Coincidence?

Speaking of David Icke, a thought occurred to me while watching the Presidential debate the other night. In Icke's book, he makes several claims about the shape-shifting fourth-dimensional reptilians that have infiltrated our planed and control our government (no, really). But, in making all these claims, he never actually proves anything.

John McCain and Sarah Palin are using the same strategy in their campaign. Every time Palin responds to a policy-related question, she replies that McCain is a 'maverick' and that they will take on the Washington establishment. When McCain is asked what he would do as president about a given issue, he talks on and on about how he will 'work across the aisle.' Neither one of the ever says what they would actually do about anything.

I'm not sure what this means, but it can't be good.

Book Club: Young Avengers: Sidekicks

I wasn't into comic books as a kid. I had nothing against them - I read a substantial portion of the death of Superman storyline, among other things - but they were never really my "thing". As a result, my subsequent forays into the world of graphic novels have always been pleasant, surprising, and short-lived.

It was with delight, then, that I borrowed a copy of Allan Heinberg & Jim Cheung's first installment of the Young Avengers series, Sidekicks. From my admittedly non-expert perspective, the artwork was great, the design tight, and the characters interesting. And, most importantly, I was left wanting to read more. Even though, just like one of the characters said, I hate time travel things. And this incarnation of the Young Avengers is, indeed, a time travel thing.

Reading the book got me wondering about graphic novel's low spot on the literary totem pole. It's an incredibly rich medium with a lot to offer that can't be readily accomplished in books or films, but society tends to view graphic novels with something between disdain and disinterest.

I, for one, don't really like reading graphic novels on subways, where I do a lot of my reading. It's not an issue of embarrassment, though: graphic novels just feel like two-handed affairs to me. I have difficulty slowing down to focus on each page when reading them on subways, the jostling of the people and the train shatter any hope I have of focusing on the details.

I often find myself at a loss when looking for a new graphic novel to read. Whatever system I use to find new books doesn't seem to work in this context. A lack of exposure and opportunity, I guess. The information must be out there, right? There are probably graphic novel (or at least literary) blogs existing side-by-side with the sports, news and politics sites I visit every day.

The general disregard of graphic novels seems to be slowly changing, though, from my still admittedly non-expert opinion. I see more of them in book stores, more being turned into mediocre Hollywood movies. So perhaps the day is not far away when we will suffer from too many graphic novels, where an illustrated equivalent of James Patterson or Nora Roberts will churn out what seems like a new book every week, to be purchased on the cheap at your local Wal-Mart.

God, what a nightmare.

Thanks to this fine gentleman for loaning me the book. Promise I'll give it back soon.

Pig Hunting Corn Haters

After about six months of off and on reading, I finally finished The Omnivore's Dilemma. In it, UC Berkeley professor Michael Pollan traces the origins and processes behind several different food chains: industrial, industrial/big organic, local, and self-obtained. It becomes obvious pretty early on that he has serious reservations about the ludicrous ways American industrial agriculture sets about dealing with the annual surplus of corn, but how practical is it really to expect us all to hunt pigs in the Northern California foothills or gather our own mushrooms in the streets of Berkeley?

Pollan raises more questions than he answers in this peek behind the curtain and, unintentionally or otherwise, it starts to feel like a ploy to get us to buy his latest book, an unofficial sequel titled In Defense of Food. I haven't gotten around to reading this one yet, at least in part because I think its tag line sums up his answer pretty well: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Are pesticides bad for you? Of course. Is fast food healthy? Certainly not in the quantities a lot of people eat it. A lot of it just comes down to common sense, though. If you eat a lot of fatty, processed foods, you're not going to be healthy. If all you eat is spinach, you're not going to be healthy. Moderation and logic will take you a long way...

So, did The Omnivore's Dilemma change my life? I suppose. I'm more cognizant of what goes into some of the processed foods I love (although it's nothing I didn't already know from reading Fast Food Nation or watching Super Size Me). I value local food more than I did before (although like the New Yorker article I linked to a while ago, if the local food isn't season it's probably just as bad if not worse than food that's been trucked across the country).

Oh, and apparently since I live east of Columbus, I'm environmentally better off drinking wine from France than from the Northern California vineyards I grew up near. So there you have it.

