Actual thought-in-writing has been hard to find around these parts of late. Luckily there are one or two other places you might look, if you're interested.
The sharp-eyed Christina is charting the rise of the self-proclaimed Funniest Man in America. If you want to get a taste of the funny-bone-tickling-party that is the work of Mr. James Gregory, you can peruse such enticements as the track list of his 1990 CD, It Could Be a Law, I Don't Know, which features titles that let the listener know exactly what they'll hear. Sign me up for some "Funny Signs," please, and then I'll move on to such can't-miss events as "Lotteries," "Stupid Relatives," and "Laxatives." Oh, man, I'm all all-chuckle just imagining what J.G. has in store -- and if you can't wait for the CD, you can get a little audio sample of "Midgets" to tide you over.
I don't think it's possible to improve on the puzzlement-inducing power of this with any remarks of my own.
You, however, are more than welcome to try.
Yesterday being a celebratory day for us, and with late October breaking out into a preposterous riot of color, we found ourselves someplace we'd heard a lot about but had never been, up the river a ways at Storm King. My sorrow at having no currently working digital camera should be balanced by your happiness at not having to squint at a lot of badly-framed shots of outdoor sculpture here.
A Google search turned up some shots by another visitor which, on the whole, are better than anything I'd have been likely to provide -- and as impressive, sadly, as any of the images you'll find on the organization's official site.
But Mr. Kleinfeld wasn't there at the right time of year, I think -- this weekend the Calders framed trees that looked as if they'd been colored in with yellow highlighters, and from the Noguchi sculpture which presides over Storm King's central hillock, the wooded slopes were daubed in deep ochres and carrot oranges, while the lawns, upon which various titantic whimsies preened themselves, were still a determined green, holding on to summer's chlorophyll binge with an appealing desperation.
Would it be too much to say that the great trick of all of the sculpture is to pull something of a Wallace Stevens on you? Although the landscape is no longer a wilderness, and was probably never slovenly, the balancing act of works like Kadishman's "Suspended" makes you look again at all of the "natural" beauty it's set in with a pleasant suspicion; you drive off a little uneasy about those picturesque stones on that ridgeline, and happily alive to the possible double-dealing in a row of nonchalant trees.
Taking a break from his duties as the Answer Man of Rock, Gavin Edwards graces us with his quizmastering presence this week. His challenge follows. Remember, no Googling or running to your copy of Cecil Adams. And please limit yourself to one guess per post (though you may post as often as you like). Mr. G. will be the final arbiter of accuracy.
The first correct answer posted to comments wins an installment of the fundamentalist apocalypse fantasia-series Left Behind, with marginal notes from the Wombat File editorial staff.
And, now, on to the Quiz!
Since urban disaster and Wombat File are natural partners (much like Bob Hope and the Whiskey Rebellion), here's this week's question:
Sometime in the first quarter of the twentieth century there was a terrible disaster in Boston. One newspaper said the aftermath was "the biggest mess since the Augean Stables." The Boston Post described it thus: "There was no escape from the wave. Human and animal alike could not flee. Snared in its flood was to be stifled."
What was this catastrophe which took 21 lives?
Before tomorrow's quiz (which will feature the return of Guest Quizmaster Gavin), a little late-nite linkage:
I disembark onto the platform's firm stage, the scattered sheets of a Village Voice seemingly by chance arranged flower-like about my steps. At my side the brave silver form of the Flatbush-bound No. 2 heaves away with a glorious velocity and I mount the stairs with purpose. The moon above is at play in a sky full of dark.
This is a very good mix tape...
So, Yann Martel's Life of Pi won the Booker. For once, I can respond to a book award by saying "Hey, I read that." I leave my much-pilloried sour grapes concerning lit honors behind and simply remark that it was a fun read.
In other book news, a colleague pointed out this to me, which I find encouraging, as it suggests that what I had previously thought was a bad habit is actually a dietary regimen helping to make me a healthy, brain-cell building athlete. Thank god my eyes have been opened, before I turned disastrously to the horrible world of decaf.
I've been told he's one-note, he's arrogant, he's a mediocre economist. Whatever: as a journalist, Paul Krugman's work has been invaluable, a freaking national treasure. This article in particular is a brilliant addition to his program, which, as Lee Siegel noted in Harpers', has been to counter the outrageous misrepresentations about the economy, taxes, and wealth perpetrated by the current administration.
