NY Times Sunday Book Review - An essay by Walter Kirn about Samson Graham-Muñoz’s latest novel

 

When I happen onto such effusive praise as Kirn pours on, I then try to find the first or previous (same thing) work to see of what it consisted. My belief was that some of the previous novel wasn’t all fiction. That is, the author probably brought in, as usual, some factual elements suitably altered.

If a search is done deeply enough into Google then, you can find, I found, support for Graham-Muñoz’s first novel. By the way, how deep have you gone in a Google search? Ever go for hundreds of pages? More? Well I went very deep and found a pitcher for the Cedar Rapids Reds who did something akin to the chiropractic on the bench and in the clubhouse. He had gone to Palmer and wanted out to play ball. Nevertheless, the win-loss record needed to improve and he felt he could help the team’s spines.

In the pursuit of such, he gave out Ambien via the team doc at 20X of the sedation dose (which he took to relax on the mound) and that dose would induce hallucinations from time to time. The second baseman kept trying to have sex with his base pad, not using an iPad, as the cunning Graham-Muñoz changed it to use by a doctor. The ball boy had a robot mistress. It used to be grad students who fiddled with the circuits until they got what they wanted, but now our youth will be serviced at younger and younger ages. Anyway, in robotics, these mistresses were a dime a dozen and got “used” and could be quite a sight with their helmets off.

Another player, an old-timer, on his 20X dose, thought he was participating in the rescue effort for the SS Princess Sophia. This Alaskan cruise ship got hung up on the Vanderbilt Reef in high winds and thick snow in 1918. Various rescue ships and boats couldn’t risk going closer. Nor could the Sophia risk launching its steel lifeboats. Weak radio (“the wireless”) couldn’t help enough. All hands stood off for better weather. The weather let up twice for short periods. They wanted to safely rescue them all, so more delay. Then the wind and snow did not abate. Meanwhile, two dawns came and went. The next night got started. The Sophia slipped from the rock. No radio, blinding snow, loud winds, and dark. For months the bodies of 75 crew and 268 passengers would appear from time to time. In that day and age, the appearance of the decomposed children was disturbing to all.

In my hunt for Graham-Muñoz, I went into a too deep penetration of Google. You can find anything, anyone, everything, and everyone. I found out more about the Sophia than I would have wanted. So Graham-Muñoz, this is a mindless dangerous technique, but better than nothing, not exclusive of course, since Kirn may have already used it in writing about you. I hope you aren’t offended.

Miranda Carter reviewed Ray Monk's Inside the Centre: the Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer for the Telegraph online

 

Well, if Monk wanted to write a scientific biography of Oppenheimer, then that would have been incrementally of little importance. Well, a biography of the nonscientific life of Oppenheimer would have become a two subject “sweet” blend about the personal and about fission and fusion bombs. Incrementally, blended, or otherwise, Carter doesn’t present the biography as being agreeable enough nor gratifying enough.

As for the science, most of the physics done by Oppenheimer would be in a subcategory about the bombs except for three papers of the 30s: "The Stability of Stellar Neutron Cores: with Serber, "On Massive Neutron Cores" with Volkoff and having assistance given by Richard Tolman, and the important "On Continued Gravitational Attraction" with Snyder. Wheeler discovered the last paper in 1952 and, during a later lecture about the subject matter of that paper, someone uttered "black hole". Wheeler in the 60s tried to interest Oppenheimer in the subject. Oppenheimer had no interest. Oppenheimer's initial approach to physics had been late, haphazard, and based insufficiently on the mathematics of it. During his 1954 security hearing, Oppenheimer said, when confronted by a physics problem, one could "if it was technically sweet you go ahead and do it" - this was in reference to the Bomb.

In particular he was referring to the solution he and others had found that was put into force at the White Sands Proving Ground, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. The explosion at the Trinity site in the White Sands killed no one. The event at Trinity provoked relief for Oppenheimer. The blast at Hiroshima was initially a triumph then seen as a horrifying occurrence even before Nagasaki. Teller's obsession would produce the H-bomb and it was an object of terror for Oppenheimer since the H-bomb was tremendously more powerful in destructive capability than the reality of the dead, sick, and maimed of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As for the blend, Oppenheimer’s personal life after WWII was ruled by factors related to nuclear weapons. Among these factors was the destructiveness of what he had helped create that went beyond a two or three times more powerful blast like the WWII ammunition ship in Halifax that exploded and killed 4,000. He thought what was needed before the work got underway at Los Alamos was six scientists and dozens of technicians. He later regretted that the Germans did not receive a taste of the sweetness of nuclear destruction. Would it have been Frankfurt, Stuttgart, or Munich? Probably Berlin would have been spared, as was Tokyo. The Japanese were still in it and the war must finish. Perhaps it could end all wars, given the US monopoly of the Bomb. Then, too, it could be used to stop Stalin from seizing Western Europe. Maybe he could be forced out of Eastern Europe.

Oppenheimer thought that at Potsdam Truman would fully inform Stalin what the US possessed as per the atomic bomb. But Truman only said it was unusually destructive and in 1945, when Oppenheimer met Truman at the White House, Oppenheimer said that he (Oppenheimer) had blood on his hands. Truman wanted nuclear weapons for US interests and Oppenheimer wanted international control. Truman's reaction was to not want such a "cry-baby" in his office ever again. Truman felt the Soviets as nuclear scientists were inept and others felt the Soviets would not make a nuclear weapon until 1960 or 1965. In any event, both did not know that Fuchs and Hall at Los Alamos had told the Soviets plenty. There was worry among the spies for the Soviets that if only the US had the Bomb, political blackmail would ensue. Revealing the secrets of the Bomb would save the world.

The H-bomb, if used against the Soviets soon enough, and with our able defense would have ended a nascent Cold War. Millions would have died. But what defense was possible? A screwdriver, said Oppenheimer, the better to open crates and find the weapon. In 1949 some Americans knew the H-bomb had no civilian use and that as a military weapon it was mass murder, extermination without justification, unless hatred be your guide.

