Intentional Ten 12/30/05

Lost Illusions - Balzac (finally finished it!)

Typee - Herman Melville

Wicked - Gregory McGuire

What I Really Want for Christmas - Brian Wilson

Christmas Songs - Diana Krall

Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane - At Carnegie Hall

The Ricky Gervais Show - Guardian podcast

At This Time - Burt Bacharach

The Rhetoric of Fiction - Wayne C. Booth

Selected Writings - John Ruskin

Petals Mark Our Paths

Margaret Robinson (at philadelphia stories) on the roles that flowers play as we wend our trails through life.

Kunkel on Lost Illusions

Verbosity Blog reprints a salon.com article by Benjamin Kunkel on reading Lost Illusions, which gives a good sense of the novel's plot and continuing relevance. My sense of it is that not a lot of people read Balzac anymore. Here's a few reasons why: (1) the customs and obsessions of 19th century French society can seem distant from modern concerns if you don't pay close attention; (2) Balzac's narrative style is inconsistent and his narrators violate "traditional" objective conventions; (3) Balzac depicts just how shallow, money obsessed and devious people can become when compelled to live in a capitalist world of credit, debt, and investment. Reason number 3 is probably the biggest factor. There aren't a lot of heros in Balzac's world. There can't be. Everybody's too busy trying to keep up, get out of debt, or get ahead. For this same reason, more people need Balzac; those 19th century Parisians aren't as foreign as you might think, and readers might learn a thing or two about themselves. Balzac is arguably the first great novelist of the modern capitalist era, the first novelist to understand what was happening to people, the first one to "get it", how they were being shaped and victimized by social and economic conditions. He also realized that such people were worthy of his gargantuan imagination, that their apparently petty lives contained plenty of drama. Although much has changed, the fundamental conditions still apply, which is why his work continues to reverberate. I could say much of the same about Dickens too.

Grumpy old bookman on Lost Illusions

Grumpy Old Bookman gives you an idea of what Balzac's Lost Illusions is all about: stripping the fanciful mask off the face of literary publishing and journalism. No matter whether it's 19th, 20th, or 21st century, print always has been a money grabbing business. Art and commercialism make awkward bedfellows. You want to be a poet? An artiste? Better start a website and write to please yourself.

Spectral pleasures

Guardian Unlimited Books posts a well written apprecation by Michel Faber of Dickens' Christmas Carol. The concluding paragraph is worthy of a pullquote:

Dickens valued morality, but what he really worshipped was merriment - the buzz of making other people happy, of making a moment glow, of dancing a jig for no particular reason. The greatest tragedy he could imagine was an existence devoid of excitement or playfulness, a biding of time on the way to the grave. Fun, for him, was the only compensation for death, the dismal inevitability of which preyed constantly on his mind. Scrooge's triumph is that he stares his own corpse in the face, and, instead of despairing, defiantly resolves to enjoy the gift of life to the full. He is galvanised by a thousand volts of goodwill. Witnessing his transformation, we realise with a pang of regret that we are hard-hearted too, and that it might take a thousand volts to transform us likewise. We cling, miser-like, to our self-protective anxieties, our emotional meanness, our pointless inhibitions. Perhaps we're all waiting for the Ghosts of our own Past, Present and Future to burst through our defences, seize us by the hand and shock us into joy. Until that day, we revisit A Christmas Carol and watch this alarming miracle happen to someone else.

A National Crisis

Late holiday sales rush not so merry for many stores (CNN Money).

Analysts said retailers cut prices more this year than they did last year in the hope of luring cost-conscious consumers, many of whom are grappling with steep gasoline prices and bracing for bigger winter heating bills.

Yet sales this year have been "solid but unspectacular". The message: we didn't do our American duty and buy enough shit. By the way: the oil company just gave a little Xmas stocking stuffer in the form of a $365 heating bill. Rock on, America, in your winter wonderland!

Hundreds of Katrina kids missing, still

Maybe this qualifies as a news story? Perhaps? WWLTV.com : FEMA is reluctant to release info that could help find missing kids. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night....

The Obligatory Exerciser

The Physician and Sportsmedicine: The Obligatory Exerciser examines the psychological factors contributing to excessive exercising: "[t]reatment may follow guidelines similar to those for overtraining, addiction, compulsion, and eating disorders." Note also the personality descriptors for those who don't know when to quit pushing their bodies: "Achievement oriented, Addictive, Compulsive, Independent, Narcissistic, Neurotic, Obsessive, Perfectionistic, Persistent."

Phys Ed, nazi style

The History Learning Site offers a brief overiew of what the Nazis had in mind when it came to educating the young. One important aspect for the fascists was physical education:

Hitler had stated that he wanted boys who could suffer pain.........."a young German must be as swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp's steel." PE took up 15% of a school's weekly timetable. Boxing became compulsory for boys. Those who failed fitness tests could be expelled from their schools - and face humiliation from those who had passed such tests.

