Staying Equal With The Joneses

John Holbo has a lively discussion going on over at Crooked Timber. He quotes David Frum:

Where you find many different lifestyles and races; where you find singles, immigrants, and gays; where you find high-rise buildings, country estates, and really great take-out – there you find inequality. After all, what is inequality but another form of “diversity”? And what is “equality” but another word for homogeneity? Communities with lots of married families, lots of single-family homes, and low proportions of nonwhite minorities and single people – communities that Democrats and liberals would inwardly disparage as “white bread” – are communities in which people tend to earn similar amounts of money.

Here's the simplified version:

diversity = inequality (boo!)
homogeneity = equality (yay!)

It's very clever doublespeak when you can pitch the Republican-dominated suburbs as the road to egalitarianism. Just think how great everything would be without all those darn nonwhite minorities and single people. Has anyone suggested this as a talking point for Mitt Romney yet?

Now how do we know that Frum is arguing in bad faith? Because he begins with this pleasant thought:

It’s an observable fact that those voters who care most deeply about equality – deeply enough to organize their lives to live in egalitarian communities – overwhelmingly vote Republican.

Yes, that's right. The suburbs were established not out of white flight but because white people and white Republicans "care most deeply about equality." It's all about the common good and happy go lucky communal living out here in the suburbs. Republican Communism. That's got to be the response to Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. Right?

The debate in the comments is pretty intense: Michael Bérubé puts in his very welcome two cents and someone called Lemuel Pitkin and someone called Grand Moff Texan go at it with tooth and claw. You can also learn about something called the Gini index which measures income inequality (or at least I think it does).

When I Lived Alone...

How it's done:



Nice Gibson.

A New Pornographers Quiz

Pick the BEST answer:

• The New Pornographers are a Canadian "Supergroup"
• A.C. Newman is a genius of Pop
  
• You only listen for the Dan Bejar songs anyway
• No one in this band is called Feist
  
• You wish you were a tambourine

There Will Always Be a Morrissey

A four star review for Morrissey in the Times:

That he is comfortable with that legacy was confirmed by his decision to open his first UK show in nearly two years with How Soon is Now. The song was as you remember it, but the singer - who sang much of it while lying against the drum riser - bore only a passing resemblance to the effete young thing who sang it in 1984.

If the greying quiff, brown shirt and tie gave Morrissey the air of a hard-bitten Seventies football manager - in the Brian Clough or Don Revie mould - the parallels seemed apt. He addressed the crowd with a brisk: “Hello, West Ham”. His band, too, played with a fists-up zeal, redolent of football teams that emerge from the tunnel to a world that they're told wants them to fall flat on their faces.

Who even knows what half of that means? My anglophilia draws a line at futbol jibber-jabber. Still it's funny that Morrissey is criticized for having outdated notions of Englishness when you try to parse that description.

All the same, it's an astute review that reminds us that the Smiths were a long time ago, Johnny Marr wasn't all that, and these are the good old days when it comes to the world of Moz.

Led Zeppelin Animation

Ectomo directs our attention to artist and animator Steve Scott, who in addition to be an excellent illustrator also did the background projection for Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" during their recent reunion.

Yacht Rock Classic

This is from back in the November, but worth the mental health break: a spot-on yacht-rock version of the New Pornographer's "It's Only Divine Right." Personally, I'm OK with the Doobie Brothers but it's still kind of funny:

Melville and Madness

In the fourth of his lectures, Milch starts off with more Kierkegaard, but having made his point, goes off on a tangent about Herman Melville that turns into a graduate seminar:

• Melville the simple travel writer who gives us simple tales of the Pacific, whaling, and pretty island girls.
  
• Melville who in his early career is a big success.
  
• Melville whose greatest work, Moby Dick, is a hopelessly boring novel, cataloging in excruciatingly dull detail every aspect of the whaling business, its tools, rituals, and practices.
  
• The average reader hates it. But feels guilty for hating it. And just wants to finish it so they can read something else!
  
• And why? In order to get to the good stuff, Melville must ground you in that world. He must demonstrate without a doubt that the madness of Ahab and the great White Whale spring only from the unknowable heart of the captain of and the uncontrollable violence of the oceans and the sea. The book is nearly impossible to read because Melville must convince you that Ahab's obsession is his own, and that it goes beyond the rational.
• With the closing chapters, that's what you get. An epic, biblical battle of man and beast.
  
• But, with Moby Dick, Melville himself seems to lose his ability to see the relationship between ideas and things. He abandons logic and his every sentence destroys itself with contradiction and irrationality. He has become alienated from those impulses that made for safe, popular fiction.
• Until, that is, late in life he rediscovers the ability of imaginative association and writes Billy Budd.
  

It's a fascinating reading of the work, and as I am still reading Moby Dick (having for years shared that same guilt over never having finished it) I found it encouraging and look forward to the Chase, First Day when Ahab and the Whale take center stage.