So what if the Soviets had the H-bomb, didn't we have enough "atomics"? Of course we had to have the H-bomb if it was technically "sweet" for the Soviets to have it. Even so, might the H-bomb ignite the atmosphere? Apparently not, since in 1948 we had 50 nuclear devices, 300 of them by 1950, by the end of the 50s we had 18,000, and at the end of five decades, we had 70,000. By 1953, Oppenheimer had revealed the secret of the Cold War - no one could "win" a nuclear war. Kahn, to come along years later, and others argued that a nuclear war was "winnable". Not all need die - that was a ridiculous exaggeration, only millions and millions. On the whole there were a great many of us so hundreds of millions dead was a happening they could live with so long as we "won".

Presumably our current nuclear stockpile is in the thousands. Does it exist to prevent the Chinese from being forceful in Walla Walla, Elko, Santa Fe, Minot, Fort Dodge, Murfreesboro, Valdosta, and Bangor? Oppenheimer's blend of personal and nuclear weapons was acceptable with the symbols of WWII and the dawn of a new unimaginable power at our disposal. But the Republicans wanted massive retaliation and Eisenhower no longer would support the "whole man" evaluation of acceptability for security risks. One action could ruin you. Under the terms of the Cold War hysteria, Oppenheimer had more than one objectionable action that he had undertaken in the 30s and later.

Kennan knew that we had a power over Nature out of all proportion to our moral strength. After his 1954 security hearing, Oppenheimer lived on but he disappeared. Even so, in 1960 in Tokyo he said he did not regret the technical success of the atomic bomb. He could still taste how sweet it had been. He and they had found a vast tree of knowledge that was not in Eden. They devoured all the equally vast number of sweet apples of that tree. Pynchon and Beckett have written passages about the consumption of a sweetness that is more than is needed or desirable. Has Monk, according to Carter, written a book that is needed or desirable?

Note: About the personal Oppenheimer, read Bird and Sherwin. About other subject matter pertaining to Oppenheimer read Bernstein, McMillan, and Cassidy. See the pictures in Goodchild.

The Island of Second Sight by Thelen as recommended by Zolov, Weiss, and Hoople from Amazon and Riding of the New York Times

 

I don't really want to read it. Another must read. Another groan from me. But since it is effusively "recommended"...and why do I read the reviews? OK, a quick check on Amazon, but a little too much in price as I was hoping for ebook savings. Library? On order.

Amazon's reviews, by the way, collectively give me more reason to read it rather than the NY Times review that told me of permutations of predilections all too familiar summed across books across the years. So I wanted another reason to read it and the other thing it has going for it, is style and humor. Too little of these two, as examples, were in the Times review to get me to buy it.

Then, too, the reviewers aren't looking to sell the book to me. I can read it when the price drops or the library copy can be checked out. It would make more sense for me to read any of anything’s reviews months or longer from now so that any hype, justified or otherwise, could die down or level off and the price and library availability would decrease and increase, respectively.

Remembering Patrick Leigh Fermor, as done by Pearson and Macfarlane

 

Remembering Patrick Leigh Fermor benefits from an appreciation in The Guardian online, or it is more like a white-hot tribute to Fermor by Allison Pearson in meeting with Artemis Cooper, author of a very recent biography of Fermor. Also from The Guardian online, the same biography is recommended by Robert Macfarlane. Fermor was their hero, whose touchstone was WWII and Fermor's Cretan exploits therein. Heroes are rare today. What they did to become a hero is usually severely compromised by an emphasis on what the hero did not do or should not have done. The nay overpowers the yea - though still a hero, albeit qualified.

The qualification doesn't partake of morals. No heroes today are moral figures. Pearson and Macfarlane between them found him to be unconventional and faunlike. The faun wasn't like one in marble since he could smoke 80 cigarettes a day and drink like a drowning fish. Very early on, on the farm, he roamed the English countryside and it is suggested he wanted to always do so. To do so he was a bit of a sponger and more like a satyr but that was more than counterbalanced by a passion for living so that in his 80's (he died at 96) he could leap from rock to rock all the while asking about food, what had been visited, supplying information about Greek myths and Dylan Thomas - meantime sporting invigoration and curiosity in addition to being inconclusive and charming.

His personality did not need assembly. Such types can get to be tiresome though envied. Who spent a long time with him on their terms and put more luster on the hero's image? One could add to his being uncommon in many of his activities such as in moral matters. He wrote about a long journey in 1933-34 when he was 18. Then, when he was much older, books about that travel came out in 1977 and 1985. He wrote them from notes not at all supportive of what found its way into print. He, in one example, recounted how he rode across a plain on horseback when he didn't have a horse.

He was not liked by all. He certainly liked the Greeks of the Mani peninsula where he had a home. Why the Greeks? Doesn't the passion for living and being an invigorating influence have representation and reception in other times and places? Yes, in other places, but in other times, certainly in more recent times, is doubtful. The sensations he brought to the fore are routine now as they are accentuated by television, the Internet, and movies. One vital distinction remains - he was real, they are not.

Fifty Shades of Grey as done by James Parker

 

The little that is left, of our culture, cannot be found in the book mentioned in Parker's "Bad Romance". [in the Atlantic Monthly for October, 2012] Now, of course, all romance is bad unless saved by S and M. So it would seem, since boredom is our plight.

He states, if you have genitals, you must have an opinion about the book. You are driven by the "culturally compulsory" to take up a position. A few of us become like soldiers hopelessly defending a private redoubt.

I thank Parker for telling me enough about the book so that I do not care to read it. Rather, I could not read it - trash, he calls it. It is hopeless, at this late date, to ward off the trash lobbed at the redoubt.

They and it cannot get in the redoubt - never will they and it do so. They and it can overrun the position. Take it, you lost souls and pieces-of-crapola. We aren't defending modernity, not what Lawrence's 1928 lament wanted abolished, but since after 1928, modernity did suffer a repulse; we now contrary-wise assert no victory over trash triumphant.

Elsewhere, the numbness of modernity vibrates so loudly that fractures put fragments in play. Those fragments that Parker quotes are sharply enough felt by him to put his observations in a register higher than the quotes he makes. The numbness that hums, drones, into his bones is too loud to be countered by any vibrancy.

The constant hum of our "culture" prevents us from hearing a small and quiet voice. In other words, morality is no longer heard here.

Pauline Kael and Our Un Peu Culture

  Pauline Kael did indeed lose it at the movies. She lost "it" in a sexual sense as implied by her first book's title. Other titles of her movie review collections in book form had a sexual connotation. Certainly movies had become her passion. One can affirm that her loss was akin to losing virginity. She did swoon over some films like the effect on her was sexual. To use Mr. Ebert's term - she was "knocked-up" by those movies.

