I finally got around to watching Zootopia this past weekend. I enjoyed it, but I wasn't overly enthusiastic about it when the credits started rolling. But it's stuck with me, and I've been thinking about it a lot in the past few days, so I figured I'd jot down a few thoughts:
Thought 1: Zootopia has a remarkably tight plot
This didn't jump out at me as I was watching it or even right after it was over, but the more I think about it, the more I realize--man this is a quality flick!
For example, the scene where Judy's chasing that weasel: as I was watching it, I thought, "Well, here it is--that old classic scene where the underdog protagonist tries to make a hero of themselves and ends up making a huge mess of things and getting in trouble. Ten bucks says the next scene has her landed in the chief's office getting put on some kind of probation."
And I was right--to a point. The scene played out as expected, and the next scene was indeed inside the chief's office for the very reason I had predicted. And yet it was different, too. When it looked like the little rodential apartment buildings were going to topple like dominoes, Judy righted them. In the end, she actually handled things quite well and didn't make much of a mess at all. She even made a friend with a little vole by complimenting her hair--and that ends up being really important later on.
"Huh," I thought. "Kinda clever that the vole showed up again later."
But that wasn't the end of it--not by a long shot. In the third act, when Judy finally solves the mystery, that weasel turns out to be the key. In the end, that scene played an entirely different (and surprisingly crucial) role in the total plot structure.
And that seems to be how the whole movie works. I've only seen it once, so I can't say for sure, but I think pretty much everything that happens early on comes up again recently. In fact, a sound bite uttered in the very first scene is, I think, repeated exactly in the climax. And the twist that happens in the climax--totally built up to, but still completely fooled me. Very impressive.
Thought 2: Zootopia has a lot to say about race
I haven't checked, but I assume other people on the internet have discussed this. It was, in some places, extremely overt. And yet, here again, the more I thought about it, the more layers I found.
You can't just say, "The predators represent Black people." They do for sure at the end of the movie, but remember that Judy only became a cop through an affirmative action program. So Judy is also Black, or at least a minority of some kind. And then she ends up perpetuating racism against the predators.
I think rather than interpreting bunnies or predators or any other group of animals as representing particular minorities, I think it's best to accept the movie as a separate world that is dealing with similar issues. When you do that, it'll give you a lot more to think about regarding our own world.
Final Thought: That world is pretty stinkin' cool
The detail that really sticks out to me is the sprinklers in the Rain Forest District during Judy's initial train ride into Zootopia. I'm a bit sad we didn't get to see all 14 districts, but we should appreciate the writers' restraint in this regard. Still, if this was the 90s, I'd be totally stoked to watch the spinoff TV show that inevitably would have explored all 14 districts.
All in all, a solid flick. Don't know that I'll get around to revisiting it myself, but I'd say it's well worth multiple watchings.
26 July 2016
05 May 2016
In defense of passive voice
Okay, I get it--passive voice tends to make things wordy and convoluted. We all hold our breath when our boss says "a decision was made" because it means the decision was made anonymously, which doesn't bode well. Fine. But passive constructions can help out stylistically in many cases, and sometimes they even help simplify your prose.
Don't believe me? Well, let's take my previous paragraph as an unwitting example: "...because it means the decision was made anonymously." Any volunteers wanna find a non-awkward way to scrub that passive construction out of the sentence?
(There isn't a way to revise what's there and get an active construction; you'll have to start entirely from scratch and say something like "...because it mean whoever made the decision is going to remain anonymous"--not terrible, I guess, but not exactly what I was saying before, either.)
But passive voice isn't only for when the subject is unknown. I love passive voice because it gives me a lot of power over the flow of information. Check it out:
Okay, yes--the active version is shorter and more direct. That should definitely be your default setting. But consider this context:
Another case where passive voice is handy is when you want to really emphasize the subject. That seems counterintuitive because the subject is often omitted in the passive, but there's this thing called end weight that give the most oomph to the thing that comes last.
(There's another unwitting example: "...the subject is often omitted in the passive...." I suppose I could have said, "The passive often omits the passive," but, again, look at the flow of information: case-->subject, subject-->passive.)
This technique is used a lot in humor, as in, "I can't believe it--I'm getting beat by a rug!" For more examples, just Google this phase (and include the quotation marks): "by a freaking"
The point is, the passive voice does have a place. Yes, it's often used unnecessarily, unwisely, and unwell. Yes, checking your prose for passive constructions will reveal many places you can tighten things up. But that doesn't mean passives don't have their place. As with most grammar and style advice, the real rule isn't "Thou shalt not" but "Stop and think."
Don't believe me? Well, let's take my previous paragraph as an unwitting example: "...because it means the decision was made anonymously." Any volunteers wanna find a non-awkward way to scrub that passive construction out of the sentence?
(There isn't a way to revise what's there and get an active construction; you'll have to start entirely from scratch and say something like "...because it mean whoever made the decision is going to remain anonymous"--not terrible, I guess, but not exactly what I was saying before, either.)
But passive voice isn't only for when the subject is unknown. I love passive voice because it gives me a lot of power over the flow of information. Check it out:
Active: Usain Bolt broke the world record.
Passive: The world record was broken by Usain Bolt.
(Source)
Okay, yes--the active version is shorter and more direct. That should definitely be your default setting. But consider this context:
After getting a bronze medal in Osaka, Asafa Powell swore he would break the world record for the 100-meter dash. And he did: in September 2007, he set a new world record of 9.74 seconds. Nine months later, that record was broken by Usain Bolt.This is nice because, stylistically, it's generally best to give old information before new information. In this paragraph, our focus shifts from Asafa Powell to the world record and then from the world record to Usain Bolt. The passive construction helps with this flow.
Another case where passive voice is handy is when you want to really emphasize the subject. That seems counterintuitive because the subject is often omitted in the passive, but there's this thing called end weight that give the most oomph to the thing that comes last.
(There's another unwitting example: "...the subject is often omitted in the passive...." I suppose I could have said, "The passive often omits the passive," but, again, look at the flow of information: case-->subject, subject-->passive.)
This technique is used a lot in humor, as in, "I can't believe it--I'm getting beat by a rug!" For more examples, just Google this phase (and include the quotation marks): "by a freaking"
The point is, the passive voice does have a place. Yes, it's often used unnecessarily, unwisely, and unwell. Yes, checking your prose for passive constructions will reveal many places you can tighten things up. But that doesn't mean passives don't have their place. As with most grammar and style advice, the real rule isn't "Thou shalt not" but "Stop and think."
28 June 2015
Regarding the Supreme Court's Ruling on Marriage
I should admit up front that I've been a bit of a flip-flopper on the topic of same-sex marriage. For most of my life, I was unthinkingly opposed to it because, as a straight man, it's hard for me to understand same-sex attraction. But then I got married, and I got to enjoy marital bliss, and I began to consider what a miserable place the world would be if the laws of my country had barred me from that bliss. But my internal pendulum has been swinging back the other way, and now, as my fellow Americans rejoice over a hard-won victory, I realize I have no idea what they were fighting for.
Anyone want to enlighten me?
Here's where I have trouble:
1) I got married for religious reasons in a religious building by a religious leader. The only reason I bothered with a state marriage license was because... well, actually I don't know why. I got married the way I did because I wanted God to recognize my marriage; I really didn't care about the government. Honestly, I doubt I would've bothered getting married if I hadn't had religious reasons for doing so. I can't wrap my head around the interest people have in getting the government to recognize their marriages. "Love has won" is the thing everyone keeps saying, but as far as I know there was never a law against loving somebody. Being in love with somebody--that's something I understand. And committing to spend your whole life with them--that's something I'm happy every day that I've done. But if you love somebody, and you swear lifelong devotion to them and they to you--what's it matter if the government recognizes it or not?
2) In answer to #1, I imagine a lot of people will point to all the reasons I should be happy the government recognizes my marriage. I've heard some of these, but I'm not persuaded by them. When I was first married and my ponderings on the greatness of marriage made me think that maybe I should be in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage, I was laboring under the misconception that marriage was a Big Important Thing in the eyes of the law. Turns out it isn't, really. Several months back, my wife and I went to a community-sponsored informational event about the legal aspects of marriage, and we came away feeling pretty somber. I don't know how state laws vary, but here in Massachusetts, if I get hit by a bus today and wind up in the hospital, my wife will have no legal right to make medical decisions on my behalf. Sure, she's my wife, but I haven't gotten around to officially designating her as my medical proxy, so she has no legal basis for advising my doctors. Similarly, if the bus hits both of us and we die, our son doesn't automatically inherit our stuff because we haven't gotten around to writing a will. (He will inherit my student loans, though, per their terms and conditions.) Basically what we learned that night was this: outside of tax laws, marriage doesn't have a lot of legal oomph. I did see a headline recently stating that same-sex couples can expect to collect a lot more social security benefits now, but I just assume everyone in my generation will get the same amount of social security when it comes time for us to retire: $0.00. As for the benefits I receive through my work, it isn't really much harder to get coverage for a domestic partner than a spouse (I actually accidentally signed my wife up as a domestic partner rather than a spouse, and I corrected it, even though I don't think there was a difference in coverage)--but that's a matter of company policy and not a legal matter, I think, though I'm sure the two interplay. I'm not saying marriage is legally worthless; I'm just saying I'm not sure it's worth all the fighting that we've seen.
Well, I've got places I need to be going to, so I'll leave it here. But if anyone can show me something worth celebrating, I do enjoy rejoicing.
Anyone want to enlighten me?
Here's where I have trouble:
1) I got married for religious reasons in a religious building by a religious leader. The only reason I bothered with a state marriage license was because... well, actually I don't know why. I got married the way I did because I wanted God to recognize my marriage; I really didn't care about the government. Honestly, I doubt I would've bothered getting married if I hadn't had religious reasons for doing so. I can't wrap my head around the interest people have in getting the government to recognize their marriages. "Love has won" is the thing everyone keeps saying, but as far as I know there was never a law against loving somebody. Being in love with somebody--that's something I understand. And committing to spend your whole life with them--that's something I'm happy every day that I've done. But if you love somebody, and you swear lifelong devotion to them and they to you--what's it matter if the government recognizes it or not?
2) In answer to #1, I imagine a lot of people will point to all the reasons I should be happy the government recognizes my marriage. I've heard some of these, but I'm not persuaded by them. When I was first married and my ponderings on the greatness of marriage made me think that maybe I should be in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage, I was laboring under the misconception that marriage was a Big Important Thing in the eyes of the law. Turns out it isn't, really. Several months back, my wife and I went to a community-sponsored informational event about the legal aspects of marriage, and we came away feeling pretty somber. I don't know how state laws vary, but here in Massachusetts, if I get hit by a bus today and wind up in the hospital, my wife will have no legal right to make medical decisions on my behalf. Sure, she's my wife, but I haven't gotten around to officially designating her as my medical proxy, so she has no legal basis for advising my doctors. Similarly, if the bus hits both of us and we die, our son doesn't automatically inherit our stuff because we haven't gotten around to writing a will. (He will inherit my student loans, though, per their terms and conditions.) Basically what we learned that night was this: outside of tax laws, marriage doesn't have a lot of legal oomph. I did see a headline recently stating that same-sex couples can expect to collect a lot more social security benefits now, but I just assume everyone in my generation will get the same amount of social security when it comes time for us to retire: $0.00. As for the benefits I receive through my work, it isn't really much harder to get coverage for a domestic partner than a spouse (I actually accidentally signed my wife up as a domestic partner rather than a spouse, and I corrected it, even though I don't think there was a difference in coverage)--but that's a matter of company policy and not a legal matter, I think, though I'm sure the two interplay. I'm not saying marriage is legally worthless; I'm just saying I'm not sure it's worth all the fighting that we've seen.
Well, I've got places I need to be going to, so I'll leave it here. But if anyone can show me something worth celebrating, I do enjoy rejoicing.
12 August 2014
Why comedians commit suicide
I understand it suddenly, in a flash. It's amazing what happens when you stop to be confused for a moment. You struggle, and then the answer comes. I guess I never really stopped to wonder why so many entertainers kill themselves. The trend is so well known as to practically be a stereotype about stand-up comedians, and it's distressed and saddened me, but on some level it just made intuitive sense to me. Some of the happiest, friendliest, funniest people I know have been silently depressed out of their minds. I've been there myself, though thankfully not in the last few years. I figured it was just one of those things.
But today the funniest man in the world died, and I was amazed how hard the it hit me. I saw the headline and skimmed through the article thinking, "Please don't be suicide. Please don't be suicide," but it was. The man who made a career being zany and yet nailed so many inspiring dramatic roles was apparently dead by his own hands, and I sent my wife a text to tell her the news.
"That's so sad," she texted back. "Don't become a professional comedian."
And that's when a deep and pressing need to know why settled into my heart. I looked at my personal and vicarious experiences with depression and my meager dabbling in the world of amateur stand-up and knew that the answer had to be there. It took most the day, but as I walked home from my bus stop, I found the answer in the sight of a stranger staring Robin Williams's face on the front page of The Globe.
When you're a celebrity, there are no strangers--except for everybody. The whole worlds is still full of strangers as far as you can see, but they all think they know you, they all look at you as though you have a shared inside joke, like you're close and lifelong friends. You can never meet someone new and start from scratch. They all want to say, "Hey, remember that one time" as though they were there. They all want to be the one that you remember, the one that next time you're on stage you'll mention, even if it's just a passing or even disparaging reference. You can't make any new friends, at least not in the usual way because conversations no longer start with "Tell me a little about yourself" but now all begin with "This is what I love about you." And how are you supposed to live like that? You're walking down the road, you're Robin Williams, a man with a wife and a couple of kids, but nobody can see you. Instead, they all see Patch Adams or Peter Branning or Sean Maguire or Mork or Genie. Every human knows to some degree the loneliness of walking down the road without being seen, but most of us experience it by being completely ignored. I can't imagine what it's like to walk down the road and still not be seen and yet have to endure an onslaught of strangers trying to speak to their favorite fictional characters. I can only imagine I'd want to kill Patch and Peter and Sean and Mork and Genie all at once, but in the end, I, too, could only kill myself.
