Teaching a Human

As even total strangers know, I am not a dog person.

So how to explain that item 2) on this list cracked me right up?

Roger Ebert decries snark.

Poiuyt

M. C. Escher -- Economist.

via Arthur Hlavaty.

Linguistics

Article in The Times Literary Supplement on the language of Venezia.

Long post by Anna Feruglio Dal Dan refuting said article point by point.

Good times.

ETA:  Anna deleted her Live Journal in the wake of RaceFail09.  (She has 30 days to restore it.  I don't know whether she will.)  

Damn.

EFTA:  I have resorted to Google cache.  So I now have the cached page with the refutation.  This is an ethical foggy area, however; this post is not the reason she deleted the journal, but she did delete the journal and I should probably get permission to resurrect her writing.  Not to mention copyright.  But the loss to scholarship...!  

And I suppose if I were a scholar, that would override all considerations.  But I'm just another packrat on the Net, going "Oooh, shiny!" at a particularly glittery fact and dragging it off to my already fact-filled nest.

EEFTA:  Communication is possible.  I will wait.

EEFTAF [as of 3/12/09]:  Restored!  

And this is where I should insert a promise to quote from the source more.  Usually I think that the source has stated matters really well and I don't want to cast my warping field of warp over their words.  Also, I take the business about "two or three sentences, tops" seriously, even though it invariably looks as though I'm quoting half the page.  Also, I try not to blow someone else's punch line.  Also, even though the linked article is long, you can read every word even if you're not totally fascinated with the languages of Italy; it's that good.

So I'll try to excerpt briefly from what I'm linking to more.  Most of the time.  Except when I don't.  OK?  [Edited to unsplit the infinitive.  Take that!]

In Memoriam

Something was buzzing about my brain re:  cowardice in the marketplace of ideas but then I saw this obituary for Wilbert Tatum.  Mr. Tatum was very controversial; he was also one of the last of the old-style publisher/editors.  Between this and the Rocky Mountain News printing its last, I'm hearing something of a dirge for the newspaper business.

Let's just say I read the obit and a few times blinked and said "What?"

Spring's Tendrils

1. It was actually still light at 6 PM.
2. Current thing-I-want-to-hear-again is "Heaven is the Sweetest Place" by Buzzy Linhart.  And I can Google for it.  Whoo-hoo!
3. One of my Lenten decisions was to hang out on the computer less.  HAhahahahahahahahaha.

Spring Must Be On the Way

Matzo Man.

via BetNoir, via Snobahr.

It's displacing a week's worth of earworm, thank goodness.

In Memoriam

Philip José Farmer.  Official home page.  NY Times obituary.

Amygdala has other links.

Cookie Jill Asks a Question

Cookie Jill asks a question. Have fun answering it.

Morning Jeezly Crows

Drifty drops (and from a great height) the Cluebat of Correction on Andrew Sullivan.

To wit:

It is no longer productive to pretend a cavalry of responsible grownups from the Right is going to arrive and scold and shame people like Alan Keyes into shutting the fuck up. Keyes isn’t capable of shame and Keyes isn’t the problem: he is merely the latest high-profile ugly symptom of a disease that the Right -- your Right -- has always nurtured and cultivated.

On the other hand, responsible grownups on the Left have already wasted decades of time and energy and money and adjectives trying to warn people like you about people like Keyes and the calamitous arc your movement was following by embracing people like Keyes. Because, Mr. Sullivan, your movement has always been built around pandering to lunatics like Keyes.

So we warned you.

And warned you.

Holy Fucking Venus on a Vespa, did we ever warn you.

It gets better.

Also, Avedon.

They're still trying to pretend that they have sexy young up-and-comers waiting in the wings when by now everyone can see that the Republican Party and its hangers on are mostly loonies, thugs, and shriekers. At this point, in fact, the Republicans only have to keep saying something before people start to think it might not be true. Eventually, there really do seem to be consequences to being habitual liars or at least consistently wrong for long enough, even if the Villagers take no notice.