 The lack of virginity was repeated over the years. There were states of immediate gratification, over and over, per movie by movie, if so affected. It was expected to go on and on, more movies, more of the unexpected. But the lack of expectation could not be of reality. There would have been a framework of the expected otherwise the unexpected would have been incomprehensible. Such expectation implies standards. At least those standards could have been acknowledged, implicitly or explicitly. Neither possibility occurred. Her history, writing style, and enthusiasms were not in service to standards.

 Her home region was not standard. She self-defined herself as a Westerner and in opposition to New York City. That is, she was from the "out West" part of the United States. This, for her, was a thin and short sliver of the West coast near and in San Francisco, but it could not be and was not representative of the West. Her West wasn't a part of New York City. Historically she had nothing to keep her apart from New York City. The Western family life was dreary. Presumably the Eastern family life was dreary also. So it was no surprise that family entertainment as a category of movie appreciation would be reviled by her. She preferred trash. School ties, meaning high school Eastern or Western, were deplorable. For example, how could anyone have gone through high schools like the one Wiseman showed in Philadelphia and then have a meaningful, useful future, she asked.

 She didn't ask, but how could the New York City of the 70's, caught up in cinema-du-zap, go on to other venues? For example, on to other venues that included lewd nuns violated on the altar. Or how did the 50's become the 60s and then how did the 60s get to the New York City of the 70s? Did one decade "cause" the next? For her, whatever came of being alive during the Depression, WW II, the Cold War, and the pain of Vietnam?

 She thought those years of the 50's were formed by a classless society characterized by dull jobs, unduly influenced by television (that did not seize our souls) that fed into consumerism and so helped to foster the nihilism of youth. Pascal's concerns about boredom were not considered. The 60's she did not characterize though she thought its violence acceptable if blood and cruelty made for the appearance of a good movie.

 Her appearance and manners left something to be desired as did her writing style. She was photographed in atrocious garb; she was short, unattractive, foul-mouthed and gregarious with Wild Turkey and cigarettes at the ready. She was very bossy, always at boil, fluttery, bird-like and bawdy. In her writing style, never much appreciated by the British, she went in for wild subjectivity, aided by a ragged conversional stance, pursuing, jazz-like, a lack of structure and adopting a tone of declarations with certainty and assertions not lacking in surety. She got into extended digressions. Sentences did not necessarily explain, or amplify or limit a preceding one.

  Such a style was, perhaps, forgiven because of her enthusiasms. Some of those enthusiasms included Art. She added to the 60's enactment of a lack of separation of parts within culture, within civilization, and between culture and civilization. She admired movies characterized as being garbage. She appreciated Art and wanted commercial ventures, what with the profit motive, to be beside the point. Nevertheless, Art is about valuable experiences. The movies lump elements of books, music, and photography into a heady or toxic mix. Lumping them together creates confusion. But is it Art?

  Because Art can turn a profit, then that should not be held against it. Either it is or it is not Art. Veering in and out of the definition of Art endangers the classification of Art. Then what is valuable becomes beside the point. The uncomfortable feeling is that if the movie is a commercial success, it can't be Art. That is, if it is a moneymaker, many people have seen it and Art was never of the many. If Art can be defined, at least implicitly, by what commercial interests had put forward, then the self-styled artists will have only their self-designations as being representations of Art.

  Other people, like Kael, defined Art in her reviews, in her appreciation of some movies. Those movies, were like ones involving butter and sodomy, a rape as "one of the few truly erotic sequences on film", "Nashville", and "Bonnie and Clyde" with its politically "brilliant" fusillade. The shooting was in the service to a suggestion of violence which would have been grotesque, but rather it was violence we needed to see for what was cool, untouched by morality. The violence of "Bonnie and Clyde" was, Kael wrote, a sophisticated response to a contemporary society that demanded it.

  It may have also "demanded" Véronique of "La Chinoise", characterized by Kael as being so much like girls on college campuses then. Véronique was a terrorist who killed the wrong person and so killed again to get it right. Véronique was said by Kael to be like so many female college students of that anti-war era – not self-conscious, frightened, yet assured. Certainly they were not so prissy as to adopt an accusatory tone and declare, dismissively, "I don't like violence".

 Also, beyond the campus, they would know that the anti-war political power of "Bonnie and Clyde" had no reference to prissy Viet Cong. Remember, blood and cruelties by whomever were acceptable if it made for a good movie. They also thought violence was for animals but, we who centuries ago found that animals could not do arithmetic, divided reality into at least two large nonintersecting groups - animal vs. us. In short, animals, without using mathematics, aren't violent, we, using arithmetic, are violent. Animals are as they are, without choice, we have a choice. We can be additive until violence occurs.

 Kael could touch on many subjects in a review, from butter and bullets as in the above. Almost anything could be in a review of hers. Those movies were dots. She was one of the lines connecting them. But, once connected, and you got there, then where were you? Nearly all aspects of life could pop up in a review by her. So what? You had arrived, and where were you? No standards there. No tradition there. On tour you went carried along by Kael and it got you nothing of value unless it was for the ride. Was, the ride, at least, placed in a frame of reference? Was it "I have arrived here" and "I came from there"? No, then nothing truly got connected. You could start with the first word of one of her reviews and get to the last one and you were nowhere. You were always being "here", but no one writes in the present.

 In the past, circa WWII in England, a book about writing nonfiction as good English noted that faults of writing can reflect faults of character and that good English writing is a moral matter. A review is not an excuse for risk taking. It is rather a dry form and to be inaccurate about achievement or attempt to get at impressions of indescribable feelings puts one into "suggestion and parable". The review writing need not have devices or tricks. An individual’s review, in error, may aspire to a peculiar range of expressions, logical weaknesses, and stylistic extravagancies. Writing down to the many, the inexpert, and we must not have been as expert as Kael, (so she indicated), can lead to mental confusions such as if there was violence in Vietnam, then violence must be on the screen. Attempting to give figure to such nonsense is, in a Puritan's terms, "mere idolatry".