What is, what was, what might be

I recently found out that Jesse Ball won the 2008 Plimpton Prize for Fiction (Thanks, Firefly!), which seemed like as good excuse as any to reread Ball's novel Samedi the Deafness. Ball's novel is virtually impossible to categorize. A philistine might call it a mystery, someone with more pretension than me could venture the phrase 'prose-poem' that I hear way too much of lately.

What the book is, in my opinion, is a beautifully written exploration of Truth, and of how we know things that we think we Know. The reader and the protagonist, James Sim, are both kept on extremely shaky ground from the moment Sim encounters a wounded man in a public park. Things get progressively weirder throughout the book, until it is impossible to know who and what to believe.

The ending is a bit ambiguous, I suppose, but all stories have to end somewhere. And I'm pretty certain I know what was going to happen next, so my only disappointment was that I had to put the book down and move on to something else.

C-ro, my friend and erstwhile programming adviser, compared the underlying plot of Samedi to the classic graphic novel The Watchmen. So now I want to reread that and also The Things They Carried, another exploration of the nature of truth by Tim O'Brien. So add those to rereads to all the new books I'm working on

I'm still getting the hang of reviewing books without spoiling them. Feel free to let me have it in the comments.

Bracket Quick Hits

I'm far from an expert as far as college basketball goes, but let's take a quick tour through the brackets anyway, before you finalize your picks. Indulge me...

Congratulations, Mount St. Mary's, on winning the right to be pummelled by UNC and the gritty-white Tyler Hansbrough. Maybe I'm a cynic, but I think it would have been a travesty to have a twenty-loss team in the tournament.

Beware repeat sleepers. Just because George Mason had a great run in 2006 doesn't mean they're the same team. Only two starters are left from their stint as cinderella. And Notre Dame is good...

Kansas is good. I know that's obvious, and I know it's lame to pick a number one seed to win it all, but they impressed me in the Big 12 championship game against Texas. I'm just saying.

Siena over Vanderbilt. I don't know why, I just feel it. The favorites can't win every time.

Gonzaga no longer qualifies as a sleeper, folks. Can we please move on?

I don't like Georgetown. Don't think they'll survive the first weekend (I have them beating UMBC and losing to Davidson).

I've already explained why Memphis isn't going anywhere. Out to a phyisical Mississippi State team. Thanks, Texas-Arlington, but no thanks.

Speaking of Miss St, Oregon is soft. So at least one 8-seed should make it to day two. Keep that in mind when you're flipping coins for the 8/9 games.

I'm not impressed with any of the Big-10 schools. You'd better have a really good reason for putting any school other than Wisconsin in the Sweet 16. Some ugly basketball in the Big-10.

Texas is really talented and athletic. When I watched the Kansas game, though, they fell apart as soon as their shooters went cold. It's a skill offesnse, not a system. If they're not hitting their shots, they're done.

UCLA is good. They impressed me by playing strong against Stanford in the Pac-10 final with what seemed like maybe 50% of Kevin Love. I technically have them out in the Elite Eight, but I just can't stand having too much chalk on my board. And I hate the Bruins.

I think San Diego's run ends against UConn. They had a nice run, but still.

It's not Duke's year. Again, just a feeling.

Anyway, that's my completely uninformed, completely arbitrary jaunt through the bracket. No offense if I didn't talk about your team - I probably couldn't think of a random stance to take on them. Good luck in your brackets - even though MidMajority.com says you shouldn't be filling them out.

Mikey B., we hardly knew ye...

This is getting dangerously close to being old news (and perhaps it already is), but Michael Bloomberg officially withdrew from the race he was never officially in. Count me among the nine people who are sorry to see him go. Not that America was ready to elect a short, Jewish billionaire as president of the United States. But still...

I don't pay much attention to NYC politics. As long as the subways are on time and relatively clean, I don't particularly care (although I do sometimes wonder exactly they're doing with all the city taxes I pay). But Bloomberg always struck me as a great mayor for the city, a confident technocrat who wasn't afraid to call in competent help when confronted with an issue he didn't know much about.