Balance

Ticketmaster admits no wrongdoing.

Deconstruction

Helen of Margaret and Helen finishes reading Guilty (so no one else has to) and Margaret offers a better book.

The series:  One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six.

Potpourri for $20, A--

Erasure.

In any perceptible power differential, greater power (real or assumed) works to assimilate and/or render irrelevant lesser power.  Sometimes in the same breath.  I don't know why humans work that way, and obviously neither do they, but it's at the root of many problems.  This human tendency is, in fact, a shark.

It is a shark because it is unacknowledged.  It is a shark, even when acknowledged, because it sets egalitarian values at null, because it's only about power.  It is a shark because, whether it's allowed for or not, it's chewing up every effort to move toward situations that are not only about power.

Really.  In fact, I can trot out a (relatively) neutral example.  

When was the last time you had a meal composed entirely of what your ancestors ate two thousand years ago?  (And if you're not Ethiopian, coffee counts against you.)

And if you did, are you presently living within 50 miles of where your ancestors lived?

New World foodstuffs, cooking advances, and movements of people, voluntary and forced, mean that my ancestors would not recognize pizza, would wonder why I was fixing tempeh, mushrooms, bell peppers, and pasta, might admire the Chinese food, and would be appalled that I had milk in coffee.  I tend not to think of the American tendency to adopt any cuisine that doesn't run screaming as cultural appropriation, but actually, it is.  It's a relatively benign example, since its genesis was in immigrants and others opening restaurants to survive, which is in fact a power thing--restaurants employed fellow "folks" of varying skills who could not get jobs in "the mainstream."   It also meant fellow "ethnics" could get "home cooking."  "The mainstream" slowly got past its xenophobia because it's tasty food.  

What does happen, however, with American versions of foreign cooking, is that the food gets blanded down.  Because everyone else's cuisine is "too spicy."  And eventually people forget how x was supposed to taste.  Or they add salt.  Hello, hypertension!  And complaining about the blandness brings "Well, people prefer it our way."  Or no actual answer.

And that's just food.  

Because when what you can do about getting more mouths around food (so the restaurant will stay in business and maybe pass to the next generation if they don't get into MIT or State) is to cater to folks whose taste buds were, to paraphrase Tom Lehrer, sawed off in school cafeterias (I still can't think of tuna noodle casserole without a reflexive shudder), that's a power relationship.  That's a sample of the process of erasure.  Don't get me started on peas and carrots in fried rice.

This looks like it's turning into a rant.  

(I was saved from a life of bland food by a couple of lucky chances; one is that when my mother went back to work, she was able to afford cookable spaghetti instead of the canned stuff; the other was discovering that a rinsed-off but raw green string bean was tasty and crunchy and good.   Depression children, as we will relearn, like their vegetables dead.)

Shaving Cream, Be Nice and Clean...

Let's just say someone opened the big chest of fragments played by Dr. Demento.

So I was out cruising around Blogtopia™ (thank you, Skippy) and got shards of something that when pieced together illuminated an odd posting and a couple of not-so-stray comments I saw later and a nice thick steak with mushrooms, wild rice, string beans, and--  

Sorry.  That last was a hallucination.  Cholesterol issues.

Anyway.  What I noticed was that one person, who may well have felt attacked, was insisting in comments to one of the posts that the bone of contention was x and responses to the person asserted y.  (If you thought I was going to get into details and maybe a link so you could check this out, you're reading the wrong vampire.)  It was just fascinating in the way that games of Invisible Idiot are ("Invisible Idiot" is a mistranslation of "Out of sight, out of mind" and is the name of a game in Spider Robinson's books about Callahan's Place).  I have been known to do that myself occasionally, which is why I tend to drop out of arguments.  

Anyway, larger issues were lurking beneath the surface.  

Larger issues usually are.  Most larger issues are turtles (or terrapins or tortoises)--shelled, slow-moving, preference or need for water.  Some of them bite, but most put up a head, say, "You're not solving me today, but I'll take that fish you're holding," take the fish, and wander off.