Rest in peace, Mr. Williams. I'll miss you more than I deserve to, but you won't miss me at all. I just hope that in heaven you get to know what it's like to be known or unknown, whichever you prefer, and I hope that those who have a right to miss you will find comfort in having known you at all.
But today the funniest man in the world died, and I was amazed how hard the it hit me. I saw the headline and skimmed through the article thinking, "Please don't be suicide. Please don't be suicide," but it was. The man who made a career being zany and yet nailed so many inspiring dramatic roles was apparently dead by his own hands, and I sent my wife a text to tell her the news.
"That's so sad," she texted back. "Don't become a professional comedian."
And that's when a deep and pressing need to know why settled into my heart. I looked at my personal and vicarious experiences with depression and my meager dabbling in the world of amateur stand-up and knew that the answer had to be there. It took most the day, but as I walked home from my bus stop, I found the answer in the sight of a stranger staring Robin Williams's face on the front page of The Globe.
When you're a celebrity, there are no strangers--except for everybody. The whole worlds is still full of strangers as far as you can see, but they all think they know you, they all look at you as though you have a shared inside joke, like you're close and lifelong friends. You can never meet someone new and start from scratch. They all want to say, "Hey, remember that one time" as though they were there. They all want to be the one that you remember, the one that next time you're on stage you'll mention, even if it's just a passing or even disparaging reference. You can't make any new friends, at least not in the usual way because conversations no longer start with "Tell me a little about yourself" but now all begin with "This is what I love about you." And how are you supposed to live like that? You're walking down the road, you're Robin Williams, a man with a wife and a couple of kids, but nobody can see you. Instead, they all see Patch Adams or Peter Branning or Sean Maguire or Mork or Genie. Every human knows to some degree the loneliness of walking down the road without being seen, but most of us experience it by being completely ignored. I can't imagine what it's like to walk down the road and still not be seen and yet have to endure an onslaught of strangers trying to speak to their favorite fictional characters. I can only imagine I'd want to kill Patch and Peter and Sean and Mork and Genie all at once, but in the end, I, too, could only kill myself.
Rest in peace, Mr. Williams. I'll miss you more than I deserve to, but you won't miss me at all. I just hope that in heaven you get to know what it's like to be known or unknown, whichever you prefer, and I hope that those who have a right to miss you will find comfort in having known you at all.
22 July 2014
Real-World Fiction
I'd called off blogging. I'm too much a fan of revision. But this is coming to you off the cuff, unproofread, and public, because these thoughts belong here on The Sage.
This blog at various times years ago produced multitudinous posts that railed against fiction. I had at the time read very little (I have now read little more), but the thoughts were not entirely unfounded, even if I didn't have a good reason for the at the time. I mostly just enjoyed kicking up dust, but now I intend to say something more substantial.
When I graduated from college, I intended to do a lot of pleasure reading, but I had no idea where to begin. I asked around for recommendations and was shocked how few came. I began proclaiming very loudly that I had ample time for reading and nothing to fill it with, so a helpful friend lent me a copy of his favorite book: The Name of the Wind.
There is no genre of fiction I lambasted more than fantasy, and I had no interest in reading any upon graduating--particularly not something so big as the book offered me, especially since it was book one of a series (a trilogy, I think, though I'm not entirely too sure and too hurried to verify). But I am a man of my word, and I really did want to read something, so I gave it a good faith effort.
It was a long and mostly painful experience. My friend once asked me how I was doing, so I confessed that I wasn't enjoying it all that much, but he encouraged me, ensuring me that, though it started slow, it would get better. Under these circumstances, I did eventually make it all the way through it.
It would be wrong for me to say that I did not enjoy it at times. The author has an enjoyable voice, which I have always and still consider the most crucial part of any book, fiction or not, and I jotted down my favorite sentences in a notebook, which I enjoy glancing through occasionally. But I had a revelation as I read that book, and I discovered the reason why it is that I can be so confident that I will never really enjoy fantasy.
It has to do with the way my brain operates, though I can't be sure if this is conditioning or personality (if those things are significantly different). I am a curious person; I like to learn things, especially when a modest amount of investigation is necessary. I get great satisfaction about deepening my knowledge of specifics. Broad knowledge doesn't really appeal to me as much. Oh, I'm a dabbler, no doubt, but I like to dabble deeply.
This was hit home to me as I read The Name of the Wind. The narrator would passingly reference some historical figure or event, and my immediate inclination was always to set the book down and see if I could learn more about these people and happenings on Wikipedia. It was an impulse I had to learn to resist. This was high fantasy and had no overt ties to the real world. These people and events had no bearing on reality, and more information would only be available if the author indulged himself in writing it himself or if fan forums did it for him. Neither appeal to me.
And that's the problem with fantasy. Novelists pride themselves on "world building," and the best of them do this very well, but I love Earth and its attending universe. The world we live in is so marvelous and weird and beautiful and dreadful that I can't on any level understand why anyone wants to escape it. I want fiction that is grounded in reality. Everything else is, quite frankly, worthless.
Like that Oz movie that came out a year or two ago with what's-his-face Franco in the titular role--it was lousy for a whole host of reasons, but offensive for only one: it seemed to assume that CG landscapes are more magical and bizarre than what dear Mother Earth can provide. I can't countenance such thinking! I consider myself made from the dust of this earth--there is no particle in me that came very recently from any other place--and earth and its inhabitants define beauty in my mind. Anything that is not a part of typical earthling experience is undesirable to me.
(As an aside, if people wish to colonize e.g. Mars IRL, let them go--Earth will be happy to rid itself of any who are unhappy here. Leave me here with the snakes and spiders and fatal diseases--I do not love them, but they are my brothers. I prefer them to the heretics who think that they'll find a better home elsewhere. Let them find a rainbow anywhere else in the solar system, if they can.)
Anyway, I'm off topic. The point is, I can't enjoy fantasy--even setting aside my beyond-hippie love for the planet I was born on, I hate being teased with passing references to people, places, and events that have no ties to reality as I comprehend it. I feel like the founding principle of the modern fantasy genre is to actively divorce itself from all such things, so I am clearly not its target audience. I do not hate so much as pity the people who enjoy such pastimes.
Enough of piety. That's all background to what I have to say next:
I'm currently reading Stranger in a Strange Land. It's hard for me to say how I feel about the book as a whole--there's a lot of it I don't "grok," I suppose--but I will say emphatically that I love Jubal Harshaw. He is, I think, my favorite character in all of fiction. Every sentence he says is so well wrought, whether it's scathing or humorous or insightful or whatever--I love Jubal Harshaw. The book was exciting, I suppose, before he showed up, but the chapters in which he's played a prominent role have been delightful. In the latter half of the book, we're off on adventures with the actual protagonist (Valentine Michael Smith, the man from Mars), and we don't see Jubal for long passages. My interest waned as my suspicions that we would not return to Jubal grew, but return we did, and that's the best part:
Jubal obtains a collection of statues--replicas of famous sculptures--that another character (Ben) calls them vulgar, which causes Jubal to launch into what I considered a very moving defense of a few of his favorites. Allow me to quote at length:
The great thing is, not only can Ben admire the sculpture with new eyes, but you and I can, too--because it's real. Not only was Rodin a real artist (he did the ever famous "The Thinker"), but La Belle Heaulmiere is a real work, and here she is:
Ben then asks about another piece in Jubal's collection:
And we can. Come, readers; salute her and all she represents:
It goes on, but I will not. The point is, in reading fiction, I got a lesson about real works of art in the real world--my world. It makes me regret having lumped sci-fi in the same category as fantasy in the past. While they are both speculative, sci-fi sometimes speculates about the world I live in, which is the only world I care about. A tangent of this length would be reprehensibly indulgent in a fantasy novel, but in science fiction, it's educational--at least in this instance. I happily embrace any such tangent. I remember liking Hugh Laurie's novel (The Gun Seller, I think it was called?) because it had many edifying tangents in it. Since any time I read a work of fiction, I'm really just taking a tangent from my own life, I appreciate it tangenting back into reality as often as it can.
I don't know how widely I'd recommend Stranger in a Strange Land, since the plot has gone in directions I find rather uninspiring, but I do recommend Jubal Harshaw. My understanding is that he appears in other Heinlein novels as well. If he's just as good in those (which I can't vouch for, since I haven't read them), they may in fact be better books than this one. Regardless, if there was a a collection of Harshawisms published together under one cover, I would relish every word of it.
This blog at various times years ago produced multitudinous posts that railed against fiction. I had at the time read very little (I have now read little more), but the thoughts were not entirely unfounded, even if I didn't have a good reason for the at the time. I mostly just enjoyed kicking up dust, but now I intend to say something more substantial.
When I graduated from college, I intended to do a lot of pleasure reading, but I had no idea where to begin. I asked around for recommendations and was shocked how few came. I began proclaiming very loudly that I had ample time for reading and nothing to fill it with, so a helpful friend lent me a copy of his favorite book: The Name of the Wind.
There is no genre of fiction I lambasted more than fantasy, and I had no interest in reading any upon graduating--particularly not something so big as the book offered me, especially since it was book one of a series (a trilogy, I think, though I'm not entirely too sure and too hurried to verify). But I am a man of my word, and I really did want to read something, so I gave it a good faith effort.
It was a long and mostly painful experience. My friend once asked me how I was doing, so I confessed that I wasn't enjoying it all that much, but he encouraged me, ensuring me that, though it started slow, it would get better. Under these circumstances, I did eventually make it all the way through it.
It would be wrong for me to say that I did not enjoy it at times. The author has an enjoyable voice, which I have always and still consider the most crucial part of any book, fiction or not, and I jotted down my favorite sentences in a notebook, which I enjoy glancing through occasionally. But I had a revelation as I read that book, and I discovered the reason why it is that I can be so confident that I will never really enjoy fantasy.
It has to do with the way my brain operates, though I can't be sure if this is conditioning or personality (if those things are significantly different). I am a curious person; I like to learn things, especially when a modest amount of investigation is necessary. I get great satisfaction about deepening my knowledge of specifics. Broad knowledge doesn't really appeal to me as much. Oh, I'm a dabbler, no doubt, but I like to dabble deeply.
This was hit home to me as I read The Name of the Wind. The narrator would passingly reference some historical figure or event, and my immediate inclination was always to set the book down and see if I could learn more about these people and happenings on Wikipedia. It was an impulse I had to learn to resist. This was high fantasy and had no overt ties to the real world. These people and events had no bearing on reality, and more information would only be available if the author indulged himself in writing it himself or if fan forums did it for him. Neither appeal to me.
And that's the problem with fantasy. Novelists pride themselves on "world building," and the best of them do this very well, but I love Earth and its attending universe. The world we live in is so marvelous and weird and beautiful and dreadful that I can't on any level understand why anyone wants to escape it. I want fiction that is grounded in reality. Everything else is, quite frankly, worthless.
Like that Oz movie that came out a year or two ago with what's-his-face Franco in the titular role--it was lousy for a whole host of reasons, but offensive for only one: it seemed to assume that CG landscapes are more magical and bizarre than what dear Mother Earth can provide. I can't countenance such thinking! I consider myself made from the dust of this earth--there is no particle in me that came very recently from any other place--and earth and its inhabitants define beauty in my mind. Anything that is not a part of typical earthling experience is undesirable to me.
(As an aside, if people wish to colonize e.g. Mars IRL, let them go--Earth will be happy to rid itself of any who are unhappy here. Leave me here with the snakes and spiders and fatal diseases--I do not love them, but they are my brothers. I prefer them to the heretics who think that they'll find a better home elsewhere. Let them find a rainbow anywhere else in the solar system, if they can.)
Anyway, I'm off topic. The point is, I can't enjoy fantasy--even setting aside my beyond-hippie love for the planet I was born on, I hate being teased with passing references to people, places, and events that have no ties to reality as I comprehend it. I feel like the founding principle of the modern fantasy genre is to actively divorce itself from all such things, so I am clearly not its target audience. I do not hate so much as pity the people who enjoy such pastimes.
Enough of piety. That's all background to what I have to say next:
I'm currently reading Stranger in a Strange Land. It's hard for me to say how I feel about the book as a whole--there's a lot of it I don't "grok," I suppose--but I will say emphatically that I love Jubal Harshaw. He is, I think, my favorite character in all of fiction. Every sentence he says is so well wrought, whether it's scathing or humorous or insightful or whatever--I love Jubal Harshaw. The book was exciting, I suppose, before he showed up, but the chapters in which he's played a prominent role have been delightful. In the latter half of the book, we're off on adventures with the actual protagonist (Valentine Michael Smith, the man from Mars), and we don't see Jubal for long passages. My interest waned as my suspicions that we would not return to Jubal grew, but return we did, and that's the best part:
Jubal obtains a collection of statues--replicas of famous sculptures--that another character (Ben) calls them vulgar, which causes Jubal to launch into what I considered a very moving defense of a few of his favorites. Allow me to quote at length:
"Well, that hideous thing I've seen before...but when did you acquire the rest of this ballast?"
Jubal ignored him and spoke quietly to the replica of La Belle Heaulmiere. "Do not listen to him, ma petite chere--he is a barbarian and knows no better." He put his hand to her beautiful ravaged cheek, then gently touched one empty, shrunken dug. "I know just how you feel...but it can't be very much longer. Patience, my lovely."
He turned back to [Ben] and said briskly, "Ben, I don't know what you have on your mind but it will have to wait while I give you a lesson in how to look at sculpture--though it's probably as useless as trying to teach a dog to appreciate the violin. But you've just been rude to a lady...and I don't tolerate that."
