him personally, sure it was because of more holistic components of his thought and deeds.

I’ve heard it said that Havel’s popularity was greater — or, at least, more uncomplicated — outside his country than in it. I remember, after he became President, a group of young women of my acquaintance decided to visit the Czech Republic (doesn’t remember whether this was before or after breakup) with a book of his writings and a huge box of condoms, his charisma having attached itself to his countrypeople. Im my impressionable mid-20s mind, this confirmed his status as the ideal political leader.

“the big one being that it’s basically an all-male world”
Yeah, problem. But great novel.

Coincidentally over the past couple of nights I’ve been reading 30+ year old disintegrating copies of Charlie the Tramp and Nothing to Do, from my own childhood (and those of my three younger siblings), to my own nipper.

“Riddley Walker” is a book I’ve read numerous times and that I know that I will read it again and am comforted by that thought. It is one of the great unmade filmed stories, along with Blood Merridan, and there at least Hollywood seems to have tried. There have been too many post apocoyptic stories of poor quality. But Dr. Miller has made a career out of it. I expect that someone may try soon, because CGI coming as far as it has, it aught to be easy by now. But the language must be a terrifying prospect. But despite its problematic dialog, “Riddley Walker” is terrifically cinematic, as you can feel the cold and mud and rain and the night from the first pages. Its not hard to imagine someone throwing their hands up at trying to reduce it to treatment.

A tribute to Russell Hoban by Michael Sporn, an animator who directed a film of one of his books, The Marzipan Pig (Tim Curry narrated):

When we completed The Marzipan Pig, Hoban came to NY from his home in London. We arranged a screening for him after which Tissa David, he and I went to lunch. In his very dry way, he told me that he was pleased with the film. As I do with all authors, I asked for criticism not compliments, and he told me there was only one complaint. We didn’t get the bridge quite right at the end of the film. Of course he was right, and it’s hard for me to watch those final scenes, now, without thinking about that damned bridge.

And here’s a post in which Sporn gives some behind-the-scenes on the animated version of The Mouse and His Child, which he had nothing to do with.

Its been a rough few days for deaths of the more-or-less worthy:

Russell Hoban
Christopher Hitchens
Cesaria Evora
Václav Havel

No doubt there were many others that escaped my attention, but to have those 4 pass away on 4 successive days (and my own birthday occuring right in the middle) reinforces feelings of age and the notion of generational succession. The greatest bane? No doubt that on the same day that each of these people died, at least one person filled with the potential for some equally immense talent was born … but I will likely die before anyone knows for sure who they are. And I’m not that old!

niamh, I wrote a lengthy thingie on “Power of the Powerless” yesterday as a diary on Daily Kos,, especially on his “Greengrocer” everyman, where it was (for the most part) promptly ignored. Maybe it would be of more interest to CT’ers.

The main point is that this essay, while usually considered within the realm of Eastern European dissident writing, is also far more than that, is a brilliant piece of social protest and an important contribution to the literature on non-violent civil disobedience.

The Frances the Badger books meant so much to me as a child (and still do). We incorporated much of the language into our own private family lingo and jokes. We still call Baby Ruth candy bars Chompo bars and talk about little sisters not being much “s-m-f-o.” Those books are an amazing achievement, and I have cherished reading them to my daughters in turn. RIP, Russell Hoban.

I hate doing this kind of thing, but some blatant blog-whoring here, which includes a contrast between Havel and Hitchens.

Given that Havel supported the Iraq War, doesn’t CT etiquette require that he now be reviled, condemned, and spat upon, regardless of whatever else he did in his life?

The precedent has recently been established.

What, Hoban? Noooo! That sucks!

The Frances books are great, but to my mind one of the best kids’ books ever written is Hoban’s “How Tom Beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen” which is as awesome as it sounds. Illustrated by Quentin Blake, so double the pleasure.

Tom is the ward of the frightening Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong, who wears an iron hat, and if Tom doesn’t stop fooling around, she’ll summon Captain Najork and his hired sportsmen to teach him a lesson. Etc.

“Eat your greasy bloaters and your cabbage-and-mutton sog!”

Louis Proyect on Havel and the struggle for socialism in Czechoslovakia. Discusses history going back to WWII with a concentration on 1968 and Havel’s differences with Dubcek

Proyect is pretty careful, and I know nothing, but I do think that if Havel completely sold his nation to Goldman-Sachs in the 90s he would still be called a hero in some circles. Hungary is showing where that kind of liberalism ultimately leads.

The Czech Republic’s numbers and conditions, GINI etc, look pretty good so far. Better than Poland’s. I guess they managed to hold on to some values and protected themselves from the neo-liberal looters. For now.

Havel and Hitchens are writerly, whatever else they might be.

I love the Mouse and his Child but I think it is the single saddest children’s book i have ever read.

Sad? yes, but real — a depth of feeling you hardly find in any book, children’s or adult. “Sad” isn’t a bad thing!

Saw Hoban’s name in an obituary list, thought it was vaguely familiar, read on to find he had written the Frances books, and was grateful and sad at once.

My kids are older, but I don’t recall many other books with the same qualities?

35: I wasn’t saying it’s a bad thing necessarily, but Jesus, shiv me to the heart one time, guy! That book gets under your skin. Maybe I just don’t want to have to dream about it later.

So I read Riddley Walker long ago and was not terribly impressed (though I do remember it at least). But I gather many think it might be worth another try?

As for Frances, I have to wait for a grandchild, now. Darn it.

