John Holbo

I know, I know: it’s been two days since my last Haeckel post. Well, worry no longer! My X-Mas cards got a link from the University of Chicago Press! They just put out a new biography of Haeckel that is, I gather, more of a general intellectual history of the reception of evolutionary theory in the second half of the 19th Century, doubling as an attempt to burnish a somewhat tarnished reputation: The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought [amazon]. Here’s a TLS review – or rather, a longer version of one – that is, effectively, a thumbnail biography in itself.

All well and good, you agree: but surely there is more to life than German X-Mas jellyfish imagery? Yes, indeed! ASIFA has posted a wonderful series of Einar Norelius illustrations from a 1929 Bland Tomtar Och Troll (a Swedish x-mas annual of fairy and folktales). For example, here’s some sort of Aquatomten admiring a bunch of jellyfish. (Or maybe the guy’s just drowning.)

You see: there’s also Swedish X-Mas jellyfish imagery. So I added another card image to my flickr set, to add variety. (Not my best work, admittedly. But I only have so much 100-year old Swedish holiday card stock in my ephemera file.)

Jacob Levy has a very interesting bloggingheads exchange with Will Wilkinson. At least it’s interesting if you want to understand what the hell just happened up in Canada, politically. That whole ‘didn’t the queen shut down parliament, or something?’ thing. If that interests you.

Next: there has been some indignation in response to Gerecht’s piece in the NY Times, defending torture and extraordinary rendition. Yglesias starts like so: “Because Reuel Marc Gerecht adheres to an appalling and cruel ethical system and the people who decide what runs on major newspaper op-ed pages have no ethics whatsoever …” [click to continue…]

It’s a Flickr set. Plus I set up a CafePress thingy.

I started some of this last year: “And so in the end it was the littlest shoggoth of all who guided Santa’s sleigh that night.” Made some printables and gift tags They’re still there, if you want ’em. But if you want to do anything with the images, downloading the images from Flickr is probably simplest. I put them up under a CC license.

This took way too long.

I link to Top Shelf Comics whenever they have one of their $3 sales. Because their stuff is great. Because you should support your independent small publishers. (Well, that is what I have always assumed, and I see no reason to change my mind.)

They have another sale, until tomorrow – December 14 – offering you free shipping on new release orders over $40, plus on orders from that $3 bin that is still pretty full.

You know. Think about how this goes.

Stockings always get stuffed with care with cheap stuff that seems sort of funny for a moment but isn’t actually that interesting. Think how much more baffled your family members will be by mysteriously Santa-provided copies of “Magic Boy and Robot Elf”, not to mention two of my favorite comics that would fit into a stocking: Dan James’ “The Octopi and the Ocean” and “Mosquito”. It makes me sad that these two titles continue to languish in the remainder bin. (Go ahead. Check out the previews.)

New stuff that looks good: Veeps, a comic book people’s history of the all those who were a heartbeat away from the Presidency. Kids will love Owly and the Korgi books. Alex Robinson’s new one is supposed to be good. (I like his old stuff. Haven’t tried the new yet.) There’s a new volume of Jeff Lemire’s Essex County series. (Possibly these names mean very little to you. Perhaps you should amend that situation.)

OK, something fun to talk about. [click to continue…]

I’m going to go out on a limb: Joni Mitchell is a great singer/songwriter/pianist/guitarist.

Pursuant of this theme, a pair of YouTube videos – really just song tracks. The first, a sweet and mournful heavy-orchestration-makes-it-good track, “Down To You”, from Court and Spark (1973). Especially the French horn bits. That was the album that gave us “Free Man In Paris”, “Help Me”, and the (slightly annoying) “Raised On Robbery”; but if you ask me: “Down To You” is the drop-dead achingly beautiful one. Right. That’s settled.

Next, “The Jungle Line”, from The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975). She’s getting into all the fusion-y jazz stuff which, for me, is mostly hit but sometimes miss. But “Jungle Line” has this crazy thumpy blatt-y bass-y bassoon-y oboe-y, synth-y stuff over the sampled African drums. Is it the long lost Brian Eno-produced Björk album from 1975? I think a few bars from this one would be great for baffling your friends/incorporating into some oddly unplaceable mash-up. What do you think?

Speaking of dubious mash-up projects, I have a very bad idea: a mash-up of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” with Randy Newman’s “Little Criminals“. Obviously you would have to call it “Smooth Little Criminals”. Can you sort of hear it? (Perhaps not. But I think you will agree that the original Jackson video is a stronger effort than the middle-school action figure Newman offering.)

My friend Josh Glenn has a new book, The Idler’s Glossary [amazon]. An acquaintance of mine, Mark Kingwell, wrote the introductory essay. And Seth did the illustrations. (I love Seth.) The whole svelte, 3.7 x 6 in. unit would slip snugly into someone’s X-Mas stocking, mayhap.

