A fortiori, the internet

Very little is read. This is the fact dissimulated by the enormous diffusion of authors and books.

-- Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation at 134.

Poetry break

Scott Horton translates a poem by Nietzsche:

The Lonely One

I detest following, but also leading.
To obey? Never! And just as bad--to govern!
He who wishes not to be terrified, will summon no terror for others:
Yet only he who peddles fear can lead others.
I even detest having to lead myself!
Like the creatures of the forest and the sea, I love
To lose myself for a while,
In meek error thoughtfully to cower,
Drawn home at length by distant things,
Being enticed by myself to my Self.

I think Kaufmann says somewhere that Nietzsche is a "good bad poet" per Orwell's definition, sort of a German Kipling.

(Commas added per Horton's transcription of the German text.)

When reading the review is more fun than reading the book

This being an Auster novel, accidents visit the narrative like automobiles falling from the sky.

-- James Wood, reviewing Paul Auster's new novel and generally hatin' on Auster in general.

The relationship of this review to Wood's laurels for the collected stories of Auster's ex-wife, Lydia Davis, would make a good subject for a 3-page Davis story, or "story," or whatever the hell those things are. I'm halfway through the Davis, and thinking that avant-garde belles lettres are a bit beyond me.

Dead poets

Via Bookslut, Poetsgraves.co.uk. Some of the pix (such as of Byron's various plaques) cry out to be enlargeable, but still, very cool. Of course they include what may be the second-most-famous poet-grave in England, Plath's. But not just English sites -- Baudelaire's, for instance.

... I have to believe that Shakespeare's grave is the most famous.


When I was 8 or 9, I read a horror comic about grave-robbers snatching Sh're's bones. The bones were NOT amused.

But my insurance STILL won't pay for my Scotch

More on the wonder drug, alcohol:

Drinking alcohol every day cuts the risk of heart disease in men by more than a third, a major study suggests. * * *

The study was conducted in Spain, a country with relatively high rates of alcohol consumption and low rates of coronary heart disease. * * *

For those drinking little - less than a shot of vodka a day for instance - the risk was reduced by 35%. And for those who drank anything from three shots to more than 11 shots each day, the risk worked out an average of 50% less.

The same benefits were not seen in women, who suffer fewer heart problems than men to start with. Researchers speculated this difference could be down to the fact that women process alcohol differently, and that female hormones protect against the disease in younger age groups.

The type of alcohol drunk did not seem to make a difference, but protection was greater for those drinking moderate to high amounts of varied drinks.

The exact mechanisms are as yet unclear, but it is known that alcohol helps to raise high-density lipoproteins, sometimes known as good cholesterol, which helps stop so-called bad cholesterol from building up in the arteries.

Of course, the Brits are appalled at the reckless Spaniards:

UK experts said the findings should be treated with caution because they do not take into account ill-health from a range of other diseases caused by excess drinking.

"Whilst [Whilst! I love it! -TBA] moderate alcohol intake can lower the risk of having a heart attack, coronary heart disease is just one type of heart disease. Cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle, is associated with high alcohol intake and can lead to a poor quality of life and premature death," said the British Heart Foundation's senior cardiac nurse, Cathy Ross.

"The heart is just one of many organs in the body. While alcohol could offer limited protection to one organ, abuse of it can damage the heart and other organs such as the liver, pancreas and brain."

The Stroke Association meanwhile noted that overall, evidence indicated that people who regularly consumed a large amount of alcohol had a three-fold increased risk of stroke.

Even the Brits concede that moderate drinking is probably good for you, nonetheless. TBA has one drink most days, zero drinks some days, 2 or 3 on one day a week at most.

"Officer, my son won't eat his broccoli -- would you please tase him?"

That seems to be the next logical step:

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - A prosecutor wants Arkansas State Police to open a criminal investigation after an Ozark police officer used a Taser on a 10-year-old girl.

David Gibbons, the prosecuting attorney for the 5th Judicial District, made the request Thursday in a letter to state police director Col. Winford Phillips.

