hobbits and penguins : to the death.

the latest bit of educational importance is up over at the earth-shattering education encounter.

bounty hunter v stunt actor (part 2)

the blogtastic educational experience continues

bounty hunter v stunt actor.

meanwhile, over at the earth-shattering education encounter, the first half of the latest what's worse entry has gone up. at last.

the road, it hath been rutted.

dear sarah prince and i have been e-chatting about books; at the end of one message she confessed, Oh, and the next book on my desk here is set in London, 1135, and is called "The Flame and the Flower". Ahhhh yeeeeeeaaaahh. thanks to googlebooks, 10 minutes and 25 pages later, i had some things to say about it.
































the flame & the flower equals snap. bang. oh, rexy: you so sexy. f me, i kind of have to read this now. somewhere in the world, time no doubt whistled by on taut and widespread wings, but here in the english countryside slowly, painfully, as if it trod the rutted road that spread across the moors on blistered feet. a few things. a) that opening sentence by kathleene woodiwiss gives her away as someone who gets the fundamental properties of sexing up your words, which is to b) give the sentence alliterative beats: in the world, time no doubt whistled by on taut and widespread wings ... it trod the rutted road; b2) seriously, you could chop up that sentence and make the first stanza of a saucy little poem; and it would be saucy, because c) it follows another rule of the sauce, which is to work as many naughty words into ordinary sentences as you can: whistled; taut; rutted; spread; blistered; wide(fucking)spread; d) you can even count moors because it makes you think of the moor, othello, and the figure of the virile, defiant, foreign black man has been known to make women want to spread wide, whistle, rut, blister; e) trod is one of my most-loved words of the minute: i love announcing i've trod on some stuff, kind of like how f) i love claiming to be clad in things, which works especially well with regard to boots, a vest, chaps---and you know who else likes being clad i bet? g) kathleene motherfucking woodiwiss. it's not enough to put the e on the end of her first name, stretching it out--kathleene--she also just goes for it with the last: woodiwiss. that's some old-school alliteration, evocative of a lesbian greek seer, or a wood nymph, or taking a leak in the forest, or trying to pee while you have a boner. i'm sold, is what i'm telling you.

lessons in taxidermy.

- Way back when, up on Whidbey Island for my initial grad school residency, my professor described to me how such-and-such university journal renamed itself Creative Nonfiction, and then—poof—as if from the ether, we had a new genre. That’s stuck with me, because I read a lot of nonfiction, and most of the good ones are intensely creative, but never do I put down one of them and wonder if it deserves a spot in the rarified genre of creative nonfiction. On Whidbey I asked, beyond memoir, what categories of books fall under CNF—I asked around. The response was nature writing, sometimes, in some circumstances; and a couple more possibilities, similarly over-qualified. Everyone was real vague about it. Well, for someone who’s writing a 2^nd-person novel, I have historically been skeptical of memoir. When presented with a novel and a memoir by one author, even of good repute, I’ve doubted the memoir as being of equal worth; I’ve doubted it as art.

- I don’t have it with me and so will have to paraphrase, but in his stellar work The Inner Eye (which will be quoted from in upcoming pages of the theory of mind & narrative paper) Nicholas Humphrey says ~ As Plato put it, we live in a world of shadows; the point of art, then, is to reveal the solid forms.

- Lessons in Taxidermy is art. One part of the beauty of Humphrey’s language—the point of art—is that it has motion. It’s not an objective classification, as in, here is an object and it is art; rather, it’s entirely subjective: a description of the way in which a work alters your vision for the world. Bee’s book utterly lacks overt spirituality, and yet it helped me organize my gratefulness to god in a new way. Her writing voice is right there, clear as day, and exactly evocative of the disconnect and zero-response to pain she learns so young. Her dual telling of the story, present day and growing up told in a well-paced intermittence, adds a depth to her, an awareness of her human emotions, that otherwise might seem to dwindle behind the list of her life, the litany of things gone horribly fucking wrong. To paraphrase an Amazon customer review—you think nobody knows the trouble you’ve seen? Read this, and stop whining.

i know that guy from somewhere.

Noah benShea’s Jacob the Baker is a fascinating exercise. What am I doing calling it an exercise—it’s a book, isn’t it. Well, yes. It’s the barest of narrative frameworks—a baker who arrives at the bakery early each morning, the sky not yet fully light, and, as he readies the day’s dough, scrawls thoughts and observations on little scraps of paper. One of these makes it into the bread of a customer, and it delights her: she places a big order and asks that Jacob put a slip of one-line wisdom into each pastry. And, so, word spreads among the townspeople, and the book progresses with short accounts of townspeople—delineated in the broadest of ways: young/old; rich/poor; kind/greedy—coming to him for advice, followed by his reply. These are compact parables suitable, it’d seem, for the purposes of a prophet on the mount, or a grad student posturing in the quad; or the book of Proverbs. Eg,

A great sadness rolled its shadow across Jacob. The words came sadly.

“We must remember,” said Jacob, “the only difference between a house and a coffin is a door.”

or

The man was astonished. “How does giving to the poor bring about my freedom?”

“You see,” said Jacob, “either the key to a man’s wallet is in his heart, or the key to a man’s heart is
in his wallet. So, until you express your charity, you are locked inside your greed.”

One- and two-line paragraphs are a staple of Jacob the Baker—in my paperback version, the font and feel recall a print-out of the sports page, a format that stretches the column borders to those of a normal page:

With a little over a minute to go, the Philadelphia Eagles had life.

But they also had A.J. Feeley, who threw one last interception to linebacker Lofa Tatupu that made the blunder moot.

But that isn't the story today.

The story is coach Mike Holmgren's reaction to his own mistake.

He didn't run from it. He didn't stare down his inquisitors as if he had special powers to make questions go away.

He answered the question and admitted his mistake. (Steve Kelley, Seattle Times)

Pascal’s Pensees, meantime, offers a rock-like density of parables and incisive lab-coat quips, all in a fashion that’s more organic in nature and less in style than Jacob. It’s a list of scientific observations or theological inclinations, from which some wisdom is made plain; with not a whiff of prologue or segue. Not a bare thread of story like that offered by Jacob the Baker, the source here is a notebook, discovered and published after Pascal’s death, filled with numbered entries, varying in length from a single sentence to a couple of paragraphs, eg,

4. Mathematics, intuition.- True eloquence makes light of eloquence, true morality makes light of morality; that is to say, the morality of the judgement, which has no rules, makes light of the morality of the intellect. For it is to judgement that perception belongs, as science belongs to intellect. Intuition is the part of judgement, mathematics of intellect.

