Conservatism reborn in twisted sisterhood

 
MERRY CHRISTMAS! Here are some of the Web searches that brought readers to this odd little blog.

sin bunion
humanum fish coloring pages
Postmodern Adventists are a growing minority
why are people eyes shaped differently
pictures of frozen remains
mental thoughts and changes when becoming a werewolf
aristophanes use of oregano
Who were the Gracchi And were they worth the hassle
bacon strip blog
Leaded glass porno
caesar buffy fanfiction
space ghost invalid cheese
boom pow
Defensive strategies in Hippopotamus
famous hypocrites
hornets nest pinata
olive garden knockies
Believing people in mind
unusual uses twist ties
what play that shakespeare wrote was about parent child relationship and involved a king
types of rituals against bad stuff
poems about coupon clippers
posted by Eve at 8:30 AM

 
This delicate sense of irony was best expressed by Wesley Sturges, who was dean of the Yale Law School. Sturges understood Yale very well, perhaps because he had taken most of his degrees elsewhere, and he would greet new law students on their first day at the school with the observation, "I do not know why you have come to law school. If you want to make lots of money, you are in the wrong place. There is a law school about a hundred miles from here on the Charles River that would prepare you for that. The function of the Yale Law School is to train presidents of the United States." The point was, at the time no Yale Law School graduate had ever been president of the United States.
--Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961
posted by Eve at 8:23 AM

 
THE DARK SIDE OF CHRISTMAS: See also, "Lully, lullay, thou little tiny child...."
posted by Eve at 4:28 PM

 
TWELVE-YEAR-OLD BOY STARTS CUB SCOUT PACK FOR HOMELESS BOYS. Via Amy Welborn.
posted by Eve at 4:26 PM

 
BREAK THE UNION!: Two good JaneGalt posts on the NYC transit strike: Et TWU?, and especially Tales from the TWU Comments Box.
posted by Eve at 11:02 PM

 
WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR NAME: Am adding a few more "regulars" (Noooooooooorm!!) to the blogroll.

Dreadnought: "Dread no one. Dread nothing. Conservative. Gay. Catholic." This dude is awesome. Found via Cacciaguida.

Manolo for the Men: Inimitable fashion advice. I can't get enough of this wonderful Duff. Also, I think, a Cacciaguida discovery.

First Things: The blog of the mag. You know, Fr Neuhaus, Jody Bottum, those guys.

(Ahh, Rebecca Howe... such a better role for Kirstie Alley than Saavik! [/geek])
posted by Eve at 10:56 PM

 
"THE APPRENTICE" FINALE (Trump version): So I've been into "The Apprentice" for awhile, especially as portrayed through Television Without Pity recaps (which often pick up on business-related issues that the show's editors miss). There aren't very many high-culture products that focus on leadership--much more in pop-cult genre products--this is also, as I've said, a huge part of why I like X-Men stories in general and Scott Summers/Cyclops stories in particular.

But the finale for this season was... it was completely crazy. And the Tw/oP recapper, Jacob, absolutely 100% nailed it. I have no idea if this link will be interesting to any of my readers, but for me, this was a pretty powerful story of image, leadership decisions, power, and race.

Trump's mic is still live. It picks up his voice: "Did you like that?"

There's not an answer.

more
posted by Eve at 10:45 PM

 
Mirror in the blogwatch
I just can't stop it,
Every Saturday you see me
window shopping.
Find no interest in the
racks and shelves
Just a thousand reflections
of my own sweet self, self, self...

Cacciaguida: Replies to my Goblet of Fire review. Many good points. I'll note that SERD (we both know her, but she might not want blog publicity, hence the initials) reminded me that the Crouch family backstory sets up both the mother-love and the Ministry-duplicity storylines in a big way, and it might have been worth sacrificing some pageantry to get that in there... but then, the movie was already so long I wanted to throttle a swan, so maybe not. I stand by everything I said about the Snape scenes though. And I tried to focus on the music, the second time I saw the ending, and I still think it doesn't work dramatically.

Odious and Peculiar: A Turing test on the question: What is a wife? Hee.

And Bureaucrash: Sorry guys... it was just a theory.
posted by Eve at 2:22 PM

 
In the narrative itself, Bronte warned against misreading Heathcliff. Isabella, his wife, stands in for the bad reader--a brilliant, ironic political point in itself. The bad reader is the sentimental reader of romance novels when life, love, and art demand a confrontation with the politics of power. The bad reader romanticizes the sadist and reads the rapist, the abuser, the violent man, as a romantic hero: tortured himself, despite proof that he is the torturer. Heathcliff describes this bad reader when he describes Isabella:

"She abandoned [her family and friends] under a delusion ... picturing in me a hero of romance, and expecting unlimited indulgences from my chivalrous devotion. I can hardly regard her in the light of a rational creature, so obstinately has she persisted in forming a fabulous notion of my character and acting on the false impression she cherished."