 Kael's colloquialisms, slang, contractions and constructions gained what? Lost what? Not a paradise lost, but what was lost was sense and sensibility and what was gained was surly and sick. She acted as if all civilizations have at least a minimal culture. But after the lost culture, there may be a civilization as residue. In any event, we now are tending to a un peu culture, thanks to the likes of Kael. Culturally, we are on the approach to zero like "The Chelsea Girls", as they were once characterized to be representing a godless civilization. In the little space and time we have left there is more than one level within our culture. It is the sum of perhaps many parts. Even so, in its entirety, it is paltry.

  With culture is Art. Now is it, pornography or Art? What's the difference? Now is it violence, crudity, and vulgarity or Art? Who cares? Now is it the trivial, animalistic, and stupid or Art? Don't ask. Now is it inhumanity, greed, and a cult of personality as morality or Art? Go away. Now is it incoherence, irrationality, and the intractable or Art? Why continue? Now is it lies, alternate realities, and the global diabolical or Art? No escape.

 The questions asked and the answers given are not of parity. The one persisting element, Art, is not an independent variable. It depends on a high order of disciplined reason. With such, it should never disappear but, if it is difficult to know if it is there, then we may be without it. It doesn’t seem to be gone so then we have a un peu culture? Some among us want the culture to disappear. Others, like Everett Ruess, who engineered his own disappearance so well that he could not be found, want more. The Ruessians want the end of culture without the option of return.

A "Sherlock" (After Death) Suggestion

 

Dr. Watson had listened only a short time to an interior decorator's deprecating opinion of the former occupant of the room, namely Sherlock, when he cursed and headed to the exit door. He opened the door and stood, hand on the doorknob, and only a short time ago he had told Mrs. Hudson (she was in an interior room) that enough was enough and that he would be back tomorrow to begin moving out.

There was a thunderous "Mrs. Hudson!" from Sherlock's former room. Mrs. H. came rushing out of an adjacent room, and in going around a corner, she glanced at Dr. W and asked "Sherlock?"

After entering S's former room, she shouted. All was then quiet. No sounds of any kind. John slowly shut the door. It closed with a loud report. Slowly, very slowly, he walked to the open entrance to S's room. The cameras shoot him from many angles during his long walk.

At the entrance, looking in, he sees Mrs. H. mostly on the floor with her head in Sherlock's lap .S is half out and half in disguise.

Sherlock - John, I had to die. Sorry. If I had not done so, then you, Mrs. Hudson, and Lestrade would have. Help me to get her to the bed.

Once that is done, J rushes S to hug him furiously. S pats J tentatively on the back.

S - Molly helped with a cadaver. And here I am.

Mrs. H. begins to come to. She sits up, declares she is hallucinating again, sees S and faints again.

S- This will never do. Mrs. Hudson! Mrs. Hudson!

John moves to assist but she comes to again. She rushes to hug S.

S - Thank you. Thank you. Could I have a bite?

Mrs. H. - Of course, Sherlock, of course you must be hungry after coming back from the dead.

Off she goes.

Sherlock has decided to take John's suggestion that he take on "small" cases for the time being.

J - And what of Moriarty?

S - He tried and he failed. It was elaborate but it failed. What if he should fail a second time?

J relates that he hasn't been at Baker Street much of late. He would hallucinate as did Mrs. H. Other than that, he thought he saw S here and there in the streets or in shops - from the back or side a remarkable number of people looked like S if you are disposed to find him there. J's therapist was urging him to leave Baker Street for good.

S - I hope you will remain.

S has his next case in the works. He has been walking along Baker Street from time to time and noticed a large part of the bottom row of windows opposite his address always lit late into the night. They had not been so before. One window is the flat for Mrs. Smith and it was not lit.

She had been complaining to the management about milk bottles disappearing. She orders a specially prepared milk from a distant restaurant. They deliver and in exchange she writes favorable reviews on her blog that is devoted to accounts of London eateries.

Sherlock had enquired about renting lodging in the building, and then thought better of it. He was in the building's management office when Mrs. Smith presented the complaint.

John is pleased that S is taking a small-is-better approach to casework but finds S to be not his old self if S is serious about "The Case of the Missing Milk Bottles".

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Adjacent to Mrs. Smith's flat is a short hallway that terminates at double doors. Behind those doors have been various commercial establishments over the years. Currently behind those doors are many windows that remain lit far into the night.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Sherlock sits on a bench in the hall opposite Mrs. Smith's door. The milk bottles are placed at her door. He has cut holes through the newspaper. He is peering through the holes. The milk has been delivered. A man in a white lab coat enters the hallway from one of the end-of-the corridor doors. He has fiery red painted-on eyebrows, red fake ill-fitting mustache, and a flimsy excuse for a red wig. In his breast pocket are pens, paper, and a short slide rule stood on end. He nonchalantly walks up to the milk bottles and takes two of the four.

S - (from behind the newspaper) asks, "Why do you always take two?"

He - So that Mrs. Smith not be totally without, but enough to attract attention.

S - My attention?

He - I had hoped so. Knowing you did reside at 221 B in this street and presumably you are doing so again.

S - Perhaps. And the milk is for....?

He - I pour it down the sink. I am in need of your help. I didn't think you to be dead. At least I hoped you weren't or I would be in horrible fix. Then I saw you in the manager's office. In disguise were you but you did that "thing" you do and you gave that "look" - both in quick succession and quickly suppressed, but I noticed nonetheless.

S - Your name?

He - Reginald

S - Reggie?

R - No, Reginald.

S - Your occupation?

R - Chemist. In there. (He pointed at the double doors.)

S - Shall we?

R - Certainly.

The interior was like a large hall filled with benches and on the benches was a large amount of lab equipment.

S - Research?

R - Certainly.

S - Please, most of the equipment here is useless for chemical analysis. Most of it is quite new and not plugged in. Those lab attendants in the white coats in the far distance, and they are always far away, are rented, I presume, since they are tenants of this building. But then there are two bench top apparatus that have been in recent operation. Your procedures for these two are at an impasse.

R - So you have been here already.

S - On two occasions.

R - Yes, the two experiments could not be completed.

S - Why not pull the plug on them?

R - They represent the problem. No crimes have yet been committed but may be. A crime against humanity. Something I find myself powerless to stop.

S - Indeed.

R - I can't continue here at the moment. A delivery is imminent. Please excuse me.

In a short time, John joins S.

J - I saw the scene of the crime in the hallway. Dreadful sight, what will they not stoop to?

S - Actually there is a much bigger crime in the offing. Reginald....

J - Reggie?

