Going Delta Berserk

Jean Smart is such a great addition to 24! I've loved her since Designing Women in the late '80s. She had some memorable small roles in Guinevere, Garden State, and I [Heart] Huckabees, but her return to television is great.

Designing Women was a key influence on my feminist development as a girl. Julia Sugarbaker was an early role model, although I've since heard the rumor that Dixie Carter, a rare Republican in Hollywood, used to bargain feminist time for singing time. The tribute site is hilariously earnest. The fan fiction is kind of depressing, though.

In other Designing Women-related news, in the latest issue of Bust, Beth Ditto of the Gossip describes her "Delta Berserk" inspiration for her DIY style: jewel tones, shoulder pads, lots of cleavage.

How to invent a Creole

A new invented language, "Esata", as described by its creators:

Many people have studied English and can speak it well, but millions of others who do not have the time or the educational background are also speaking it, badly. Less competent speakers of English represent an ever increasing user group. Eventually, we can expect that the numbers of those who speak some Creole or corrupted version of English will predominate over those who speak it well. In this context Esata is proposed as the basis for a standard internationalized 'creole English', an attempt to gain control over the 'vulgarized' form of the language, and influence its future.

Words are formed from syllables of consonant plus vowel. The normal English alphabet is used, but vowels have only one sound, and some consonants have different sounds (c as ch, x as sh).

Here are some examples of phrases in Esata:

hubiyu who are you?
wobixi where is she?
vayuti what do you think?
bidara is that right?
hobihiko how is he coming?
yonotavegu I don't talk very good
feyunosanose If you don't know, don't say
mikanorenu My car isn't running now.

What is the official definition of a "creole", anyway? The UN High Commission on Human Rights explains:

A 'Pidgin' (and also a 'Creole') is a language variety used for interethnic contact... As a result thereof, the language in question may undergo drastic changes and result in an entirely new language... Pidgin is usually not anyone's primary language (so its users have their native tongue to fall back on for in-group communication), but when it becomes a native language for its speakers it is called a Creole.

One of the main languages that must have inspired Esata is Nigerian Pidgin English, spoken by tens of millions of West Africans. The UNHCHR explains that "Nigerian Pidgin English... [has] no unified standard or orthography. It is used in novels, plays, radio, poetry and becoming more and more important as a language."

Nigerian Pidgin English is among the hundreds of languages and dialects that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been translated into:

For December 10, 1948, di meeting of di whole world, wey dem de call United Nations (naim be say all di kontris wey de for di world come unite to be one), come hold talk and dem come bring out one paper and write wetin suppose to be our right inside. Dem call am Human Rights...

Georgia stops the rain

Some Tbilisi residents jokingly call the bus system "Sandrabus", a reference to president Saakashvili's Dutch wife, Sandra Roelofs, because Georgia bought the busses recently from Holland at a suspiciously excellent price.

But like a mom in front of a Dukes of Hazzard sweatpants display, Georgia was blinded by the bargain. It turns out busses' aisles are so narrow that riders must spend endless time negotiating ways to squeeze past each other.

I suspect that at this moment the Dutch are sitting in spacious, new busses, which give plenty of room to smoke hash and fondle prostitutes, while meanwhile Georgia's hand-me-down busses move around like giant sideways telephone booths stuffed with impossible numbers of people, many of whom have long ago given up on getting out near their destination and instead have given themselves over to the whim of fate. "I wonder what unexpected adventure awaits me," a lucky Geogian might say as the hospital where he was scheduled for a kidney transfer recedes in the distance.

When the busses were launched last summer, officials were mortified to realize that their windows didn't open. When riders complained about the sauna-like conditions, the minister of transportation held a press conference and triumphantly announced that he would have every third window on the busses simply removed. "But what if it rains?" Asked a journalist. He froze, stunned, and responded sternly, "It won't rain."

Portraits of Georgia

This photo-heavy blog by Hans Buhr, a German who conducts adventure tours in Georgia, makes me wish I knew German.