[...]
"You know I wouldn't be rude to the old woman who posed for that. Never. What I can't understand is a so-called artist having the gall to pose somebody's great grandmother in her skin...and you having the bad taste to want it around."
[...]
"All right, Ben. Attend me. Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist--a master--and that is what Auguste Rodin was--can look at an old woman, protray her exactly as she is...and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be...and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart...no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn't matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired--but it does to them. Look at her!"
The great thing is, not only can Ben admire the sculpture with new eyes, but you and I can, too--because it's real. Not only was Rodin a real artist (he did the ever famous "The Thinker"), but La Belle Heaulmiere is a real work, and here she is:
Ben then asks about another piece in Jubal's collection:
"How about this one? It doesn't bother me as much...I can see it's a young girl right off. But why tie her up like a pretzel?"
Jubal looked at the replica "Caryatid Who has Fallen under the Weight of her Stone" and smiled. "Call it a tour de force in empathy, Ben. I won't expect you to appreciate the shapes and masses which make that figure much more than a 'pretzel'--but you can appreciate what Rodin was saying. Ben, what do people get out of looking at a crucifix?"
"You know how much I go to church."
"'How little' you mean. Still, you must know that, as craftsmanship, paintings and sculpture of the Crucifixion are usually atrocious--and the painted, realistic ones often used in churches are the worst of all...the blood looks like catsup and that ex-carpenter is usually protrayed as if he were a pansy...which He certainly was not if there is any truth in the four Gospels at all. He was a hearty man, probably muscular and of rugged health. But despite the almost uniformly poor portrayal in representations of the Crucifixion, a poor one is about as effective as a good one for most people. They don't see the defects; what they see is a symbol which inspires their deepest emotions; it recalls to them the Agony and Sacrifice of God."
"Jubal, I thought you weren't a Christian?"
"What's that got to do with it? Does that make me blind and deaf to fundamental human emotion? I was saying that the crummiest painted plaster crucifix or the cheapest cardboard Christmas Creche can be sufficient symbol to evoke emotions in the human heart so strong that many have died for them and many more live for them. So the craftsmanship and artistic judgment with which such a symbol is wrought are largely irrelevant. Now here we have another emotional symbol--wrought with exquisite craftsmanship, but we won't go into that, yet. Ben, for almost three thousand years or longer, architects have designed buildings with columns shaped as female figures--it got to be such a habit that they did it as casually as a small boy steps on an ant. After all those centuries it took Rodin to see that this was work too heavy for a girl. But he didn't simply say, 'Look, you jerks, if you must design this way, make it a brawny male figure.' No, he showed it...and generalized the symbol. Here is this poor little caryatid who has tried--and failed, fallen under the load. She's a good girl--look at her face. Serious, unhappy at her failure, but not blaming anyone else, not even the gods...and still trying to shoulder her load, after she's crumpled under it.
"But she's more than good art denouncing some very bad art; she's a symbol for every woman who has ever tried to shoulder a load that was too heavy for her--over half the female population of this planet, living and dead, I would guess. But not alone women--this symbol is sexless. It means every man and every woman who ever lived who sweated out life in uncomplaining fortitude, whose courage wasn't even noticed until they crumpled under their loads. It's courage, Ben, and victory."
"'Victory?'"
"Victory in defeat, there is none higher. She didn't give up, Ben; she's still trying to lift that stone after it has crushed her. She's a father going down to a dull office job while cancer is painfully eating away his insides, so as to bring home one more pay check for the kids. She's a twelve-year-old girl trying to mother her baby brothers and sisters because Mama had to go to Heaven. She's a switchboard operator sticking to her job while smoke is choking her and the fire is cutting off her escape. She's all the unsung heroes who couldn't quite cut it but never quit. Come. Just salute as you pass her [...]."
And we can. Come, readers; salute her and all she represents:
It goes on, but I will not. The point is, in reading fiction, I got a lesson about real works of art in the real world--my world. It makes me regret having lumped sci-fi in the same category as fantasy in the past. While they are both speculative, sci-fi sometimes speculates about the world I live in, which is the only world I care about. A tangent of this length would be reprehensibly indulgent in a fantasy novel, but in science fiction, it's educational--at least in this instance. I happily embrace any such tangent. I remember liking Hugh Laurie's novel (The Gun Seller, I think it was called?) because it had many edifying tangents in it. Since any time I read a work of fiction, I'm really just taking a tangent from my own life, I appreciate it tangenting back into reality as often as it can.
I don't know how widely I'd recommend Stranger in a Strange Land, since the plot has gone in directions I find rather uninspiring, but I do recommend Jubal Harshaw. My understanding is that he appears in other Heinlein novels as well. If he's just as good in those (which I can't vouch for, since I haven't read them), they may in fact be better books than this one. Regardless, if there was a a collection of Harshawisms published together under one cover, I would relish every word of it.
03 April 2012
The Hollywood Pinboard
A few years ago, I saw Taken in a discount movie theater with my roommates and afterward postulated that there must be a bulletin board somewhere in Hollywood where action-flick writers post sticky notes with ideas--things like "Retired CIA field agent brought out of retirement when his daughter gets kidnapped" and "American tourist sold into foreign sex-slave trade" and "Person kills roomful of enemies and hides under bodies to shoot at enemy reinforcements when they arrive"--and when the board gets full, the producer pulls down all the sticky notes, arranges them in such a way as to make them vaguely interrelate, and then sends the conglomeration to his screenwriters to add manufactured dialog and flat characters, and then sends the script to a friendly cameraman with shaky hands. Bam--action flick.
I've decided recently that my hypothesis was unfair: Hollywood's Pinboard does not only apply to action movies, and it isn't a recent phenomenon.
I've decided I like Danny Kaye. He's an actor from the age of Hollywood musicals. I've often expressed the fact that I don't much care for musicals (except, of course, for the undislikable Singing in the Rain), but The Court Jester is excellent family-friendly fare; if you've never seen it, I recommend it highly as good, clean fun. It's also a good introduction to the sort of humor Danny Kaye excels at.
Because my wife and I like Danny Kaye, we'll occasionally pick up a movie he's in without knowing anything about it except that he's in it (when movie rentals are free at the local library, there's no real risk in random movie selection). Sometimes we do well (On The Double was a non-musical comedy that had some surprisingly hilarious moments despite its fairly straightforward comedy-of-errors formula), but sometimes we don't.
On The Riviera is a 1951 musical that stars Danny Kaye, and it made me realize just how accurate my beliefs about a Hollywood Pinboard must be. It functioned like a lot of other musicals (White Christmas, which Danny Kaye is also in, comes to mind) in that its protagonist has a career as a musical performer, so throwing unrelated dance numbers together becomes child's play, but this movie went one step farther:
There's a scene in which a party is going on, which the protagonist (Danny Kaye) was at but has left. Now, the protagonist has recently gotten a big break: a television studio wants to broadcast his stage show because his impersonations of a famous aviator (also Danny Kaye) have been making such a big splash. So he runs off to do his broadcast, and some people at the party gather around the TV to see his show. But instead of his impersonations, he does this number, which I imagine had been on a yellowing sticky note on the Hollywood Pinboard for years before someone finally said, "Okay, fine. Fine! We'll throw it in the next movie we do." This scene simultaneously demonstrates 1) why I don't like musicals and 2) why I do like Danny Kaye. It's complicated, I know. If you can sit through this video, you'll get to see Danny Kaye slaughter the pronunciation of various animals and plants, and it makes me giggle, but the song is grating and the scene had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the movie: it was never alluded to beforehand; it was never mentioned afterward. And I imagine it was really expensive, with all the harnesses etc. How was it deemed worth the time and money?
No wonder musicals don't exist anymore....
Anyway. I give you the final death throes of musical cinema:
I've decided recently that my hypothesis was unfair: Hollywood's Pinboard does not only apply to action movies, and it isn't a recent phenomenon.
I've decided I like Danny Kaye. He's an actor from the age of Hollywood musicals. I've often expressed the fact that I don't much care for musicals (except, of course, for the undislikable Singing in the Rain), but The Court Jester is excellent family-friendly fare; if you've never seen it, I recommend it highly as good, clean fun. It's also a good introduction to the sort of humor Danny Kaye excels at.
Because my wife and I like Danny Kaye, we'll occasionally pick up a movie he's in without knowing anything about it except that he's in it (when movie rentals are free at the local library, there's no real risk in random movie selection). Sometimes we do well (On The Double was a non-musical comedy that had some surprisingly hilarious moments despite its fairly straightforward comedy-of-errors formula), but sometimes we don't.
On The Riviera is a 1951 musical that stars Danny Kaye, and it made me realize just how accurate my beliefs about a Hollywood Pinboard must be. It functioned like a lot of other musicals (White Christmas, which Danny Kaye is also in, comes to mind) in that its protagonist has a career as a musical performer, so throwing unrelated dance numbers together becomes child's play, but this movie went one step farther:
There's a scene in which a party is going on, which the protagonist (Danny Kaye) was at but has left. Now, the protagonist has recently gotten a big break: a television studio wants to broadcast his stage show because his impersonations of a famous aviator (also Danny Kaye) have been making such a big splash. So he runs off to do his broadcast, and some people at the party gather around the TV to see his show. But instead of his impersonations, he does this number, which I imagine had been on a yellowing sticky note on the Hollywood Pinboard for years before someone finally said, "Okay, fine. Fine! We'll throw it in the next movie we do." This scene simultaneously demonstrates 1) why I don't like musicals and 2) why I do like Danny Kaye. It's complicated, I know. If you can sit through this video, you'll get to see Danny Kaye slaughter the pronunciation of various animals and plants, and it makes me giggle, but the song is grating and the scene had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the movie: it was never alluded to beforehand; it was never mentioned afterward. And I imagine it was really expensive, with all the harnesses etc. How was it deemed worth the time and money?
No wonder musicals don't exist anymore....
Anyway. I give you the final death throes of musical cinema:
18 March 2012
Lancelot's Mistake
I've been reading T. H. White's The Once and Future King lately. I think Arthurian legend is worth knowing, and I thought this would be a good primer. It was actually written and published as four separate books, which were then abridged and modified and combined into The Once and Future King.
The third book is called The Ill-Made Knight and is all about Sir Lancelot's illicit relations with Queen Guenevere. I expected not to like it very much, but I actually enjoyed it more than I can say. Lancelot is the protagonist of the book, and he's a beautifully conflicted character that I connected with in a few different ways, but there's something about him that I've been reflecting on this Sunday afternoon that I think is worth sharing.
Here's a summary of the story of Lancelot for those of you who are unfamiliar. If you know it, feel free to skip down to the asterisks.
Lancelot's childhood obsession was to become a knight of the round table, and while most kids are out fooling around and playing games, he dedicated himself entirely to becoming the best knight in the world. By the time he became an adult, he was an unconquerable warrior because he had done nothing but work on becoming the best. He idolized Arthur, and he went off to Camelot and became a knight of the round table, and he and Arthur became best friends.
Guenevere and Arthur were already married when Lancelot joined the table, but their marriage had been more political than anything, I think. Guenevere and Lancelot fell in love at first sight, but Lancelot was a pious knight and fiercely loyal to Arthur and refused to do anything sinful, so nothing bad happened--for a while. He decided that his burning love for Guenevere was wrong, so he went out questing and was gone for a couple years, but he found himself unable to stop thinking about Guenevere.
One castle Lancelot came to during his journeys contained a young woman who was confined by witchcraft to a boiling bath. The curse she was under could only be broken by the best knight in the world (why do witches always make provisions like this?). Lancelot was the best knight in the world, and his reputation had proceeded him, so when he came to this castle, the people begged him to help. He entered the steamy bathroom and was able to lift the damsel from her watery prison, which she had been trapped in for something like 4 years because she had been more beautiful than the local witch woman. So of course she fell desperately in love with her rescuer (she was only 18, so we can't fault her for that), but Lancelot was burning for Guenevere, so refused the girl's father's offer of marriage.
That night, the girl's butler decided to be crafty, and he got Lancelot drunk. Lancelot told the butler all about Guenevere, so the butler got him to drink a little more and then told him that Guenevere had come without the King and was in a private room and wanted Lancelot to come see her. The drunken knight stumbled into the dark room and made drunken love with the woman inside, believing she was Guenevere, but of course she was not. In the morning, when he woke up and found the girl he had rescued, he became very distraught and drama ensued, but he ultimately decided that, since his virginity was lost and his honor and virtue were destroyed, he had nothing left to lose, so he returned to Camelot and became Guenevere's not-so-secret lover, and set in motion the downfall of Arthur's kingdom.
***
I don't fault Lancelot for saving a damsel from a witch's power, and I don't blame him for refusing to marry one person when he was in love with another, and I don't think it's fair to say he was wrong in harboring feelings for Guenevere (at least, I wouldn't know how to tell him to smother them), and I don't think we can even point to liquor as being his failing (even though drunkenness was out of character for him and unbecoming of a knight). I'll even go so far as to say that having sex with Elaine was not his Big Mistake (though it was certainly wrong of him). No, Lancelot's Big Mistake was thinking all was lost. He woke up, realized that he had lost his virginity, and decided that he may as well give up trying.
I understand Lancelot. I know what it's like to think I've undone all my life's goodness and may as well give up. I think it's common for people who are trying their best to do what's right to feel that way. We make one mistake, and we convince ourselves that it's a slippery slope with no hope of return, and we damn ourselves by thinking we're already damned. But it isn't true. The whole point of the Atonement--its purpose, its upshot, its summom bonum, its raison d'être--is to save us from such a fate. If Jesus hadn't saved us, then that slippery slope would be real--one misstep, and you slide straight to hell--but a good Christian knight--particularly a Catholic one like Lance!--should understand the power of Confession and the reality of Absolution.