S - No, Reginald, the owner of this lab has set up this staged chemistry effort to attract my attention.

J - And here you are. From milk bottles to what?

S - Crimes against humanity.

J - Here? New equipment. What's this? Not being used.

S - Obviously.

J - Except for close to us. How convenient. Rats in a maze. Worms in a tank.

S - Planarians. Wormrunners of history, old history. The Digest. Grind them up, feed the grounds to other worms and they could learn faster - memory transfer. So it was maintained.

J - The rats seem confused. Dazed perhaps?

Reginald approaches. R - Ah, Dr. Watson, I am Reginald Susset of the Pacific. Lately in your metropolis to attempt replication of....

S - More history than chemistry.

J - Reggie?

R - No, Reginald.

J - So what brings us here?

R - Before you are the two experiments of interest.

J - Rats and worms. Forgetful rats, so they appear to be.

S - Precisely.

R - Quite so, Dr. Watson. The rats are forgetful. So too are, so to speak, the worms.

J - The rats can't do the maze.

S - And more than that.

R - True enough. Their forgetfulness has been accelerating. So elementary a state that they are forgetting to eat. Then, I suppose, to move.

J - The worms are in a like state?

S - Yes. So, Reginald, how did they get to be this way? Don't tell me. The two experiments have only their water supply in common. What's in the water?

R - Good question. I can't find out.

J - Eh?

R - If I try to analysis, I begin to have more of whatever it is.

S - Self-assembly of the molecules. Hierarchal and helical with unusual environmental conditions promoting a riotous outcome.

R - I can't explain it any other way. Just as you said.

J - You mean something in the water makes them, rats and worms, forget? We could forget? A great many of us could forget and go on forgetting until we forget to carry on?

S - Correct. Rats are evolutionarily speaking much closer to us than the worms so chances are....

R - Right.

J - If in the wrong hands, it is a crime against humanity? Milk bottles and now this. You haven't done well, Sherlock, in getting on to a small case.

S - In such an elementary state, they could be reversible.

R - These are neither the first rats nor worms so affected. It is irreversible.

S - Then disassociate the molecule, the contaminant in the water. Obviously you didn't invent it, how was it discovered?

R - A water bottle from a supplier had it in it, apparently. No other cases of memory loss have been reported.

S - A chance thing, that it was in the water at all.

R - Yes, it would appear so.

S - And now you want the contaminant neutralized?

J - By us?

R - Well, where else could I go? After all, you are across the street.

S - After you purposely located here. Actually this has gotten boring. So go about your business of disposing of the molecule. Use your ubiquitous slide rule, if it is more than an artifact of history, to calculate how it must be done.

R - It is reproducing itself in the container. It will burst the container. It will be set loose upon the world.

J - Now from what film was that?

S - Hold on, John, this is not as elementary as it might appear. Reginald has a point. If no action on our part is forthcoming, we are accessories to an unsavory future. For how long could we live on milk or some such?

R - Yes, there you have it.

S - So irradiate the water.

J - Cc by cc? Wouldn't we need a few centuries?

S - Well, actually molecule by molecule and it would be much faster if massive amounts of protons were available and pulse discharge of electricity were collaborative with the addition of coenzymes.

R - Have you an invention in mind?

S - It is with us now if the Sun cooperates. It has been active of late. Even so, the display is not often seen in Great Britain.

J - How's that?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Neither J nor S trusts R to carry out the task of transporting the water to the far North of Great Britain during a particularly fearsome outbreak of the aurora borealis, the Northern Lights.

R had to be coerced into going. He has a phobia about polar bears. It is one reason he lives in the Pacific. It took a long time to quiet him and assure him forcibly that no polar bears are in the North.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Mission accomplished. J and S are at their ease at 221B.

Mrs. Hudson - Boys, here's a parcel for you.

She gives it to Sherlock.

S - From somewhere in the Pacific. Will you do the honors? (Hands it to John)

J - What have we here? Two slide rules. Gorgeous cases. Velvet slip covers. They are trimmed in gold, no doubt. A check for a substantial amount. A note. And a packet of seeds. The note says - I have now returned to my island. I did encounter a bear, a polar bear, after you left the North. He had escaped from an illegal zoo and was stalking a child when I intervened. I used my slide rule. I threw it at the bear. Got its attention. They can run quite fast. He was netted and darted and how resides where a bear, a polar bear, should be, after an excursion by plane. The enclosed slide rules were the most advanced available. The seeds represent what we all should undertake to do from time to time and vice versa and etc.

S - They are?

J - Forget me nots.

S - Good old Reggie, well, we will see what can be done with them by Mrs. Hudson.

J - By the way, what container hereabouts should not be used to water the plants?

S - Whatever do you mean?

J - Of course you retained a sample of the Reggie’s water for later analysis. Somewhere before it was neutralized, it wasn't all neutralized, was it?

S - Herein, (holding up a lipstick case-sized gleaming metal tube) is what can be a project to carry me through a dreary afternoon. Soon it will be done. Can I count on your assistance?

J - Certainly not.

S - The best of a possible regress is a solitary one?

J - Let's just say I have some treasured memories that I wish to retain.

S - What you can't remember would not be a danger to you.

J - You have yours, I have mine. Your remembered danger need not be mine, and vice versa and etc.

The doorbell rings.

END

Bonnie and Clyde, the movie

There is authenticity and there is sufficient authenticity. "Bonnie and Clyde" lacked the latter. Why? The music, the acting, the writing, and a special fusillade all lacked sufficient authenticity.

What Scruggs played was banjo's "Foggy Mountain Breakdown". It was performed by him starting in the 40's and "Bonnie and Clyde" (B and C) was set in the early 30's. The happy or jolly banjo sounds gave a lilt at times to motion on screen, usually cars in motion. The music breaks in as apparently needed here and there and has a slower mournful sound near the end.

At the start of the movie there was a repressed bedroom Bonnie upstairs at the family home. She had been working as a waitress. She saw out her window that Clyde was looking to steal the family car. He had been in State Prison and his claim to fame was toes missing courtesy of prison antics and his propensity to rob banks.

Bonnie wanted to know what armed robbery was like. Well, there was presented a phallic pistol that she dutifully stroked. The gun did work. They introduced themselves in a grocery store while stealing. Then it was "car and kiss".