The troublesome larger issues, however, are sharks.  (Yeah, another cheap shark metaphor.  Don't call the lawyers.)  You know they're out there, the fins are visible, and the minute there is blood in the water the feeding frenzy--I mean the thousand comments complete with trolling, counter-trolling, talking past each other, ruptures of real-time friendships, involvement of other blogs/LiveJournals/mailing lists--goes on until everyone is either too exhausted or too disgusted to continue.

(No, I'm not talking about the intersectionality business, although that shark doesn't usually wait for blood in the water.  Our own selves are pie charts of many slices, and the slice of greatest importance and easiest misunderstanding is exactly the one you just said doesn't matter.  Say hello to Bruce the Shark.)

One of lo squalo di tutti gli squali ("shark of all sharks" although there are several because sharking is non-hierarchical in that regard) is any form of discrimination, touched upon here (because I was present on the day someone posted a "can we talk about this?" on a newsgroup and even with topic drift, there was still yelling three months later) by Twisty Faster:  

She (the reader) will necessarily come to her own conclusions; I am not insensitive to the possibility that these will not precisely mirror my own. Such a contingency will sorely harsh my mellow, since I desire nothing more desperately than to be agreed with unconditionally by everybody in the world, Internet entities I don’t know and never will included, but, you know. Life’s a journey or something.

Another shark, which nibbles on your legs a lot, surfaces at Off Our Pedestals here, with this:

The person I referred to earlier was well-intentioned. I even believe that person’s work will eventually produce some real, concrete good in the world. But it wrecked my real, concrete self anyway, because I experienced it as having a fairly major chunk of my life winked out of existence for the sake of intellectual exercise. I’m not saying intellectualism is bad (although, you watch, someone will write a vague post insinuating that I have said exactly that). I am saying intellectualism requires care and grounding in practice. It requires heart. Because in practice, you are almost always going to come back at some point to dealing with people, and people are not ideals, references, theories, culture, class, race, intersectionality, or any of that. They are people, and as such, they can often surprise you with their confounding ability to speak for themselves.

A lot of "intellectualism" is credential worship, unfortunately, and I wish I remembered where I saw the account of people (who had been doing a good job working with people) pushed out in favor of credentials and "professionalism" toward the "clients."   

None of this has anything to do with the Journey videos.  

Naming no names, I followed a link to a non-video video which led to other videos and eventually to this one.  (The Chicago White Sox won the World Series in 2005 behind "Don't Stop Believing.")(It was news to me because there had been a death in the family around that time and I was less than attentive.)  Which in turn reminded me that the first video on MTV that made an impression on me (when I lived in NYC, for considerably less than $500,000, I might add, I spent the occasional weekend with the parents, who had that newfangled cable arrangement) had been the one for "Oh, Sherrie."  I've always been a sucker for "breaking the fourth wall."

This post entitles the bearer to sleep through the Oscars and to read about it in the paper Monday morning.

Spreading the Word

From flip flopping joy, what anyone needs to know about the Allied Media Conference.

Honours

Peter Cook honored with plaque at the site of the Establishment Club that he, um, established.

(Because he was "ranked top in a 'comedian's comedian' poll, voted for by comics and comedy writers."  He wasn't only the Impressive Clergyman.)

In and Around

We poke around the 'Net:

1. An interview with Paul Krassner.  
   
   
   During which he says:

   The more repression there is, the more need there is for irreverence toward those who are responsible for that repression. But too often sarcasm passes for irony, name-calling passes for insight, bleeped-out four-letter words pass for wit, and lowest-common-denominator jokes pass for analysis. Satire should have a point of view. It doesn’t have to get a belly laugh. It does have to present criticism.

   via The Sideshow.  From The Sun magazine, which looks interesting.

   
   
2. The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones profiles Beyoncé Knowles' musicianship and musical influences: