TBL's Quote of the Day for Moon Day 2009

Here's my short quote of the day for the 40th anniversary of Moon Day.

Whenever I see a picture of Buzz Aldrin or Neil Armstrong on their 1969 trip to Tranquillity Base, this is the upbeat ditty --from 1970's "Songs of Love and Hate" -- that always buzzes through my head:

Ah, they'll never, they'll never ever reach the moon,
at least not the one that we're after;
it's floating broken on the open sea, look out there, my friends,
and it carries no survivors.
--Leonard Cohen, Sing Another Song, Boys (this one has grown old and bitter)

Happy Moon Day to you all.

Two Departures

1) It seems that the death of free broadcast television was not exaggerated. On June 12 when my seven fuzzy analog signals ended and I turned on my digital converter, I did get ABC on channel 7.1, paid infomercials on 7.2, and a weather crawl on 7.3. I don't get any of them anymore, though a burst of colored pixels and the occasional sound will sometimes pop up in lieu of the "No Signal" screen for a few minutes on one of those channels. Tonight, instead of watching what Disney has cooked up for me, I'll watch one of the DVDs that I took from the Free Public Library this afternoon on my computer: It Happened One Night with Gable and Colbert (not that Colbert), Girl on the Bridge with Auteuil and Paradis, or Season Five of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Does anyone even need TV? Really, now that Walter Cronkite's dead, what's the point?
2) The domain name of WHIGGATE.org is dead too. It wasn't worth paying the annual fee to keep the name alive for the WHIGGATE UPDATE blog at whiggate.blogspot.com. If Americans didn't care about the lies that led us to invade Iraq while the liars were still in power, why should they care now? And President Obama's right; it's more important for us to look at our future challenges than our past crimes and errors. So let's just ignore the members of the White House Iraq Group and thank their mythical god that they will spend the rest of their lives believing in a universe where an eternity in hell is a possibility.

The Kindle Would Be Kindling if Its Components Weren't Toxic, or It's Final: E-"Books" are NOT Books.

The e-book is dead, and killed with the ultimate ironic twist. Click here to read the article about its death on today's electronic facsimile of the New York Times.

This is an illustration of real books. They contain dried ink on paper.

If George Orwell had been able to imagine the future a little more clearly in 1984, there would have been no paper and ink involved at all in the attempts of Big Brother's regime to control the written word. Ideally B.B. would have provided all his subjects with an ugly little device filled with billions of words that could be changed and controlled from one central computer. George Orwell could not have imagined such a fiendishly simple system to control history and literature, but the folks at Amazon.com have.

According to today's article in the Times, "Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices — and apparently to make them vanish."

As bad as it is that some customers have had their copies of 1984 and Animal Farm deleted from their pasty-white gizmos, at least they know the books are gone. It's the other option, the ability to "synchronize electronic books between devices" which has always been scarier to me. And it's also the mutability that makes an e-"book" something other than a book. The electronic text file may have advantages in searchability and bookmarking over the physical object that it's trying to replicate, but its ability to change its words and shape makes it something which deserves another name. Its ability to have its words and shape changed (or deleted) by someone other than you without your knowledge makes it something dangerous. Calling a mutable electronic text file a "book" is a perfect example of Newspeak, but maybe the best model book for this situation isn't 1984 at all, but Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. He better realized the real danger of losing the immutable printed word to the omnipresent mutable video screens. And the real power of the immutable printed word over tyrants who would control our futures and pasts. If you have Bradbury's chef d'oeuvre on your Kindle, make sure it doesn't disappear (or self-immolate).

[And, of course, don't ever trust blog entries either.
I could change this tomorrow to make myself
look smarter -- or to please Amazon's rapacious
lawyers -- and you would never know.]

I don't know about you, but I'm taking a trip to the Library this afternoon.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
UPDATE 19 July 2009: Here's an example of Amazon revising a "book" file for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on a customer's Kindle to "synchronize electronic books between devices."

This ability to change an e-"book" still strikes me as much more Orwellian than the ability to delete one. Amazon sent this customer an email to advise him about the upcoming change in his electronic text file, but there is nothing to stop a central computer from keeping all electronic "books" fully "correct" and "up-to-date" without any warning (Big Brother's wet dream). All of this points to the need for a new name for these electronic text files. The real books sitting on my shelves (see illustration above) will not be revising themselves anytime soon.

I did make a trip to the Library yesterday afternoon and the dead-tree book I took out was The Great Gatsby; I felt the need to reread it after hearing this show rebroadcast on Studio 360.