[The also dutiful inhibitory bit got introduced as Clyde said he didn't like kisses though he did not like boys. Bonnie had her chance (fat chance) to go home but this (anything) was better than being a waitress. She had been smarter than all others in high school. There were more dutiful words about youth (the movie was released in 1967) with the viewers being young, and Beatty and Dunaway were good looking, and in rebellion, and moving fast along the roads of hopelessness, and they and a farmer shot up that farmer's home lost to the bank as social protest, and they had their funny-sad adventures covered in the press, and so on.]

Then it was on to real banks, after a robbery attempt of a failed one, and murder later as a clinging banker got it in the head through a getaway car's side window. Emphasis of concern was then on why the driver, Moss, parked the car and was still parked as the robbery had gotten beyond the bank.

A more dutiful scene awaited viewers as Bonnie writes, something of artistry, of talent, like all the youth of the 60's self-reported that they had too in abundance. Then, later, Eugene was shouting at Velma, his girlfriend, to step on it as B and C gave chase in a turn-the-tables- on- them after B and C stole Eugene's car. So Eugene and Velma joined the gang for a day until knowledge of Eugene's profession as an undertaker got them left in the road. But all knew they were folks just like them.

The best scene brought Bonnie near home to have a family reunion at which Ma made the sensible remark - keep running. What else was there to do? They were too stupid for disguises or strategy near the borders of states then currently being travelled. To go out West, work, settle down for a time, were all beyond them. It could have been better but it wasn't. It was fun and sad and sad and fun. Robbery for little money and few groceries was their forte.

[For those of that era to the rural North of their exploits, the news about them was received knowing that they weren't dead yet and so no information could be gotten about how they had got it. The interest was in when and how. If B and C were to rob and kill among them, then there would have soon been answers about the when and the how.]

Clyde was hit. Bonnie was hit. They had been surrounded. Buck, Clyde's brother, was dead, shot in the head. Blanche, Buck's wife, was captured. Moss took B and C to his father's house. B and C recovered. The most violent scene occurred there as the devious father punishes his son for having a tattoo and for taking up with B and C.

The father betrayed B and C to get his son's prison time reduced. Meanwhile, Bonnie wrote and the dutiful outcome regarding the inhibition was presented as Clyde overcame his inhibition because of what she wrote and got more than hot for Bonnie. The father, the betrayer, stops them on their return to his house. From behind rustling bushes the lawful authority opened fire. Clyde, out of the car, and Bonnie, in the car, were hit multiple times, blood showed. A special herky-jerky sequence showed Bonnie getting hers. There was not a shot of the corpses. The viewers were shown the back of the car. End.

Beatty had been Beatty, an excitable Beatty. Dunaway was a 60's chick stuck into the 30's. Estelle Parsons as Blanche and Gene Hackman as Buck acted well enough that the title for the movie, on acting merit alone, should have been "Blanche and Buck".

Eight More from Crowther

 

Yojimbo

• Seen here was an expanded upon taste for Westerns' clichés.
• No deep drama was in the hard to follow plot complications.

 

The Wild One

• A part of the then contemporary American life was an ugly and debased menace. Those making up the menace, like a wolf pack, were seen from a frightening viewpoint.
• What with their aggressive contempt for police and common decency, the members of the pack enjoyed an advantage against those in a fair society that were not members of the pack.

 

Blackboard Jungle

• This was a tale of vicious and terrible hoods as animal-like juvenile delinquents. Could such horrors be real? The movie depicted terrorism by urban youth.
• The movie was social dynamite. It went beyond entertainment and perhaps stimulated youth.
• As an ineffective counterbalance, there was shown, briefly, an incredibly different school complete with palm trees.

 

Hud

• Ours was a culture, asserted Crowther, that nurtured indulgence and greed. We were foully diseased moderns.
• Some critics disapproved of the film's conventional morality. Hud was said to be no worse than all the rest of them.
• Moral scruples including respect for the law were addressed by the film. Such a subject could very well be more important than petroleum or the nuclear bomb.

 

Blowup

• Within the long wandering about into redundancy, there was good, solid substance in the film. It was a fascinating film having something to say about personal involvement and emotional commitment.
• The too candid dehumanizing potential of photography may have explained the film's blackballed status.

 

The Godfather

• Crowther found immense and astonishing scope in this film. As a moral society we were shown to be phoney.
• The ethics within the mob were put to us as supporting love, loyalty, and sentiment as opposed to the mores of the conventional capitalist economy. The mob's ethics were grounded in expediency and the audience went along with it.
• The film achieved the ultimate in fantasizing and romanticizing the genres of gangster and crime movies.

 

Nashville

• A great swath of the American scene was accurately developed in this film. The theme was that politics was everywhere in American life.
• The ubiquitous political cast to our lives was a grim and sinister take on the cheap and vicious Big Con of having the concept of values supported but specific values becoming vulgar.

 

Last Tango in Paris

• Because Brando was in this film; it got a lot of attention.
• Sheer lust was denigrated. A cruel sadistic way to loss of confidence and competence brought out brutality to a woman as part of a self-destructive urge.
• As a preventive for love, the male character became a sodomist. He was a strong symbol of evil, actually, there was nothing stronger.
• In sum it was the flame-out of the Heroic Age of movie entertainment. Perhaps it represented the American rape of the postwar world.

Five by Crowther

 

The Golden Coach

• You saw a teeming, colorful picture that was a beautiful sight.
• It was curiously hollow and meaningless.
• Anna Magnani was a lusty and lumpy termagant with raucous vitality wasted on a shrieking laugh at lame gags.

Shoeshine

• The film was a neorealist deeply devastating look at two boyish swindlers who are usually among those corrupted and corroded by circumstances.
• De Sica and others had cried out in pain against the terrible outrage committed by the powerful impersonal forces set against the post WWII Roman poor.

Breathless

• It was devoid of moral tone. It had a sordid view of the savage ways and moods of the rootless young of Europe.
• A cruel punk going nowhere in a couple of murky days did so in a vicious manner with ragged relations in regard to the world.
• The girl was imperious to morality or sentiment. She was cold, shrewd, and a self-defensive animal in a glittering, glib, irrational, and heartless world.
• The film's venom was in full force then and, later, youth could very well find themselves in a more poisonous milieu.

