The Scandal of the Season

A friend called Sophie Gee's new novel, The Scandal of the Season, a "bodice-ripper." "Actually, it's a bodice-unlacer," I joked, as there's a funny seduction scene in the middle of the book. Maybe I didn't get that sexiness across in my introduction to the interview I did with Sophie Gee for the National Poetry Foundation website, which is now up online, because I was so focused on talking about mock-epics, but maybe that's also a way of saying that there's a lot going on in the book. It's a fun book, even if you aren't interested in eighteenth-century poetry.

I had such a great time talking with Sophie about her novel and about Alexander Pope. There's a funny part that I didn't get on the tape recorder about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's apparent obsession with Alexander Pope--I've always wondered if there's any rhyme or reason as to why Pope's translation of Eloisa to Abelard shows up in multiple Kaufman scripts (the puppets in Being John Malkovich and the title of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the title of which is an excellent example of the genitive case that we discuss in the interview). There's no real answer to the question, but it's still interesting! I also had a nice time cutting the interview into something readable--though it's still quite long--it's funny to see what becomes important after multiple edits.

Also, I saw a musical theater production of The Rape of the Lock a couple of years ago--very Gilbert & Sullivan, in its own odd way.

A large example is dangerous

I look forward to Edward Rothstein's Connections columns in the NY Times. Yesterday's column, about the recent revisions to the Oxford English Dictionary, is a typical Rothstein piece: first he summarizes the book he's reading, and then he riffs for a while on something fascinating. (I hurry to get to the latter parts of his columns--except for this weird one about absinthe, which is funny in its inversion of the formula.) The end of the column is a funny critique of how the OED editors chose illustrative quotations:

But the biggest difficulties are in the “ historical principles,” which seem to have become historical themselves — held over from the past, only to be jettisoned when inconvenient. This is clearest in the use of quotations. Of course the first O.E.D. was skewed in its choices, reflecting few writers of the 18th century, and offering a selection not fully representative of the language’s powers. But now the O.E.D. does not even pretend to offer “all the great English writers of all ages.”

Diversity becomes a greater priority. The Shorter dictionary has 1,300 new quotations from writers like Susan Faludi, Spike Lee, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Zadie Smith, and the editors emphasize their broad demographic intentions. This can be illuminating. I like, for example, the Shorter’s definition for “mook” (“a stupid or incompetent person”) with an illustration from Mr. Lee, “Who are you gonna listen to, me or that mook?” But in that case, there is also too little information: Only cross-references lead the reader to guess that the word evolved out of a racial slur.

And while it may be fine, in the old O.E.D., to cite authors like Shakespeare or Tennyson by first initial and last name, once the floodgates are opened, undated identifications become bewildering.

A. Cohen, for example, turns out to be the writer Arthur Cohen. But in what way does his quotation, “He could make no promises,” illuminate the evolution of the language or masterly use of the word promise? Similarly, the word smile is illustrated by a quotation from The Japan Times: “A smile creases his ...face.” There is no distinction in these examples other than the lexicographers’ desire to certify their broad representation of sources. To what linguistic end?

Does it matter, for example, that the word entrust is entrusted with a quote from L. Bruce — “I was entrusted with the unromantic job of weeding” — even if the L. in question is Lenny? As for a more obscure word, like enubilate, it might have been made as clear as its meaning (“make clear”) by providing some appropriate examples. For that you must turn to the unabridged O.E.D., where a 1903 citation from The Saturday Review establishes an enchantingly ornate context: “Maeterlinck is gradually enubilating himself from those enchanting mists in which first he strayed.”

Rothstein spends some time with Samuel Johnson's sense of incompleteness when he produced the 1755 Dictionary: reading Johnson's illustrations can be fascinating, as Henry Hitchings has found out in Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary (here's a nice review of the book in the NYRB). But the weirder version of Rothstein's investigation occurs in Richard Holmes's Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage, an imaginative biography of Johnson's relationship with ne'er-do-well poet Richard Savage. Holmes begins the book with a note about Johnson's Dictionary:

He was working at great speed, and he chose his illustrations entirely at random. Most of them are from the great classics of English literature, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden and Pope. But of the 116,000 quotations eventually included, he chose seven from the works of his strange friend Richard Savage. These quotations, and the seven words they illustrate, may have a curious significance. Since they were chosen rapidly and at random, from such a vast source, they could be thought to reveal unconscious links and symbolic meanings. If considered as a form of 'association-test,' these seven words must instinctively have brought Richard Savage to Johnson's mind. Thus, to an analyst they might suggest something about the nature of that most puzzling relationship. Here are the seven words, and their illustrations, in alphabetical order.