--Andrea Dworkin, "Wuthering Heights," in Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1989. Dworkin overwrites, always, but this essay is absolutely worth your time if you care about WH, as I do. Dworkin gets so much of its essence--even the parts with which I take issue (e.g. the eroticism of sameness)--and although she for the most part ignores WH's formal or perspectival innovations, she is 100% what she always is: hardcore. And WH demands a hardcore reader. WH demands a reader who can be at least as unflinchingly oneself as Andrea Dworkin was.
posted by Eve at 2:11 PM

 
JUS IN BELLO: Marty Lederman on what is in the McCain Amendment and what it means: the good, the (potentially) bad, the ugly, the law. (Or start here and scroll down.)

And Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky:

...As someone who has been on the receiving end of the "treatment" under discussion, let me tell you that trying to make a distinction between torture and CID techniques is ridiculous. Long gone are the days when a torturer needed the nasty-looking tools displayed in the Tower of London. A simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the mattress and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night after night after night. Or how about the "Chekist's handshake" so widely practiced under Stalin -- a firm squeeze of the victim's palm with a simple pencil inserted between his fingers? Very convenient, very simple. And how would you define leaving 2,000 inmates of a labor camp without dental service for months on end? Is it CID not to treat an excruciatingly painful toothache, or is it torture?

Now it appears that sleep deprivation is "only" CID and used on Guantanamo Bay captives. Well, congratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular confessions in Stalin's "show trials" of the 1930s. The henchmen called it "conveyer," when a prisoner was interrogated nonstop for a week or 10 days without a wink of sleep. At the end, the victim would sign any confession without even understanding what he had signed.

I know from my own experience that interrogation is an intensely personal confrontation, a duel of wills. It is not about revealing some secrets or making confessions, it is about self-respect and human dignity. If I break, I will not be able to look into a mirror. But if I don't, my interrogator will suffer equally. Just try to control your emotions in the heat of that battle. This is precisely why torture occurs even when it is explicitly forbidden. Now, who is going to guarantee that even the most exact definition of CID is observed under such circumstances?

But if we cannot guarantee this, then how can you force your officers and your young people in the CIA to commit acts that will scar them forever? For scarred they will be, take my word for it. ...

Finally, think what effect your attitude has on the rest of the world, particularly in the countries where torture is still common, such as Russia, and where its citizens are still trying to combat it. Mr. Putin will be the first to say: "You see, even your vaunted American democracy cannot defend itself without resorting to torture. . . . "

read the whole thing (link probably via Andrew Sullivan)
posted by Eve at 9:58 PM

 
I DON'T REALLY KNOW HOW TO DESCRIBE IT, but here is Terry Teachout's description of his recent collapse and diagnosis with congestive heart failure. He is recovering, he could use your prayers, and he manages to describe the events with characteristic grace.
posted by Eve at 9:12 PM

 
"CAPOTE": Saw it on Saturday with a friend. Verdict: a strange movie, with flaws in unexpected places.

The basic thing is that it's about Truman Capote researching and writing (and promoting) In Cold Blood, his 1965 account of the murder of a small-town Kansas family; and either you think, Whoa, must see now! or, ...And? The movie doesn't work hard to shift people from category B to category A--characters talk about how revolutionary the book's style is, how it will change the way people write and how journalism gets done, but even though this actually turned out to be true you don't get a sense from the movie of why or how. If you aren't interested in this story already, I don't know that the movie would make you interested. That's okay by me, because I was already fascinated with the story. So anyway, let's say you are already interested, for whatever reason. Does the movie work?

Partly no: This might be the first movie I've ever seen with good writing, great acting, and intrusively bad direction. How does that combination occur? The music is aggressively awful, saccharine and cliched. (So are the end titles.) The cuts are jarring and purposeless, sometimes even misleading the audience to focus on the wrong thing in a scene. Grr.

There's also a major writing problem: Although we do get a strong, and fairly subtle, sense of all the elements that drew Capote to the Clutter family killings once he knew a lot about them, I didn't get a sense of what made the first impression, what made the story click with him. Eh, I'm not sure that's a problem that can be solved, now that I think about it: I don't want armchair psychoanalysis of the dead, so some level of opacity in Capote's motivations will necessarily remain. Must think more whether there was a better way to handle this question though.