Jimmy Saville died as well! Why no thread about him? If you ask the average British person, you will discover that Saville’s death was a far more culturally significant occasion than that of Hitchens.

Given that Havel supported the Iraq War, doesn’t CT etiquette require that he now be reviled, condemned, and spat upon, regardless of whatever else he did in his life?

…oh. I attempted to pre-emptively reply to this sort of thing in Belle’s first Hitchens post-mortem (mortem post?), figuring it might become all the rage of the moment to find some excruciatingly asinine excuse to equivocate the two men under the Wrong About Iraq masthead. Still, sheesh. The ‘ooh ooh let’s make a sardonic deference to CT etiquette now that it expresses disapproval of sexism’ meme ought to have had a half-life of 24 hours or so; there’s no reason to make it a thing, you know?

Anyway, as you’ve gone ahead and clarified that this apparently needs saying — I’m honestly perfectly happy to give Hitchens an honorary Get Out Of Iraq-War-Infamy Free Card (the original was issued to John Cole, so it’ll have to be a photocopy), and given that Hitchens recently passed, I won’t even ask for an act of contrition to ‘earn’ it. Okay. He’s still an obnoxious boor who lived in a bubble of self-crafted hatred masquerading as virility. Hitchens identified himself as an anti-theist; it’s only right and proper for salutations to acknowledge that he was rather anti-human, too.

Which brings me to Havel, who developed the audacity to assert human rights in the absence of deism constitute “mere froth floating on the subsiding waters of faith in a purely scientific relationship to the world” and acknowledge the “departing era” of genuinely humanist socialist reforms in the same sentence. Quite a strange capstone, and “noted without comment” seemed like a perfectly excellent response to steal. What more is there to say?

http://www.constitutioncenter.org/libertymedal/recipient_1994_speech.html

Well yeah (and btw -not that anyone here has said otherwise – it doesn’t require the many universes/realism about possible worlds, as some seem to suppose) but that is specifically called the weak anthropic principle, isn’t it? And I’d assumed (possibly actually learned, can’t remember) that this contrasted with a ‘stronger’ principle, that would be similar to that expressed in the quote.

…ah, it’s probably OCR…

that is specifically called the weak anthropic principle, isn’t it?

tl;dr: Sort of, not quite; Havel is asserting a version strong enough to be met with disdainful eyebrow-raises from anyone not deist, and even most proponents of a rather strong anthropic principle shy away from those conclusions of his.

tl: The strongest version of the Anthropic Principle asserts that conscious life compels the creation and development of a Universe compatible to it. There’s three versions I’m familiar with. In the first, there’s a Creator mechanism that exists in a context independent of universal constants who moves over the surface of the waters and stuff and then boom there’s a life-supporting universe, generated for the purpose of supporting the lives of plants and animals and people and snakes and maybe an apple tree or two. In the second, the Universe has a kind of consciousness prior to its own existence, and manifests within its own existence minuscule replicas of itself; that is, there is a Universal Consciousness that generates our own consciousness (confession: I quietly take a lot of personal solace from this particular version — absence of evidence does not imply evidence of absence! and such nonsense — but of course you’re welcome to denigrate it to your liking).

The third version attempts to play around with gimmicks in time evolution to sort of argue there is some kind of ‘consciousness outside time’ blah blah if you think outside of time, man, everything was, like, always here.

The next stronger version asserts that there exists an (as yet undiscovered) observable whose corresponding conservation law ‘compels’ the development of conscious life. (The Universe is; therefore, I am?) In this version, the probability of conscious life emerging as the universe evolves in time approaches 100%. (This is not quite the same as guaranteeing life, which makes this version slightly less strong than the strongest, but I will spare you the stupid pretensions to calculus.)

A strong but slightly less strong version asserts that the only possible universes are ones in which all the fundamental physical constants are compatible with conscious life. That is, the universe is always capable of producing an environment conducive to conscious life, but the probability of conscious life emerging does not necessarily approach 100%, even allowing for an infinite time horizon.

There’s a weaker version still; it mumbles that there might be plenty of universes in which life is not supportable, but we’d only be around to observe a universe that supports conscious life, so, like, what did we expect to find? “It’s impossible for conscious life to make observations in a universe in which conscious life cannot exist” is the right flavor. (Note, it’s not quite a tautology, as conceivably there might be some way to make observations in one universe while comfortably seated in another. For a wide variety of completely sensible definitions of the word ‘universe’ it does reduce to tautology.)

I suppose the weakest version would be the tautology, ‘it’s impossible for conscious life to exist in a universe in which conscious life cannot exist.’

It’s pretty normal for these variants to get appropriated and muddled together for the sake of a pretty saying, for which example of we might as well forgive Havel. My own favorite formulation is either “We’re very lucky to be capable of discovering that we’re very lucky to be” or “Conscious life is perfectly well justified in admiring with gratitude and a sense of breathless luck the universe in which its own antecedents, whether by inevitability or by serendipity, emerged” or, extending a little, The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

(As the reverent italics probably imply, I like best the sort-of-backwards version asserting that conscious life is compelled to marvel at the astonishingly improbable universe it finds itself in.)

It seems to me that his ‘we are around to observe a universe that supports conscious life’ claptrap is in contradiction with his ‘human rights’ claptrap. The universe has conscious life with human rights and without them, and obviously both situations need to be observed, to the fullest extent.

As for Frances, I have to wait for a grandchild, now. Darn it.

Sez who?