State police spokesman Bill Sadler says Phillips received the request and passed it along to the commander of the agency's criminal investigation division. Those two officials will discuss the request.

Police were called to the home Nov. 11 after the girl's mother couldn't get her to take a shower. Officer Dustin Bradshaw's report says the girl was "violently kicking and verbally combative" when Bradshaw tried to take her into custody.

He said he delivered "a very brief drive stun to her back."

The Smoking Gun has the incident report:

According to the below Ozark Police Department report, when Officer Dustin Bradshaw arrived at the residence last Thursday, he found the girl "screaming, kicking, and resisting every time her mother tried to touch her." Bradshaw added that, "Her mother told me to tase her if I needed to." After Kiara continued to refuse her mother's instructions, the cop concluded that "there was not going to be a peaceful resolution of the issue." Bradshaw warned the girl that she was "going to jail," but the child continued kicking and crying and resisted his attempt to handcuff her. During the tussle, Kiara "struck me with her legs and feet in the groin, reported Bradshaw, who countered with a brief "stun to her back" with his Taser. The child, not surprisingly, "immediately stopped resisting and was placed into handcuffs. She would not walk on her own and I had to carry her to my police car."

21st-century parenting. Just one of the many services of the modern State.

(Alternate post title: "Don't tase me, Mom!")

It's a constant of nature, like Planck's

Kevin Drum is astonished that 52% of Republicans think ACORN somehow stole the 2008 election for Obama:

There aren't words for this. Something like 40 million Republicans are now convinced that ACORN (!) somehow managed to steal an election that McCain lost by seven percentage points. Another 20 million think they might have stolen it but aren't sure. The Fox/Limbaugh/Palin axis, which probably directly reaches maybe 10 million people on a regular basis, has nonetheless convinced six times that number to buy into a conspiracy theory that makes the Area 51 crowd look sane by comparison.

Drum's chart however makes the answer clear: 26% of all persons polled buy the ACORN theory. And that's well within the margin of error of the 27% Crazification Factor.

John: You realize this leads to there being over 30 million crazy people in the US?

Tyrone: Does that seem wrong?

John: ... a bit low, actually.

Against italics

And this is why the practice of putting single words into italics for emphasis (again the Victorians are guilty) is so vulgar; a well-constructed sentence should be able to carry a stress on any of its words and should show in itself how these stresses are to be compounded. Both in prose and poetry, it is the impression that implications of this sort have been handled with more judgment than you yourself realise, that with this language as text innumerable further meanings, which you do not know, could be deduced, that forces you to feel respect for a style.

-- William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. 28.

... We might concede his point for poetry, but does it really carry over to prose? Note that what Empson asserts is that level emphasis is what "forces respect" because it implies that the text has more meanings than we realize, perhaps than we can realize. (Oops, see, there I go.)

Polysemy would not seem to me to be indispensable for respecting a work's style. It rather seems to assume the desirability of a "stylistic sublime," which is corroborated in some degree by Empson's saying that polysemy "forces respect"; force and respect are elements of the sublime. But we can admire a style that is clear and unambiguous, at least for some purposes.

Note Empson's definition of poetry:

... two statements are made as if they were connected, and the reader is forced to consider their relations for himself. The reason why these facts should have been selected for a poem is left for him to invent; he will invent a variety of reasons and order them in his own mind. This, I think, is the essential fact about the poetical use of language.

(P. 25; emphasis, of course, added.) In other words, parataxis is the essence of poetry.

That is the exact opposite of what rhetorical prose seeks to do: it wants the reader to carry away exactly one meaning and thus to be persuaded in the manner the author intends. Naturally, TBA thinks of lawyers' briefs. Courts do, to their sorrow, occasionally confront briefs of which they are "forced to consider their relations" and to "order them in their own mind," but they are not typically pleased to be put to the labor, and it does not bode well for the poetical brief writer's chances of success.

