Kablammo!

To this point, I have read one of Dostoevsky’s novels and started reading another. Both have been thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

No, the theme of today’s discussion, as you may have noted from the title of this post, is man. In each of his books I’ve read, Dostoevsky has had the narrator define man. The definitions are different from one another, but both are quite interesting.

The narrator of Notes from Underground provides these thoughts:

Gentlemen, let us assume that man is not stupid. (Really, you know, it is quite impossible to say that he is, if only because after all, if he is stupid who can be clever?) But if he isn’t stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful, all the same. He is phenomenally ungrateful. I even think that the best definition of man is: a creature that has two legs and no sense of gratitude.

And here is what Aleksandr Petrovich Goryanchikov, narrator of The House of the Dead, has to say:

When it got dark we used all to be taken to the barracks, and to be locked up for the night. I always felt depressed at coming into our barrack-room from outside. It was a long, low-pitched, stuffy room, dimly lighted by tallow candles, full of a heavy stifling smell. I don’t understand now how I lived through ten years in it. I had three planks on the wooden platform; that was all I had to myself. On this wooden platform thirty men slept side by side in our room alone. In the winter we were locked up early; it was fully four hours before everyone was asleep. And before that—noise, uproar, laughter, swearing, the clank of chains, smoke and grime, shaven heads, branded faces, ragged clothes, everything defiled and degraded. What cannot man live through! Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.

Both definitions are true to a certain extent, and they’re certainly not exclusive of one another. Both apply to me, for example, so I can’t really disagree with either. I’m wondering whether this is a theme repeated in Dostoevsky’s writing. Does every one of his narrators reduce man to a pithy phrase like this? How would Fyodor himself have defined man?

Song of the Moment: «Med en gong eg når bånn» — Kaizers Orchestra

There’s probably a grain of truth to this:

Lest the value of computer searching be unduly emphasized, I would like to point out that computers have definitely not obsoleted human patent examiners. Computers cannot be made to combine references to anticipate specific inventions, although this would not appear to be insuperable. At the present time, there is no adequate approach towards the searching of mechanical inventions. I think it is self-evident that the searching of the chemical arts is a relatively easy matter compared to the searching of drawings. The underlying skeletal nature of chemical inventions, and their classification into well-recognized groupings render their searching a relatively simple matter. This is not true of mechanical inventions and in particular, complex mechanisms.

Arthur H. Seidel, Antitrust, Patent and Copyright Law Implications of Computer Technology, 44 J. Pat. Off. Soc’y 116, 123 (1962)

Then again, I don’t know much about chemistry [1], so I can’t really be sure.

In other news, sometimes it happens that I get a song stuck in my head without knowing what song it is [2]. Sometimes I’ll remember a snatch of the lyrics [3], or I’ll have some idea who the recording artist might have been [4], but just as often I won’t. The song I most recently got stuck in my head sounded like it might have been a post-Sgt.-Pepper Beatles track [5], or maybe a John Lennon solo track. Turns out it wasn’t. After weeks of increasingly halfhearted searching, I gave up. Some time later I put my mp3 player on shuffle and it spit out “I Could Spend the Day” by The Zombies, which is what I’d been looking for all along. I was happy.

* * *

[1] I may not know much about chemistry, but I do know some biology, I have a few science books, and I even remember some of the French I took.

[2] As I understand it, Paul McCartney wrote “Yesterday” by getting it stuck in his head without knowing what it was. After months and months of trying to figure out where he might have heard it or who might have recorded it, he grudgingly accepted the fact that he might have come up with it himself. So far, I haven’t been as lucky.

[3] Remembering a snatch of lyrics can be helpful, especially when what you remember also happens to be the name of the song. Unfortunately that doesn’t help all that much when what you remember is “I Do”. For the record, it’s by The Marvelows. It took quite a lot of searching for me to find it.

[4] Knowing the band isn’t very helpful when you have a dozen of that band’s albums. I mean, obviously it’s helpful since it narrows it down to a dozen albums, rather than a few hundred, but that’s still an awful lot of songs to dig through searching for a single riff that you almost thought was David Bowie at first before you suddenly realized it was CMX. (For the record, it was “Punainen nro. 6″.)