Kierkegaard Quote

Here's the bit from Kierkegaard that Milch likes to quote (and as difficult as it is to read Kierkegaard, this does not seem like the best translation):

Such a derived, constituted, relation is the human self, a relation which relates itself to its own self, and in relating itself to its own self relates itself to another. Hence it is that there can be two forms of despair properly so called. If the human self had constituted itself, there could be a question only of one form, that of not willing to be one’s own self, of willing to get rid of oneself, but there would be no question of despairingly willing to be oneself. This formula [i.e. that the self is constituted by another] is the expression for the total dependence of the relation (the self namely), the expression for the fact that the self cannot of itself attain and remain in equilibrium and rest by itself, but only by relating itself to that Power which constituted the whole relation. Indeed, so far is it from being true that this second form of despair (despair at willing to be one’s own self) denotes only a particular kind of despair, that on the contrary all despair can in the last analysis be reduced to this. If a man in despair is as he thinks conscious of his despair, does not talk about it meaninglessly as of something which befell him (pretty much as when a man who suffers from vertigo talks with nervous self-deception about a weight upon his head or about its being like something falling upon him, etc., this weight and this pressure being in fact not something external but an inverse reflection from an inward experience), and if by himself and by himself only he would abolish the despair, then by all the labor he expends he is only laboring himself deeper into a deeper despair. The disrelationship of despair is not a simple disrelationship but a disrelationship in a relation which relates itself to its own self and is constituted by another, so that the disrelationship in that self-relation reflects itself infinitely in the relation to the Power which constituted it.

This then is the formula which describes the condition of the self when despair is completely eradicated: by relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it.

Talk Amongst Yourselves, Part 3

Milch wants us to move from the fanciful associations we have to the imaginative associations we can share with others.

From "Tell Me A Story" by Robert Penn Warren:

Tell me a story.


In this century, and moment, of mania,

Tell me a story.


Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.


The name of the story will be Time,

But you must not pronounce its name.


Tell me a story of deep delight.

Later, we learn that writing is the process of accumulating images so that the fanciful associations of the dead past are transformed into imaginative associations in the future tense of joy.

We must rest transparently in the spirit that gives us rise and reject despair. If we cannot rest transparently, and force upon it a form and logic, then we are in despair. Resting transparently requires faith.

(This notion of despair comes from Kierkegaard).

Anything you think about writing when not writing is wrong. The outline is an expression of despair.

Talk Amongst Yourselves, Part 2

More from Milch. On Paul as a writer:

That sense of being on a roll allows us to infer that the excellence of the message is based on the principles of association of its components.

We think: "oh it's the content of what he's saying." And because of all our experiences of religion, we think, "yeah, yeah, yeah, it's very good, very good thinking."

But that ain't what's going on.

It's the juxtaposition of things and the way that one begets the next until finally we have a sense of the comprehensiveness of what is being said by its rhythms and juxtapositions.

I will tell you later in this conversation or another one that content tests and verifies the implicit assumptions of form. And Paul's religious vision affirms at the level of content the perfection of the communication which he accomplishes because he has given his soul to God.

And this was a guy that did a murder.

In other words, in order to write, you must have faith in what you're doing. He reads a passage from Paul (1 Corinthians 13) and continues:

If you give your heart to the encounter with those words, you will know how to write. Because Paul had given himself the logic and it led him to murder, but the principle of association ...

Remember yesterday, I was saying, the idea that, any idea that is based on subject/object relationships (I and it, the thinker and the thought) must ultimately generate logic as its organizing principle. And must be wrong.

And logic murders faith.

That's why I don't use an outline. Because an outline is an expression of fear, and I must trust that the spirit will move with me.

I know what it is to murder and to want to be in the temple and I've been blessed to have heard the voice ask me why I persecute it. Every writer does. The trick is to train yourself to listen.

Heavy stuff. Poetic nonsense. Profound. (It's also important to note that he's speaking without notes -- true to form. Putting these ideas together as if they're coming off the top of his head).

Talk Amongst Yourselves

Topics for further study taken from David Milch's first lecture:

• Paul the Apostle
• The Bicameral Mind
• Echolalia is Tourette's, Glossolalia is "speaking in tongues"

Main Ideas:

• Disregard for organizing principles
• Faith through works

No Outlines

A series of lectures given in December by David Milch are now available online. Milch is famous for his work on Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, Deadwood, and most recently John From Cincinnati.

These lectures are brilliant, challenging, hugely entertaining, and sometimes maddening. There's no question that Milch is a talented writer, but his real gift is telling stories in the old-fashioned mode of the raconteur. He's the loudest guy in the bar and he can talk all night to anyone willing to listen. And of course it has to be bar because Milch comes from the school of writing for tough guys -- hard drinkers, drug abusers, wife beaters, guys with "boundary issues." If you want to be a writer you better come from alcoholic parents who beat you to sleep every night while they gambled away the family fortune and left you with a child molester for a baby sitter. If you're going to write, you've got to get down and dirty, and bring it, because Milch is the kind of guy who will wrestle you to the ground and beat you with his words until you cry uncle. This is serious stuff here.

There's a lot of psychologizing in Milch's thought process. For him, the writer is a deeply wounded person who through childhood traumas has been made to feel apart from the world. Writing is the process the writer uses to bring himself back into the community by transforming those wounds into art. The goal is to be authentic. To be honest and true and not use your writing to bury those wounds or disguise them. You've got to bring them right out into the harsh light and make what's personal and hurtful to you, universal and profound to the reader.

