Oh, no.

Michael Crichton died. He was one of my favorites, and the only public intellectual who didn't make me ashamed of my alma mater. The greatest person to come out of the Harvard English department in a very, very long time. Except he didn't stay an english major for long: he got fed up and left. My favorite story about him is that he got so annoyed at his awful, pompous, talentless Harvard writing teacher that for one assignment he just took a George Orwell essay and submitted it under his own name. This is the kind of stuff students talk big about but nobody ever has the guts to do. But Crichton did it, and of course the hack teacher gave Orwell a B minus. That was it for Crichton, and so he abandoned his early major and switched to the sciences and pre-med. I just wish I would have been that smart and perceptive that early on, instead of realizing what I had to do only in my senior year once it was already too late, and having to do premed from scratch after graduation. Better late than never, though, and a heartfelt thanks to a great writer and a great man like Michael Crichton for inspiring me and so many others.

The whole conservative blogosphere is celebrating him today, linking to his famous essays and speeches mocking environmentalist religious hysteria. I was pretty much obsessed as an undergrad with the argument that humans have a fundamental need for religion and that even the most violently secular are driven to live out Biblical archetypes, and was excited to see that Crichton's anthropological research led him to the same conclusion. I would like a moment, however, to present a different side to his ideas. In my senior year, I put aside my secular myth kick and took up a new literary obsession. The Portrait of a Lady, Herzog, Light in August, The Plague, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Flannery O'Connor's stories, all pointed me in one direction. Here are Michael Crichton's thoughts on selflessness, on the importance of losing yourself in devotion to others. That was the message I took away from Henry James and co., and it profoundly changed my life. I never saw that Crichton essay until today, but please check it out and think on what he has to say, it sure is a lot shorter and more straightforward than my reading list was.

Anyway, all a long way of saying that I will miss him, and I hope he rests in peace.

It's not enough that Obama wins and Michael Crichton dies, but now, less than a day after I wrote about how I would love to move to Texas to be closer to people like her, Rachel Lucas announces she is moving to England! It's actually great news for her, and I wish her the very best, but it's been a rough day for America is all I'm saying.

I should add as an afterthought to my Crichton Orwell story that my writing teacher at Harvard was simply amazing. He was definitely a big exception to the rule. His secret? The class was actually all about none other than Orwell! Crichton's trick would not have worked with this guy, believe me. That's a danger with good teachers, though: they keep you under their spell (have I mentioned The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie?) and prevent you from breaking out on your own. I'm glad that wasn't a problem Crichton had to worry about.

It's a close one, today, folks

It's really a toss-up as to what was the dumbest, most offensive sentence in this morning's Montreal Gazette.

Reading the opinion section, I was certain this was going to be the winner:

"The modern [Quebec] independence movement was born in Montreal's bilingual francophone intellectual community, inspired by hearing Martin Luther King and Gandhi speak about freedom, justice and liberty" - Georges Boulanger, "Pauline Marois and her problem with English," B7

Because, you know: MLK, Gandhi, Levesque.

But then I read this bizarre statement in the book review section, and was no longer so sure:

"I'd like to think of this as high praise and not offence: I don't think it's a book a woman could have written." - Kirk LaPointe, in a review of Charles Brock's Beautiful Children, I9.

What on earth is that supposed to mean??? In the reviewer's defense, he also praises Don DeLillo, the single worst author in human history, so he can't really be taken all that seriously, he probably doesn't even know how to read and is just one of those illiterate guys artfully bluffing their way through life. Come to think of it, that could make a pretty good story - the illiterate book reviewer. Not all that implausible, either.

Faced with no choice but to open this rag every morning, I sometimes wish I couldn't read!

Funny? Or Just Sad?

I can't quite make up my mind. The funny side: I got a kick out of some of the lines in this incredibly silly, occasionally outright dumb, article. I'm not even going to bother pointing out all the inanities, because it's a lot more fun if you read it for yourself and just let 'em reach right up and smack you on the nose.

The sad side: considering all the real problems girls and boys are facing these days, and the obvious desire of the author to get her serious thinkin' on and have something important and gendery to say, it's a frightening monument to her utter cluelessness that this is the best she can do.

My Book to Help America

No, not mine. His. Doubt we'll see anything like that again (except, naturally, as an exercise in teaching children irony, workin' 'em up to cheer for Colbert with all the cool kids).