What a Rush! or, the soon to be ExAKGovSarahPalin will soon be twittering without fetters!

If you can't see the image of Governor Palin's tweet from very early this morning up above, the text from @AKGovSarahPalin reads "elected is replaceable;Ak WILL progress! + side benefit=10 dys til less politically correct twitters fly frm my fingertps outside State site" It sounds to me like she wants to provide some competition for Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter when she steps down in a few days. I can't wait to see what her new Twitter handle is after the "AKGov" is removed. I vote for "@ExAKGovSarahPalin" or "@THESarahPalin," if those names are not already taken.

She must love a format like Twitter that requires neither grammar nor correct spelling. And I love the way that there is no room for vowels in her tweet, but there is room for an exclamation mark!

The Quote of the Day about the "defectively imagined future" (and a primary difference between conservatives and liberals?)

"... Sooner or later Holytail [marijuana-growing area in Vineland County] was due for the full treatment [from the federal marijuana eradicators of CAMP], from which it would emerge, like most of the old Emerald Triangle, pacified territory -- reclaimed by the enemy for a timeless, defectively imagined future of zero-tolerance drug-free Americans all pulling their weight and all locked in to the official economy, inoffensive music, endless family specials on the Tube, church all week long, and, on special days, for extra-good behavior, maybe a cookie."

--Thomas Pynchon, Vineland, pp.221-222

The passage published in 1990 up above was one of the last I read on the train from work this evening. And while I wasn't going to write at all about Sarah Palin's July 3rd resignation (feeling that commenting on Palin, Sanford, Ensign, Boehner, Cheney, and all the other Republicans right now is like piling insults on the mentally challenged), I couldn't help thinking that this paragraph pointed out a key difference between liberals and conservatives. That picture of church-going Tube-watching Stepford families is a dystopic nightmare in Pynchon's universe, and in mine, but I can't help thinking that it's Sarah Palin's and Dick Cheney's dream, and even the dream of those like Sanford and Ensign who have recently slipped from their ideal straight and narrow and are now praying to regain their footing on that correct path with the promise, after confessing their "sins" to the world, of "maybe a cookie."

These are not views of the world that are ever going to be fundamentally reconciled by political compromises (or by any political means). Like it or not, there will always be people who feel they know the one correct way for all of us to behave (even when they don't behave that way themselves).

I hope the new design attracts scores of new visitors

Well, "scores" is probably optimistic.
Maybe "dozens" is more realistic.
I'd hope for at least a dizaine of new visitors after taking the afternoon to brighten up a design that had been done all in black since it was created in the dark days of early November 2004 when we had lost all hope in the American electorate and the motto at the head of this new blog was "helping save america from the dark side, one state at a time." And what was going to save those deep red states in the thrall of torturers? Why, t-shirts of course! You laugh. But who's our President now?

Maybe the new page design will even prompt me to write here on a more regular basis. Or maybe not.

The Rumors of the Death of Free TV Have Been (Slightly) Exaggerated.

The Countdown to the Death of Free TV is over and the switches have been thrown.

My television on the fringes of the New York viewing area is, surprisingly, not totally dead. With my converter box in place and with quite a bit of fiddling with the antenna, I am able to get WABC channels 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3! Or at least get them sometimes; they do tend to break up into soundless pixels from time to time. So I'll be able to watch the NBA finals tonight (maybe), but Dave Letterman and Conan O'Brien can forget about lobbying for my support, because NBC and CBS have disappeared (as have Fox, PBS, and whichever networks are associated with channels 9 and 11 -- the WB? CW?).

So last night when there was nothing on Disney's ABC except a Disney movie about Disneyworld's Haunted Mansion attraction, I had to read (finishing Rabbit Redux by Updike and starting The Women by T.C. Boyle) and listen to music (Thelonious Monk's Criss-Cross and Underground and Angela Hewitt's interpretations of Francois Couperin's keyboard music). It's hard to argue that the loss of free television isn't an overall plus.

Possible Origins of Inherent Vice , and a belated recognition of The Recognitions

Where does Inherent Vice come from?
"Well," you might answer, "if it's 'inherent,' it doesn't come from anywhere; it's just there."
But I'm not asking about the vice itself, but about the title of Thomas Pynchon's upcoming novel. The title of his last novel, Against the Day, has a full page dedicated to its possible origins and meanings on the PynchonWiki, so I thought I'd put my thoughts about the possible origins of the next novel's title on the record before I get a chance to flip open its cover for the first time. Before anyone beats me to it.