But Milch is not just lecturing, he's telling stories, and the wilder and more obnoxious he gets the more you realize that he's putting on a demonstration. He's proving a point. Your reactions to him are the Q.E.D. of his method because he wants to provoke you. That's what good writing is supposed to do.

No outlines!

That's the thing that gets you, as you sit there listening, trying to be a good student of the "How To Write" school. He offers up no paradigm, no thoughts on 3 act, 4 act, 5 act structure. No recommendations on how to break a story down into beats. For Milch that's the Ego's way of keeping you from writing. You have to get past all of that and write. Writing is writing. Thinking about writing is NOT writing. You've got to dig down into your Id and let it speak.

It's a nice antidote to Dramatica and the Hero's Journey and all of the Structuralist methods you're likely to encounter out there in the marketplace. On the other hand, I remember a lot of wannabe writers from my student days who shared Milch's personality but none of his talent. They wanted to be Beats, to write from their hearts, experience everything, tap into the wild untapped imagination of the world, and sing, sing, O muse. But their work was sloppy, unedited, and often unreadable. They had no discipline, no willingness to rewrite, to critical eye for murdering darlings. Everything they wrote, they assumed, was good, because it had come in the heat of inspiration. Going back would just kill it.

In the end, they failed Milch's last test which is to take what's meaningful to oneself, and tell it in a way that's meaningful to others. He borrows from Coleridge's distinction between Fanciful associations which are mechanical and personal and Imaginative associations which are organic and communal.

Milch also has interesting things to say about St. Paul, Kirkegaard, Melville and many other poetic theories that I didn't quite catch the first time. Well worth another listen.

[via Jill Golick's Running With My Eyes Closed]

NFL Playoffs Round 2

The Saturday games were a testament to the power of over-dogs. We already knew that the Patriots were pretty awesome, but just how awesome are the Green Bay Packers? I think they just might be very, very awesome, and with the Cowboys out of the way we could see Brett Favre doing his John Elway impersonation in the Super Bowl.

The Sunday games were all about the grit and determination of road underdogs overcoming adversity, et cetera and so on.

Next week, the Saturday winners should crush the Sunday winners and in convincing fashion.

Other thoughts:

• The Chargers did an amazing job against Peyton, taking away his arsenal of weapons and forcing him to go with his last option every time.
• The Colts missed Marvin. A lot.
• The turnovers and red zone misses came from the fact that they could not run the ball.
• The Chargers offensive line is the real star of the team. Who knew that it was them and not LT and Rivers et al. Apparently anyone can look like a superstar behind those guys.
• Rivers is a jerk who will unravel against the Pats.
• The Cowboys on the other hand are a team of superstars. They needed T.O. healthy in order to win.
• Romo's play was meaningless.
• Eli Manning played the game of his career and didn't put up big numbers.
• I still can't figure out the Giants. When they win, it doesn't make sense and when they lose it doesn't make sense. Mostly it's just too painful to watch the faces of Coughlin and Manning as they betray their every though and emotion.
  
• I won't say anything against T.O. for crying. I've seen my team go down in flames enough times to know how he feels.
  

The Lunatic is on the Grass: The Echo Maker

I finished Richard Powers's The Echo Maker yesterday and it turned out to be a fantastic book. Even with all the accolades (National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize Nomination) I was still afraid that the novel would be dry, dull, and dreary. And at first it is, but intentionally, as Karin Schluter comes to Nebraska in the wake of her brother's catastrophic car accident, we meet a woman who is not really well equipped for the challenges of life and who easily falls victim to her own moods, emotions, and false hopes. When brother Mark regains consciousness he no longer recognizes his sister but insists that she is an impostor, a cleverly crafted simulation designed to trick him. From here the book surprisingly turns from mere medical drama to an engaging psychological thriller. A page turner, but like nothing I've read before.

The characters in The Echo Maker don't act like characters in books and movies, but more like people you know. They behave inappropriately, say the wrong thing, react emotionally when logic is needed, abuse cool rationality when a kind heart is what is required. They engage, but fail to engage, and conversations that would take two lines in an episode of House take months of introspection to get out. The plot itself, and the central mystery of what happened to Mark the night of the crash is revealed but not in the linear mechanistic way we've grown to expect from the movies. There are clues to be chased down, pieces to be put together, but in the real world there is no one to play detective and put it all together for us. There are bills to be paid, and therapy to go to, and the maddening presence and demands of other people to deal with.

Instead we have a book that evokes genre conventions and then knocks them down. It is a thriller without a hero or a villain, a conspiracy without a They, a ghost story haunted by the living, and horror novel where the only monsters are those in our minds.

The rational savior of the book is Gerald Weber, a neurologist and popular author, who has become famous writing on the bizarre neurological cases he's worked on (a la Oliver Sacks): people who suffer accidents and can no longer form new memories, who can only see things on the left side of their bodies, who believe their close relatives have been replaced by robots, who can no longer distinguish individual faces, etc. But when Dr. Weber comes to Nebraska to save Mark, he suffers a crisis of conscience. His cool rationality is a facade, and he begins to doubt everything he believes about identity and consciousness. He has become more of a storyteller and myth-maker than scientist, and ultimately he fears that his life's work is unethical. It exploits the powerless, gives false hope to broken minds, and can neither provide a cure nor expand our understanding of what's gone wrong.