1. 'Elevate': to raise with great conceptions.
Savage: 'Now rising fortune elevates his mind, He shines unclouded, and adorns mankind.'

2. 'Expanse' a body widely extended without inequalities.
Savage: 'Bright as the Etherial, glows the green expanse.'

3. 'Fondly': with great or extreme tenderness.
Savage: 'To be fondly or serenely kind.'

4. 'Lone': solitary, unfrequented, having no company.
Savage: 'Here the lone hour a blank of life displays.'

5. 'Squander': to scatter lavishly, to spend profusely, to throw away in idle prodigality.
Savage: 'They often squandered, but they never gave.'

6. 'Sterilise': to make barren, to deprive of fecundity or the power of production.
Savage: 'Go! sterilize the fertile with thy rage.'

7. 'Suicide': self-murder, the horrid crime of destroying one's self.
Savage: 'Child of despair, and Suicide my name.'

Holmes's book is a moving "biography of a biography" about Johnson's relationship with Savage. The researcher in me is skeptical of the 'association-test' that he invokes at the beginning--it's hard for me to reconcile my commitment to miscellany with the bit about the unconscious. Nevertheless, I'm fascinated in it as a writing experiment related to the fictional obituary of Savage he writes at the beginning of the book in order to outline the rambler's life and the alternate-universe obituary Holmes imagines for a Samuel Johnson who never finished the Dictionary and met with only disappointments in his professional career. Here's how Holmes imagines part of Johnson's obituary of failure:

At the time of his Death, perhaps hastened by Poverty and Overwork, he was engaged in a delusory Scheme to compile by his singular efforts a General Dictionary of the English Language, an enterprise more rationally undertaken in France by a Committee of scholars labouring over many years. The tribulations and disappointments of his Life have been summarised in a recent poetical satire, 'The Vanity of Human Wishes,' which some may take as his own Elegy.

I was especially taken with the part of the book when Holmes is describing Savage's painstaking corrections to the proofs of his long poem The Wanderer. The quotation is from Johnson's Life of Savage (1744):

Johnson himself, early hardened to the vicissitudes of journalistic publication and creeping misprints, noted this Quixotic desire for perfect typesetting with shrewd amusement. To him it revealed an obsession wholly characteristic of Savage's lack of realism in daily affairs:

'A superstitious Regard to the Correction of his Sheets was one of Mr Savage's Peculiarities; he often altered, revised, recurred to his first Reading or Punctuation, and again adopted the Alteration; he was dubious and irresolute without End, as on a Question of the last Importance, and at last was seldom satisfied; the Intrusion or Omission of a Comma was sufficient to discompose him, and he would lament an Error of a single Letter as a heavy Calamity.'

Ah, but here's Johnson's poem (translated from Latin) about his own Quixotism and sense of failure at not perfecting the Dictionary.

Going to the mattresses

Ever since Deng Xiaoping allowed peasants to sell crops they grew above the public quota, it has been universally acknowledged that markets excel at producing efficiency and meeting commercial needs, at least in most cases. Which makes it all the more glaring when ostensibly open and fair markets fail.

The subprime mortgage debacle, in one recent example, is really several market failures in one: a failure of consumers to learn about the self-destructing contract terms they were signing under, a failure of risk assessors to acknowledge the high correlation between loan defaults in California and loan defaults in Carolina, and a failure of shareholders to reward CEOs more highly for prudence than they do for daring. James Surowiecki explained the latter problem clearly in his New Yorker column:

Stanley O’Neal, who was recently forced to resign as the C.E.O. of Merrill Lynch, made eighty-four million dollars in 2005 and 2006, a figure based in part on the huge profits that Merrill booked as a result of its forays into the subprime market. Last week, thanks to those same forays, Merrill announced giant losses and writedowns that obliterated most of those profits. O’Neal, however, won’t be giving any money back.

