The View from the Outer Periphery

Beyond Dominoes and Billiard Balls

2011-12-22T15:37:00.000-08:00

Josiah Narog has been known to get me thinking. He asked what I thought about the Arab Spring. Remarkably, I had an opinion.

Dear Josiah,

Forget dominoes. It stinks of international relations theory. That sort of metaphor makes you try to conceive of the political as being akin to the physical. Instead assume that you are dealing with humans.

Maintaining a relationship of abusive domination requires the dominator to cultivate intense fear in the dominated. Typically the goal of this fear is to economize on the use of violence. Anyone who really understands politics understands that balances of power are not like a lever teetering on a fulcrum. Rather, it’s a great deal more like football. No matter how good one team and how bad the other, on any given Sunday you can win or lose. The trick of the dominator is to avoid losing by minimizing the number of games he or she has to play. Each game is a playoff game. If you lose once, you’re out of the game or will at least have to renegotiate the terms of domination. To stay in the game, the dominator has to win and preferably, win big. Abused people have to believe that they have no hope of resistance if they are to willingly bear the costs of abuse. Hope is the wellspring of the will to fight. Hope must be eliminated in the dominated if the dominator plans on making the abuse a foundation of his or her rule.

Demonstration effects are possible because the experience of seeing resistance work in a context that you see as much like your own is inspiring. It restores hope. Plus, there are young people. Young people differ from old people in that they have very limited experience of how difficult it can be to bear the costs of failure. Naturally the young will seize an opportunity when they are inspired. This is the essence of the demonstration effect. Most will lag behind to “see if it works.” If it looks like resistance is possible, more will join. Dennis Chong is right--it’s basically a tipping game. It needs inspiration (charisma), however to get it started. That said, losses dampen the will to fight. Recall that every charisma lives from success to success and with each passing hour grows nearer and nearer to its own death. Seeing resistance crushed is also psychologically powerful.

Bear in mind that age plays a role also for the dominator. Most people including a good many dictators, are not what I called psychopaths and what you called sociopaths: individuals who are incapable of feeling sympathy and, as a result, can objectify others with no psychological costs. Abuse has a psychological cost for the psychologically normal dominator, as does the will to savagery and cruelty. The dominator is not able to bear these psychological costs uniformly throughout his or her life. As one ages, one loses these capacities. The Mubarak was a very old and feeble man in this round. He was leaning on JIMMY for Christ’s sake. What does that tell you about his sense of real politik?

This analysis, bear in mind, is very simplified. Recall that Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Yemen are all facing remarkably different situations of domination and remarkably different domestic problems. But they weren’t dominoes. One falling over does not guarantee the next falling over. If I have tried to teach you anything at all, it’s been to stop thinking of states as a system. There are some loose regularities that characterize the states on this planet; this is true. But you’re never going to get more than loose regularities owing to the lack of uniformity in institutions and the personalities who run them. Billiard balls and dominoes are of no practical use to us here.

Merry Christmas, brother! Commend me to your wife. Let me know if you ever get the time to grab that beer.

Cheers!

Talal

The New Food Plan

2011-02-26T23:04:00.000-08:00

Frans wanted to know what I was doing for my food plan. There are the meals:

The Fiber One cereal is because, well, I’m descended from the goodly folks of the Mediterranean Basin and am pushing 40. A cup and a half of Fiber One and I’m perfect. Other folks may not need as much. Obviously cereal needs milk, so there’s the cup of 1%. Perhaps I should use skim, but I’m not that strong. The eggs are hard-boiled to save on frying calories (ostensibly) and to save precious morning time (really). I have a latte in the morning because I am Seattlite. I sweeten with sucralose. That took the most getting used to.

For lunch and dinner, right now I’m having 6 ounces of shish tawouk (chicken kebabs for the uninitiated) and a very large salad. My salad is a cup of a salad mixture I create at the beginning of the week (6 bell peppers of multiple colors, 3 English cucumbers, two onions—all diced—yes, I am a Levantine), half a Romaine heads, chopped finely (about 4 oz) and a diced roma tomato. Kraft fat-free Italian is only 15 calories per tablespoon and doesn’t taste bad at all. I imagine I’ll have to develop a few alternatives, as even I can’t bear this much repetition for weeks on end. I’m throwing in 6 oz of roast, which actually has fewer calories than the chicken this week. I’m also looking at a black bean and corn salsa to alternate with the salad.

Snacks are pivotal to this plan, as I eat something every two hours. This way the body is always digesting and, hence, burning more calories. Moreover, this way I avoid hunger. Weight Watchers is clever about rating hunger on a scale on 1-5, where 1 is ravenous and 5 is stuffed. You eat at 2 (hungry, but not like a wolf) until you get to 4 (approaching full, but not there yet) so that you spend most of your day at 3 (neutral—not hungry, but not full, not engaged with food). Mine are pretty plain:

The apple treat probably won’t work for most folks, but I like it. I dice an apple and crush an ounce of walnuts and throw them in a bowl. I then sprinkle with 4 packets of sucralose, liberal amounts of ground cinnamon and a light sprinkling of nutmeg. Cloves are nice if you have them, but I’m out. I have a serious sweet truth and this gets me close to desert without breaking the diet or creating refined carb cravings.

The total caloric intake is roughly 1969 calories. I often have a second latte in the afternoon, so I’m hovering below 2100. As I weigh about 210, 2100 is my goal (10 calories per pound I weigh). Maintenance is supposed to be 15 calories per pound I weigh. I’m doing my pathetic version of weight lifting, so hopefully I pack on some muscle and don’t lose much weight, but just burn some fat. I’ll keep you guys posted.

McCarthy's Big Moment

2011-01-01T14:23:00.000-08:00

Listen to The Bears Still Suck Polka from Chicago Bears

Let's hope he doesn't blow it, eh?

For Dinur and Shawn

2010-10-31T01:29:00.001-07:00

Mike McCarthy

2010-10-27T15:56:00.000-07:00

This is from Coach McCarthy’s press conference on Monday:

(How can you use a win like that? The flip side, the season’s not over if you lose and fall to 3-4, but then you’ve lost four games by three points each and things are pretty tough around here. What kinds of things can you take from a win like this and build off of and try to create some momentum?)

I’m the point man of this deal. I don’t swing left to right like that. I’m out in front. I do not change. It’s not my personality. I believe it’s ineffective to swing with the emotion, the criticism, even on the other side of it. When something everybody feels extremely positive is happening, I don’t think you run around with your pom-poms this week. That’s the last thing that I’m going to do. Everybody had a chance to enjoy the win last night, and I’m sure everybody feels good today. It was easier coming to work today than it was last week. That’s our business. Winning is important. A lot of good things come off of winning. But it’s onto the next one. It’s a simple as that. I wish I had some fancy words up here to make you feel better, I could answer your question better. But that’s what you’ve got and that’s what I am.

(You are that way, but you have 25-year-old kids who are more emotional and might look at it differently. How do you make sure that they use it in a positive way?)

Well, it’s all part of how you, you have to set the tempo and the plan every week. A big part of coaching is you’re a teacher and a salesman. You have to sell that plan, sell that path every single week. You can’t just go up and give a good speech at the beginning of the year and roll the ball out there. It doesn’t work that way. Today’s athlete is different. I think they’re very educated, they’re very in tune. The social networking is unbelievable. Some things I don’t even know how to work. But I’m in tune with what’s out there. It’s important for us to stay focused on the next opponent, and that’s our approach.

McCarthy is in awe of twitter (?!). I'll let that pass. But in his own words, the man is a technocrat. He isn’t a leader. I’ll be genuinely surprised if we beat the Jets come Sunday. But Brent limped off the field last Sunday. If we can beat the Bears come Christmas, I'll say the season turned out alright. Or as well as could be, our coaching situation considered.

Favre from the Taiwanese Vantage Point

2010-10-16T14:19:00.001-07:00

But What Is the Running Game?

2010-10-02T10:51:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, the media asked Mike McCarthy, “When you went back and watched the tape, how did you evaluate the run game?” This is the opening of McCarthy’s response:

The run game? Well, it’s—I think you have to, you know… look at the—what’s the definition of “run game?”

So what is this guy? A second-year grad student? What’s the definition of “run game?” This is football, not existential philosophy. Last I heard, the running game happens when (1) the quarterback hands the football to the running back, (2) the O-line punches a hole through the D-line and (3) the running back carries the ball through the hole toward the endzone.

Silly Talal. Trix are for kids! Apparently Mike McCarthy has redefined the concept of running game to mean “throwing lots of short passes” so that our offensive line will not be taxed to excess. God forbid the O-line be troubled with opening a hole for the running back to run through. Right guard Darryn Colledge recently said, “We’re an optimistic offense. We’ll take the yards any way we can get them, whether it’s run, pass or A-Rod scrambling for them himself.” Yeah, we can even have Rodgers run the ball in himself for the first down. Darryn Colledge calls that optimistic.

Personally, I call it desperate, but as Coach points out, this is apparently all a matter of definition. Apparently, Packers football is no longer played for the reality-based community.

I hate Mike McCarthy. The Packers O-Line will stink for as long as he’s here. Here watch these. I can’t write any more. This is making me sick.

I Read Some Marx (And I Liked It)

2010-07-02T19:37:00.000-07:00

A Wingnut’s Meditation on the Playoffs

2010-05-20T20:46:00.000-07:00

A while back, Kirk wrote to me:

I'm actually interested in seeing what playoff hockey is all about. Who knows, it may even hook me on to the sport a little.

I felt the need to write a lengthy, self-serving posting that would encourage Kirk to not only care about hockey, but to embrace his destiny as a Wingnut. After all, friends don’t let friends become Bruins fans. It’s not quite as bad as being a fan of say, the Buffalo Bills. But it still hurts. You can’t want that for a friend.

Kirk, the playoffs are the most wonderful time of the year. It’s hard to explain how deeply hockey fans feel about the playoffs. As a sort of benchmark, Dinur phones me every year and wishes me Happy Playoffs, as if it were Christmas or Hanukkah. No joke. For the past couple of springs, I’ve had really good theory sections and the Wings have fought all the way to the Stanley Cup series. The spring has been pretty magical and it comes not a moment too soon. Winter quarter always sucks moderately, because football is over by mid-January. The hockey regular season is still going, but I’ve not been able to adjust my lame attention span to following much regular season hockey (although I find programming everything into Outlook really helps me track a lot better—I’ve had fun following the Yanks so far this baseball season).

I followed hockey closely in February and March of this year, though. The Wings, for the first time in about twenty years, looked like they might not make the playoffs. Being a Wingnut, you just get so fuckin’ spoiled. It was hard to think we wouldn’t be a playoff contender.

Reflections on this Year

But sure enough, the Wings pulled through. It’s just so awesome to have your team have so much damned character. And it’s so damned hard to accept that the last of my generation of Red Wings (the guys who are our age I mean) are pretty much gone. Ozzie’s a back-up now. Malts may be gone next year. These guys are core players who, while not the greatest players in Red Wings history, are some of the best teammates in any sport’s history and who have a great relationship with the fans. These guys are hard-core professionals who know that they’re insanely lucky to get to be NHL hockey players and approach the game with gratitude. They’ve developed their careers around core athletic and sportsmanship values that are so pure they make cry.

Any will anyone ever forget Nick Lidstrom, patron saint of hockey defensemen everywhere? And this veritable hockey god was actually in the shadow, if you can imagine such a thing, of Steve Yzerman for a time. Try imagining Lidstrom in anyone’s shadow. That’s how amazing the team has been. This has been a legendary and rich time in Red Wings history.

Yeah, I was a little sore after being eliminated by the Sharks this year. But in all frankness, as long as we weren’t swept, I was okay with it. Thank God for that drubbing we gave them in Game 4. Yeah, we lost the series. But let’s face it: dynastic conditions are very difficult in the present NHL. We’ve been insanely good for several years. There is much speculation by persons like Dinur and Todd Tavares at school (a Bruins fan, God help him—Ai! The pain!) that this Golden Age is coming to a close. Yet we keep managing to find highly viable combinations of veteran experience and youthful talent. Management has been superlative—we keep winning while rebuilding. It’s really something to behold. Show me another team that has been managed so well.

I only wish my dissertation were half as impressive.

Right and Proper Playoff Philosophy

Moreover, it’s important to note that we’ve also been one of the few philosophically pure hockey teams in the league, really until this year. I have to admit that while we’ve been genuinely good, several other teams in the NHL have suffered from bad coaching philosophies that have made them vulnerable in the playoffs. In Kirk’s last letter, he said to me:

Football, basketball, baseball and soccer don't really change, they are just more intense, but apparently the "experts" agree with you that teams that are built to win in the regular season aren't necessarily the best teams in the postseason. I think the only other possible comparison to this is in baseball, where a great offense can get get you a great record in the regular season but in the postseason all you need is 3 great starting pitchers and you have a chance to shut down all your opponents. So, teams with mediocre offenses but great starting pitchers may manage to have a winning record and perhaps even win 90 games or so, but then go on to knock off more flashy 100-win teams in the playoffs if their pitchers manage to dominate.

Hockey is like your account of baseball, except exactly the opposite. In the hockey playoffs, the true edge belongs to offensive powerhouses. This is why the Wings have been dominant in the offseason for several years. Several teams in the league were wrongly fixated on immoral and improper strategy for victory that is primarily “defense first.” This strategy is an abomination and the gods do not favor it. While many teams favored this strategy, I prefer to foist most of the blame on Ron Wilson. He probably didn’t invent it. But after Nagano, he deserves the blame for anything that’s wrong in North American hockey. The Ron Wilsons of the world have simply tried to rely on their regular-season, defense-first strategies going into the playoffs. These teams would develop very tight defenses. Then, they’d get a goal or two lead and then actually sit on it for the remainder of the game.

That sort of strategy can work in the regular season. Actually, it often works well. The hockey regular season is long, somewhat like the baseball season. Moreover, there are thirty teams in the league and you meet most of the teams from the opposite conference only once per season. The regular season is not a very scouting intensive experience. You aren’t going to play tonight’s team all that often, so it’s not like any one team has a great set of incentives to really learn the other team’s weaknesses. Games are not usually played as series, in baseball’s style. You just develop a method that’s well-suited to your team and keep plugging away at it. Under those constraints, a strong defense is a very good insurance policy in the regular season of making the playoffs.

Of course, any fan of the San Jose Sharks can tell you that making the playoffs is different from winning in the playoffs. The psychological dynamic is quite different in the playoffs, where you face a best of seven series. Suddenly, your ability to really learn your opponent’s weaknesses is critical to victory. In this setting, it is my opinion that the key to victory is a highly intelligent and high-powered offense that has the psychological aplomb and patience to learn how to dismantle the opponent’s defense. Naturally, defenses also learn in this process. However, hockey defenses are extremely vulnerable, owing to the critical importance of a single man—the goalie. Once a goalie is cracked, i.e. faces a definitive and crushing failure, it very rare for a team to come back in the playoffs. That said, it is never impossible. One need only recall last year’s Stanley Cup series for evidence of this fact.

Digression on Game 6 of the 2002 Western Conference Championship

That said, such a performance is exceptional. I think the textbook case of defense not winning the playoffs is Game 6 of the 2002 Western Conference Championship, between the Detroit Red Wings and the Colorado Avalanche. This game was the definitive turning point in a series that ended the intense and bitter rivalry that emerged between the two teams over the course of the ‘90s, banishing the Avalanche to obscurity over the following years. While the former Quebec Nordiques did win their Stanley Cup the year before, I feel this series put the cap on any Avalanche attempt to define themselves as one of the storied franchises of the National Hockey League. I feel this is true for some time to come.

Some context: Both teams had been quite impressive during the regular season, with the Wings entering the playoffs as the first seed, having won the President’s Trophy. The playoff bracket is reproduced below, courtesy of my friends and yours at Wikipedia:

Note that the first seed in the Eastern Conference was the Boston Bruins, who were eliminated in six games by the eighth seed Habs. This is typical Bruins fare. Look, Kirk, it’s your choice. I’m just sayin’.

But to return to the original digression, the Avs were the second seed in the conference, tied with the San Jose Sharks for second highest points in the league. This conference championship, then, was a showdown. If the Avs were to ever show that they were better than us, this was their moment.

In all fairness, they didn’t suck. It was a seven game series that was played neck and neck. The Red Wings won the first game at the Joe, 5-3. Colorado came back for Game 2 and won in overtime, 4-3. In Denver, the Wings pulled ahead again 2-1, also in overtime. Once more, the Avs tied the series, winning Game 4 in Denver, 3-2. Then, in Game 5, the Avs pulled ahead in the series, winning against the Red Wings 2-1 in overtime.

The turning point was the “Statue of Liberty Goal” scored by Brendan Shanahan in the first period. As you can see below, Roy thought he had the puck securely in his glove. But the ref hadn’t whistled it dead and it had fallen out as he was hoisting it. Shanny scooped it in. The shame shattered Roy’s psyche. In Game 7, he basically left the light on and the key under the mat for the Wings. The Avs were shut out, 7-0. I like to think of this as the definitive moment of Patrick Roy’s career. I imagine there are many who disagree with me and I really could care less. This is how I will remember him for all time to come.

During the playoffs, when the goalie is finally broken, you have them. True, series are won without this spectacle. But there is nothing quite as satisfying as watching your team destroy your opponent’s goalie. The core point is, the playoffs are about your offense’s strategic ability to learn how to crack the opponent’s defense and your defense’s psychological ability to recover from failure. At the end of a series, you know who the better team was. This is the glory of the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Return to Discussion of Proper Playoff Philosophy

In the past few years, one of the elements that, in my opinion, contributed to the Wings’ hegemony was the overwhelming number of teams that employed this Ron Wilsonesque defensive philosophy—get a lead and then sit on it. Let your strong defense and super-cultivated goalie do the rest.

One can see the temptation. There are some very refined goalies in this sport. Among the most refined was a man named Dominik Hasek, otherwise known as “Mr. Slinky for a Spine.”

But even the refined goaltending of Dominik Hasek doesn’t win Stanley Cups. Briggs Moon probably remembers a team that used to hail from Minnesota, the North Stars, actually defeating the Great Slinky for a Spine in Game 6 of the 1999 Cup finals. It was in third overtime and I had already gone to bed, to be sure (I had to work in the morning), but the Stars eventually won the Cup that night. This sad story (well, not for Briggs) has three core morals.

First, Slinky for a Spine would only win the Cup when he got to (you know it) Detroit, where we don’t play “sit on the lead” hockey. So forget that “defense first” crap. It doesn’t win the Stanley Cup.

Second, there are some things that money can’t buy, but Dominik Hasek isn’t one of them. And the identity of the team that could afford to buy him (and Brett Hull, too)? The Detroit Red Wings. Remember this, when picking your allegiances.

This last moral needs a preamble. I was living in DC during the ’99 playoffs and actually ran into this guy from Buffalo on the metro. He saw my shirt, and said, “Now that the Wings are out, you’re rooting for Buffalo, right? You have to root for Buffalo.” You could see the pleading desperation in his eyes. “They have to win. They have to.” You could see what losing the Lombardi Trophy three times had done to the poor man. For pure pity’s sake, I told him I would root for the Sabres. So fucking sad. So yeah, there are worse teams than the Bruins, Kirk. But still, friends don’t let friends become Bruins fans. It’s just too bitter. When I called Briggs the next day to congratulate him, all I could think of was the poor bastard from Buffalo on the metro. So fucking sad.

So third, don’t let that happen to you.

Well, to get back to the subject. Over the past few years, people have realized the defensive approach doesn’t work—thank God! It was disgusting while it lasted. In general, the league is abandoning the defensive trend and learning to play proper playoffs hockey again. Take, for example, the team that beat us this year, the Sharks, have done everything possible to become us. They fired Ron Wilson and hired Red Wings Assistant Coach Todd McLellan. And they do look a lot like us now. It’s kind of scary when guys in teal (teal!) try stealing your identity. I have to admit that they did well at managing the transition from regular season hockey to playoff hockey this year. Pretending to be the Wings seems to work for them.

Prophecy: If the Sharks don’t win the Cup this year, they will forever be a choke team. I mean, they bought one of our coaches and tried to become us, doing a not-half-bad job. What else could they need? An octopus on the ice? Motown hits over the loudpeakers? A trumpet rendition of Hava Nagila during third period? There can be no excuses. If they don’t win this year, they’ll be one of those teams. One of those teams like the post-’71 Bruins. Plus, those fuckers will still be wearing teal.

So, hopefully, for Dinur's sake and the sake of all my in-laws, Thornton will remember this little bit he did last year:

Bottom line for the Wings after this playoff season: As the NHL abandons its dalliance with a defensive approach to the playoffs, the Wings need to come up with some new innovation for these guys to later copy after we beat them. The good news? We probably will.

The Problems of a Philosophy of the History of Forms

2010-05-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

I can't believe it's more than two years since I finished the last chapter. At this rate, I'll be sixty before I finish. Again, this is heavy philosophy. Virtually anyone who reads this blog will want to skip it. But it's there, if only as monument of my hard work for no one but me to appreciate.

Georg Lukács 1914

The Theory of the Novel

The Forms of Great Epic Literature examined in Relation to Whether the General Civilisation of the Time is an Integrated or a Problematic One

2. The Problems of a Philosophy of the History of Forms

As a result of such a change in the transcendental points of orientation, art forms become subject to a historico-philosophical dialectic;

Okay. There were shifts in literature from the epic, in which no transcendence was needed, to the tragedy, where man reaches to meaning and finds it untouchable because it exists in a separate world of meaning, to Plato’s theory of the forms, where the philosopher-hero grasps the forms, including the form of the good. As a result of these shifts, art forms became subject to a historico-philosophical dialectic. Dialectic is questioning something logically, criticizing it and reconstructing it. So as we go through history and learn, our philosophical outlook changes and we change the genres of our art to match our changes in mindset.

the course of this dialectic will depend, however, on the a priori in ‘home’ of each genre.

So the idea that is “given” in each genre will be the factor that shapes the development of each genre. I’m worried about the word “home” in this usage. Is this the same sort of “home” in which Novalis says we wish to feel at everywhere, or is this just a source or origin?

It may happen that the change affects only the object and the conditions under which it came be given form, and does not question the ultimate relationship of the form to its transcendental right to existence; when this is so, only formal changes will occur, and although they may diverge in every technical detail, they will not overturn the original form-giving principle.

I think the idea above is something like this: Over time, what we are telling stories about may change. That may lead us to very different techniques that we may have been using before, but this can occur without upsetting the genre at all, because the fundamental worldview we hold may be the same in its basic assumptions about how the world should work from the vantage point of constructing meaning.

Sometimes, however, the change occurs precisely in the all-determining principium stilisationis of the genre, and then other art-forms must necessarily, for historico-philosophical reasons, correspond to the same artistic intention. This is not a matter of a change in mentality giving rise to a new genre, such as occurred in Greek history when the hero and his destiny became problematic and so brought into being the non-tragic drama of Euripides. In that case there was a complete correspondence between the subject’s [i.e., the creator’s, the artist’s] a priori needs, his metaphysical sufferings, which provided the impulse for creation, and the pre-stabilised, eternal locus of the form with which the completed work coincides.

Oh! So clearly I have it all wrong. This isn’t like the succession of genres he was discussing before. This is a different idea.

The genre-creating principle which is meant here does not imply any change in mentality; rather, it forces the same mentality to turn towards a new aim which is essentially different from the old one. It means that the old parallelism of the transcendental structure of the form-giving subject and the world of created forms has been destroyed, and the ultimate basis of artistic creation has become homeless.

Well, wait a second. Didn’t the Greeks have to develop a new genre each time their worldview ran into a stumbling block on its route to meaning? That sounds like what he was describing above. The Greeks believed that meaning was immanently graspable. They started with the epic, then encountered tragedy and finally grasped Plato’s transcendence. Their worldview wasn’t changing. Rather, their genre changes could be viewed as different strategies to make that worldview “work out” each time it encountered an obstacle.

German Romanticism, although it did not always completely clarify its concept of the novel, drew a close connection between it and the concept of the Romantic; and rightly so, for the novel form is, like no other, an expression of this transcendental homelessness.

Okay. So the novel, romanticism and transcendental homelessness are related somehow.

For the Greeks the fact that their history and the philosophy of history coincided meant that every art form was born only when the sundial of the mind showed that its hour had come, and had to disappear when the fundamental images were no longer visible on the horizon. This philosophical periodicity was lost in later times.

This makes good sense to me. Before you’re learned too much and life gets complex, the stages seem to follow naturally, as if they were meant to follow a specific order, when in fact it’s just you don’t have many ideas to mix and match and no others to observe. It is complexity and awareness of the other that gives an individual a grasp of the complexity of human experience.

Artistic genres now cut across one another, with a complexity that cannot be disentangled, and become traces of authentic or false searching for an aim that is no longer clearly and unequivocally given; their sum total is only a historical totality of the empirical, wherein we may seek (and possibly find) the empirical (sociological) conditions for the ways in which each form came into being, but where the historico-philosophical meaning of periodicity is never again concentrated in the forms themselves (which have become symbolic) and where this meaning can be deciphered and decoded from the totalities of various periods, but not discovered in those totalities themselves.

So the form of the genre no longer is fundamentally tied to our existential quest for meaning. It becomes an option or choice. The form of a given genre is no longer a timeless vehicle for leading us to meaning in a given stage of our life.

But whereas the smallest disturbance of the transcendental correlations must cause the immanence of meaning in life to vanish beyond recovery, an essence that is divorced from life and alien to life can crown itself with its own existence in such a way that this consecration, even after a more violent upheaval, may pale but will never disappear altogether.

An immanently graspable meaning can be banished, can be lost, whenever its basic assumptions seem invalid to us. So when our worldview changes, we can easily lose the notion that meaning is just out there to grasp. But if we believe that meaning is in a different realm of ultimate reality, one that is difficult for us to understand, then the difficulty we have grasping meaning is no longer problematic. The problem becomes a lifelong journey slowly apprehending and coming to terms with the true nature of meaning.

That is why tragedy, although changed, has nevertheless survived in our time with its essential nature intact, whereas the epic had to disappear and yield its place to an entirely new form: the novel.