Throughout the book, neurology is explored in great detail, highlighting the fragility and unknowableness of human consciousness. What we consider to be our coherent selves, is nothing but an illusion created by the complexity of the brain. One break in the system, and the self that we thought we were blinks out of existence, or becomes someone knew and unrecognizable. There is no identity, no memories inside our heads, except the story that we tell ourselves over and over again to make our lives seem coherent and meaningful. Frames in a film that give the illusion of movement.

The cranes that gather each winter on the Platte river in Nebraska become a metaphor for human memory and its fragility. These are creatures that have gathered in the same spot year after year since the time of the dinosaurs and their annual movements provide a symbolic map in the mind of nature. As time passes and humans exploit the resources of the Platte, the ecosystem is threatened, and the birds grower ever closer to extinction. What will become of the Great Plains when this memory is lost, how will the mind of nature be damaged or impaired?

In Margaret Atwood's review, she finds The Wizard of Oz encoded into the story (and why not? OZ is in many ways America's ur-myth): Mark as the Scarecrow, Dr. Weber as the Wizard, Karin as Dorothy. It's a clever reading but not one I caught onto. Perhaps next time I'll listen to Dark Side of the Moon while I read and see what happens (synchronicity, coincidence, anarchist miracles). After all it too speaks of the mysteries of the human mind.

BloggingHeads and Media

A really good BloggingHeads episode on indie rock, media fragmentation, iTunes, the death of CDs, reality television, the writer's strike, and the end of scripted television. It's got everything.

Highlights:

• Indie music was once difficult to hear about, and difficult to get ahold of even if you knew what it was. In the age of media fragmentation everyone already knows everything so there are no surprises, it's easy to hear new bands, and so there's no coolness factor.
  
• Baby Boomer Pathetic Fallacy: "It [music, movies, TV, etc.] no longer speaks to me, I no longer understand it, therefore it's not as good as it used to be."
• iTunes did not curb illegal downloading. It killed off CDs.

The guy from Viacom seems like a nice guy but everything he says about the TV industry is evil:

• Television survives because people like it and they hate doing other things like reading.
  
• Staffing on most shows is bloated and people who make their careers doing it probably won't last.
• Once the writer's strike is settled, companies will hire fewer writers.
• Scripted TV survives because advertisers think it's classier than reality TV.
  
• We're down to 4 sitcoms from 30, and they aren't very good.
  
• Reality shows are the new profit centers in TV. Reality show celebrity tours are the new back end profit (as opposed to the old model of reruns through syndication).

It would be nice to hear them say more about things like TiVo, TV on DVD, the HD DVD wars, etc. In the meantime, this was very enlightening stuff, especially for people who like things like indie music, reading, and scripted TV and movies.

Genre Conventions and Structuralism

The Literacity blog goes way out on a limb in hopes of finding something worthwhile in the horror genre. In this case, the quest for something called a "metastructure:"*

The archetypal mystery plot is not a metastructure; neither is the idea of cosmic horror. The former is too small; it is a genre convention. The latter is too vague, but it gets us closer still.

The concept of magic in high fantasy is a metastructure: most high fantasy novels, from Tolkein to Pullman, treat magic in roughly the same way: not everyone can use magic; one learns a spell, then casts it; it often manifests as some sort of a light show; certain creatures can only be harmed by magic; I'm sure you could contribute to the list. Each of these traits on its own would be a convention, or perhaps part of one; taken together, they form a metastructure for the way high fantasy readers expect magic to work. Elements may be modified, stretched, or shuffled around, but the basic essence of what makes high fantasy magic recognizable remains consistent across decades and continents.

It's good stuff as always, but I don't think "metastructures" exist the way they're described here. Genres have their conventions, and within a genre, authors can create and share fictional universes with internally consistent mythologies (Middle-Earth, The Cthulu Mythos, Star Trek, etc.), but I don't think there is a single mythology that ties them all together.

Tolkien and Pullman may share a few genre conventions but their universes and approach to magic are very different. As any fantasy writer knows, your formula for how magic works (spell book or blood sacrifice, wizards or humans) is every bit as important as a science fiction writer deciding on the rules for FTL space travel.

On the other hand, if Magic truly is the metastructure that links all of the fantasy genre conventions together, then I think for horror you'll have to go for something equally vague like "Death." If there is a single, common element, that's it.

In which case I might argue that this metastructural view of Death gives rise to horror conventions like:

• Death personified: ghosts and monsters, killers and demons
• Death as a place: underworlds, tombs, abattoirs, wastelands, and the beyond
  
• Life after Death: supernatural events, hauntings, and curses
• Death in action: murder, torture, ritual, mayhem and apocalypse
  
• The philosophy of Death: nihilism, the occult, obsession, morbid thoughts, and cosmic dread

From here writers have developed the rules and conventions of a good horror story:

1. The main character is an ordinary every-person who is not necessarily well-equipped to deal with the extreme circumstances in which they find themselves.
   
2. The main character is not an adventurer or hero, but a potential victim.
3. The events of the story are in contrast with every day life. The real world is invaded by the supernatural. A maniac is on the loose.
   
4. The setting and atmosphere of the story highlight the sense of unsettledness, dread, and malevolence. Suspense builds and builds into fear and terror.
   