He has a great populist touch, giving out free hot chocolate and sleds to kids during our recent snow storm.

And, most importantly for me, Bloomberg isn't bogged down in partisanship like so many of our politicians. Hell, the man only chose the Republican party because he saw a clearer route to the mayoral nomination. He's not afraid to cross the aisle, to transcend petty Democratic/Republican squabbles, to do what is best for the city.

Now that the wheat has separated from the chaff, we're left with three very competent, very qualified candidates, none of whom I'm particularly excited about. Was I excited about a President Bloomberg? That's probably pushing it. But I do think he possesses the combination of experience, independence and transcendence that we need in our next executive-in-chief. It felt like much less of a compromise, whereas now I'll spend the next eight months trying to distinguish between three ok choices.

Makes me wonder what might have been...

Counting the Colors till Friday

I've been reading Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia lately and, while I still intend to write about it when I finally finish it, his chapter on synesthesia stopped me in my tracks.

To a composer named Michael Torke, each musical key has it's own discrete, unique color. D Major is blue. G Minor is ochre or gamboge, whatever that means. (Apparently it's yellow.) D Minor is flint or graphite. F Minor is an earthy, ashy color.

Another unnamed musician actually experiences tastes corresponding to musical intervals.

• Minor second = sour
• Major second = bitter
• Minor third = salty
• Major third = sweet
• Fourth = mown grass
• Tritone = disgust
• Fifth = pure water
• Minor sixth = cream
• Major sixth = low-fat cream
• Minor seventh = bitter
• Major seventh = sour
• Octave = no taste

Not only does she taste these things whenever she hears an interval, that tastes actually occur even when she's not sure what she heard, and help her to identify sounds.

Now, I've thought that we can never really know what is going on inside another person's head at least since I was sitting in John Searle's Philosophy of Mind lectures back at Berkeley. And the reason I say I can't know what's in anyone else's head is the simple fact that I have no direct access to their brain states. You can tell me what you are thinking/feeling, and I can compare that to my own experiences, but that's it. It's understanding through analogy.

Without direct access, though, I can never know for certain that another mind actually exists. This is where we get to the wonderful idea of a philosophical zombie. (That's right. You probably thought we philosophers just sat around, staring at our hands and trying to define happiness. Nope. We have zombies.) Rather than eating brains and walking funny, though, a p-zombie acts exactly like a normal person, except there is no corresponding brain state behind their actions. Hit your p-zombie boyfriend with your car and he will say 'ouch.' Show a p-zombie the new study proving Derek Jeter is a terrible shortstop, and he'll seem outraged. (Our p-zombie is a Yankee fan. Let's call him Vinnie.) But there is no consciousness underlying either reaction. And, as an outside observer, I would be unable to tell the difference between Vinnie the p-zombie and a normal human being (although the Yankees thing might give it away).

I spent a lot of time in college defending this position. It's tough to convince people you're having a conversation with that you are under no obligation to concede the ontological status of their very consciousness. I admit it's philosophically ugly, and that it seems like the sort of thing you'd only come up with after a few too many bong loads. But now you're going to tell me that E Flat has a color? That a tritone tastes like disgust? (How great is it that something can taste like disgust? I say very.) With such phenomenal differences in our perception of the supposedly material world (I think we can all agree that this is great. Rawr.), how can I possibly pretend to know what any one else is thinking? For that matter, how can I know that anyone else actually is thinking?

I'm not saying other minds don't exist. (Although some people do.) In fact, I'd prefer it if the people around me are not p-zombies or figments of my imagination. I think it's an ultimately unanswerable question, though, whether or not there are other minds out there. I'll never have direct access to another person's consciousness, so I'll never be able to say for sure that such a consciousness exists. But I suppose I should act as if it does, just in case.

BRRRAAAAAAIIIINNNSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!

One Quick Thing about College Basketball

The Memphis Tigers are currently #1 in both the coaches' and AP polls, 10-0 in conference and 24-0 overall.

They will not reach the Final Four. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if they don't even reach the Elite Eight. When you're filling out your bracket, Memphis has to be the first number 1 seed you eliminate.