To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

or

7. The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

or

8. There are many people who listen to a sermon in the same way as they listen to vespers.

I’ve never spent time thinking about the formula for the construction a parable, and it’s fascinating to me. Just as taglines have a logic, a progression—in my work, I commonly use verb product. verb your life, or similar—so doth the invention of parables. From these two books, we can identify not more than a handful of variations on the formula, none of which even moderately resembles how a person actually speaks. (Which is, in part, what makes Jacob the Baker a fascinating conceit. Pensees has an associative progression wherein a succession of entries will have a core topic until he's finished thinking about it, and then, new topic; meanwhile, Jacob's structure—a solitary man who refuses to see what the fuss is about—lends a cloudiness to the matters of time and place. An almost necessary element, if you’re going to star a dude who, in conversation, says things like “…knowing less than ONE would leave the world with nothing, and more would leave the world in pieces.”)

Maybe I'm biased, but parable makes me think first of Jesus, part of whose storytelling genius was not giving away the game: his stories were metaphors, and if you explain a metaphor at the end, that wrecks everything. On the other hand, if your story is just a framework for you to insert a tagline-sized bit of rhetorical wisdom, said story is likely to end up portraying roughly the depth of a crepe, which is both flat and French. In Jacob, this format does not vary; Pensees, while devoid of lead-in, tends to wrap up entries with similar flourish—one that resides, linguistically, between a parable and a quip. As such, I'd like to propose a bastard term we'll both think is fun for about two minutes: parabaquip.

Now. In putting together a parabaquip, the primary operation seems to be combining reflection, as in, the end mirrors back the beginning, with reflective—the backward reflection of the language yields unexpected meaning, a pause-giving element. The simplest example is Noah benShea’s:

Yes it is about time, and yes it is about time.

That’s maybe my favorite from either author. Here’s another reflector/reflective, this from Pascal’s Pensees:

19. The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first.

Aren’t we suckers for the short ones. It’s idiosyncratic and nothing more, probably, but now, having realized the common structure in these parabaquippes [French spelling], the visual I keep coming back to is that of Narcissus at his pond. The other day I heard a deepish, alternative take on Narcissus that dug into his history and posited how he saw the burden of the whole world in his face; I aa-ahed it, then later thought it contrived. With the Greek myths, there are additional layers of meaning to be read into, but never, insomuch as I know, layers that counteract the original meaning. Like, Narcissus was vain as hell, and surely it’s possible to extract finer, more subtle meaning from the tale of his demise; but it’s not going to be in opposition to the original: if you homilize the pond story and end up with Narcissus was a selfless man, you’re doing it wrong—and you’re not doing it any better than the 4^th-grade Mark Huntsman, who heard about playing devil’s advocate, thought it was awesome, and started saying the opposite every time anyone expressed an opinion. Here’s a more advanced PQ (also Pascal):

923. It is not absolution only which remits sins by the sacrament of penance, but contrition, which is not real if it does not seek the sacrament.

So. We get absolution and contrition compared via the reflecting pond of the sacrament, which then springs to life and gazes downward at contrition. The first leads to the second, is compared to the third, which then questions the second.

Does absolution get frozen out in that operation? Nearly. The larger insight of that PQ involves absolution only proximally. In a structural sense, the real recommendation is not a true mirror—the opposite—but a vector. It's perpendicular to the starting assumption.

Who you are is the price you paid to get what you used to want. (benShea)

Here, the setup is simply reversed: Who you are is... has you looking for a verb that seeks a noun; what you get is a shift in tenses that redirects clear back to the question of the opening phrase. Who are you, besides the ADD malcontent that spent a year's allowance on a paintball gun he used twice. Have you changed at all. Recently I read Malcolm Gladwell’s latest New Yorker piece, Dangerous Minds about criminal psychologists—profilers. The piece builds to a close juxtaposition of the language in their reports and the language of magicians and psychics.

Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic "The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading," itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler. First is the Rainbow Ruse—the "statement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite." ("I would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you.") The Jacques Statement, named for the character in "As You Like It" who gives the Seven Ages of Man speech, tailors the prediction to the age of the subject. To someone in his late thirties or early forties, for example, the psychic says, "If you are honest about it, you often get to wondering what happened to all those dreams you had when you were younger." There is the Barnum Statement, the assertion so general that anyone would agree, and the Fuzzy Fact, the seemingly factual statement couched in a way that "leaves plenty of scope to be developed into something more specific." ("I can see a connection with Europe, possibly Britain, or it could be the warmer, Mediterranean part?") And that's only the start: there is the Greener Grass technique, the Diverted Question, the Russian Doll, Sugar Lumps, not to mention Forking and the Good Chance Guess—all of which, when put together in skillful combination, can convince even the most skeptical observer that he or she is in the presence of real insight.

They had been at it for almost six hours. The best minds in the F.B.I. had given the Wichita detectives a blueprint for their investigation. Look for an American male with a possible connection to the military. His I.Q. will be above 105. He will like to masturbate, and will be aloof and selfish in bed. He will drive a decent car. He will be a "now" person. He won't be comfortable with women. But he may have women friends. He will be a lone wolf. But he will be able to function in social settings. He won't be unmemorable. But he will be unknowable. He will be either never married, divorced, or married, and if he was or is married his wife will be younger or older. He may or may not live in a rental, and might be lower class, upper lower class, lower middle class or middle class. And he will be crazy like a fox, as opposed to being mental. If you're keeping score, that's a Jacques Statement, two Barnum Statements, four Rainbow Ruses, a Good Chance Guess, two predictions that aren't really predictions because they could never be verified—and nothing even close to [what the killer was actually like].

I may form a parabaquipping club. We can play with the formula, which, who knows, could reveal itself as strong enough that a dude can occasionally generate a parable that supersedes his understanding. Email if interested.

i could think of things i never thunk before.

stebbins and i are knocking out some working mom-targeted banner ads today. hey, you're busy, you're a mom; you should go to college, mom. that kind of thing. he sent the attached image with the notion of a thought bubble, saying this

my copy is made up on the fly-not really good, but you get the message...




















and my response was … what. what needs to be changed here, it’s perfect.

with the money i'd be makin'
my hips would be gyratin'
if i only had a degree

i would not be just a nuffin'
my head all full of stuffin'
my womb whistlin' with the breeze
i would dance and be merry
life would be a ding-a-derry
if i only had a degree

sportsmanship ... books.

i heard a funny news piece this morning, involving raising awareness in darfur about all that americans are doing on their behalf -- "they don't know the significance of the fact that matt damon is worried about them. we've got to educate them." some time after, i discovered myself with a song in my head, and my heart -- and my brain:

Terrorists, your game is through
'Cos now you have to answer to

America! FUCK YEAH!