We are no longer able to grasp transcendental meaning as if it were immanent and palpable. Hence the epic is impossible, because it is the story about grasping immanent meaning and we can’t grasp it, at least not by simply reaching out. Yet, we can feel that we ought to be able to grasp immanent meaning, so tragedy can still make sense in the present time. But to take the place of the impossible epic, we now have the novel.

The complete change in our concept of life and in its relationship to essential being has, of course, changed tragedy too. It is one thing when the life-immanence of meaning vanishes with catastrophic suddenness from a pure, uncomplicated world,

The passage above represents the old Greek tragedy.

and quite another when this immanence is banished from the cosmos as though by the gradual working of a spell:

And I would assume this next passage above is the new tragedy. The new tragedy takes the form, apparently, of modern disenchantment.

in the latter case the longing for its return remains alive but unsatisfied; it never turns into a hopelessness rooted in certainty: therefore, the essence cannot build a tragic stage out of the felled trees of the forest of life,

So it appears that the new tragedy does not have reversal as one of its essential features.

but must either awaken to a brief existence in the flames of a fire lit from the deadwood of a blighted life,

But isn’t tragedy usually short? Reversal happens quickly. The imagery reminds me of Brünhilde. So how is Brünhilde fundamentally different from Oedipus?

or else must resolutely turn its back on the world’s chaos and seek refuge in the abstract sphere of pure essentiality.

Then how is this still tragedy? Where is the hubris leading to reversal?

It is the relationship of the essence to a life which, in itself, lies outside the scope of drama that renders necessary the stylistic duality of modern tragedy whose opposite poles are Shakespeare and Alfieri.

It would probably help if I had the vaguest idea of who Alfieri was.

Greek tragedy stood beyond the dilemma of nearness to life as against abstraction because, for it, plenitude was not a question of coming closer to life, and transparency of dialogue did not mean the negation of its immediacy.

Because Greek tragedy featured a meaning which seemed immanently palpable and graspable, it never had to be concerned with the fact that meaning seems to exist only in a world of abstraction, a world of ideas that seemed much like the heaven of Plato’s forms. Speech occurs in time, whereas the world of the forms is a world of timeless perfection. Speaking, in a sense, pushes the individual out of this timeless realm of forms back into the material world of time and of imperfection. Because the Greeks thought meaning was immediately graspable, they simply never had this problem.

Whatever the historical accidents or necessities that produced the Greek chorus, its artistic meaning consists in that it confers life and plenitude upon the essence situated outside and beyond all life. Thus the chorus was able to provide a background which closes the work in the same way as the marble atmospheric space between figures in a relief closes the frieze,

I haven’t read any Greek tragedy since undergraduate. Let’s see. The chorus suspends the actions in the play into a sort of tableau, a suspended, transcendent moment. Sort of like that scene in Troilus and Cressida where Shakespeare paints Troilus, Cressida and Pandarus into their mythological, transcendent roles, whereas in most scenes they are allowed to be persons,

yet the background of the chorus is also full of movement and can adapt itself to all the apparent fluctuations of a dramatic action not born of any abstract scheme, can absorb these into itself and, having enriched them with its own substance, can return them to the drama.

So the chorus is a more sophisticated tool, as it can pull you into the experience of timeless transcendence while leaving you in time to appreciate the action. The story doesn’t have to stop for you to appreciate the meaning.

It can make the lyrical meaning of the entire drama ring out in splendid words; it can, without suffering collapse, combine within itself the voice of lowly creature-reason, which demands tragic refutation, and the voice of the higher super-reason of destiny.

I’m not sure I understand why he uses the terms “creature-reason” and “super-reason.” I interpret the above sentence to mean that you, as the audience, can experience the ultimate reality of the world of religion, forms and meaning while remaining in the mere mortal world of everyday life. As the audience, one essentially gets to have one’s cake and eat it, too.

Again, this reminds me a little of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. You, the audience, watch the chorus, who in turn watches the hero. Of course, the chorus interacts with the hero, whereas the audience never interacts with the chorus. But the chorus is supposed to be the hero’s link to the world of ultimate reality. Ostensibly, the hero does not know that he is dealing with any world other than the mundane world (hence the possibility of reversal when he realizes that he has been after something entirely different that he thought and his story is not in the same genre as he believed—no one in a tragedy knows that he or she is in a tragedy until it is too late—that’s what makes tragedy tragic). But the chorus, apparently, grounds the hero in the world of meaning for us, the audience.

Speaker and chorus in Greek tragedy are of the same fundamental essence, they are completely homogeneous with one another and can therefore fulfil completely separate functions without destroying the structure of the work;

Okay, so once more I’m misunderstanding Lukács. The speaker and the chorus are both part of ultimate reality, the world of meaning. The speaker really isn’t in our world of mundane reality. Oh, wait—maybe this is it: The hero thinks that he or she is in the mundane world, but surprise!—they’re in the world of tragedy, in ultimate reality, the world of meaning. That’s the problem. The hero doesn’t know that he or she is in a tragedy until it’s too late—that’s what makes tragedy tragic! But the reason why the chorus can play the role of grounding the action in ultimate reality is because it is really part of that world. The hero is also part of that world, so he or she shares the chorus’ essence and can make sense in the story. The trick is that he or she doesn’t know it. But they can work together in a meaningful way for the genre because they belong to the same conceptual world.

It’s like the genre difference between writing science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction has a rational accountability. While clearly the author is inventing technology, he or she must make it appear to be consistent in the same way the rules of science appear to be logically consistent, knowable and ultimately manipulable. Fantasy rests on magic. Magic, in order to have its transcendent, other worldly and even mystical quality, must always remain out of reason’s grasp. While magic may show itself in mundane reality at any time, it is not graspable as part of mundane reality. It belongs to, well, ultimate reality.

I think what Lukács is after is that tragedy works because the hero, however embedded in mundane reality he or she may be, finds himself or herself enmeshed in ultimate reality, just as magical stories can feature characters who don’t believe in magic, but suddenly find themselves enmeshed in a world where magic suddenly penetrates his or her reality. But the story isn’t a realistic story. It’s a magical story. You really can’t have a story where the mundane world retains its own sensibility and yet you simultaneously find yourself on the plain of ultimate meaning.

all the lyricism of the situation, of destiny, can be accumulated in the chorus, leaving to the players the all-expressive words and all-embracing gesture of the tragic dialectic laid bare — and yet they will never be separated from one another by anything other than gentle transitions. Not the remotest possibility of a certain nearness-to-life such as might destroy the dramatic form exists for either: that is why both can expand to a plenitude that has nothing schematic about it and yet is laid down a priori.

Life is not organically absent from modern drama; at most, it can be banished from it. But the banishment which modem classicists practise implies a recognition, not only of the existence of what is being banished, but also of its power; it is there in all the nervous words, all the gestures outbidding one another in the endeavour to keep life at bay, to remain untainted by it; invisibly and ironically, life nevertheless rules the bare, calculated severity of the structure based a priori on abstraction, making it narrow or confused, overexplicit or abstruse.

So one type of modern tragedy is the tragedy that depicts life as meaningless. So you get the sort of Waiting for Godot abstractions, because all you really can do is gesticulate at the meaninglessness. I may be summing this up too quickly and missing something. I just feel like pushing on now.

The other kind of tragedy consumes life. It places its heroes on the stage as living human beings in the midst of a mass of only apparently living beings, so that a clear destiny may gradually emerge incandescent from the confusion of the dramatic action, heavy with the weight of life — so that its fire may reduce to ashes everything that is merely human, so that the inexistent life of mere human beings may disintegrate into nothingness and the affective emotions of the heroic figures may flare up into a blaze of tragic passion that will anneal them into heroes free of human dross. In this way the condition of the hero has become polemical and problematic; to be a hero is no longer the natural form of existence in the sphere of essence, but the act of raising oneself above that which is merely human, whether in the surrounding mass or in the hero’s own instincts.

This is Wagner’s Brünnhilde and Siegfried. We are freed spiritually on the funeral pyre of our physical destruction.

The problem of hierarchy as between life and essence, which, for Greek drama, was a formative a priori and therefore never became the subject of dramatic action, is thus drawn into the tragic process itself; it rends the drama into two completely heterogeneous parts which are connected with one another only by their reciprocal negation and exclusion, thus making the drama polemical and intellectual and so disturbing its very foundations.

The Greeks never had this problem because meaning was never alienated from the material world for them. They had the luxury of naïveté. They could, at least some of the time, believe that essence was palpable, to be grasped on the high road of adventure. They had the epic and we lack the epic.

The breadth of the ground-plan thus forced upon the work and the length of the road which the hero must travel in his own soul before he discovers himself as a hero are at variance with the slenderness of construction which the dramatic form demands, and bring it closer to the epic forms;

Fuck, that one’s hard. Let’s think. In the modern tragedy, the hero has to have a longer journey to even realize that he is a hero. Perhaps this is because the modern tragic hero lives in a more complicated, realistic world of details. Discovering meaning or the absence of meaning is much more difficult. Perhaps this is directly related to disenchantment. It’s much more difficult to get a modern character into a fantasy world of magic than it is for the prince or princess in a fairy tale to encounter magic. Theirs is the world of the epic. They just reach out and there it is, magic and meaning wait around the corner. They almost expect magic. When their world became the world of the tragic in Greek times, they still weren’t coping with much disenchantment. They reach out and realize, oops, I can’t grasp meaning. That doesn’t mean that world is necessarily meaningless. You’re just having trouble orienting yourself toward it. Then Plato comes to teach you the forms, and suddenly, you can orient again. But you can only have the rinse-lather-repeat procedure so many times when you realize that you are permanently separate from the world of meaning and may, in fact, be inventing meaning as you go. Meaning is something that you invent, not something that transcends you. That realization is the traumatizing aspect of the experience.

Getting the modern hero to encounter tragedy is harder now because our art is so realistic. But drama requires a simplified world—clean, uncluttered sets—simple streamlined stories. The long journey in the simplified world makes the modern tragedy look like an epic—a long journey in a simplified world.

and the polemical emphasis on heroism (even in abstract tragedy) leads, of necessity, to an excess of purely lyrical lyricism.

According to OED, something that is lyric is—

Of or pertaining to the lyre; adapted to the lyre, meant to be sung; pertaining to or characteristic of song. Now used as the name for short poems (whether or not intended to be sung), usually divided into stanzas or strophes, and directly expressing the poet's own thoughts and sentiments. Hence, applied to the poet who composes such poems. lyric drama, lyric stage, the opera.

—so the emphasis on heroism leads this new type of tragedy to over-rely on short passages that directly express the hero’s own sentiments and thoughts. These plays are too much about the inside of the hero’s mind, about him or her expressing their inner meaning.

Well, given the way that this genre must work, it would have to by lyrical, as it could never express anything other then the individual’s experience. There is no world of general meaning to latch on to.

Such lyricism has, however, yet another source which also springs from the displaced relationship between life and essence. For the Greeks, the fact that life ceased to be the home of meaning merely transferred the mutual closeness, the kinship of human beings, to another sphere, but did not destroy it: every figure in Greek drama is at the same distance from the all-sustaining essence and, therefore, is related at his deepest roots to every other figure; all understand one another because all speak the same language, all trust one another, be it as mortal enemies, for all are striving in the same way towards the same centre, and all move at the same level of an existence which is essentially the same.

So, even with the advent of Greek tragedy, it was assumed that all the characters related to the same world of meaning. So all of them could communicate with one another effectively and count on one another to play their acknowledged role in a story in which the existence of each character could make sense.

But when, as in modern drama, the essence can manifest and assert itself only after winning a hierarchical contest with life, when every figure carries this contest within himself as a precondition of his existence or as his motive force, then each of the dramatis personae can be bound to the destiny that gives him birth only by his own thread; then each must rise up from solitude and must, in irremediable solitude, hasten, in the midst of all the other lonely creatures, towards the ultimate, tragic aloneness; then, every tragic work must turn to silence without ever being understood, and no tragic deed can ever find a resonance that will adequately absorb it.

The new tragedy features characters who never really can understand one another. The characters, moreover, can equally not be understood to the audience. The only understanding that can unite them is the understanding that no genuine understanding is possible, and this is simply too little in common to create a genuine shared ultimate meaning.

It’s sort of like Lisa Wedeen’s description of the simulacrum state in Syria. Syrians’ common identity is “the people who get Hafiz al-Asad jokes.” The audience can understand the tragedy because it tells them, “You can never have a world of common meaning with anyone else” and, indeed, that does give them a common identity of sorts. But just as Syrians cannot relate to the state in any meaningful way, as the state’s primary means of control accentuates the meaninglessness of its legitimation narrative, so can the audience not genuinely experience community at a modern tragedy. Yes, they have the disconnection from a common ultimate meaning in common, but that cannot serve as a genuine foundation for community. This common identity is an identity that guarantees that they must remain individuals. It’s a fake identity, in that sense. It does not link anyone together with a means of relating to one another.

But a paradox attaches to loneliness in drama. Loneliness, is the very essence of tragedy, for the soul that has attained itself through its destiny can have brothers among the stars, but never an earthly companion; yet the dramatic form of expression — the dialogue — presupposes, if it is to be many-voiced, truly dialogical, dramatic, a high degree of communion among these solitaries.

So the bit above is about Greek tragedy. Yes, the tragic hero is alone in the sense that only the extraordinary man has a destiny. Yet, he faces the world by speaking to a chorus, which assumes that he has soul mates, that he can be understood.

The language of the absolutely lonely man is lyrical, i.e. monological; in the dialogue, the incognito of his soul becomes too pronounced, it overloads and swamps the clarity and definition of the words exchanged. Such loneliness is more profound than that required by the tragic form, which deals with the relationship to destiny (a relationship in which the actual, living Greek heroes had their being); loneliness has to become a problem unto itself, deepening and confusing the tragic problem and ultimately taking its place. Such loneliness is not simply the intoxication of a soul gripped by destiny and so made song; it is also the torment of a creature condemned to solitude and devoured by a longing for community.

In contrast, loneliness is not simply the problem of the tragic hero when we arrive at modern tragedy. It is the universal problem of the human being. The genre itself does not deal with loneliness as a side-effect of destiny. Rather, it deals with loneliness as the quintessential problem that haunts humanity. The question of loneliness has displaced the question of destiny.

Such loneliness gives rise to new tragic problems, especially the central problem of modern tragedy — that of trust.

So trust is now the central issue of modern tragedy. Is this because no one shares the same essence and we always look to someone we can know and predict when we must trust?

The new hero’s soul, clothed in life yet filled with essence, can never comprehend that the essence existing within the same shell of life in another person need not be the same as his own;

When the new hero starts his journey, he doesn’t know that he is irremediably alone. He discovers this along the way.

it knows that all those who have found one another are the same,

It knows that common identity exists and that this is the cure to its dilemma of loneliness.

and cannot understand that its knowledge does not come from this world, that the inner certainty of this knowledge cannot guarantee its being a constituent of this life.

Is Lukács saying that, basically, this “knowledge” is faith, but like all faith, the hero’s soul clings to it uncritically, taking power from his inner certainty?

It has knowledge of the idea of its own self which animates it and is alive inside it, and so it must believe that the milling crowd of humanity which surrounds it is only a carnival prank and that, at the first word from the essence, the masks will fall and brothers who have hitherto been strangers to one another will fall into each other’s arms.

In the sea of strangers, the soul believes that behind the masks, there must be kindred spirits, if only it learns how to find them.

It knows this, it searches for it, and it finds only itself alone, in the midst of destiny. And so a note of reproachful, elegiac sorrow enters into its ecstasy at having found itself: a note of disappointment at a life which has not been even a caricature of what its knowledge of destiny had so clairvoyantly heralded and which gave it the strength to travel the long road alone and in darkness.

So this form of tragedy then is mourning the loss of faith, of losing the strength of believing that one day you will find that special someone whose soul is cut from the same cloth. Boy, this guy is a real downer.

This loneliness is not only dramatic but also psychological, because it is not merely the a priori property of all dramatis personae but also the lived experience of man in process of becoming a hero;

This last bit is a little harder for me. His word ordering here is problematic. The loneliness being dramatic seems to link well with it being an a priori property of all dramatis personae, at least on the surface in the sense that the terms “dramatis personae” (the persons of the play, i.e. the characters) and dramatic go together. However, isn’t it only the hero in the play that feels the isolation? Moreover, the choice of word ordering would mean that the psychological, that is, the understanding of humanity when taken as individuals is supposed to link up with “the lived experience of man in process of becoming a hero.” But we don’t all become heroes. In fact, the term would be meaningless and obscene, sort of like the Communist chorus from Nixon in China—the people are the heroes now/Behemoth pulls the peasant’s plow.” Heroes are meant to be extraordinary. By definition, the ordinary cannot be heroic. Heroism is always elevated, extraordinary. Perhaps this is linked to the dilemma of modernity, which seems to promise exactly what the Communist chorus is preaching—that we can all become heroes. So perhaps we are now all coping with the fact that we cannot engage in a journey that brings us into a spiritual communion with love.

It does make me wonder about fairy tales. Why were people so interested in stories about princes reaching out and touching meaning when so clearly their world offered them no genuine encouragement that they could reach out and grasp that heroic, even palpable world of meaning? Granted there is an explosion of interest in these stories in the 19^th century as, with the rise of social mobility, many people start to believe that they too can reach out and be heroic. Indeed, Marx’s fantasy of communism is the ultimate expression of this desire—a world where we can all be creative heroes.

Yet, the stories are older than capitalism. I wonder why they endured so well? Perhaps the small number of literates could identify with princes, as literacy did betoken an elite status. And perhaps, even if we can’t touch meaning, it is still reassuring that at least someone can.

and if psychology is not to remain merely raw material for drama, it can only express itself as lyricism of the soul.

So if psychology is not just a plot point, but rather, if human psychological needs are a genuine motivator for the problems literature is to address, then the means of expressing those meanings must be lyrical, as clearly we are all alone and all we can really express that is comprehensible to one another is that loneliness.

Great epic writing gives form to the extensive totality of life, drama to the intensive totality of essence.

OED give us:

Intensive: Of, relating, or pertaining to intensity, or degree of intrinsic strength, depth, or fullness, as distinguished from external spatial extent or amount; of or pertaining to logical intension. Econ. Applied to methods of cultivation, fishery, etc., which increase the productiveness of a given area: opposed to extensive in which the area of production is extended.

Extensive: Of immaterial things: Far-reaching, large in comprehension or scope; wide in application or operation; comprehensive; also, lengthy, full of detail. : that extends to, applicable to, comprehensive of. Econ. Applied to methods of cultivation in which a relatively small crop is obtained from a large area with a minimum of attention and expense.

A total is either “Constituting or comprising a whole; whole, entire” or refers to an aggregation of smaller elements without the notion that, whether or not they are the whole in a larger sense, they are all that we possess.

So the epic tells us about life, the activities that we undertake, and not really about the meaning of those activities. It is an uncritical (would that be the correct word here?) artistic expression of what we do. Drama (presumably tragedy) is about meaning. There are fewer actions encompassed, but we understand the meaning of life more fully.

Of course, one wonders that any work of art could express the totality of life or essence. But perhaps the illusion that life and meaning can be encapsulated and handled is what is at stake in these types of writing. We would like to believe that life and meaning are not somehow greater than us and our capacity to understand them.

That is why, when essence has lost its spontaneously rounded, sensually present totality, drama can nevertheless, in its formal a priori nature, find a world that is perhaps problematic but which still is all-embracing and closed within itself.

Tragedy was always about the unreachable meaning. We can always return to this genre, because meaning can always become ungraspable for us. We can always be filled with hubris and have it knocked out of us by the unexpected nature of reality. However, for the epic to work, we must be innocent. Once one loses innocence, one can never have it back again. Therefore we can have and attain the epic as a genre only once. Once we are no longer innocent, there is no turning back the sun dial.

Tragedy provides a world of recognizable forms, but then complicates them, filling us with doubt. But it is a recognizable world. We may become alienated from it in the end, but we never start out the play that way.

But this is impossible for the great epic. For the epic, the world at any given moment is an ultimate principle; it is empirical at its deepest, most decisive, all-determining transcendental base; it can sometimes accelerate the rhythm of life, can carry something that was hidden or neglected to a utopian end which was always immanent within it, but it can never, while remaining epic, transcend the breadth and depth, the rounded, sensual, richly ordered nature of life as historically given.

The epic cannot survive as a viable genre past our innocence. It fundamentally relies on the fact that meaning is never out of reach, that meaning is just waiting there to be discovered.

Any attempt at a properly utopian epic must fail because it is bound, subjectively or objectively, to transcend the empirical and spill over into the lyrical or dramatic; and such overlapping can never be fruitful for the epic.

You could try to write a utopian epic, but you can’t reach out and grasp a utopia. The world of meaning and the real world are separate with that strategy. For the epic to work as a genre, the reader must assume that meaning is palpable, like an apple on an apple tree, waiting to be grasped.

There have been times, perhaps — certain fairly-tales still retain fragments of these lost worlds — when what today can only be reached through a utopian view was really present to the visionary eye; epic poets in those times did not have to leave the empirical in order to represent transcendent reality as the only existing one, they could be simple narrators of events, just as the Assyrians who drew winged beasts doubtless regarded themselves, and rightly, as naturalists.

The world of the imagination is imaginary to us. What makes the epic work is that the imaginary world is assumed to be real and not removed.

Already in Homer’s time, however, the transcendent was inextricably interwoven with earthly existence, and Homer is inimitable precisely because, in him, this becoming-immanent was so completely successful.

Homer’s epic was a success because it came at the exact moment that its vision reflected the era’s perceived reality. It could only be achieved at that moment of innocence. No one has done it since because no one can turn back the clock.

This indestructible bond with reality as it is, the crucial difference between the epic and the drama, is a necessary consequence of the object of the epic being life itself. The concept of essence leads to transcendence simply by being posited, and then, in the transcendent, crystallises into a new and higher essence expressing through its form an essence that should be — an essence which, because it is born of form, remains independent of the given content of what merely exists.

In a sense, morality is the result of reality not matching our image of a world with immanent meaning. This is the birth of the idea of ultimate reality.

The concept of life, on the other hand, has no need of any such transcendence captured and held immobile as an object.

The epic was about life where meaning was palpable. Transcendence was not needed to arrive at meaning. You just reached out and picked the apple.

The worlds of essence are held high above existence by the force of forms, and their nature and contents are determined only by the inner potentialities of that force.

This is a reference back to Plato again. Potentiality is a latent capacity. So the world of meaning is not some independent, transcendent world. The potential of any world of meaning is latent in its explicit forms, which are created ideal types.

The worlds of life stay as they are: forms only receive and mould them, only reduce them to their inborn meaning.

The ideal types are constructs in our mind. They assign meanings we have created to the world that we experience.

And so these forms, which, here, can only play the role of Socrates at the birth of thoughts, can never of their own accord charm something into life that was not already present in it.

Not being transcendent, the forms can call reality into being. They simply reflect reality from our viewpoint.

The character created by drama (this is only another way of expressing the same relationship) is the intelligible ‘I’ of man, the character created by the epic is the empirical ‘I’.

So the constructed self, the identity that we build, is the self that exists in drama. The body is the self in the epic. I presume this is the case because we are not yet aware that meaning is outside of ourselves, so a body/soul distinction did not yet exist in the epic.

The ‘should be’, in whose desperate intensity the essence seeks refuge because it has become an outlaw on earth, can objectivise itself in the intelligible ‘I’ as the hero’s normative psychology, but in the empirical ‘I’ it remains a ‘should be’.

Meaning exists in the constructed world of ideals, a world that Plato believed was transcendent, more real than reality. So meaning is a refugee in the physical world, seemingly harassed and harried by mundaneness and emptiness of its life.

For objective, OED gives us: That is or belongs to what is presented to consciousness, as opposed to the consciousness itself; that is the object of perception or thought, as distinct from the subject; (hence) (more widely) external to or independent of the mind.

So meaning can make itself independent of the mind in the constructed self as the tragic hero’s normative psychology. I guess that means that meaning is the object of the hero’s quest, his or her encounter with this removed world of meaning. The epic never had another world to deal with. Meaning was an apple. But meaning for the body remains an ideal, something that ought to be, something to be lived up to. This is the idea of ultimate reality. If we live our life in this shadow world in accordance with the forms, we will find meaning and lead a happy life.

The power of this ‘should be’ is a purely psychological one, and in this it resembles the other elements of the soul; its aims are empirical, and here again it resembles other possible aspirations as given by man himself or by his environment;

Man’s normative drive is not related to the existence of an ultimate reality. Rather, this is a psychological drive. It is not different from other impulses and other human goals. I think this is perhaps Lukács’s way of saying, “In case you didn’t notice, God has been killed beneath the weight of all that we have said.”

its contents are historical, similar to others produced in the process of time, and cannot be severed from the soil in which they have grown: they may fade, but they will never awaken to a new, ideal existence.

Our norms are cultural products of a specific time and place. They cannot lead us to some sort of transcendence because, as much as they may seem to belong to a transcendent, perfect reality, the emotional experience we feel is simply one feeling that is part of our psychological repertoire of emotions, one that has been triggered by an experience that is bound to a time and a place.

The ‘should be’ kills life,

The ideal kills life because it rejects what is in favor of what ought to be but is not. It rejects life as it is.

and the dramatic hero assumes the symbolic attributes of the sensuous manifestations of life only in order to be able to perform the symbolic ceremony of dying in a sensuously perceptible way, making transcendence visible;

The word “sensuous” here reminds me strongly of Marx. I don’t know if I really knew what Marx meant when he used the word either. “Of or appealing to the senses.” When I read this, I think of Brünhilde, burning on the pyre with Siegfried’s body. Her death had a mythical meaning, not a literal one. The hero dying is not a literal death, but an allegory of transcendence.

yet in the epic men must be alive, or else they destroy or exhaust the very element that carries, surrounds and fills them.

The epic does not require transcendence, because in the epic, meaning is palpable, graspable. The reason the epic is no longer written is because we can’t be naïve enough for the effect the epic created to work. Meaning belongs to a world of forms and gods. Tragedy is about the discovery that we cannot touch meaning, that in order to touch it, we must transcend.