Azeri women selling produce at the market in Gori, Stalin's home town

Cattle drivers descending to Kakheti from Tusheti

Sheep being herded across the Alazani river

Niva lost to hidden road collapse in Tbilisi

Unknown Georgian woman with rifle

Sincerity and authenticity

The James Frey and JT Leroy spectacles are old news by now (that's what I get for starting these posts and then refusing to finish them), but I wanted to put in a few words:

First of all, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan totatlly forecast this event in their song, "Kid Charlemagne"!!! The similarities are eerie:

While the music played you worked by candlelight
Those San Francisco nights
You were the best in town
Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl
You turned it on the world
That’s when you turned the world around
Did you feel like Jesus
Did you realize
That you were a champion in their eyes
On the hill the stuff was laced with kerosene
But yours was kitchen clean
Everyone stopped to stare at your technicolor motor home
Every A-frame had your number on the wall
You must have had it all
You’d go to LA on a dare
And you’d go it alone
Could you live forever
Could you see the day
Could you feel your whole world fall apart and fade away

(and that's just the first verse!)

OK, who's stopped reading?

Memoir isn't a genre with fixed conventions. Writing a memoir doesn't have to have a moral purpose, though the success of Frey's book is grounded in its triumphant arc of recovery and self-discovery. The fraud exposed the arc as Frey's construction, as his attempt to conform to a convention of a recovery memoir. Frey's fabrications aren't defensible, but they reveal his readers' desire to find a moral purpose in writing. Memoirist Mary Karr argues this point uncritically in her op-ed article from The New York Times (January 15, 2005 and TimesSelected). In writing her memoir The Liars' Club, she writes, she had to examine her memories and determine their truthfulness (as opposed to their Steven Colbertian 'truthiness'):

"Mr. Frey seems to have started with his perceived truth, and then manufactured events to support his vision of himself as a criminal. But how could a memoirist even begin to unearth his life's truths with fake events? At one point, I wrote a goodbye scene to show how my hard-drinking, cowboy daddy had bailed out on me when I hit puberty.

"When I actually searched for the teenage reminiscences to prove this, the facts told a different story: my daddy had continued to pick me up on time and make me breakfast, to invite me on hunting and fishing trips. I was the one who said no. I left him for Mexico and California with a posse of drug dealers, and then for college.

"This was far sadder than the cartoonish self-portrait I'd started out with. If I'd hung on to my assumptions, believing my drama came from obstacles I'd never had to overcome -- a portrait of myself as scrappy survivor of unearned cruelties -- I wouldn't have learned what really happened. Which is what I mean when I say God is in the truth."

This writing process is admirable, perhaps, but it's not the only possibility for memoirists. The success of Karr's The Liars' Club might have made it more popular to write and read memoirs about an author's search among her memories for what's psychologically constructed and what really happened, but that's a convention that can be charted historically. Mary McCarthy makes some of those gestures in her excellent Memories of Catholic Girlhood, but she doesn't have the same vocabulary of recovery and psychology that Karr learned in the 1980s recovery movement. McCarthy and Karr may be farther apart in purpose than Karr argues. Presidential memoirs don't usually contain deep the psychological insight that Karr demands.

Michiko Kakutani's commentary on the affair in The New York Times (January 18, 2005 and appears to be TimesSelected) hits all the predictable targets in a reactionary defense of Absolutely Truthful Memoirs, and in so doing hits wide of the mark.

"If the memoir form once prized authenticity above all else--regarding testimony as an act of paying witness to history--it has been evolving, in the hands of some writers, into something very different. In fact, Mr. Frey's embellishments and fabrications in many ways represent the logical if absurd culmination of several trends that have been percolating away for years. His distortions serve as an illustration of a depressing remark once made by the literary theorist Stanley Fish--that the death of objectivity 'relieves me of the obligation to be right'; it 'demands only that I be interesting.'

"And they remind us that self-dramatization (in Mr. Frey's case, making himself out to be a more notorious fellow than he actually was, in order to make his subsequent 'redemption' all the more impressive) is just one step removed from the willful self-absorption and shameless self-promotion embraced by the 'Me Generation' and its culture of narcissism."

The thing I find weird about all this handwringing about the demise of Truth is that we've seen several examples of it treated historically in films this year: Johnny Cash gets confused for the subjects of his songs and embraces the persona in Walk the Line; Truman Capote gets involved in the story he's writing for the New Yorker and manipulates the events; and I'm all set to see the meta-film of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, itself a play on the malleable conventions of a memoir and the novel (and film, in this adaptation that I'm dying to see). People have responded to these tricky formulations of authorial personae and truth in complex ways; I haven't read many reviews of these films that take up Oprah's crusade for clear genre conventions.