So lick my butt and suck on my balls
What you going to do when we come for you now,
it’s the dream that we all share; it’s the hope for tomorrow

FUCK YEAH!















McDonalds, FUCK YEAH!
Wal-Mart, FUCK YEAH!
The Gap, FUCK YEAH!
Baseball, FUCK YEAH!
NFL, FUCK, YEAH!
Rock and roll, FUCK YEAH!
The Internet, FUCK YEAH!
Slavery, FUCK YEAH!

FUCK YEAH!

Starbucks, FUCK YEAH!
Disney world, FUCK YEAH!
Porno, FUCK YEAH!
Valium, FUCK YEAH!
Reeboks, FUCK YEAH!
Fake Tits, FUCK YEAH!
Sushi, FUCK YEAH!
Taco Bell, FUCK YEAH!
Rodeos, FUCK YEAH!
Bed bath and beyond (fuck, yeah, fuck ... yeah)

Liberty, FUCK YEAH!
White Slips, FUCK YEAH!
The Alamo, FUCK YEAH!
Band-aids, FUCK YEAH!
Las Vegas, FUCK YEAH!
Christmas, FUCK YEAH!
Immigrants, FUCK YEAH!
Popeye, FUCK YEAH!
Democrats, FUCK YEAH!
Republicans (fuck, yeah, fuck, yeah)
Sportsmanship ... Books.

who is this king of glory - how shall we call him.

my grad school mentor, the venerable robert clark, showed this to me more than a year ago, claiming that, some days, he needed 12 or 15 viewings just to keep everything going, together.

i cannot disagree, and i cannot hide it under a bushel, no! i'm gonna let it shine.

video footage of my freshman-year roommate, who was randomly assigned.

i. cannot stop watching this.

be embraced, you millions.

no piece of art settles my soul, raises my eyes in quite the manner of the 4th movement of beethoven's 9th, the ode to joy. although the progression of it was burned on my brain at around the age of 9 or 10, as i lay on the shag with my head next to the stereo, not until recently did i learn the words; in the first vocal stanza, the powerful baritone calls out, freude!! freude -- and, i don't know, but i always associated it with a powerful man taking action. it's german, and all german sounds upset. so that was my picture--this big, hair-faced german dude, setting aside his dignity and throwing his glove to the ground: FREUDE! then the chorus is beckoned, right on his heels, and it's downright transcendent. but i always thought, you know, it's german, it's demanding and righteous. turns out that it is those things, but with a 1st corinthians 13 kind of aim that i just wouldn't have guessed. the italicized first words are beethoven's--the rest belong to the poet schiller.

Oh friends, not these tunes!

Rather let us sing more

cheerful and more joyful ones.

Joy! Joy!

Joy, beautiful spark of the gods,

Daughter of Elysium,

Touched with fire, to the portal,

Of thy radiant shrine, we come.

Your sweet magic frees all others,

Held in Custom's rigid rings.

All men on earth become brothers,

In the haven of your wings.

Whoever succeeds in the great attempt

To be a friend of a friend,

Whoever has won a lovely woman,

Let him add his jubilation!

Yes, whoever calls even one soul

His own on the earth's globe!

And who never has, let him steal,

Weeping, away from this group.

All creatures drink joy

At the breasts of nature;

All the good, all the evil

Follow her roses' trail.

Kisses gave she us, and wine,

A friend, proven unto death;

Pleasure was to the worm granted,

And the cherub stands before God.

Glad, as his suns fly

Through the Heavens' glorious plan,

Run, brothers, your race,

Joyful, as a hero to victory.

Be embraced, you millions!

This kiss for the whole world!

Brothers, beyond the star-canopy

Must a loving Father dwell.

Do you bow down, you millions?

Do you sense the Creator, world?

Seek Him beyond the star-canopy!

Beyond the stars must He dwell.

Finale repeats the words:

Be embraced, ye millions!

This kiss for the whole world!

Brothers, beyond the star-canopy

Must a loving Father dwell.

Be embraced,

This kiss for the whole world!

Joy, beautiful spark of the gods,

Daughter of Elysium,

Joy, beautiful spark of the gods

npr did a series on beethoven with the philadelphia orchestra--there's interviews with the conductor, Christoph Eschenbach, for each of the 9 symphonies; truthfully i didn't realize how good philly was until i listened to a few other recordings.

"dick, have you seen this?!?!?!?!?! [sic]"

theonion took down an article that'd been in its archives until just very recently. and, since i have the text, here it is. it's a fun article, so the part where i bitch is after.



Bush to Cheney: Can We Invade Iraq Yet?

WASHINGTON, DC—Vice-President Dick Cheney issued a stern admonishment to President Bush Tuesday, telling the overeager chief executive that he didn't want to hear "so much as the word 'Iraq'" for the rest of the day.

"I told him, 'Listen, George, I promise we're going to invade Iraq, but you have to be patient,'" Cheney said. "'We need a halfway plausible casus belli. You know that, George. Now, stop bugging me about it.'"

According to Cheney, for the past three weeks, Bush has been constantly asking if it's time to move troops into the Gulf region.

"George is calling me, he's following me around in the halls, he's leaving notes on my desk reminding me to let him know if I hear 'any news,'" Cheney said. "He just will not sit still. I actually have a permanent red mark on my shoulder on the spot where he comes up and taps me."

"'Hey, Dick, is it time yet?'" said Cheney, adopting a Texas drawl in imitation of the president. "'Hey, Dick, can we invade yet?'"

In spite of repeated assurances that he will be apprised the moment the time to invade arrives, Bush continues to badger Cheney.

"He knows I don't want to talk about it, but he still somehow manages to find a way to sneak it into conversations," Cheney said. "He'll drop by my office on some pretense—the Kyoto treaty or whatever—and then right before he's about to leave, he'll say, 'Oh, by the way, do you think it's time to get those troops into the Middle East yet?' As if that wasn't his whole reason for the visit."

Bush has also taken to hanging around certain West Wing hallways, hoping to "accidentally" bump into Cheney as he exits meetings.