Now I am not a Catholic, but I do believe in the forgiveness of sins. I believe that the Son of Man has descended below all things and has created a way that all men might be saved. I believe that Satan is the sower of despair, and that fatalistic thoughts of abandon come from him, not God. Jesus Christ has already paid the price of our sins and is therefore passionately invested in seeing that we're saved--otherwise he bled at every pore and trembled because of pain for naught.
It occurs to me that the Lancelots of the world are those who reject salvation when they are standing closest to it. People who don't know God at all would not despair after one lascivious night: that despair only comes to those who have scrambled so desperately for heaven all their lives. If only they could see that they are so much closer to the mountain's top than to its bottom, perhaps they would not be so insistent upon tumbling down its side.
Forgive the mixed metaphor....
The third book is called The Ill-Made Knight and is all about Sir Lancelot's illicit relations with Queen Guenevere. I expected not to like it very much, but I actually enjoyed it more than I can say. Lancelot is the protagonist of the book, and he's a beautifully conflicted character that I connected with in a few different ways, but there's something about him that I've been reflecting on this Sunday afternoon that I think is worth sharing.
Here's a summary of the story of Lancelot for those of you who are unfamiliar. If you know it, feel free to skip down to the asterisks.
Lancelot's childhood obsession was to become a knight of the round table, and while most kids are out fooling around and playing games, he dedicated himself entirely to becoming the best knight in the world. By the time he became an adult, he was an unconquerable warrior because he had done nothing but work on becoming the best. He idolized Arthur, and he went off to Camelot and became a knight of the round table, and he and Arthur became best friends.
Guenevere and Arthur were already married when Lancelot joined the table, but their marriage had been more political than anything, I think. Guenevere and Lancelot fell in love at first sight, but Lancelot was a pious knight and fiercely loyal to Arthur and refused to do anything sinful, so nothing bad happened--for a while. He decided that his burning love for Guenevere was wrong, so he went out questing and was gone for a couple years, but he found himself unable to stop thinking about Guenevere.
One castle Lancelot came to during his journeys contained a young woman who was confined by witchcraft to a boiling bath. The curse she was under could only be broken by the best knight in the world (why do witches always make provisions like this?). Lancelot was the best knight in the world, and his reputation had proceeded him, so when he came to this castle, the people begged him to help. He entered the steamy bathroom and was able to lift the damsel from her watery prison, which she had been trapped in for something like 4 years because she had been more beautiful than the local witch woman. So of course she fell desperately in love with her rescuer (she was only 18, so we can't fault her for that), but Lancelot was burning for Guenevere, so refused the girl's father's offer of marriage.
That night, the girl's butler decided to be crafty, and he got Lancelot drunk. Lancelot told the butler all about Guenevere, so the butler got him to drink a little more and then told him that Guenevere had come without the King and was in a private room and wanted Lancelot to come see her. The drunken knight stumbled into the dark room and made drunken love with the woman inside, believing she was Guenevere, but of course she was not. In the morning, when he woke up and found the girl he had rescued, he became very distraught and drama ensued, but he ultimately decided that, since his virginity was lost and his honor and virtue were destroyed, he had nothing left to lose, so he returned to Camelot and became Guenevere's not-so-secret lover, and set in motion the downfall of Arthur's kingdom.
***
I don't fault Lancelot for saving a damsel from a witch's power, and I don't blame him for refusing to marry one person when he was in love with another, and I don't think it's fair to say he was wrong in harboring feelings for Guenevere (at least, I wouldn't know how to tell him to smother them), and I don't think we can even point to liquor as being his failing (even though drunkenness was out of character for him and unbecoming of a knight). I'll even go so far as to say that having sex with Elaine was not his Big Mistake (though it was certainly wrong of him). No, Lancelot's Big Mistake was thinking all was lost. He woke up, realized that he had lost his virginity, and decided that he may as well give up trying.
I understand Lancelot. I know what it's like to think I've undone all my life's goodness and may as well give up. I think it's common for people who are trying their best to do what's right to feel that way. We make one mistake, and we convince ourselves that it's a slippery slope with no hope of return, and we damn ourselves by thinking we're already damned. But it isn't true. The whole point of the Atonement--its purpose, its upshot, its summom bonum, its raison d'être--is to save us from such a fate. If Jesus hadn't saved us, then that slippery slope would be real--one misstep, and you slide straight to hell--but a good Christian knight--particularly a Catholic one like Lance!--should understand the power of Confession and the reality of Absolution.
Now I am not a Catholic, but I do believe in the forgiveness of sins. I believe that the Son of Man has descended below all things and has created a way that all men might be saved. I believe that Satan is the sower of despair, and that fatalistic thoughts of abandon come from him, not God. Jesus Christ has already paid the price of our sins and is therefore passionately invested in seeing that we're saved--otherwise he bled at every pore and trembled because of pain for naught.
It occurs to me that the Lancelots of the world are those who reject salvation when they are standing closest to it. People who don't know God at all would not despair after one lascivious night: that despair only comes to those who have scrambled so desperately for heaven all their lives. If only they could see that they are so much closer to the mountain's top than to its bottom, perhaps they would not be so insistent upon tumbling down its side.
Forgive the mixed metaphor....
15 March 2012
Arachnophilia?
I don't kill spiders. I may have mentioned it once or twice before, but I don't expect you to remember. One summer in my teens, I went to take a shower and found a spider in the tub. This was not uncommon in the summer, and I generally washed them down the drain, but for some reason that particular summer day, I decided to capture the spider in a jar and take it outside, and that became my standard procedure for such situations.
That was probably a decade ago, and now I've grown into a man who is nearly unable to kill crawling things. I am puzzled by the culture I live in, which instills in young minds the belief that killing bugs is not only acceptable but actually a sort of duty--unless the bugs in question are ladybugs or butterflies, in which case it's a crime. I don't harbor any ill feelings toward our pesticidal society, but I've often wondered why it is we go out of our way to crush the poor boneless ones.
Here's the irony: I'm a bit of an arachnophobe. I think spiders are ugly, creepy, icky things, and I feel revulsion when I see them. I understand why people kill the spiders they find in their houses because even a decade of pacifism hasn't removed from me the natural inclination toward destruction. But I can't do it. Once, early on in my marriage, I killed a rather large spider that had found its way into our apartment. I did it to show my wife I wasn't a ninny. After I did it, I was so beset by guilt that I wasn't quite myself the rest of the day. So I've never done it again. Now whenever I find a spider in our apartment, I catch it and take it outside. My wife has laughingly pointed out that I do this even when the ground outside is covered in frosty snow or puddling rain, which may well dictate a crueler death for the spider than a quick blow from a shoe, but I don't do this because I love spiders--I don't love spiders! If I loved them, I might let them live with me. But they're frightening little beasts, and I hate them, so I don't let them live with me. But I do let them live--or at least throw them out to the elements where they can suffer a natural death and turn into dirt. The odd-shaped cog of my mind that dictates my conscience says that's better than killing them outright.
I've tried to come up with justifications for my behavior (I don't want insanitary spider guts embedded in my carpet. Spiders eat flies, and flies are more proactively annoying than spiders are.), but why should I feel compelled to justify my desire not to kill? The truth is, I'm deeply embarrassed by the fact that I can't kill spiders--especially since I hate them. See, if I had an academic interest in those eight-legged fiends and could discourse on their invaluable contributions to the local ecology and was fascinated by their anatomy, then it would make sense that I would not want to kill them, and if anyone asked me why I didn't kill them, I would have a good reason. But I'm not that guy. I see spiders as nightmarish creatures, and I wonder why God didn't make them more cuddly because, really, a fly-eating pet would be pretty awesome. And so I'm embarrassed that I feel guilty when I kill them, but guilt trumps embarrassment, so I go on not killing them.
I feel like Kierkegaard would have had something to say about this, but I don't know what it would've been. Perhaps he would've examined the paradox of harboring a murderous hatred for something but feeling a moral necessity to preserve its life--he might have called the paradox Love. Who knows....
There's got to be something to say about the way I treat spiders and why I do, and I'm convinced there's a parable in here somewhere. At any rate, there's a moral to this story, and it isn't, "Ugliness isn't a capital offense." It's something more than that. Something about love and hatred being totally unrelated to tolerance. I can't quite seem to formulate it, so I'll leave that up to you.
That was probably a decade ago, and now I've grown into a man who is nearly unable to kill crawling things. I am puzzled by the culture I live in, which instills in young minds the belief that killing bugs is not only acceptable but actually a sort of duty--unless the bugs in question are ladybugs or butterflies, in which case it's a crime. I don't harbor any ill feelings toward our pesticidal society, but I've often wondered why it is we go out of our way to crush the poor boneless ones.
Here's the irony: I'm a bit of an arachnophobe. I think spiders are ugly, creepy, icky things, and I feel revulsion when I see them. I understand why people kill the spiders they find in their houses because even a decade of pacifism hasn't removed from me the natural inclination toward destruction. But I can't do it. Once, early on in my marriage, I killed a rather large spider that had found its way into our apartment. I did it to show my wife I wasn't a ninny. After I did it, I was so beset by guilt that I wasn't quite myself the rest of the day. So I've never done it again. Now whenever I find a spider in our apartment, I catch it and take it outside. My wife has laughingly pointed out that I do this even when the ground outside is covered in frosty snow or puddling rain, which may well dictate a crueler death for the spider than a quick blow from a shoe, but I don't do this because I love spiders--I don't love spiders! If I loved them, I might let them live with me. But they're frightening little beasts, and I hate them, so I don't let them live with me. But I do let them live--or at least throw them out to the elements where they can suffer a natural death and turn into dirt. The odd-shaped cog of my mind that dictates my conscience says that's better than killing them outright.
I've tried to come up with justifications for my behavior (I don't want insanitary spider guts embedded in my carpet. Spiders eat flies, and flies are more proactively annoying than spiders are.), but why should I feel compelled to justify my desire not to kill? The truth is, I'm deeply embarrassed by the fact that I can't kill spiders--especially since I hate them. See, if I had an academic interest in those eight-legged fiends and could discourse on their invaluable contributions to the local ecology and was fascinated by their anatomy, then it would make sense that I would not want to kill them, and if anyone asked me why I didn't kill them, I would have a good reason. But I'm not that guy. I see spiders as nightmarish creatures, and I wonder why God didn't make them more cuddly because, really, a fly-eating pet would be pretty awesome. And so I'm embarrassed that I feel guilty when I kill them, but guilt trumps embarrassment, so I go on not killing them.
I feel like Kierkegaard would have had something to say about this, but I don't know what it would've been. Perhaps he would've examined the paradox of harboring a murderous hatred for something but feeling a moral necessity to preserve its life--he might have called the paradox Love. Who knows....
There's got to be something to say about the way I treat spiders and why I do, and I'm convinced there's a parable in here somewhere. At any rate, there's a moral to this story, and it isn't, "Ugliness isn't a capital offense." It's something more than that. Something about love and hatred being totally unrelated to tolerance. I can't quite seem to formulate it, so I'll leave that up to you.
06 March 2012
Equal Partners
"By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners." --The Family: A Proclamation to the World (a document written and signed by 15 men)
I'm sure it seems odd to many outsiders that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints proclaims equality between men and women but maintains a male-only clergy. Heck, I'm a lifelong Mormon, and I've had trouble seeing the equality at times. The search for equality seems to be an ongoing struggle in the LDS community, and I sometimes wonder if we're looking beyond the mark. Priesthood holders are so afraid of falling into the woman-go-make-me-a-sandwich brand of unrighteous dominion that we've started debasing ourselves and placing our women on unreasonably high pedestals: "Our women are so much better than us," we say; "they are spiritually superior and socially graceful and oh so very patient with our idiotic maleness--we men would be hopeless without them," and then we wonder why they always feel so inadequate.
The truth is, many LDS men are uncomfortable with the fact that they can be ordained to priesthood offices while women cannot. We really do believe that men and women are equal, but we can't seem to find an ideology that doesn't either keep women below us or exalt them above us. We're forced to say somewhat lamely, "Men hold the priesthood, and women are--um--great." However, as is often the case with gospel quandaries, a return to the basics is all that's necessary to resolve this problem, so let's talk about the purpose of life.
If you ask most any LDS Sunday-school class what the purpose of life is, they will say, "To get a body!" and "To return to live with Heavenly Father!" One of the most frequently quoted passages in Mormondom is Moses 1:39, wherein God explains that His work and glory is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. We believe that, because of the Atonement of Jesus Christ, everyone who comes to earth and receives a physical body will be resurrected someday and get to keep their physical body forever--that's immortality. We believe that the Atonement of Jesus Christ also enables everyone who comes to earth to be redeemed through priesthood ordinances so that they can one day live with God--that's eternal life. Immortality and eternal life are equally important: having a physical body while dwelling outside of God's presence (immortality without eternal life) is hell; lacking a physical body while dwelling in God's presence (eternal life without immortality) is the state we were in before we came to earth, the state that we came here to move beyond. God's work and glory is only fulfilled when we achieve both immortality and eternal life.
How do we do this? Well, first we have to receive a physical body, and the only way to do that is to be born of a woman. The work of clothing God's spirit children in physical bodies can only be accomplished by women. Even Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, had to be born of Mary, and I have heard it argued that Adam was no exception, either: he was brought into mortality by a woman because Eve gave him the forbidden fruit. Half of God's work and glory--the half concerned with bringing about our immortality--is entrusted entirely to women.
What about the other half--the half concerned with our eternal life? This work is given to men. Worthy men are ordained to the priesthood, and they use that priesthood to perform the saving ordinances necessary for us to return to God's presence. Just as nobody comes to earth without being born of a woman, nobody returns to God without being baptized by a man. This half of God's work and glory is entrusted to men.