Speaking of the many wonders of diversity...

You know what, I'm not thrilled about it, but I can at least handle the sad reality that our exaggerated respect for Indian cultural sensitivities is destroying children's literature (via Instapundit). But aren't things just a tad out of hand when it also destroys children's lives?

Also: Dr. Markesteyn? Really?

I refuse on principle to think of a dirty play on words on a children's classic with which to title this post

You know how we conservatives are always saying that liberals have absolutely no moral compass? Well, it may usually be a slight exaggeration, but not today, not in the crazy mixed up world of NYT reporter Alessandra Stanley.

Stanley today writes a review of the TV adaptation of the Gossip Girl series. The very series that, not long ago, was rightly eviscerated by Naomi Wolf in these same pages, revealed as the repulsive piece of trash that it is. So what does Stanley have to say about the soulless, materialistic, drug-fueled, sex-obsessed characters? Why, that they remind her oh so very much of the Little Mermaid! Or, no, wait, perhaps Sleeping Beauty. Well, in any case, definitely Willy Wonka. You see, folks, it's just another fairy tale!

"Like 'Peter Pan,' 'Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland' or the 'Harry Potter' series, these novels are fantasies and projections of an imaginary world where parents are dead or peripheral, and lost boys and girls struggle on their own with good and evil, or in this case, Bergdorf Goodman and evil.
Even the characters’ names — Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen — are as fancifully evocative as those found in children’s books ...."

You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me. I know, I know, Judy Blume is still banned in some places for her sexual themes, Alice got high from her mushrooms, and some Harry Potter fanfic has just gotten way out of hand. But, and I will try to muster the deepest reserves of my eloquence here, come on!

The moral of this story: if you have kids, make sure to keep them away from Alessandra Stanley!

"The contemporary liberal is in large measure a conservative"

A line I came across, from 1971. "[H]is desire for social change is balanced by a mounting apprehension that the most essential traditional values are being undermined and ultimately will be abandoned."

"religion is not primarily about God"

"but about the sacred"

Please, please, please read this essay by Roger Scruton! Excuse my enthusiasm, but this is my thing, I wrote like fifty papers on this exact topic, on the persistence of sacred myths in secular literature, I am thrilled to see Scruton write such a wonderful piece on the topic.

Some more key quotations:

"A myth does not describe what happened in some obscure period before human reckoning, but what happens always and repeatedly. It does not explain the causal origins of our world, but rehearses its permanent spiritual significance."

"you could subtract the gods and their stories from Greek religion without taking away the most important thing"

"According to Girard, the need for sacrificial scapegoating is implanted in the human psyche, arising from the attempt to form a durable community in which the moral life can be successfully pursued. One purpose of the theatre is to provide fictional substitutes for the original crime, and so to obtain the benefit of moral renewal without the horrific cost."

"The experience of the sacred is not an irrational residue of primitive fears, nor is it a form of superstition that will one day be chased away by science. It is a solution to the accumulated aggression which lies in the heart of human communities."

" the experience of the sacred can be suppressed, ignored and even desecrated (the routine tribute paid to it in modern societies) but never destroyed. Always the need for it will arise, for it is in the nature of rational beings like us to live at the edge of things, experiencing our alienation and longing for the sudden reversal that will once again join us to the centre."

There's much more, please do check it out! (h/t: ALDaily)

UPDATE: Here's something I wrote a while back on Moby Dick which I think is relevant:

"Finally, at the chapter’s end [the chapter 'The Whiteness of the Whale'], he discovers the answer, and the answer to Melville’s central question about the ongoing human reliance on mythology: Ishmael’s greatest fear is not that the whale represents any one thing, but that it represents nothing. He senses that there is nothing there for it to signify, that there is nothing meaningful in the 'heartless voids and immensities of the universe,' nothing except a pointless and inevitable 'annihilation' (282). It is not a specific sinister meaning that he fears, but the absence of any meaning at all; it is 'atheism from which we shrink' (282). The chapter ends with his fear that color (and thus meaning) is but an illusion that the human mind imposes on a colorless (meaningless) world, that beauty and purpose are not innate to nature but 'only laid on from without' to mask 'the charnel-house within' (283). Like those who insist on masking the blinding whiteness of the sun with colored glasses, so Ishmael senses that humans mask the emptiness of life with myths of meaning. The 'Albino Whale' is the symbol of this blinding whiteness, of the indifference of the universe to man’s storytelling, and that is why he is so feared and why he must be killed.[1]

Melville’s Moby Dick portrays mankind’s fundamental need for meaning, which it creates through myth. The only thing more frightening than an inescapable fate is no fate at all, and Melville shows that men will drive themselves to madness and death in the creation of myth, rather than face the void of an existence deprived of meaning. But there are some funny parts, too!