"Last Thursday, I nearly ran him over as I was coming out of a debriefing with the Joint Chiefs of Staff," Cheney said. "So he says, 'I was thinking of maybe talking to [CIA director] George Tenet, because the CIA helped spark that Kurdish uprising in '96, so maybe we could do something like that again with Iraq.' I said, 'George, I'm doing everything I possibly can to set things up for an Iraq invasion. Try to think about something else—health-care reform, the economy, anything—before I strangle you.'"

Though he understands and appreciates the president's eagerness, Cheney said his patience finally wore out when Bush called him at home over the weekend.

"I'm sitting down to dinner, and I get a phone call asking if 'Congress knows they've got weapons of mass destruction,'" Cheney said. "I told him yes, and to settle down. Later that night—it must have been midnight—the secured line rings. I leap out of bed, thinking something awful has happened. It's George, saying that he can't sleep thinking about how right at this very minute, Saddam is manufacturing more weapons of mass destruction, and we're sitting here doing nothing."

On Monday, Cheney sat Bush down and explained at length the political ramifications of proceeding with a first strike without creating the appearance of approval from Congress and the American people.

"I said we can do it, but we don't want to at this moment," Cheney said. "'If we just wait a little longer, Saddam is bound to commit some act of aggression or we'll find some juicy al Qaeda ties or something, and then we can make it look like the whole country's behind it. George has got to learn to hold his horses."

Cheney also explained to Bush that his constant pestering is keeping him from attending to the very work that will make the invasion a reality.

"Donald [Rumsfeld] and I are working on the U.N. weapons-inspections thing, and we're this close to finding a way to make that a compelling reason, but we just need a little more time," Cheney said. "I told George to go back to the Oval Office and stay there. I also made him put his hand on his heart and promise me he wouldn't talk to me about it anymore."

Within an hour of sending Bush to his office, Cheney received six e-mails from Bush, all of them forwarded news articles that the president had found online. Among them was an Associated Press story titled, "Lawyers Say Bush Does Not Need Congress To Attack Iraq," accompanied by a message from Bush reading, "dick, have you seen this?!?!?!?!?! [sic]"

"Of course I've seen it," Cheney said. "Who does he think planted the story?"

The vice-president is not the only key White House figure Bush has harassed.

"George is driving me absolutely batty," Rumsfeld said. "I got back from lunch, and there were four voicemail messages from him, then another two on my cell phone. Each one says he has to talk to me about a 'highly confidential subject,' as if I don't know what it is. Condoleezza [Rice] said she's been getting the same thing. He just doesn't seem to understand that we all want war as badly as he does."



why it's important, i think, is as a marker: these days, with the election a scant entire fucking year away, i personally have found it impossible to escape forming opinions about the candidates. and i think about our woman candidate, and how cool it'd be if she got elected. i think that; i don't feel that. (same goes for edwards, btw.) so i go back, and i re-read this article, and i smile a smile that maybe looks ironical but really is regretful, if a little wry. 'cos folks: the onion published this shit almost 4 weeks before congress voted on authorization of force in iraq. one month before the hand-wringing ended in a vote, any person who paid a bit of attention could see the pretense of concern in iraq was a sham. even back then, the way bush spoke about it echoed a persistent, precocious child. that's what this article says; it reminds me that, when the issue was published, i read it, sitting at my father's computer in his den, and i laughed and i laughed. ha ha! i said, laughingly. this is so fucking funny because it is so fucking true; so true, and so fucking obvious. as the fabulous ruth haney says: kucinich to the finich.

the golden compass.

for the christian haters who love to hate, the word on this movie is that it will be everything bad and awful. it will be

harry potter's witchcraft + the teletubbie's secret gay agenda + the godless flab of tom "davinci" hanks, which together will = our children learning to hate god.

for me, the trilogy is so profoundly imaginative; thoughtful, with levels of allegory and teleology not found anywhere this side of middle earth. the characters look to have been...near perfectly casted. color me boyish with excitement.



this trailer isn't as cool as the one on the movie site, just fyi.

YOU'RE WEARING PLAID! WHAT KINDA PARTY IS THIS!

i wrote a bunch of 2-liners for my company's new banner campaign on myspace. i love that this one is getting used; dalton sees it as evidence that i've cracked the code -

also receiving consideration was

STOP OVER-COMPENSATING FOR YOUR PLAID SKIRT!
Earn your Business degree online

what's worse? the deadliest jobs - part 2

the Earth-shattering Education Encounter has a new post:

Commercial Diver v Smokejumper.

it's thrilling. the most happening thing since part 1.

you get a taco! you get a taco! EVERYBODY GETS A TACO.

need a cause?

need a spring break pickup line?

need a way to feel good about yourself while still kinda creeping everybody out? donate your taco!

i say again, donate. your motherfucking. taco.

what's worse? the deadliest jobs.

the Earth-shattering Education Encounter has a new post, about things such as this

and this.

exciting stuff.

One year ago today, the time for excuse-making has come to an end.

my company's seo site has a fresh and exciting new blog that i'll be writing for, called

Earth-shattering Education Encounter
substance. knowledge. consequences.

it's going to be really fun; i'll put up a link here whenever i write a new post (there are other contributors as well). here's a slice of the level of dialogue EsEE will work to provide:



"One year ago today, the time for excuse-making has come to an end." -Washington, D.C., Jan 2003
It’s not hard to put things off. With big things, like getting a college degree or admitting a mistake, it can be pretty easy. No more excuses: just get out there and do it. The future of yesterday is today.

listen. first the fat boys break up - now every day i wake up - somebody got a problem with hal.

...I devoured the Sherlock Holmes stories at an early age; I loved them. I don’t remember how Mr. Arthur Conan Doyle spelled out the details of Holmes’s face, but here was a man whose mystery, method and essence gathered in a place just behind his eyes, and whether I read it or determined it for myself, Holmes’s eyes were, like mine, gray. I was nine or ten years old. I became a fiend for the finer points of deductive reasoning. I’d walk onto the school playground, examine the gravelly sand beneath the swing set, and determine whether the previous swingers had jumped or fallen off. At home, my mother’s face was a complex tapestry of tiny stresses and rewards—of minor victories and, far more numerous, small things gone majorly wrong.