And only the super elite were fit enough to be sent to "Adolf Hitler Schools". Here future leaders would be trained for ubermensch duty for the fatherland.

Six years of tough physical training took place and when the pupils from these schools left aged 18, they went to the army or to university. The very best pupils went to Order Castles. These were schools which took pupils to the limits of physical endurance. War games used live ammunition and pupils were killed at these schools. Those who graduated from the Order Castles could expect to attain a high position in the army or the SS.

Physical prowess was used as a signifier of Nazi racial superiority. And this kind of thinking didn't start or end with the third reich. Think of the Spartans in ancient Greece or the Soviets and their client states using sterioid stuffed olympic athletes as props in the cold war theater of action. Most any nation or class of people using physical ability or appearance as a marker of social identity is vulnerable to the charge of exceptionalism: the "we're better than you" syndrome. In America, this can take nationalistic form (the flag-waving, chest-beating, gun-toting "these colors don't run" variety) as well as more class-based forms ("look how fit I am, I look perfect, therefore I belong to the elite register in the social pecking order). Fitness and beauty obsession also feeds the American worship of competitive individuality: "look at me, I can swing a 50 pound iron ball around my head for half an hour." These feats of personal achievement or endurance have immense importance to those seeking validation. But there's something desperate in all these attempts to look good and feel right. The desire to push one's body to the limit of endurance comes from the same source that feeds the desire to starve one's self in to the right dress size or to medicate and diet oneself into the right body type.

Getting Fit, Even if It Kills You

New York Times story on a crazy fascistic American gonzos who follow an extreme fitness program called CrossFit , which pushes one's workout to the point of -- but unfortunately for the rest of humankind, just short of -- death.

A common axiom among practitioners is "I met Pukey," meaning they worked out so hard they vomited. Some even own T-shirts emblazoned with a clown, Pukey. CrossFit's other mascot is Uncle Rhabdo, another clown, whose kidneys have spilled onto the floor presumably due to rhabdomyolysis.

Intentional ten 12/23/05

Happy Christmikah, Merry Kwanzmas, and Super Solstice to all ye jolly-faced consumption bots. Have yourself a merry little chronic-kah! Now do your American duty, hit the roadways and buy more crap. You must give. You must be nice. You must swipe the plastic card swiftly through the slit.

Eddie Cochran: Greatest Hits

Small Faces: Greatest Hits

Neil Diamond: 12 Songs

Paul McCartney: Chaos and Creation in the Backyard

The White Stripes: Get Behind Me Satan

Management and Machiavelli by Antony Jay

John Fogerty: The Long Road Home

Linda Thompson: Dreams Fly Away

William Ackerman: The Sound of Wind Driven Rain

Led Zeppelin III

Mass media's last blast?

Admittedly, it's typical flabby journalism, but this LA Times piece covers an important cultural topic of the moment: the demassification of society into boutique-sized, search-enabled, clusters of consumer preferences. The phenomenon has been in place since the 90's; now it's hitting critical mass.

REBOL Demo Contest

Write a cool demo program under 32KB in REBOL, win an iPod or Mac Mini.

Blogs in the writing class

Andrew Johnson offers helpful suggestions for setting up an English course to use student blogs.

Pinter keepin' it real

Nobel winner Harold Pinter on Art, Truth and Politics.

Intentional Ten

Give Me Convenience, or Give me Death - Dead Kennedys

Lost Illusions - Balzac

London Flat, London Sharp - Dave Brubeck

I Heart Huckabees (film)

Career Girls (film)

Truman Show (film)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Rhetoric - Aristotle

Gattaca (film)

Chronicles of Narnia (film)

Intentional five, 12/9/05

It's a short list this week because I had to read approx. 75 rough drafts of research papers!

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life: Erving Goffman

Lost Illusions: Balzac

Rhetoric: Aristotle

Gattaca (film)

Management and Machiavelli: Antony Jay

Ricky Gervais podcast

Guardian Unlimited is offering "The Ricky Gervais Show" as podcast. bb

The Penguin Podcast

The Penguin Podcast will be offering an audiobook version of Dickens' Christmas Carol unabridged very soon.

Cannonfire

Cannonfire has some compelling investigative blogging on the shady Wilkes Corporation. Republican graft-o-rama, pentagon style!! Fake companies, dead websites, maildrops, and plenty of filthy lucre: your tax dollars at work....

Intentional Ten, 12/03/05

How Proust Can Change Your Life - Alain de Botton

Lost Illusions - Balzac

Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 4 finale - Larry David

"The Storm" - Kate Chopin

"Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat" - Russell Banks

"The Darling" - Chekhov

"The Lesson" - Toni Cade Bambara

Typee - Herman Melville

Consuming Passions - Judith Williamson

Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind - Gerald Graff

Proust quote

"In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merley a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity." - Marcel Proust