In Doctrine and Covenants section 132, we learn that exaltation (the highest form of immortality and eternal life) can only be gained through the new and everlasting covenant of marriage. It is only by the coming together of man and woman as husband and wife that exaltation can be achieved. No man, no matter how faithful he is to his priesthood, can be exalted without first being sealed eternally to a woman. Likewise, no woman can make it alone. Is it any wonder why this is when God's work and glory is divided evenly into male and female stewardships? Paul said it best: "Neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord."
I believe that men and women are absolutely equal before God and that they are equally vital to His plan. I think we only lose sight of that equality because of our location in God's plan. If you are here on earth, reading this essay, you have already been born of a woman; your mother played her part in God's plan for you, and you are bound for immortality. But God's work and glory will not be fully realized in you until you reach eternal life, and to get there you must rely on the help of men--even if you are a man, you need the help of other men. And so we have a male clergy to guide you to eternal life. This is not to say that women cannot help and instruct you along the way, but just as it was by a woman that you were born and began your journey toward immortality, it is by worthy, priesthood-bearing men that you can be born again and begin your journey toward eternal life.
(I am deeply indebted to Valerie Hudson, whose article in SquareTwo inspired these thoughts in me.)
27 February 2012
Pragmatic environmentalism
(And I'll abuse the word "pragmatic" all I want, thank you very much!)
I have a hard time pigeonholing my politics. I've spent my entire adult life being opposed to political parties (or, at the very least, our two-party system as it now stands), but I'm starting to dislike the labels of "liberal" and "conservative" as well. I just don't feel like I fit in with any of these groups, and I don't see how any thinking person really can.
For example, deep in my heart of hearts (and I'm sure this is on this blog somewhere), I'm a passionate, pre-World-War isolationist: I just wanna hole up and leave the rest of the world alone. But it's a pipe dream, right? I can't wrap my head around any way that's even remotely possible, given the last 70 or 80 years of world history. Similarly, I'm all for a legislative rewinding to get closer to the Constitution, but I just don't think it's feasible: what are we going to do, fire everybody who works in Social Security and MediCare and NASA and National Security etc? Sounds like a terrible idea to me. As a last example, I'm infatuated (as wholeheartedly and ignorantly as the word connotes) with the idea of a completely free market--laissez faire and the invisible hand and all that. I love thinking that the market will always sort itself out. But the truth is, the market is frightfully amoral, and I honestly believe that bad guys always win in a truly free economy. It just seems obvious to me that, in a system where competition is everything, those who are willing to cheat will most likely pull ahead. Scum rises to the top etc. etc. So even though my deep Idaho roots call out for the government to leave me t'heck alone, I kinda like having Big Brother trying to level the playing field.
So there's a crash course in Schmetterlingism, which might just look like apathetic moderatism but feels more like a liberal leaning conservatism.
But there's one area that I'm straight-up liberal (not hard-core or bleeding-hard but fairly radical all the same), and that's environmentalism. I'm all for the privatization of a lot of things (education, for instance), but I feel like the environment is one thing that's big enough to warrant a government stewardship. It's just so hard to get a big-picture view as an individual. And it's the sort of thing that requires big actions on a regular basis because so many little actions are constantly screwing it up. So I'm all for the government regulating emissions and protecting species and (dare I say it?) angering farmers by making up rules. Here again, I might be mistaken as passionately apathetic (I often say that I don't care whether man-caused climate change is real and that I think minimizing the stuff we pump into the air is worthwhile even if it doesn't save the polar bears because it might save some asthmatic kindergartener in New York), but I am not. I consider myself a pragmatic environmentalist.
My most recent environmental stance has evolved over the course of the past few months, and its evolution started when I read an article in (*GASP!*) Mother Jones, which I now have a subscription to, thanks to a brother of mine (our mother was mortified when she found out!). The article ("Jet Blue" by Christie Aschwanden, located on the last page of the May + June 2010 issue, which was the borrowed hook that reeled me in) talked about how bad for the environment jumbo jets are. It says that a family of 4 living in western Colorado can replace an old fridge with an efficient model, replace 10 75-watt lightbulbs with 20-watt compact florescents, recycle all their paper and glass and metal and plastic waste, switch to using a bus or train for a daily 12-mile commute, and replace the family sedan for a Prius, and if they live that way for a year, they still won't have done as much to help the environment as they do to hurt it if they fly to Boston for Christmas at the end of that year. Lots of environmentally-minded people justify flying because it's public transportation, and they all assume that, when it comes to transportation, public=environmental, but the truth is that flying is the most environmentally destructive per-capita mode of transportation.
I was thinking about this as my wife and I flew out to Florida for Christmas. The facts seemed to say that we would've been better off driving that whole long way, and I felt a little guilty as I watched the SLC tarmac disappear below us. But the flight gave me time to think, and Pragmatic Environmentalism was born.
Let's imagine a hypothetical couple living just outside of Salt Lake City somewhere--in Provo, we'll say--and let's name this hypothetical couple Kyle and Katie. Now let's say that Kyle and Katie have been invited to spend Christmas in DisneyWorld with Katie's family. There are essentially three options to them: 1) they can fly (the traditional solution); 2) they can drive (the more environmentally friendly solution); 3) they can stay in Provo (the Mother Jones solution).
Solution 1: The fly out of SLC int'l and go to Orlando with a layover in DC and then come back the same way. Nearly 15,000 lbs of CO2 are emitted into the atmosphere, "high in the atmosphere, magnifying the ill effects" (that's from that article, btw).
Solution 2: They drive for a couple of days each direction. Nearly 4,000 lbs of CO2 are emitted by their car in addition to the 15,000 lbs being emitted by their airplane, which incidentally has to make its connections even if nobody's on it.
Solution 3: They stay home. 15,000 lbs of CO2 are still emitted by that airplane!
Moral of the story: Solutions 1 & 3 are equally damaging to the environment; solution 2 is more damaging.
The thing is, I do care about the environment, and so I wish that there weren't so many airplane cruising around up there, but I was looking at the maps in the seatback pocket in front of me, and it looks like they run in circuits. So even if I could get everyone in Utah to refrain from flying to DC, the Utah plane would still have to fly to DC to pick up all the people there who are headed to Orlando, and if I could talk all of them out of their trip, there's still people in Orlando who need to get to--I dunno--Kentucky. The thing is, to get even one plane grounded, I have to stop at least three and perhaps four or five plane's worth of travelers from flying anywhere.
So the plane flies, regardless of what I do. If I'm on it or if I stay home, it doesn't make any difference. But if I drive to Florida, I only make things worse.
And that's pragmatic environmentalism, which sounds an awful lot like environmental fatalism, but isn't exactly.
I have a hard time pigeonholing my politics. I've spent my entire adult life being opposed to political parties (or, at the very least, our two-party system as it now stands), but I'm starting to dislike the labels of "liberal" and "conservative" as well. I just don't feel like I fit in with any of these groups, and I don't see how any thinking person really can.
For example, deep in my heart of hearts (and I'm sure this is on this blog somewhere), I'm a passionate, pre-World-War isolationist: I just wanna hole up and leave the rest of the world alone. But it's a pipe dream, right? I can't wrap my head around any way that's even remotely possible, given the last 70 or 80 years of world history. Similarly, I'm all for a legislative rewinding to get closer to the Constitution, but I just don't think it's feasible: what are we going to do, fire everybody who works in Social Security and MediCare and NASA and National Security etc? Sounds like a terrible idea to me. As a last example, I'm infatuated (as wholeheartedly and ignorantly as the word connotes) with the idea of a completely free market--laissez faire and the invisible hand and all that. I love thinking that the market will always sort itself out. But the truth is, the market is frightfully amoral, and I honestly believe that bad guys always win in a truly free economy. It just seems obvious to me that, in a system where competition is everything, those who are willing to cheat will most likely pull ahead. Scum rises to the top etc. etc. So even though my deep Idaho roots call out for the government to leave me t'heck alone, I kinda like having Big Brother trying to level the playing field.
So there's a crash course in Schmetterlingism, which might just look like apathetic moderatism but feels more like a liberal leaning conservatism.
But there's one area that I'm straight-up liberal (not hard-core or bleeding-hard but fairly radical all the same), and that's environmentalism. I'm all for the privatization of a lot of things (education, for instance), but I feel like the environment is one thing that's big enough to warrant a government stewardship. It's just so hard to get a big-picture view as an individual. And it's the sort of thing that requires big actions on a regular basis because so many little actions are constantly screwing it up. So I'm all for the government regulating emissions and protecting species and (dare I say it?) angering farmers by making up rules. Here again, I might be mistaken as passionately apathetic (I often say that I don't care whether man-caused climate change is real and that I think minimizing the stuff we pump into the air is worthwhile even if it doesn't save the polar bears because it might save some asthmatic kindergartener in New York), but I am not. I consider myself a pragmatic environmentalist.
My most recent environmental stance has evolved over the course of the past few months, and its evolution started when I read an article in (*GASP!*) Mother Jones, which I now have a subscription to, thanks to a brother of mine (our mother was mortified when she found out!). The article ("Jet Blue" by Christie Aschwanden, located on the last page of the May + June 2010 issue, which was the borrowed hook that reeled me in) talked about how bad for the environment jumbo jets are. It says that a family of 4 living in western Colorado can replace an old fridge with an efficient model, replace 10 75-watt lightbulbs with 20-watt compact florescents, recycle all their paper and glass and metal and plastic waste, switch to using a bus or train for a daily 12-mile commute, and replace the family sedan for a Prius, and if they live that way for a year, they still won't have done as much to help the environment as they do to hurt it if they fly to Boston for Christmas at the end of that year. Lots of environmentally-minded people justify flying because it's public transportation, and they all assume that, when it comes to transportation, public=environmental, but the truth is that flying is the most environmentally destructive per-capita mode of transportation.
I was thinking about this as my wife and I flew out to Florida for Christmas. The facts seemed to say that we would've been better off driving that whole long way, and I felt a little guilty as I watched the SLC tarmac disappear below us. But the flight gave me time to think, and Pragmatic Environmentalism was born.
Let's imagine a hypothetical couple living just outside of Salt Lake City somewhere--in Provo, we'll say--and let's name this hypothetical couple Kyle and Katie. Now let's say that Kyle and Katie have been invited to spend Christmas in DisneyWorld with Katie's family. There are essentially three options to them: 1) they can fly (the traditional solution); 2) they can drive (the more environmentally friendly solution); 3) they can stay in Provo (the Mother Jones solution).
Solution 1: The fly out of SLC int'l and go to Orlando with a layover in DC and then come back the same way. Nearly 15,000 lbs of CO2 are emitted into the atmosphere, "high in the atmosphere, magnifying the ill effects" (that's from that article, btw).
Solution 2: They drive for a couple of days each direction. Nearly 4,000 lbs of CO2 are emitted by their car in addition to the 15,000 lbs being emitted by their airplane, which incidentally has to make its connections even if nobody's on it.
Solution 3: They stay home. 15,000 lbs of CO2 are still emitted by that airplane!
Moral of the story: Solutions 1 & 3 are equally damaging to the environment; solution 2 is more damaging.
The thing is, I do care about the environment, and so I wish that there weren't so many airplane cruising around up there, but I was looking at the maps in the seatback pocket in front of me, and it looks like they run in circuits. So even if I could get everyone in Utah to refrain from flying to DC, the Utah plane would still have to fly to DC to pick up all the people there who are headed to Orlando, and if I could talk all of them out of their trip, there's still people in Orlando who need to get to--I dunno--Kentucky. The thing is, to get even one plane grounded, I have to stop at least three and perhaps four or five plane's worth of travelers from flying anywhere.
So the plane flies, regardless of what I do. If I'm on it or if I stay home, it doesn't make any difference. But if I drive to Florida, I only make things worse.
And that's pragmatic environmentalism, which sounds an awful lot like environmental fatalism, but isn't exactly.
Bret is very proud of his Oscar
Perhaps you've heard that a song from The Muppets won an Oscar. I was so happy about that. For one thing, I love the Muppets; for another, Bret McKenzie (of Flight of the Conchord
fame) wrote the songs for that movie, and it just kinda rekindles my
faith in the whole movie industry that a man like Bret McKenzie can win
an Oscar.
As soon as I found out it, I decided to look up Bret's Wikipedia page to see what it had to say about this honor, and I found myself having to hold back my laughter. I think Bret himself probably modified his Wikipedia page to make it read this way. This is copy-pasted from that page (I've added highlighting so you can get the gist without having to actually read the whole thing):
As soon as I found out it, I decided to look up Bret's Wikipedia page to see what it had to say about this honor, and I found myself having to hold back my laughter. I think Bret himself probably modified his Wikipedia page to make it read this way. This is copy-pasted from that page (I've added highlighting so you can get the gist without having to actually read the whole thing):
Academy Award winner McKenzie has appeared in the first and third films inPeter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. His silent role in the first film as Figwitachieved some minor internet fame, which led to Jackson giving him a line in the third film. In April 2011, McKenzie, the winner of an Academy Award, was cast as the elf Lindir (who in contrast to Figwit is a character created by Tolkien himself) for the upcoming The Hobbit. His father Peter McKenzie played the role of Elendil in Lord of the Rings.
Along with Clement, Oscar winning McKenzie was featured as one of 2008's "100 Sexiest People" in a special edition of the Australian magazine Who.