And in briefs, certainly, TBA frequently resorts to italics (I try to reserve boldface for blockquotes). A poet may owe his reader the respect of supposing that said reader is unreservedly literate, educated, attentive to nuance, and replete with free time. These are not assumptions I would make about judicial clerks and their supervising judges, and I daresay those readers would not want me to make that assumption. If well-placed italics can help them avoid wondering what the main point is supposed to be, then bring 'em on.

Sarah Palin, fluent in English AND German!

Palin on Israeli settlements:

I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead.

Shorter Palin: Lebensraum, baby, Lebensraum!

H/t Matt Yglesias, who spells things out:

But of course the population of the United States is growing. Does that mean we should start colonizing portions of Canada? Almost every country is experiencing population growth--and that growth with be accommodated within those countries’ boundaries. After all, the population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is also growing. Should their be Palestinian settlements inside Israel?

Silly Matt fails to realize that Israel is entitled to enjoy the population density of Alaska, a/k/a God's Country.

Not Bush's worst AG, but most disappointing

Scott Horton tears Michael Mukasey a new one:

Former Bush Administration Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey addressed the Federalist Society only hours after his successor, Eric Holder, announced his plan to bring a group of Guantánamo prisoners up on federal charges in Manhattan. He offered harsh words, claiming that the trials would prove a “circus.” Such attacks on the nation’s criminal justice system have become routine on the political right. * * *

Will the trials be a “circus”? No doubt there will be a circus on Fox News and in the pages of the Weekly Standard. But in the courtroom? An example is furnished by the case of the “blind sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman, tried in a New York courtroom in 1995. The government charged that he planned to set off five bombs simultaneously, striking the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, and a federal building housing the FBI. They showed videotapes of defendants mixing bomb ingredients in a garage before their arrest in 1993. The trial was a major test of the ability of prosecutors to present a terrorism case and of federal judges to manage it. The defendants wanted to use the case to turn themselves into martyrs, but the case was handled with exemplary decorum and fairness, producing convictions in 1995. There was no “circus.” The judge who presided over the case made his reputation through it. His name is Michael Mukasey.

What a sad, sad little man. No one ever had high hopes of Ashcroft or Gonzales, but many (including Horton) hoped for better from Mukasey. They erred.

Pia fraus?

The reviewer is justifiably bemused by a book entitled Pious Nietzsche:

The argument in this volume is that Nietzsche retained his native Pietism. He was brought up in a Pietist home and broke away from the beliefs which it housed, but he did not thereby cease to be religious or pious. He aspired to become a disciple of Dionysus, a devotee of Life, of which Dionysus is the symbol. This determination to pursue a way of life is rightly called "piety" when we observe the continuities between Nietzsche's background Pietism and his later quest. His Pietism was a way of life rather than a set of doctrines. The form remains where the content changes. In pursuit of what changes, Nietzsche sought out a musical askesis. Benson explores this carefully. Ask sis is a form of spiritual exercise in self-transformation. It is not identical with asceticism, which carries connotations of bodily denial. It is affirmative of bodily life as well as negative toward spiritual sickness and the enemy of decadence, also carefully explored by the author, which Nietzsche self-consciously fought in himself. * * *

* * * a question goes unanswered: what difference does it make whether or not we regard Nietzsche as pious in Benson's sense or religious in any sense? It surely strains language beyond what is permissible to describe the mature Nietzsche as a kind of theist, but I shall not pause here to quarrel over language or, for that matter, to analyze types of Pietism and therefore the language of "piety." Nietzsche is called pious in this volume because of certain structural similarities between his Dionysian faith and Pietism, abstractly considered (the latter is shorn of its Christian content). Possibly Nietzsche was "pious" in a sense arrived at by (relative) abstraction; possibly Nietzsche should be called "religious" in some non-trivial sense of that word. But what does it matter? What exactly do we forfeit if we refuse to call him "religious" or "pious"?

But when we're presented with a book arguing for a religious Nietzsche, we should respond as did Dr. Johnson with regard to the woman preacher: it matters less whether it's done well, than that someone tried to do it at all?

QOTD

My concern is these students are in this developmental phase, and I don't think it's a good developmental practice to just tell somebody to just sit around and masturbate. I don't think that promotes relationships.