[5] Look, I do know the White Album, but my knowledge of anything past that is sketchy at best. (For the record, I think their strongest work was Rubber Soul or Revolver.) If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been meaning to familiarize myself with Abbey Road and Let It Be.

• How can Coca-Cola justify and/or get away with asserting that they use the “original formula” for Coke, when the current formula has only been in use since 1984? That’s when they changed sweeteners from sugar to high-fructose corn syrup, which strikes me as a rather substantive, if straightforward, change. Funny, though, that Mexico still has “the real thing” while those of us in the land where Coke was born have to make do with a compromised version made necessary by the combination of ridiculous import tariffs on sugar and downright grotesque subsidies to corn growers.
• When I first tried contact lenses, it was such an amazing and wonderful experience that I couldn’t believe it. For one thing, I could see clearly—that was quite nice, but I could achieve the same result with glasses, and had been doing so since I was 8 or 9 years old. The difference with contacts was that I could see without distortion.

  Glasses, especially ones as strong as mine, introduce a good deal of distortion. Objects appear smaller, for one thing, and straight lines become curved, especially if they’re far from the optical center of the lens. And, of course, your peripheral vision is shot to hell, since you have what amounts to a patch of clarity floating in a sea of blur. No matter how big your glasses, they simply can’t correct your vision in every possible direction you can look. Even lens materials introduce their own issues. Go with a fancy lightweight plastic, and you have to put up with frankly sickening amounts of chromatic aberration. (The first time I tried plastic lenses, I had to return them to the store an hour later because the fringing literally made me sick to my stomach.) Glass is much better in that regard, and is a good deal more scratch-proof to boot, but weighs a ton, especially when your prescription is as strong as mine.

  I’d internalized all of those flaws during my ten years of wearing ever-thicker glasses, to the point that I didn’t even notice them anymore. It was, I understood, the price to be paid for being able to see things more than a few inches from my face. So it was that, upon being fitted with contacts, I felt like I’d had my eyes opened for the first time. All that shit was gone, and I didn’t have to subconsciously compensate for any of it, or worry about them falling off or slipping down my nose, or anything. I vowed never to go back to glasses, because contacts, after all, gave me a more correct view of things.

  It was years before I even got a pair of glasses at an updated prescription, because I was so averse to the glasses paradigm. Now, though, I split my time pretty evenly between contacts and glasses. I still am grateful for contact lenses for the same reasons as before, but I now appreciate glasses for their own reasons. They’re more convenient, in that you don’t need to wash your hands before manipulating them, but that’s merely an ancillary benefit. No, I now appreciate glasses exactly because of their flaws and distortions. They serve as a reminder that everything I ’see’, my vision of the world around me, is inherently a construct of my own mind, an inference pieced together from some sensory perceptions and tinted by my own biases, assumptions and preconceptions. Glasses reinforce the fact that experience is subjective.

• Does nobody at the New York Times read Bob the Angry Flower? I mean, jeez:
  

  So it came as little surprise that Diebold, a company once known primarily for making safes and A.T.M.’s, [sic] …

• Soon I will find out whether 94.85% is sufficiently close to 95%. Fingers crossed. I could have just taken an extra hour of leave to bump myself up slightly, and in fact my supervisor just told me, “That’s how the game is played,” but evidently I like cutting things close.
• Speaking of cutting things close, there’s a lot of other shit I need to get done yesterday, that I’ve been putting off for months. We’ll see how that all goes.
• In other news, pictures from Yosemite are coming, just as soon as I stop being extremely lazy.

Song of the Moment: «Soul Finger» — The Bar-Kays

I noticed a hair on the floor, a hair so long it couldn’t have possibly been mine and must have been a remnant from a visitor. I bent over to pick it up, intending to bring it outside and release it into the wind, as one might do with a wayward insect, hoping it might find its way back home. When I picked up the hair, I saw that it was completely straight, and so wispy as to be nearly transparent; but by the time I finished standing up, it had become thick, dark, lustrous and curly. As I walked to the door it grew into a dirty-blonde dreadlock, and by the time I got outside I was holding a wig’s worth of golden braids. I flung them into the air, but the wind wanted nothing to do with them and they fell to the driveway unclaimed.