Of course, reading about Krugman over in the Blue Room is likely to provoke a familiar reaction.
With expectations set on low, we caught the Losers Lounge tribute to Elvis Costello this weekend, and the result was surprsingly good: a minimum of tired covers (a dreadful "Radio Sweetheart," an uninspired "(What's so funny 'bout) Peace, Love and Understanding") and a remarkable tally of sit-up-and-take-notice interpretations, particularly from EC records I previously didn't favor. David Driver's take on "All This Useless Beauty" was particularly exceptional, as was the rendition of "I Want You," sung by an Englishman with a doom-deep voice whose name I've forgotten. Also right on: Robin Goldwasser's version of "Riot Act." Tell me again why I don't have a copy of Get Happy!?
With almost no expectations at all I picked up Aleksandar Hemon's Nowhere Man. I haven't finished, so can't render any final verdict, but it's been awhile since I've come across such fluency with the art of sentences married to the ability to keep a story going. A nugget picked out at random: "The faucet was sternly counting out droplets." The story zig-zags, rushes ahead, slows down, pauses and tells a joke, abruptly says goodnight, and then calls the next morning right after breakfast; like life, like an interesting fellow met at a party to whom one takes a quick liking before really knowing or trusting. I'm looking forward to getting to know Hemon's work better.
This week's quiz question comes to us from the fine people at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For the year 2000, the highest paid profession in the U.S. was physician. The next-highest profession was lawyer. (These figures are based on average annual salaries for employees in these professions).
What profession came in third?
(Note that an industry is not necessarily a profession, so these results pass over highly compensated jobs in the financial industry and such; "manager" is not a profession by these standards.)
The ethical participant will keep away from Google or handy copies of Labor Statistics for Dummies. First correct answer posted to comments wins a Sanrio "Bad Badtz-Maru" pencil case half-full of expired generic ibuprofen tablets.
I have been trying to pull together my thoughts about the Nobel Prize for Literature ever since the denizens of Metafilter spent the night before the announcement placing their bets.
It was an interesting discussion, and one which brought to mind the perpetual use of such awards and lists and the like -- as sparks for a conversation which produce a rich yield of recommendations. Speculation on MeFi about possible American honorees ranged from the far out to the well-reasoned (if mistaken).
In the end, of course, the 2002 winner was Imre Kertesz, a Hungarian novelist little known in this country -- not known to me at all, though this is not particularly notable, as the wasteland of my own personal ignorance is vast. As a consequence of said ignorance, I have nothing to say about Kertesz or his work, and can only add it to the list of writers I need to read.
However, the occasion of the Nobel award itself (and not the committee's particular choice), does raise in me some questions, or at least one question. To wit: why exactly do we care about the Nobel Prize for Literature at all?
(Wait, don't go yet. No, please, sit down. Give me a second, here.)
The Nobel prizes, for the most part, reward something fairly measurable: the importance of an individual contribution to a field of science -- physics, chemistry, medicine, economics (this one's a johnny-come-lately, but still). The language, while lofty and of course leaving lots of room for intra-field politics, nevertheless focuses the prizes on significant advances in theory in a particular academic field or set of related fields. The territory, in each case, of the experts in that field. There are two prizes which are different: the Peace prize and the prize in Literature.
The Peace prize is overtly political. It is given out annually by a committee selected by the Norwegian parliament, and (as with this year) its choice is often designed to send some kind of a message to the community of power-wielding world politicians about what that group finds worthy of praise. Since it comes with a lot of prestige, it is a carrot dangled as an inducement to leaders to make or broker peace. And since having a dissident in your society get it brings a nation a kind of inverse prestige, it is also a kind of moral stick held out against repressive governments. The Peace prize is purely political, and takes its meaning in that arena openly. It's also completely subjective -- but no one would mistake it for anything else. I don't really know how useful it is on the whole, but at least I know what it is and isn't.
The Prize in Literature, however, is a harder thing to manage. Ostensibly rewarding the same "benefit to humanity" that the other prizes offer, it differs in that it is the only one which presumes to reward excellence in art. That itself seems rather strange -- why not a prize in painting? In sculpture? In acting? The answer is, of course, that old Alf Nobel only specified literature in his will, and the Nobel committee follows his instructions. But the prize for Economics was added without anyone consulting Nobel in the afterworld, so presumably these things aren't unchangeable. More to the point, the prestige of the prize (beyond it's monetary benefit) is enormous -- and depends on the world continuing to esteem Nobel's prize and his categories.
