Maggie's Farm

Jeff Harrell enters retail Hell

We all sometimes feel like we just want to buy something, do we not? Usually an impulse best resisted, but what the heck. Harrell's piece is funny and familiar.

Bush just can't win

Now he's too engaged with the storm mess. Just goes to show you can always criticize anyone, anytime, if you want to. Sensible Mom. I agree. Fact is, I think the press just wants to see some emotion, Clinton-style ("my empathy is bigger than your empathy"), rather than manly effectiveness.

Melville

Call me Bird Dog. I would have to confess to being a Melville fan, having read everything he wrote that is extant, including Billy Budd a few times and Moby Dick more than a few. Far from being a daunting book, Moby Dick is pure fun, a rambling, shambling mythic tale decorated with all sorts of information and local color; truly a book as big as an ocean and as unruly. If Moby Dick is the ocean, then Billy Budd is a pearl in an oyster at the bottom of the ocean. Like all wonderful writers, Melville couldn't write on one dimension if he tried. But Melville was almost forgotten and lost until the 1920s. From Dirda's review of Delbanco's new biography:

The life and afterlife of Herman Melville (1819-1891) present the greatest illustration in American literature, perhaps in world literature, of the Psalm "The same stone which the builders refused is become the head-stone." After the popular success of Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), which led to the young Melville being dubbed "the man who lived among cannibals," he embarked on a literary career that went gradually, then precipitously, downhill. By the time he was 40 he had essentially abandoned fiction altogether, tried publishing poetry with comparable success (i.e., none), and finally resigned himself -- he was, after all, married, with four children and debts -- to spending the rest of his life as a customs inspector for the city of New York. When he died, the newspaper obituary misprinted his name as "Henry Melville."

Odysseus Found?

Like Pejman, I will take this story with a grain of salt. But fun to think about Ithaka.

Why Citizens must be Armed, #2

Part 1 here. Part 2 here - thanks, Instapundit.

Darkness at Noon

Hitchins has done us a favor by highlighting Arthur Koestler in Slate magazine. Koestler was a Hungarian Jew who spent much of his life searching for something to believe in: Marxism, Zionism, hedonism, and who ultimately committed suicide. His disillusionment with Marxism resulted in the anti-Stalinist Darkness at Noon which is, or was, on every high school reading list.

A couple of quotes from Hitchin's piece:

From the first page of Darkness at Noon you become aware that the daily realization of impending execution is a powerful stimulus, both to reflection and to fatalism. Koestler's chief character, Nicholas Rubashov, is modeled on those former Bolshevik intellectuals who made full "confessions" of fantastic and abominable crimes at the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s. And, because Koestler had by no means forgotten what he had learned about the dialectic, he decided to place Rubashov in a dilemma from which he himself had escaped. What if the opponent of Stalin is still half-convinced that Stalin is morally wrong but may be "historically" right? He may decide to put his name on the confession and hope that history will one day vindicate him. His last duty to the Party may, in other words, be suicide.

Another:

Orwell's more widely read Nineteen Eighty Four, which has many points of similarity with Darkness at Noon, makes the same terrifying point that the fanatics don't just want you to obey them: They want you to agree with them.

One more:

Throughout the novel, Koestler is at pains to stress the similarity of totalitarianism to religion and to make the related comparison between dissent and heresy. It was actually his co-editor, Richard Crossman, who came up with the title The God That Failed for the anthology that included the ex-communists Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, and many others. Memorable though the title proved to be, a better one might have been Another God That Failed. For the rest of his life, Koestler swung between various forms of rationalism and pseudo-science. He was one of those people who is so intelligent and polymathic—and, one suspects, so easily bored—that no topic could detain him for long.

Read the whole thing.

Semicolon Wars

It seems like a fine thing to have a debate raging which has nothing to do with politics. Where do you stand on the semicolon issue? Some love 'em, some hate 'em, and, difficult as it may be to believe, some people are actually indifferent to the subject. I happen to enjoy colons, semicolons, ellipses, dashes, parentheses, and any other things on the keyboard, but I sometimes wonder whether some of that is pure laziness, or lack of time for editing. From a piece by Butterworth in Financial Times:

Big deal or not, there is really only one use of the semicolon that is “more or less mandated”, says Ben Yagoda, professor of English at the University of Delaware and author of About Town, a monumental account of The New Yorker magazine (whose history is marked by fractious debates over the placement of commas). And that is to separate series elements containing commas (for example, “The cities represented were Albany, New York; Wilmington, Delaware; and Selma, Alabama). The other principal uses, says Yagoda, are discretionary: “That is I might, with total grammatical correctness and without changing my meaning in the slightest, choose any one of the following: 1. ‘The book under review is utter hogwash; and that is why it is worth examining.’ 2. ‘The book under review is utter hogwash, and that is why it is worth examining.’ 3. ‘The book under review is utter hogwash; that is why it is worth examining.’ 4. ‘The book under review is utter hogwash. That is why it is worth examining.’” Deciding which of the four to choose is strictly a matter of sound and rhythm, says Yagoda - that is to say, personal style. “Writers who like (consciously or unconsciously) to stop and pause, and/or who are under the influence of Hemingway, choose 4. Those who like balanced rhythms might choose 3. Those aiming for a ‘transparent’ style might choose 2. And those who are a little bit enamoured with the sound of their own voice might choose 1.”