5. The main character is often psychologically fragile and in danger of not being believed by other characters who are still grounded in reality.
6. The main character is often physically isolated, powerless, and vulnerable.
   
7. The antagonist is unstoppable, single-minded, and indestructible.
8. The antagonist can be delayed, deferred, appeased, or sent back, but never truly defeated.
9. The antagonist always comes back.
10. And so on.
    

Going a step further, you get more conventional representations like ghosts and haunted houses, graveyards and the living dead, the ancient tomb that should not have been opened, the magic words that should not have been spoken, demonic possession, witches and inquisitors, dungeons and iron maidens, broken down cars on lonely country roads, teenagers and psycho killers, etc., etc.

Once you get to the level of Cenobites vs. the Vampire Lestat, or Aliens vs. Predator, you've dipped back down into universe-specific mythologies, or, more interestingly, metafictions like Alan Moore's Black Dossier ("What Ho, Gods of the Abyss"**), and pretty much the whole of postmodern fiction with its mash-ups, camp humor, pastiches, and intertextual shenanigans.

The real issue here is that there are so many stories out there, so many different takes on the material that what's needed is a curator like Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman to help us separate the good stuff from the junk, and provide a single narrative thread that links one work to the next: all the way from European folk-tales and legends, to the early ghost stories and gothic tales, to the modern novel and short story. What writers want is to know that they are part of a community of the like-minded, that they are building on and contributing to a tradition of story-telling that reaches deep into the human past, and will continue long after they've written their last line.

----------------------------
* I know what's meant by the term "metastructure," but it seems like an unnecessary neologism when there is already literary structuralism to contend with. This is from the Wikipedia: "Literary structuralism often follows the lead of Vladimir Propp and Claude Levi-Strauss in seeking out basic deep elements in stories and myths, which are combined in various ways to produce the many versions of the ur-story or ur-myth." I suppose one way of looking at this topic is the search for ur-myths in genre literature rather than shared universes.

----------------------------
** The Black Dossier (part of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series) links the whole of fantastic literature into a single mythology (or metastructure): including ancient mythology, fairy tales, Shakespeare, Jules Verne, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Charlie Chaplin, James Bond, Television, Comic Books, etc., etc. -- even Jack Kerouac gets pulled into the meta-soup. "What Ho, Gods of the Abyss" is a brilliant pastiche of H.P. Lovecraft and P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster (and if you can do that, you can do anything).

Championship Second Half

An almost brilliant start to the second half.

After a great defensive stop, they completely blow the game with a failed blocked punt. You can see after that play, that the Buckeyes have just given up. So have I, and I'm switching it off.

Better luck next year.

Update
------------------
Final score LSU 38 OSU 24

The second quarter just killed the Buckeyes.

Championship Halftime

At 24-10 at half, the game is probably over. In the 2nd quarter, the Buckeyes made every possible bad decision they could:

• Robiskie drops a touchdown in the end zone.
• The blocked field goal when they should have run a fake.
• Not running the ball enough when Wells is ripping one long run after another.
• Allowing Boeckman to throw long.
• Ghostly personal foul penalties from the homer-friendly referees.
• Over pursuit against yet another spread offense.
• Kicking field goals when you must score points.
  

You can blame the players if you want, but I think Tressel misread what was happening when they had the early lead.

Buckeye Championship Series

It's the big game tonight between OSU and LSU for the National Championship. I don't know if the Buckeyes will win - I've been through too many disappointments and surprises to be able to predict these things - but I do think they'll play better than expected and make us proud.

According to Dan Wetzel at Yahoo, Coach Tressel has been getting back to basics and working the team hard with a lot of contact, hitting and weight-lifting. Sounds very 300. They've also had a 10 p.m. curfew while in New Orleans.

Maybe that's good. It's been a back and forth argument for as long as I can remember: if the team is too relaxed, they don't show up ready to play, if the team works too hard, they play tight and don't execute properly. It may be a lot of psychological hum-bug. In all likelihood the team that can do a better job pushing around the other guys will win.

Either way, I'm looking forward to the game and seeing what these two teams can do. LSU is very intriguing as a Michigan style SEC team, a home over-dog, and a two loss juggernaut.

More on the Myth of the Cultural Elite

A nice synopsis from The Star on high and low culture. Essentially, we are no longer defined by the culture we are born into, but by our incomes. Income and wealth determines status and status is displayed by the way we consume culture like music, movies, theater, television and art. According to the new Oxford University study, you fall into one of four categories:

"Univores," the largest of the four groups, consume great quantities of pop culture – TV, pop music and Hollywood flicks – and little else. "But there are no truly popular forms in the visual arts that have as wide a media exposure as does pop music," says Goldthorpe. Tak Wing Chan was his colleague in the study for the Economic and Social Research Council in England.

"Omnivores," the next biggest group, includes people who go to the ballet, symphony or opera on occasion while still buying lots of pop culture.

For purposes of the study, cultural consumption was split into three basic categories: theatre, dance and the movies; music of all sorts; and the visual arts.

Only "Paucivores," a decidedly small group, may be found at a blockbuster museum opening. But that's about the extent of it. Paucivores don't care much for contemporary art.