More curiously to me, we accept the Nobel as a "lifetime" award, a judgement laid down on the individual. Toni Morrison is a Nobelist. So is Gunter Grass. It is not that Beloved or The Tin Drum were rewarded with esteem, in the manner of the Booker and the Pulitzer. These prizes are fraught with their own insufficiencies, and of course their own politics. But the book can, as it were, stand alone in competition against other books. And the limitations (must have been published first in thus-and-so-country, between these given dates) lend a necessary constraint to the task of aesthetic judgement. Ask me "Who of the Romantic poets was the most valuable to humanity," and I (if honest) will have absolutely no answer for you. Ask me to compare the merits of Songs of Innocence and Experience with Lyrical Ballads and I might have something to say (not right now, though, really, but thanks for asking).
But the while the Nobel gestures at the excellence of a particular piece of work, it refuses the limitations that make aesthetic conversation possible by marching off into the transcendent empyrean of "benefit to humanity." This by itself maddens me -- it confers such a mantle of sainthood that to argue with it almost immediately puts us into the territory beyond argument. Is Toni Morrison as important to literature as Wole Soyinka? Are we talking about the art or the artist? Their whole body of work, or one significant document? Since almost all of the nominees are worthy of a considerable degree of praise, it becomes a question of hopelessly un-sortable aesthetic criteria. It's not comparing apples to oranges. It's comparing wonderfully delicious apples to exceptionally finely made Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
So how do the categories get sorted out? Politically, and with no great deal of sophistication. Everyone assumes now that the committee will rotate from country to country, giving each equal time. A sort of calculus seems to be undertaken, so that a kind of ideal parliament, representing various peoples, temperaments, and historical issues.
And a big part of me sees that as inevitable, and in truth laudable. I'd like to see that parliament meet. I'd like to see them break up into committees and read the minutes. I don't know what on earth one could expect them to do, but I think the minutes of their arguments alone might be worth the trouble of building them a nice-looking meeting hall. (Some, of course, would be incredibly self-serving and boring as hell. But some of the screaming matches would be priceless).
Yet there's another part that whispers, every year: It's a sham. It's a well-meant fraud. It's a benevolent distraction from the literature itself.
And then I feel horribly ashamed to run down anything, any part at all, of our embattled and increasingly marginalized (sub)culture of writers and readers.
So...ah...um... what do you think?
A very late night of "experimenting" has ended predictably; a layout that looks fine when served up locally, but is not ready-to-mix with MT. The drawing board, again, as soon as we're able.
A busy evening experimenting with one of the CSS layouts formulated by glish has been educational, but I'm a ways yet from ready to subject you to my poor application of his work. But soon, soon, my pretties.
The following quotation comes from one of a number of oral histories, taken in the mid-20th century, of a famous event:
"I jumped out of bed and pulled on my pants. Everybody in the house was trying to save as much as possible. I tied my clothes in a sheet. With my clothes under my arm and my pack on my back, I left the house with the rest of the family. Everybody was running north. People were carrying all kinds of crazy things. A woman was carrying a pot of soup, which was spilling all over her dress. People were carrying cats, dogs and goats. In the great excitement people saved worthless things and left behind good things. I saw a woman carrying a big frame in which was framed her wedding veil and wreath. She said it would have been bad luck to leave it behind."
What massive -- and now legendary -- crisis was the cause of the flight described?
Post your answers to the now-fully-functional comments. As with prior quizzes, resist the urge to Google. First complete, correct post wins (really!) a copy of the recorded work of America's most beloved poet.
The hardware at home is once again inhabited by poltergeists -- don't know what's going on, but stay tuned. Quiz here later in the morning, with luck.
UPDATE 11:00 AM EST: Problem solved via application of Advanced Speedysnail Technology.
Sorry everyone, in the attempt to fix the permalink problem (new MT entries clashing with previously generated static pages) I've well and truly mucked up the comments. As of now, each comment link misdirects you to the comments for a previous post. Of course, one can still comment -- but the comment header will make NO sense, as you're really looking at...comments for the wrong post.
**Goes to bed**
My first apartment in New York was a charmless hybrid thing, a corner of a small tenement building in a section of Brooklyn none of my Manhattan-dwelling acquaintances had ever considered living in, when Smith Street was a strip of failing bodegas and E-Z Credit furniture stores, with no sign of the runway of prcey eateries it would become a decade later.
