Out of Pocket

WoW will down for a couple of days while I attend a funeral in Raleigh on Sunday.

There's plenty to keep you busy in my absence. I know there's some sort of sporting event this weekend. I might even have the chance to catch it on TV if I can figure out what time it starts and the idiot commentators stop commentating idiotically all over the place. The hype is incessant and inane. I suppose it's a big deal, though, if you're from Pittsburgh or St. Louis, er, Phoenix. [P.S. I hear Bruce is doing something at half-time.]

But, for real, it's time to start assessing your pitchers and catchers for the season. Spring is nearly here.

Why They Hate Us

1,073,741,824. One billion plus.

This is the number of ancestors you had, theoretically, approximately 600 years ago, sometime around 1400. How did I arrive at this figure? Simple: you have two parents, each of them has two parents (4), each of them has two parents (8), each of them has two parents (16), and so on for approximately 30 generations (@20yrs).

But there's a problem. According to the best available estimates, at that time there were only about 350,000,000 people alive. Three-hundred-fifty million, slightly more than one-third of the number of your theoretical ancestors. "Go back forty generations, or about a thousand years, and each of us theoretically has more than a trillion direct ancestors—a figure that far exceeds the total number of human beings who have ever lived." Or so says Steve Olson in an article published several years back in The Atlantic Monthly: "The Royal We." What gives?

Intermarriage, intermingling of family trees, etc. Fine. Yet, there is a mathematical issue.

"In a 1999 paper titled "Recent Common Ancestors of All Present-Day Individuals," [Joseph] Chang [a statistician] showed how to reconcile the potentially huge number of our ancestors with the quantities of people who actually lived in the past. His model is a mathematical proof that relies on such abstractions as Poisson distributions and Markov chains, but it can readily be applied to the real world. Under the conditions laid out in his paper, the most recent common ancestor of every European today (except for recent immigrants to the Continent) was someone who lived in Europe in the surprisingly recent past—only about 600 years ago. In other words, all Europeans alive today have among their ancestors the same man or woman who lived around 1400. Before that date, according to Chang's model, the number of ancestors common to all Europeans today increased, until, about a thousand years ago, a peculiar situation prevailed: 20 percent of the adult Europeans alive in 1000 would turn out to be the ancestors of no one living today (that is, they had no children or all their descendants eventually died childless); each of the remaining 80 percent would turn out to be a direct ancestor of every European living today."

Everyone today who has any trace of European ancestry is descended from Charlemagne (the Holy Grail, if you will, of genealogical research). And Muhammad: "The line of descent for which records exist is through the daughter of the Emir of Seville, who is reported to have converted from Islam to Catholicism in about 1200. But many other, unrecorded descents must also exist," says Olson.

Further, as a matter of statistical certainty, everyone alive today is descended from Abraham and David and Confuscius and Nefertiti:

"the most recent common ancestor of all six billion people on earth today probably lived just a couple of thousand years ago. And not long before that the majority of the people on the planet were the direct ancestors of everyone alive today. Confucius, Nefertiti, and just about any other ancient historical figure who was even moderately prolific must today be counted among everyone's ancestors."

So, how does it feel to have royal, even divine blood? Feels pretty good, doesn't it? It gives you a real sense of self-esteem, n'est pas? A sense of pride and confidence. Even a sense of privilege. And that's the problem. This February 12th marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. His On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) offended everyone who felt they had a drop of noble blood because at some level nobility is associated with divinity.

Throughout the history of Western civilization, royalty embellished their claims to rule over others by tracing their ancestral roots to the gods. Today's most blatant example is the Pope of the Roman Catholic sect who claims his authority comes from Peter, to whom Jesus the Divine purportedly gave the keys of heaven: "Behold he [Peter] received the keys of the kingdom of heaven, the power of binding and loosing is committed to him, the care of the whole Church and its government is given to him [cura ei totius Ecclesiae et principatus committitur (Epist., lib. V, ep. xx, in P.L., LXXVII, 745)].

Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code plays on this myth of divine sanction, articulating the counter-myth that Charlemagne was the direct physical descendant of Jesus through the line of Mary Magdalene—which claim, of course, is a direct challenge to the spiritual authority arrogated to itself by the Roman church. Prior to this, the Roman Emperors, of course, formalized the model, relying heavily on the divine sanction for their authority. The Divine Augustus, the apotheosis of Nero, etc.