(The ‘should be’ kills life, and every concept expresses a ‘should-be’ of its object;

This is Plato. To know a knife is to know its virtue, to know a good knife. To know a man is to know man’s virtue, to know a good man. Recognition is based on understanding the form of the good. But, for Lukács, this means knowing is to believe in a transcendent world that destroys reality, because reality cannot transcend itself.

This, perhaps, is why Brünhilde must burn. If what is real has entered into the realm of the transcendent, it should no longer exist in the realm of the visible form. Death is the gateway to eternal life.

that is why thought can never arrive at a real definition of life, and why, perhaps, the philosophy of art is so much more adequate to tragedy than it is to the epic.)

We can’t define life because, in creating a “form” for life, we create an ideal up to which reality cannot live. I would guess that we can understand the tragic better than the epic because the tragic seems to endure for us, whereas the epic is moribund.

The ‘should be’ kills life, and an epic hero constructed out of what ‘should be’ will always be but a shadow of the living epic man of historical reality, his shadow but never his original image,

We may return to the epic in our present day, but we would paint the epic hero as an ideal to be lived up to. This ruins the effect that the original epics of ner H Homer had. The point of Homer’s epics is that one could reach out and touch meaning. We really can’t believe that story, because we are not naïve enough for it to work. As a result, we translate the new epic hero as an ideal to be lived up to. But the ideal kills the real. It leads us to reject what actually exists, taking us away from the notion that meaning is palpable and graspable in the physical world. This is totally in contravention of what made the genre so satisfying in its original inception.

Moreover, in a sense, the new hero is a tragic hero in the sense that he finds meaning in an ultimate reality. Or perhaps the new epic hero is really that Platonic hero, who reaches across the gap to the realms of the forms and, in apprehending the form of the good, allows man to once again (at least as far as he can realize) reach out and touch meaning again. He learns to reach out of the mundane world and grasp the forms.

and his given world of experience and adventure can only be a watered-down copy of reality, never its core and essence.

When this new epic hero is adventuring, he is reaching out to touch the forms, so his adventure becomes allegorical. He is never adventuring in the real world.

Utopian stylisation of the epic inevitably creates distance, but such distance lies between two instances of the empirical, so that the sorrow and majesty created by this distance can only make for a rhetorical tone.

The tone of this type of heroic narrative relies on the fact that the hero traverses from the world of ordinary life to the realm of meaning (the forms, ultimate reality, etc.), both believed to be real places. Traversing this vast, if not insurmountable, distance lend this new kind of epic sorrow (because the distance is too far away and, I would assume, most people cannot cross it) and majesty (in that making it across confers the hero who crosses with a sort of dignity rooted in their ability to gain insight from suffering).

This distance may produce marvellous elegiac lyricism,

An elegy is a song of lamentation, often for the dead. We already decided that the word lyrical referred to “short passages that directly express the hero’s own sentiments and thoughts.” So the distance between the palpable world and the world of ultimate reality gives this new epic the quality of being a song of the hero’s personal sorrow, possibly for his own death. Perhaps this is the result of gaining wisdom by means of suffering. The wisdom can only be gained a terrible cost.

but it can never, in itself, put real life into a content that transcends being, or turns such content into self-sufficient reality.

But this new kind of epic always finds meaning outside of ordinary life. It cannot create ordinary life into a self-sufficient world of meaning. It always refers to another reality, one that we might reach, but not without the suffering of the hero’s journey.

Whether this distance leads forward or backwards, upwards or downwards from life, it is never the creation of a new reality but always only a subjective mirroring of what already exists.

Here we find the cold reality of trauma theory. Because the experience of meaning seems profoundly empirical and transcendent, we assume that it comes from a world more real than our own. But trauma theory would teach us that we create our own meaning and the terms of what we find meaningful, as a result, must be created from our own experience of the world around us. As a result, it never transcends that reality, but is the direct product of our interaction with that reality.

Virgil’s heroes lead a cool and measured shadow-existence, nourished by the blood of a splendid ardour that has sacrificed itself

Aeneas sacrifices his passionate love for Dido. This nourishes a “cool and measured shadow-existence.” I really wish I’d had the discipline to wade through Homer, as so much rests on that now. I did read the Aeneid. If Aeneas lived a “shadow existence” compared with Homer’s heroes, it is probably because unlike Homer’s heroes he is not following his desire and, as a result, not directly throwing himself into a passionately lived life. He resigns his passion because it is his fate to do so in order to found the Roman state. The refined resignation of patriotic duty had displaced passion in creating meaning for Aeneas. I would imagine that Lukács believes that this sacrifice negates life and living. Passion for Lukács makes life. Duty, an ideal, kills it.

in order to conjure up what has vanished forever:

Perhaps this is a reference to ultimate meaning. We know that the frankly palpable meaning that is of the world and of us that guarantees that our life has not been lived in vain if gone. Attempts of heroes to cross out of ordinary life into the realm of ultimate meaning are always illusory, always a naïve attempt to do what, by now, we ought to be mature enough to know is impossible—to justify our lives by an objective, transcendent standard.

while Zolaesque monumentality amounts only to monotonous emotion in face of the multiple yet simplified complexity of a sociological system of categories that claims to cover the whole of contemporary life.

Émile Zola’s great work was a novel that covered several generations of two families’ lives in France. This huge, monumental work attempted to express the fundamental spirit of an age in its totality. Nonetheless, in final analysis, Lukács believes it amounted only to an expression of “dull, unchanging feeling.” Perhaps this is because it did not seek to relate ultimate meaning the way the new, Virgilian epic does, but merely to express what happened and what it felt like. So we can’t reach ultimate meaning, but giving up on ultimate meaning doesn’t really help us create satisfying art either.

So does Lukács believe that there is any point in writing at all?

There is such a thing as great epic literature, but drama never requires the attribute of greatness and must always resist it.

I wonder what he means by greatness in this context? If drama is still tragedy, tragedy is always about the hero’s flaws. In this sense, the hero is not very heroic. That’s just a stab in the dark. I have no idea what this means.

The cosmos of the drama, full of its own substance, rounded with substantiality,

When something in rounded, it is an enclosed perfect world. So the tragedy is a world which is self-sufficient in the sense it provides a world of complete meaning.

ignores the contrast between wholeness and segment, the opposition between event and symptom: for the drama, to exist is to be a cosmos, to grasp the essence, to possess its totality.

The way the drama achieves its “perfect world of meaning” is by taking a fragment and presenting it as a whole, in much the same way that the epic does. The difference is that the epic apparently was able to get away with explaining the totality of life, whereas drama explains the totality of a fragment in a way that is made as satisfying as the epic was, by reducing the scale of the and presenting it, if not as life written large, than as the full aesthetic experience of someone’s life.

But is this drama Greek tragedy anymore? This seems more like Ibsen than Sophocles.

But the concept of life does not posit the necessity of the totality of life; life contains within itself both the relative independence of every separate living being from any transcendent bond and the likewise relative inevitability and indespensability of such bonds. That is why there can be epic forms whose object is not the totality of life but a segment of it, a fragment capable of independent existence.

Presumably there is no reason to think that anyone’s life is “like” anyone else’s life. Each life is indeed unique. That said, we have a deeply rooted need to belong to a group, to know that we aren’t alone. The idea of this new epic form is to share an individual’s life and not the totality of life. Strange, but this “fragment epic” sounds like a novel. Presumably also to share one person’s encounter with meaning, not all that it meaningful. But reducing the scale of the “amount of meaning” one is supposed to find in the work can make meaning seem frankly palpable again. Sharing the one person’s voyage contextualizes the reader to share the meaning that the one person finds. The novel is an epic that is not on an epic scale.

But, for the same reason, the concept of totality for the epic is not a transcendental one, as it is in drama; it is not born out of the form itself, but is empirical and metaphysical, combining transcendence and immanence inseparably within itself.

I’m having some trouble with the chunk above. “But, for the same reason” grammatically refers to “life contains within itself the both the relative independence of every separate living being from any transcendent bond and the likewise relative inevitability and indispensability of such bonds.” Why does the fact that we can separate every individual’s story from every other story, yet have some need for common identity and meaning give the epic its nature? The drama, he says, offers a form of totality that is born from the form itself, from the genre itself. This is not the case for the epic.

The concept of totality in the epic is empirical and metaphysical. Well, isn’t this just because the epic is the story of a naïve people? While meaning is a human creation, meaning appears to be metaphysical because of the emotions it evokes. But we are too young when reading the epic to realize that meaning belongs to a world of forms. We find it palpable, and hence empirical. But then look at his word order in the next phrase! He says transcendence and immanence, and not the other way around. This would suggest that “empirical” and “transcendence” marry up, as would “metaphysical” and “immanence.” I would have thought that should be the other way around.

I may be reading too much into the word order here. We’ll have to wait and see.

In the epic, subject and object do not coincide as they do in drama, where creative subjectivity, seen from the perspective of the work, is barely a concept but only a generalised awareness; whereas in the epic subject and object are clearly and unequivocally distinct from one another and present in the work as such.

In the epic, the hero goes off and discovers. He is always a subject. He never gets discovered. In the epic, the hero is never the victim of fate. Being a creative subject in drama is more problematic. In a tragedy, you think you are an actor but, surprise! You’re not. You’re a victim of fate and the plaything of the gods. To the extent that you are creative, it’s in learning and becoming aware of your real situation.

And since an empirical form-giving subject follows from the empirical nature of the object seeking to acquire form, this subject can never be the basis and guarantee of the totality of the represented world.

Oh, fuck! That one’s a nightmare. What could it mean? Well, in the epic, the human is never the object, so we have to be instead in the tragedy. So if, with our tragic awareness, we seek to discover the meaning of life, we know that we are an object, not a subject. Fate buffets us and there isn’t much we can do it about it. Clearly, we aren’t the subject. We want to acquire form (is this self-awareness, knowledge of the self?), so we deduce that there must be a God. After all, we can apprehend that there must be a meaning for life. Meaning presumes intention. Someone with agency must have intended us. So it follows that if we, sad objects that we are, can still believe that our life has meaning, someone who is a subject must have created us to find that meaning.

We know it’s a puzzle, but we’re no longer duped by the epic. We know the answer isn’t “just there” for us to grasp. Yet, we have this drive toward meaning. So perhaps meaning is in the realm of forms with the gods.

In the epic, totality can only truly manifest itself in the contents of the object: it is metasubjective, transcendent, it is a revelation and grace. Living, empirical man is always the subject of the epic, but his creative, life-mastering arrogance is transformed in the great epics into humility, contemplation, speechless wonder at the luminous meaning which, so unexpectedly, so naturally, has become visible to him, an ordinary human being in the midst of ordinary life.

So, in the epic, we can only find the meaning of life in the contents of the great task to be achieved. The meaning of life is above and beyond the hero. Since it is a revelation and a grace, it is clearly not something the epic hero creates, but is, in the end, given. The epic hero is arrogant and life-mastering. He thinks he can achieve anything. But the experience of attaining (receiving?) meaning moves him to speechless wonder. He never knew that such meaning could exist in the midst of ordinary life.

I’m finding this passage difficult. In the epic, the hero can attain his goal. But meaning still is above and beyond him. But perhaps that is only clear to the epic hero because when confronted with meaning in all its glory, he is abashed. He feels humility. He feels reverence. He knows it is greater than himself. But he worked so little to find meaning, that while it is greater than him, metasubjective even, that his image of the transcendent is naïve. He can believe that the gods literally live on Mount Olympus. He is not yet fully aware of the harsh, cruel and unbridgeable distance implied by the prefix meta-. He doesn’t know how lucky he was to stumble into meaning on his first adventure.

In the minor epic forms, the subject confronts the object in a more dominant and self-sufficient way. The narrator may (we cannot, nor do we intend to establish even a tentative system of epic forms here) adopt the cool and superior demeanour of the chronicler who observes the strange workings of coincidence as it plays with the destinies of men, meaningless and destructive to them, revealing and instructive to us;

If the “minor epic form” is indeed the novel, as I suspect, what Lukács describes here sounds familiar. The narrator narrates his story with omniscience.

or he may see a small corner of the world as an ordered flower-garden in the midst of the boundless, chaotic waste-lands of life, and, moved by his vision, elevate it to the status of the sole reality;

I’ve read that one.

or he may be moved and impressed by the strange, profound experiences of an individual and pour them into the mould of an objectivised destiny;

Yup. I’ve read that one, too.

but whatever he does, it is his own subjectivity that singles out a fragment from the immeasurable infinity of the events of life, endows it with independent life and allows the whole from which this fragment has been taken to enter the work only as the thoughts and feelings of his hero, only as an involuntary continuation of a fragmentary causal series, only as the mirroring of a reality having its own separate existence.

Is the narrator here literally the author, the inventor of the story? The minor epic form is clearly created by the author in a way that the epic is not. Was the epic the product of revelation? Whatever the case, the world outside the minor epic only enters into the story when the hero allows his attention to wander to them.

Completeness in the minor epic forms is subjective: a fragment of life is transplanted by the writer into a surrounding world that emphasises it and lifts it out of the totality of life; and this selection, this delimitation, puts the stamp of its origin in the subject’s will and knowledge upon the work itself : it is, more or less, lyrical in nature.

Wow. I actually understand that one without mulling it over. Blow me away!

The relativity of the independence and the mutual bonds of all living beings and their organic, likewise living associations can be superseded, can be elevated into form, if a conscious decision of the creative subject brings out an immanent meaning within the isolated existence of this particular fragment of life.

I don’t know where it would have been more appropriate to say this, but it seems to me that we want a world where meaning is empirical, outside ourselves. A world where we are not making meaning up as we go along, but rather one where we find it in a totality far greater than ourselves. We want to enter into the world of creation and find God Himself. But we must remain naïve to believe that we will find and know God absolutely.

Undoubtedly, we will stumble into the constructed realms of others and discover their subjectivities, which differ from our own. Their symbols are not ours. We can withstand this to some extent. We may believe that we have a destiny while others do not and, as a result believe that our own, narrow vision is that true empirical reality, that true meaning that can be discovered. We can believe that, while we have not yet seen the face of God, it is we who are on the correct quest, the true path; we can believe that it is we who will one day see it. But this sublime, sad, arrogant faith that is begotten of youthful innocence can only withstand so many setbacks. Eventually, we must admit that we have not discovered meaning. We made it up as we went along. While I do not believe that this means all faith is sad and arrogant, I have come to believe that this faith of the young has its limits. There is another faith, but I don’t know how to articulate this feeling right now. I feel it, for what that’s worth.

The only form in which we can possibly retain the emotional “feel” of not having made it up as we went along is created by elevating our fragmentary consciousness as a story—a world that another can discover by reading. For the writer, it is the only world which can truly seem to cohere, because it is a world that reflects our inner experience in which all feelings and their stimuli quite naturally appear to “fit together” or “belong together.”

Having lost our innocence, we know that we have not found objective reality. Yet this is no way affects our deep and profound need for meaning. If the world is not meaningful, we will go mad. So we lift our experience as a novel. We share it and others read it, both reader and writer hoping to find that we are not alone. Perhaps if in these shared experiences we find shared meaning, we also find that empirical meaning for which we yearn.

Plato. We yearn to know as Plato would have us know—perfectly. It is a deep impulse, one we cannot set aside easily, even after we believe we have set it aside completely.

The subject’s form-giving, structuring, delimiting act, his sovereign dominance over the created object, is the lyricism of those epic forms which are without totality.

This makes good sense. The lesser epic forms don’t claim to reproduce the whole world. The limited experience of totality they provide is the experience not of the world, but of a specific person’s worldview. It must be lyrical, as only the person who experiences the worldview can express it coherently in a way that makes it seem as if it were a world.

Such lyricism is here the last epic unity; it is not the swallowing of a solitary ‘I’ in the object-free contemplation of its own self, nor is it the dissolving of the object into sensations and moods; it is born out of form, it creates form, and it sustains everything that has been given form in such a work.

I imagine that the individual’s worldview is the last epic unity because it is the root of our bias that made it seem as if the unity and perfection of the original epic is possible. We now know that the extent to which we share forms is the extent to which we have been socialized to those forms as a group. The forms are not common to us all because they are universal. They merely seem to be universal because they happen to be common to those in a given group. But our internal world seems coherent to us unless we are traumatized. The fact that we can be traumatized suggests that, as a view, our identity is typically coherent insofar as we are unaware of any contradictions that exist in it. As a result, it is a “natural” unity of sorts. There is no possibility that the individual could exist if the self were to dissolve completely. It must perforce be a unity that we accept. We cannot live without it, even if we know nothing objectivates it for others.

The immediate, flowing power of such lyricism is bound to increase in proportion with the significance and gravity of the life-segment selected; the balance of the work is that between the positing subject and the object he singles out and elevates.

Strange that there is no reference to the reader here. Surely for the lyricism to have power, it is not enough that the writer believe that the life-segment he or she shares is significant and grave. It must in some sense appeal to the reader as well. Otherwise the reader would never bother with it.

As disparate as one person’s worldview is from another, they must share something in common for the reader to find meaning in the author’s experience.

In the short story, the narrative form which pin-points the strangeness and ambiguity of life, such lyricism must entirely conceal itself behind the hard outlines of the event; here, lyricism is still pure selection; the utter arbitrariness of chance, which may bring happiness or destruction but whose workings are always without reason, can only be balanced by clear, uncommented, purely objective depiction.

It’s not a problem for the text to have a third-person narrator. The author’s choices in the story expresses his or her worldview to the reader. That said, as the short story tends to have chance as the antagonist, the author conceals his or her voice behind objective description. The “objective” narrator “conceals” himself or herself behind the façade of objectivity created by his or her tone. The desired result is for the reader to feel as if he or she had an experience of the story world that feels as if it were a real world the reader had experienced not through the narration of some other, but directly, through his or her own senses. The success of this illusion is among the best estimates of the author’s skill. No matter how successful the illusion, however, we must be frank. The reader has encountered only the constructed worldview that the author has created for the him or her.

The short story is the most purely artistic form; it expresses the ultimate meaning of all artistic creation as mood, as the very sense and content of the creative process, but it is rendered abstract for that very reason.

Short stories, in rendering an experience of life in what is, by definition of the genre, a small number of words, have to force through a point that is very abstract and comprehensible across a number of contexts. There aren’t enough words to contextualize an outsider. You simply ground the reader in a feeling.

It sees absurdity in all its undisguised and unadorned nakedness,

I don’t know if I get this one. The short story sees absurdity. But what’s the antecedent of “its” in “in all its undisguised and unadorned nakedness”—is Lukács talking about the “the undisguised and unadorned nakedness of the short story” or “the undisguised and unadorned nakedness of absurdity?” Well, the “it” at the beginning of the sentence definitely refers to the short story. The most recent noun before “its” is “absurdity,” so let’s pick that meaning initially.

So why does the short story see absurdity in a way that is undisguised and unadorned? Why does absurdity appear to be naked in a short story? Well, in the few sentences before, we’ve been talking about how we lack forms that are transcendent. We’re all stuck in our subjective skulls. The short story works on what we share, which is an occasional common emotion. I imagine this should suggest to us that shared meaning is in itself absurd. The most we realistically share, the most that could be thought of as universal is a set of emotions. Those emotions are as likely as not to be triggered to different stimuli because we do not share the same set of symbols to trigger them.

So trying to share a common world is absurd. It won’t work perfectly. Although people actually bother to read short stories, so they have to work to some extent. But the extent is not perfect and we do not arrive at universal meaning. And I guess we’re very attached to perfection here.

and the exorcising power of this view, without fear or hope, gives it the consecration of form; meaninglessness as meaninglessness becomes form,

What all share, apparently, is a guarantee that we will never share the same set of forms. This commonality in itself is like a form because it is universal. We are abased before our weakness in awe. It is as divine as a form, as a god, if ever so much less beneficent. We do experience catharsis as a result of experiencing it. It is a tragic element.

it becomes eternal because it is affirmed, transcended and redeemed by form.

I don’t understand the bit above. Does he mean that because we yearn for forms, we realize that we are powerless to arrive at forms and this then gives us the only common truth we can hold? If we didn’t care about forms, i.e. if we were as naïve as the Greeks for whom Homer was a natural worldview, we would need neither forms (the product of the shattering of that epic worldview) nor as a result, would we come to learn that we cannot arrive at forms. None of that could happen if we weren’t bent as a species on this trajectory that required ultimate meaning.

Between the short story and the lyric-epic forms there is a clear distinction. As soon as an event which has been given meaning by its form is, if only relatively, meaningful in its content as well, the subject, falling silent, must again struggle for words with which to build a bridge between the relative meaning of the event and the absolute.

I think I can get it if I ground it in the practical experience of an author writing his or her experience of life. Say I am an author and I experience something that, in the cosmology of my life, is deeply meaningful and moving. I choose to elevate it into a story. But in order for that story to make sense, I must translate it into a language that has some universal meaning. A symbol that is personally meaningful in my cosmology may mean something else or even nothing in someone else’s cosmology. I must find words we hold in common to bridge that gap.

In the idyll such lyricism merges almost completely with the contours of the men and things depicted; it is this lyricism that endows these contours with the softness and airiness of a peaceful seclusion, of a blissful isolation from the storms raging in the outside world.

That peacefulness makes sense. The author provides a world where the forms match the experiences. The reader can lose themselves in a world where the forms actually work. The world isn’t real, but reality can be overrated. The world of theory is delightful because it is simple and clean and it works. Empirical reality is such a fucking mess.

Only when the idyll transcends its form and becomes epic, as in Goethe’s and Hebbel’s ‘great idylls’, where the whole of life with all its dangers, although modified and softened by distance, enters into the events depicted,

So some writers (Goethe and Hebbel, apparently—boy, I wish I were well read!) push their idylls into the realm of the epic. The hero reaches out for meaning. This is always dangerous, but provides us with plot. Only when this happens, apparently—

must the author’s own voice be heard and his hand must create the salutary distances, to ensure that the hard-won happiness of his heroes is not reduced to the unworthy complacency of those who cravenly turn their backs on an all-too-present wretchedness they have not overcome but only escaped, and, equally, to ensure that the dangers of life and the perturbation of its totality do not become a pale schema, reducing the triumph of deliverance to a trivial farce.

Okay, I think I’m beginning to get this. If the author has the characters reach out for meaning he has a genuine writer’s dilemma. He must personally commit to the notion that the meaning he allows the characters to find does not appear to the reader to be a lame, unsatisfying answer. If the reader isn’t impressed enough to find meaning where the characters do, then the author is seen as lazy and having given his characters an easy escape from life’s suffering. The reader can’t follow the character on his or her journey and hence can’t share in the redemption. And why would the reader bother with the story if the reader can’t at the end be redeemed?

We can’t have the reader reach out for the Greek forms because the reader is not that naïve. But the reader clearly shares the naïve hope of finding a world of forms, otherwise they wouldn’t be reading. The reader must be seduced into believing that he can find a meaning that links his life to (1) eternity and (2) other people. The reader does not like to be cheated and won’t forgive the author unless the author can give him or her at least the hope of forms, the hope of redemption.

And such lyricism develops into a limpid, generously flowing, all-embracing message only when the event, in its epic objectivation, becomes the vehicle and symbol of unbounded feeling; when a soul is the hero and that soul’s longing is the story (once, speaking of Charles-Louis Philippe, I called such a form ‘chantefable’);

For this form of lyric narrative to have its impact on the reader and be interpreted as a rich and desirable narrative that pulls the reader along its perfect flow, the event must become epic in the reader’s eyes. That is, the event it describes must offer a world of meaning that the reader can just “discover.” To do this, the event has to become a means for expressing the reader’s feelings of longing.

when the object, the event that is given form, remains isolated as indeed it should, but when the lived experience that absorbs the event and radiates it out also carries within it the ultimate meaning of life, the artist’s sense-giving, life-conquering power.

The challenge of this form of writing is that for the story to have this power, it must present itself as a complete world where the forms are uncomplicated and just waiting to be picked up. We know the universal story doesn’t work and that any story will have to be idiosyncratic. Having done this, however, the novel must also do what it is most unlikely to do—point at universal truth while using a completely idiosyncratic vehicle!

Strangely, however, the meaning of life is apparently, “the artist’s sense-giving. Life-conquering power.”

This power, also, is lyrical: the artist’s personality, conscious and autonomous, proclaims its own interpretation of the meaning of the universe; the artist handles events as though they were instruments, he does not listen to them for a secret meaning.

A prophet would interpret reality, discover its meaning. An artist assigns it. The story is a tool for assigning meaning.

What is given form here is not the totality of life but the artist’s relationship with that totality, his approving or condemnatory attitude towards it; here, the artist enters the arena of artistic creation as the empirical subject in all its greatness but also with all its creaturely limitations.

The author can’t give us a perfect knowledge of the universe and its meaning. What he or she can give us, however, is his relationship with the universe—what this encounter has meant to him. The author gives us meaning while admitting his own limits.

Neither can a totality of life which is by definition extensive be achieved by the object’s being annihilated — by the subject’s making itself the sole ruler of existence. However high the subject may rise above its objects and take them into its sovereign possession, they are still and always only isolated objects, whose sum never equals a real totality.

The approach of assigning meaning, however, can only give meaning to a small slice of experience. The real world is too large and complex for an artist to get away with simply assigning it a meaning.

Even such a subject, for all its sublime humour, remains an empirical one and its creation is only the adoption of an attitude towards its objects which, when all is said and done, remain essentially similar to itself; and the circle it draws round the world-segment thus selected and set apart the limits of the subject, not of a cosmos complete in itself.

The comedian attempts to provide meaning through domination, through imposing meaning on the world. But even when he or she does this, he or she only succeeds in assigning meaning to just a portion. I imagine this is why comedy travels so poorly out of its context. Of all genres, the situational comedy is this least portable from one culture to another.

The humorist’s soul yearns for a more genuine substantiality than life can offer; and so he smashes all the forms and limits of life’s fragile totality in order to reach the sole source of life, the pure, world-dominating ‘I’., But as the objective world breaks down, so the subject, too, becomes a fragment; only the ‘I’ continues to exist, but its existence is then lost in the insubstantiality of its self-created world of ruins. Such subjectivity wants to give form to everything, and precisely for this reason succeeds only in mirroring a segment of the world.