Its two small rooms were brilliantly configured to serve all household functions equally poorly. It had a back room shaped in such a manner as to foil attempts to fit a bed in it, so the pull-out futon (do you remember when we all based our living arrangements around the ubiquitous pull-out futon?) in the front room served as sofa and bed. It was an ungainly thing that never really resolved, when folded up, into a couch. It remained nothing more than a heavy mattress, draped over frame of slats, upon which one could perch for a while, if one didn't mind it eventually sliding forward onto the floor over the course of the evening.
The sofa faced the apartment's grand architectural feature, the wall of exposed, discolored brick which constituted the place's sole resemblance to the loft-y space of my New York fantasies. To the left, a wall of cheap cabinets, a dingy refrigerator and ancient stove revoked whatever small aesthetic benefit the brick wall had added. Since I effectively slept in the kitchen, I learned not to cook particularly odorous food late at night.
The room in the back became the "office" where I parked the enormous government surplus desk my father had salvaged for fifty bucks from his old offices. It was made of some indestructible wood-composite, and weighed fourteen million pounds. It got moved to three other apartments before I finally got wise and sold the monstrosity to a neighbor. In the back room I'd sit at my fortress of a desk and stare through the tiny window, across a courtyard and straight into the kitchen of the neighborhood firehouse. I remember one Sunday night as I sat studying, I could hear the sound of the television from their kitchen, punctuated every two or three minutes by a roar of laughter from the guys. One of them shouted "Go Al!" and I realized that they were watching Married...With Children.
I shared a wall with a mysterious figure who almost never left his apartment. He left the television on constantly, a perpetual stream of voices and music that came through my wall just below the threshold of intelligibility. I could never find the show on my television that matched the one he was watching. Late at night, it seemed that he found some channel that played perepetual old cop shows from the seventies, of the Barnaby Jones type. I'd hear muted dialogue, mournful music coming to a crescendo and then dying away. And then the sound of a gunshot, and tires screeching. More mournful music -- doodle-do doo! Dum! Da-da-da-da...dum! Once I heard him open his door, and I raced to catch a glimpse of him through the fish-eye of the peephole in the door -- a hulking t-shirted back, shuffling down the hallway.
The only really pleasant times in that apartment were Sunday mornings. I would go out the night before, late, and buy the morning paper and a small carton of orange juice, and some eggs. In the morning I would get up and make french toast, or pancakes from a box of Bisquick. I had a tiny white table by the window which overlooked the street, and I would bring my breakfast there with the paper, and sit in the sun, and I would put on this record. And it became in this way my home.
(Though I moved in a year, and was very, very happy to do so.)
If it's manageable, secure a place in the far front end of the very first subway car, right up by the door at the front, next to the driver's tiny closet. This is a pointless excercise in the newest cars, which have an airlock space between you and the front of the train. The glass is even deliberately polarized oddly, so you can't see out.
If you are in an older car, something from a 70's or 80's vintage -- it need not be one of the Redbird cars from the 60's, just not one of the new ones with the canned airport voices and the electronic route maps -- you can stand up against the front door and peer into the darkness that stretches out before you. You are not really yet awake. As the train lurches forward slowly, you can see that what appears from the ordinary perspective to be a cylindrical tube is actually a flatter space, honeycombed with girders and walls, an indeterminate number of tracks along its floor. Down in front of the train you see sandbags left behind by work crews.
The signal lights ahead of you are red, until you get close to them, and then they switch to yellow, sometimes only a few seconds before the train glides past. You can see every small twist of the track and you can feel the driver's braking technique, following exactly his reactions to lights which do not change quickly enough, or a track which takes a sudden jog. Through the perversely winding route that takes the train from Flatbush through Metrotech and into Brooklyn Heights, it is as if he is feeling his way. You can look in through a tiny window into his cubicle and see the digital speed readout from time to time. Above it is a simple, old-fashioned incandescent lamp that goes on when the doors are open. When the train stops, the driver stands and looks back down the car out his window to see if all are inside.