When I first heard the title, my immediate thought was that its sound and rhythm were an obvious tribute to the major work of a younger artist who wrote in Pynchon's shadow, Infinite Jest by the late David Foster Wallace. That tribute may still be part of the title's origin, but over the last month I've had the pleasure of reading a novel (that had been on my list forever) by an older writer who helped pave the way for Pynchon, The Recognitions (1955) by William Gaddis. The phrase "inherent vice" appears throughout the book (eight times on four pages: 182, 234, 355, & 949) and the arguments about inherent vice are at the heart of the book's examination of originality and forgery.

"But of course no one will insure against inherent vice." (234)
"As you've told me, one cannot insure against inherent vice." (355)
"We cannot insure against inherent vice." (949)

So, did Pynchon read, and was he influenced by, The Recognitions? Is he recognizing its importance in the title of his upcoming novel? For me, the evidence was there and indisputable as soon as I saw the poem at the heart of Gravity's Rainbow, Rilke's "The Duino Elegies", quoted directly on page 277 of The Recognitions and become an important plot point later in the book (see pages 299, 622, 746). Even this could still be simply a coincidental regard for a great poem, but there's no coincidence that could account for the fact that the first sentence of Gravity's Rainbow is a famous echo of the beginning of the Elegies and that The Recognitions ends with a paraphrase of their ending (see the last note, 956.25, on this last page of "A Reader's Guide to The Recognitions").

I may start reading Inherent Vice on the day that it comes out in August and decide that I'm full of shit about the title, but right now I'm sure of my theory of the title's origin. Maybe this little blog entry will even find itself linked to on one of the many Pynchon fan sites one day. What an ambition!

And even if I'm not sure where the title on the cover comes from, I am sure where the cover art originated: Cruiser Art in Hawai'i. But don't ask me why (yet).


(I've also become an apostle for The Recognitions. Read it! Its rewards are tremendous and it's not as hard as its reputation suggests -- especially if you're a fan of Pynchon's -- but I do suggest that you bookmark WilliamGaddis.org and the Reader's Guide on that site before you start reading. I didn't discover it until I was about 500 pages into the book and starting to get the vast cast of characters confused. The Guide is a great online resource, if only for its translations of the foreign passages.)

2009 Is Going to Be a Great Year (Part Three)

Thomas Pynchon and Bob Dylan seem to be working in concert lately, and picking up speed, as they continue their creative careers. I couldn't help thinking that it seems like just yesterday that Pynchon's Against the Day and Dylan's "Modern Times" were released, and now here we are (or at least here I am) anxiously awaiting their new creations.

But their parallel paths go back much further than 2006, or even 1997. In every year that Thomas Pynchon published a novel, Bob Dylan has given us a new studio album!

2009 -- TP's Inherent Vice // BD's "Together Through Life"
2006 -- TP's Against the Day // BD's "Modern Times"
1997 -- TP's Mason & Dixon // BD's "Time Out of Mind"
1990 -- TP's Vineland // BD's "Under the Red Sky"
1973 -- TP's Gravity's Rainbow // BD's "Dylan" and "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid"
1966 -- TP's The Crying of Lot 49 // BD's "Blonde on Blonde"
1963 -- TP's V. // BD's "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan"

The only year that seems a little off is 1973, where even two Dylan albums weren't enough to balance the scales. The cover versions on "Dylan" and the extended single of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" that is "P.G. & B.t.K." are no match for the weight of Gravity's Rainbow (GR would have been balanced by "Blood on the Tracks" in a more perfect world), but all the other years seem to reach a sort of equilibrium. I'm surprised that I never noticed this coincidence between two of my favorite artists before, but I'm sure that someone else has.

(I had hoped that these magical creative years might give us some financial guidance as well in these turbulent economic times, but there's no such luck: 1963, 1997, and 2006 were up years for the Dow, but 1966, 1973, and 1990 saw declines.)

Gone but Not Forgotten

What a great Bushism I found from our ex-President in Slate today, the first one since he helicoptered out of town on January 20:

"I'm going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there's an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened."

—On what he hopes to accomplish with his memoir, as reported by the Associated Press, Calgary, Canada, March 17, 2009 [http://www.slate.com/id/2214256/]

If they let him write those presidential memoirs without a ghost, maybe I’ll have to read it just for the comic authorial (or is that authoritarian? or authoritative? or some conscious Joycean mélange of the three?) voice. It could be another Autumn of the Patriarch if his publisher has the genius to tell him, “Editor? You don’t need no friggin’ editor! It’s perfect just as it is Mr. President.”