The reason why the comedian does his or her own thing is because he or she wants universal meaning. The violence with which he or she imposes that meaning, shows, in a sense, how badly the person needs that universal meaning. Someone who needs for everything to have a clear form and meaning is driven to control. Humanity, being finite, can only impose meaning on a small corner of reality. Generalizability is too much to hope for.

This is the paradox of the subjectivity of the great epic, its ‘throwing away in order to win': creative subjectivity becomes lyrical, but, exceptionally, the subjectivity which simply accepts, which humbly transforms itself into a purely receptive organ of the world, can partake of the grace of having the whole revealed to it.

Ironically, the form of the novel is designed to create a world that is narrowed sufficiently so as to be detailed enough to appear real to a modern palate. The narrowing allows the author enough control to create the illusion. Without the narrowing, there is not enough detail to satisfy the contemporary palate. Strangely, the illusion such a controlling author is trying to create is that he or she is receiving the real world, when in fact, he or she as actually creating a fake, limited world. Strangely, this fake world is in some senses more satisfying that the real world.

This is the leap that Dante made between the Vita nuova and the Divina commedia, that Goethe made between Werther and Wilhelm Meister, the leap Cervantes made when, becoming silent himself, he let the cosmic humour of Don Quixote become heard;

And this is where I really wish I were well-read. I can only surmise that Dante, Geothe and Cervantes were good at creating this illsion…

by contrast, Sterne’s and Jean Paul’s glorious ringing voices offer no more than reflexions of a world-fragment which is merely subjective and therefore limited, narrow and arbitrary.

…whereas it sounds as if Sterne and Jean Paul couldn’t even be bothered. Either that, or their goal was to show that the illusion is only that, an illusion. The point is, one way or another, they didn’t advance this façade.

This is not a value judgement but an a priori definition of genre:

So it sounds as if the correct interpretation is the latter. Sterne and Jean Paul, for whatever reasons, chose not to write in this defined style. Lukács isn’t taking shots at them. But what follows is his definition of the genre (perhaps the novel, I’m not quite sure):

the totality of life resists any attempt to find a transcendental centre within it, and refuses any of its constituent cells the right to dominate it. Only when a subject, far removed from all life and from the empirical which is necessarily posited together with life, becomes enthroned in the pure heights of essence, when it has become nothing but the carrier of the transcendental synthesis, can it contain all the conditions for totality within its own structure and transform its own limitations into the frontiers of the world. But such a subject cannot write an epic: the epic is life, immanence, the empirical. Dante’s Paradiso is closer to the essence of life than Shakespeare’s exuberant richness.

The irony is that the epic always wants the realm of meaning to be the realm of the palpable. If you want meaning, you pretty much need to enter the world of abstract thought. And if you want to write an epic, you need to find a way of suffusing the real world you are going to describe with the meaning you discover in the realm of the abstract. Dante’s Paradiso is a story of theological abstraction. In contrast, Shakespeare gives us a very tangible world. Paradiso comes closer to giving us actual meaning. But I can’t help thinking that the way Lukács is describing Shakespeare and Dante, he must think that Shakespeare does a better job. This is true, even though Shakespeape may be more of a cheat.

Apparently, the reader wants the impossible. Or, at least, the reader wants to be seduced into believing that the impossible is possible, to feel again as he or she felt when he or she was young and innocent. The reader wants to lose himself or herself in the magic that the loss of innocence has destroyed.

The synthetic power of the sphere of essence is intensified still further in the constructed totality of the dramatic problem:

The created emotional impact that the author creates in his or her abstract becomes more intense when it is moved and expressed in the concrete world of the problem described in the novel.

that which the problem decrees to be necessary, whether it be event or soul, achieves existence through its relation to the centre;

Is the center, in this case, the realm of meaning and reflection?

the immanent dialectic of this unity accords to each individual phenomenon the essence appropriate to it depending on its distance from the centre and its relative importance to the problem.

The cosmos of the novel is ordered according to a set of values that is derived from the moral center of the specific problem.

The problem here is inexpressible because it is the concrete idea of the whole, because only the polyphony of all the voices can carry the full wealth of content concealed in it. For life, the problem is an abstraction; the relationship of a character to a problem can never absorb the whole fullness of that character’s life, and every event in the sphere in life can relate only allegorically to the problem.

I think the bit above is explaining how the illusion works. But suffusing the abstract thought behind the problem into a whole created world filled with voices, the problem avoids looking abstract. Moreover, there is still a real, concrete palpable world being described (Shakespeare not Dante). While there is allegory and abstraction involved, the allegory and abstraction are set among myriad other details which gives the whole “problem world” a very real feeling. The world has the epic’s “real world” feel because of the detail. Yet because this world of detail is nonetheless constructed around the problem, meaning feels everywhere palpable.

Perhaps the effect appeals to those of us who are given to want to see magic in the world, to see signs. We feel as if meaning were just out of reach. The idea is to provide enough obscuring detail to make the reader feel as if he or she were situated in the mundane world of reality. But, ultimately because the goal of the novel is to find meaning through exploring the abstract problem, the incidence of meaning hiding behind the façade of mundane reality is much higher in the novel.

Indeed, it would have to be. When we discover meaning lurking behind the façade of the mundane world, we don’t discover it. We create it. Creating meaning is hard work. In this sense, the novel, when done well, is truly a gift. It gives rich meaning without labor. It provides the world of the epic, where one can reach out and touch meaning, guzzle it in greedy gulps, like pop from a soda fountain. No abstract philosophy, no racking of the brain is needed. This is why we die inside when a good novel ends. A good novel allows us to live in a realm of palpable meaning, a world where the promise of meaning peeking out from behind every façade is kept and honored. Who can bear to leave such a world? The only solace is that the mundane world contains some people who will touch you back.

It is true that in the Elective Affinities, which Hebbel rightly called ‘dramatic’, Goethe’s consummate art succeeded in weighing and ordaining everything in relation to the central problem, but even these souls, guided from the start into the problem’s narrow channels, cannot attain to real existence; even this action, narrowed and cut down to fit the problem, fails to achieve a rounded totality; to fill even the fragile shell of this small world, the author is forced to introduce extraneous elements, and even if he were as successful throughout the book as he is in certain passages of supremely skilful organisation, the result would not be a totality.

I don’t know the novel, but Wikipedia says that it had an impact on Weber’s sociology, of all things! Now I’m deeply curious. I’ve felt for some time as if I were caught in the middle of an old argument between Weber and Lucács from late imperial and Weimar Germany. My instinct is that I come down more strongly on Weber’s side, but that there is something in Lucács’s thinking that Weber feared and which I don’t, so that in the end, my thinking will differ from his. So odd to have such feelings when one doesn’t really and truly understand the terms of the argument.

The novel does seem to relate everything philosophical to everything happening in the mundane world, Lukács tells us. But he still has to admit that there are things unrelated to the novel’s problem that are in the novel. It’s not perfect.

I guess it shows how far gone I am from the expectation of universal transcendence that I’m excited about something as a satisfying illusion!

Likewise, the ‘dramatic’ concentration of Hebbel’s Song of the Nibelungs is a splendid mistake which originated pro domo: a great writer’s desperate effort to rescue the epic unity — disintegrating in a changed world — of an authentically epic text.

So Lukács considers the myths surrounding Siegfried as a real epic that Hebbel tries to reformulate for modern use. He wants to import the epic into the sensibility of his age.

Brunhilde’s superhuman figure is here reduced to a mixture of woman and valkyrie, who humiliates her weak suitor, Gunther, and makes him completely questionable and feeble; only a few fairy-tale motifs survive the transformation of Siegfried the dragon-killer into a knightly figure.

Siegfried and Brunhilde wind up losing their epic appeal in this process. I guess I can see that. It’s been a long time since I read the Nibelungenlied and naturally I remember Wagner far better.

The work is saved by the problem of loyalty and revenge, that is to say by Hagen and Kriemhild. But it is a desperate, purely artistic attempt to create, with the means of composition, structuring and organisation, a unity that is no longer organically given: a desperate attempt and a heroic failure.

That is actually true. The real characters are Hagen and Kriemhild, as they actually are the movers and shakers of the story and the ones with deeper emotions. They have less noble emotions than Brunhilde and Siegfried, but are nonetheless more rounded (to steal Lukács’ word) characters. Nobility of character lacks depth of character in that piece. It makes sense, though. The values of the receiving world of the audience really don’t have a place for the values of Vikings.

For unity can surely be achieved, but never a real totality. In the story of the Iliad which has no beginning and no end, a rounded universe blossoms into all-embracing life. The lucidly composed unity of the Nibelungenlied conceals life and decay, castles and ruins, behind its skilfully structured façade.

The Nibelungenlied, in translating the myth, has wound up only changing the genre. But it hides this well. It’s art, but it’s no longer an epic. The epic, Lukács tells us, is dead.

I don’t know quite why, but I feel an overwhelming urge to say, “You may have killed the epic beneath the weight of all you have said. But do not believe that you will create a genre that means more than it has.”

Maybe I have more peace with our need for transcendence and yet our utter inability to ever fully transcend. I dunno. Heavy stuff.

Plus ça change...

2010-05-18T00:03:00.000-07:00

Once I believed in the glory of the future. Then, then I became a political scientist, God help me.
Come gather 'round people, wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide, the chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon for the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who that it's namin'.
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway. Don't block up the hall.
For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don't criticize what you can't understand.
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn. The curse it is cast.
The slow one now will later be fast
As the present now will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

Nazi Tourettes

2010-05-13T23:06:00.000-07:00

This is fuckin' brilliant. I busted a gut.

Litany Against Fear

2010-05-09T00:31:00.000-07:00

I will not fear—fear is the mind killer.
Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

MULE!!!

2010-05-08T18:12:00.000-07:00

Writing Is Now Baseball

2010-04-11T09:26:00.000-07:00

Part of writing now is learning to accept that I can't simply impose order on this damned mess in a single, bold stroke the way I did a decade ago (can I have been sick that long?). I need to be patient (I hate that pun) while I plod my way toward coherence. It makes me sick, but that's how this works now and nothing will change it. Writing is a slow boring of hard boards needing passion and perspective. The charismatic version of this was way more fun.

Baseball. Writing is baseball. It's about grinding it out patiently across the long season.

JOBA!

2010-04-07T00:33:00.001-07:00

I Finally Get It

2010-03-13T06:47:00.000-08:00

The brain damage has left me with three core problems:

I have difficulty sorting because I have trouble holding multiple items in my brain at one time and manipulating them. I suck at filing.

I have difficulty suppressing intense emotion. This was apparently something I used to be able to do very selectively.

I suffer from chronic fatigue that’s akin to living like someone in their sixties or seventies. Moreover both sorting and dealing with strong emotion are the things that greatly exacerbate this fatigue. This probably has to do with "rewiring" the brain does to get around the damage. Ironically, moving heavy boxes is less fatiguing for me now than filing or cleaning. Anything is less fatiguing than intense emotion.

The first two skills are the foundation of all disciplined work. Having the last defect sure doesn’t help get my job done.

When I’m thinking up new ideas, I get emotionally overstimulated. The stuff I dream up excites me a great deal. Talal Amin described the charismatic inspiration of shamen and artists this way:

Johann Sulzer, a theorist of the fine arts, wrote in more general terms: “All artists of any genius claim that from time to time they experience a state of extraordinary psychic intensity which makes work unusually easy, images arising without great effort and the best ideas flowing in such profusion as if they were the gift of some higher power. This is without doubt what is called inspiration. If an artist experiences this condition, his object appears to him in an unusual light; his genius, as if guided by a divine power, invents without effort, shaping his invention in the most suitable form without strain; the finest ideas and images occur unbidden in floods to the inspired poet; the orator judges with the greatest acumen, feels with the greatest intensity, and the strongest and most vividly expressive words rise to his tongue.” Such statements, Flaherty argues, are strongly reminiscent of accounts of shamanism—in this case of a shaman described not skeptically but in wonderment. They employ the idea of inspiration metaphorically—as control of an “instrument” from outside the person, or as a “gift” from a “higher power.” But these remain metaphors, covering an inability to explain a this-worldly phenomenon in natural terms.

Sorting through the flood of inspired ideas pouring into my skull and rapidly organizing them would be difficult enough in my state. I can't rapidly organize anything anymore. But feeling that intense passion, literally ecstasy, makes it even more difficult for me to sort. I overheat emotionally and have to slow down and process more slowly. Moreover, I don’t really feel ecstasy anymore. I feel panic. I feel a very strong reflexive immediacy to write, as if slowing the thinking down will makes me forget the connections my imagination has made between objects. To some extent that is actually true. There are ideas that one might not imagine again if one doesn’t latch on to them immediately. So what was once ecstasy is now pure choking.

Nonetheless, slowing down and handling the flood of inspiration through patient note-taking about what I’m imagining over several passes over months is a viable way of handling this. Once I detach emotionally from what I've imagined (which takes a few weeks), I can sort through the mad intuitive drivel for the real gems. It’s slow, but I do eventually “get there.” I can still do this work.

But I nonetheless can’t absorb the input from my imagination rapidly enough to proceed the way I used to before. That ecstatic, charismatic feeling of “channeling divine inspiration” is something I’m never going to feel again. I will never be able to sort rapidly enough to select which relationships to accept and which to reject as inspiration floods my brain, let alone handle the flood of emotion this creates. The emotion exhausts me well before I can achieve the sorting task. That is what the disability has cost me.

But using my brain to rapidly sort the deluge of inspiration that would flood my mind was the work process with which I most identified myself. Losing this gift has entailed losing what I valued most about myself as a person. I don’t need to mourn it anymore, because I’ve been mourning it for years now. But finally being able to articulate it has finally allowed me to let it go and move forward.

Affirmation

2010-02-16T21:03:00.001-08:00

I want my dissertation. This is my fight. And I want it. I want it so badly it hurts. This weekend it’s Schmitt. The Concept of the Political. I will beat that Nazi fuck. The knife is going in.

I am the quarterback. And I have all kinds of time. It doesn’t look like it. But I do.

From Shawn

2010-01-26T20:35:00.000-08:00

This is not Detroit, man! This is the Super Bowl! Schadenfavre. That's what it is. Schadenfavre.

Just Had to Share

2010-01-25T15:56:00.001-08:00

Signature Favre

2010-01-24T20:30:00.000-08:00

From an AP article on today's NFC Championship game:

With the NFC championship game tied, the Vikings close to field goal range and mere seconds left, Favre made the kind of mistake he had avoided all season. He threw across his body toward Sidney Rice, and Tracy Porter stepped in front to intercept the pass, ending the Vikings' chances to win Sunday's game in regulation.

The Saints won the coin toss in overtime, and before Favre could take the field, Drew Brees drove them into position for Garrett Hartley's winning field goal.

Signature Favre.

GO PACK GO!!!!!

Rosh Hanikra

2010-01-18T11:09:00.000-08:00

The place is located in some white chalky cliffs by the sea.

You start up on the top of the cliff, where you can get some magnificent shots of the Mediterranean coastline near Haifa.

You have to take a cable-car down to the grottos.

Naturally, there are big rocks below.

But the view from inside the grotto is amazing. I only wish I were a better photographer.

New Year

2010-01-16T00:15:00.000-08:00

This is the last year of the first decade of the 21st Century. This September will be a full ten years since I came to Seattle. It’s weird. If you count Austin and El Paso as separate places (they’re both Texas, it’s true), I’ve lived in Seattle for longer than anywhere else. I’ve been a fan of the Green Bay Packers and the Red Wings for thirteen years now. I got my first MA twelve years ago. I came out about eight years ago. I met Craig six years ago. We got married four years ago. My grandmother died five years ago. My aunt died a year and a half ago. I paid off the first car I ever bought for myself last spring. I became a Yankees fan a few months ago.

I realize that my life is just like this song. I don’t know if it makes any sense. The words and notes are cobbled together, but it nonetheless has a strange sort of emotional integrity and like the kid at the end, I’m sort of left saying, “Wow!” And I know the thing that gives it emotional integrity is love.

PLAYOFFS, BABY!

2009-12-27T21:11:00.000-08:00

It was only the Seahawks—a crummy team (Sorry, Shawn). But we dominated that crummy team—no second half slump! That is new and bespeaks discipline.

I still worry about the O-line and probably will until I see them beat a good defense playing their best. We may see that quite soon. But for the moment, they're holding their own and I'm grateful. Moreover, this was a win in the cold. All I could think of was that second Bears game in 2007 and that blasted NFC Championship game against the Giants. Today, we won in the cold. The Green Bay Packers may, just may, be winter's team again.

For the first time in a while, I could enjoy that delicious jaded feeling of casual half-interest in the second half of the game, indulging in idle chatter with others, knowing my beloved Packers had everything under control and that victory was well in hand. I have missed that luxurious, decadent feeling reserved for the most blessed sport-fan bastards in all the earth and am glad to have had it back for an afternoon.

Playoffs, baby! GO PACK GO!!!!!

Practicing in the Cold Helps...

2009-12-06T15:11:00.000-08:00

According to Mike Vandermouse, Mike McCarthy recently said

But the Packers might be better equipped to handle the cold this year because McCarthy has them practicing outdoors on a new heated field. In past years, the Packers worked out inside the Don Hutson Center in the winter.

“Practicing outside definitely helps,” McCarthy said.

How many seasons did it take Captain Dipshit to come to the conclusion that practicing in the cold might actually help the team weather the cold? How many seasons did he say, "You get the best practice under the best practice conditions, so we'll just practice indoors and leave the doors open?" Does anyone remember that we lost the NFC Championship at Lambeau Field because the team sucked in the cold? Knowing McCarthy, he probably has Crosby and Kapinos practicing their kicking indoors, too.

McCarthy sucks. Slowest, most stubborn fuck I've ever seen.

Turkey Day

2009-11-27T02:18:00.000-08:00

I’m in a good mood due to some stimulating conversations I’ve had over the past few days.

Thinking about the Packers Offense

I had an online chat with a guy named Oppy on the CheeseheadTV live blog during the Packers-Lions game today. Last week or the week before, Oppy mentioned that Rodgers is McCarthy’s “shiny new sports car, he wants to show it off.” As a result he tends to solve most of his problems by using the quarterback.

This makes a lot of sense to me, this notion that McCarthy is basically a QB coach and thinks like a QB coach. Oppy also critiqued my notion that the O-Line was ignored, “I don't think the o-line has been ignored.. Just over-estimated. O linemen have been taken en mass through the draft for years. They just haven't panned out much. Spitz and Sitton look to be the best of them, but Spitz's future is uncertain at this point.”

I like that. Clearly management feels that they’re focused on the O-Line. It’s just they think that they can coach Alex Gibbs’ zone-blocking system. They can’t. I strongly want to critique this notion of McCarthy being an offensive genius. I think he’s a quarterbacking genius. But ultimately he’s too biased toward the position of the quarterback in most of his analyses.

Oppy asked, “I still don't get why on 4th down attempts or 3rd and Goal McCarthy seems to refuse to use sets that at least make defenses acknowledge it might be a run. I mean, if you want to pass it, that's fine.. But would it kill you to pass it out of a formation with a RB and maybe even a FB in the backfield?”

I said back, “Oppy, I almost get the impression that McCarthy just doesn't trust running as a concept. It's like he thinks, ‘On third and long, of course you throw. No one would rush, so why fake it?’”

He said back, “Cup, I'm not even talking about 3rd and long situations. I'm talking about 3rd and goal.. 4th and 2.. At least make the defense THINK you MIGHT run it. But when you go empty backfield, you're telegraphing ‘Just rush the passer or cover’”

I thought for a bit, but realized it didn’t change my answer. “Oppy, I still think that line of reasoning can be expanded. McCarthy is biased toward passing. Whenever tension is high, he passes. He grafts that bias onto the defense. He thinks, ‘This is a crucial play, we can't run it. The defense knows that.’ He likes passing and grafts that bias onto the defense, so he doesn't try to trick them, thinking it won't work. That's my theory, anyway.”

The Packers play book, according to Aaron Rodgers, is roughly 250 pass plays and 100 run plays. Is it any wonder that he passes way too often? It feels more than 75 percent of the time, but I don’t know the numbers. But even going by a random distribution of the plays, he’d be passing at least 75 percent of the time. Call me old fashioned, but I think that’s crazy. He may be a genius QB coach, but he’s not a genius offensive coach and he’s no head coach. He’s trained Rodgers. He’s done the best he can do. I don’t think he’s a strategist.

Thinking about the Damned Dissertation

I had a talk with Steve Hanson, which very often has a mind-clearing effect for me. He drove home a clear point. “Talal, you should be an unabashed supporter of qualitative methods.” Ellis has also told me to be myself and stop sounding “like you through a Poli Sci echo chamber.” Steve pointed out that all this work was worth it because it has prepared me to go up against the KKV types and that was what I needed to get out of the methods courses. So I guess, in the end, you come up against yourself.

Steve also gave me a minimum for my causal argument. It has to be reasonably falsifiable. That’s the boundary. I can work with that. For the first time I feel like this is a football game I could win. My goal is a theory chapter by Week 1 of next term.

I’m actually pumped about writing.

I Need to Stop Selling Myself Short

I’ve lost a lot of respect for myself because of the illness. I’ve come to believe that I can’t fight, that I don’t have it in me to fight. Maybe I’ve sat in too many seminars in the Pacific Northwest. When I went to Palestine, when I saw that wall in Jericho, I realized that was wrong. There’s fight left in this sclerotic carcass after all. I want to go back.
I will not fear—fear is the mind killer.
Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Reading Up on Packers O-Line

2009-11-15T10:40:00.000-08:00

The Packers O-Line has never recovered from the loss of Mark Rivera and Mike Wahle at the end of 2004. Two veterans of the old O-Line remain: Mark Tauscher (RT) and Chad Clifton (LT). Both are injury prone, as one would expect of ten-year veterans in this vicious sport. Tauscher is backed at right tackle by Allen Barbre, a third year player. Clifton is backed at left tackle by T.J. Lang, a rookie, who also backs up left guard. Our current center, Scott Wells, is back in his job again after having been ousted by Jason Spitz, our former right guard. Spitz is out for the year with a back injury, so Wells is in again. At left guard we have Darren Colledge and second-year player Josh Sitton is right guard. Sitton and Wells are both backed up by Evan Dietrich-Smith, a rookie. The unit is run on a “musical chairs” philosophy. It has no coherent identity beyond the fact that, as a unit, they suck.

Aaron Rodgers has been sacked a total of 37 times in eight games. That’s nearly five sacks a game. That old man who works in Minneapolis has only been sacked 18 times this season. That’s a little more than twice a game. And that doesn’t tell the story. Aaron Rodgers is mobile. We can’t say that Brent moves that well. He’d be toast if he still played here.

Last summer, when McCarthy purged the defense coaches and started anew, he didn’t bother to change his offensive line strategy at all. This is a problem. This is how Pete Dougherty of The Green Bay Press-Gazette summed up the coaching history of the line.

When McCarthy became the Packers’ coach in 2006, he brought with him Jeff Jagodzinski, a Gibbs protégé, to teach Gibbs’ distinct and idiosyncratic branch of the zone-blocking scheme.

Gibbs, whom McCarthy worked with in Kansas City in 1993 and 1994, had a track record of success, especially in Denver (1995-2003) and then Atlanta (2004-06). In both stops, he was allowed to fully implement his comprehensive run scheme that emphasizes smaller, quicker offensive linemen, extensive cut blocking, and decisive one-cut running by the backs.

But considering no one running Gibbs’ system has duplicated his success, maybe there’s something about it that’s too dependent on Gibbs himself.

So we’re trying to build a miracle O-Line that operates with sprightly leprechauns instead of the beefy motherfuckers that everyone else favors for all their O-Line needs. Our sole link to the mystical body of the canny and sagacious Alex Gibbs, the only man able to create this miracle O-Line, was a guy named Jeff Jagodzinski. Jagodzinski left the Packers at the end of the 2006 season, the season that O-Line was looking just a little bit better.

So, you ask. Who is the Packers O-Line coach now, Talal? They knew that this strategy was motherfucking hard and can’t just be pulled out of your ass. They got a specialist, right?

Our current O-Line coach is James Campen. Here’s a bit from his profile on the Packers website:

Promoted to offensive line coach Jan. 15, 2007, by Head Coach Mike McCarthy, Campen moved up from his position as assistant offensive line coach in McCarthy's first season at the helm. Prior to that, Campen filled the role of assistant offensive line/quality control coach for two seasons following nine years in the high school ranks.

That’s right, boys and girls. They put the head coach of Ponderosa High School in charge of the Great Experiment, because the kids get mighty high-tech in Shingle Springs, California. The guy watches Jagodzinski for a year, and suddenly he can coach the Miracle O-Line Zone Blocking Scheme.

Give McCarthy his due. He’s an excellent quarterback coach. I like the way the Kid turned out. I truly do. But that’s all I like about McCarthy. So long as he's coach, this line is never going to perform.

What floors me is the way the media covered this. I'm a crummy football fan. Kirk sends me website URLs to read up on what a zone blocking offensive line is supposed to be. I heard about the Broncos's success with the approach and experienced it first hand at the most unfortunate Super Bowl game of my life. But until I found this recent Dougherty piece, I didn't know that no one has had success coaching it besides Alex Gibbs. And Jagodzinski left at the end of the 2006 season. He's the last guy who has worked with the guy extensively. Then they bring in the high school coach. But no one over three seasons says anything. Yeah, they're under pressure from the team to be rally the troops. But I have to wonder just how knowledgeable reporters are in sports. The reason I ask is that very few are much good as analysts in politics. I know that because while I'm not a beat reporter, I can often cull together decent analysis based on what they can feed me, because I know the Levant well (and not as well as I want, by the way). This data has been there for a while. In this case, they didn't pick up on it, or were too afraid of the team's response to use it. My gut tells me it's mostly the former.

Nazereth

2009-11-01T07:21:00.001-08:00

Frustrating as it is to not have gotten my massive article download, I'm excited by the prospect of getting my camera back to Palestine/Israel and getting better pictures. These are my best from Nazereth.

The produce shots I got at Carmel Market are better, but I couldn't resist this stack on the road up to the Church of the Annunciation (I can hear Alberto, our tour guide now: AN-NUN-CI-A-TION!) I couldn't resist this handsome guy I met on the road, either...