Sterne's fictional memoir, Cash's prisoner persona, Capote's novelistic journalism, and McCarthy's author's note about the imprecision of memory all occurred before the "Me Generation." Steve Winn's column from the San Francisco Chronicle comes close to pinpointing some of these issues of how generic conventions might necessarily be reexamined or played with in a moment of technological change:

But then again, maybe people are a whole lot more sly and better at this game than that. Among the great pleasures and promises of 21st century life is our own self-awareness, our media-tutored sensibility about a mediated age. Technology has taught us to be wary of technology. TV warns us against itself. Writers, filmmakers and visual artists revel in the ambiguities and imprecision of their own work. We can happily submit to a con now -- whether it's reality TV, fiction packaged as nonfiction or a fraud dressed up as truthiness -- and know we're doing it. That's not to say we can't be had. But now, if it happens, we can't say we didn't see it coming.

Something similar happened in the eighteenth century with the rise of print: with so many forms of news, ballads, romances, and other genres of print competing for space in a writing market, authors were bound to play around with notions of authenticity determining use value. Lennard Davis argues that these mutable conventions are the basis for the early novel in Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. In their own weird little way, the Amazon.com Statistically Improbable Phrases for the book, which include authorial disavowal, simulacrum theory, moral verisimilitude, and attitude toward fact, demonstrate that playing with authorial truthfulness and personae is a historical phenomenon that can't be ascribed to a "Me generation" of first-person shooters. Steve Shapin's A Social History of the Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England is another great book to consider when working against these "Death of Absolute Truth" arguments.

Ben's post about F. Scott's Fitzgerald's use of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin makes for another example of how the memoir genre has historically not demanded absolute truthfulness. Here's an excerpt from Adam Gopnik's review of recent biographies of Franklin (published in the New Yorker, June 30, 2003), including Tom Tucker's Bolt of Fate, which argues that Franklin embellished many of his achievements, including the story about the lightning bolt and the key. Far from taking an expose-type tone, Tucker wants to know what Franklin's embellishments say about how the ideas of authenticity circulate and are valorized. Gopnik writes,

"Who is to decide when doctors disagree? It is, finally, as conservatives like to say, all about character. And here one approaches an area of subtle gradations, easy to misinterpret. Tucker points to evidence of Franklin's series of hoaxes as conclusive, or anyway highly suggestive. He offers a long list and shows how they often advanced Franklin's career; for instance, when he was just starting out as a printer he wrote a pseudonymous essay in favor of paper currency and then, after the legislature had been persuaded, got the government contract to print money. As Tucker recognizes, the majority of these impostures are closer to deadpan satiric jokes than they are to self-seeking lies. Franklin liked to write letters claiming to be from other people--a 'famous Jesuit,' or a Scottish Presbyterian--in order to dramatize some political point through obvious overload. The last thing he wrote was a letter purportedly from a Muslim slaver, 'Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim,' whose lust for slavery was intended to hold a mirror up to the American slaveholder's own, and shame him.

"This is the reason for Franklin's opacity and, perhaps, for the doubts about the kite, which do not begin with Tucker. Franklin was an instinctive ironist. That is not to make him contemporary; it was Enlightenment irony, not Duchampian irony-begun as a way of getting past censorship. But it was his natural mode, as in the joke about the electrocuted turkeys: which was a joke, and had a serious point, and was something he actually did, and the whole thing depended on being reported with an absolutely straight face. It was not that he did not value honesty. He did. It is that he did not value sincerity, a different thing. He would have been reluctant to say something that he believed to be a lie. But, as a businessman and a writer and a diplomat, he might very well have been willing to dramatize, or even overdramatize, something he believed to be essentially the truth."

Fitzgerald didn't look to Franklin as a known embellisher but as a man obsessed with self-improvement, including self-improvement through "publishing [his] errata." So that's another loop in the Franklin-Gatsby story: is self-aggrandizement a form of self-improvement, or should self-aggrandizers be publicly shamed--and even sued--a la Frey and Leroy? Also, to compare Gatsby's story to Leroy's, why isn't starfucking an acceptable form of self-improvement?