I’m so bourgeois right now, it’s not even funny. Not only am I the kind of person who spends his evenings listening to jazz on his hi-fi while sipping single-malt Scotch, but I’m also now the kind of person who orders prints of artwork featured in Harper’s magazine. What can I say? I like Lichtenstein’s work and references thereto, and I love biting satire (and Scotch).

It’s been pointed out to me, and rightfully so, that my last post has more than a little in common with the Wondermark strip excerpted below:

While I can’t really disagree with that, there’s another comic that does a better job of summing up my life as a whole right now. It’s excerpted below:

Go ahead and read the whole thing. It really hits the nail on the head, except for minor details like the typewriter (people use computers nowadays) and the convertible (I ride a train). I’ve had Work is Hell for 12 years or so now, and of all the cartoons in it, that’s the one that’s stuck in my mind the most—especially the last panel—because it seemed like it portrayed such a singularly unpleasant and stultifying way of life. Now, though, I know better, because I’ve lived it. It’s really not all that bad… until you start thinking about it. Which, in a way, is really the whole point of the last panel.

All things considered, yesterday was a very nice day, in many ways.

None of these quite made it as its own post.

• Setting the scene: a few weeks ago I began reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, and soon after, I finished reading it. (I quite enjoyed it, incidentally, though at times it seemed distressingly prescient, as though some people had treated it as an instruction manual rather than a cautionary example.) I mentioned reading it to an acquaintance, and he recommended that I read Homage to Catalonia and Down and Out in Paris and London next, saying they were his favorite Orwell books.

  As it happens, last week I found myself unable to get Lodger’s “I Love Death” out of my head. (This will become more important later on.)

  Also last week, I discovered that AFI Silver would be playing 七人の侍 (Seven Samurai), and the page about it also mentioned a film called Wild Strawberries, saying: “Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece is to cinema what Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is to the novel: the definitive ‘memory piece’ of the art form.” This caught my eye, since memory is something I find fascinating, so I had it in the back of my mind as I made my way to go see Samurai.

  I was humming Lodger to myself the whole way to the movie theatre, and after buying my ticket I had some time to kill before the screening actually began, so I figured I’d go to the Borders around the corner on the off-chance they’d be carrying an album by a Finnish indie-rock band. And maybe while I was there, I’d be able to expand my Orwell collection. Once I entered the store, I strode purposefully towards the music section, confident that I wouldn’t find the album I was looking for, and already consoling myself with the knowledge that my taste in music was hip enough that a faceless conglomerate with a brick-and-mortar presence couldn’t possibly satisfy me. Alas, they had exactly what I wanted, and I had to settle for being thrilled with my purchase. I vaguely browsed the music section a bit more, hovering over a best-of Country Joe and the Fish compilation before deciding against it, when I started looking for Bobby Bare Jr. As it turned out, this time I did in fact stump the record store, but since they did have some Bobby Bare [Sr.], I picked up an album of his that had a particularly glowing cover blurb: “Good-time outlaw country — One of the greatest live recordings ever!”

  Music in hand, I made my way to the “Literature” section of the store, confident that a chain of bookstores that stocked eclectic Finnish CDs would have Orwell’s novels. They did have about eight copies each of 1984 and Animal Farm, but no Catalonia or Down and Out to be found, other than as excerpts in a compilation. Fuck that. Disappointed, I decided to look for that Proust memory thing I read about earlier. I found the Proust section quick enough (”Or” and “Pr” aren’t too far apart) and started looking at the spines of the books. I had a dim recollection of hearing about Proust as a writer of short stories, so I paid more attention to the slender books on the shelf and ignored the enormous tomes. After a fruitless search, I finally looked at the huge books in the Proust section and realized that this Remembrance thing was waaaay the fuck longer than I’d been expecting. Oh well, so it goes.