[1] The irony being that Moby Dick has already become a myth in himself. This shows that myths will never die: even thoroughly anti-mythical figures will end up being thought of in mythical terms. "

UPDATE 2: And an excerpt from an introduction to a paper on Melville and James:

"Rather than have their unwitting heroes inadvertently play into the hands of inescapable fate, their protagonists are deliberately and self-consciously mimetic. This is not Oedipus, fulfilling the prophecy of the gods despite himself, but a modern-day protagonist in a world without manifest gods or fate nonetheless choosing to live as if prophesied. This idea of accepted, even expected, fate permeates Melville’s Billy Budd and is present to a lesser extent in James’ The Portrait of a Lady. In either case, classic, ancient tragedy – the inability to escape the fate assigned by the gods – is supplanted by the absurd, modern kind: the enthusiastic acceptance of divine fate in a world without gods."

UPDATE 3: Thank you to Ambivablog for the link and the kind words! Please see her post for links to much better posts on the topic.

Poetry Corner

So I'm just starting On Chesil Beach (big McEwan fan, please go and read the first section of Atonement at once, you can thank me later) and it reminds me a bit of this poem (the perceptive among you may have noticed I love Larkin). Profanity warning, btw:


HIGH WINDOWS
(Philip Larkin)

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

The World's Stupidest Fatwas

You know, making it this easy kinda takes the fun out of it. I mean, Pokemon, really? I would love to see them add Harry Potter to the list!

Amazing article

On the Great Siege of Malta, in 1565. Via HotAir.

As I was hinting before, I think that recent events may spark a dramatic revival of revisionism, as the Crusades and other battles involving Islam may come to be seen in a fundamentally (ha! get it?) new light.

Good Intro

Tried reading Wodehouse's Leave it to Psmith today, but was too busy, only got through the introduction. Still, the intro, by Wilfrid Sheed, is very entertaining. Here are the first two paragraphs:

"Somewhere between the Romantic Revolution and the Great Victorian Exhibition of 1851 in England, suet pudding entered the English soul, after which it became almost impossible for that country to produce a pure artist. Despite generous help from Ireland, America, and even Poland, any Englishman who had been to a public school felt and looked like a perfect chump, a tourist, in the world of Flaubert and Rimbaud.

It was almost as if these schools, founded in the 1830's, had it for their main object that Shelley and Byron would never happen again. When such a one showed up, he was immediately laughed at, plunged into cold water and taught to laugh at himself for twelve grueling years; after which he was either hopelessly maimed, or would retreat with the crowd into humor, crossword puzzles, detective stories and the burdens of facetiousness."

Another section I liked:

"In the last days Wodehouse observed mildly that his childhood seemed to be just like Kipling's, except that he'd rather enjoyed his. But this was some triumph of will and selection. For just as George Orwell made a hell of his schooldays by fanning the right memories, Wodehouse made a heaven of his; and it is a clue to how close these processes are that Orwell and Kipling, the laureates of unhappiness, were among Plum Woodhouse's most ardent admirers. They knew the score."

And a heartening tidbit: "By all accounts, he was a friendly and obliging fellow; but no less an admirer than Evelyn Waugh described him privately as the dullest man he ever met. And socially he was famous for fleeing the kind of jolly scenes he wrote about to walk his dog."

Leaving a party for a quiet walk with the dog - that's my kind of guy. I love all the Jeeves books, can't wait to read Psmith.

The Dark Knight Returns

First comic book I've read in over a decade. And it's less comic book than an excuse for merciless anti-liberal satire. In other words, I loved it. In brief: Batman goes around attacking vicious criminals, while liberal television commentators and famous therapists argue that the criminals are simply misunderstood, are nothing but innocent victims, can easily be rehabilitated, etc. It's mostly very broad satire, such as a scene when the mayor, rather than execute a monstrous criminal leader, decides to negotiate with him and is murdered within moments. There were some subtler moments, like the panel depicting the "Arkham Home for the Emotionally Troubled" (fans know the original name of the Asylum is the Home for the Criminally Insane). Even subtler is the panel right next to that one, my favorite image in the book: in the hallway of the Asylum, which houses all the most degenerate psychopaths in the world, there is only one forbidding sign, and I'll bet you can guess what it is.

