My Miscellany's Nothing Like the Sun

I am slipping away with my missus for a slightly extended weekend to celebrate, a few days prematurely, our 20th wedding anniversary.  Here are some items of random and varying interest to tide the weblog over whilst I do so: 

• This quietly fascinating video for The Mountain Goats' "Woke Up New" seems the opposite in sophistication to the delightful technical primitivism of the OK Go 'treadmills' video:

 

The director, Rian Johnson, is reportedly on record that the final version was constructed with only two edits -- can you spot them? -- and no post-production compositing or other trickery.  He is sufficiently proud of it that he has made available a high-resolution, downloadable Quicktime version here.  [Link to download via *Sixeyes.]

• It is often reported that when bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks he explained, "That's where the money is."
  
  • A 1997 column by Steve Cocheo in, appropriately enough, Banking Journal, profiles Sutton and explores the authenticity of his most famous statement.
    
  • Here, Radley Balko does not cite Sutton, but provides a similarly obvious answer to the question, "Why is there so much Lobbying and Corruption in Washington, D.C.?"

• There are weblog "carnivals" -- moveable feasts of collected posts -- on innumerable subjects.  (Readers may recall my double-header April Fool's hosting of the law-related Blawg Review.)  "Carnivalesque" is a carnival of pre-modern/ancient/medieval history.   Meg Worley's xoom hosted Carnivalesque XVII in July, and she was kind enough to link my somewhat-period-appropriate writeups of the opera Grendel. 

A former law partner of mine was, in her undergraduate days, a medieval history major.  Medievalists as a rule tend to be interesting and worthwhile people.  Most of what one really needs to know about humankind was figured out well before the Renaissance, and medievalists are in on the secrets.  Ezra Pound knew this, before he lost his marbles.  xoom -- which is more contemporary than medieval in most respects  -- was added to the sidebar here earlier this month and is recommended.

• At least once a week, I can count on receiving a visit from someone referred by Mókus.lap.hu.  As near as I can tell, that page compiles Every Link You Could Possibly Desire Relating to Squirrels, in Hungarian.  The link labeled "Kép az 1800-as évekből" leads here, specifically to the "Moose and Squirrel" archive page.  The Web it is wide, but the World it is small, non?

• So, you say you want to abandon your dreary dead-end job for the high-flying world of Internationally Successful Fantasy Writer?  But you protest you lack the skills to produce the predictable piffle whose very badness practically guarantees best seller status?  Bad writing, after all, "is governed by subtle rules and conventions of its own, every bit as difficult to learn and taxing to apply as those that shape good writing.  But do you ever find workshops offering instruction in how to write the sort of really atrocious garbage that leers at you from every railway bookstall?"  Well fear not, friends!  Consult "The Well-Tempered Plot Device" and you will soon be on your way to the very pinnacles of SF/Fantasy's equivalent of Grub Street.  Twenty years old, but its lessons are timeless -- and so simple, even genuinely good writers can and do apply them.  [Via John Crowley, whose expressions of interest in undertaking to write a fantasy series have begun to grow disturbing.]

• Speaking of fantasy: Childhood isn't what it used to be, thanks in part to folks such as the editors of the newest edition of the Norton Anthology of Children's Literature.  Rather than adopting a decriptive posture -- "here is a comprehensive survey of what English- speaking children have read and been molded by over the centuries" -- the editors have opted for the scolding and prescriptive -- "here is a survey of some things we are righteously horrified to know our children have read, and a wider survey of what we are darn well convinced they should read."  A C Douglas is most emphatically unamused.

• Still speaking of fantasy: The Law & Society Blog has an entirely serious post concerning legal rights to virtual [i.e., fictitious] property in massive multiplayer online games: 

Suppose you spent the last eight weeks leveling up . . . to obtain a particular armor, only to find out that two days later the online game company took away some of the protective effects of that armor.  Do you have a legal remedy for the devaluation of your virtual property?

[Via Overlawyered.]

• And what of Fantasy Foreign Affairs?  I realize we are busy trying to Fix Everything in the Middle East, but I want to know what plans the State Department's Africa specialists have to bring democracy to Celesteville.

Quite what [King] Babar knows about the environment is anyone's guess, as his only recognisable expertise is in dictatorship.  In the 75 years that Jean de Brunhoff's creation has been on the Celesteville throne, Babar has shown no inclination to relax the iron tusk in his velvet glove.  Having returned from Paris to the African jungle in 1931, he promptly built a city modelled on western architecture and forced all his subjects to wear western dress.  Any notions of regime change are banished firmly from the page as Babar has never even bothered to go through the charade of a rigged democratic election.

Celesteville Libre!

[Via 3quarksdaily.]

~~~

 

• LAST MINUTE ADDITION [082506 0945 PDT]:

All modern literature aspires to the condition of McSweeney's.  Additional evidence: Josh Corey lists improbable character names actually appearing in recent fiction.   My favorite is:

"FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast [and] his demonic younger brother, Diogenes,"

though I think I would like to learn more about Gemma Bastian.

Comments

[Rick]

Mazeltov to you and the Mrs., boychick.

[bridget]

Happy XXth, and many XXXXXXXXs more!

[meg]

Nice of you to link to me -- thanks.

Regarding the Norton anthology of children's lit, it's not nearly as bad as those reviews make it sound. While I wouldn't use it for my own children's-lit classes, the central problem seems to be a misunderstanding of course goals. It doesn't pretend or want to be a survey of ch.lit; rather, it's meant for courses that deal with ch.lit as if it were adult lit -- asking it the same questions, filtering it through the same theoretical perspectives, etc.

As for Celesteville, a friend's child has a Babar doll wearing yoga togs, down to the t-shirt that reads "yoga." The doll is flexible, of course -- can the Babar & Celeste Kama Sutra dolls be far behind? ("Now with extra-flexible trunk!")

Have a good jaunt, and congrats on the milestone. We hit that one next year.