The "Inactives," are the Goldthorpe-Chan version of couch potatoes, hunkered down in front of the television day and night. They're found in every culture. Along with the U.K., data was assembled in France, the Netherlands, Hungary, Israel, Chile and the United States and analyzed by 13 researchers.

The Paucivores are the most frightening to me. More so than the couch potatoes. Those are the people who don't watch TV, don't read books, don't go to the movies. Basically don't do anything unless they're dragged into it.

But the real consequence of all this is understanding that good taste does not come from good breeding, nor is it a talent, something innate in you that you have learned and developed over time. It is a consumer product. Your taste in movies or music or art does not reflect your super cool personality. Its just another reflection of your income tax bracket.

Frank Rich on the Republicans

Rich writes this morning on Obama and Huckabee as agents of change for their respective parties, and as a rebuke of both the Clinton and Bush dynasties. He says:

Among the Republican candidates, Mr. Huckabee is also as culturally un-Bush as you can get. He constantly reminds voters that he did not go to an Ivy League school and that his plain values derived from a bona fide blue-collar upbringing, as opposed to, say, clearing brush on a vacation “ranch” bought with oil money attained with family connections. “People are looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of the guy they work with rather than the guy that laid them off,” he told Mr. Leno, in a nifty reminder of Mr. Romney’s corporate history as a Bush-style, Harvard-minted M.B.A.

It’s such populist Huckabee sentiments that are already driving the Republican empire to strike back. The party that has milked religious conservatives for votes for two decades is traumatized by the prospect that one of that ilk might actually become its standard-bearer. Especially if the candidate in question is a preacher who bashes Wall Street and hedge-fund managers and threatens to take a Christian attitude toward those too poor to benefit from the Bush tax cuts.

It has always been an irony of the Republican party that while they superficially embrace middle America and preach the gospel of hard work as the key to wealth, they are incredible snobs.

As for the other candidates, McCain, like Edwards, is a man without a constituency. He's not really a man of his party and yet he's compromised his outsider standing as the straight-talker.

Giuliani's candidacy has been aptly summarized as a noun, a verb, and 9/11. There's nothing else that needs to be said.

Thompson at this stage seems to be a footnote. I never understood his appeal anyway.

Ron Paul is the candidate for blogging libertarians and no one else. If you want to get page views on your political web site, write something negative about him and see what happens.

Finally, Mitt Romney is the money candidate for the Republicans, and like HR Clinton, needs the establishment to throw its collective weight behind him to get through the primaries. He certainly can't win based on his empty suit of ever shifting positions.

Overall, the primary season is where the political establishment seeks to inspire and contain the the hopes and fears of its own people. Politics requires idealistic, motivated people who can be tamed in time to elect the party favorite.

Josh Marshall on the Democrats

It's my sense that many people have been sitting on the fence, waiting to see what would motivate voters in Iowa and New Hampshire: would we get the passionate candidate or the money candidate? Would we get the idealist or the electable compromise?

Obama is benefiting from Iowa and comes out as the new face of America. Clinton is struggling as the divisive, old school, boomercrat and Edwards is the populist without a people.

Josh Marshall reads things much more pragmatically:

In general, I think Obama's the winner tonight. I think Hillary made her case well. I think Edwards had the best debate. But the debate can only be understood in the context of the moment. Right now, Obama's on fire. The first post-Iowa polls show him picking up a big post-caucus bump. He needed to come off well. Not make any mistakes. And not let Hillary open up any strong line of attack against him. And I think he did each one of those things. Which means he gave some reassurance to those who might be hesitating to get on the bandwagon and didn't do or allow anything to happen which significantly change the trend of the moment, which is moving heavily in his favor.

Holiday Reading: The Hogfather

As a novel, Terry Pratchett's Hogfather is neither good nor bad. The story of Santa Claus as told in the alternate universe of Discworld is surprisingly conventional in both its plot and its writing. Just as in every other Christmas tale, we find a world without a Santa Claus, and all is restored through the "magic" of belief. The twist is that this story features stabbings and nightmares and the mythical figure of Death (as if there's no such person as Tim Burton). So basically, it's like a Rankin Bass cartoon crossed with The Nightmare Before Christmas (which is basically, The Nightmare Before Christmas).

As an aside, just once I'd to see Christmas saved by cool rationality, skepticism, and a healthy regard for common sense. Alas.

Considering the sometimes satirical tone of voice, Pratchett is neither all that subversive, nor is he very funny. He's no Douglas Adams. Not even Robert Asprin (whose groaningly titled "Myth" books I enjoyed as a kid). He takes a stab at a grand unifying theme, but what's the point of imagination and belief in a world where magic really works and universities are staffed with Wizards?

I was originally attracted to the book because of the TV mini-series and my mistaken belief that it had something to do with the Scottish New Year celebration of Hogmany. The mini-series itself is a charming British hybrid of Harry Potter and Dr. Who: all earnest nonsense, theatrical staginess, and mostly laughable, occasionally impressive, special effects. While their attempt to portray Death with an immobile skull mask and the UK equivalent of James Earl Jones's voice was kind of sad, the actors playing Mr. Teatime and Susan helped the show get through the creakier bits.