A lot of people have religious experiences in Holy Land. The only place I came close was at the Church of the Annunciation. It was really the only place I felt genuine love for God. The art was simple, but sincere and it moved me. Below is a Madonna donated by Japan:

The Annunciation to the Blessed Mother by the Archangel Gabriel.

Mary Magdalene washing Jesus' feet. The Latin reads, "Your sins are forgiven. Go in peace."

A Madonna donated by Egypt.

A Greek Madonna.

I found this image commemorating a meeting between Pope Paul and Patriarch Atenagoras to be particularly moving, as there isn't much in Jerusalem to express any sentiment of Christian unity. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is particularly bad in this regard.

Here's more detail on their faces. The birds are perhaps Orthodox, as clearly they weren't too kind to poor Pope Paul...

We had so little time in Nazereth. I really would like to spend the day next time. It's such an Arab city. It looks like an upscale version of Fuheis.

This one caught the eye of the political scientist in me.

I never saw a single Palestinian flag in any of the Arab parts of Israel. But Palestinians express identity in several ways through religion. I imagine this sign was up for Ramadan. I'd like to get a clearer idea of the way religion expresses identity for Arab Israelis.

Too Little Butter Spread over Too Much Bread

2009-10-18T22:43:00.000-07:00

The past two weeks have been difficult, primarily because my workout schedule sucks and this is making me very unhappy. Anyone who knows me is likely to laugh, as I’ve never really taken any work out program seriously before, but let’s lay out recent changes.

Value Changes

My values with respect to working out have changed. I have two motives. The first is pragmatic and the second is spiritual. First, I discovered that working out in concert with B-12 seriously improves my health and overall energy level. This real difference on a daily level is worth the fight.. I feel healthier when I go the gym. I love the feeling of blood pumping up my muscles for a few days after a workout. It makes me happy.

The second is that being queer has changed my spirituality. Before I was always concerned with the soul and the mind. Discovering a world of sex has really changed the way I look at the body. I realize that the core of my peace of mind is the body. There is nothing more beautiful than the male form. When I see a built guy, especially one who doesn’t have an asshole streak—that sort of energy is really offputting—seeing his body puts me at peace and fills me with awe. I realize that I want to be that for any queer guy like me who needs to see it. I’ll never be Brian Urlacher, I understand this, but I can be better than my present form.

We didn’t have the cash for a gym membership in Tel Aviv, so I didn’t get to work out at all. Craig lost weight there, but I didn’t. I’m not as badly off as when I started working out at the start of summer, but I hate being in the hole again. I need to get back on the wagon.

What Works

To be successful, I need to:

Eat Breakfast: This is a double latte (a shot of caffeinated espresso, a shot of decaf, and ¾ of a cup of steamed 1 percent milk), a large bowl of Fiber One Cereal (aka Super Colon Blow from Saturday Night Live), and a low-fat, high-fiber Jimmy Dean Pseudo-McMuffin.
Work out immediately: I lift two days and do cardio for the other three.
Eat lunch: This meal will be larger than breakfast. I’ll be good and hungry. A stir fry with brown rice is good. Unlike when I first wake up, I can actually eat a larger meal after working out. I find that if I eat at this time, I don’t have much hunger or energy lulls during the day.

Snack three times through the afternoon on apples, celery, etc.
Dinner: A large salad and chicken or steak.

Root of the Problem: My Teaching Schedule Sucks

I’m a teaching assistant this term. That means I’m on campus five days a week—a commute totaling roughly twelve hours. Moreover the schedule itself is lousy. The lecture is at 9:30, as are my first sections. So I’ve got to be there bright-eyed and busy-tailed. Anyone who knows me, knows that I don’t do bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Moreover, my second sections are at 12:30, so on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’m trapped on campus. I have to work in the law library (where no one knows me and I can’t get sidetracked).

This Leads to Difficulties with Working Out and Diet

All of this means that I’m having trouble managing working out and eating. I’m only working out two or three times a week. After Wednesday, I’m really dragging. I have two many “on” days. Without the B-12, I’d never make it to the gym at all. But still, I can’t pretend that I’m a normal, healthy, 38 year-old man who can push myself exactly as hard as I please. Thursdays and Fridays, I drag. I seriously lifted for the first time again last week. I did it right in doing the ultrapathetic workout the week before. I was sore, but not in pain today.

Because I need to prep in the morning for sections, I tend to workout later in the morning, rather than early. It sucks. Craig and I had a really busy weekend and I haven't cooked. I'm going to be, as the Hobbit once said, "Like too little butter spread over too much bread."

Plus, I have a huge hang-up about visible progress from my previous high-energy life. My shoulders SUCK. I really want to see some progress there over the next few months, but with this pathetic schedule, I can’t hold my breath on that count. I hate not having shoulders. I’m thinking about starting to run. I’ve always sucked at running. It would be so cool to be in good enough shape to play rugby. If I could, I’d take a page out of Kirk’s book and get the laser surgery so that I could see without glasses. Plus, I promised myself when field research was over, I could get a dog. It would be cool to be one of those guys who runs with his dog by Lake Washington. Plus, I like yellow labs, but they’re energetic dogs.

I need to build myself for this. I also need to survive this term. I’ve been working on a new proposal. I’m getting there. This is all progress, it just doesn’t feel like it. I have to make sure I don’t lose faith in myself. Just because it feels slow, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. I have to stick with it, despite the fact that I won’t feel like I’m making progress. The hardest thing about MS is that it’s a slow boring of hard boards. It takes passion, but perspective. I suck at perspective.

Greenland from the Sky

2009-10-09T05:49:00.000-07:00

I took these shots of Greenland from the air on the flight home from Tel Aviv. They all punch up to larger sizes for more detail (less than a meg each, though). Let me know what you think.

About Last Night

2009-10-06T07:12:00.000-07:00

The O-Line stinks and will continue stink all season. They were sort of okay when Jeff Jagodzinski was here. Still, the success of the 2007 season was more luck than skill. Since Jagodzinski left, it’s clear that there’s no one to coach this zone blocking approach. If the line is to get better, we need a change of coaching staff or BIGGER LINEMEN and a more traditional approach.

McCarthy seems to be a good QB coach. Sadly, he seems to have been promoted beyond his greatest competence. Under his leadership, we will continue to be a mediocre football team. I officially vote no confidence in his leadership.

I don’t want to talk about Brent anymore. I just don't.
It was good to hang out with Shawn Lee. I am mindful that I own him and Simon letters of recommendation. Simon's has to be written tonight.

Yankees? WTF?!

2009-10-02T03:28:00.000-07:00

Shawn Lee, survivor of POL S 325, wrote to me while I was out of the country to complain about my “misguided” sense of sports loyalties.

Yankees: WTF! The fucking yankees. How Boring! That is all it took, take Talal to the ballgame, buy him some peanuts and a new ballcap, and he won't care if he ever comes back? The Yankees are the arrogant bratty prep school rich kid of baseball, they don't cultivate thier own talent, they just buy it from other teams, because they have far greater resouces than every one else. Any attempt at revenue sharing is routinely killed by the Yanks. Anyone interested in social justice, and aren't all you liberal academics interested in that?, should not support the Yanks. Enjoy rooting for Goliath. I am sure that is satisfying for the soul.
Your sports loyalities seem a bit troubling. There is no regional logic to them, and seems to have a heavy dose of (gulp) front-runnerism. By buddy from Detroit finds it odd that you are a Wings fan and a Packers fan, and now throw the Yanks in the mix. Whoa.

What’s truly magnificent about that speech is that I can hear it in Shawn’s voice in my head. Sports fandom brings out the passion in the male voice. It’s a beautiful thing.

Despite my admiration for the rhetoric, I have, however, felt for a few weeks now that this required some sort of rebuttal. Moreover, Neil has had his real life troubles over the past week, so I thought this might cheer him up. Here's hoping.
> Yankees: WTF! The fucking yankees. How Boring!
And there I was thinking I was being controversial... For what its worth, you don’t sound bored, Shawn.

> That is all it took,
> take Talal to the ballgame, buy him some
> peanuts and a new ballcap, and he won't
> care if he ever comes back?

Well, Neil actually did spend hour after impassioned hour explaining the strike zone and the nuances of the catcher-pitcher-batter triad. Listening to him explain strategy while at a baseball game is actually quite mesmerizing. But yeah, sheer enthusiasm and giving a shit was basically the price of my loyalty. I thought I was easy. But out of all my friends over several years, Neil was the only one who cared. So I’m a Yankees fan.

> The Yankees are the arrogant bratty
> prep school rich kid of baseball, they
> don't cultivate their own talent, they
> just buy it from other teams, because
> they have far greater resources than
> every one else.
Hmm. My friend Kirk, a Red Sox fan once posted to this blog to say, “If you take a step back and look at the Yankees of late '90s objectively any true fan (even Red Sox fans) would have to admit the team truly did win through home-grown talent.”

Did I mention Kirk is a Red Sox fan?

> Any attempt at revenue sharing is
> routinely killed by the Yanks. Anyone
> interested in social justice, and aren't all
> you liberal academics interested in that?,
> should not support the Yanks. Enjoy
> rooting for Goliath. I am sure that is
> satisfying for the soul.

Actually, this is what I’m enjoying. I’m always on the losing side. I’m an Arab, not an Israeli. I’m a Democrat and not a Republican (Republicans manage to rule with an iron fist with a mere 40 votes in the Senate—you've got to admire the skill). I’m gay, not straight. I’m always on the runty, losing side. This is new and different. Besides, if baseball is all about bucolic suburban serenity, wouldn’t it make sense that I’d be a fan of the team that’s the Hegemonic Urban Machine?

> Your sports loyalities seem a bit troubling.

Do they now?

> There is no regional logic to them,

I’m quite literally from Bedouin stock. You know, the people who “wander from place to place?” I have no regional logic because I’ve never really settled anywhere. Well, actually there is one exception to the non-regional rule—I was born in Bridgeport, CT. As it’s right outside New York City, that would make it logical that I wound up an Yankees fan. In fact, that’s the only team that has a slight regional logic to it. I have been to New York many times. I’ve only been to the airport in Detroit and I’ve never set foot in Wisconsin. Although my dear friends Simon and Nelly want me to go tailgating with them for the Favre game at Lambeau Field. When financial aid money comes in, we’ll have to see. The ticket to Chicago is pricey. Although we may see of going straight to Wisconsin is cheaper…

> and seems to have a heavy dose of (gulp) front-runnerism.

This of course has been my bad (?) luck. The only thing I can say in my defense is that I had no idea how football was played when I became a Packers fan, let alone that Packers had won the Super Bowl the year before. I really gravitated toward the Wings very strongly because my buddy Aram was a big fan. I understood a lot more about hockey than football, so watching them play was mesmerizing. Of course, as you say, the ’98 Wings were a legendary team.

For what it’s worth, you’ll see me still root green and gold, despite the fact that our offensive line still stinks and it’s quite likely that Brent is going to hand us our collective asses next Monday.

> My buddy from Detroit finds it odd that you
> are a Wings fan and a Packers fan,

Come on. They don’t play football in Detroit. I mean, yeah, there’s that whole “Lions” team they’ve got there, but no one takes them seriously. Well, except maybe the Redskins.

> and now throw the Yanks in the mix. Whoa.

Kirk, ever the scholar of sports patterns, actually hit the trend:

You seem to have adopted the teams with the best team histories in other sports. Green Bay and Chicago have far and away the best team histories in the NFL, particularly pre-merger. After 1970 or so several other teams have been more interesting but the Packers still will always have one of the very best team histories in the sport. The same goes with the Red Wings, who were one of the original 6, each of whom have great team histories. I would say that is probably the one characteristic that most closely binds the Packers and Red Wings and going with the Yankees for baseball would fit very well.

I definitely have tended toward teams that have rich histories and, above all, a fanatically loyal fan base. I’m usually rooting for the visitor whenever I get to see any of my teams. It’s good to know that your fellow fans will always be a presence in the enemy stadium. I have to admit, that fanatical loyalty that reaches beyond geography is deeply appealing to me.

I don’t know if that will convince you, Shawn. But I feel secure in my sporting fan choices…

Home Again

2009-09-29T15:08:00.001-07:00

Craig and I got back on September 24. We’re trying to whip the house into shape and get situated again. Owing to the short-term recall problem, I do very poorly when my patterns get disrupted. Once I have a pattern, I’m good at sticking to it, because it’s in longer-term memory and pops up just fine. But when patterns are disrupted, you stop using the memory of the procedures. This forces you back into short-term recall, as you reinvent the activity. Relying on short term recall = consistent fuck-ups. The equation is that simple. So basically I’m swamped and at my most inefficient right now.

I need new infrastructure. The system of prompts I had is out of commission after a major disruption. Specific alarms that I set on my cell phone will have been turned off and I have to remember to turn them back on, etc. Often, this can take several days of fuck-ups. My life is a series of daily alarms. Out of sight, out of mind. I get lost in what I’m doing very easily and distracted from what I’m doing just as easily. I won’t remember to do things like laundry or start dinner if I don’t have the alarms. If they’re not on, I won’t necessarily remember to turn them on. Eventually, you get the system back in place. But the infrastructure has to be re-established. There’s no option for “hitting the ground running.”

Plus I’ve got to choose new times. I have to be up at 5 am every fucking day this term. I got shafted on TA assignments, so I’m teaching at 9:30 am and 12:30 am. There’s a two hour gap between classes. Just more proof that I need to fucking graduate. My present prof wants me to carry a copy of The New York Times to every class. This way, I set an example. I think this will have no impact and is a waste of time.

I forgot to take the negative led off the pickup’s battery before I left. The battery was very sadly dead on our return. I charged it up some on 6 amps, Craig jumped me and it was fine. But I’ve only driven it to campus once. Last night, I forgot to remove my cell phone charger from its socket. So naturally, it was completely dead this morning. So I have it charging today on 2 amps, hoping that tonight it will be roaring to go. I wasn’t having any alternator problems before I left to the best of my knowledge, so I’m hoping that the battery was weakly charged after only one round trip to campus. We’ll see tonight.

So, on the whole, I’m cranky. I’ve got to start writing again.

National Christians Go to the Movies Day in Israel

2009-09-18T12:11:00.000-07:00

The sun has just set and Rosh ha-Shana, the Jewish New Year, has begun. Dinur very wittily calls Christmas “National Jews Go to The Movies Day.” I thought he might get a kick out of the role reversal. Although I must confess I was very able to empathize before, having spent many years of my life in a Muslim country. Ramadan, in particular, was impressed on my mind. Experiencing someone else’s dominant religion is always interesting. I think it’s actually `Eid al-Fitr today as well. Gotta love the lunar calendar.

From my perspective, Rosh ha-Shana will be like the Sabbath on steroids. Everything will shut down for the weekend, including the bus system. I have no idea if the movie theaters will actually be open. Of course, this is a cultural difference predicated not on religion, but on dedication to capitalism. I look forward to all these vestiges pre-capitalist society vanishing in some near future. Between this sort of thing and Ramadan, studying the Middle East is nigh near intolerable. Surely religious minorities everywhere ought to be able to enjoy the American freedom of going to the movies on majority religion feast days…

Of course, I’m thinking a lot about identity here in Tel Aviv. I remember when I worked at the Texas state senate as a messenger. This was the summer of ‘93. Once, Senator Armbrister, who was a very nice man and very easy to work with, asked me if I were “the Jewish messenger.”

I stared at him rather blankly and said, “No Senator, I’m Catholic.” It hadn’t dawned on me that my “look” might have contributed to the decision to hire me until that very moment. Likewise, it hadn’t dawned on good Senator Armbrister (who is really a very nice man to work with) that I wasn’t Jewish. Of course, if I were, how would I have answered that question? Given that I know Senator Armbrister is a very nice man, how must identity work in his mind for him to even ask the question?

Needless to say, I am deeply aware of the fact that I look really Jewish. I’ve been told this since puberty when my nose swelled up like a balloon. Of course, at the time, I simply assumed it was because most Texans are too stupid to tell an Arab from a Jew. While there is some (small) truth in this judgment, it is not the correct interpretation in this case.

You see, I remember the first time in Jordan that someone thought I was an Israeli. This was back in the ’95-’96 school year, when I was on Fulbright. I was completely psychologically unprepared for this moment. I was a lot younger then and hadn’t the first clue that I was a homosexual. I took identity for granted back then. I was in Jerash (the tourist site in Jordan that, unlike Petra, is really worth seeing, IMHO). I was laying on my back in one of the stage entrances to the Roman coliseum, taking a photo of how the ceiling’s corner had been constructed. Yes, I’m a geek and yes, I love Roman architecture. Sue me. The security guards looked at me with a marked hostility. One asked the other in Arabic, “What’s he doing?”

The other said, “Oh, he’s just taking a photo of the corner.” They both sounded contemptuous. I immediately greeted them in Arabic. Talal’s Lesson One of Third World Dictatorship Etiquette: always be polite to the cops. They both gave me a nasty stare and walked off.

I was absolutely floored. People don’t give you nasty looks for no reason in Jordan. People are friendly. And being polite and speaking Arabic seemed to make matters worse, which isn’t usually the case in Jordan. I was stunned. When I got to the Temple of Diana, people also gave me dirty looks. This sort of thing usually doesn’t happen in Jordan (especially if you are male, which solves 93 percent of your Arab world problems, very sadly). When I got to the nyphaeum, some kids had climbed to the top and shouted down at me, “Shalom!”

Shalom? I thought, dumbstruck. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. Oh my God! They think I’m an Israeli! I was quite distressed. I expected this in Texas. I never guessed it could happen in Jordan. I really look like a Jew, I thought, even to other Arabs! I spent an impassioned fifteen minutes trying to persuade these kids that I was from Fuheis. I speak damned good Arabic with a real Arab accent. On my best day in Jordan, I went about 25 minutes chatting with a cabbie before we got to talking about something complex and he realized that my Arabic wasn’t native and asked, “Where are you from?” As that’s usually the first word out of the cabbie’s mouth in the Arab world, I am deeply proud of that statistic. But I wasn’t making any sales with these kids. I was an Israeli tourist in my own goddamned county (or one of them, anyway).

And here in Israel? I fit right in unless someone asks to see my passport. Being a quarter Swedish, having bluish eyes and a lighter complexion than most Arabs apparently has its advantages in Israel. After they’ve seen me twice, security guards often wave me through without further inspection. This floors me. There’s lots of security here, but I can’t say their commitment impresses me. I don’t understand why these guys make people here feel safer.

I’m pretty sure that I’d be treated differently here in Israel if I really looked really Arab. This has its ironies. Last week, when I was at the supermarket, two of the stockers were talking near the front of the store. They were speaking Arabic. I watched them with a little longing. Even though lots of people speak English here, it’s rough being in an all-Hebrew environment. Let’s face it: `ivrit sheli stinks! Well, the Palestinian stocker stared me down quite violently. I didn’t stop smiling, but I looked away, as I didn’t want to get into a fight. Undoubtedly, he learned young to stand up for himself and wasn’t going to take some Jew looking down on him. But I wasn’t some Jew. I was an Arab, like him. And I wasn’t looking down on him. I was thinking how awesome it was that he was speaking Arabic, how “at home” hearing that familiar language in this foreign place was. But of course, starting a conversation would have been intensely awkward. I’m some Jewish-looking gay bearish guy standing in line with my domestic partner at a Tel Aviv supermarket. Who the hell would believe I’m an Arab? What would an Arab be doing here, if not working as a stocker? And after the second intifada even that is way less likely.

The more I study violent identity conflict, the more I realize that all the clichés are true. Many, many people in different societies are people of good will. The trite truism is true. It’s just that the in-group, out-group distinction is more basic and prior to that good will. When you leave the sphere of hanging out only with people you knew and grew up with, identity is determined by markers that allow you to slot the individual. The rationalization of the capitalist economy teaches us over and over again that no system of markers is foolproof. I slip under the markers here quite easily until someone looks at my passport, which isn’t often. Haim Gal, the archivist here, thinks that with my beard, I look like a rabbi.

The rationalization of identity and technology leads to bizarre situations. I have had my first experiences with computer support here in Israel. Our internet died, so my landlady hooked me up to Hot, the Israeli cable provider. The woman I spoke to was named Manar. She was an Arab Israeli, but spoke no Arabic. Just Hebrew and excellent English. She lives in (what’s left of) Palestine and I speak better Arabic than she does. The second time I had to call up, my service rep was Palestinian woman whose name I forget, but only spoke Hebrew and Arabic. I’m quite proud of the fact that I made it through a long customer service call in Arabic and actually got our internet back up. In fact, what was entertaining was that we both had to make reference to English words, as the operating system was in English. Moreover, she called a computer a mikhshav not a hasub (extra linguistic points if you figured out that both words actually have the same root—see, I told you I was a geek!). It was the ultimate postmodern moment. An Israeli-Arab helping an Arab-American get his internet connection back up, her using her standardized call center politeness, and us throwing three languages around. She and Manar had asked me where I was from as part of the conversation. I asked the second woman where she was from, and she responded, “Ana min Hot…” (I’m from Hot). I told her I understood. Yeah, her answering that question for real could lead her to a lot of compromising situations. I hadn’t meant to be rude. Not that she treated me as if I had been. She was a smoothie and well-versed in call center etiquette.

Never in my life could I have anticipated this bizarre, syncretic set of conversations!

The place where people sometimes do get a little funny about me is actually in the archive. You see, everyone there knows that I’m an Arab. I think that’s a little weird for them. Of course, I would imagine that not many Arabs have come there to read the Arabic newspapers. The same papers that are collected so assiduously there are for the most part forbidden at a Palestinian university like Beir Zeit. I’d like to be sanctimonious and leave it at that, but many aren’t available at Arab universities anywhere, thanks to our fine Arab commitment to sad little dictatorships with no sound economic development policy (not that I’m bitter). This lack of open library stacks, after all, that was what drove me to come to Israel in the first place.

My second or third day there, Mikha, the guy who assists Haim, was moving several boxes of papers back to the stacks. Apparently they had just been scanning a large stack of Filistin, Palestine’s leading paper through the mandate that kept printing in Jerusalem up through ’67. Of course, those of you with a little Arabic know that the word Palestine is a Latin corruption of the word Filistin. So when moving the boxes he threw them down in a joking way and said in Arabic, bir-ruh, bid-dam, nafdi ya-filistin! This is a Ba`thist chant that usually ends with the word “Saddam” or “Hafiz” (and now, I suspect, Bashar)—in the soul, in the blood, we will sacrifice, O [INSERT BA`THIST LEADER HERE]. I gave Micha what I hope was the strangest look. “Well that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”

“Maybe if you’re a Ba`thist…” I said.

Little things to test my reactions. People greet me in Arabic with this sort of weird air about them, as if they weren’t quite sure how to respond to my presence. I mean, when I learned Hebrew, I did assume that it would be used for more than an occasional sports-related conversation with Dinur (which, lazy student that I am, I don’t do enough of). Perhaps they only learned Arabic to read the newspapers. I mean, there are lots of Arabs nearby. One of the janitors working in that very building was a Palestinian woman (she got engaged just before Craig and I left the country). But apparently me being there among the Arabic newspapers is as weird for them as for me. In a way it’s reassuring that I’m not the only one who’s a little edgy in this situation.

One of the undergraduates walked up to me the other day and showed me a political cartoon in a March 2002 issue of ash-Sharq al-Awsat, the Saudi-owned Arabic daily out of London. You’ll recall that this was the time at which the “Arab Peace Initiative” was advanced by the League of Arab States—an offer of complete recognition and normalization of relations with Israel in exchange for complete withdrawal to the 1948 borders. The cartoon was a picture of the Arab League building with all of the flags of the Arab states in front of it hanging at half-mast. He asked for “the interpretation of an American researcher.”

Yeah, right, I thought. My American aura is what brought you here. But maybe it was. Who knows? The question, however, seemed quite loaded to me. After all, from the Israeli vantage point, the cartoon was not flattering.

I did what a scholar should do in such circumstances, which is to give a genuine interpretation. So I told him, “They’re mourning the death of pan-Arabism.” This seemed to surprise the student a little, so I explained. “The Arab-Israeli conflict is viewed as a zero-sum conflict by both sides. Any possible compromise must be viewed in that framework. The Arab League made an offer to recognize Israel. This is tantamount to admitting defeat, especially after the Arab failure to create political unity after the collapse of the UAR. From that time forward, the only real project that expressed pan-Arab sentiment was the liberation of Palestine. An offer to accept Israel in the 1948 borders is a tacit admission of defeat. The pan-Arab project was a failure.”

The student seemed taken aback. I said to him, “For what it’s worth, the Israelis rejected the offer out of hand, adding insult to injury. For them, of course, this gesture wasn’t nearly enough. In a zero-sum conflict, compromise is rarely a viable means to a solution. I don’t know if you know any American history, but there was this guy named Henry Clay—”

“—the Great Compromiser!” the student finished. “Yes, I know him!” I must admit that I was quite impressed. Most of my students don’t know who David Ben-Gurion was, let alone someone a little more second-tier like Levi Eshkol. This kid has read enough American history to know who Henry Clay was and speaks English. While analyzing a cartoon doesn’t suggest Arabic skills, he may well have those as well. Most of my students are not bilingual. Most people in Tel Aviv seem to be. As our education system declines into the sewer, I can’t help being a little envious.

“Well, then you know at the end of the day, all the compromises failed and we had a civil war. Compromise doesn’t work in zero-sum conflicts.” I don’t know if anyone has ever tried to prove that. It might make an interesting research project.

“You don’t think it could be the League mourning the deaths of the Arabs who died in the Intifada?” he asked.

“Well, I guess anything is possible, but this image isn’t the most direct way to express that sentiment. Why would you need the Arab League building in the picture if you weren’t trying to say something about the institution itself?”

He thought for a while. Apparently he had been attached to his previous interpretation, which suggests that perhaps he hadn’t brought the article to test my politics after all. “I see your point. It is a better way of looking at it,” he said. He nodded and walked away.