The other wrinkle in the story that concerns me is how quickly commentators jumped on Leroy's play with gender and how Oprah's intervention into the story was used to reify a woman as the arbiter of moral truth (Daniel Defoe's Roxana is a fantastic rebuttal to this convention). Here's Virginia Heffernan's gleeful Times coverage of Oprah's interview last week:

Just like back in the days when her guests were abusers and sexual deviants, Ms. Winfrey came for vengeance — and vengeance on behalf of the poor, the voiceless and the women above all, who get conned and defrauded and violated by men who think they're so bad. But because Ms. Winfrey never sounds just one note, she turned in an uncanny performance, modulating her aggression with such finesse that she seemed to be the penitent one, and not the one with the whip hand.

So along with Oprah's insistent delineation of genre conventions, add gender conventions to that list of worries, as well.

"I see it as a night scene by El Greco"

When it came time to write about The Great Gatsby in high school, I wrote a four-page prose poem about Cugat's art deco cover for the novel, H.L. Mencken's "The Libido for the Ugly," the El Greco painting Vista de Toledo, and Michael Stipe's photography for the New Adventures in Hi-Fi album art. The section of the book that (I believed) tied these various pieces of art together was Fitzgerald's commentary about who could adapt to mid-Atlantic and midwestern landscapes best:

"That's my Middle West--not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were alll Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us all subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

"Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old--even then it had always for me a quality of distortion. West Egg, especially, still figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouched under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely, the men turn in at a house--the wrong house. But no one knows the woman's name, and no one cares.

"After Gatsby's death, the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes' power of correction.

I wanted to know what acts of visual "correction" and "distortion" are required for adaptation--not just for viewing the landscape, but for living in the East. I probably should have focused more on Mencken and less on Michael Stipe, but maybe he gets the vision thing just right when he drives up to Mulholland Drive in "Electrolite". The first paragraph of that passage is evocative because the images are instantly recognizable, even in our post-sleighbell culture. The second paragraph is a distorted, even ugly image that doesn't appear in the book (though it's evoked, I argued as a seventeen-year-old, in the similar organizations of sky and landscape in the Cugat and El Greco paintings) and probably doesn't evoke any specific memories for the reader. So what's changed in Nick Carraway's vision in those two paragraphs?

If that sounds esoteric, belabored, and high-minded, recall that I was a junior and high school, I really wanted to be an English professor when I grew up, and I loved REM. I don't pull stunts like that anymore.

But Bernard Henri Lévy does! I kind of want to know what he would do with the night scene by El Greco. Or maybe I don't.

I wanted more from Slate's book club discussion about Bernard Henri Lévy's new collection of essays, American Vertigo. "Don't Go Back to Tocqueville," is an inspired title, but my eyes glazed over at the mention of Francis Fukuyama, if not before. Garrison Keillor's review in the New York Times Book Review on Sunday is fantastic for its clear-headedness about Lévy's work:

Lévy is quite comfortable with phrases like "as always in America." Bombast comes naturally to him. Rain falls on the crowd gathered for the dedication of the Clinton library in Little Rock, and to Lévy, it signifies the demise of the Democratic Party. As always with French writers, is short on the facts, long on conclusions. He has a brief encounter with a young man outside of Montgomery, Ala. ("I listen to him tell me, as if he were justifying himself, about his attachment to this region"), and suddenly sees that the young man has "all the reflexes of Southern culture" and the "studied nonchalance ... so characteristic of the region." With his X-ray vision, Lévy is able to reach tall conclusions with a single bound.

My prescription: Just listen to REM.

"Manny Ortez"

Why I love the Red Sox (besides the footage of David Ortiz in 2005 spring training shouting "Give me the sticky-icky-icky!"):

Bill Simmons: My favorite "Manny being Manny" moment happened in the final game of the regular season -- he had just crushed a home run, the cameras caught you guys sitting next to one another in the dugout, he was talking excitedly about what pitch he had hit, and somewhere along the way, you just started staring at him in disbelief, as though he had just said something like, "I knew it was going to be a slider because I started craving a pork sandwich, and that always means a slider's coming!" And you just kept staring at him, and then he walked away to another part of the dugout, and you started shaking your head in shock like, "Wow, I will never, ever, ever figure that guy out." How many of those Manny encounters happen per season?

Curt Schilling: Three to four per day.