As you approach each station, the effect of the brightly lit platform emerging from the darkness of the tunnel -- emerging from your perspective, for of course you are the one doing the emerging, really -- is very engaging. The tiny figures, bathed in warm yellow light, crane their heads at you, are watching and waiting for you as you whoosh toward them. Then you are shooting past them, and they turn into full-size human beings and are much less charming, and you are relieved to see that no one is waiting to get into the front end of the first car, so it won't be very crowded. Coming into Boro Hall, it looks as though you are going to run straight into the back of the No. 4 as it sits at the platform, then suddenly you swerve sickeningly to the right and North, and you miss it by just a few yards and wonder if the arrangement isn't asking for trouble.
The trip under the river is dull, except that you can pinpoint the exact moment the train resumes its upward course, and then downtown Manhattan is a maze of twists and you realize that two stations are no more than fifty yards from one another as the train travels, and then at last you are on the straightaway up Seventh Avenue, and the driver has a clear field and green light after green lights, now you are truly an express, racing past the folorn glowing islands of the local platforms until coming toward you like something that can be honestly called a destination, there it is, and now it's time to get off, wake up, wake up, wake up.
Another simple, fine thing gone. Good luck and thanks to the Eds.; they hung on longer than one might have expected. (Bad tidings provided by MeFi; where, in compensation, it has been noted that one can find some of the same folks making some of the same connections here.)
I am far too tired to post anything coherent, thoughtful, or complete about the impending Guaranteed Bad Experience of a GWB speech tomorrow night, and the fulfillment of the aura of inevitability that has surrounded this whole pre-campaign campaign.
So, I will only mention that the rhetorical blur between Bin Laden and Hussein is becoming quite pronounced. Moreover, the president seems willing enough to act unilaterally to get in there to git him before he gits us: "We must not ignore reality. We must do everything we can to disarm this man before he hurts one single American."
But when the discussion shifts to what happens after we nab that rascal, why, then we're just part of big ol' Team World: "[S]hould force be required to bring Saddam to account, the United States will work with other nations to help the Iraqi people rebuild and form a just government."
Ah, yes. Distributing righteous justice far and wide? That's what America does best. Keeping the peace? -- sounds like a U.N. problem to me!
But you know all this. It's more words down the wind. Dammit.
Those who have been following my trials and tribulations here know that I recently went through first a crash of this weblog and then a crash of my home machine.
Things are better now, in large part due to the brains and goodwill of a few kind souls who occasionally glance in this direction: specifically Rory, Rob, and in particular Mr. Hackly Fracture. The Wombat is positively bursting with gratitude for your kind and detailed responses to my endless stream of woeful technology news, and your patience with my pre-K level of digital savvy.
So, things are on the mend. However.
The new installation of Windows XP not wishing to run Outlook in any way, shape or form, we're in a bit of an e-mail quandary -- to wit, we've had to change email programs, which is working just fine, but can't import (because of the same problem) any of our old messages/address.
So, if you are reading this, and would be so kind, email the Wombat a brief note, that I may drop you into a new address book.
Your attention to this matter is greatly appreciated. Really.
The quiz resumes.
In 1902, a Scots physician, James McKenzie, was engaged in a line of medical research which led to his consultation with a local watchmaker to help perfect a device to further his studies. Although he published a book with the results which had strictly medical applications, the machine which he and the watchmaker developed became the basis for a gadget which has a function quite different than McKenzie's researches envisioned.
What is the device that McKenzie can (inadvertently) be credited with inventing?
CAUTION: do not take the quiz when operating Google or any other search engine. Posting your answer to comments below may cause you to win a copy of Margaret Cheney's recent biography of Tesla. Side effects include headache, drowsiness, perplexity, frustration, and repetetive stress injury from clicking "refresh."
With bare-bones template and ghostly archives, the File returns to you, friends. Glory in the comments, for again they are your playground. Frolic and cavort within.
In a peculiar twist of fate, it was this morning that my computer at home -- or, more accurately, its scotch-tape-and-string excuse for an operating system -- had a Massive Freakout which entails much, much greater problems than an inoperable blog. And yet, though I must now go home and attempt, as Mr. Hackly Fracture has dubbed it, "an upgrade to health."
And yet I find myself so cheered by the wan visage of my Wombat, pale and thin, rooting around again and hungry for posts and comments, that I can face this little problem cheerily.
**scratches imaginary wombat behind ears**
If this be satire, 'tis a weak one. If it's not...no, no, it must be...
It's not ready yet. Look for it later today or early tomorrow. The Wombat may look a little undernourished for a time, but, as with Steve Austin, we will build him better than before. Comments and all.
We appreciate your kind indulgence.