But the subprime mistake isn't on my mind today. The market failure I'm concerned with is why mattress shopping is such a miserable and beleaguering activity. I enter the Sleepy's mattress store at the corner of Flatbush and Fulton St. near downtown Brooklyn. I am reluctant to spend hundreds of dollars on a mattress only marginally better than the one I already own. I am apprehensive about navigating the many mattress options and making the right choice. And thirty minutes later I leave, even more uncertain.

In a perfect market, I would know the relative quality of increasingly expensive mattresses, and I'd know exactly what Sleepy's needs to make on each mattress to stay in business. Sleepy's would know exactly how much I can pay. Neither of us has this information, but we are not equally in the dark. Like a car dealership, Sleepy's knows that it knows much more than its customers about its products. And like a car dealership, Sleepy's has years of research and training on how to read a customer's ability to pay.

A writer with the memorable name Jon Mooallem wrote last week's Times Magazine cover story about the enormous commerce in sleep aids and specialty mattresses, including this anecdote from an industry convention in Las Vegas:

At a seminar on creating “SleepSperiences” at the retail level, the speaker kicked things off by asking the room full of mattress salespeople what they thought shoppers most often compare them to. Everyone groaned, “Used-car salesman” at once, except the woman seated in front of me. She said, “Like going to the dentist.”

The task before Sleepy's then is to exploit its favorable imbalance of information, but to appear not to. Hence the Sleepy's price guarantee (they'll beat any competitor's price by 20%, or the mattress is free--a laughable promise, considering that they collude with manufacturers so that the mattresses Sleepy's carries have slightly different product names that appear nowhere else). Hence the inflated sticker prices, ripe for dramatic discount. Hence the song and dance performed for me in my visit, entirely in monotone:

Salesman, to boss: I need you to okay something: I offered to double this customer's savings.

Boss: You doubled the savings without asking me!? Now you've done it! That mattress just can't be sold so low!

Salesman, to me: Sorry, I shouldn't have doubled the savings.

Boss: Wait, wait. You already promised him double the savings. I don't like it. In fact, I hate it. But if corporate can approve it downtown, we'll see what we can do.

[Dials number.] Hello, Roy? I have a salesman here, he doubled the savings--that's right, he took the single savings, which is already 10% off, and he doubled it, to a price you're never gonna see matched by anyone else.

I know. I know. Dammit Roy, I know. Step back from the ledge, Roy, it ain't worth it. We let this one get away, Roy, but we'll eat Ramen for a few years and we'll be back on our feet. Yes, I know your wife is having twins. Yeah, I have the same insurance. No, it's called seppuku in official Japanese. Harakiri is just a slang term, little known fact. Yes, I will deliver your death poem to headquarters. Etc.

Here's where I think Sleepy's miscalculates: I would be willing to pay more for a mattress if there were no negotiation possible than I am willing to pay after negotiating, because I can never be satisfied that I have gotten fair terms.

True, Sleepy's would surely make less money per mattress if they did away with sales negotiation, losing profits from richer customers (since they would be willing to pay more) and losing sales to poorer customers (since they wouldn't be willing to pay the higher average price). But a significant number of customers put off by the haggling wouldn't be lost, and might become repeat customers or word of mouth advertisers, important considering that a new mattress is likely to come up in conversation. The same goes for comparison shopping: when customers feel misled, even successful sales represent lost business because the customers don't recommend the store to others.

Surowiecki's essay concludes:

One lesson of the current market chaos, then, is that it’s hard to get incentives right. Investors, after all, want fund managers and corporate executives to take reasonable risks—that’s the only way to make money—and many of them do just that. But, in trying to reward reasonable risks, we’ve encouraged unreasonable ones as well. And when you make it rational for people to bet the house, you may end up without a roof over your head.

Let me use Surowiecki's language: Sleepy's commission and franchise structure create a perceived incentive to maximize the profit on sales that happen, at the less obvious cost of sales that don't happen because of the lack of information, the hard selling and the obfuscation. Companies like Sleepy's may be content with that balance, but I wonder if the incentives to salesman from commissions really offset the disincentives to customers by making the sales process fundamentally adversarial and dishonest.

The internet is the great answer in many cases like this: comparison shopping is easy online, and price discrimination and haggling are impossible. Even with the model names precluding real comparison, I longed to order a mattress from 1800mattress.com, even without lying down on the damned thing. But unlike other industries, mattress sellers don't need to learn much from the online competition. It'll be a long time before mattresses, wedding rings and jeans are bought online with the kind of volume they sell when people can touch them.