Bret "Oscar-Winner" McKenzie and fellow Conchord Clement guest starred as a pair of camp counselors in "Elementary School Musical", the season premiere of the 22nd season of The Simpsons, which aired on 26 September 2010.[3]
Oscar winning McKenzie, together with Australian comedian Hamish Blake is
set to star in a New Zealand feature film, Two Little Boys, currently
under production in New Zealand and set for release late 2011.[4]
During the summer of 2010, Academy Awardee McKenzie flew to Los Angeles to serve as the music supervisor for the The Muppets.[5] He
went on to write five songs for the films soundtrack including "Man or
Muppet" and "Life's a Happy Song" both of which were nominated for Broadcast Film Critics Association Awards and Satellite Awards for Best Original Song.[6]
I miss my blog
The Eccentric Sage has sat in disuse for a long time now. It's tragic, really. The heyday of blogging is something I now think of in fits of nostalgia, if I think of it at all. Yet I still follow some blogs--meaning they secretly feed into my Google Reader, and I glance at the posts an read most of them. I've become a spectator in cyberspace, participating only when I feel a strong inclination to do so--and I don't feel that way often. Still, if other blogs are still running strong, why shouldn't this one? The blogosphere has not collapsed, despite the vacuum I've created there.
And so--I'm back. I've given The Eccentric Sage a much needed facelift, and I'm posting again. I'm not promising that I'll ever post with the frequency I once did (I'd say I peaked in the summer of '08), and I actually have no intention of dedicating that much time here. This blog was fueled by the angst of my bachelorhood, and I've been happily married for 20 months now. Also, I don't want to join the masses of bloggers who say, "I'm totally back and I'm gonna post every day and you guys should visit my blog because it'll be so totally awesome!" and then goes another 8 months without posting. No, this will be a very different blog from here on out, I imagine, and I'm marking the change with a titled post. Now, instead of a place to vent my angst, The Eccentric Sage will be a place for me to probe reality. I admit that it may be hard for anyone but me to detect a difference in the resultant posts, but I feel different, and it has been nearly a year since I last posted--and much longer than that since I posted frequently!--and I really feel no inclination to make a conscious effort to recreate what once was. I just need a place to think in written words, and I imagine that's what blogs were invented for.
So here we go.....
And so--I'm back. I've given The Eccentric Sage a much needed facelift, and I'm posting again. I'm not promising that I'll ever post with the frequency I once did (I'd say I peaked in the summer of '08), and I actually have no intention of dedicating that much time here. This blog was fueled by the angst of my bachelorhood, and I've been happily married for 20 months now. Also, I don't want to join the masses of bloggers who say, "I'm totally back and I'm gonna post every day and you guys should visit my blog because it'll be so totally awesome!" and then goes another 8 months without posting. No, this will be a very different blog from here on out, I imagine, and I'm marking the change with a titled post. Now, instead of a place to vent my angst, The Eccentric Sage will be a place for me to probe reality. I admit that it may be hard for anyone but me to detect a difference in the resultant posts, but I feel different, and it has been nearly a year since I last posted--and much longer than that since I posted frequently!--and I really feel no inclination to make a conscious effort to recreate what once was. I just need a place to think in written words, and I imagine that's what blogs were invented for.
So here we go.....
14 April 2011
Post 244
So, I don't visit A Motley Vision nearly as often as Theric would probably like me to. I wander over there occasionally when he links to it or says something cool is going on, but I've never gotten involved with them mostly just because I really have no idea what AMV is.
But so far, the only person to comment on my previous post was Wm Morris of AMV fame. Of course, my initial thought was, "Who the heck is Wm Morris?" and then I clicked on his name and ended up at AMV and learned about this little writing contest they're having over there that I found really exciting. (Check it out)
Now, because I really know nothing about AMV, I don't have a clue what Monsters & Mormons is, so I don't know what I'm missing out on, so I don't really feel bad about potentially disqualifying myself by telling the whole world (or at least the two judges of the contest, both of whom apparently read my blog sometimes) why my entry is the best. [NOTE: I don't recall the rules saying anything about not being able to publish a submission elsewhere, so perhaps I won't DQ myself, but this is just a disclaimer to say that, regardless of the consequences, I'd rather toot my own horn than sit and wait for someone else to toot it for me.]
I wrote a passage from the Book of Lehi. But the awesome thing about it is that I composed this bit of false scripture by piecemealing various other scriptural passages. I changed a few names, and I added one word ("for"), but the rest of this is a scriptural hodgepodge. Check it out [note, I submitted it without the references; I'm writing this blogpost to show how awesome I am in case neither Wm or Th notice]:
Lehi 16:5-9
5 "And it came to pass that Laman and Lemuel" [1 Nephi 16:20, 1 Nephi 18:11] "took of the daughters of Ishmael to wife; and" [1 Nephi 16:7] "they had many children who did grow up and began to wax strong in years, that they became for themselves" [3 Nephi 1:29] "lewd fellows of the baser sort" [Acts 17:5].
6 "And now [Laman] had a son who was called [Bedlam]" [Ether 7:22]; for "when [Laman] went in to his wife, she conceived, and bare a son, and he called his name" [1 Chronicles 7:23] "Laman, being called after the name of his father" [Mosiah 24:3]. "Then said they unto him, Say now [Laman]: and he said [Bedlam]: for he could not frame to pronounce it right" [Judges 12:6] "; and therefore he was called [Bedlam]." [Mosiah 24:3]
7 "Now this [Bedlam] had, by his cunning, drawn away much people after him; even so much that they began to be very powerful; and they began to endeavor to establish [Bedlam] to be a king over the people" [Alma 2:2] "; and they did rise up in rebellion against us." [Alma 57:32]
8 "And [I] did exhort them then with all the feeling of a tender parent, that they would hearken to [my] words, that perhaps the Lord would be merciful to them, and not cast them off;" [1 Nephi 8:37] "[b]ut behold, [Bedlam] hearkened not, saying: Who is the Lord that I should know him?" [Moses 5:16]
9 "Wherefore, they went up into the wilderness. And [Bedlam] being a strong and mighty man, and a stiffnecked man, wherefore he caused a contention among them; and they were all slain [..] in the wilderness" (Omni 1:28) ": and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses." [Isaiah 37:36] "And thus endeth the days of [Bedlam]." [Alma 51:37]
So that's my scripture-wresting tour de force. Hope you like it. My only regret is that I failed to use my all-time favorite scriptural phrase: "Wherefore, lay apart all filthiness and [you ready for this?] superfluity of naughtiness" [James 1:21]. Oh well. I should be studying for my final finals anyhow.
But so far, the only person to comment on my previous post was Wm Morris of AMV fame. Of course, my initial thought was, "Who the heck is Wm Morris?" and then I clicked on his name and ended up at AMV and learned about this little writing contest they're having over there that I found really exciting. (Check it out)
Now, because I really know nothing about AMV, I don't have a clue what Monsters & Mormons is, so I don't know what I'm missing out on, so I don't really feel bad about potentially disqualifying myself by telling the whole world (or at least the two judges of the contest, both of whom apparently read my blog sometimes) why my entry is the best. [NOTE: I don't recall the rules saying anything about not being able to publish a submission elsewhere, so perhaps I won't DQ myself, but this is just a disclaimer to say that, regardless of the consequences, I'd rather toot my own horn than sit and wait for someone else to toot it for me.]
I wrote a passage from the Book of Lehi. But the awesome thing about it is that I composed this bit of false scripture by piecemealing various other scriptural passages. I changed a few names, and I added one word ("for"), but the rest of this is a scriptural hodgepodge. Check it out [note, I submitted it without the references; I'm writing this blogpost to show how awesome I am in case neither Wm or Th notice]:
Lehi 16:5-9
5 "And it came to pass that Laman and Lemuel" [1 Nephi 16:20, 1 Nephi 18:11] "took of the daughters of Ishmael to wife; and" [1 Nephi 16:7] "they had many children who did grow up and began to wax strong in years, that they became for themselves" [3 Nephi 1:29] "lewd fellows of the baser sort" [Acts 17:5].
6 "And now [Laman] had a son who was called [Bedlam]" [Ether 7:22]; for "when [Laman] went in to his wife, she conceived, and bare a son, and he called his name" [1 Chronicles 7:23] "Laman, being called after the name of his father" [Mosiah 24:3]. "Then said they unto him, Say now [Laman]: and he said [Bedlam]: for he could not frame to pronounce it right" [Judges 12:6] "; and therefore he was called [Bedlam]." [Mosiah 24:3]
7 "Now this [Bedlam] had, by his cunning, drawn away much people after him; even so much that they began to be very powerful; and they began to endeavor to establish [Bedlam] to be a king over the people" [Alma 2:2] "; and they did rise up in rebellion against us." [Alma 57:32]
8 "And [I] did exhort them then with all the feeling of a tender parent, that they would hearken to [my] words, that perhaps the Lord would be merciful to them, and not cast them off;" [1 Nephi 8:37] "[b]ut behold, [Bedlam] hearkened not, saying: Who is the Lord that I should know him?" [Moses 5:16]
9 "Wherefore, they went up into the wilderness. And [Bedlam] being a strong and mighty man, and a stiffnecked man, wherefore he caused a contention among them; and they were all slain [..] in the wilderness" (Omni 1:28) ": and when they arose early in the morning, behold, they were all dead corpses." [Isaiah 37:36] "And thus endeth the days of [Bedlam]." [Alma 51:37]
So that's my scripture-wresting tour de force. Hope you like it. My only regret is that I failed to use my all-time favorite scriptural phrase: "Wherefore, lay apart all filthiness and [you ready for this?] superfluity of naughtiness" [James 1:21]. Oh well. I should be studying for my final finals anyhow.
12 April 2011
Post 243
I heard the joke countless times in my childhood:
Q: What's the difference between a piano and a fish?
A: You can tune a piano, but you can't tuna fish.
It occurred to me recently that, either this is a mistelling of the joke, or the joke's creator really fell short of the full potential here. I propose the following revision:
Q: How is a piano like a fish?
A: You can tune a piano, and you can tuna fish.
It's harder to grasp, I think. That's why I imagine that the joke originally ran this way but the six-year-olds who spread it around couldn't get it right. Or maybe we should just blame it all on REO Speedwagon.
Can is the pivotal word here. Replacing it with synonyms, we get "You are able to tune a piano, and you place tuna fish into cans."
You can tune a piano, and you can tuna fish. It's a lot more interesting grammatically, and it makes the pun work better because the sentence actually makes sense (because, really, what does "you can't tuna fish" mean? Would you say "you can't sardine"? I can't think of a reason such an utterance would be made).
In a week and a half, I'll graduate from BYU. I've spent 3 years studying the English language, and I've spent 2 years trying my hand at stand-up comedy. The result? I am now fully qualified to be a children's joke critic. Fantastic.
Q: What's the difference between a piano and a fish?
A: You can tune a piano, but you can't tuna fish.
It occurred to me recently that, either this is a mistelling of the joke, or the joke's creator really fell short of the full potential here. I propose the following revision:
Q: How is a piano like a fish?
A: You can tune a piano, and you can tuna fish.
It's harder to grasp, I think. That's why I imagine that the joke originally ran this way but the six-year-olds who spread it around couldn't get it right. Or maybe we should just blame it all on REO Speedwagon.
Can is the pivotal word here. Replacing it with synonyms, we get "You are able to tune a piano, and you place tuna fish into cans."
You can tune a piano, and you can tuna fish. It's a lot more interesting grammatically, and it makes the pun work better because the sentence actually makes sense (because, really, what does "you can't tuna fish" mean? Would you say "you can't sardine"? I can't think of a reason such an utterance would be made).
In a week and a half, I'll graduate from BYU. I've spent 3 years studying the English language, and I've spent 2 years trying my hand at stand-up comedy. The result? I am now fully qualified to be a children's joke critic. Fantastic.
24 January 2011
Post 242
And now a very subtle joke:
To error is human.
Bahahahahahaha!
(Sorry. I just barely learned that error is a noun and err is a verb, so to "to error" is an error.)
To error is human.
Bahahahahahaha!
(Sorry. I just barely learned that error is a noun and err is a verb, so to "to error" is an error.)
20 January 2011
Post 241
This is an outrage!
So. That song "We Built This City" by Starship? It's kinda become my song in the last month or so for various reasons. I just really, really like it. "Marconi plays the mamba / Listen to the radio!" is pretty much one of the best things to happen to the 80s--and I like the 80s!
Anyway, I looked the song up on Wikipedia to see what I could learn about it. I know that Starship came into being as the result of a lawsuit, and so I thought maybe it was their first hit because the whole thrust of the song is, "Hey, remember us? Yeah, we're awesome. You know that; we know that. Corporations do their silly things, but we're still here, and we're ready to rock." Wikipedia said nothing about this, but it did say this:
Really, guys? Really? The #1 worst song ever? Really? I recognize that most people probably don't like it as much as I do and that I once had to tell a roommate that my musical selections "are not hampered by things like taste," but the worst song ever? Seems a bit harsh....
So I looked up VH1's little list, and that's when I got really upset.
To be fair, it might be a very good list (it has a lot of songs I don't know, so it's hard for me to judge fairly), and I have to give it credit for getting two of my least favorite songs ever ("Barbie Girl" by Aqua and "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" by Toby Keith). They also identified several songs that probably don't deserve the honorific part of this dubious honor but really are pretty terrible ("I would do anything for love (but I won't do that)" by Meatloaf, "I'm too sexy" by Right Said Fred, "Achy Breaky Heart" by Billy Ray Cyrus, "Ice, Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice, "From a distance" by Bette Midler). There are songs I like that I'm not surprised to see on a list like this ("Broken wings" by Mr. Mister, for instance), but that's to be expected, I guess. So, really, most of the list is probably pretty reasonable.
But the parts that aren't reasonable are so unreasonable!
First the songs that, regardless of how you feel about them, don't seem hate worthy: "Never gonna give you up" by Rick Astley, "You're the inspiration" by Chicago, "Cotton eye Joe" by Rednex (not a song I thought I'd ever defend!), and "Don't worry, be happy" by Bobby McFerrin.
If those were my biggest complaints for this list, it wouldn't deserve a blogpost, but here are the real kickers:
"Two princes" by Spin Doctors comes in at #46; "We didn't start the fire" by Billy Joel is #44; "Heart of Rock-n-Roll" by Huey Lewis & the News is #10; and "Breakfast at Tiffany's" by Deep Blue Something is #6!