The last image I had is of my landlady. Craig and I had wondered, after getting a good look at the Tel Aviv, if receiving the apartment in the state we had received it was par for the course. After meeting Raya, we’re pretty sure that it is. She seems like a very nice and sincere woman. Craig and I both liked her immensely. She asked in out forty minute, delightful conversation in the kitchen, if Craig and I were going to go to Jordan. I told her that I thought it might be awkward, as I really wasn’t out to my father’s family.

“They wouldn’t be accepting?”

“I don’t even know if they have any clear way of getting their heads around it. We don’t formally exist in their culture.”

She nodded. She clearly understood the tragic nature of what I felt. She told me about her brother and his American partner who live in Toronto, where they can be legally married. Her dad had trouble accepting her brother’s homosexuality for many years. “Such a small thing to make such a big deal about,” she said.

Ellis said it might be hard on me. Ellis was right.

But I don't want to end on that note. Craig and I are getting used to Tel Aviv. In many ways, it has been easy. For example—

See? They clearly knew we were coming. Craig and I couldn’t resist buying lemon-scent Fairy for all our manual dishwashing needs.

Photos for Briggs

2009-09-12T12:51:00.000-07:00

Briggs wanted pictures. Here's the best 15 of the lot I took in Jerusalem. You can click for somewhat larger versions, but only one is over 200k in size. They should pop up quickly. This is a view of the Old City taken from the Mount of Olives.

These are the city walls, again from the Mount of Olives.

This is a Russian Orthodox Church. I forget it's name, again taken from the Mount of Olives.

This is a view of the West Jerusalem taken from Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum.

This is Craig, with West Jerusalem in the background, again taken at Yad Vashem.

This is a windmill in Jerusalem. It was not built by Don Quixote, but from the story the tour guide told, it might as well have been. Sadly, the details are fuzzy in my memory. I don't know that I trusted our tour guide to begin with.

This is the Abbey of the Dormition.

The Dome of the Rock and one of the minarets of Al-Aqsa Mosque, taken near the entrance to the Wailing Wall.

Al-Aqsa Mosque, taken near the entrance to the Wailing wall.

This is a close-up of the Dome. You can click onto it to get the full resolution. I didn't scale it down—so if you click on it, you'll get over a meg of data. But you can really see a lot of the detail.

The domes of Al-Aqsa Mosque, taken at the Wailing Wall.

One of the many beautiful rooftops in the Old City. Craig does our porch with flowers in Seattle like this. It's rather permanently given me a soft spot for porches, terraces and rooftops of the sort.

This is opening of the Fatiha from the Quran. It's inscribed in the room in which Jesus was supposed to have had the Last Supper, from the period when the room was made into a mosque.

Christian Coffee in The Jewish State

2009-09-11T23:23:00.000-07:00

Living with Craig all these years has made me a little more interested in aesthetics. The most aesthetic thing about our crappy apartment is making Turkish coffee in the morning. So I played with that process this morning. First, our kitchen is dark. Now, this camera is magnificent at letting in light. In fact, it's overexposing my outdoor pictures—I have to play with the manual and figure out how to avoid that problem. But in the dark kitchen, it has a slow shutter time. As a result, kitchen pictures tend toward blurriness, as it is very difficult to keep the camera perfectly still during that long shutter time.

This problem can be solved by using a tripod. Note the picture below of the bukraj is nice and clear. The word is Turkish, I think. It's what we call a Turkish coffee pot in Jordan. They call it other things elsewhere.

The only really nice thing about our cesspool apartment is the roughly three square feet of marble countertop. The Middle East on the whole is big on marble countertops. Most older houses have them. Anyway, you add three heaping tablespoons of Turkish coffee and two level tablespoons of sugar and mix them up like so:

I probably should have had "action shots" showing the spooning. I was lazy. I'd never make it in advertising. Plus, the focus should have been on the contents of the pot. Anyway, you then add water. I didn't get an action shot there, either. You live; you learn.

I did try for the action shot when lighting the stove (no pilot light—just a match), but I didn't angle the remote correctly and missed my shot. I was, again, too lazy to reshoot.

You will want to stir the coffee once as you start boiling it and again just as it starts boiling. Note that the grate on the stove makes a pleasant background for the photo. This apartment doesn't totally suck after all!

Invariably, the coffee will boil over. Just as it does, snatch it from the fire, stir and then put it back on again. You repeat this proccess twice more. Thad Tierney once told me, "Oh! You make Christian coffee!"

"Christian coffee?" I ask.

"Christian coffee!" he says. "Muslims only let it boil once. Christians do it three times for the Holy Trinity."

I had no idea that I made Christian coffee. My mom never told me the theology behind it when she taught me how. Of course, she's from Bridgeport, Connecticut, so whichever one of my dad's relatives taught her may never have explained this logic to her either. But there we are—a tutorial on Christian coffee from the Jewish state, inspired by an Irish guy from Wisconsin, who's still not as big a Packers fan as I am but apparently has a thing or two to teach me about the Middle East! It's a small fuckin' world!

Pouring, of course, has its own set of dilemmas. The autofocus targeted the rim of the cup. This is undesirable when empty, as the eye is drawn to the cup itself, rather than the contents. As a result, the image appears blurry.

There are ways of targeting the autofocus and them moving the focused object out of the center of the screen and maintaining that first focus. As is, the camera tends to retarget. I need to learn that technique. Like I said, I've been lazy.

Then, of course, pouring technique is everything. Note that I have a coffee stain on the back right of the cup. Sloppy! I'd make a terrible geisha. But note the fact that as the surface of the coffee rises, you mind the unfocused body of the cup less and less, as you are seeing an increasingly focused surface of the rising liquid. I imagine the proper solution is to pour a little, refocus, pour a little, refocus, etc. It sounds like a pain in the ass, especially when you're making your first cup of the day.

The final product follows. Again, we would want to see the final picture served up with a tall glass of mineral water and perhaps a cookie. But my desire to drink my coffee won out over my need to have my coffee.

And that was my most boring post ever! Well, maybe not. I just wish it was. Sigh.

Cozy Bear at The Wailing Wall

2009-09-11T11:34:00.000-07:00

So by the time that Craig and I got to the Wailing Wall today, I had to go to the bathroom. Welcome to multiple sclerosis. It's like I'm a pregnant woman. Anyway, when I get back, I look around for Craig. Lo and behold I spot him approaching the Wailing Wall in a yarmulke! See for yourself!

And Craig starts praying! Please bear in mind that my partner isn't Jewish!

When I asked him later, he said he wasnt praying. He was just "feeling." He had an intuitive instinct that he shouldn't pray, he should just be open to a feeling. Craig he felt love and warmth. It was overpowering.

Then the rabbi who had just fleeced him for 50 shekels came by to fleece him down for more...

Then the rabbi's buddy got into the scene...

By which time, Craig figured he'd had enough of the Wailing Wall!

And here are, of course, the obligatory pictures of the Dome of the Rock and the Holy Sepulchre

And last, but not least, here's one of a Palestinian guy selling pomegranates by the Jaffa Gate.

Sunrise over The Irish Sea

2009-09-05T06:19:00.000-07:00

When we took off from Seattle our route took us directly over Canada. We caught up with nightfall somewhere over Hudson Bay. Craig reached over and lifted the window cover and said, “Look!” We’d caught up with dawn and saw the sun rise over the Irish Sea. Sadly, my camera was in the overhead compartment, but it really doesn’t matter. The window was way too smudged to get a good photo. I lifted the one above from the internet. For what it’s worth, it’s prettier than the one I could have taken.

It was so odd to come against the limits of reality. Natural time feels like it is a universal. Night comes and day follows. But it doesn’t work that way in flight. You catch up with the night and then pass through it. It’s been a very long time since I was able to run up against a limit that wasn’t induced by multiple sclerosis. It was a bit of a thrill.

Strange that we caught up with the dawn over the Irish Sea. We’d just passed over Dublin. I couldn’t help but think of my pub band. I miss getting tanked and singing Irish songs. It’s the truth. But I also miss being young, being a romantic. I had a student this term who was a romantic. It was painful to watch, especially when his passion would interfere with his ability to internalize discipline. It was painful to watch because I knew what the price of internalizing discipline would do to him. Is it worth it? Yeah, it’s worth it. But you can’t understand at that age what cost is, let alone how much it will cost you. Paying hurts. When I look at him, I can’t help but flinch.

Of all the bizarre coincidences, I was watching the new Star Trek movie as the sun rose. Now Simon and I have an argument about the movie. I like it and he doesn’t. I understand his position to a certain extent. I mean, they let a by-and-large two-dimensional villain blow up Vulcan. I mean, they blew up fucking Vulcan! Talk about maiming your original Star Trek universe. I see his point. And Nero was a lame villain. Simon had other points that didn’t register as neatly. He didn’t like Simon Pegg as Scotty, saying what had once been a serious character had been converted to comic relief. I dunno. The most memorable Mr. Scott moments for me were from The Trouble with Tribbles

I liked Scotty as a bar-brawling Scottsman who then proceeded to beam all the tribbles into the hold of a Klingon D-4 cruiser “where they’ll be no tribble at all…:” Certainly, I relished the fact that the new Scotty made Admiral Archer’s dog the victim of an experimental transporter accident. I always hated that mutt.

I love dogs. But come on. A dog on a starship? A starship captain who sleeps with his dog in sickbay and gets offended when new alien species find dogs objectionable? It was too much. Scotty fries Porthos in a transporter accident? I love it!

But you see, I think that blowing up Vulcan took balls. The thing I hated about the Enterprise series (the one with Scott Bakula in it) was that they didn’t have any. I thought the Tucker-T’Pol relationship was awesome. Connor Trinneer definitely needed more fuck scenes. Craig and I really loved the one where he ran around the ship all episode long in his underwear. The guy is not only cute, but he’s seriously hung. Seriously. I don’t know jack about how women view the world, but Craig and I believed that Trip was a product that would move off the market quickly. T’Pol needed to close the deal.

But sci-fi seriously now—a love relationship between a really masculine, but nonetheless emotionally expressive human male and a sensual if repressed Vulcan female had great energy. I thought they made a great couple. Watching them work through a relationship as the series would have progressed would have been, well, fascinating. The writers were just too fucking limp-dicked to mess with the formula. I hate that. Take some fucking risks!

Well, this group of writers that weren’t scared of cracking some eggs to make their omelet. This line of history will be totally different. Yeah, I see what Simon says that in a way it’s disrespectful. We cherished all those stories (except Star Trek V—did anyone like that movie?) and now they don’t exist. But what I came back with was that Star Trek wasn’t just sci-fi anymore. It is, in the purest literary sense, mythology. What makes myth work as a literary form is its timeless capacity for being told and retold. I am excited by the possibilities.

And yeah, this means something personal to me. Destroying Vulcan totally changed Spock. I think maybe Kirk is the only reader here who knows me long enough to remember this, but Mr. Spock was my childhood hero—half one thing and half the other, a super strong mind ruled by logic—what wasn’t to find cool? I even identified with him getting beaten up at school all the time.

This Spock, however, is different. Compare and contrast Old Spock with Lieutenant Uhura—

Mr. Spock: Miss Uhura, your last sub-space log contained an error in the frequencies column.

Lt. Uhura: Sometimes I think if I hear "frequency" again, I'll cry.

Mr. Spock: Cry?

Lt. Uhura: I was just trying to start a conversation.

Mr. Spock: Well, since it is illogical for a communications officer to resent the word "frequency"... I have no answer.

Lt. Uhura: No, you have an answer. I'm an illogical woman who's beginning to feel too much a part of that communications console. Why don't you tell me I'm an attractive young lady or ask me if I've ever been in love? Tell me how planet Vulcan looks when the moon is full.

Mr. Spock: Vulcan has no moon, Miss Uhura.

Lt. Uhura: I'm not surprised, Mr. Spock.

—with New Mr. Spock and Lt. Uhura:

This Spock, among other things, gets laid. Surprise, so does the new Talal. Small wonder I like the change. The old Spock viewed his human side as his weakness, but is now willing to integrate it. The new Talal has had a very long time now to examine and integrate his human frailty. Moreover Spock as a character has a new beginning. And watching the sun rise over the Irish Sea, I realized that I, too, have a new beginning, even if it’s come late in the day. This Talal won’t be like the other Talal. He has a lot of new weaknesses, but he also has new strengths. But for better or worse, this Talal caught up with the sunrise. Maybe he’ll even graduate. So yeah, I hope the new Spock makes it, because maybe I’ll make it too.

Craig and Talal in Tel Aviv, Day 1

2009-08-28T15:09:00.000-07:00

I have a blog entry for Simon that’s an installation of our ongoing argument about the Star Trek (the new movie) that was inspired while watching the sun rise above the Irish Sea from 30,000 feet. It’s good. But philosophy later. Let’s talk about the shit. Literally.

So we get to the apartment circa 3 am Tel Aviv time (that’s 5 pm PDT). Our landlady, Raya is off in Budapest settling her daughter in for a few years of academic study. We’re greeted by a lady named Ilam, her assistant. The apartment was very warm, so we cranked up the AC. It works, thanks be to God. It works really well, so well that I’m probably going to spend the next few weeks worrying about the electric bill. The apartment is actually bigger than Craig and I expected. All of that is the good news.

The bad news was that the toilet is clogged. We need to call her in the morning so she can make arrangements for the plumber. Apparently, Friday is a half-day off and Saturday is a full day off. I suspect that this may have something to do with the Sabbath beginning at sunset on Friday, but I am not certain. Well, the guy at the airport wanted to screw us on a deal for cellphones (praise God for Grace who provides us with the necessary tip-off), so until I figure out how to buy a local simcard from local telecom giant Cellcom, we have no phone. The apartment had no plunger. Through vague descriptions of what you do with the device, we discovered that a plunger is a called a plumba and purchased one for sixteen shekels. Our toilet has a very bizarrely shaped drain hole, which makes it difficult to get a proper seal using the plunger. Sadly, if fortunately, I have developed some expertise with a plunger and, by trial and sewage-soaked error, I managed to unplug it.

Craig has taken some lovely photos of our apartment. They follow.

I love the detail he got on the building number.

The problems below really aren't visible. The dirt doesn't show in the photos.

That toilet looks innocuous. Trust me. It's not.
Of course, I spent some time this morning focusing on the smelly mold in the kitchen, depicted below.

We bought a mold stain remover with bleach as a component. It’s cleaned up well. Craig is still sleeping. When he wakes, I’ll see if I can get him to get on a chair and reach the very top zone. I hope he sleeps until morning, though. It makes all the sense in the world that he’d get over jet lag faster than me. He can sleep twelve hours at a drop anytime. He wakes frequently, but falls back asleep just as easily. I wish I slept like him.

We desperately need to buy some bleach come Sunday. There are several surfaces I’d like to scrub. Everything shuts down come Friday afternoon. Fortunately, our supermarket was open. So we did get enough food to survive until Sunday.

The Aesthetics of Tel Aviv

We explored some yesterday. Tel Aviv is the most unusual city. It’s ugly in person, yet strangely photogenic. I can’t explain it. This view from the beach at the Hilton looks hideous. It’s an ugly factory abutting on the beach. Yes, I composed it to use space as effectively as possible. I did add that much to the image. But it never dawned on me the photo would be attractive. But surprise, it’s not that bad.

It's obviously not alluring, but it was ugly in real life. I'm having trouble sorting it out. Part of it may be an issue of light. The sea, while pretty in real life, appears with deeper, more beautiful color in these photos, I didn't doing anything special to the color in the pictures.

I do notice that the automatic setting is leaving the rocks and surf overexposed in several of the other photos I've taken today. I'm going to have to experiment with manual control. I have a beautiful sketch (somewhere) of a Bedouin tent pitched on the beach of the Mediterranean. I remember how jarring it was, the first time I saw it. Obviously, I grew up post-'67. There were no Palestinians on the beach in my Jordanian imaginary. I can't venture to make any comments about the Israeli imaginary, other than to note that again, class organization trumping tribal organization seems to be the rule. The people here all have recreational hobbies like fishing and windsurfing, something I don't see a lot of in the Arab world.
But to return to the topic at hand, perhaps Tel Aviv light has a photogenic quality. Georgetown light did, but Georgetown looks beautiful to the naked eye, too. I can’t explain Tel Aviv. The stores look grimy, crowded and nasty. But look at these photos Craig took while shopping.

Yeah, Craig has an artist’s eye (I love my Big Bear), but it’s not all just his eye. He’s finding these results unpredictable, too.

Part of it is a problem of maintenance. Like the apartment, the city as a whole is exceptionally poorly maintained. You can see how Labor Zionism shaped the ethos of the city. The bourgeois compulsion toward creating a perfectly commodified cityscape simply has no expression here. Buildings are run down and filthy. There are our apartment windows, taken from the outside. This grime is standard, at least here on Arlozorov Street.

Indeed, Craig wonders if we have any right to complain of the apartment’s filth. For all we know, this may be par for the course. The neighborhood has its share of blown-out buildings.

And façades can be terrible. Who dreamed up this monstrosity?

But there are people who share Craig’s sensibility and try to create little nooks of cozy beauty.

And there was some aesthetic sensibility, for example in the creation of street signs. Here is one for Ben-Yehuda Street:

I find these trilingual signs quite charming. The street is named for the guy who revived Hebrew from the dead. Hebrew died circa 500 BC. That’s roughly contemporaneous with the founding of the Roman Republic to help you contextualize. This guy, through force of will, brought it back from the dead and now a few million people speak it as naturally as if it were, say… Arabic. Sorry. I couldn’t resist.

Michael Dewar, a new friend in Portland I made through my goddaughter Michelle, is an old Tel Aviv hand who has helped Craig and me with much practical advice. He reminded me of Theodor Herzl’s slogan from Altneuland—If you will it, it is no fairy tale! I think of that phrase a lot while I’m here. Michael sent me the German phrase translated into Arabic (إن أردتم فهذه ليست أسطورة) and I had to scramble to figure it out at first, as it didn’t seem to be an Arabic idiom he picked up while in the Peace Corps in Madaba. While the translation with literally accurate, if one were to translate its emotional impact on the Arabs rather than the literal words, it would have to read as a wry Though we do not will it, it is nonetheless no fairy tale. I mean, here I am.

Yes, sure enough, the fairy tale became real. But the word real has so many meanings. In the process of becoming real, it feels as if Tel Aviv has none of the positive qualities of a fairy tale. It's all too real and not in that Arab political sense, either. It’s just not at all enchanting. It’s not that it lacks charm, but it’s in little things like the street signs. Like an unexpected photo taken by your partner of you trying to figure out which carton of milk to buy.

NOTE TO NEIL: Yes, that is my old Packers cap. But I wore my new Yankees cap to the gym everyday last week, which won me a snarky comment from the gym owner and a few glances from other clients, including a guy in Red Sox cap. Rest assured, the Yankees cap will make it into the rotation regularly on this trip.

Self-Doubt and Teaching

2009-08-21T11:46:00.000-07:00

A while back, I told a friend about my students, "Every year I'm a year older and and every year they're the same age." He didn't quite get why I'd have trouble relating to them and I realized that I'd explained myself poorly. I'd like to take another shot at it here.

It’s not that I don’t relate to them, although the cultural gap is growing—not all of them have seen Star Wars, for example, and most sitcoms I watched they haven’t. They still know who Madonna is. The problem is that I became me because of a charismatic experience of being taught by someone who could really do the job when I was their age. In comic book terms, to be a perfect geek, it was my origin.

I face my origin every time I teach. I face that romantic passion that propelled me down this course. When a man is a young, he is willing to pay any price for the object of his passion. All you can see is the Holy Grail, shining, clothed in white samite. No price can be too great to taste again this holy glory. This moment is, at its essence charismatic, in the Weberian sense of the term.

Charisma is the experience of the divine. This can, but need not refer to a deity. Rather, it is the experience of newly found power against the monotony and limitation of everyday life. Most students have experienced this only in its romantic form, which we call infatuation. You meet that special someone and, suddenly everything becomes possible. Their very presence is intoxicating. You feel you can do anything at all when that person is with you. I ask the students if that feeling is love. I always love their emotional response. They know that it’s not but, looking in their eyes, you can feel the pain that accompanied their discovery that it wasn’t. The students tell you it’s not because it doesn’t last, that you don’t really know the person yet and that when you do, they’re never as magnificent as they seem while you’re infatuated

I explain to them that the reason that the person seems perfect is that because our image of them is one-sided. We can see only what we like. Invariably, everything has another side and the thing that we like contains things that we don’t like that are associated with it. In fact, we often learn that the thing that we like needs that thing that we don’t like in order to work at all. So while what we imagine is more imperfect than the world in the sense that the world is much more complex and our vision is invariably too simple and reductionist to be of practical use, what we imagine is more perfect than the world in the sense that it is inspiring, it lets us know what we desire to change the world into. But the imagination has a powerful impact on our emotions. Human beings love power and the imagination is at the root of that love. You have to be able to imagine the world differently in order for power to be meaningful.

Well, when I was their age, I took up the quest to become a professor. I loved what a good teacher could do and loved theory. I wanted to be the one and forge the other. The price didn’t matter; I would take up the quest. When I said I would do anything, I had no way of understanding what that word “anything” meant. I did not understand pain or sorrow in anything but the most superficial sense. This is the essence of innocence. Innocence is a strange thing in that it is both beautiful and a source of shame. We try to preserve it in our children because of its beauty. Yet losing it shows us that we cannot be who we imagined ourselves to be and this is a source of pain and, for a moment at least, shame.

I see that innocence in their eyes. I loved the intoxication of charisma, the romantic zeal, the passion of being young. I see a very young Talal in their eyes and I know the road that they will walk and what they will learn on that road. Because I am, sadly, very romantic I remember the pain all too vividly. I cannot shield them from it. I would not be their teacher if I did.

I know what my teachers were for me and I know, therefore, the limits of what I can be for them. I remember how I judged my teachers when I was their age. Because I know the pain of their journey and how badly I needed a teacher when I was young, I live in fear of their judgment. But it is not really their judgment. It is the judgment of that young Talal whose innocence I have spent. I know his suffering exactly. It is his passion that I have spent and if he were to look at me and ask, “What have I become?” I feel as if I would wither and die.

Now and then, there is a student whom you must perforce disappoint because they want to be indulged in a childlike way and you must be stern. Most of the time, I do this without difficulty. But, now and then, there is one who reminds me very strongly of the old Talal. Now the old Talal was a great believer in legitimate power. But now and then there were times in which he could not defer and then he was quite defiant. When it happens that I have a student who reminds me of the young Talal and he or she is defiant with me, even though I am certain that I have not wronged him or her, I cannot help but wonder if I have become that which I hated as a young man. I do not believe I have. But there is always room for doubt.

One can’t do without self-doubt. It is central to good leadership. Machiavelli said something along the lines of, “A leader needs good information, but hierarchy distorts good information. All you can do is reassure your subordinates that they can tell you anything. But if they can actually say anything to you, it because they have no respect for you.” For this reason, a leader needs self-doubt. Because in the final analysis, the leader is responsible for his actions and must actively work to compensate for the fact that the better he does his job, the less able others are to check him and the worse his flow of information becomes. Without self-doubt, any leader will become a tyrant.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll keep coming back. But seeing myself through their eyes is the part that gets harder on me every year.

Israeli Cell Phone Commercial

2009-08-18T10:13:00.000-07:00

While looking for some sort of cheap cell phone to use in Tel Aviv, I stumbled across this recent "Cellcom" commercial that has caused quite a stir in Israel and among Arab activists.
I'm not quite sure what I make of it myself. Certainly, the fact that we can't see the other side of the wall is very interesting. While I don't interpret the intent of the advertisement as sinister, I seriously doubt that Cellcom is connecting people on both sides of that wall. Some of the commenters, probably correctly, argue that a Palestinian who got close enough to the wall to kick a soccer ball over would have already been shot. The wall itself is the cause of a serious humanitarian crisis. The Palestinian "economy," if you can justify the use of the word, was designed to be entirely dependent on Israel in order to prevent any basis for a future Palestinian state. Sealing off the territories from the economy of Israel has sealed off a large number of Palestinians from making a living. That wall represents more than political separation. It represents very real economic deprivation. Malnutrition is a serious problem for the Palestinians.

Certainly, the problem here is one of imagination. The commercial gives us some clues about "Josef Q. Public" views himself. The view is almost identical to that of a suburbanite in the United States. Of course, suburban identity works because of its lack of an "other." To be a happy suburbanite, you can't imagine yourself as the source of oppression. In a sense, that identity rests on not seeing the other side of the wall. So much in politics rests on the management of time and space. As I get older, I find more and more uses for Foucault.

Michael Dewar, Michelle's good friend who has given Craig and me a lot of good information about getting around Tel Aviv, told us that the gay community in Israel is the one of the few places where Arabs and Jews get along. It makes sense. If we believe Kinsey, roughly ten percent of American men, at least, experience only homosexual attraction and an other twenty percent fit along the gamut of bisexuality. Assuming that Kinsey uncovered a biological regularity, that means fewer than one in three guys is a potential fuck and a number of these guys are not in the regular hook-up market. If we believe that Arab and Israeli queers are as sexed as American queers and we believe that a good fuck is a good fuck, it makes all the sense in the world that Arab and Israeli queers would get over it. The market is too small to entertain prejudice. Surely any guy can see the logic in landing the next fuck. Feminists don't get this, but the penis can be a remarkably democratic organ. It's really the other brain that is steeped in prejudice.

A year or two ago, when I first started planning this trip, Ellis Goldberg, my committee chair, suggested that it might be rather hard on me emotionally to be in Israel, given the Israeli openness to homosexuality in comparison to the sort of denial most Arab societies have with respect to homosexuality. Indeed, I imagine that closedness is an other factor that makes for this "peace between the queers." It must be very hard to maintain a gay community in Arab Middle East. Yeah, it makes sense to hang out in the Israeli gay neighborhood when you can't have one of your own. But it's hardly free of political complication, is it? Sex is never free of political complication.

Crossing Over to the Dark Side

2009-08-17T02:28:00.000-07:00

Life is too busy. I don't like busy. I'm not wired to handle it anymore. Here's the latest.