Jesus, as far as I can tell, was the first commoner/plebeian/peasant to be claimed to be a direct divine descendant; and, in the eyes of much of the Christian church, this elevated him to royalty. King Jesus. But this is confusing. In the New Testament, the books of Matthew and Luke make some attempt to trace Jesus's genealogy back through Joseph to David and, thus, Abraham and even Adam; but that makes no sense if his "father" was the Holy Spirit of God and not the icky, spermy Joseph. Either Jesus had a divine ancestor, arguably, in Adam, the first man, or Jesus's lineage represented a break in the chain of ancestry as the divine acted directly in the womb of his mother, Mary.

The tradition, of course, is much older, however. The Greek gods were continually meddling in the affairs of mortals and begetting spawn who were destined to rule over the people. There's a long history in the ancient Near East, as well. The so-called 'Divine Right of Kings' was but a modern shadow of the persistence of this myth.

Suffice it to say: Nobility, Royalty, Divinity: they are all inextricably intertwined in Western history. It can be quite confusing to us poor non-elites. 'Divinity' mythologizes the right of one person or one group to hold sway over another group. 'Divinity' authorizes rulership.

Then, along came Darwin. His work smashed this myth, waking humanity from its great slumber of irreality. There are truly no divine origins, no divinely sanctioned royalty, no exclusive nobility. We all have the same origins. We are all, in essence, of the animal kingdom. Human, all too human. It is the great disillusionment.

And 150 years later, the Christers, primarily, are fighting a fierce, rear-guard action defending the primacy of their great delusion. They need to believe that the authority of their priests, ministers, preachers, etc. derives directly from some higher power; that some divinity deigned to appear on earth and interfere in human affairs by impregnating a young Hebrew girl; that the presence of this divinity among us was revealed exclusively to a selective few, bestowing upon them some form of spiritual authority over the rest of us; that this authority has been handed down in an unbroken chain of succession ever since; and that the stories surrounding this revelation are set down in holy writ and, if we read them aright (the way the authorities tell us to), it will be revealed to us in all its glory. Magical thinking, that.

Darwin detached that chain at the source, demolished the feigned origins of authority (divine AND secular) and nobility. That is why they hate us.

A Quick One, While He's Away

I've been having some fun in the Comments over at D.G. Myers's blog: A Commonplace Blog. The redoubtable Dan Green from The Reading Experience is there, too.

It all started here, you might want to as well.

Poetry Break, Sort of

Tiger Swallowtail on Periwinkle

Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955)
Disillusionment Of Ten O'clock

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches Tigers
In red weather.

(from "Harmonium," 1923)

I'm not a Stevens scholar or a poet, but I wanted to take a run at this poem. It illustrates a point from my last post on the novel.

I'll start with the premise that it is the persona of the poem who is disillusioned. And he (let's assume it's a 'he', despite the night-gown connotations) is disillusioned with himself, not the villagers. He is disillusioned by the sameness and conformity of the neighborhood/community in which he finds himself: the houses, the night-gowns. His life is mundane: no color, no exoticism, no adornment. No dreams.

Query: Why does the poet use the loaded term 'periwinkle'? And which meaning does he intend? A periwinkle can be an exotic color, a lovely, delicate flower of that color, or 'a shore-dwelling mollusk'—all of which fit. The color fits the theme of white gowns that aren't either green, or purple, or yellow with various designs upon them. The flower is dreamily exotic, especially in the hands of a baboon, connoting the lack of imagination of the people. The shore-dwelling mollusk contrasts with the drunken sailor, and seems more emblematic of the persona's disillusionment with himself and his life. Similarly, its shell echoes the beads of the sashes the unimaginative (apish?) people don't wear. Let's go with all three.

Red sky at night, sailor's delight.
Red sky in morning, sailors take warning.