All in all it was entertaining enough to sit through, even if the assassination plot goes unfulfilled, we spend way too much time dealing with the Tooth Fairy, it's never explained why the Hogfather has disappeared in the first place or why the Auditors want him dead, and the whole subplot at the University involving the bath tub and Hex the thinking machine is just plain dumb.

What was really strange was how closely the filmmakers were able to follow the book: entire scenes, whole chunks of dialog, editing, pacing, cuts. It's all there. If you've seen only the show, reading the book is like reading a screen play and vice versa. It adds nothing to the telling. It's redundant.

As for Hogmany, I think it has something to do with Vikings, but the book isn't really about that. If anyone does know something about Scottish folklore, I'm sure there's a good novel just waiting to be written.

Lovecraft in Brooklyn

The Mountain Goats go loud with "Lovecraft in Brooklyn," a track from their forthcoming new album. Their previous acoustic sound is replaced here by barking electric guitars, and a jittery paranoid beat. More Taxi Driver than Lovecraft but still interesting.

[Via Vulture]

Go Mountaineers!

So, West Virginia, the team that lost to Pittsburgh, goes out and annihilates Oklahoma, champions of the Big 12. Well good for them: they played hard for their interim coach and redeemed themselves to a certain degree.

On the other hand, Oklahoma had already beaten a highly ranked Missouri team just after the Tigers had beaten the previously undefeated Kansas Jayhawks (who play tonight in the Orange Bowl). What did they have to prove?

Meanwhile, Missouri, bumped from the BCS, blows out their (less than stellar) SEC opponent Arkansas. The Razorbacks, if you'll recall, are one of the TWO teams that beat LSU so their highlight reel was already full.

LSU as we all know are playing in the exhibition game that decides the national championship. This was decided not by the fact that they won a lot of games but because of the losses mentioned above at the end of the season. LSU will play Ohio State who earlier this year lost at home to Illinois and was considered D.O.A. for a top BCS birth.

In case you missed it, Illinois was humiliated by USC in the Rose Bowl.

USC of course thinks they deserve a share of the title but no one should let them forget that they already lost to Stanford, a team that went 4-8 and lost to the Worst. Notre Dame team. Ever. So USC is out.

Among Notre Dame's many losses was a 38-0 drubbing by Michigan who as everyone knows defeated the defending BCS champs Florida on New Year's day. Michigan of course began their season with a home loss to the defending Division I-AA National Champions Appalachian State.

App. State defended their title earlier this month by beating Delaware 49-21 (at the division I-AA level, aka, the "Championsip Division," they don't play exhibition games to decide the championship, they have an actual tournament).

So what's it all mean? Go Mountaineers!

Crooked Timber vs. The Little Dictator

Crooked Timber has a great post today on Jonah Goldberg's ridiculous new book Liberal Fascism. Of the many, many good points in the essay, this is one of the best:

Now we get to what is maybe an actually half-interesting point. There are two reasons why ad hitlerem arguments tend to be rude and crude. (Everyone knows Godwin’s Law is law. Here’s why, more or less.) First, the Holocaust. It’s pretty obvious how always dragging that in is not necessarily clarifying of every little dispute. Second, a little less obviously, ad hitlerem arguments are invariably arguments by moral analogy. Person A espouses value B. But the Nazis approved B. Not that person A is necessarily a Nazi but there must be something morally perilous about B, if espousing it is consistent with turning all Nazi. The trouble is: with few exceptions, the Nazis had all our values – at least nominally. They approved of life, liberty, justice, happiness, property, motherhood, society, culture, art, science, church, duty, devotion, loyalty, courage, fidelity, prudence, boldness, vision, veneration for tradition, respect for reason. They didn’t reject all that; they perverted it; preached but didn’t practice, or practiced horribly. Which goes to show there is pretty much no value immune from being paid mere lip-service; nominally maintained but substantively subverted. Which, come to think of it, isn’t surprising. How could a list of ‘success’ words guarantee success, after all?

What's highlighted here is the triviality of comparing anyone to the Nazis at anytime. It's basically meaningless.

But it works well as a smear, which is all Goldberg's interested in. His rewrite of the history of Liberalism in America is exactly the sort of believer's skepticism and critical thinking we were warned about. Goldberg doesn't really care about what fascism is or what it means to us today; he's just trying to attack his enemies and defend his own entrenched positions. It's not history or political science: it's political creationism.

The Patriots are the Greatest of All Time

There, I said it.

Football fans outside of Boston have been going through the five stages of grief with regard to the success of the Patriots this year: Anger (they cheat!), Denial (yeah, but they haven't won the Super Bowl yet), Bargaining (please let the Colts win the AFC, please, please), Depression (why even bother having the playoffs if the Pats are just going to win anyway?), etc., etc.

It is now time for Acceptance. As King Kaufman writes:

The Patriots haven't won the Super Bowl, but as far as the regular season goes, they haven't matched the '72 Dolphins, they've blown them out of the water.

The '72 Dolphins played a ridiculously easy schedule. They played two games against teams that had winning records, and both of those teams, the Giants and the Kansas City Chiefs, went 8-6. There were six teams in the league, excluding the Dolphins, that had a better record than anybody Miami played. Eight of the 26 teams in the NFL went to the playoffs in those days. The Dolphins didn't play any of the other seven.

