Author: geoff

Odd stuff in the mail

As a resident alien in the US, I don’t get to vote, or sit on juries, or various other stuff. And although it wouldn’t be illegal, I refrain from participating directly in US politics – I don’t contribute to or work for political campaigns, PACs, or advocacy groups.
Yesterday I was surprised and amused to receive an unsolicited piece of mail from the Bush campaign. It contained a letter, urging me (not once, but three times) to contribute “$1,000, $500, $250, $100, $50, $35, or even $25 today“. It spent more time blasting the spending of “hundreds of millions of dollars [by] liberal special interests” that it did actually talking about Bush’s policies and values. (And the policies weren’t particularly coherent: more “Cutting taxes”, not a word about the deficit, energy, or health care.) And it encouraged vandalism! The envelope contained a “W’04” bumper sticker which I was encouraged to put on my car “or that of a neighbor or family member who’s backing me.”
Compared with the up-beat Kerry-Edwards mailing that my wife received the same day, this Bush piece felt negative and threatened. Portraying the President as an underdog may be realistic, but (unlike us Brits) America seems to prefer winners. In this mailing, Bush certainly didn’t come across as a winner. And ranting about the “attacks” in Liberal “TV ads” is a bit rich, in view of the fact that media analysts rate the Bush campaign as the most consistently negative in modern history.
However there was one positive item: the letter concludes with the assurance that “This is my final political campaign”. Amen. And so this morning I compromised my principles (just a bit) by putting a Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker on my car. Hey, I can always say that one of my neighbors did it!

I almost forgot to mention the project….

A few weeks ago I decided that it was time to start reading Stephen King’s epic series The Dark Tower. I figured that if I timed it just right I’d be ready to start on the final, seventh volume when it’s published on September 18th. So far things are on track: I’m half way through Wizard and Glass, the fourth volume in the series. Volume 5, Wolves of the Calla, is sitting on the table, ready and waiting. And I’m enjoying the whole project immensely.
Oddly, I’ve never been a great reader of Stephen King until this year. I don’t enjoy horror for its own sake, in literature or film. (A couple of days ago I started watching the movie of Dreamcatcher on TV and wound up turning it off and walking away. The image of a guy sitting on a blood-spattered toilet seat trying to stop a monster from getting out just didn’t appeal to me.) Now this may seem odd, since I’m a huge fan of Clive Barker: I think that Imajica is a true masterpiece, even if Barker’s version of Dante’s Inferno includes many fearsome monstrosities. It works because it’s a great story. Whatever the genre, first there has to be a story, and too much horror fiction subordinates narrative to adrenaline. (Frankly, I though that The Silence of the Lambs was unwatchable.)
I came to Stephen King via George R. Stewart. His classic 1949 novel Earth Abides posed some deep questions about the nature of “civilization” through the device of a plague that wipes out most of humanity. After reading it, I was curious how Stephen King had used the same idea in The Stand. Instead of philosophy, I found a fragment of an epic, apocalyptic story. Only a fragment: there were clearly many chapters preceding and following what I was reading (even if it was 1200 pages long). After this, I read The Green Mile, and I was hooked.
So the time is right. I’m usually a fast reader, but I think I can pace myself. By early September I’ll be ready for Song of Susannah, and then The Dark Tower itself.

"The Corporation"

So as I blogged last month, I’ve seen the Control Room. I’ve seen The Fog of War. I own the DVDs of OutFoxed and Uncovered. I missed The Hunting of the President, but I read the book. This is clearly the summer of the political documentary.
So yesterday we were planning to go to see Fahrenheit 9/11 (which we still haven’t seen – are we the only ones?) But on Saturday we talked to my son Chris, and he urged us to go to see The Corporation first, so we did. It’s a study of the rise of the modern corporation over the last 150 years, from groups that were specifically chartered for limited purposes through the emergence of the corporation as a legal “person”, to today’s supranational entities.
It’s a very good documentary – it’s 145 minutes long, and the time flies by. It’s not a great documentary, in part because the film-makers tried to cram too much in, and lost focus. But on the other hand if you’re only ever going to watch one documentary on the subject, it’s probably a good tactic to cover as many bases as possible, to plant as many seeds for future reading, research, and – just maybe – action as they could.
My (un)favourite person: the woman psychologist who works on ways to make advertising targeted at pre-school children more “effective”: specifically, by making the children more productive naggers of their parents. She managed to keep her composure when asked whether she regarded what she did as “ethical”, but as she replied that she “didn’t know about ethics” her eyes told a different story.