But partly yes: Capote is brilliantly written--egotist, self-deceiver, genius, user. And Philip Seymour Hoffman is clearly having a great time with the role. He was terrific. Harper Lee, wonderfully played by Catherine Keener, gets the fun role of Capote-deflater. They have a lot of chemistry together. And it's an inherently fascinating story. In the end, I was really glad I saw this, even though the music and editing problems grated. You should go!
posted by Eve at 8:47 PM

 
INSPIRING IRAQI VOTE. Seriously. At some point tomorrowish I will be looking through the Iraqi blogosphere, and will post here any especially interesting takes.
posted by Eve at 8:42 PM

 
"WHY CAN'T HE BE YOU?": I have a short story in the Advent issue of Dappled Things, a new Catholic online lit-mag. I note that a Holy Whapper and a Godsbodkin are also represented therein. Why not mosey on over for a look?

(This is the story set at a conference for ex-abortion clinic workers. There are a lot of reasons someone might not want to read a story with that setting, so I figured I should let you all know.)
posted by Eve at 8:35 PM

 
She's laughing out loud
And busy 'cause she's minding somebody else's blogwatch...

Jane Galt: Fish in foil!

And life after the farm dole, in New Zealand:

...Granted, twin-island New Zealand is only the size of Colorado with a population of 4 million, and represents a mere thimbleful of the world's agriculture. But the evidence is there, its farmers say: Since the government's momentous decision to abolish all 30 agricultural subsidies, their productivity has grown, farming's share of gross domestic product has risen as has the rural population, and family farms have survived and are thriving. ...

Nationally, going cold turkey was a group effort. The government used the state-owned Rural Bank to show commercial lenders the lead in debt restructuring, and encouraged them to go easy on mortgage defaulters. The banks, facing massive losses if farming collapsed, wrote off up to 40 percent of farmers' debts. The worst-hit families were given welfare payments.

And the farmers learned to work harder and do with less.

"We were young, so we put our heads down and just worked the farm," Ruth Rainey, now 46, recalled in an interview. "We didn't buy anything basically for years."

Pedersen, now 48, believes the government was acting "from a social conscience rather than from an economic plan," and indeed, there are indications the authorities themselves weren't sure cold turkey would save agriculture. Pedersen remembers Finance Minister Roger Douglas telling a farmers' meeting as late as 1989 that theirs was "a sunset industry. Agriculture will never again be the major contributor to this economy."

Instead, farming today is 16.6 percent of total gross domestic product, up from 14.2 percent in the late 1980s, and in the year to April 2005 it racked up exports worth $12.7 billion, more than half of all New Zealand exports.

The farmers have learned to diversify. During the subsidy era New Zealand had 72 million sheep -- 18 for every human. By last year the number was just 39 million, but more efficient methods mean the islands still produce the same amount of meat, and meanwhile freed-up land is being turned over to growing grapes for wine and other exotic crops. There are even niche markets of deer, goats, ostriches and llamas.

more (via the Club for Growth blog)
posted by Eve at 7:05 PM

 
YESTERDAY'S TOMORROWS: R.J. Lehmann got a hold of a 1979 issue of Omni, including readers' predictions:

Predictions Shared By More Than 50% of Omni Readers
...PREDICTION: By the late 1980s, cloned human beings will become a reality.
OUTCOME: They clearly didn't hit the mark, but how far off they were is tough to judge. If you count embryos as humans, then Advanced Cell Technologies claimed to have done it in 2001 and Hwang Woo-Suk definitely did it in 2004, making them off by a decade and a half. If the claim is for a truly viable, post-embryonic human, then I guess it depends on what you think of the claims made by Panagiotis Zavos and Severino Antinori, or those of the Raelians. ...

PREDICTION: Gas prices will top $1-a-gallon by 1982.
OUTCOME: The one prediction readers were likely hoping wouldn't come true, and it actually arrived two years early... at least, in California, which is the only market for which I have data. The average nominal price of gasoline jumped from $0.89 in 1979 ($1.98 in today’s dollars) to $1.23 in 1980 ($2.49) before going on to hit a peak price of $1.66 ($3.08) in 1981.

more--I'm addicted to this kind of thing
posted by Eve at 2:37 PM

 
Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled.
--Pale Fire, hee.

(Quicquid comments here.)
posted by Eve at 2:33 PM

 
MAYBE LATER WE CAN MAKE A SNOWMAN/WE CAN MAKE THE SNOWMAN BE OUR SLAVE:

Dreidl Dreidl Dreidl
I caught you in my teeth
Dreidl Dreidl Dreidl
The Void yawns underneath

and more family favorites....
posted by Eve at 11:03 AM

 
But let me not pursue the tabulation of nonsense.
--Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

(Eh, I'm on p. 101 of this now, and I have to say I'm not sure I know why we're here. So far it seems cute and clever, but nothing more. What am I missing? --Lolita is really great, and I need to re-read it, and Invitation to a Beheading is fascinating though I thought it petered out toward the end, but this one I just don't get.)
posted by Eve at 10:59 AM