In the end, I stumbled my way into haggling mastery. After putting down a (supposedly) refundable $100 deposit and waiting a week, I stopped in to cancel and get the deposit back. Suddenly the mattress, already discounted 20%, dropped another 30%. I had had to cajole my way through corporate-scheduled resistance to get to that 20%; getting the extra 30% by haggling would have taken a good hour of talking Roy through bushido arcana.

Surely there's a better way.

Maps and legends

There was a nice overview of recent books on maps in Friday's NY Times. My friend Alicia also recommended Peter Turchi's Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. This summer, I was fooling around in the Dewey Decimal section of Butler Library's tenth floor stacks--my favorite part of the library, in a way, because I always find something weird when I'm looking for an old copy of a novel or an old biography--and found W.P. James's The Lure of the Map (circa 1920). The book--since taken out of circulation because it was crumbling to pieces when I picked it up--is bright green with an eye-catching font on the spine. I can't find much more information about the author, but he's written this collection of essays about how maps structure consciousness and our relationship with landscape; the disappearance of the triple-decker novel; how authors imagine unknown lands. I love this passage from the title essay:

Ruskin, confessing what a vast amount of knowledge had been thrown into a narrow space by the charts of the world drawn up by modern science, regretted that they were not pictorial enough to enable the spectator to imagine the kind of contrast in physical character which exists between Northern and Southern countries. We know, he said, the differences in detail, but we want that broad glance and grasp which should enable us to feel them in their fullness. He imagined what it would be to fly with the swallow or the stork, to view the Mediterranean lying beneath like an irregular lake, with all its ancient promontories sleeping in the sun; to pass northwards from that great peacefulness of light, Syria and Greece, Italy and Spain, laid like pieces of a golden pavement into the sea blue, and to watch the orient colors change gradually into a vast belt of rainy green, where the pastures of Switzerland and poplar valleys of France and dark forest of the Danube and Carpathians stretch from the mouths of the Loire to those of the Volga, seen through clefts in grey swirls of rain-cloud. And so on farther north still, to see the earth heave into mighty masses of leaden rock and heathy moor, bordering with a broad waste of gloomy purple that belt of field and wood, and splintering into irregular and grisly islands amidst the Northern seas. And at last the wall of ice durable like iron, its white teeth set deathlike against us out of the polar twilight.

But what was it that made possible for Ruskin this flight in imagination over successive latitudes of the earth's surface? What but the map to which his tribute is inadequate? Without the map his bird flight and bird's-eye view would have been clean impossible. He had grown up, as we have all grown up, in a world of maps and of the geographical knowledge made visually intelligible by map. We are familiar with the contours of the countries of the world laid out upon the blue ocean on the terrestrial globe. Ruskin, with his experience of travel and his gift of observation, learnt to read in a fuller measure than most of us the full text of nature in the shorthand of the map, and transcribe it with all the splendour of his rhetoric. But without the map the vision would have been unimaginable.

And this is one of my favorite passages ever written about maps, from Michael Herr's Dispatches:

There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, coming back late to the city, I'd lie out on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off. That map was a marvel, especially now that it wasn't real anymore. For one thing, it was very old. It had been left there years before by another tenant, probably a Frenchman, since the map had been made in Paris. The paper had buckled in its frame after years in the wet Saigon heat, laying a kind of veil over the countries it depicted. Vietnam was divided into its older territories of Tonkin, Annam and Cohin China, and to the west past Laos and Cambodge sat Siam, a kingdom. That's old, I'd tell visitors, that's a really old map.

If dead ground could come back and haunt you the way dead people do, they'd have been able to mark my map CURRENT and burn the ones they'd been using since '64, but count on it, nothing like that was going to happen. It was late '67 now, even the most detailed maps didn't reveal much anymore; reading them was like trying to read the faces of the Vietnamese, and that was like trying to read the wind. We knew that the uses of most information were flexible, different pieces of ground told different stories to different people. We also knew that for years now there had been no country here but the war.

Sorry Hofstadter, they're just pretty pictures

Douglas Hofstadter's new book I Am a Strange Loop places him firmly in the Daniel Dennett camp of philosophers on the mystery of consciousness: the camp that believes that "consciousness is an illusion" is enough of an explanation to settle the matter.