West Side Story

• This was nothing short of a cinema masterpiece, a rich artistic whole. The dances had sweep and vitality. There was a pulsing persistence of rhythm. The drama was valid and had integrity.
• The candy-store owner screams - You kids make this world lousy! When will you stop? It was a cry to be heard by all sympathetic and thoughtful Americans.
• It presented what was a staggering waste of the energy of youth.

Jules and Jim

• Arch and arty it was.
• It was about the perversities of enigmatic and evasive woman in a continual and babbling flow.
• Emotional content of the film was lodged in the score. You heard, too, long conversations and intrusive commentary.

Eight More from Kael

 

Yojimbo

• The soggiest humanitarian sentiments need not have had confirmation in the movies- said Kael.
• The kinesthetical response to the action was overwhelming. The action was so thoroughly and outrageously bloody that it got to a hilarious kind of style. It was a glorious comedy. The comic and exhilarating extreme violence didn't sicken you.
• Movies needed to have their concepts of heroism overturned.

 

The Wild One

• A news story became a nightmare on the screen. Then the misunderstood boy meets girl.
• The postwar lust for security got countered by Brando. He had his instincts. Society was crap and he knew it. He was strong enough not to take the crap.

 

Blackboard Jungle

• The youth center's activities did not negate the violence of delinquency. The delinquents weren't mistaken about being suspicious of psychiatric tinged social workers and teachers.
• The violence of delinquents had garnered headlines and Blackboard Jungle's creators wanted a traumatic structure gotten from a social problem drama. Police were called into theaters to quell the reactions to the violence of Blackboard Jungle. It was a violence that meant more than relief from a boring plot.
• The why for the violence was not sought. The boys had their codes, leaders, and gangs. They rejected society. Some persons reacted by putting it down to mixed-up kids. They still wanted the boys with them, within society.
• "...as yet, we have no social or political formulations that use indifference toward prosperity and success as a starting point for new commitments."

 

Hud

• In an America confused about enjoying prosperity, Hud was to be an indictment of materialism. It wasn't to lean on hokum, glamor, romance, tempo, and invoke a feeling for a place by means of the rhythm in and of a slick style.
• The misunderstood son pursues wives and attempts what could have been a ritual rape of the "white Negro" housekeeper. She invited "rape" and could have been grateful for his breaking down her resistance.
• The gunmen (the Nazis) shot the cows (the Jews). Kael's socialist friends couldn't accept cops if there was a necessary shoot but their government was to integrate schools and stop discrimination in housing while splintering the CIA that killed JFK.
• Her father had been adulterous and a Republican. He was also generous, kind, and a Western democrat not understood by Easterners.

 

Blowup

• Kael saw Marcel Marceau appreciated by an audience that applauded itself for its own appreciation of art. She preferred the Ritz Brothers. So Marceau was to the Ritz Brothers as Blowup was to movies that she liked.
• Blowup's peculiar slugged conscious was desired and became a personal matter to too many people. So what if it is sex without connection - naughty but nice? Easy sex doesn't mean an empty life.
• Movies of the past could make drama exciting and possible even if the protagonists were shallow and venal. Those movies did it without heavy symbolism standing in for self-importance.
• The photographer was an anti-hero. Thirty-eight people did not call the police in the Kitty Genovese case. Anti-humanism was so defined? Blowup had a complaint to register about dehumanization but it was carried out in a dehumanized way.

 

The Godfather

• The worst in America was its feudal ruthlessness.
• Organized crime was an obscene symbolic part of unleashed free enterprise and unbridled government economic policy.

 

Nashville

• She never loved a movie more. It was the ultimate Altman.
• Wild metaphors were filmed. The lonely degraded failures of an entire group of the poor turned into groupies.
• The movie was the funniest epic about America. It was exhilarating to feel a part of the life Altman showed you.

 

Last Tango in Paris

• The male of the movie had masculine pride and aggression and obscene debasement as reality. The female of the movie carried the whole history of movie passion in her long legs and a baby face of the bourgeois.
• Feelings about the sex scenes were unresolved. Nevertheless, the film was utterly beautiful to look at.
• It was the breakthrough. Finally emotional violence had been committed in the most erotic movie ever made. It could also become the most liberating movie ever made.

Five by Kael

 

The Golden Coach

• Jean Renoir in this ironic comedy found beauty in our being human. Such a status brings to us, via Renoir, illusion vs. reality and theater vs. life and confusion in role-playing of our identity.
• Anna Magnani gave her greatest screen performance.
• The film ended in loneliness and before the end, the viewer needed to have experienced the "feel" of the film. This entails feeling with A. Magnani the deep sense of the ridiculous, her deep roots that she can pull out, shake them in the face of pretension and convention, go back down, and be stronger. She laughs cosmically and cries "Mama Mia!"

Shoeshine

• Kael saw it alone in 1947. It was seen after a terrible lover's quarrel. She was crying and in incomprehensible despair.
• After the showing, a college girl said it wasn't special. How could this be? How could one not feel what the movie offered? Some needed a fist to hit them to provide the feeling.
• The movie came out of a welter of experience. It provided the truth about confusion and accident in our affairs.
• The boys had their dreams betrayed. Their weaknesses and desires were exploited.

Breathless

• She proclaimed this film to be the most important New Wave film to arrive in the U.S. It was a frightening chase comedy.
• What appears to happen was accidental. The two principals of the film were a horrible possible new race of chaos-embracing, casual, and carefree moral idiots. They were of a terrifying mass society that has its members indifferent to human values.
• The girl was an impervious, passively butch American. Not giving a damn, she was a sad, sweet, and affectless doll. Existence for her was to experiment with roles. She was in the most terrifyingly style a muse and a bitch and a goddess.

West Side Story

• Kael thought the movie was an attempt to be more than a musical. It blasted stereophonic music and otherwise was attempting to stun you.
• The movie was a frenzied hokum pretending to deal with racial tensions.
• The dancing lost the feel of the best of American dance. It did not have the rhythm of unpretentious movement.
• The ultimate wisdom the movie imparted was "You kids make this world lousy! When will you stop?"

Jules and Jim

• It is, said Kael, one of the most beautiful films ever made. Truffant was showing his love of life as completely as he could.
• The Legion of Decency stated the film was "in a context alien to Christian and traditional natural morality." "If the director has a definite moral viewpoint to express, it is so obscure that the visual amorality and immorality of the film are predominant..."
• Kael found it to be "exquisitely and impeccably moral - as a work of art, though she found Catherine to be morally insane.
• Catherine was super-white à la "Negroes now" being so sensitive about their rights that equality was not on the table.