--from a recent interview with the latest right-wing Christian to unexpectedly win the hearts of Bostonians

The French prisoner

NY Times on David Mamet:

There are many lessons about the craft of writing that David Mamet would like to share with the general public — pithy, sensible guidelines that any aspiring wordsmith could instantly benefit from — but alas, most of them are unprintable in this newspaper.

Smuggled Cigarette Arrested

You gotta love the clumsy translation.

Prime News Online
January 29, 2006, 10:20 pm

Smuggled Cigarette Arrested

... 32 packages of smuggle were found in the truck heading from the breakaway South Ossetia to Georgia, Prime-News was told by the representatives of the Interior Ministry.

Driver Tengiz Tutberidze, citizen of Russia was detained. The proceedings were instituted.

My pipeline is bigger than yours

In the last 48 hours, Georgia cut off the gas supply to the Russian embassy in Tbilisi (mayor of Tbilisi: "It is better to supply gas to two blocks of flats at least than to the agencies that are directly associated with the energy crisis in Georgia"), and Russia retaliated by cutting off the electricity at the Georgian embassy in Moscow (Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman: "the Russian party is fully authorised to take the relative measures with regard to gas supply to the Georgian Embassy to Russia too").

Though I think the Georgian tactics are shortsighted, they are certainly staying ahead of the news cycle and appearing to be active and not passive, which is unfortunately the standard by which most freezing Georgians will judge them. (After all, in national polling about role models, Stalin and even Beria beat out the generally popular current president.)

Professional BS artists

In the unlikely position I find myself here in Georgia -- immersed in international relations, with absolutely no training or education -- it's surreal to me how important tiny nuances of meaning are. Witness this press statement:

Sean McCormack, State Department spokesman
Press Statement of January 27, 2006

The United States welcomes reports that the repairs to the Mozdok-Tbilisi pipeline in southern Russia are on course to restore gas to Georgia and Armenia in the coming days. Most of the citizens of Georgia have been without gas, and many without electricity, following explosions on January 22. The United States applauds the resilience of the people of Georgia during this crisis, as they and their neighbors in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Russia endure severe winter weather and the threat of energy shortages. We commend Azerbaijan's efforts to supply some gas to Georgia. The United States has been in close contact with concerned governments on the importance of restoring the flow of Russian gas and electricity to those in need.

What this statement is really saying is, "We are extremely angry at Russia, we do not believe it acted in good faith in this crisis, to the point that we are considering shifting our long-term strategic relationship with Russia." How does it say this? By commending everyone's role except Russia's.

I don't think this kind of hair-splitting is how I want to spend a career.

Recommending gateway books

I have often wondered why Amazon doesn't introduce a more useful system of ranking and recommendations. The system of giving starred ratings and the suggested purchases (which always seem heavily skewed towards the last author I bought) are not very helpful, and it'hard to surmise from the written reviews what the consensus is on, say, which Philip Dick book you should start with if you want to give him a try.

A new site called "Debbie's Idea" tries to solve this by allowing you to endorse certain books as good entry points:

Long before the Internet was commonly available, Debbie had the idea that it would be useful to have a reference work suggesting which book of an unfamiliar author would be best to read first. Start reading an author with a poor or atypical example of his work, she observed, and you would likely never read that writer again—perhaps losing in the process a world of pleasure and knowledge. On the other hand, since there would seldom be one right book to read first, the resource would have to be a compendium of opinions.

Debbie died in 2004, at the age of ninety. This website has been created in loving memory of her and her very good idea.

I think the best Philip Dick book to start with is Ubik.

Georgia's skip-stop energy crisis

During the Georgian energy crisis, life goes on normally with only small differences. When the lights are out, the heart of downtown Tbilisi looks like a village road in the mountains. Friends make plans around when electricity is, and isn't, available. McDonalds can't get its lettuce shipped in, so Big Macs are made with cabbage. Whereas the Parliament building is usually brilliantly lit at night, now the only lighting is this memorial built into the steps, to help people keep from slipping on the smooth marble. And when the heat comes back after an outage, it seems amazing I ever took it for granted.

The burden is not evenly distributed, despite the government's promises to the contrary. In our wealthy neighborhood at the center of town, we hardly ever have outages of more than a few hours. In other neighborhoods, there is only gas and electricity for a part of each day. And there are reports that in some of Georgia's smaller towns, gas and electricity have been cut off completely.