Read entire.

Sir George Martin

Known as the Fifth Beatle, Sir George surely deserved the term. Producer and advisor on all of the Beatle's records (except for "Let It Be," produced by Phil Spector), he also did all of the orchestration and performed on many of the records. Without doubt, he is the guy who took their raw talent and charisma and shaped it into something big.

When he first heard their demo in 1962, he commented "Awful," - but he liked the fellows when he met them, and enjoyed their humor. One of his early moves was to replace drummer Pete Best with Ringo, a better drummer from a competing Liverpool band.

A grown-up (born 1923), an ex-lieutenant in the British Air Force, a devotee of classical music and an experienced producer who had worked with Peter Ustinov, Peter Sellers, Spike Mulligan and Dudley Moore, it was great luck that he decided to take on the unknown Liverpool and Hamburg bar-band The Beatles. Sir George lent stability and musical sophistication to the band, and he knew his way around a recording studio. Sir George is, sadly, now hard-of-hearing and getting on in years, but Beatles afficionados (and who isn't?) can get a good sense of the Beatles' evolution, and of his role in it, on the 1996 The Beatles Anthology, a fine series to watch on a rainy Sunday afternoon while puttering around.

(In their brief, very productive 10-year life, it's hard to decide on a favorite Beatles album, but I would have to say that "Revolver" is their best. Not to disparage any of their other stuff. "Rubber Soul" is up there too, but for pure simple wholesome joyful pop, their first American release, which I still have on vinyl - "Meet The Beatles" - is great clean fun and full of memories for me and everyone else of my generation. It holds up well, too, if you don't need ugliness and evil in your pop music. But I cannot get into favorite Beatles - Hey Jude, Penny Lane, I Wanta Hold Your Hand, She Loves You, and the magical She Said She Said...it's endless. Oh, also Revolution, the B side of the single Hey Jude - the tune that corrected millions of impressionable adolescent minds. If you young pups want to Meet the Beatles, listen to all of their recordings - in chronological order. Satisfaction guaranteed.)

Frank Houston did a good piece on Martin in Salon in 2000, here. A brief intereview with him here, on his composing the score for the movie Yellow Submarine.There is a brief bio of Sir George on Wikipedia. There is a better and more extensive one here - click on Biography of Sir George Martin and it will appear. And more on him at this website. I am sure that a Knighthood is a fine and very cool thing, but Sir George has a far better reward for his work - the delight and gratitude of millions.

Matisse

However familiar his work is, the man himself has been a mystery. No longer. From Schjeldhal's review of Spurling's multi-volume biography of Henri Matisse, in The New Yorker:

How can intellectual potency be claimed for an artist whose specialty, by his own declared ambition, was easeful visual bliss? It’s a cinch, now that Spurling has cleared away a century’s worth of misapprehensions and canards. Take, for example, the popular notion that Matisse was hedonistic. Hedonists seek pleasure. Matisse served it, as a monk serves God. He was a self-abnegating Northerner who lived only to work, and did so in chronic anguish, recurrent panic, and amid periodic breakdowns.

Read the whole review to learn more about the man who said that art should be like a good armchair.The piece above is Matisse's Seated Dancer - in an armchair. Notice the way he patterned her skin, like upholstery. The website Artcyclopedia has a good Matisse section here, with paintings listed by museums, and links to photos.

LNG Tankers

Natural gas used to be flared off at the top of oil wells, but it has become economically worthwhile to transport and sell it by means in addition to pipelines.

Thus liquefied natural gas tankers are a growing component of fuel transport. As of 2003, there were only 151 operating, and more being built. Most, but not all, have the distinctive row of bell-shaped containers. Their construction is double the cost of oil tankers due to the costs of refrigeration and insulation, and only eight shipyards in the world are building them. We can expect to see more of them around in the future, but their construction is limited by the numbers of unloading terminals. 

There's some good info on the economics of LNG transport here, and a fine gallery of LNG tanker photos here.

Sunday evening, Long Island Sound, looking for stripers and blues.

Translation

Re our piece on translating Petrarch posted yesterday, a reader sent in this quote from the Hebrew poet H. Bialek: "Reading poetry in translation is like kissing your mother, through a veil."

Sail a 12-Metre

Does this sound good?

12metre.com on St. Maarten has five retired 12 meters, and they run several races per day. Yes, they have professional crews, but you can go too and they will put you to work.

Parker

We reported on the death of Rick's black lab Buzz last week, a reformed felon (Buzz, not Rick, well...hmmm, um) who was a hunting machine. The good news is that Parker has just joined Rick's household.