It’s amazing to realize I can recall with detail “cases” I worked, that far back—I must have repeated and run over the facts so many times that my memory couldn’t help but encode them. The disappearance and stealthy recovery of my wristwatch—the one that currently lay on Etta’s pillow—was a very proud moment for me. The watch is and was old, and has Donald Duck on it. The blue leather strap has gold stitching, and the white face is bordered with gold-painted metal. In the center stands an 0pen-beaked Donald, wearing his standard outfit: blue hat, blue coat, no pants. He’s pointing to the numbers around him with arms that have long since stopped rotating; attached to these are hands that do not belong together: his right hand has an extended middle finger and the thumb raised to make the pistol sign, which can generally mean either bam or way to go, sport. So we’re okay there. But then the shorter left hand, the hour hand, is bent at the wrist, the white fingers splayed stylishly, suggestively. If gay cartoon ducks have a system of hand signs, this is the one that says, I’m busy just now, but later, I’m yours every way you want me. Gail never detected the sexual ambiguity of Donald’s fingers; but she did detect, or at least invent, an offensive sexuality on the part of the man who gave me the watch. He was my Little League baseball assistant coach, Ted, and after I failed to get a crucial hit in the last game of the season, he presented it to me as a gift. He’d had it since he was a boy.

I really took that to heart; Donald Duck was not my favorite Disney character, by any means, but his voice was funny, and I realized the intent of the gift: don’t over-think, don’t be all angrily serious about this kind of very minor situation. About baseball. But Gail thought the gift was inappropriate; she took the watch from me and stashed it away. I spent every spare moment surreptitiously trying to recover the Donald. I looked in all the usual stash locations, racking my nubile brain, killing myself. Then I thought of Sherlock. Hardly for the first time—I even had the hat. I’d shut myself in my room, put it on, and pace back and forth, eyes narrowed, thinking about the problem at hand, sometimes aloud. Ah, there you are, Watson. Outstanding. Have you seen my pipe, one can’t be expected to walk properly around the crime scene without a pipe, a decent pipe. Procurement of a pipe is to be our top priority, once this case of the missing Donald is solved; although that will be a tricky business all by itself … a tricky business. I often repeated my last words, after a pause—and even then I knew this was very un-Holmes, but hell, my Watson was imaginary, speaking Watson’s part aloud mad me sound crazy. I allowed myself leeway. As much as I was the eager detective, the mysteries I pursued were never about whodunit; they were exclusively whereisit in nature. As much as I scoured the tattered, faux-leather-bound volume of the collected Holmes stories, his method didn’t translate, because I was interested in finding, not blaming. I wanted to know location, not motive. But I didn’t know of this discrepancy; and so I tried many other things to rectify it.

Prone though I am to working a heavy psychological angle when thinking back on the way I was as a boy, the answer, here, is that I had a lot of time alone; and I had an eye that was curious for the way things worked. This meant Peter Pan was great, but Robin Hood was better. I was rarely asked how I felt, so I rarely considered my feelings of much import. For all intents and purposes, Sherlock Holmes possessed no feelings not expressed in solving cases and occasionally manhandling his violin, and so he was a fascinating model of behavior for me.

The Case of the Missing Donald was a turning point—for the first time, motive was relevant. Feelings were relevant. Gail felt that Coach Ted had been wrong to give me the watch, so she stepped in and took it from me. Okay, she’s acting on feelings, here, so she’s not planning it out, she’s reacting. What happened next. We were leaving the game. We got in the station wagon and she was yelling, not really at me, to me. She looked at my face, silent but murderous, and saw that while I hadn’t showed much care for the game—I’d taken my shoes and socks off in left field and was still barefoot—I sure as hell cared about that watch; I wasn’t going to bend. So she got out of the car and stormed back to the dugout, where she proceeded to talk normally to Coach Ted for a few seconds, then explode, waving her arms everywhere while stepping towards him, which was just so awful—I looked away. She was wearing her little knit vest that she wore in the springtime—it had a lot of pockets, many places to conceal a small Donald Duck wristwatch. Even as she got back in the wagon, I was already in detective mode, sizing up any apparent pocket bulk, and, when we got back, tracing every movement of Gail and the vest in order to pick up the trail that’d lead me to the Donald’s resting place. I was more stealthy and thorough than I’d ever been, and came up empty. I ran through the scene, again, again, again, trying to make my memory pull up some sliver of detail, or to derive likely locations. That night was sleepless, and I climbed out of my window and walked almost five miles to the baseball field, where I scoured the tall-ish grass close to the dugouts, eventually collapsing there, leaning my tired back against the wire fence and staring up at the generous light of the May moon. Why, I asked the moon. Why can’t I find Donald. He must be somewhere—she never throws anything away, she hates to throw things away. And, my friend, that’s when it clicked: she hates throwing things away. The motive I was interested in was not motive for the crime—Gail’s feelings about the Donald watch had no bearing, here. But suddenly I had this new scent, a trace of motive for what she’d do with the watch: Gail could not bear to throw things away; she went around with this particular hatred right on the tip of her mind or tongue—throwing things out was a waste, and this policy governed many things, even how much food first came on my plate at dinner. Waste not/want not, the truism said, and the first part governed Gail’s daily decisions. I leaned against the dugout fence, still staring at the moon, and realized that she’d given the watch back to Assistant Coach Ted. She’d yelled at his uncomprehending face and waved her arms wildly about gift-giving and role models, and then she’d turned and walked calmly back to the car, after handing him back the watch. So that it wouldn’t go to waste. That was the last game of the season; I wouldn’t see Assistant Coach Ted again. I was so excited about this, I marveled at it enough that I began walking towards Assistant Coach Ted’s neighborhood before talking myself out of it. It was late, I didn’t know which house was his. He probably still had the watch. It’d been his before, and he hadn’t offered it to me in a way that suggested he’d offered it to the better players first. No, he was holding onto it, until such a time as I could come forward and accept his old Donald Duck wristwatch like a man.

I’d anticipated having time to discuss what I knew, and how I’d come to know it, when Assistant Coach Ted gave me the watch for a second time. But when I came to his door that Sunday afternoon, he was a little short with me, restless, by no means convinced I was there on my own. I looked down at the welcome mat and apologized for my mother’s yelling. Assistant Coach Ted let out a laugh—thank god, he said. I was second-guessing the good things I thought about you that made me give you that watch—hold on, I’ll be right back.

He brought out the Donald Duck watch and escorted me to the edge of the front yard, where he lit a cigar. Leaning back against his car, a cherry Chevy Nova, he rotated his cigar in small, quick turns, taking a short puff with each twist. I’d no idea, at the time, how a cigar was smoked, but it was undoubtedly a close relative of the pipe, which I wanted to smoke very much, and this cat knew what he was doing. I stood a few feet in front of him, studying, his technique, and marveling at the thick curls of pungent smoke. Assistant Coach Ted looked thoughtfully down the quiet road, then down at me, tousled my moppy hair, and chuckled. He told me to enjoy my watch and went back to his cigar. I backed away from him a few steps, then turned and trotted down the street, becoming more happy and running faster as I went. It was my see you around, kid moment, a moment of recognition between me and a solitary, cigar-smoking man.