All in all, though, a very depressing read. It was written more than twenty years ago, yet very little has changed. Things have probably gotten worse. I know that almost every time I go back home, there's a story about some child rapist or murderer who gets a five year sentence and is out after two on good behavior (good behavior in jail? well, duh - there aren't any nine-year-old girls to rape in prison). In one case last year, a man brutally raped a 14-year-old girl, bashed her head in with a rock, and left her for dead in the St. Lawrence River. Only by a miracle did she survive and manage to swim to safety. The prosecutors asked for ten years. The judge, displaying extreme coldheartedness, sentenced him to eleven. He only had to serve seven - not bad for rape and 'attempted' murder. There was an uproar in the aftermath of the sentence. It was reviewed, and the reviewer deemed the judge made the right decision, since the rapist had no prior history of sexual assault and was not a demonstrable risk to society (I swear I'm not making this up). Of course, it then turned out that, yes indeed, he did have a history and had sexually assaulted three other young girls. For these new charges, the prosecution asked for, and the judge granted, three years in jail - to be served concurrently with his other sentence. In other words, three more victims, not one extra day. And, as that article notes, if he behaves nicely in prison, he could be free after just two years. Anyway, sorry I'm getting carried away here, but I just wanted to show that The Dark Knight Returns is, these days, probably less satire than documentary.
Among the liberal elite, in his comic as in our lives, rapists and murderers receive sympathy and understanding; shunning is only for those who fight back. Oh, and of course, those who smoke.

p.s. no, i'm not demanding that the castrations begin immediately. baby steps, baby steps. a little deterrence might not be a bad place to start.

p.s. Jonah Goldberg promised some thoughts about this, I hope he comes through.

UPDATE: I forgot to add that Miller also makes a lot of fun of Reagan, which is why I wrote that the comic is anti-liberal, since it's not exactly conservative.

Nancy Drew, Eat Your Heart Out

Here follows, in full, a blurb from this morning's Children's Books section from the Montreal Gazette:

Teenage Amal Decides to Wear Hijab
Shelley Boettcher, Canwest News Service
Being a teenager isn't easy at the best of times, but 16-year-old Amal has
decided to do something that will complicate things further: wear a hijab full
time.
Her parents and teacher try to talk her out of it - she was born and raised
in Australia - but she's made up her mind, and she doesn't want to back
down.
It's not easy. First, there are the nasty girls at her new school. And
there's her crush on a non-Muslim boy. Then there's her best friends: one's
obsessed with her weight and the other has a bossy family.
This debut novel is funny, smart, serious, and fun.
It's for anyone who's ever felt like they didn't belong.
(Calgary Herald)
Does My Head Look Big in This?
By Randa Abdel-Fattah
Scholastic, 368 pages
$20.99

I believe a sequel is already in the works, in which Amal makes up her mind, despite the worries of her kind teacher, to circumcise herself. Once the swelling subsides, life is good for the funny, smart youngster, and she soon ditches her materialistic friends to hang out with some really welcoming people at the local mosque, people who understand, just like her, how hard it is when you feel like you don't belong and your parents just don't understand. The novel ends on a reflective note, when Amal's new friends find out about her first kiss, with her non-Muslim crush, and slit her throat as a matter of honor. The writing throughout is clever and full of verve, especially in the final pages, when Amal, as the life slowly drains out of her, comes to the beautiful understanding that she had it coming. Due out early next year, already available as a preorder from Scholastic, the book's title is Are You There, God? It's Me, Uncovered Meat.

UPDATE: Thank you to Tim Blair for the link!

Great blogs

It's six in the morning, and I'm still awake, because I've spent the past seven hours absorbed in two blogs I discovered when I went hunting for pictures of Jean Arthur and Myrna Loy.

One blog is pictures, pictures, pictures.

The other has fewer pictures, a lot more words. Miss O'Malley, despite being a Red Sox fan, appears to be passably literate.