It’s a glossary: entries on absentmindedness and acedia through to working-class hero. (Shouldn’t there be an entry for ‘zzzzzz’? With no gloss? I think that might have been an elegant way to end the book.)

Right, the philosophy of idleness. First, I will note that Kingwell and Glenn have diametrically opposed theories of boredom. Kingwell quotes a passage from a Kingsley Amis novel: “My wife accuse me of thinking her boring. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that this might be because she’s boring … To her mind, her being boring is a thing I do.” Kingwell takes the husband’s side, but Glenn goes on to take the wife’s: “Go ahead and blame your dull companions, but being bored [a slang term that appeared among London’s smart set in the late 18th century, perhaps derived from the French for ‘triviality’] is your own fault. It’s the state of being too restless to concentrate, while too apathetic to bust a move.” Which, come to think of it, is a pretty stable Kinglsey Amis formula.

So who’s right: Kingwell or Glenn? In philosophical terms, if a tree is boring in the forest, and there is no one there to be bored by how dull Nature is … ? In Humean terms, is boringness a matter of (we shouldn’t say ‘gilding and staining Nature with our sentiments’) dulling and drearing Nature with our sentiments. Or was existence already dull and drear when we lay down on it?

Let us proceed to our second topic, which is of even greater significance: idleness, per se. [click to continue…]

Victor Davis Hanson: “George Bush is neither the source of all our ills nor the “worst” president in our history.”

It says something that even Bush’s die-hard defenders implicitly concede that assessing his legacy is going to be a matter of wrangling over the semantics of ‘worst’.

Full disclosure: I’m married to a woman who is descended from James Buchanan, so it may be that I am over-eager to see the mantle of ‘worst’ pass to another family line, freeing my offspring from the stain of shame.

I can’t believe I beat Josh Marshall to this one. Check out this preview page for #3 of the new Top 10 run. To the right, in the center panel, see an elongated Don Young with ‘AK Mink’ – Alaska Mink – on his spandex. (See this old TPM post for backstory.) Also, Newt Gingrich is there. Of course I know all this because like a sensible person I listened to the John Siuntres Word Balloon podcast interview with Gene Ha, the artist for Top 10.

If you don’t know: Top 10 was an Alan Moore-authored series now being written and drawn by two of the original artists, Zander Cannon having shifted to writing. And so this seems like an appropriate time to reflect on the fact that Alan Moore is famous, and everyone has heard of Watchmen and V for Vendetta and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. But I like a lot of other Moore work as much, if not better. [click to continue…]

A little something about the whole ‘Obama needs to be cautious because this is still a center-right nation’ thingamajig. (Hilzoy derides it; Sirota has been tracking it; Ramesh Ponnuru questioned the intelligibility of the proposition. No doubt you’ve noticed some of this discussion going around.)

Way back two years ago, I blogged a review of Micklethwait and Wooldridge’s Right Nation. Here was my verdict: “The authors basically have a Louis Hartz ‘liberal consensus’ argument. Do a change-all ‘liberal’ to ‘conservative’. Which is really a substitution they ought to think through a bit harder. Since they cite much of the same evidence Hartz cited for his thesis way back when.”

Consider “Liberalism in America: A Note for Europeans” by Arthur ‘vital center’ Schlesinger, written in 1956, anthologized in The Politics of Hope [amazon]. He takes a Hartzian view. “In a sense all of America is liberalism.” That’s the first line, establishing a certain ‘who’s your daddy?’ dominance. Then what follows is ostensibly more moderate: [click to continue…]

My free music posts have been generally well-received, so here’s another. First, if you don’t know, the new Guns N’ Roses album is now streaming on MySpace. I shall listen while writing this post. [UPDATE: it sounds like Guns N’ Roses.]

Right. Other free stuff. If you don’t know, Stereogum is a great source for music news and free mp3 downloads. They have whole albums and lots of individual tracks. You can download old archive sets in convenient zips. Here, for your delectation, a free fix of mostly recent, mostly Stereogum-derived freebies. Just right-click and download. Report back later, praising my good taste. [click to continue…]

It’s boring for me to keep linking to Amazon stuff, but, damnit, they have adopted the strategy of giving away good stuff for free. This time it’s This is Daptone Records…, a fantastic sampler. The Daptone sound is a perfect retro funk soul affair. They release 45’s, just to fool people into thinking the stuff is decades old. You’ve heard the Dap-Kings backing up Amy Winehouse about that whole ‘not going to rehab’ thing, among other issues. They’re all over her Back To Black album, a big reason why it sounds so sharp. The three Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings tracks on the sampler are as good as any Winehouse stuff. But the best track is “Make The Road By Walking”, from the Menahan Street Band. You can listen on YouTube.