A practical understanding of what constitutes a memo.

The priorities harmonization mission will be implemented over the next three quarters. Employee response has really been something. In terms of where this will place you all on the synchronization roadmap, you will look forward to a growing rate of return into the next decade and beyond.

The standing labor attorney has reviewed the upcoming mandatory training sessions—these will successfully look at a spectrum of known behaviors as they have manifested in a range of unfortunate ways:

A concrete explanation of a respectful work environment

A practical understanding of what constitutes harassment

Gaining this understanding of constitution requires focus. But you all will be able to re-direct & re-apply your energy during the subsequent training segment looking at an evolving conceptualization of

The wide range of behaviors that can lead to a claim of harassment

and

Incorporating our organizational values into creating a trusting workplace.

Please note that two adjoining training sessions will be separated out accordingly: one for team managers; and one for everyone else.

Your anticipated cooperation is appreciated.

A practical understanding of what constitutes a memo - P2.

MEMO-MANAGEMENT-MEMO-MANAGEMENT-MEMO-MANAGEMENT-MEMO-MEMO-MEMO

Now. Now you can all stop pretending that you don’t have the tools for structuring comprehensive policy implementation training sessions. If you’re going to construct mandatory training sessions notification and do it effectively, you'll never get out of the gate without specificating compulsory adherence to The 2 Stipulating Memo Principles.

1) All memo narrative forms are replaced by the 2nd person. Often mistaken for personal, this voice lets you maintain control of your memo by referring to all recipients as a de-individualized collective. “You all” is the preferred form of conveying non-directive warm fuzzies; and complimenting good performance at or near the outset is longstanding memo tradition, on the theory that you must give before you get.

2) Participles form the foundation around which all other useful linguistic qualifiers are gathered. Because participles indicate motion but are in fact staid; and because they so strongly imply an expiring timetable but are in fact tenseless, the standing HR participle policy has been 5 participles per memo paragraph of not more than 4 lines, known colloquially at the policy management level as the “5P4” strategy, with which you are familiar.

The company is expanding; the partners are optimistic that growth can be profitably contained, but they kindly ask that all managers adopt the new, highly evolved 7PP4P memo policy right away: no less than 7 participles per 4-line memo paragraph. 7PP4P has been rigorously trial-tested and shown to result in memos that communicate a sense of more pressing responsibility than ever before, while feeling no less organic.

you can't do that to shatner.

my friend marlise has a new book out, about the years right after college when she magically created herself a job as a reporter for the globe. i just bought it yesterday, and am really enjoying it; one of the early highlights is her getting into william shatner's 50-guest wedding reception by pretending to be drunk and pee in the bushes--this after being turned away at the gate, to which she brought a big lavender tiffany's box with a pickle dish in it.

this led to a fun email string -

i've always liked you, marlise. and now ... what can i do but marvel at the retardedly high extremes of likeability to which you've traveled: you brought a pickle dish to william shatner's wedding... you gave william shatner a pickle dish. a tiny wittle dish in a big purple box, for him to put his pickles in.
--
a great deal of thought went into that purchase. it was either that or a key chain, but the key chain would have come in a pouch. couldn't do that to shatner.
--
1) no, i don't expect you could

2) couldn't do that to shatner is destined to become a fantastic hit song, a party song, maybe with a scissor sisters disco rock kind of sound, like

3) whoa-oh / you can't do that to the shat / no no / can't get on the list / put his pickles in a dish, oh no / i said you can't / can't ride the shatner / dip his fish in your batter / oh yeah / best bring a platter / or a dish if you wish / to ever do that to shatner / if you wanna do that to the shat / oh yeah / oh, no.


tabloid prodigy is great fun. click the entry title to go to marlise's site.

gertrude box redux.

..apsi has just received a comment on our first-ever post, and it's marvelous.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "how about Pandora. no? then let's go with Gertrude...":

Hey there! You're talking about my GREAT GRANDMA! She happens to be a great great grandma at this point X 4!

Gertrude Box (or grandma gert as we called her) is an eccentric and wonderful person.

She is 86 years old and is the quintessential life-long learner, but she didn't start her formal college education until after she left her husband at 50 years old!

She has swam in the senior olympics

She has given birth to eight children

At 86, she can still do at least three pull-ups, as she demonstrated at our last family reunion

Quick! Someone do a documentary before she kicks the bucket sky-diving!

http:www.jeanjitomir.com

the post itself was a rich prelude to the sartorial sophistication that would come to define apsi.

i have a thing for the notion that a name plays a role in dictating character. ...really it's a cheap subset of the question as to whether fate determines character or character determines fate -- but that's not exactly a top-shelf philosophical wondering to begin with. so whatever; it's a fun thing to ponder.

especially when today i return to my phd database [am temping at the UW college of education on a study tracking the career paths of phds in certain disciplines] and set about the task of uncovering the current residence of one Gertrude Box. ah, pardon: dr. gertrude box. she has two phds.

go ahead! say it aloud a few times. gertrude BOX. gerTRUDE box.

GERTRUDE! BOX!

strangely freeing, isn't it? it took a while but i finally tracked her down; she was a tough nut to crack. box to open. whichever.

and, if your mind is anything like mine--a generally unhelpful combination of scornful and lazy--you have to wonder what kind of person gertrude box, phd is: whether she eats wheat; if maybe when she laughs her face looks the same as when she takes a shit. that kind of thing.

i looked up the acknowledgements page of her sociology dissertation, to look for references to other family/spousal members who have more easily researchable names. and, jackpot:

"to my father, reverend harry thomas morrell, ba, bd, bph, ma, phd, and to my eight children - trudy, terry, ted, twinkle star, tom, tim, tiara and todd ... but especially to twinkle star."

well, i mean, DUH. of course it was twinkle star box who helped you, who did ALL the typing of your disseration about development of a metric for "the sociological impact of recreational parachuting." because, you know, she had the time.

black dogs : ian mcewan.

There’s a savory depth to this book. When I pull back enough to think of the whole work conceptually, it’s the layers of the pie that first demand comment. McEwan gives us a novel posed as a memoir, with two very different but inseparable narrative threads pulled by the intellectual and spiritual biographies of the writer’s parental in-laws, who, though still married, are long estranged; the primary crisis having arisen very early on, back in the 1950s, when they belonged to the Communist Party. Fun and romantic, he gangly and she graceful, both of them drowned in idealism—a pair of smiling and hopeful young British communists.