Neil Has Converted Me Into A Yankees Fan

Neil, Craig, Pam, Pam's friend Hala (who's quite a pip!) and I went to the Safe to see Yankees beat the Mariners (5-2). Neil bought me a cap and a commemorative pin to mark the event. At that point, as no one has ever explained as much baseball to me as Neil, let alone buy me a cap, I felt that I had to swear undying loyalty to the Yanks. So Michelle and Gretchen can rejoice. Kirk's wife Keriann will probably never forgive me. But, had fate left me in Bridgeport rather than moving to the ends of the earth, I probably would have been a Yankees fan anyway, so there we are. Plus, I'd like something that links me to my favorite city on the planet, which will always be New York. It's probably never going to be a job, so I take what I can get.

So Neil, since I swore I'd go to Fenway with you, do you feel like taking some martial arts classes with me next fall? We're gonna need all the help we can get.

Craig and I Head to Tel Aviv in Ten Days

My mom had a dream that my dissertation was published. The cover was blue and white. Odd color scheme, given that my dissertation is about Jordan and Lebanon, but from her lips to God's ears. I want a real job that has a paycheck in the month of September.

I Finally Signed Up for a Facebook Account

Craig is now very happy. My favorite greeting so far was from Fiona Davis, who said, "Oh wow, has Hell frozen over? Kidding! Welcome to the dark side, my friend!"

An Anatomy of Denial

2009-08-13T12:44:00.000-07:00

The emotional dynamics have changed over the years I’ve been dealing with my cognitive problems. Rewind to the summer of 2004. This was Craig and my first summer together in that shithole house in Skyway. Craig was heroic and made certain that we bought air conditioners and made several other modifications that helped keep the house cool. It was the first summer I’d had since I moved to Seattle in which I wasn’t lost in lethargy. Moreover, my mom helped me out with some money for the summer, so I didn’t have to work. It was the first time in a while when I wasn’t broken by exhaustion. But I bounced six checks. I’d always assumed my problem was being overwhelmed by fatigue. But I wasn’t hot and I wasn’t exhausted. I realized something else was wrong. So I started searching MS profiles. I read about short-term recall problems and realized that was my difficulty.

I consulted my neurologist and, by spring of 2005, I was in a cognitive symptoms support group organized by Mary Pepping, a neuropsych PhD at the UW hospital. The group wasn’t an MS group. It was a group of patients that were dealing with cognitive problems caused by things as diverse at traumatic brain injury and aneurisms. This was the first time that I realized that, yes, lesions in your brain count as brain damage. The group had a skills component and a therapy component. Because of school conflicts, I was only able to attend the skills component. I only got to go to the therapy group once.

The group I was part of happened to be all men, three of who really stand out in my memory. One was an elderly gentleman who had had a stroke. He was always cheerful and upbeat. I later found out that he had been comatose for six months after the stroke and in that period, his wife had passed away. She had been ill and he was not there to care for her during that time. I remain in awe of this man’s character. I cannot imagine waking up to discover that Craig had died of a debilitating illness and I had not been able to be there for him. That he could hold himself together with such composure still leaves me in awe. I can think of no other word to describe it. The second man’s disability had in essence left him in a constant state of sexual arousal. Many of us had read about this possible damage and said, "Hey that doesn’t sound so bad." I didn’t get to hear the man’s story, because he was only in the therapy group and I only got to go the once, but seeing the tears in the man’s eyes, I could see that no, this was a nightmare, not an adolescent fantasy. The last man was a construction worker who had been injured on the job. His damage was, I think, the most pronounced of all of us. He would, for example, wash dishes and then put them in the garbage can, instead of the cabinet. He would not realize that he had just thrown away his dishes.

At these sessions, I realized that one of my major problems was that, before I realized that I had a short-term recall problem, my response had been one of unconscious terror. This had been a major source of fatigue, as the most fatiguing stimulus I can feel is heavy, negative emotion. Carrying boxes up stairs is literally a good deal less fatiguing. Carrying boxes is cognitively simple. Before I consciously understood that I had a problem, I would feel terror five or six times a day. The most visceral memory I have of this was one day when I was looking for a paper in the many unstable stacks that, after the onset of MS, have plagued me. I found a library book that had been recalled. At that time, recalled library books were the bane of my existence, as I would rarely remember to bring them back if I could find where they were in the first place. The fines I paid at this time were quite expensive. Finding the book terrified me. If I picked up the book and put it somewhere where I would see it and remember to take it to school, would I remember to keep looking for the document that I needed? And if I kept looking for the document, would I later remember that I had found the recalled book and go back for it? I was fucked no matter which decision I made. The experience of the "Catch-22" was unbearable and totally overwhelming.

The terror was only able to remain terror so long as I was unconscious of the emotions and of the cognitive problem itself. The experience of terror had set in slowly and been part of my life for so many years that I never realized it was there. The difficulty is that of all non-moral failings, the one of which I had always been the most contemptuous since I was a child had always been disorganization. Having become this sort of contemptible person was deeply distressing to me. After I became conscious of the problem and understood the source, I could begin to consciously work on letting go of a value that was one of my core values. Unconscious terror gave way to conscious shame.

For about four years (say 2005-2008), my progress was made very slow by shame at being unable to live up to a core value. You can’t simply give up a core value just because you have no realistic way to live up to it. If you could just punt an ideal, it wouldn’t be a core value. Shame is a reflexive emotion. Evolutionary theory suggests that the reason we feel shame is that those individuals who confronted a situation in which they had exceeded their rightful identity claim in that situation tended to withdraw from it. This reflex aided individuals in social circumstances, as withdrawing often kept someone who was angry about the slight the person had committed from killing them. Shame can often lead to anger because it is a reflex. The thinking "You made me feel ashamed and made me withdraw. Because it’s a reflex, I couldn’t control it, so that makes me doubly angry, as I had no real reason to withdraw." Shame gives way to anger and then to violence.

The only way to stop feeling shame is to find a way to let go of the value. But letting go of the value is difficult because core values are a central part of identity. You were someone and now you can’t be that person. But you liked being that person. And now you’re some other fucker who you’d never sign up to be, some guy who has traits of which your old self would have been actively contemptuous. The only realistic way to let go of the dead guy’s values is to find things that you actually like about the new guy. You have to be willing to sign up to be yourself at the end of the day. You can’t live if you don’t.

So that’s taken the last year. I fuck up a lot now and I’m choking a lot less when it happens. I’ve accepted the fact that I’m a flake. I have other redeeming values. But like an onion, there’s always a new layer. I now have to deal with the emotion that created the Old Talal’s character in the first place. The Old Talal became an intense organizer because, dating back to my early childhood, the feeling over being overwhelmed was just about the thing I hated most. I hated feeling powerless. That’s why I became such a good organizer. I organized everything so that I would never feel overwhelmed again. And I was pretty effective, too. I might get overwhelmed in round one of a new activity, but I’d definitely organize to be ahead of the curve for round two. Not organizing was, in my view, a will to be weak. What could be more contemptible?

Apparently contempt is an emotion that I prized as a child and a young man. Clearly, I’ve had to learn the real nature of compassion the hard way. Kinder, gentler ways might not have broken through my character flaws.

I’ve learned a number of organizational methods that can help someone with my weird frontal lobe problems. Yet, I tend to desert them. So I’ve been paying close attention to how I feel. For example, in the early trip planning phase, I worked last spring with a speech therapist named Stacy. She taught me some planning techniques that were genuinely helpful. I created several lists of tasks using this method and got a lot done. My mom kicked in both the cash and the communications needed to land the apartment. I’ve needed to do another round. I should have repeated the technique, but I didn’t.

I’ve asked myself why and tried to pay attention to my emotions. I’ve realized that I dislike organizing because when I have an accurate picture of how many details I have to organize, I start feeling overwhelmed. Using the organization techniques, I have quantitative proof of the extent of the disability in the form of the list staring me in the face. By not organizing, I’m protecting my mind from the horror of really seeing just how daunting the once manageable world is for me now. I've learned to hide in the fog of my mind. The fog, the cause of my disgrace, now is my hiding place, my retreat from feeling disgrace. As someone who has always prided himself on looking at the world face on, this is a painful realization.

Plus, there is just procrastination to cope with as well. Not being able to simply crush entropy-related emotions, I not quite sure how to push past it. In fact, it probably won’t have a "pushing" aspect to it. That’s why I hate it. In pushing past, I felt freedom from constraint. I was Superman. I have to learn to like being Clark Kent.

I think I need to go back into therapy again. Well, I’m really late for the gym. Gotta go!

Just In Case

2009-08-11T13:54:00.000-07:00

Just in case any of you guys are geeky enough to want to see what a full page of newspaper text looks like, given my setup, click here. I have now followed in Dinur's footsteps (bold trailblazer that he is) and gotten a paid Flickr account to store all the newspapers that I am going to photograph. This way, I have a nice, online backup in case the worst happens.

Swamped

2009-08-11T08:15:00.000-07:00

I forgot to make copes of the lit reviews from Lisa Wedeen’s Ambiguities of Domination and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. One of my students who is a friend came to office hours yesterday and when the time was up, since we were talking, I forgot to go into the copy place next door and just walked with him to the parking lot. That means I’m fucked till Wednesday. Can you believe that there’s no place in Renton where you can make cheap photocopies? It’s the U District or bust. Renton sucks. But our house here doesn’t and I need to keep that in perspective. I have to grade all day. That will suck. I should be at the gym, but I forgot to charge my MP3 player. So I need to fill in 20 minutes or so before I can go. I don’t get far on an ellipsis machine without a good strong beat and something good to read that helps me keep me in the mood.

I need to timeline Dilip Hiro’s Lebanon: Fire and Embers. It’s a very basic history of the Lebanese Civil War. The Lebanese Civil War is anything but cut and dry and that could cause me troubles.

I have to write to Haim Gal today too. Too much going on.

Looming Departure

2009-08-09T10:02:00.000-07:00

Ugh. We leave on August 26. Not much time. I forgot to set my alarm this morning, so with the afternoon’s schedule, there is no time for the gym this morning. They close at 7 pm on Sundays, so if we manage to get back by the afternoon, I’ll hit it then. The impact on my energy level is best in the morning right after breakfast. It’s my fault for being unfocused. I’m totally behind in grading. Weekends are getting too busy. Preparation for this trip is taking too much time. But I can’t blow it off. I’ve got the get this data if I’m ever going to graduate.

I’ve been coping with power conversion for the past few days. Craig and my laptops work just fine on both power sets, and I’ve discovered my battery charger for the camera does too. I’ve bought plug adapters. Sadly, my cheap lamps don’t work on a universal basis. I bought a power converter, depicted below, to power my lamps.

It’s going back to the store. Israel is set at 230 volts, 50 Hz. We’re at 110 volts, 60 Hz. This particular converter can only “step down” from 220 volts, not 230. It also does absolutely nothing to the frequency. I’ve found one that seems to handle all possible conversions.

If these were normal lamps, I’d just buy them when I get there. But I have no idea what it would take to buy Israeli lamps with clamps and low-heat bulbs. I’d rather avoid wasting time and come prepared. I wasn't a Boy Scout for nothing.

I need a better lit review in my proposal. Iza Husin, one of my colleagues who has a real PhD and a real job now, recommended I look at Lisa Wedeen’s lit review from Ambiguities of Domination and Benedict Anderson’s lit review in Imagined Communities for ideas on how to mix an eclectic series of texts. There is no “natural” book review for this damned piece, so I sort of have to invent one. I’m going to try to photocopy the original texts for mark-up this afternoon.

Plus, I've been meaning to write a post about what Neil has been teaching me about baseball. I’m beginning to see that the reason that baseball appears to be so boring is that the strategic interactions between the players require a lot of previous knowledge of the batter and the pitcher and their choices. Without this knowledge, the game is boring, because there is virtually no action in it.

EDIT: Sorry if the link to the new transformer didn't work for you the first time. It's fixed now. (8/10/09)

Why I Hate Online Classes

2009-08-07T22:45:00.000-07:00

Teaching online sucks. This is the first five minutes of a lecture. It took me hours to compile. I gotta admit I gotta admit I'm glad the class was cancelled.

First Tired Day in A While

2009-08-06T15:10:00.000-07:00

Life has been a little too intense lately. I'm zonked today and, sadly, didn't make it to the gym. The past two weekends have been very social. My life tends to work best when I’m not social at all on the weekends. But that gets to me after a while. But, sadly, fatigue also gets to me after a while. The trip is coming up and I’m not really looking forward to it, as much as it is a sign of progress in my life. I need to work on getting centered.

Here’s what’s going on:

Discovering the World of Low-Weight, High-Rep Shoulder Exercises

I used my free trainer session with Richard, my gym’s trainer to discuss my utterly unresponsive shoulders. Richard is the most magnificent older man I’ve ever met. He’s either in his late fifties or early sixties. He’s totally ripped. I think I have a new role model. Richard is fairly unemotional in his demeanor. He listens and diagnoses very quickly. He said that he once had a similar problem getting his shoulders to grow. His present shoulders show no evidence of this problem. He suggested that two things were likely at fault. The first was that the blood vessels running into shoulders were relatively small and until the shoulder started getting more exercise, they would remain small, and hence the muscle would have trouble. The other is that my triceps were more developed than my deltoids (this is a sad commentary on my pathetic shoulder muscles, as opposed to any notable development of my triceps or any other muscle at all in my body) and were probably doing a share of the work. His solution—low-weight, high-rep lateral raises, depicted below:

The goal is to get to three sets of fifty using five-pound dumbbells. I did two sets of fifty with him day before yesterday, broken up by some shoulder presses using ten pound dumbbells in sets of ten. It’s truly humbling to know that five pound dumbbells can totally kick my ass if I do enough reps. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am a genuine geek, in case you were wondering. No one will ever mistake me for an athlete. I was the kid who got beat up every day in the seventh grade. Kirk and Briggs can confirm this. They were there. I had to break my first set of fifty into two sets of twenty-five. The second had to be broken up into fives and tens. He patiently waited while I worked my way through. He said I’d feel it the next day. I felt it a little yesterday morning, but by night again, I was quite decently aware. I’ve been sorer, but I can tell the strategy had a new and different impact. I’m definitely going to work on this for a while.

I Need to Grade Again

'Tis the season! Fa-la-la-la-la!
I Started Work on Rewriting My Proposal

It took two days, but this is the revision chart. The only thing left to figure out is what the lit review should look like. I'll spend some time there tonight.

I’m Getting to Know My Camera

I discovered that in addition to having a receptor for an external flash, my camera has a built-in flip-up flash. If I get a telephoto lens, it will be very viable for everyday uses. I've also been learning that minature photography actually has many problems of focus. Look at this photo of this grill ornament Craig gave be a few days ago.

It never really dawned on me that focus could be complex in photographing a small object, but here, the focus is clearest on the dials and on the little hook on the lid. I'm realizing that in macro photography, you have to put a great deal of attention to how you focus in composing your picture.

I need to work on packing the equipment and figuring out how I'm going to tote it all around Tel Aviv.

Writer's Block in a Glass Bubble

2009-08-02T17:31:00.000-07:00

Here are the first two entries in the "Kaleidoscope" train of thought:

Glass Bubble
For a while, earlier this year, Kirk, Simon, Nelly and Josiah and I were playing an online game called Legends of Elveron. As happens when geeks gather in one place, we got to storytelling about old D&D campaigns. In telling the story of my favorite gaming character, Max Forger, I started talking about living in Seattle at the turn of the millennium. This is what I wrote:

I've promised myself that if I ever manage to teach myself to write again and graduate, I'm going to write an Eighteenth Brumaire of George W. Bush. I owe him and his men so much of what I learned about the limits of democracy, rationality and, indeed, how under the right circumstances how an adroit politician may shape, no—virtually sculpt public opinion like so much clay. There was so much to talk about then. We were not yet desensitized to horror, as we are now. Truly these were the last days of my youth.

We drank a good deal together and had a lot of fun. One of the greatest blessings in my life was that Simon lived very close to me. He and his girlfriend Nelly, with whom I also became very good friends, hardly passed a day when we didn't bump into one another, if we hadn't planned on meeting. While I've never smoked tobacco, Nelly and Simon did, and we all drank coffee in the upstairs room at Cafe Allegro. We'd drink coffee and play cards and philosophize. We played this delightful Russian card game Nelly taught us called Durak, which Simon dubbed "Russian Ratfuck." It's the perfect salon game. As it was the game of nobility, Nelly and I decided that everyone should have a title. As Nelly was my courtly lover, we ripped off Les Liasons Dangereuses and she became the Marquise and I became the Vicomte. Simon became the Duke. I forget what title we gave Peter Hovde. Ru became the Pirate King (despite the fact that in my mind, Simon has always been the Pirate King). We talked and talked and talked. We lived in a glass bubble in the storm that engulfed the nation. Outside, the storm raged on and we were hardly senseless to it, after all, the bubble was made of glass. But I never realized until now how safe the bubble was and how beautiful. I was too stupid to realize it at the time, but it was one of the greatest blessings of my life.

Nelly and Simon were here over the past view days. We had such a good time just talking. I miss them both so dearly. Seattle lost much of its charm for me when they left. But whether or not they were here to lend it charm, Seattle has been a safe, glass bubble for me. There is virtually no place else in America in which it is easier to be an out queer than Seattle. This town has been good to me.

We’ve had a heat wave in Seattle (90+ degrees for several days—we aren’t designed to weather this sort of thing here). Nelly needed to buy a summer dress, as she had no idea that she’d need one here. So Simon and I left her to shop at Alderwood mall and we browsed through different geek-oriented stores. We came to a knife shop and Simon wanted to go in, so we did. I saw a particularly lethal looking knife blade there. This is the closest image I could find, but it’s a good deal scarier that this one:

Looking at this knife in the store’s cut-up, a thought that has been growing in my mind began to crystallize. I’m not going to live in a glass bubble forever. Looking at the knife, so clearly designed to disembowel upon exit, I could see human hatred. It takes a certain mind to objectify a person enough to create a knife like that. That person is out there. Odds are that person hates queers. Well, I’m a loudmouth queer. And I’m not going shut up either. I need to learn to defend myself and my partner. I can’t live in a glass bubble for the rest of my life. I’m going to graduate and probably have to leave Seattle. I need to start getting real. I believe in democratic political order, but there are plenty of people involved in creating democratic political order who don’t believe in me or mine.

I think I want to take a karate class when Craig and I get back from Tel Aviv.

Writer’s Block
In a recent e-mail, one of you guys asked:

It's curious in your blog you talk about how you have difficulty writing but then you write these very long thoughtful emails to me.

I could say that it’s a very different type of writing. That is technically true. It is totally different to spew at someone in a conversation (hockey again) then to write an intellectual argumentative essay (football). The differences between the structural demands of both types of writing couldn’t be more stark. The difficulty with that claim is that it is emotionally dishonest. I think I have, after many years now, figured out how to break the job into parts and conquer it. There remain technical challenges, of course, but I know that this is something I can handle. Something else is wrong.

The something else is that I have writer’s block, because I know that I will never again experience writing as euphoria. A while ago, I did a blog entry on a piece I read by Talal Amin (the other Talal in the social sciences, the one whose name some other social scientist might actually recognize). This was the passage that set me off:

Johann Sulzer, a theorist of the fine arts, wrote in more general terms: “All artists of any genius claim that from time to time they experience a state of extraordinary psychic intensity which makes work unusually easy, images arising without great effort and the best ideas flowing in such profusion as if they were the gift of some higher power. This is without doubt what is called inspiration. If an artist experiences this condition, his object appears to him in an unusual light; his genius, as if guided by a divine power, invents without effort, shaping his invention in the most suitable form without strain; the finest ideas and images occur unbidden in floods to the inspired poet; the orator judges with the greatest acumen, feels with the greatest intensity, and the strongest and most vividly expressive words rise to his tongue.” Such statements, Flaherty argues, are strongly reminiscent of accounts of shamanism—in this case of a shaman described not skeptically but in wonderment. They employ the idea of inspiration metaphorically—as control of an “instrument” from outside the person, or as a “gift” from a “higher power.” But these remain metaphors, covering an inability to explain a this-worldly phenomenon in natural terms.

Before I got sick, writing was always that way for me. I’ve always had a powerful imagination. Before the fateful autumn of ’99 when I had the really nasty attack that gave me optic neuritis, my frontal lobes were capable of processing many, many steps at the same time and I could keep up with the flood of images coming into my brain. I loved writing because it was the highest experience of creative power I knew. I loved it even more than singing. That’s why I became a scholar, not a tenor. The reason I have writer’s block is because I know that I will never feel that power again and my heart and soul hates that fact. Like a child, I refuse to accept what is hateful.

When my niece Valerie was very young, she would often refuse to come along with me when the appointed hour for leaving the McDonald’s playland to go home or leaving the television to go to her bath or her sleep. I would look down at her (as my niece at the age of four was much shorter than me) and say, “Niece. You have two options. You can come along with dignity or without dignity. But you’re coming along. So which will it be?”

At this point Valerie would usually stare up at me in resignation and sigh, “Dignity” and come along. On occasion, however, she would clench her jaw, stare up angrily and say, “NO DIGNITY!” This was boundlessly entertaining and I would laugh, scoop her off the floor and carry her to the next exotic port of call.

I am not a four year-old niece. I am a nearly forty year-old uncle. As much as my subconscious has been screaming “NO DIGNITY!” lately, it is not charming or entertaining. It is unacceptable. I must accept that writing will be plodding and not euphoria. This isn’t cooking. I can punt cooking. I have things I want to say, damn it. I can’t punt writing. Damn it, I’m a scholar. Scholars produce scholarship. This is not negotiable.

I need to make tables, lay out tasks, make check marks and I need to do write everyday, just like I work out every day. I need to accept that change will happen slowly, that I’ll never be directly satisfied with a day’s work, that I cannot measure my life in immediately visible results. Writing will never again be ecstasy, because it will never happen quickly enough to overload my senses. Of all the limitations, this hurts the most, for I wrote once with divine inspiration and will not write that way again. But I have to write every day from now on. This won’t work otherwise.

Kaleidoscope

2009-07-31T09:39:00.000-07:00

Sometimes life is like looking through a kaleidoscope when you’re a kid. My life has been that way lately. Unexpected splashes of color have been thrown into the space occupied by my conscious mind, where light is reflected and refracted and converted into a beautiful picture, a source inspiration.

The most important and vital splash is that Nelly and Simon are here in Seattle and I got to spend Wednesday and Thursday with them. It’s so fucking good to see your friends after so long an absence.

I’m going to try to write a series over the next week or so. In sequence then, I’m hoping to do the following blog entries:
Glass Bubble
Writer’s Block
Phallocentrism
The Joy of Building a Life with Your Partner

I’ve tried to write series before and failed. I’m not going to be afraid to keep trying. I can do this. It doesn’t matter how many times I fail. I am patient enough to achieve this.

New Season's Resolution

2009-07-28T17:08:00.000-07:00

Well, the word is out. Favre won't become a Viking. What kills me is if you look at this post this post on Cheesehead TV, where the fans have quite decent analytical skill, there are people who still want to take the motherfucker back. This is what I posted:

I respect Favre even less as a person now. Why raise all this ruckus in the first place if you're not going to play for the Vikings?

If your spouse openly investigated leaving you for someone else and then came back and said, "Nah. It was a nice fantasy, but in the end it was probably not worth it..." would you take them back?

The way this has played out, he'll be talking about playing for the Vikings in 2017 and, fools that we are, we'll still be talking about the S.O.B. My new season's resolution as a Packers fan is to get myself some self-respect. No more Favre posts.

I mean it. I don't give a shit anymore. No more Favre posts.

My Old Buddy and Writing Partner Briggs

2009-07-28T15:02:00.000-07:00

Briggs Moon gave me a call yesterday. In some ways, MS has made be a better friend, but the one way it didn't is that I suck at staying in touch (although I'm working on getting better). I haven't had a long talk with Briggs in five years or so. Way the hell too long. Things have changed in his life. He has a new, very sultry fiance (see picture above) who's intensely brainy as well (a geneticist). He's a dad twice over now, too. His eldest is Phoebe and his youngest is Riley.

I met Briggs a little after I met Kirk, back in junior high. We didn't really become friends until junior year of high school in Linda Melanson's debate class. Melanson sucked as an instructor. She was an amazing speech and interp coach, but somewhat lecherous and very lazy. There were whole days in that class in which we'd do nothing at all. I practically taught myself to be a debater. Briggs and I sat on the yellow couch in her room and talked about Star Trek: The Next Generation, back when the show was in its production run. "I love Star Trek," he said, eyes darting back and forth, searching for interlopers who might overhear. "Don't tell anyone, okay?"

A decade ago we were working on a sci-fi novel together. Sadly, other writers and movie-makers found their way to several elements of our original ideas for the book before we finished it. The project fell apart because my life collapsed between 1998 and 2001. I was hit by the quadruple whammy of being fucked over royally at USAID, having my first MS exacerbations, living in three different cities in three different years and coming out. I was broken every single way you could break me. In the autumn of '99, Briggs was in Chicago for a business trip. Both of us like whiskey quite a bit. I think we drank Crown Royal that night. It's Briggs' favorite. Briggs likes pistachio nuts and I like cashews. I brought both with me. And a tape recorder. We listened to sci-fi music, drank, and brainstormed the night through. I got it all on tape. Shortly after, I got optic neuritis, one of the tell-tale symptoms of MS. Optic neuritis is like looking at the world through fogged-up glasses. I couldn't read. If you want to scare a guy like me to death, take away his ability to read. I listened to Briggs and me on those tapes over and over again. It was my only escape. That night with Briggs was one of the greatest blessings in my life. I'm really glad we're back in touch.

Naturally, "blast from the past" photos are in order. This was Briggs, taken a day or two after a Stars loss to Wings, 0-3 (yes, Ozzie was in net, thank you). You'll see the stoic, serious expression that befits the moment. You'll also see that, unlike me, Briggs has had a real job over the past decade, one that pays in American dollars. But the Wings still won that game, so I can't complain.

The picture below was me as I looked roughly at the time Briggs saw me last. I think Brian McGrath took that photo just after St. Patrick's Day of 2001, the best St. Patrick's Day Party I ever threw. Briggs and Kirk were there! Either that, or Dinur took the photo in 2002. That punch-drunk, bunny-in-the-headlights look was the old Talal just before it all ended.

