John Holbo

John & Belle is terribly amusing at the moment – check out our new comments policy, for example. I self-promote so shamelessly because I know many of you sincerely loved the ‘jake’ contributions to this thread – college squid, hepcat leftist sockhopper assumptions J. Edgar etc. etc. (Jim Henley devoted a short post to marvelling.) So you should know there is more to be had. Acephalous is having fun as well. We aren’t yet taking pre-orders for the CT brand “even Ezra Pound would have called you a bitch” Café Press thong underwear (with the delicate ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made’ stitched in). PZ Myers is already banging the table for his college squid baby-t. Ah well. But the future is a long time, as they say. Perhaps the troll will straighten up, fly right – that is, in an away direction, and all will be well.

But all this is just to entertain you, by way of paying you back for answering a question. I’m writing a review of Zizek’s The Parallax View – which, weirdly, doesn’t discuss Pakula’s The Parallax View (see the top post on J&B). But the weird thing about this, seems to me, isn’t just that Zizek is a filmhound, so he should mention the film in a big book of this title – one containing a lot about film. The weird thing is that ‘the parallax view’ is a weird phrase because there’s no such thing as a parallax view. Parallax is a difference between two views – for example, the view through a camera viewer and the view through the lens, which then comes out as the picture you’ve taken. (See all the different things parallax can mean.) A difference between two views is not, itself, any view. The one thing that seems like it could be a ‘parallax view’ would be … healthy eyesight. The marksman with two eyes has better depth perception than the one-eyed marksman, to whom everything looks flat (like a carefully composed Pakula frame). I’m not sure what to make of this, but for starters I’m just asking: I’m not a photographer or astronomer, so maybe my premise is wrong? Does anyone ever use the phrase ‘parallax view’ except as the title of a book or film? If not, then it seems like Zizek naming his book after the film, then not discussing it, is some kind of clue, or joke.

Spring is here, and meat is in the air!

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I’m reading Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality [amazon]. It’s a pretty ok little intro, suitable for undergrads; but kinda pricey for what it – a slim paperback, several years old (though I guess there’s a new edition.) Anyway, here’s a passage that raised my eyebrow: [click to continue…]

It seems to me that 50 SF films for $16.47 is a good deal [Amazon]. Anyone care to comment on the various titles? It’s got classics like “Teenagers From Outer Space” and “Destroy All Planets” and “Phantom Planet” and “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”. Everything. (Nothing good, of course.) It’s got John Agar and Basil Rathbone and Steve Reeves. How well do I remember the Young Fresh Fellows singing “The New John Agar”! Well, sort of well. It was long ago. Discuss! (Someone should start a roll-your-own MST3K mp3 commentary track project.)

This collection of 100 cartoons seems likely to be good as well. How can a badly made cartoon from the 30’s entitled “Professor Ya Ya’s Memories” be bad?

I know it seems terrible that I’m always flogging stuff from Amazon. But is it?

UPDATE: As is pointed out in comments, there is in fact a a whole series of 50-packs: mystery, horror, comedy, musical, drive-in, martial arts, historical, dark crimes, pastoral-comical, tragical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical pastoral, robot monsteral-pastoral, santal clausal-tragical, teenageral-historical and so forth. Also, some intrepid/damned soul has reviewed every single item in the SF 50-pack!

I finally got around to reading the Euston Manifesto. Something of the sort used to be me. Here I am, back in Feb 2004, recollecting 2002-2003: “I did a Hitchens, basically. But I’m better now. Really, I feel fine.” Well, I was never worse than a sort of nail-biting queasyhawk, squawking about threatening storms. But good thing that Belle has been upholding the family honor with her ongoing ‘why I was wrong’ series. Apart from the fact that Belle accidentally logged in as me to make the first post, I never openly endorsed them. Usually I do that at dinner. But maybe a few words now about this Euston thing. [click to continue…]

Atrios used to have those fine bits of poetry, threadbare from overuse. "He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument," etc. Now he just says ‘yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.’ What with timezones, that’s all I ever see at the top of the page when I visit. Let’s see if memory and google can do better.

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Two quotes I happened to run across. The first from Michael Lind’s new piece at TAP, about Bruce Bartlett and Bushism.

From Bartlett’s perspective, genuine conservatism is better represented by the John Birch Society than by those closet liberals, Nixon and the two Bushes, not to mention Eisenhower, whom the Birchers accused of being a Communist (provoking Russell Kirk, one of the founders of modern conservatism, to quip, “Eisenhower isn’t a Communist, he’s a golfer”).

Next, from a Rick Perlstein piece at Huffpo late last year (via Henry’s announcement of the man’s new webpage). You really should read this great speech he delivered at a gathering of conservatives. (The Lind is good, too, but Perlstein is great.)

Republicans are different from conservatives: that was one of the first lessons I learned when I started interviewing YAFers. I learned it making small talk with conservative publisher Jameson Campaigne, in Ottawa, Illinois, when I asked him if he golfed. He said something like: “Are you kidding? I’m a conservative, not a Republican.”

Make of it what you will.

“Tiktaalik, Dr. Shubin said, is ‘both fish and tetrapod, which we sometimes call a fishapod.'” (NY Times link)

It seems to me there is a missed opportunity in not calling them ichthyopods. Because then you could riff on Daniel Dennett – the whole ‘no skyhooks’ thing. You could pen an attack on ID: ‘ichthyopod crane and the headless horseman of natural selection.’ Something like that. (I suppose an ichthyopod would really be an organism with fish for feet. But, then again, so would a fishapod. Come to think of it, suppose we find an organism with the number four attached to the ends of its legs. What are we going to call it? Not a tetrapod, surely. A problem. Speaking of four, google only gives us four hits for ‘ichthyopod’, as of today. If you are feeling lucky, you see this.)