This adage is at least as old as Jesus: "When evening comes, you say, 'It will be fair weather, for the sky is red,' and in the morning, 'Today it will be stormy, for the sky is red and overcast.' (Matt. 16:2-3)

Query: So, in this allusion, is the old sailor dreaming about catching Tigers in a treacherous morning, or is he catching Tigers in the delightful, promising evening of his dreams? And are we talking about the big cats or the butterflies here? That one is up for grabs, too (and we can't ask Stevens); but it is clear that the persona of the poem is wistful of the life of the vivid imagination (embodied by the drunken sailor who doesn't don a dull night-gown, but sleeps drunk and in his boots, and is perhaps, an alter ego, a life not lived, or merely a romantic figure)—the danger (Tiger, morning) and the beauty (Swallowtail, night)—and disillusioned with the safe life of houses haunted by white night-gowns as he readies for his own sober, dreamless sleep of ugly conformity. And perhaps, as it's getting late in the day, his death.

By Shroder's definition (in the previous post), there's a whole novel in this lovely, breath-taking, little poem.

Man Size Pleasure

What is a novel? This is a question I am continually asking myself as I work on my second one.

The learning curve for writing novels is quite steep. Someone once said that writing your first novel is toughest because not only do you have to write your novel, you have to teach yourself how to write a novel as well. Well, from my experience, writing the second novel is just as tough because you're teaching yourself how to write a different novel. That's really just a way of saying I eschew formulaicism.

One of my ways of keeping focused on the task is to keep a theoretic framework in mind. A map, if you will, of the territory ahead.

So, what is a novel? Is it more than, say, a fictional narrative in prose of a certain length? Is it one genre among others in the category of longish fiction? Some good discussion on the Web has been going on recently. Here's Dan Green at The Reading Experience. Here's Richard Crary at The Existence Machine. Go there. You'll find me in their Comments pimping for WoW.

Maurice Z. Shroder, in an influential 1963 article entitled "The Novel as a Genre" in The Theory of the Novel edited by Philip Stevick, remarks the breadth and flexibility of the form prevents easy definition. Some things, though, can be set out:

"Like any narrative, the novel has a typical action, with thematic value, which is peculiarly its own.

The matter of the novel—the theme that has informed the genre from Don Quixote onward—is relatively uncomplicated. The novel records the passage from a state of innocence to a state of experience, from that ignorance which is bliss to a mature recognition of the actual way of the world. In the less loaded terms of Lionel Trilling, the novel deals with a distinction between appearance and reality. It is not necessarily a question of ontological subtleties: the reality to which the novel appeals is that to which it is historically connected, the reality of bourgeois life, of business, and of the modern city. The first Falstaff, as he stands on the field of Shrewsbury, the thought of money metaphorically coloring his speech—as he questions the value of such aristocratic absolutes as chivalric honor and resolves to be a live coward—Falstaff embodies the sensibility that will make the novel possible. The great expectations of the young Hotspur find ironic responses in the lost illusions of the old Sir John. The protagonist of the novel follows the same pattern of disillusionment—which Harry Levin sees as a major part of what we call realism—from potential fulfillment to actual accomplishment, from a hopeful naivete to a resigned wisdom.

Thematically, then, the novel distinguishes itself from the romance, in which the protagonist proves himself a hero, actually fulfills his heroic potentiality. ... The protagonist of a novel is likely to be an 'anti-hero,' an 'unheroic hero," ...who is able to elaborate his dreams of glory only by ignoring the material realities of his station and his times." (14-15)

Further:

"The action of the novel...is essentially a reworking of the basic action of the romance...the 'monomyth'...the 'quest.'... In the novel, the 'going forth' may be metaphorical rather than actual; but the voyage often provides the novelistic framework, and the protagonist's movement is always from a narrow environment to a broader one. He may move in space...he may move rather in time. The goal of the quest...may or may not be achieved; but the protagonist of the novel is likely to discover, with Falstaff, that there is no future for heroism, that he himself is a perfectly ordinary man, with the experience and the knowledge that suit his station. ... [P]rotagonists succeed only because they have let fall their illusions and their pride. Such a fall, in a novel, is a happy one, since it represents the completion of that educational process with which the novel deals, an education into the realities of the material world and of human life in society." (15-16)

According to Shroder, "The novel would then seem to be an essentially ironic fictional form, occupying a middle position between the non-ironic romance and the philosophical tale, which is ironic, but in ways often different from those of the novel." (20)

To recap: the novel is essentially urban, middle class, and anti-romantic, marking the passage from ignorance to knowledge, innocence to experience, appearance to reality. It is ironic in attitude; disillusioned in stance. According to Shroder, these are the hallmarks of the novel, properly so called.