-- Father Joe Vetter, of the Duke (Univ.) Catholic Center, re: an on-campus study recruiting Duke coeds to participate in "sex-toy parties" a la Tupperware, in which they will "view sex toys and engage in sexually explicit conversation with other female Duke students."

Father Vetter's concern is for the students' souls; TBA is still just trying to figure out how the "behavioral economics" guys got this past the school's human-research ethics committee. And when the videotaped interviews will hit the internet.

Michael Schoenfeld, Duke's vice president for public affairs, said that all kinds of research are important on university campuses and that the sex toy party project went through a peer review process before any students were sought.

"Not all research will make people comfortable," Schoenfeld said.

But evidently, some research will make some people very comfortable indeed.

(H/t Tyler Cowen.)

Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike ...

I guess you either like "Tyler Durden's" kind of humor or you don't, but I do, so:

Fight Club’ is unquestionably the best movie ever made, and tomorrow, finally, it comes out on Blu-Ray and a special DVD to celebrate its 10th anniversary. In high school me and my friends used to get together and fight for no reason other than to do it, and that was before this was even a movie, so maybe that’s why it still resonates with me. I mean we didn’t actually punch each other, because I would have been frightened and I didn’t have any friends, but on Friday night I would make popcorn balls with my mom, and she would send me to my room if I ate too many and then I would kick my stuffed animals, so in that sense it was still very much like ‘Fight Club’.

... In unrelated but similarly lurid news, Belle de Jour reveals herself. "Who?" you ask. You have spent your time on the web much too responsibly. But you can change that.

Surreal Sarah

"Surreal" is, to TBA, the proper word for the spectacle of Steve Schmidt, in his role as campaign advisor to John McCain, Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States of America, trying to convince McCain's choice for vice-president that evolution is a fact:

"But your dad's a science teacher," Schmidt objected. "Yes." "Then you know that science proves evolution," added Schmidt. "Parts of evolution," I said. "But I believe that God created us and also that He can create an evolutionary process that allows species to change and adapt." Schmidt winced and raised his eyebrows. In the dim light, his sunglasses shifted atop his head. I had just dared to mention the C-word: creationism. But I felt I was on solid factual ground.

Has Sarah Palin ever in all her born days *not* "felt she was on solid factual ground"?

(Hint to Sarah: a species that changes and adapts, becomes another species.)

Please refrain from glorifying the terrorists

Matt Yglesias puts it very well:

In political terms, the right likes the war idea because it involves taking terrorism more “seriously.” But in doing so, you partake of way too much of the terrorists’ narrative about themselves. It’s their conceit, after all, that blowing up a bomb in a train station and killing a few hundred random commuters is an act of war. And war is a socially sanctioned form of activity, generally held to be a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people. What we want to say, however, is that this sporadic commuter-killing isn’t a kind of war, it’s an act of murder. To be sure, not an ordinary murder--a mass murder--but nonetheless murder. * * *

After all, do we really want to send the message to the world that a self-starting spree killer like Nidal Malik Hasan is actually engaged in some kind of act of holy war? It seems to me that we don’t. A lot of people in the world are interested in glory, and willing to take serious risks with their lives for its sake. Insofar as possible, we want to drain anti-American violence of the aura of glory. And that means by-and-large treating its perpetrators like criminals.

It's like if the Fort Hood shooter had killed 3,000 people and we decided that was "war" (but executed him anyway).

If Khalid Sheikh Muhammad plotted the 9/11 attacks as an act of war, then we should be ruefully praising his ingenuity. How is 9/11 more of a war crime than Dresden or Nagasaki? But it's not an act of war. Al-Qaeda doesn't get to "declare war" any more than Tim McVeigh did. It's not a sovereign state. It's a criminal organization, like the Mafia, and its members need to be put on trial like the criminals they are, rather than like the warriors they fantasize themselves to be.

At the most extreme, one could suggest that the Right insists on calling the terrorists "soldiers" because the Right shares the terrorists' fantasy of private insurgency against the American government. But that is another story.