Still not persuaded? I can almost imagine a person (not much of a person, but a person nonetheless) who didn't like any of those songs, but I cannot conjure an image in my mind of the sort of person who would hate all of those songs PLUS a song that I think has one of the greatest keyboard riffs of all time yet somehow lands itself a place on this ridiculous list at #16: "The Final Countdown" by Europe.
Who hates "The Final Countdown"?? Who even has a mild distaste for that song? Who of all the people who have ever heard that song as heard it without at least having a passing thought of, "Man, this song is pretty great"? What sort of terrible people wrote this list?
Furthermore, where is Eminem on this list? Where is Uncle Kracker (that song "Follow Me" is horrible!)? Where is Britney Spears? How did "Hey Mickey," "Material Girl," and "Tubthumping" all avoid this list? (I actually like all three of those songs, but they are pretty "awesomely bad.") No Twisted Sister? No Air Supply? No Aaron Carter? How is there not a single 90s boys band on this list? Also strangely absent: "All by myself" by Eric Carmen. (I would bring up Lady Gaga and Jusin Beiber, but they weren't around in 2004.)
Anyway. I think it's terrible. Here's the list, for anyone who's interested. Tell me, friends, what injustices you can find:
50. Corey Hart - I Wear My Sunglasses at Night
49. Puff Daddy f/ Faith Evans & 112 - "I'll Be Missing You'
48. Michael Bolton - 'Can I Touch You There'
47. Bobby Brown w/Whitney Houston, 'Something in Common'
46. Spin Doctors - Two Princes
45. Ruben Studdard, 'I'm Sorry'
44. Billy Joel - We Didn't Start The Fire
43. Master P feat. Silkk, Fiend, Mia-x & Mystikal - 'Make Em Say Uhh'
42. Rednex - Cotton Eye Joe
41. JC Chasez - 'Some Girls (Dance with Women)'
40. 4 Non Blondes, 'What's Up'
39. Snow - 'Informer'
38. Ja Rule - Mesmerize
37. Bette Midler, "From a Distance"
36. Color Me Badd - I Wanna Sex You Up
35. Don Johnson - Heartbeat
34. Crazytown - 'Butterfly'
33. Jennifer Lopez - 'Jenny from the Block'
32. Mr. Mister - Broken Wings
31. R. Kelly, 'You Remind Me of Something'
30. Nelly - Pimp Juice
29. Meatloaf - 'I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won't do That)
28. Rick Astley - 'Never Gonna Give You Up'
27. Wreckx-N-Effect - 'Rump Shaker'
26. Bryan Adams - The Only Thing That Looks Good on Me is You
25. Michael Jackson, 'You Rock My World'
24. Phil Collins, "Sussudio"
23. Sisqo - 'The Thong Song'
22. Lionel Richie - Dancing on the Ceiling
21. Rembrandts, "I'll Be There For You"
20. Toby Keith, 'Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue'
19. Chicago - You're the Inspiration
18. Hammer - 'Pumps and a Bump'
17. Right Said Fred, "I'm Too Sexy"
16. Europe, "The Final Countdown"
15. Crash Test Dummies - Mmm, Mmm, Mmm, Mmm
14. Will Smith, "Will2K"
13. Aqua - 'Barbie Girl'
12. New Kids on the block - Hangin' Tough
11. Gerardo - Rico Suave
10. Huey Lewis & the News - Heart of Rock-n-Roll
9. Bobby McFerrin - Don't Worry Be Happy
8. Ricky Martin - She Bangs
7. Eddie Murphy, "Party All the Time"
6. Deep Blue Something, "Breakfast at Tiffany's"
5. Vanilla Ice, "Ice Ice Baby"
4. Limp Bizkit, "Rollin'"
3. Wang Chung - Everybody Have Fun Tonight
2. Billy Ray Cyrus, "Achy Breaky Heart"
1. Starship, "We Built This City"
So. That song "We Built This City" by Starship? It's kinda become my song in the last month or so for various reasons. I just really, really like it. "Marconi plays the mamba / Listen to the radio!" is pretty much one of the best things to happen to the 80s--and I like the 80s!
Anyway, I looked the song up on Wikipedia to see what I could learn about it. I know that Starship came into being as the result of a lawsuit, and so I thought maybe it was their first hit because the whole thrust of the song is, "Hey, remember us? Yeah, we're awesome. You know that; we know that. Corporations do their silly things, but we're still here, and we're ready to rock." Wikipedia said nothing about this, but it did say this:
In April 2004, the song was listed as "the #1 Worst Song Ever" by Blender magazine. [...] The Blender ranking of the song as the worst song ever was in conjunction with a VH1 Special of The 50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs...Ever. In order to qualify for the distinction, the songs on the list had to be a popular hit at some point, thus disqualifying many songs that would by general consensus be considered much worse.
Really, guys? Really? The #1 worst song ever? Really? I recognize that most people probably don't like it as much as I do and that I once had to tell a roommate that my musical selections "are not hampered by things like taste," but the worst song ever? Seems a bit harsh....
So I looked up VH1's little list, and that's when I got really upset.
To be fair, it might be a very good list (it has a lot of songs I don't know, so it's hard for me to judge fairly), and I have to give it credit for getting two of my least favorite songs ever ("Barbie Girl" by Aqua and "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" by Toby Keith). They also identified several songs that probably don't deserve the honorific part of this dubious honor but really are pretty terrible ("I would do anything for love (but I won't do that)" by Meatloaf, "I'm too sexy" by Right Said Fred, "Achy Breaky Heart" by Billy Ray Cyrus, "Ice, Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice, "From a distance" by Bette Midler). There are songs I like that I'm not surprised to see on a list like this ("Broken wings" by Mr. Mister, for instance), but that's to be expected, I guess. So, really, most of the list is probably pretty reasonable.
But the parts that aren't reasonable are so unreasonable!
First the songs that, regardless of how you feel about them, don't seem hate worthy: "Never gonna give you up" by Rick Astley, "You're the inspiration" by Chicago, "Cotton eye Joe" by Rednex (not a song I thought I'd ever defend!), and "Don't worry, be happy" by Bobby McFerrin.
If those were my biggest complaints for this list, it wouldn't deserve a blogpost, but here are the real kickers:
"Two princes" by Spin Doctors comes in at #46; "We didn't start the fire" by Billy Joel is #44; "Heart of Rock-n-Roll" by Huey Lewis & the News is #10; and "Breakfast at Tiffany's" by Deep Blue Something is #6!
Still not persuaded? I can almost imagine a person (not much of a person, but a person nonetheless) who didn't like any of those songs, but I cannot conjure an image in my mind of the sort of person who would hate all of those songs PLUS a song that I think has one of the greatest keyboard riffs of all time yet somehow lands itself a place on this ridiculous list at #16: "The Final Countdown" by Europe.
Who hates "The Final Countdown"?? Who even has a mild distaste for that song? Who of all the people who have ever heard that song as heard it without at least having a passing thought of, "Man, this song is pretty great"? What sort of terrible people wrote this list?
Furthermore, where is Eminem on this list? Where is Uncle Kracker (that song "Follow Me" is horrible!)? Where is Britney Spears? How did "Hey Mickey," "Material Girl," and "Tubthumping" all avoid this list? (I actually like all three of those songs, but they are pretty "awesomely bad.") No Twisted Sister? No Air Supply? No Aaron Carter? How is there not a single 90s boys band on this list? Also strangely absent: "All by myself" by Eric Carmen. (I would bring up Lady Gaga and Jusin Beiber, but they weren't around in 2004.)
Anyway. I think it's terrible. Here's the list, for anyone who's interested. Tell me, friends, what injustices you can find:
50. Corey Hart - I Wear My Sunglasses at Night
49. Puff Daddy f/ Faith Evans & 112 - "I'll Be Missing You'
48. Michael Bolton - 'Can I Touch You There'
47. Bobby Brown w/Whitney Houston, 'Something in Common'
46. Spin Doctors - Two Princes
45. Ruben Studdard, 'I'm Sorry'
44. Billy Joel - We Didn't Start The Fire
43. Master P feat. Silkk, Fiend, Mia-x & Mystikal - 'Make Em Say Uhh'
42. Rednex - Cotton Eye Joe
41. JC Chasez - 'Some Girls (Dance with Women)'
40. 4 Non Blondes, 'What's Up'
39. Snow - 'Informer'
38. Ja Rule - Mesmerize
37. Bette Midler, "From a Distance"
36. Color Me Badd - I Wanna Sex You Up
35. Don Johnson - Heartbeat
34. Crazytown - 'Butterfly'
33. Jennifer Lopez - 'Jenny from the Block'
32. Mr. Mister - Broken Wings
31. R. Kelly, 'You Remind Me of Something'
30. Nelly - Pimp Juice
29. Meatloaf - 'I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won't do That)
28. Rick Astley - 'Never Gonna Give You Up'
27. Wreckx-N-Effect - 'Rump Shaker'
26. Bryan Adams - The Only Thing That Looks Good on Me is You
25. Michael Jackson, 'You Rock My World'
24. Phil Collins, "Sussudio"
23. Sisqo - 'The Thong Song'
22. Lionel Richie - Dancing on the Ceiling
21. Rembrandts, "I'll Be There For You"
20. Toby Keith, 'Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue'
19. Chicago - You're the Inspiration
18. Hammer - 'Pumps and a Bump'
17. Right Said Fred, "I'm Too Sexy"
16. Europe, "The Final Countdown"
15. Crash Test Dummies - Mmm, Mmm, Mmm, Mmm
14. Will Smith, "Will2K"
13. Aqua - 'Barbie Girl'
12. New Kids on the block - Hangin' Tough
11. Gerardo - Rico Suave
10. Huey Lewis & the News - Heart of Rock-n-Roll
9. Bobby McFerrin - Don't Worry Be Happy
8. Ricky Martin - She Bangs
7. Eddie Murphy, "Party All the Time"
6. Deep Blue Something, "Breakfast at Tiffany's"
5. Vanilla Ice, "Ice Ice Baby"
4. Limp Bizkit, "Rollin'"
3. Wang Chung - Everybody Have Fun Tonight
2. Billy Ray Cyrus, "Achy Breaky Heart"
1. Starship, "We Built This City"
11 December 2010
Post 240
You know that song "We Wish You a Merry Christmas?" It's an upbeat song, right? And it gets a little rowdy about halfway through with the carolers demanding figgy pudding and saying they won't leave until they get some--this is a song meant to be shouted as much as sung and is usually delivered by people who are giddy with Christmas spirit, right? That's just the nature of the song.
Isn't this common knowledge? I think so.
So a question: WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA???
I stumbled upon this a few days ago, and my wife and I listened to it until "we won't go until we get some" and just couldn't take it any more.
Isn't this common knowledge? I think so.
So a question: WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA???
I stumbled upon this a few days ago, and my wife and I listened to it until "we won't go until we get some" and just couldn't take it any more.
27 November 2010
Post 239
So, it's officially Christmastime. The passing of Thanksgiving lifted my wife's moratorium on Christmas music, so I'm listening to lots of it now. I don't know what happened to me last year, but it was the first year since halfway through high school that I wasn't offended by Christmas music being played ridiculously early, and this year I found myself turning on holiday jingles whenever I was driving somewhere without my wife. It's good to wait till after Thanksgiving, though: since there are only, like, 30 or 40 really good Christmas songs in existence, I'd probably get sick of it by mid-December if I listened to it non-stop.
Anyway, the point of this post is to once again demonstrate the awesome breadth of the internet's reach. When I was very young, we got a Christmas basket from a family in the ward, and one of the things in it was a tape of really random Christmas songs. I remember several of them (one called "Santa Got a Cold on Christmas Eve," one with a refrain that began, "We are Santa's reindeer / We've learned to sing this year," one sung in a weird accent about how the kids go nuts at Christmas, a version of "I'm Gettin' Nuttin' for Christmas" that ended with a burglar coming in a Santa suit...), but my favorite of all of them was a song by Mel Blanc. I remember it was by Mel Blank because my eldest brother had to explain to me who Mel Blanc was when he told me who sang the song.
I loved that song as a kid, and the inventions of Google and YouTube have made me try every year to find it online. This year, I finally did (thanks to Google, not to YouTube). I can't embed it here, so just click on this link to listen. (NOTE: my wife wasn't terribly impressed; I think it'll probably appeal to you a lot more if you're, say, 7 years old.)
Merry Christmas!
Anyway, the point of this post is to once again demonstrate the awesome breadth of the internet's reach. When I was very young, we got a Christmas basket from a family in the ward, and one of the things in it was a tape of really random Christmas songs. I remember several of them (one called "Santa Got a Cold on Christmas Eve," one with a refrain that began, "We are Santa's reindeer / We've learned to sing this year," one sung in a weird accent about how the kids go nuts at Christmas, a version of "I'm Gettin' Nuttin' for Christmas" that ended with a burglar coming in a Santa suit...), but my favorite of all of them was a song by Mel Blanc. I remember it was by Mel Blank because my eldest brother had to explain to me who Mel Blanc was when he told me who sang the song.
I loved that song as a kid, and the inventions of Google and YouTube have made me try every year to find it online. This year, I finally did (thanks to Google, not to YouTube). I can't embed it here, so just click on this link to listen. (NOTE: my wife wasn't terribly impressed; I think it'll probably appeal to you a lot more if you're, say, 7 years old.)
Merry Christmas!
15 November 2010
Post 238
So, there's a new Muppet movie coming out in about a year. It's being filmed right now. I like the Muppets, so I'm naturally inclined to be curious for the film and to hope that it isn't terrible, but I'm actually really, really excited for it.
Why, you ask? Because of the guy co-writing and guest starring in it: Jason Segel.