Four Hour Shifts for Telecommute Editor

 

an ad:

“Work from home providing corrections and suggestions for academic and business papers. Work in four-hour shifts according to your schedule. This is a contract opportunity that requires skill in style manuals like Chicago, APA, MLA, CSE and AP. Two years of professional editing experience and a graduate degree are required. Location: remote Compensation: $300-$3000”

I considered this employment opportunity since I am set up for writing and editing at home and have been doing it for years. A new to me wrinkle was that you work in four hour shifts. The style manuals listed are well enough known. They don't mention Turabian. A graduate degree is needed? But then you could make 3000... or 300.

So I went to their website and looked at the detail about the position. Actually, you work according to their schedule in 4 hour stretches at certain times they specify and on certain days they specify. In addition your rate of compensation depends on what day and shift you work. No breakdown of specifics per day and shift is stated. Also, how much you are compensated depends on how many other editors are on your shift. This number, this competition, is unknown to you.

Nevertheless, I filled out the online application that asks for name, phone, address, and more particulars. Thereafter you are to take tests to gauge your suitability. I didn't make it past the first test. I would have preferred the test before the application.

The test was on grammar, spelling, punctuation, and markup per a style sheet. Doing the test I encountered questions about the Turabian. The questions often were 4 sentences that at first glance looked very much alike. How they were different was the key. Something about one of them was correct. Sometimes I couldn't find how they differed. I assumed it was something to do with spacing. Sometimes there were 2 sentences to compare. If it were to be 2 or 4, so what, that's not real work. A customer wouldn't offer you a choice. In reality you look at one "example" and don't have to play needle in the haystack. One particularly irritating series of questions, four in number, was about a matchup of letters standing in for the style sheets vs. matchup with placement of parts of a document.

Something like that. Anyway, I missed those 4 and that in itself would have been enough for failure. It turns out that of the 42 questions, you could miss two. I assume one or none was preferable. And, no, I did not miss 3, I got the old time gentleman's B-. If they would have told me at the outset that miss three and you’re out, then one quickly comes to the realization that this isn't the only game in town.

Good luck to all of you who attempt the test. May the score be with you.

Sample Corrected Federal Resume

 

Rocket Scientist Rocket Engineer - GS 04566

Doc Smith

4987 Missile Launch Way

Cape Kennedy, FL 09876

Home Phone: 913-044-0001

Email: docs@nasa.net

US Citizen

Veteran's Preference: Y

Highest Previous Grade: Test Dummy Not Applicable

PROFILE

Industrious and outgoing with proven organizational, administrative, and management accomplishments. Demonstrated research and problem solving skills. Detail oriented with skill in managing and tracking projects. All Almost all deadlines met. Project reports are in a superior category accurate in regard to justification to Mission Control. Outstanding ratings via the Russians. Presentations are to a high state of spit polish. Team work is essential and accordingly never falters.

EDUCATION

1998, Doctor of Rocketry Repair, Cal St, California State University, Sacramento, Calif, CA 00 200 semester hours, Major: Fuels and heat energy exchange, Minor: History, GPA of 5.0 4.2 of 5.0  Audited Trajectory Equations.

1988, Bachelor of Science, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA, 80 semester hours, Major: Advanced Calculus, Minor: Topology of Accelerated Torsion, GPA of 4.99 .95 of 5.20

COLLEGE RESEARCH PROJECTS:

CHIMP TO THE MOON: Designed and tested experiments and conducted research in support of sending a chimp one way to the moon. I investigated and measured altitudes attitudes towards the fallout over the permanently departed chimp the potential success. Fuel additives and alternatives were checked at flashpoint levels. Bats, rats, and gnats were in the control group at 50,000 feet. The experimental group escaped the zoo was difficult to quantify.

APPLIED PSYCHOLOGICAL CALCULATIONS TOO QUICK TO BURN TEMPERAMENTAL FUELS, BOTH SOLID and LIQUID PROPELLANTS

Each test object sailed went skyward at least to moon level above the horizon,certainly more than four inches to obtain objectives. Methods and techniques used to research and analyze a more practical situation.

DEVELOPED AND ADMINISTERED QUESTIONNAIRES

Fuel technicians and animal trainers where most thoroughly queried as to how and why their endeavors intersected. None found.

COMMUNICATED AND COLLABORATED WITH MARTIANS DISGUISED AS CLASSMATES

Discussed aspects of being the mission control specialist for the return from Mars from Mars while remaining on Mars. Presented results and conclusions to professors who blew it off.

COMPUTER SYSTEMS STOLEN ON LOAN FROM RUSSIAN RUSSIANS H-BOMB WITH COBALT ADDITIVE (DOOMDAY MACHINE) TO PROVIDE TASK SUPPORT FOR SELF-DESTRUCTIVE PROPULSION FOR GAME SIMULATION DEVELOPMENT

WhomeverWhoever initiates the Mars return countdown is fated to remain there. Computer game simulation involvement at the last is critical.

PROFESSIONAL HISTORY

01/1999 to Present, Chief Fiduciary Compliance Person, Procedures Activist, Assitant Assistant to All As Needed for Public Affairs, Werner von Braun Mausoleum, Coral Gables, Florida, or Houston, Texas. Librarian for back issues of Die Rakete. Made model of Raketenflugplatz. Recorded soundtrack of October 3, 1942, launch of A4. Program notes for See Merritt Island As It Is Today! Hours vary. No financial compensation. Lots of vacation time. Dr. Augustus Huh Hught, 510-888-1230, Contact: maybe Yes

REVIEWED, ANALYZED, AND EVALUATED all of my plans, contributions and distributions. All compliance standards followed to a T as required.

DEMONSTRATED OUTSTANDING COMMUNICATION SKILLS, to all who entered the WVB the Mausoleum, and of those three lost individuals there was one former astronaut. Responded promptly and properly to all questions about the ongoing Martian suicide launch control plans.

AWARDS, HONORS, RECOGNITION

High honors at local beach Science Fictions fish fry.

Many talks given at ruined traffic lights on esoteric pitch and roll problems of the V2.

TRAINING

Physical endurance severly severely tested by pursuing bill clerks.

Proficient in all personal computer systems since Jobs in the garage. Can reconstruct any and all and apply to rocketry.