  There have been a lot of times when I’ve wondered about the threshold of incongruity required for a cashier to comment on a purchase. Apparently this time I crossed it, since as he rang everything up, the guy exclaimed, “Country music and Proust!?“

• This Tuesday I discovered that my login for the timekeeping/payroll system at work had been deactivated. My supervisor got it straightened out in a few minutes, but it was still mildly disconcerting.
• I think I’ve crossed a Rubicon of sorts: I got a haircut today, without even being at the point where I’d been needing a haircut for weeks or months already.

Over the course of a rather enjoyable evening[1] last night, I managed to get in a conversation about Vonnegut. Naturally, once I made my way home[2] I had a tremendous urge to read some Vonnegut, since it had been quite a while since I’d read anything of his. (In the past two or three years, other than a few articles and such, all I’d read was Welcome to the Monkey House (yet again) and Mother Night.) Upon looking at my bookshelf, though, I was suddenly reminded that during the heady days of my near-obsessive Vonnegut mania and evangelism, I’d managed to lend out the bulk of the books that I owned, and I had only a vague recollection of who the recipients might have been.[3]

So it goes.

Anyway, I settled into reading Jailbird (that and Rosewater were my only choices, and Jailbird won the coin toss), and immediately remembered why I love Vonnegut’s writing so much. I also immediately remembered the fan letter I’d once started writing to him, the one that will probably never be written or mailed, though the sentiments it was intended to articulate were and still are entirely sincere.

So it goes.

Anyway, upon reaching Chapter 1 of Jailbird I was thrilled to discover that this was the one with the guy who would sit quietly and periodically clap his hands three times. So my initial disappointment at not having Breakfast of Champions at hand was immediately replaced with delight that I was able to read the book I’d subconsciously wanted to read even more.

Anyway, I just wanted to cite a couple of excerpts that seem particularly apropos or something:

The tragedy of the planet was that its scientists found ways to extract time from topsoil and the oceans and the atmosphere—to heat their homes and power their speedboats and fertilize their crops with it; to eat it; to make clothes out of it; and so on. They served time at every meal, fed it to household pets, just to demonstrate how rich and clever they were. They allowed great gobbets of it to putrefy to oblivion in their overflowing garbage cans.

And:

“You told a fragmentary truth,” he said, “which has now been allowed to represent the whole! ‘Educated and compassionate public servants are almost certainly Russian spies.’ That’s all you are going to hear now from the semiliterate old-time crooks and spellbinders who want the government back, who think it’s rightly theirs. Without the symbiotic idiocies of you and Leland Clewes they could never have made the connection between treason and pity and brains. Now get out of my sight!”

* * *

[1] There are a lot of things or activities that I am indifferent towards, or don’t particularly care for, but will do or take part in to indulge someone else. There are comparatively few that I actively dislike. Many forms of dancing (and ‘dancing’) fall under the former category. Last night, though, I came to the conclusion that being in a throng of people bobbing vaguely to the rhythm of a shitty R’n'B song is decidedly in the latter. Other than that, though, I had a great time.

[2] As I exited the Metro station in the wee hours of the morning, I was slightly dismayed by the little cold things that kept landing on my face. Until, that is, I finally realized they were snow and became overjoyed.

[3] But then, even if I knew exactly who had them (which I actually do for a couple), it seems kind of strange to go up to somebody and say “Hey, remember that book I lent you 5 years ago? You know, the one I completely forgot about? If you’re done with it I’d like to have it back.” Like it’s somehow presumptuous for me to want something back even though it’s mine and (as I recall) I even wrote my name in it. Of course, my real concern could just be that I might have to give back the books I’ve accidentally stolen from their rightful owners over the years. But what are you supposed to do when, a few weeks after lending you a book, the guy drops out of school (or something), disappears off the face of the earth, and you never see him again? And I didn’t even finish reading that book (at which point, incidentally, I immediately lent it to somebody else, as if it were mine with which to do so) till last month, which was about six years after I began it.

So, after an enjoyable week or so in Danmark, I find myself right back where I was before I left. Hopefully I’ll have something more substantive soon, but for the moment here is a “teaser”.

» » Continue reading . . .

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