If you don't know who Jason Segel is, or if you do know who he is but can't quite imagine him being involved with the Muppets (or any PG comedy), I advise you to click here and watch a pretty awesome video (because I had no idea he did any sort of puppetry).
Why, you ask? Because of the guy co-writing and guest starring in it: Jason Segel.
If you don't know who Jason Segel is, or if you do know who he is but can't quite imagine him being involved with the Muppets (or any PG comedy), I advise you to click here and watch a pretty awesome video (because I had no idea he did any sort of puppetry).
05 November 2010
Post 237
[NOTE: this post is lengthy because I'm writing it for mostly cathartic reasons. If you want to learn some interesting stuff without finding out how I myself found this stuff, just hop down to the very bottom of the post and read my findings. Otherwise, get comfy: you're gonna be here a while!]
Years ago--probably more than a decade ago--ya know, back when I was in high school--my Sunday school teacher (who had previously been my bishop) was in the habit of writing a quote on the board before class started each week. One week, it was a quote from Goethe. I don't recall how my Sunday school teacher rendered the quote, but I've always thought it was "Choose well, for your choice is brief yet endless."
I like that. I think it's very fine. Stirring, poignant. Recently I've been thinking about it a lot, and I decided that I wanted to know what the actual quote was and where it came from.
The most common rendering of the quote it, "Choose well; your choice is brief, and yet endless," though it can be found with just "yet" and just "and" and even with "but" instead of either. It appears on many, many quote pages, usually attributed to Goethe but never any of his works. I Googled and Googled and Googled trying to figure out where it came from, hoping that I could find the original German and figure out whether the double conjunction was a vital part of the quote or just the most famous translation.
Usually, if something can be found on the internet, I can find it through Google in no more than a few searches and a couple of minutes, but it took me, like, two hours to find the information I'm about to share with you, and I hope that by collecting my findings here on my blog I can aid future researchers with their quest.
The first thing I discovered is that Masons love this little line, and the reason they love it is that it came from a poem Goethe wrote about Masons (Goethe was one himself). But none of the sites about Masons and Masonry said anything about the original poem except that it was translated into English by Thomas Carlyle, and it's Carlyle's English translation that they always talked about.
Carlyle's translation (entitled "The Mason Lodge") is where the quote comes from. I looked at a few different pages that had the full poem, but they all gave Carlyle's version without any mention as to what he translated it from. But then--a breakthrough.
I found a website that had English versions of three Goethe poems about Masonry: "The Mason Lodge" translated by Carlyle, "A Symbol" translated by Edgar Alfred Bowring, and "Song Of Fellowship" also translated by Bowring. The important thing, though, is that the website says that Carlyle's "The Mason Lodge" and Bowring's "A Symbol" "are both translations of the same original, written in 1827, but so different that they even have different titles!" (source link).
"A ha!" I thought. "I'll just compare the line in the two different poems and see which I like better!"
Not that easy: Carlyle's "Choose well; your choice is / Brief and yet endless" corresponds to Bowring's "To do what is best, Unceasing endeavour!"
Somebody cheated!
I got this far in my quest in a few searches and a couple of minutes, but the puzzle I found here propelled me through my desperate search for the next few hours.
I still don't know where Carlyle's translation was published, but I found (courtesy of Google Books) a book by Bowring called The Poems of Goethe Translated in the Original Metres. I found "A Symbol" in there and found a footnote that said, "This fine poem is given by Goethe amongst a small collection of what he calls Loge (Lodge), meaning thereby Masonic pieces."
Because Bowring was interested in maintaining "the original metres," I thought that perhaps his title for the poem would resemble the original title more closely than Carlyle's, so I used a few different online translators to translate "symbol" into German, and they all gave me "zeichen."
I looked and looked for something by Goethe that had "Zeichen" or "Loge" in its title, and I found nothing except a book called Wielands Andenken in der Loge Amalia, which I could find no machine-searchable version of. I looked to see if BYU's library had a copy, and they do--on microfiche.
No good.
I Googled the web for anything that talked about Carlyle and Goethe or Bowring and Goethe; I searched for websites that had side-by-side English and German versions of Goethe's poems; I searched Wikipedia for the quote; I perused Goethe's and Carlyle's Wikipedia pages--couldn't find a thing.
I actually gave up after a while. I decided that there was no way I was going to find the original poem and decided that I would just compare the number of pages Google came up with when I searched for the quote with various conjunctions, with and without quotation marks, appending Carlyle -Goethe and -Carlyle Goethe to see who was most often given credit for the quote--all this just to know what the most common version of the quote was and who the author is most commonly supposed to be.
I learned a funny thing about Google search results a couple years ago in a class I was taking: when you search for something, and Google tells you it's come up with, say, "about 21,900 results," if you go to the bottom of the page and hop over to the very last page of results, you often find that Google only actually found, like, 153 results (those numbers come from a quick search of "brief and yet endless" [with quotation marks]). I kept this in mind as I tried to figure out which version of the quote produced the most pages, and that's why magic happened.
On the very last page of a search for the quote and Goethe and Carlyle, I found a page in German. I can't read German, but I understood well enough the phrase "Goethe und Carlyle" and I recognized a new word: Symbolum.
Symbolum??? That's not German--that's Latin!
Ah, mais bein sur! This is the 1820s we're talking about--of course the title's going to be in Latin!
I Googled Goethe Symbolum and found a Wikipedia page called "Symbolum." This page only exists in German Wikipedia, but I glanced over it and--hallelujah!--the poem was there. I had Google translate the page, and then I looked at the poem and found my line: "Missed practice not to / The forces of good!"
grumbleWORTHLESSgrumbleCRUMMYgrumblegrumbleAUTOMATEDTRANSLATIONgrumblegrowlgrumble
But at least now I had the title of the original poem. Early on in my searching, I had found a website that had the poems of Goethe in both German and English, but it had been useless to me because it had the poems organized alphabetically by German title, and they didn't have a poem called Zeichen or Loge. Now, knowing that the poem is actually called "Symbolum," I Googled my way back to that site and found the poem in both German and English.
The end of my quest, you think? Wrong: it had Carlyle's translation!
Gar!
I kept looking, but all the sites I found used either Carlyle's or Bowring's translation, so I gave up on that. I went back to the German Wikipedia page for "Symbolum" and found the line I was looking for and then hopped over to Babylon online translation and translated the words one at a time.
This, of course, gave me something that was no better (even a little worse) than Google Translation's version.
In a fit of futility, I copy-pasted the entire phrase into Babylon, and that's when I finally found what I was looking for: "Do not fail to exercise the forces of good."
So Carlyle and Bowring were both cheating: neither one of them came anywhere near what the original German said!
At least now I know....
So here are the lessons learned:
1) Babylon online translation is amazing. To be able to identify and translate an imperative phrase is very impressive to me (that is assuming, of course, that it actually is an imperative phrase; I don't know German, so I really can't say for sure, but the translation sounds very convincing).
2) Perhaps everything I could ever want to know is on the internet, but sometimes it's very hard to find.
3) [and this is the important one:] "Choose well; your choice is brief and yet endless" is 100% Carlyle! It may have been inspired by Goethe, but it doesn't even approximate anything Goethe wrote, so it probably ought to be attributed to Carlyle instead. (Even though I still have no idea where Carlyle published his translation, his version is so consistent from one website to the next that there's no real reason to doubt the double conjunction.)
Years ago--probably more than a decade ago--ya know, back when I was in high school--my Sunday school teacher (who had previously been my bishop) was in the habit of writing a quote on the board before class started each week. One week, it was a quote from Goethe. I don't recall how my Sunday school teacher rendered the quote, but I've always thought it was "Choose well, for your choice is brief yet endless."
I like that. I think it's very fine. Stirring, poignant. Recently I've been thinking about it a lot, and I decided that I wanted to know what the actual quote was and where it came from.
The most common rendering of the quote it, "Choose well; your choice is brief, and yet endless," though it can be found with just "yet" and just "and" and even with "but" instead of either. It appears on many, many quote pages, usually attributed to Goethe but never any of his works. I Googled and Googled and Googled trying to figure out where it came from, hoping that I could find the original German and figure out whether the double conjunction was a vital part of the quote or just the most famous translation.
Usually, if something can be found on the internet, I can find it through Google in no more than a few searches and a couple of minutes, but it took me, like, two hours to find the information I'm about to share with you, and I hope that by collecting my findings here on my blog I can aid future researchers with their quest.
The first thing I discovered is that Masons love this little line, and the reason they love it is that it came from a poem Goethe wrote about Masons (Goethe was one himself). But none of the sites about Masons and Masonry said anything about the original poem except that it was translated into English by Thomas Carlyle, and it's Carlyle's English translation that they always talked about.
Carlyle's translation (entitled "The Mason Lodge") is where the quote comes from. I looked at a few different pages that had the full poem, but they all gave Carlyle's version without any mention as to what he translated it from. But then--a breakthrough.
I found a website that had English versions of three Goethe poems about Masonry: "The Mason Lodge" translated by Carlyle, "A Symbol" translated by Edgar Alfred Bowring, and "Song Of Fellowship" also translated by Bowring. The important thing, though, is that the website says that Carlyle's "The Mason Lodge" and Bowring's "A Symbol" "are both translations of the same original, written in 1827, but so different that they even have different titles!" (source link).
"A ha!" I thought. "I'll just compare the line in the two different poems and see which I like better!"
Not that easy: Carlyle's "Choose well; your choice is / Brief and yet endless" corresponds to Bowring's "To do what is best, Unceasing endeavour!"
Somebody cheated!
I got this far in my quest in a few searches and a couple of minutes, but the puzzle I found here propelled me through my desperate search for the next few hours.
I still don't know where Carlyle's translation was published, but I found (courtesy of Google Books) a book by Bowring called The Poems of Goethe Translated in the Original Metres. I found "A Symbol" in there and found a footnote that said, "This fine poem is given by Goethe amongst a small collection of what he calls Loge (Lodge), meaning thereby Masonic pieces."
Because Bowring was interested in maintaining "the original metres," I thought that perhaps his title for the poem would resemble the original title more closely than Carlyle's, so I used a few different online translators to translate "symbol" into German, and they all gave me "zeichen."
I looked and looked for something by Goethe that had "Zeichen" or "Loge" in its title, and I found nothing except a book called Wielands Andenken in der Loge Amalia, which I could find no machine-searchable version of. I looked to see if BYU's library had a copy, and they do--on microfiche.
No good.
I Googled the web for anything that talked about Carlyle and Goethe or Bowring and Goethe; I searched for websites that had side-by-side English and German versions of Goethe's poems; I searched Wikipedia for the quote; I perused Goethe's and Carlyle's Wikipedia pages--couldn't find a thing.
I actually gave up after a while. I decided that there was no way I was going to find the original poem and decided that I would just compare the number of pages Google came up with when I searched for the quote with various conjunctions, with and without quotation marks, appending Carlyle -Goethe and -Carlyle Goethe to see who was most often given credit for the quote--all this just to know what the most common version of the quote was and who the author is most commonly supposed to be.
I learned a funny thing about Google search results a couple years ago in a class I was taking: when you search for something, and Google tells you it's come up with, say, "about 21,900 results," if you go to the bottom of the page and hop over to the very last page of results, you often find that Google only actually found, like, 153 results (those numbers come from a quick search of "brief and yet endless" [with quotation marks]). I kept this in mind as I tried to figure out which version of the quote produced the most pages, and that's why magic happened.
On the very last page of a search for the quote and Goethe and Carlyle, I found a page in German. I can't read German, but I understood well enough the phrase "Goethe und Carlyle" and I recognized a new word: Symbolum.
Symbolum??? That's not German--that's Latin!
Ah, mais bein sur! This is the 1820s we're talking about--of course the title's going to be in Latin!
I Googled Goethe Symbolum and found a Wikipedia page called "Symbolum." This page only exists in German Wikipedia, but I glanced over it and--hallelujah!--the poem was there. I had Google translate the page, and then I looked at the poem and found my line: "Missed practice not to / The forces of good!"
grumbleWORTHLESSgrumbleCRUMMYgrumblegrumbleAUTOMATEDTRANSLATIONgrumblegrowlgrumble
But at least now I had the title of the original poem. Early on in my searching, I had found a website that had the poems of Goethe in both German and English, but it had been useless to me because it had the poems organized alphabetically by German title, and they didn't have a poem called Zeichen or Loge. Now, knowing that the poem is actually called "Symbolum," I Googled my way back to that site and found the poem in both German and English.
The end of my quest, you think? Wrong: it had Carlyle's translation!
Gar!
I kept looking, but all the sites I found used either Carlyle's or Bowring's translation, so I gave up on that. I went back to the German Wikipedia page for "Symbolum" and found the line I was looking for and then hopped over to Babylon online translation and translated the words one at a time.
This, of course, gave me something that was no better (even a little worse) than Google Translation's version.
In a fit of futility, I copy-pasted the entire phrase into Babylon, and that's when I finally found what I was looking for: "Do not fail to exercise the forces of good."
So Carlyle and Bowring were both cheating: neither one of them came anywhere near what the original German said!
At least now I know....
So here are the lessons learned:
1) Babylon online translation is amazing. To be able to identify and translate an imperative phrase is very impressive to me (that is assuming, of course, that it actually is an imperative phrase; I don't know German, so I really can't say for sure, but the translation sounds very convincing).
2) Perhaps everything I could ever want to know is on the internet, but sometimes it's very hard to find.
3) [and this is the important one:] "Choose well; your choice is brief and yet endless" is 100% Carlyle! It may have been inspired by Goethe, but it doesn't even approximate anything Goethe wrote, so it probably ought to be attributed to Carlyle instead. (Even though I still have no idea where Carlyle published his translation, his version is so consistent from one website to the next that there's no real reason to doubt the double conjunction.)
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