What sort of crazy, Bill Jamesean statistical analysis did I use to reach this conclusion? You might want to sit down. You might even want to take notes. It's that complicated:

The Memphis Tigers can not shoot free throws.

And I don't mean they're just mediocre; they're terrible. I wouldn't bet 5 dollars on them making any given one.

The team is shooting 58.4% from the charity stripe. Fifty eight. The number one free throw shooting team, the mighty Gauchos of UC Santa Barbara, are shooting 78.4%. There are a few schools tied for 100th in free throw shooting - powerhouses like Coppin State, Akron and a few others. Memphis' 58.4% is good for 338th place in Division 1 basketball. That is not a typo.

I'm not going to harp on this. I don't even follow much college basketball until the tournament starts in March. But my god. Don't say you haven't been warned. The Memphis Tigers are going to shoot themselves right out of the Final Four. The 1976 Hoosiers can rest easy, and join with the '72 Dolphins in their feelings of superiorty to us defeated mortals.

Cormac McCarthy: Mash Up Artist

Fair warning: There are some spoilers here, but all the books have been out for a while, so deal.

One night, Cormac McCarthy was sitting in his dorm room at the University of Great American Novelists, working his way through a bottle of whisky. He stared at the computer screen, swore at the endlessly blinking cursor. Smoke from a mostly forgotten cigarette curled up past his face, and he waved it idly away.

This is ridiculous, he thought. Or maybe he muttered it. The pressure was definitely starting to get to him.

I wrote All the Pretty Horses. No Country for Old Men. I won the National Book Award! But he couldn't get any words on to the page, and hadn't in weeks. The whisky was beginning to take hold.

What I should do, he muttered or thought, is redo On the Road as if it were written by Ernest Hemingway. A new perspective. Toughen that beatnik drivel up. People will appreciate how originally I've combined two previously existing, seemingly unrelated things.

The pages flew by as McCarthy's whisky-wobbled fingers struck at the keys with a newfound sense of purpose. Carefree cross country jaunts in search of kicks in post war America became a perilous journey in a post Apocalyptic future to horrible to even contemplate, let alone survive.

The characters were easy to transition. Sal Paradise, Kerouac's stand-in/narrator, knows the only people he's interested in are The mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a common place thing, but burn burn burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars. The only person who matters for this new, unnamed narrator is his son, God's own firedrake, tending to the fire whose sparks rushed upward and died in the starless dark. Not all dying words are true and this blessing is no less real for being shorn of its ground. And we have no time for Roman candles, no sir. No time for metaphor, either.

Rather than discussing the limits of human potential and the wonders of existence on a mad-dash car ride along the eastern seaboard, repeatedly curse the futility and wretchedness of a world where the sky is full of ash and civilization has disintegrated. Think of the hopeless, stoic perseverance of The Old Man and the Sea, only if the ocean were poison and all the fish were dead.

And in the end, instead of having the protagonists simply drift apart and outgrow one another with the passage of time, let's kill off the narrator and leave the child to fend for himself amongst a band of unknown survivors who may or may not be carrying the fire themselves (Damnit, one metaphor slipped through. But that's the only one.). Robert Jordan (For Whom the Bell Tolls) would be proud.

And you know what, Cormac? So would the kids on collegehumor.com. Congratulations - you've successfully juxtaposed two completely different things, like this Bear Grylls mash-up, Man vs. Girls Gone Wild. (Note: You probably shouldn't watch this at work. Or if you have an IQ over 80.) I can't wait to see Veggietales characters dialouge spliced into the No Country trailer.

*****************

In all seriousness, The Road is a great book, and just incredibly written. McCarthy paints an intimate portrait of a father-son relationship, and describes about as beautiful an ash-strewn apocalyptic wasteland as could ever exist.

I preferred No Country for Old Men, mainly because I was more able to relate to the characters in it. I may still be stuck in the concrete jungle Bob Marley sings about, but the thing hasn't burnt down yet. I'm not contending with deranged, cannibalistic mobs (although some days on the subway it can feel like it). So there you go.

I'd recommend either book, though, and you can't go wrong either way. And if I ever find my way back to the library, I might just start in on the Border Trilogy as well...Not that I don't have enough to read already.

Enjoy.