They’re early in their marriage, hiking in the European mountains, when June, the wife, has a Hitchcockian encounter with two black dogs that lastingly alters her belief in the order of things. The black dogs, who may or may not be instruments of terror biologically engineered by the Nazis but left behind after the occupation, do away with June’s inclination and/or ability to hold herself according to the rational nature of life. Her husband, Bernard, veers exclusively to logical layer of the pie, and his affinity for the Party is largely explained in this way, as being a logical framework to bring people even-handed solutions. Bernard was up the path a ways when the dogs confronted June, having been held up by these fascinating insects he was compelled to count the legs on, or something.

This, the encounter to which the title speaks, is the centerpiece of the whole arrangement; it’s the pithy center of the pie, of what’s compelled our narrator to seek out the stories and tacit counsel of the couple, the two separate parts of this diametrically opposed pair.

Why do you sound like you’re trying to write the stuffiest 10th-grade book report ever? you ask. You said you were gonna talk about the “layers of the pie”—which sounded kinda like crap at the time, but that was before you started to see how many syllables you could fit into a sentence without being interesting. You make a good point. The crazy part is that I’ve stuck to my notes so far—it’s just that I’m still relating to you the details that evoke the first part of my first point, which is the backwardness of the whole affair:

- The encounter with the black dogs is the denouement of a relationship that would continue for decades after

- Said encounter makes up the title, and is alluded to throughout the book, but is only told to us right near the end, like a proper denouement

- Though the narrator never says so, the black dogs are the driving force of his efforts—he wants to understand them, and doesn’t.

For as complicated as I’m making this, you can really simply appreciate the tightness, the emotional layers of the characters present in McEwan’s prose, by finishing the book and setting down next to you: it’s 145 pages long; the paperback is ¼” thinner than my cell phone. And four or five degrees of really complex theory of mind are at work in those pages.

The narrative turns, in the latter part of the tale, as the account of the black dogs is finally being given. There’s a break from the 2nd person voice, and it comes so naturally, I’d gone for pages before I realized the storyteller had left; nobody was telling the story; the story was just happening.

The change in style—as the 2nd person drops away, what steps in is an action-oriented tone—serves another purpose: This was the fracture point between to lovers. It became the definite pivot around which they would ground their respective life philosophies. But, strangely, the material shift of the narrative voice has a converse effect; beautifully, it brings a substance to the ambiguity of the pair’s differences.

That’s an obtuse book-report way of saying it, so let me try again: I loved this book. The end of this book, after I’d put it down, made me understand selfishness, as it relates to love, in a way that was new to me.

herzog : saul bellow.

Ah, Herzog. I’ve made a surplus of notes on the book—it’s Proust-like ratio of action : meaning; the blurring of the line between funny and desperate; the letters that frame the fragmentary passions of Moses Herzog. MH, as I took to referencing him in my notebook. As I read through it, my part, the part of reader, became more and more complicated; my note-taking began to borrow a non-sequential tendency from the narrative, and I let it tend as it would, a half-intentional effort to more closely feel the pulse of Saul Bellow’s prose. I would disqualify no train of thought from my notes, not even the trolley cars, which are just for fun. That way, I would really get into MH’s dilemma.

MH, I wrote again. These initials are mine, as well. That’s right. This makes sense, my note-taking continued, given the complex layers of patience I’ve had to develop. like MH, people in this world have heedlessly thrown trials in my direction, and i’ve countered with tribulations of my own creation—at my most heedless, i’ve mocked them by thinking myself to a standstill and making the situation worse than they ever could. Bless his complicated, initials-sharing soul, MH understands this--he set the damn bar for it. In the world where everyone has a kindred spirit on television, Herzog’s is George Costanza, who, during a previously muted break-up conversation, hollers, You’re giving me the ‘it’s not you it’s me’ routine? I INVENTED ‘it’s not you it’s me!’ nobody tells me it’s not them it’s me. if it’s anybody, it’s me. George is legitimately hurt in that moment, but it's what hurts him--not being dumped so much as having his own hollow line used on him--that parallels exquisitely back to the inclinations of Moses Herzog, his way of dialing in on a set of variables that may seem incidental to the uninformed eye. The thoughts and travails of Herzog are testament to nothing if not the likelihood of meaning in the minutiae. Although it may take some looking, during which there’s sure to be crises of cyclical analysis and general doubt. But doubt is the toothpick to the samurai sword of self-awareness, and, getting back to my point, I understand this. I, MH, understand better than some the burden of Moses Herzog. I’m not a Jew, I'm a commitment-phobic protestant, but even still.

The other day I read an entry in FreeDarko, an NBA blog a handful of writers have reserved as a space to put strangely compelling pictures and write unevenly about pro basketball, in whatever terms they happen to encounter, but always erring on the side of meta-. Sometimes with a nifty under-note of common narrative. The mention of Herzog came right at the outset of the piece, but well before the really juicy existential bit; so, sorry, it’s a long quote.

Silverbird’s promising academic career was not built on this sort of celebratory posturing... Yet somehow, FreeDarko brought out the booming rector in him.

There’s a good reason for that: since its inception, FreeDarko has been rife with overtones of prophecy, revolution, imminent change, and apocalyptic fervor. Hence the preoccupation with Futurism, the Old Testament, Islamic extremists, the Black Panthers, Heidegger, the First Continental Congress, and Herzog. I can’t exactly say what draws me to these things, other than ennui and impatience...

History’s over in art and music, but maybe basketball has yet to ride out that tide. The ripples of team destiny are what every fan’s truly after, and I’m stuck trying to do this for the league writ large...

That raises the question, though, of whether FreeDarko-ness beckons because we hate stuffy NBA thinking, or whether we hate that thinking because of a strong allegiance to FreeDarko-ness. I honestly couldn’t tell you; it’s a bit like asking if revolutions are motivated by hatred for the present or hope for the future. FreeDarko walks like it does in part because it needs to dignify its hit-list, but also because we want to believe in basketball’s future. And the only way to do that now is to hope for change, to aggressively note it at every turn. If we sometimes force the issue or appear delusional, it’s because someone has to camp at the vanguard for when reality’s caught up.