ASIFA Animation Archive has a complete scan of a WWII era cartooning guide ‘for use of U.S. Armed Forces personnel only’. It’s a pretty solid little how-to. (Confidentionally, I’m kinda nostalgic about this stuff, as you may have noticed.) Bonus points for the advice about rendering racial stereotypes and for advising budding cartoonists to sketch their fellow soldiers in the shower. (Don’t ask, don’t tell – just sketch.) Also, ‘cartooning the female’ sounds like an MLA paper title.

In other news: Will Wilkinson linked, a few weeks ago, to a TED lecture by the psychologist, Jonathan Haidt on ‘the moral mind: the real difference between liberals and conservatives’. Will didn’t agree with it much. But I quite liked it. It pretends to be doing way more paradigm-busting than a basically pat, introductory lecture could possibly manage, but that’s a pardonable rhetorical sin. It fit well with intro philosophy material I teach (not about liberalism/conservatism but about pretty much all the other stuff Haidt talks about). So I suggested to my students to watch and they liked it very much. Here’s my favorite bit (round about minute 10). He apparently did a survey in which he asked respondents whether, if they were buying a dog, they would want the one that was a member of a breed known for being ‘independent minded and relating to its owner as a friend and equal’; or would you prefer the one that is ‘extremely loyal to its home and family and doesn’t warm up quickly to strangers’? Turns out, liberals pick the first option more, conservatives the second.

[you can’t really read the scale on my little screencap. It runs along the bottom from liberal, through neutral, to conservative.]

This was funny to me because I had made a rather similar point to my students by talking about the ethics of promise-keeping, quoting Nietzsche from Genealogy of Morals: “To breed an animal with the right to make promises—is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? is it not the real problem regarding man?” I have this great schtick I do about that one – the Kantian dogshow. (Way funnier than Haidt with his ‘fetch, please!’ joke.) Here’s my cartoon to go with. (I really want to do a better one. A nervous group of humans hovering around an intense little dog that looks like it might be about to make a promise. I think Jules Pfeifer could draw a good one.) [click to continue…]

Pejman Yousefzadeh: “Vote to remind a certain Presidential candidate that he and his surrogates can’t get away with the claim that they only intend to raise taxes on the rich.”

I guess Pejman Yousefzadeh endorses Barack Obama for President. Because, after all, the only way to hold Obama accountable for claiming that he only intends to raise taxes on the rich is, presumably, to gather evidence that this was not his true intention. I fail to see how it will be possible to gather more evidence about his true intentions than we’ve got already if he loses.

But seriously: I think it’s significant that the complaint against Obama is not that his tax plan is bad (who would say that, if they wanted to win over voters?) No, the complaint has to be that Obama’s tax plan isn’t Obama’s. Republicans have had such a rhetorical advantage on the tax question for decades that it’s remarkable to see them so hobbled this time out. That’s change I can believe in!

Amazon is giving away a a free ‘sampler’ album from Light In the Attic records. It’s drop dead fantastic, I say. It’s got “Katie Cruel”, by Karen Dalton [wikipedia]. Such an amazing song, and an amazing voice – like Billie Holiday decided to sing a perfect contribution to the soundtrack for “Deadwood”. Dalton’s In My Own Time was released in 1970, then only made it to CD a couple years ago. Then there is “An Elegy”, some kind of champagne trip soul hop remix of a Free Design track. Then another Free Design track, “Make The Madness Stop”. (Either you like Free Design or you don’t. It’s totally ridiculous stuff.) Then there’s a crazy great Betty Davis track, “He Was A Real Freak”. A fun ringer, “Sugar Man”, from someone named Rodriguez. The brief bio from the label is interesting. His 1970 album is “one of the lost classics of the ’60s, a psychedelic masterpiece drenched in colour and inspired by life, love, poverty, rebellion, and, of course, “jumpers, coke, sweet mary jane”. The album is Cold Fact, and what’s more intriguing is that its maker – a shadowy figure known as Rodriguez – was, for many years, lost too. A decade ago, he was rediscovered working on a Detroit building site, unaware that his defining album had become not only a cult classic, but for the people of South Africa, a beacon of revolution.” Also on the sampler are a couple of solid reggae/r&b tracks – especially “Chips – Chicken – Banana Split”, by Jo Jo and the Fugitives. The tracks by The Black Angels and the Saturday Knights are solid, too. Like I said: great album, and free.

I see that the Black Angels just played a Halloween gig with Roky Erikson. That reminds me of another free mp3 to pass along. A great cover of Erikson’s “You Don’t Love Me Yet”. I know about that one because I really enjoyed Jonathan Lethem’s novel – same title
– which didn’t get much attention. It’s kinda like Philip K. Dick wrote an episode of “Friends”. But in a good way. No, that’s not what it’s like, except for the names. What can I say? It’s a slight work, evoking aimlessly attractive youth. There are comic couplings and decouplings, and very nicely written it is.

I know what day it is. But every post can’t be about the election.