Most importantly, this is Briggs' model of the Eschersphere, our starship. He made it by modifying models of a Cardassian cruiser from Deep Space Nine and, of course, an imperial star destroyer from Star Wars. I was so excited when he sent these to me.

Side view

Front view

Top view

Bottom view
The Eschersphere was powered by a miniature black hole (MBH). Briggs developed a whole technology around what it took to contain and harness the power of an MBH. These are the joys of having an engineer as a writing partner. I was good at politics, cultures and species. He was the science guy. I was good at making vast systems of character relationships and political situations. Briggs excelled at taking a wrench to them, ripping a whole in their guts and thereby creating dynamic plot. Goddamn, we were good together. Those were the days!

What the Camera Setup Looks Like

2009-07-26T00:04:00.000-07:00

Mid-range good day. I was feeling a little low-energy, so I thought I'd wait until afternoon to go to the gym. Big mistake. I was right in calling that I was having an "I need rest" morning. But when the day started, I never got back to working out and the gym closes early on Saturday. I blew it for the day. That sucked.

I did manage to get in some play time with the camera this evening, though. First, this is my actual unit, through Craig's camera.

The picture looks a little nicer than the real camera, thanks to good lighting. Below is a front picture of one of my cheap $9 lighting units ($12 with cool flourescent bulb)

This is the back:

In order to reduce glare on the item to be lighted, Chad suggested I fit a round defuser cloth around the opening of the lamp's bowl. My central difficulty is that the top of the bulb is at about the same level as the rim of the bowl. I was afraid that the heat from the bulb might eventually begin to burn the cloth. I solved this problem by innovating with binder clips. This also gave me a chance to show off just what a macro lens can do. Click onto that binder clip and really look at that detail. It blows me away

I attach four at right angles to the rim of the lamp.

I put the lever in the "down" position on the outside of the bowl, like so...

...but I leave the lever "up" on the inside of the bowl, like so... (you can see that in the picture above, but click on the detail for that shot. This lens is amazing!)

...finally, I put the cloth over the top of the extended levers of the binder clip so that it doesn't touch the bulb, like so...

When I was done with the close-ups, I began to have trouble. The combination of using this lens and a busy background (my bookcase) was far too much for the autofocus to handle. It went haywire. In order to take a photograph of the tripod, I had to switch to semi-manual, which I'd already set to take pictures in black and white:

Here's how I connect the lamps to a TV tray.

I'm going to have to hope that the Press Archive furniture at the Moshe Dayan Center is conducive to this sort of "clamping." If not, I may have to waste money on purchasing some sort of substitute and hope they have a small space where I can store whatever I buy, as hauling this sort of stuff from our apartment in Arlozorov Street to the university would be quite tiring.

I also played with a fun black and white feature this camera has. Some of you who like to take pictures may know that photographers frequently use colored lenses in black and white photography, as this changes the texture of the picture. I wondered if that might bring out the text more clearly. Here's the plain black and white photo of the area that was blurriest with Craig's camera:

Red, depicted below, made the image a little sharper, but caused the letters to fade

Orange was better, but basically had the same problem.

Yellow sharpened the letters, but did not darken them

Green, depicted below, darkened the letters and sharpened them. I will definitely bear this in mind when working in Tel Aviv.

I have to play with manually setting the white balance tomorrow. I also ought to stand up on a chair and see if I can get the whole sheet. I'm guessing that will be counterproductive, but a good scientist is thorough in testing all options.

How is this for the most boring blog entry ever?

Wow! Expensive Cameras Rule!

2009-07-24T22:21:00.000-07:00

So I bit the fuckin' bullet and bought the new camera today. The camera was about $300. It's a used digital Canon Rebel-Xt SLR, depicted below, in its shiny commodified newness. If I'm feeling energetic tomorrow, I'll use Craig's camera to shoot a picture of my actual unit, when I do the step-by-step walkthrough of the photo setup.

The macro lens for the digital SLR, however, cost me another $400. My mom and Aunt Charlotte's (God rest her soul) generous funding took a nasty hit today. I was reeling. But I'll give Camera Shop Chad credit where it's due. I can get a whole newspaper page very clearly with my present tripod. I might try shooting a whole sheet standing up on a chair to see if the camera is capable of actually getting a whole sheet. I don't know if they make taller tripods. To show you guys how effective the new equipment is, I went to one of the single-page photos I took with Craig's camere. Here's the "before" picture cropped to show one of the clearest passages:

Here's the same bit with the new camera:

More to the point, there were lots of areas on the "before" photo that weren't readable. For example:

Here's the Rebel-Xt image:

I'm totally floored. More geeky tech details soon...

Craig wants us to take up photography as a hobby, as we don't have any hobbies in common. Before B-12, I'd have said "no way." I used to love photography, but it's very extroverted, energy-intensive work. But now? Fuck yeah, that sounds like fun!

Lighting for the Tel Aviv Trip

2009-07-21T19:15:00.000-07:00

Well, I didn't get to the gym on Monday, but I hit it first thing today. Pecs, back and abs. I feel better. I'm really beginning to think that there is something to this "MS patients have low endorphin levels" story because I really felt like shit yesterday. When I go in the morning, I feel way better for the rest of the day. It's almost a night and day difference.

Today I dealt with several errands, including buying some lights for the photographing of newspapers. This is what the set-up looks like, minus Craig's camera, which I used to take the photo.

The tripod works fine and I'm happy with the lighting. I'm just hoping that the archives have furniture conducive to the cheap clamp-on lamps I bought at the hardware store. The lamp the camera store sold me is going back. It cost $20. They sold me a special bulb for another $15. It's going back too. The clamp lamps from the hardware store were $8 a piece. Moreover, they have bowls onto which I can attach a defuser cloth from the camera store. I will bite the bullet and get that from them. My major concern is how big a picture I can take. This is a full sheet image.

If you click on it, you'll see that only the center is really readable. Below is a single-page image:

It's better, but still blurry in places. I'm not going back to this archive. It isn't good enough. This image is a bit larger than a half page:

If you click on it, you'll see it's readable. But that means four photos per sheet, instead of the most desirable one photo per sheet. Chad at the camera store (funny--the guy who owns my gym is also named Chad--lotsa chads hanging around my life these days. It's like I'm a Florida election) suggests that a $300 Canon he has comes with a bigger chip than Craig's does and might get a clearer picturer. So back to the camera store I go. They have a fourteen-day return policy, so if it can give me at least single-page photos that are clear, it'll be a keeper.

Sadly, the lamps are going to need a power converter. I have to figure out if I should be a big power converter and hook a power strip. I've not used a power converter since I was twelve. My laptop works on both currents and I didn't bring any other gadgets with me to the Mideast last time I went, which is over a decade ago.

NOTE: Actually Blogger reduced the image size, even when you click on them. While the last image is readable, there are large parts of the first images that are readable in real life. Just not all of each picture.

Manic Sunday, Part II

2009-07-19T22:47:00.000-07:00

Craig's morning thing canceled, so I got to the gym bright and early after all. Still cardio today. I'm stuck between resistance 16 and 17 on the ellipsis machine. Part of it is that summer has kicked in and the place isn't air conditioned. Heat fucks with a multiple sclerotic pretty badly. I did almost the whole 20 minutes at 17 a few days ago when we had a cool spell. Now that it's hot, I can only do 17 for a few minutes at a time. It's pissing me off. At least I get the pleasure of dripping more sweat this way. Given the wussy character of my workout, I take what pseudo-signs of manly manness that I can get. I think I'm back to weights tomorrow, assuming that I'm not crashing on the damned exams. Five more left. Plus I gotta go the bank tomorrow. Blech. Too much crap.

I gotta figure out my medications for the trip, too. MS makes me feel like my grandmother, God rest her soul. I totally get why she hated going anywhere. Of course, my grandmother could have organized a successful planned economy for the Soviet Union. And her cooking was way, way better than Stalin's. I was never up to her standards on my best day.

I hate grading. Five more essays, then plug and chug. Then printing grade sheets. I want these fucking exam dead.

Whine, whine. Bitch, bitch. Goddamn. I never write anything worth reading anymore.

Manic Sunday

2009-07-19T00:20:00.000-07:00

The tripod works. I'm maybe halfway to a lighting solution. Craig's camera is probably not up to the task. I'm going to have to buy a $300 one to get the job done.

Craig has a full day planned. I won't get to the gym until early afternoon, which sucks. I have thirteen more essays to grade. The short answers and map quizzes are done. Then I have determine if there will be a curve, implement it and print evaluations. I have to have their next exam question posted by Monday. It has to be a new one, this time. I haven't done a '48 War question in a long time. I give back the exam that day, too. I'll probably get slammed at office hours. Tuesday, I trek back to Kenwood to return the lighting equipment that won't work out and get the guy's advice on what will work. I need to write to Haim Gal to ask him to e-mail me a letter of invitation and tell him about my setup and see if it works for him.

I'm getting cranky. Too many details. Not enough frontal lobe power.

I Need to Start Writing Again

2009-07-18T11:54:00.000-07:00

Today, Craig and I are headed to the far north side of town to go talk to a guy at a camera shop about the correct lighting, camera and tripod for digitizing the newspapers in Tel Aviv. Wish us luck.

I need to start working on rewriting my proposal for grant applications for the 2010-2011 school year. I need a much more serious lit review for the proposal. Everyone who has read it says so. I also need to write more about the content analysis. I need to find a way to write or block articles every day, the way I go the gym everyday. The "little every day" approach works well for an MS patient. I need to start engaging the other blog again. And I need to punt on "The Ideal-Type of the Sacred" again. I am so sick of punting. I hate rebuilding. I've got to teach myself to be patient through the process. Too much of this is the emotional side. I need to force the practical side up through my consciousness.

And I gotta finish grading. Those papers need to be back on Monday.

The Kid's Growing Up

2009-07-18T01:03:00.000-07:00

Is it just me, or is Aaron Rodgers' voice deeper this year? Fuck, he's growing up right before my eyes. He wasn't this confident last year, but damn, he's turned into a real quarterback. And to think six years ago I was snippy at Dinur for wanting Brett Favre to just die so California Boy could have a career. Who knew I'd become a fan of Aaron Rodgers and want to see Brett Favre beat into a bloody pulp? The times they are a changin'.

I may just buy me one of these t-shirts. My brother-in-law Chris is a Vikings fan, God help him. I'll get him the purple one and me the green one. It'll be even better than when we wear rival hockey jerseys.

Neil Demands Equal Billing

2009-07-15T09:43:00.000-07:00

Neil wrote demanding equal billing with Kirk. Without further ado, then, this is the grand response

* * *

Warning: I'm not as funny as Talal, nor as well-spoken as Kirk...

Talal,

First, I have to say that I laughed out loud when I read your rendition of our conversation on Saturday night. I'm really looking forward to "classes" this summer.

Have to say that I agree with about 95% of what Kirk wrote. I'd even one-up him on the Evil Empire bit. The pattern he described for the mid-90's to now was actually a repeat of the mid-70's into the 80's.

In the mid-70's, the Yankees won the Pennant in '76, '77 and '78. They were close in '79 and '80 and won it again in '81. They had some home grown talent (Ron Guidry, Thurman Munson and later Dave Righetti). Many were free agents (Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, Goose Gossage).

Then, after being beaten by the Dodgers in '81 (I still remember Kenny Landreux catching the final out of the series) The Boss - no, not that one - but George Steinbrenner, went on a spending spree. Jack Clark, Steve Kemp and most forgettably Ed Whitson were among the players that were brought in.

Those teams were just awful. But I loved them just the same. Thurman Munson (who died in 1979), Ron Guidry and Willie Randolph were my favorites. Don Mattingly as well.

You're right, the mid '90s teams (champions in '96, '98, '99 and '00) had a combination of free agents and home grown stars.

Since 2001, my beloved Yankees have made it to the playoffs almost every year but have been beaten by the Angels, Red Sox and a few other teams.

I take being a fan very seriously. I joke that I bleed "pinstripe". But I also respect fans of all stripes. Even Red Sox Fans and Mets Fans.

(Incidentally, I rooted for the Red Sox in '86. Because, as a true-blue Yankees fan, no matter how much ya hate the Red Sox, ya gotta hate the Mets more. Cross-town rivals and all.)

Why am I a Yankee fan? I'm from New York. I remember my first Yankee Game. It was 1980, and the Yanks lost to the Royals 4-1. A camp counselor who I later developed a crush on took me to that game. I was 7. She was probably 18.

Kirk's point about history is a good one. The Yankees are one of the most storied franchises in all of sports. Even Steinbrenner can't ruin that.

I am thrilled that Talal is willing to be a Yankee fan. I am more thrilled that he is willing to learn about baseball.

My goal will be to teach baseball first, let him join Yankees Universe and then go into the history. I could do it in the opposite order (show the history, let him join the Universe and then teach him baseball) but then it wouldn't make sense.

In the end, the goal is to teach baseball. Not Yankee allegiance.
I don't know if I'll be able to say the same if and when Pam and I have kids. Yankee fandom might come first.

(Kirk, by the way, thank you for reassuring my wife about Boston. A friend of ours put the fear of god in her head some time back and she even suggested once that if we ever move there I'd have to stop wearing my Yankee cap. I've been trying to tell her that Fenway is where I'd expect getting hassled.)

Play Ball!

Kirk on the Yankees

2009-07-14T20:45:00.000-07:00

Of all the sports fans I have known, Kirk casts the greatest aura of dispassion. This image is by and large fake, as he can actually get quite stirred when his teams lose. But he doesn't like for anyone to know. Officially, Kirk is unfazed by everything and tries to effect the air of the unfazed more and more each year. Here, reproduced by permission, is his response to the possibility of me, one of his closest friends, becoming (gasp!) a Yankees fan.

* * *

Hey Talal -
I read your blog about entertaining the possibility of becoming a Yankees fan and am a little concerned because it almost sounds as if you were convinced the Yankees are not indeed the face of all evil. Actually, to be honest, while the "evil empire" stuff was funny and did apply when the Red Sox team president jokingly used the phrase to refer to the Yankees, I don't think the term really applies as much any more. In those days the Yankees were desperate to continue winning and didn't have the farm system to continue producing top players so they simply outspent everyone. The owner was a real piece of work and was so obnoxious he even was suspended from the MLB for a period during the '70s and '80s. The combination of winning championship after championship, outbidding and overpaying for all the top free agents, and a super-ass of an owner was more than enough to make them the most hated team in baseball. Throw in those obnoxious New York fans and they may have been the most hated team in all of professional sports. On top of that 4 of their top players, three of whom were high priced free agent acquisitions, have admitted to using steroids. There may have been more but I can only think of the four offhand. During that time they were comparable to all the things everyone hates about the Dallas Cowboys only magnified by a hundred.

If you take a step back and look at the Yankees of late '90s objectively any true fan (even Red Sox fans) would have to admit the team truly did win through home-grown talent. Nearly all the top stars during the championship years came up through their system and with the addition of the ultra-classy manager (the equivalent of the head coach in football) Joe Torre along with a front office headed up by another classy individual at GM, Brian Cashman, the team was actually quite likable. One could watch the owner's antics and chuckle because the rest of the team was a real class act.

However, as the team got older and players retired or left via free agency, the owner took a much more active role in demanding instant results instead of allowing the GM to do his job as all other GMs do, by acquiring players through a combination of free agency and the draft. That wasn't good enough for Steinbrenner and thus the Yankee style of management was born - bring in all the biggest names you can get and get rid of any who don't perform as expected right away. Thus the evil empire was born.

A couple of years ago Steinbrenner and Joe Torre decided they just couldn't stand each other any longer and Torre left when his contract was up. Sure, the Yankees made an offer for him to stay but it was an insultingly low-balled offer to such an accomplished manager. The GM Brian Cashman was next on the firing line but he managed to talk Steinbrenner, who was older and in declining health by this point, into the idea of developing their farm system again. The Red Sox had won in 2004 with a team largely made up of mid-range free agents (since the Yankees gobbled up all the top ones) but the Red Sox championship in 2007 contained quite a few home-grown players and Cashman wanted to follow a similar route to long-term success. Steinbrenner surprisingly agreed and the Yankees have at least moved up to "not evil" on the scale of badness. They haven't stopped buying up the top free agents but limit themselves to only a few each offseason rather than gobbling up the entire herd.

The current Yankees are certainly not the evil empire any longer and have even managed to bring up a couple of players through their own farm system, none of whom have yet excelled at the major league level but they at least have promise. George Steinbrenner is now offscreen and his sons Hank and Hal are running the team. Hal seems to be an even-tempered rational sort of guy but Hank shows signs of becoming even more outspoken than his dad. Hank has routinely become an amusing source of never-ending eye-popping quotes.

To say the current Yankees were built through the farm system would be dead wrong, however, at least at the star level. The team managed to grab both the top free agent pitcher (CC Sabathia) and top free agent hitter (Mark Teixeira) this past offseason so they aren't done with the big spending. Their other major stars are either holdovers from the glory years (Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera and Jorge Posada, eac of whom came up through the Yankees system in the mid-90's) or are still free agent acquisitions (Hideki Matsui, Alex Rodriguez, Johnny Damon, Xadier Nady and Nick Swisher). One guy actually fits both groups, as Andy Pettite came up in the mid-90's as a starting pitcher, left the team via free agency in 2004 and returned to the team via free agency in 2007.

The only current Yankees who are stars or budding stars that came through the system after the championship years are two pitchers, Ching-Mien Wang (legitimate top pitcher) and Joba Chamberlain (budding star), and a hitter who is perhaps above-average (Robinson Cano). While there are a number of other players on their team who came up through the system none are stars or even on the verge of becoming stars. Thus, the Yankees are still acquiring their star power through free agency or riding their aging stars from the old glory days.

All of this is truly little different from all the other big teams - the Red Sox, Dodgers, Cardinals, Cubs, Giants, White Sox, Angels and Braves. All of these teams have some players who come up through the system combined with some free-agent signings of various magnitudes. To say the Yankees are any worse would be a lie but to claim the Yankees are superior simply because they don't grab ALL the top free agents any longer would be a lie as well. The Yankees still do bring in top players, they just do it in the same manner as the other top teams. The true injustice nowadays is how all of these top teams can afford the top players where the rest of the league cannot, but since the vast majority of revenue is locally-generated and there is no salary cap or revenue sharing, this is likely to continue for the forseeable future. Even the top teams have reduced their spending so salaries at the top are dropping a bit, and I believe there is some sort of pseudo-revenue sharing going on but it's just not enough to make the league completely even.

I write all of this in response to your blog where it sounded as if you might be getting some false impressions of the Yankees. I know you may consider me biased due to being a Red Sox fan but in all honesty this is my objective view of the Yankees. I don't feel the negativity toward them that I once did, but like I said they just aren't as hateable any longer.

As long as I'm writing this I might as well give you what I think is the primary reason you should consider the Yankees for your favorite team, as much as I would rather you root for the Sox. The Yankees have perhaps the best team history in baseball and one of the best in all of professional sports. I'd say the top tier of team histories in baseball would include the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants, all of which started as New York-based teams. A close second tier would include the Red Sox, Cardinals, Cubs and White Sox, but it seems as if the Yankees, Dodgers and Giants have been involved in far more of the memorable events and have combined to win most of the World Series. That is the only reason why I was a semi-Yankee fan as a kid, although the Dodgers were still my top team. Yankee team history is so interesting I have a book on it sitting here right next to my Red Sox team history book. My collection would be complete if I could find a good Dodger team history.

You seem to have adopted the teams with the best team histories in other sports. Green Bay and Chicago have far and away the best team histories in the NFL, particularly pre-merger. After 1970 or so several other teams have been more interesting but the Packers still will always have one of the very best team histories in the sport. The same goes with the Red Wings, who were one of the original 6, each of whom have great team histories. I would say that is probably the one characteristic that most closely binds the Packers and Red Wings and going with the Yankees for baseball would fit very well. So would the Red Sox, who also have the added bonus of sharing the word "red" in their nickname along with the color in their uniform with your beloved Wings.

I would have posted this on your blog but, well, it was just too damn long and I didn't really feel like getting into a sparring match with your friend. Keep me posted on your progress as a budding baseball fan and as always feel free to ask questions. I actually have time to answer them this summer!

Kirk

PS - Incidentally, the Red Sox have beat the Yankees all 8 times they've played so far this season. Just thought you should know when making an informed decision.

Transformations in the Works

2009-07-12T23:04:00.000-07:00

Two things have happened this weekend. First,

I Did All My Food Prep

All of that food prep I spelled out in the last blog entry? I fucking did it all. And I did most of it tonight. Only thing that sucked today was that I didn't make it to the gym. Let's hear it for Vitamin B-12, the MS wonder drug! This wasn't as much work as the old Talal would have done, that's true. But, get this--I don't give a fuck because it's beginning to approach respectability!

Neil Parekh Has Taken Up the Quest for My Baseball Soul

Get this, all ye non-pedagogical baseball fans who care nothing for my sporting soul. My friend Neil is actually taking up the challenge of trying to convert me into a baseball fan. At stake is my long-standing pledge to swear undying loyalty to the team of the friend who achieves this feat. So while Michelle and Gretchen will be pleased, the rest of you are screwed, 'cause Neil Parekh is a fan of the Evil Empire of the sporting world--the New York Yankees.

Last night, Neil went over lesson one. "Repeat after me: The Yankees are not evil."

"What do you mean, the Yankees are not evil?" I ask. "They can buy whatever the hell they want, right? If I'm to sell my soul here, damn it, they'd better dominate!"

Neil spewed a list of impressive names that included Derek Jeter (see, I've learned one name already and I allegedly think this sport is boring--maybe Neil's magic is working) and said, "These guys are the core of our team! All of them came up through the farm system!"

I leaned in closer to him and said, "Yeah, sure, they farmed the core of the team, but the Yankees can buy whoever they want, right? Biggest market in baseball, right?"

"Well, yeah, it's true. But there are limits to that. We haven't taken the pennant since 2001..." This was a moment of troubled reflection, but Neil quickly switched to a different, more urgent line of thought and said, "But, Talal, you've got to drop this evil empire crap. This would be like if I went to you and said, 'I want to become an ardent student of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. I hear the Arabs are a bunch of terrorists.' It would never work."

"Ah," I said. "But if you said to me, 'I wish to become an ardent student of the Arab-Israeli Conflict--teach me and I will become an Arab,' nothing you could say could bother me, for I know your soul will be mine. Powerful Jedi am I."

By the way, my pledge is no cheap offer either. I'm not that low-caliber kinda geek, here. If Neil can teach me to yearn for pitchers and catchers reporting to camp every spring, I have sworn to him that I will go with him in full Yankees-fan gear to Fenway Park itself. Pam, Neil's wife and my dear friend and stalwart colleague at school, is already worried about hate crimes if she gets a job in Boston. Of course, I wouldn't mind working in Boston either. That's the scary thing about this pledge. Imagine if I lived in Boston. It would be like doing field research in Tel Aviv... Oh, wait. I'm doing that, aren't I? What was that thing they were saying about "Never saying never?"

This brings back memories. My first live Wings game was at the MCI Center in Washington, DC. I went with Aram Mohamed (who was the reason I became a Wingnut) and Brian McGrath. There were these pseudo-hockey fans behind us trying to act like they were all tough. This is DC. This is the wrong city and sport combination to have tough fans of any sort. Aram leans over to Brian and me and says, "If these guys want to make trouble later, are you guys behind me?"

"Sure," I say. "But you do realize that the guys behind you will be Brian and me, right?" Boston ain't DC. This time I have to be prepared. If Neil succeeds, I'm going to have to take a martial arts course.

And of course, the worst thing will be that Kirk's wife, Keriann, might not let him play with me anymore. You should have seen the look on her face when I gave Kirk a Red Wings jersey. Like I'd let him become a Bruins fan and doom him to a lifetime of disappointment.

2009-07-11T12:33:00.000-07:00

Today is food prep day. The list runs:

Prepare the ribs with rub-rub and wrap them up for freezing. I bake the individually wrapped ribs in a foil-covered baking pan at 200 degrees for about three hours before grilling.
Prepare the teriyaki steaks with ginger rub (lots of ginger, and a little powdered onion and garlic, and of course a little black pepper) and wrap them up for freezing. I usually use round eye steaks for this. The cut is a little tough, but again, I bake the individually wrapped pieces in a small, foil-covered baking pan at 200 degrees for about three hours before grilling). That gets them nice and tender. I grill them, brushing on my home-made (homo-made, too, come to think of it!). When they're done, I slice them up thinly using an electric knife and pour a little more teriyaki sauce over them.
Slice, spice and freeze the salmon (I use a little soy, a little olive oil, onion powder, garlic powder, cayenne pepper and ground sage. I wrap the pieces in foil, freeze them. I defrost them the morning before we eat them and grill them up in the foil.

Slice celery for snack packs and for black bean and corn salsa
Prepare black bean and corn salsa and store in refrigerator. This has canned black beans, canned corn, celery, red onion, sweet red peppers some lemon juice, salsa and cumin. I usually have a big helping of this with my lunch.
Slice, mix and store the pepper, cucumber and red onions that form the base for daily dinner salads (I slice the lettuce and tomato just before serving, as these parts get soggy or create sogginess and must be cut in real time).

I just got back from my workout and I actually feel a little tired this time. I went up in arm weights yesterday, and I'm a little sore as a result. I notice that soreness and fatigue correlate really well. This makes good sense. The body is healing and healing takes energy. I don't know if I should make a point of skipping the day after I go up a set. We'll see how sapped I am with the vegetable knife this afternoon.

The dinner menu looks like this:

SUNDAY: Salmon and salad
MONDAY: Roast AND salad (this should have leftovers for lunches)
TUESDAY: Teriyaki and salad
WEDNESDAY: Barbecue chicken and salad
THURSDAY: Ribs and salad
FRIDAY: Steaks and salad.

Craig doesn't mind the repetition of large dinner salads as long as the meat keeps changing. That said, there's too much red meat there and too much use of barbecue and teriyaki sauce. I need to integrate more chicken there. I need to start making stir-fries again. I tend to like stir-fries for lunch, as I tend to like them over brown rice and I like to keep my starchier carbs for earlier in the day. I'm going to have to mull it all over.

Gotta get back to work. I have a lot of vegetables to cut.