More on Great War poetry

In my earlier piece on Some Corner of a Foreign Field I forgot to mention that one of the poems is The Volunteer by Robert Service. CD cover art for War, War, WarI also have a powerful collection of Service’s wartime poems set to music by Country Joe McDonald, called War, War, War. It came out in 1971, was briefly reissued on CD in 1995, and is well worth getting hold of. The most gut-wrenching piece is the last: The March of the Dead (and yes, I know that this is about the Boer War, not the Great War – but the sentiment is timeless).
Speaking of Country Joe, check out the new song by the Country Joe Band, Cakewalk to Baghdad. It’s a cheerful little ditty in the spirit of the immortal I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag ; and as they sing, it’s Easy to cakewalk in … not so easy to cakewalk out.

CD of the week: "Some Corner of a Foreign Field"

Because of the rehosting activity, I missed last week’s CD of the week posting. I’ll try to catch up…CD cover for Some Corner of a Foreign Field
This week’s CD is a little unusual, even for me. You can’t buy it in music stores, or at Amazon.com. I found it at a British goods shop in Newburyport, MA, along with the tea towels, Marmite, beer mugs, and Burbury coats. It’s produced by a small company in Worton, Oxfordshire called Classical Communications, that seems to specialize in “bespoke” CDs for musems and corporate customers. It’s run by a guy called Martin Souter, and this particular CD seems to have been a labour of love for him.
Some Corner of a Foreign Field is a collection of poems and music from the Great War of 1914-1918. It runs the emotional gamut, from fiercely patriotic to deeply cynical, from whimsical to heartbreaking. Some of the pieces are familiar – Kipling’s Recessional, Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier. Others are wholly new, at least to me – Philip Johnstone’s deeply sarcastic High Wood about postwar battlefield tourism, Edward Thomas’s As the team’s head brass, and Eleanor Farjeon’s Easter Monday. Perhaps the ones that touched me most unexpectedly were AA Milne’s throwaway piece OBE and May Cannan‘s The Armistice.
The music consists mostly of contemporary (and hence very scratchy) recordings of such songs as We don’t want to lose you (but we think you ought to go), If you were the only girl in the world (followed by the sarcastic If you were the only Bosch in the trench), A Mademoiselle from Armentiers (NOT followed by one of the ribald variations that I suspect are better known than the original), and Roses are shining in Picardy. The final sequence of poems is beautifully linked by passages from Elgar’s Nimrod and Mozart’s Adagio from Clarinet Concerto.
I’m not sure why this CD has grabbed me so strongly. In part, I suspect, it’s because of the power of the poetry: I’ve always thought that the Great War galvanized a generation of poets to produce some of the finest English poetry ever written. I wonder, too, about certain similarities between the war of 90 years ago and that of today. Of course they were tremendously different; yet both wars were marked by leadership of extraordinary stupidity and vanity, and by a reckless disregard for the waste of life.
I wonder what poetry this century’s folly will produce?

Five uneasy pieces (Iraq-related)

First, River has resumed her blog Baghdad Burning after a six week hiatus. As always, it’s both moving and informative, particularly her observations on the Christian churches in Baghdad. And then there’s the chilling note that:
Word on the street has it that email, internet access, and telephone calls are being monitored closely. We actually heard a couple of reports of people being detained due to the contents of their email. It’s a daunting thought and speaks volumes about our current ‘liberated’ status- and please don’t bother sending me a copy of the “Patriot Act”… this last year it has felt like everyone is under suspicion for something.
Second, Juan Cole wrote an excellent op-ed piece in the Washington Post about Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and Muqtada al-Sadr. Essential reading.
Third, Terry Karney proposes a practical way of dealing with the al-Sadr situation. Of course the chances of it being followed are slim to none….
Fourth, while everyone’s attention is on Baghdad and Najaf, it appears that the British forces have abandoned Basra. With separatist elements emerging in the south as well as the Kurdish north, the whole thing could be about to break apart.

And finally, as I was checking out various US media websites to see if and how they were reporting all of this, I came across an MSNBC page with a small sidebar entitled “IRAQ: the human cost”. Naively, I thought that this might actually address the real human costs: all the casualties (coalition and Iraqi, military and civilian), the effect on health, education, and humanitarian services in Iraq, and so forth. Not a chance: it was simply about coalition casualties. Now I’m all in favour of recognizing the sacrifices of those who have died, but why limit it to Americans? I guess that, for MSNBC, Iraqis simply aren’t human.

Sock

Vacation reading: Sock, by Penn Jillette. Brilliant. New York, sex, rock’n’roll, murder and philosophy chanelled by a sock monkey. Read it.