The sentiment the writer expressed at the end—the deflective call-out that hey, I might look crazy to people, to you, but “someone has to camp at the vanguard for when reality’s caught up”—bound itself back to Herzog; it drew a neat picture of Herzog’s ultimate ennui and impatience, to borrow a phrase. The language, “camp at the vanguard,’ struck me as something he’d be comfortable with. What Herzog vaguely stands up for as the story opens is this definitive sense of being ahead of the rest—not ahead in the sense of lengths on the racetrack, but something more intellectually effete and important and as-yet-ineffable than that. His stumble and stop with his critical masterwork is a black-sounding drum note in his internal narrative, and the other parts of his life—his lack of a life at home in which to invest, his listing and recording of hesitations with people (and aspects of himself) he wants to trust but no longer does—all these are tin notes sounding the loneliness that descends with the dark, out here at the end of the long peninsula, at the campsite on Vanguard Point. It’s cold, and we’re running out of matches. But of course it’s nice to stand bravely alone, too.

ba da ba ba baa ... i'm lovin' it less and less.

i've had only crap coaches in my life, from pee-wee to high school, so i've had a lot of time to imagine my dream coach, then idolize him. looking back, i can say i was selective in my imaginings; i didn't want the part where gene hackman or kurt russell makes the team work out for hours after a devastating loss; what i wanted was the part where gene hackman or kurt russell's collected rage steams out into the open and explodes at someone who marginally if at all deserves the barrage of merciless gypsy insults. when coaches like gene hackman or kurt russell show themselves in real life, i'm awed; in boyhood-fantasy terms, it's akin to ariel splashing up where i walk, up where i run, up where i play all day in the sun and wandering free with me, part of my world--you won't need those seashells up here, baby. let me get those for you. after football practice one day last week, navy coach paul johnson felt ready to remind us of a simpler time, a time of hard work and honest pay, down at the docks.

Reporter: Can I ask you something without making you mad?

Johnson: Maybe. I don't know.

Reporter: I was talking to a Navy fan and he said he follows the coverage and that he noticed something and I'm just going to put it to you. He says that it seems like when Navy loses you blame the players, i.e., we can't execute fundamental plays, but that the success of the team the last four years has been attributed to brilliant coaching. How do you respond to that?

Johnson: Whatever he thinks. I don't go down to McDonald's and start second-guessing his job so he ought to leave me alone.

Reporter: But do you feel like it can't be both ways?

Johnson: You know what? I could care less. I'm old enough where I could give a crap what the fans think or what you think to put it in a nutshell.

Reporter: Wins and losses are evenly distributed as far as credit and blame, right?

Johnson: If you could ever find one time that I said we won the game because of brilliant strategy I will kiss your butt at city dock and give you two days to draw a crowd. Find it and bring it to me.

bradshaw shrugged.

when all's said and done, carrie bradshaw will have played midwife at the birthing of the same number of defiantly confused and pointless writers as bukowski. and ayn rand. i just watched an old episode of sex & the city with laura, thank god for syndication. things were going along fine. at the end, after a long phone conversation where either she or samantha or both were in the bathroom, second-guessing the fuck out of shit, carrie thoughtfully decided to wrap things up with a voiceover. she'd realized some important things, and she announced them into the ether, using the wafting, nasal tones of someone being made to wait--and it was priceless. just breathtakingly bad. a roll of pennies in the fat fist of shittiness. if you're going have a character ingest the obvious and barf it back up for the chicks to eat, if you're going to do that, don't make her an artist, man. we do enough of this type of shit to ourselves, please, i mean it. there are people who jump on, mis-identify it as artistic, and they have something to say, too, and that's how the yuck gets born. i'd sooner pardon you for reading fear & loathing in las vegas and concluding "mescaline will always be my friend" than i would for watching episode 8 of season 5 or whatever and having your big epiphany: "when you call me a bitch, it hurts my feelings! because you're right."

tips? i got your tips right f'ing here.

a bit i wrote for work went up on the yahoo! main page as a featured article. just for an afternoon, but it generated a ton of business. this lead to dudes at work coming by my desk, flashing me the thumb and saying quietly, huntsman. nice work. i was reminded of senior year, when i asked sydney shuck to prom and she said yes; the next day at school dudes who'd never looked me in the eye were crossing the hall to shake my hand. at the end of prom i got a hug; here i get paid; it all works out in the end.

this is what it is like.

from the inner eye, by nicholas humphrey -

when an atom bomb goes off on a pacific island, this is what it is like:

albatrosses will fly for days, skimming a few inches above the surface of the water… beautiful creatures. watching them is a wonder… we were standing around waiting for this bomb to go off, which we had been told was a very small one… and the countdown comes in over the radio… and suddenly i could see all these birds… and they were smoking. their feathers were on fire. and they were doing cartwheels… they were being consumed by the heat. their feathers were on fire. they were blinded. and so far there had been no shock, none of blast damage we talk about when we discuss the effects of nuclear weapons. instead there were just these smoking, twisting, hideously contorted birds crashing into things. (interview with an observer of a test at christmas island.)

and when an atom bomb goes off over a city, this is what it is like:

the appearance of the people was … well, they all had skin blackened by burns. they had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn’t tell whether you were looking at them front or back. they held their arms bent like this .. and their skin – not only heir hands, but on their faces and bodies, too – hung down ... wherever i walked i met these people. many of them died along the road – i can still picture them in my mind – like walking ghosts. they didn’t look like people of this world. they had a special way of walking – very slowly … i myself was one of them. (interview with a survivor of hiroshima.)

and this is how men talk about atomic weapons, a speech by senator mcmahon in 1952:

some people used to claim that a-bombs, numbered in the thousands or tens of thousands, were beyond our reach. i am here to report to the senate and the american people that the atomic bottlenecks are being broken. there is virtually no limit and no limiting factor upon the number of a-bombs which the united states can manufacture, given time and given a decision to proceed all out… we must have atomic weapons to use in the heights of the sky and the depth of the sea; we must have them to use above the ground, on the ground, and below the ground.

in terms of the story i have been telling about the evolution of human social intelligence and the capacity for insight, something has gone very badly wrong. alone in the animal world we are capable of knowing what we are doing, and the effect our own actions may be having upon other human beings. such insight and imagination ought to provide the greatest restraint possible on human acts of cruelty, or blindness or indifference to the suffering of others. yet again and again, human relationships go up in smoke. after six million years of human evolution, there are just, it sometimes seems, these smoking, twisting, hideously contorted human bodies crashing into one another.

..that's the first pages of the book’s closing chapter. at 177 pages, it’s a slender volume: a science book at the start, and at the end, too, but by that time it’s revealed itself as something more--an investigation, a philosophy of us. it is supremely elegant.