Nowadays 12 of 32 teams go to the playoffs, and this year's Patriots played six of the 11 others, plus a game against the Cleveland Browns, who went 10-6 and missed the postseason on a tiebreaker. The Pats played two of the top three teams in the league by won-loss record -- excluding themselves. They played three of the top five and five of the top 10.

The Patriots regular season run against the Colts, Steelers, Cowboys, Giants, etc. was pretty dang impressive.

Now, let's all hope they choke in the playoffs and we get some good games.

Gawker goes Sci-Fi

Gossipy haters + nerdy shut-ins = my favorite new blog of 2008.

E.G., reasons Star Trek should stay dead:

3. It's no longer looking ahead. Like Star Wars, Trek is trapped in prequel-land. Enterprise bored us by filling in pointless backstory on the early days of Starfleet, but the J.J. Abrams movie looks to be twice as pointless. We already know everything we need to about young Kirk and the other Trek tots. Mining your own past is a prime symptom of idea bankruptcy.

That last sentence should be carved into a public building or something.

Freeman Dyson on Nuclear Weapons

Freeman Dyson uses the World Question Center as an opportunity to demolish some entrenched myths about nuclear weapons:

When facts change your mind, that's not always science. It may be history. I changed my mind about an important historical question: did the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bring World War Two to an end? Until this year I used to say, perhaps. Now, because of new facts, I say no. This question is important, because the myth of the nuclear bombs bringing the war to an end is widely believed. To demolish this myth may be a useful first step toward ridding the world of nuclear weapons.
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In addition to the myth of two nuclear bombs bringing the war to an end, there are other myths that need to be demolished. There is the myth that, if Hitler had acquired nuclear weapons before we did, he could have used them to conquer the world. There is the myth that the invention of the hydrogen bomb changed the nature of nuclear warfare. There is the myth that international agreements to abolish weapons without perfect verification are worthless. All these myths are false. After they are demolished, dramatic moves toward a world without nuclear weapons may become possible.

Religion and Skepticism

The World Question Center asks of scientists and intellectuals, "what have you changed your mind about and why?" Paging through the responses is pretty interesting and provides a buffet of interesting ideas in take home sizes.

One of my favorites is this nugget of wisdom from Rupert Sheldrake:

I used to think of skepticism as a primary intellectual virtue, whose goal was truth. I have changed my mind. I now see it as a weapon.

Creationists opened my eyes. They use the techniques of critical thinking to expose weaknesses in the evidence for natural selection, gaps in the fossil record and problems with evolutionary theory. Is this because they are seeking truth? No. They believe they already know the truth. Skepticism is a weapon to defend their beliefs by attacking their opponents.
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In practice, the goal of skepticism is not the discovery of truth, but the exposure of other people's errors. It plays a useful role in science, religion, scholarship, and common sense. But we need to remember that it is a weapon serving belief or self-interest; we need to be skeptical of skeptics. The more militant the skeptic, the stronger the belief.

As a firm believer in the power of critical thinking and skepticism myself, I take his point to heart.

Bowl Roundup: Thanks M!ch!gan!

The Capital One Bowl in Orlando was by far the best of the bowls as Michigan overcame 4 turnovers to beat Florida 41-35. Not only did we finally get to see the offense that we all thought the Wolverines would have coming into the season, but they did the Big Ten football world proud by beating an SEC power, beating the defending BCS Champs, beating the Heisman Trophy winner, and winning one for their coach.

Ohio State and Michigan may be hated rivals during the regular season, but when it comes to the bowls, I always root for the Big Ten.

Other thoughts:

• Wisconsin played well enough to win but couldn't get it done against the Volunteers.
• USC would have made a case for a split championship if they hadn't been playing an overachieving Illinois team that really had no business in the BCS.
  
• Poor Hawaii. 12-0 against a host of second tier teams doesn't look so good now.
• Illinois's spread option offense was doomed once they were playing from behind. The inability of their defense to stop USC in the first quarter just fed the blowout. When they beat Ohio State it was with good defense, ball control, and clock management.
  
• The Heisman trophy winner has lost in the following bowl game three straight years (Tim Tebow, Troy Smith, Reggie Bush).
• Once again, Texas Tech makes a mockery of the game of football. Entertaining though.
• I didn't see the game, but it didn't seem like Arkansas and Darren McFadden had much to play for. Missouri got some redemption and McFadden still ran for 100 yards.
• In upcoming games, I like Oklahoma to crush West Virginia, and Virginia Tech to beat Kansas in a barn-burner.
• P.S. I'll take the SEC and Pac-10 seriously when they have to travel out of their respective regions for post-season games. The best thing about a playoff system would be seeing USC travel to Columbus or the Gators in the Big House for games in late December.
  

Thoughts on the BCS championship:

• The OSU - LSU game will be decided in the trenches. Line play and quarter back pressure will be the key for both teams in an old school, smash mouth kind of game.
• If LSU scores more than 20, OSU will have a hard time keeping up.
• If OSU keeps the game close, LSU will not like to see overtime (again).
• If linebacker James Laurenitis gets a turnover, the Buckeye defense can win the game.
• If quarterback Todd Boeckman throws an interception (or worse yet, fumbles on a sack), the Buckeye offense can lose the game.
• Beanie Wells is the OSU X-factor. He must be able to get into the secondary and break out for long runs.