"Romance is essentially escapist literature; it appeals to the emotions and imagination of the reader, invites him to marvel at an enchanted world of triumphant adventure—and the triumph may be the slaying of a dragon or the unmasking of a corrupt sheriff. The novel...leads the reader back to reality by questioning the basis of romance; and the more sophisticated, the more subtle, or the more devastating the process becomes...the less 'popular' the novel is likely to be, the more limited the audience that savors the novelist's irony." (21)

So, for the novelist, the novel is, essentially, novelistic: the better the novel you write, the less it will sell/the harder it will be to get it accepted for publication. How ironic.

Thirty-five Words

Yesterday, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, John Roberts, had one task: to administer the Constitutionally-prescribed Oath of Office to the incoming President of the United States. He blew it.

Disregarding, for the moment, his political antipathy to one of few Senators who voted against him, was it an act of:

1. Freudian slip?
2. Conservative hostility?
3. Malice?
4. Judicial malpractice?
5. Arrogance?
6. Nervousness?

Without evidence, I won't speculate over what's going on in his psyche or what his motivation was; I'm not a novelist. Oh, wait...I am.

Regardless. I'm not going there. Chief Justice Roberts couldn't spit out the words as he stood there facing President Obama.

Charitably, we could assume he simply choked due to jitters at such a historic moment in front of those 1.8 million assembled and the eyes of the entire world. Anybody would get the butterflies.

Apparently cognizant of this, C.J. Rehnquist used to use a notecard at these swearings-in as a prompt. Roberts eschewed it, thinking, I guess, he could wing it. Well, that's the problem, isn't it? We've had eight long years of people thinking they could just wing it. Let's hope that era is over.

The wingnuts, and even Fox News, are frothing over the fact that Obama cannot legitimately execute the office of the presidency because he didn't mouth the words precisely as they are set out in the U.S. Constitution. Fact is, any judge can swear him in, anywhere, anytime—if he wants a do-over. Bush's Presidency* ended at noon Jan. 20, 2009. There's nothing these people can do about it. And just remember, these are the same folks who managed to overlook the Constitutional rules regarding the Vice President's proper role and function, separation of powers, the honoring of treaties and international accords, the Establishment Clause, habeas corpus, unreasonable searches and seizures, etc., for the past eight years.

In my opinion, Roberts should proffer his resignation forthwith. He had one job to do yesterday: thirty-five words long. It is, perhaps, the most important task of his office. And he botched it. Badly. If he had any professional or personal integrity, he would resign, realizing he can no longer do his job with any respect for the Office of the Presidency, the Office of the Chief Justice, or himself. He has been exposed: the man's a hack.

UPDATE: 1/21/2009—22:00 E.S.T.: CNN and Fox News are both reporting that C.J. Roberts just re-administered the oath to Pres. Obama. I guess the President decided to give the Justice a do-over and forgive him for trying to throw a monkey wrench into the works.

"Our Common Humanity"

"...that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself..."

Barack Hussein Obama, Jan. 20, 2009, First Inaugural Speech.

Amen.

I'm going to hold you to that, Mr. President! Good luck! Now, get to work. Have you closed that prison at Guantanamo yet? Have you repudiated all uses of anything that reeks of torture at Abu Ghraib or elsewhere? What about the practice of extraordinary rendition? And say, any word on those war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in your and my name over the past, oh, eight years or so?

Just asking.


UPDATE: Jan-22-2009: 15:30 E.S.T.: Damn if he didn't do it (ex-Nuremberg): Gitmo, torture, rendition on Day Two! Plus, Mitchell and Holbrooke to boot! Wow.

Are We Not Men?

"Humanity is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not." Protagoras of Abdera (ca. 430 BCE).

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle II, ll. 1-2 (1733)

Stanley Fish, in his usually brilliant blog, Think Again, hits pretty close to home with this post. According to Fish—as with Alexander Pope—the proper study of Humankind is Humanity.

I am a full-bore humanist in his sense. I graduated college with a double major in Philosophy and English, and a double minor in Classics and History. I have graduate degrees in Theology and Philosophy. I terminated my Philosophy work with an M.A. when I realized how peripatetic the life of an academic truly could be. I would have no real control over where I lived, taking whatever adjunct positions I could until I managed to land a tenure-track spot at whatever backwater U. This felt like the beginnings of what Fish is lamenting.