Here, she features a wonderful excerpt from the one and only Camille Paglia:

Genuine radicals did not go on to graduate school. If they did, they soon dropped out, or were later defeated by the faculty recruitment and promotion process, which rewards conformism and sycophancy. The universities were abandoned to the time-servers and mercenaries who now hold many of the senior positions there. Ideas had been relegated to the universities, but the universities belonged to the drudges.

There is a widespread notion that these people are dangerous leftists, "tenured radicals" in Roger Kimball's phrase, who have invaded the American establishment with subversive ideas. In fact, they are not radicals at all. Authentic leftism is nowhere to be seen in our major universities. The "multiculturalists" and the "politically correct" on the subjects of race, class, and gender actually represent a continuation of the genteel tradition of respectability and conformity. They have institutionalized American niceness, which seeks, above all, not to offend and must therefore
pretend not to notice any differences or distinctions among people or cultures.

"they never cease to make you smile and feel at ease. but they do that for everyone. and they will do it for anyone."

Great post. "Do not expect anything to come from dating charming people." It's kinda obvious if you think about it, but it needs to be said, because lots of girls (and guys) seem blind to this false charm. I suspect there are more people like this at Harvard than in most places, what with all the networking and politicking and all that. There are kids here who have incredible charisma, who make you feel as if you're the only person in the world, who treat every person as their long-lost best friend - except, if you think about it, they don't like you at all, because if you were somebody completely different, they would treat you exactly the same, you're absolutely interchangeable to them.

I myself am always at my best with people I'm uninterested in. With people I really like, I'm a total bore, because I'm not looking to put on an act and entertain them, I'm just free to be my regular boring self.

The trick is to come to terms with that regular, boring self. I'm not one of those new age-y people who says you have to learn to love yourself before you love others, in fact I'm quite opposed to loving yourself. But you do at the least have to like yourself. Otherwise, when you're in a relationship, you'll have to keep the act up, keep entertaining her 24/7, and will inevitably run out of steam. The goal of love, as I see it, is not to keep each other entertained, but to be able to simply be yourselves, your private selves - to be with one another as you would be if you were alone.

I am not yet anywhere near that point - I still often prefer my act, my entertaining side, to my real side. My real side is the side that hates it here and gets depressed and all that jazz. I went on a few dates this year with a truly wonderful girl, the only girl with whom I've ever truly been able to be myself, but I don't think either one of us could have kept it up because we're both in kinda bad places and it would just have ended up as a suicide pact or something.

So until I'm able to make peace with myself (and I hope that leaving Harvard will help a great deal), I'm staying away from romance. Because, if I'm going down, I don't want to take anyone else down with me!

To return to book recommendations, my favorite author by far on this subject is Hemingway. I would recommend A Farewell to Arms in particular. Hemingway's couples talk of love and wonderful romantic futures, but he shows that they know, deep down, that their talk is empty, that they are playing roles, and nothing more.

p.s. to end the post on a lighter note, I am proud to report that at least one person has come upon my blog after a google search on "Nipples Photography." I am sorry if I disappointed them!

The mirror crack'd from side to side

I continue to be enthralled by Catholic literature. In case you haven't read it, I highly recommend Dame Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Don't trust the film or stage adaptations, which completely butcher the main point of the novel. As Benilde Montgomery puts it, the screenplay "ignores any reference to the religious context in which Spark so carefully sets her novel." Spark herself wrote of the adaptation that she had the "distinct impression that my views, as author of the book, were not really welcome."


The book is absolutely fascinating. It's not really about Miss Brodie or any of her students - it's about Spark herself. The novel, not just in its plot but in its very form and style, reenacts Spark's conversion to Catholicism. She begins writing in a deliberately flawed manner (what she would call a Calvinistic style) and evolves as a narrator and a stylist (towards Catholicism) as the pages go by. That's how I read it, anyway. In any case, a very interesting, very beautiful work.


The central imagery of the novel (well, besides the Bible) comes from Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott," and these lines in particular:

She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces through the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look'd down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalott.

We all have the tendency to elevate our egos, to think the universe revolves around us (especially at Harvard!), to see others only as characters in the tapestry we weave. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a welcome reminder that the world exists without us, and that if we are to truly appreciate it we must see it not through the eyes of a chosen prophet, but through those of a humbled penitent. Doing so, we may sacrifice many a tempting and self-aggrandizing fantasy, but we will instead have the chance to imbue our lives with a deeper sense of grace.