Jon Mandle points to one anticipation of Thomas Kuhn. Here’s another – this one about the romance of paradigm shift vs. the pedestrian dullness of ‘normal’ science:

In a philosophical view, consistency is a certain level at all times, maintained in all the thoughts of one’s mind. But, since nature is nearly all hill and dale, how can one keep naturally advancing in knowledge without submitting to the natural inequalities in the progress? Advance into knowledge is just like advance upon the grand Erie canal, where, from the character of the country, change of level is inevitable; you are locked up and locked down with perpetual inconsistencies, and yet all the time you get on; while the dullest part of the whole route is what the boatmen call the ‘long level’ – a consistently-flat surface of sixty miles through stagnant swamps.”

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Scott Kaufman has an interesting distributed intelligence project. He’s soliciting suggestions for ‘best introductions to’ various standard topics in literary studies. Feel free to contribute. It’s a nice project. Lots of subjects could do with good lists of this sort.

I’m thinking about issues of copyright and fair use – specifically, the rather unfortunate lack of clear legal precedents in certain areas. The inability to be sure a given use is fair has an unfortunate dampening effect. (But this situation is no doubt mirrored in other areas where black letter implications are unclear, and precedent is thin on the ground.) What is to be done? Could you engineer the setting of precedents like so: semi-staged, lowball lawsuits. That is, someone claims ‘fair use’, in the secure foreknowledge that they won’t be sued for huge damages (because this has been informally settled or determined with the plaintiff in some manner, in advance.) So the defendant doesn’t have to risk catastrophic loss, just – say, a couple thousand dollars, plus legal fees (not trivial, but not crippling to certain folks.) The suit needn’t be strictly a fake, in that there could be real disagreement between the parties about what constitutes ‘fair use’. But the main idea is making it attractive as fairly low-stakes gambling for both parties. Presumably this would work best if both parties felt that setting a relevant precedent would be a considerable value in itself. Obviously aspiring fair-users will see the value of this; but some rights-holders will, too, if only because they may foresee wanting to make confident fair uses themselves; or perhaps because they are just plain idealistic. So you arrange for such parties to sue each other … slightly.

I can see that the law, in its majesty, might frown on this as slightly disrespectful of its aforementioned majesty. There is something frivolous about agreeing to disagree, just for the sake of taking up some judge’s time. But the goal – setting a precedent – is distinctly non-frivolous. Is there any precedent for setting out to set precedent in this way?

Anyone want to discuss the Hammer’s announcement of withdrawal from the race [Time, NY Times)? There’s a thread developing at Redstate. Realamerican writes:

Look, I’ll be honest. I don’t care if DeLay broke a few laws. He was good for our side, and I’d rather have a corrupt Republican than an honest Democrat (not that there is such a thing).

But by dropping out, he might as well put on a T-shirt saying, “Yes, I AM guilty!” This will paint the entire Republican Party in a bad light, and put our majority in real jeopardy. The honorable thing for him to do would have been to resign before the primary. By waiting until now, he makes it look as though Earle or someone has something really damaging on him. Even if he’s innocent, he looks incredibly guilty.

This is bad. Just really, really bad. Truthfully, I think we just lost the House.

Interesting use of the word ‘honorable’. To be fair, realamerican is getting a bit of pushback from the others in the thread. Not as much as one would hope for, however.

I think Powerline nails it about right:

It’s too bad, I think. DeLay was an effective leader, albeit too liberal in recent years. It’s possible, of course, that he did something wrong along the way. But there is no evidence of that in the public domain; as I’ve often said, the politically-inspired prosection of DeLay by Travis County’s discredited DA, Ronnie Earle, is a bad joke. As far as we can tell at the moment, DeLay appears to be yet another victim of the Democrats’ politics of personal destruction–the only politics they know.

As to my post title. I’ve used that joke before, but it seems extra super appropriate today.

And just to be clear: realamerican and hindrocket are mostly here to provide black humor. You don’t need to talk about them unless you want. You might consider discussing levels of denial of Republican corruption problems, however.

The Republican War On Science is a good read. But also – broadly – the same genre as this (shudder) and this (shuddershudder). The title hints at a sinister plot to – well, you see what I mean. The worry is the thing is afflicted with a touch of the paranoid style. Now I quite like a little hyperventilation. I know book marketing makes lurid demands. I’ve read a couple reviews that accuse Mooney of polemic; some seriously, excessively polemical negative reviews. Mooney has had chunks taken out of him. I’m not so interested in more of that. Still, a potboiling polemical style will deform presentation in predictable ways. Let’s consider. [click to continue…]

Fellow Timberteer Maria is visiting Singapore on her way to some important meeting. She and Belle ran off to Little India today. I had to work. It is left to me to memorialize their shopping trip, based on its products. What can I say?

My work is done. You, our readers, shall now compose the screenplay/libretto of a Bollywood musical, based on Donnie Darko. (Click for larger image.) Since I am an incorrigible Amazon whore I cannot refrain from noting that the director’s cut is marked down 50%. If you don’t go for that, this Hank Thompson collection is only $4.97. (You’re saving $1.01!!) For some reason, when I was a kid, I had a record with “Whoa Sailor” on it. I played it over and over but turned out straight. The man who is tired of Donnie Darko and Hank Thompson is tired of life. (Don’t miss the slideshow.)