There is a benefit to a humanities education, however indirect. Granted, a terminal undergrad humanities major does not translate directly into a professional career. Understanding human nature, learning to think, learning to feel: these by-products of reading, say, Milton and Herodotus, Wittgenstein and Beckett, and Protagoras and Pope (for that matter) are not negligible. Navigating the seas of humanity is not an M.B.A. skill. Not even a PoliSci or Econ skill, as much as their proponents would have you believe.

My humanities background translated into a pretty fair law school app. Because of my training in logic, I scored in the 98th percentile on the LSAT's—way better than my SAT's, by way of contrast. Frankly, law school was a breeze after Philosophy grad school—law review editor, honors, multiple job offers from top NYC firms, etc., all while holding down at least one job and finishing my M.A. thesis (on inter alia Barthes's S/Z). And certain areas of the practice of law—research, analytical reading, reasoning from facts and principles and rules, rhetoric, argument—came easily as well. Understanding people—their motivations, foibles, and deviances— played a big role also. I always recommend Philosophy to kids who know they want to go to law school. I do not always recommend the practice of law, though, and I'll go into the reasons for that another time.

[My wife translated a Philosophy and Music double major, filled out with the requisite pre-Med science courses, into a successful medical school app. And there are others.]

There's a long list of blogs I follow with some regularity. For the most part, they are non-corporate and non-professional. All are humanistic—broadly conceived, whether their proponents would agree or not. For this reason I commend them to you. As the humanist aspect of education wanes, the conversation of humanity is continuing on in the blogosphere. Click, comment.

Here they are (in no particular order):

Arts & Letters Daily
Maud Newton
The Elegant Variation
The Reading Experience
The Millions
Nigel Beale
Blog of a Bookslut
Conversational Reading
OnFiction
Literary Saloon
Literary Kicks
That Shakespeherian Rag
wood s lot
Chekhov's Mistress
Joshua Harmon
The Existence Machine
FictionBitch
The Valve
3quarksdaily
This Space
Syntax of Things
Sentences (Harper's Magazine)
The Book Bench (The New Yorker Magazine)
Paper Cuts
Booksquare
This Itch of Writing
O Caderno de Saramago
CONTRA JAMES WOOD
paperpools
The Modern Word
ReadySteadyBlog
Brit Lit Blogs
ABC OF READING
Yankee Pot Roast
MOBYLIVES
Book Trib
International Necronautical Society
The Morning News
Novel Readings
zunguzungu
Cahiers de Corey
Happy America Literature
Jacob Russell's Barking Dog
Lee Rourke's Scarecrow
Mister Trippy
Bianca Steele
The Glass Hombre
htmlgiant
3:AM Magazine » Buzzwords
Dennis Perrin
BLCKDGRD
Barry Crimmins : Political Satirist
Jesus' General
Landover Baptist
EXILED ONLINE - MANKIND’S ONLY ALTERNATIVE

Who knows, maybe I'll make a blogroll.

Anybody Catch This?

Did anybody catch this story? Apparently, the Weser River town of Hamelin in northern Germany has been plagued recently by a surge in the rat population.

Can anybody come up with a solution to this problem?

Don't Let the Door Hit You...

As Pres.* Bush makes his farewell star turn, he keeps repeating one message: At least his administration kept the country safe after 9/11. Indeed, after that terrible day, there have been no more attacks on the "homeland".

But, the President* is being far too modest in his accomplishments. This guy named Jon Swift, I think, gets it just about right:

"After Hurricane Katrina President Bush kept our cities safe. ...

After the October 2008 stock market correction there have been no Great Depressions. ...

After Iraq and Afghanistan took a turn for the worse, President Bush kept us from losing any wars. ...

After the District Attorney firing scandal, the outing of Valerie Plame and other scandals, President Bush restored integrity to government. ...

After divisive elections President Bush united our country. ...

After Abu Ghraib, President Bush reaffirmed America's adherence to the Geneva Conventions and against torture. ..."

I would note, too, that after the President's re-election in 2004, we no longer needed to keep up with those color chart threat alert levels to know how much danger we were in. And it is truly comforting to know we are leaving precisely none of our children behind.

BTW: Mr. Swift, if you're reading this, I enjoyed that travelogue of yours about the horses and giants and such.