I think this dodges the question. Of course consciousness is an illusion; but since we don't understand how that illusion itself is experienced, we're back at square one. Whether or not thinking is a variation on talking to ourselves (Dennett's theory) or the result of our ability to reference ourselves and our own thinking (Hofstadter's theory), the question of feeling remains. How do some chemical processes feel, while other chemical processes--which may, like ours, be incredibly complex and recursive--just happen?

But at least Hofstadter is consistent: he thinks there is a continuum of complexity, from ants up to humans and beyond. From his recent Wired interview:

You have a great line: “I am a mirage that perceives itself.” If our fundamental sense of what is real — our own existence — is merely a self-reinforcing mirage, does that call into question the reality of the universe itself?

I don’t think so. Even though subatomic particles engage in a deeply recursive process called renormalization, they don’t contain a self-model, and everything I talk about in this book — consciousness — derives from a self-model.

Strange Loop describes the soul as a self-model that is very weak in insects and stronger in mammals. What happens when machines have very large souls?

It’s a continuum, and a strange loop can arise in any substrate.

This is the direction Hofstadter started out in with his classic stumper Godel, Escher, Bach, where he failed--though brilliantly--to demonstrate that these thinkers and artists hold the key to understanding consciousness and the soul.

His idea is that consciousness grows from being able to examine your own mental workings. This is a fun mental exercise, but it doesn't hold up. It relies on ex post facto reasoning: because minds are better and better equipped to do this as you move up the latter from amoebas to humans, this must be the engine that drives consciousness. But self-awareness is just a small element of awareness, and it doesn't seem to correlate highly in our varied mental states and between variously self-aware people. What of brain-damaged people whose understanding of their existence as a human being is fundamentally impaired? What of lower animals, which we imagine feel intense hunger, lust and pain without having a self-examining mind in any sense like ours?

Presumably, when a shark floods itself with hormones at the start of a feeding frenzy, or a mouse releases adrenaline on seeing a cat, it feels something like a rush we can feel. Do sharks and mice thus have a self-model in their brains? Must all such animals that feel fear and urges? Would a mouse that mutated so that its primative self-model was broken no longer have the spark of awareness? And if so, why couldn't that mouse evolve into a human that similarly functioned like we do, but without the spark of awareness? How could we tell the difference between us and him? Are we sure he's not us?

Armand Hammer

Weird coincidence: how many times can Armand Hammer show up in the New York Times in 48 hours? There he is in articles about two of my favorite--but unrelated--things (which have little to do with the man except for his money): eighteenth-century print culture and New Mexico. Ricky Jay's exhibition of eighteenth-century print ephemera will show for one day only (November 25) at the UCLA Armand Hammer art museum (here's a note on the oil tycoon's rules for the museum, which have been relaxed recently). I thought immediately of the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West in Las Vegas, New Mexico... which was one of the features in the Escapes section in today's paper!

Las Vegas, New Mexico is one of my favorite places: it's an old Victorian town in the north-central part of the state, and the buildings are absolutely beautiful. There are a couple of amazing New Mexican restaurants on the plaza--I can't remember the names, and the article doesn't mention any food in the area, just buildings.

It's too bad the story doesn't have any photos of the Montezuma Castle on the United World College campus. It's an amazing building with a weird history. Here's Wikipedia on the Castle:

The current castle is actually the third on the site, the first two (dating to 1881 and 1885) were the first buildings in New Mexico to have electric lighting, and they both burned down.

The castle was originally constructed by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad as a luxury hotel, capitalizing on the natural hot springs on the site. ... It operated as a hotel until 1903. It was then briefly owned by the YMCA, then operated as a Baptist college from 1922 until 1930. The Southern Baptist Church sold it to the Catholic Church in 1937, and it was operated as a seminary for Mexican Jesuits until 1972. The building then sat empty for a decade and was subject to significant vandalism and decay. The Jesuits made a little money renting the building out as the set for the low budget horror movie The Evil in 1978.

In 1981, the castle was purchased by industrialist and philanthropist Armand Hammer for use as a United World College. In 1997, it was placed on the list of America's Most Endangered Historic Places by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, along with landmarks like Ellis Island. In 2000 and 2001, the school invested over $12 million restoring the building, and it has won awards as one of the great historical restorations in the United States. It is also the first historic property west of the Mississippi to be designated one of "America's Treasures" by the White House Millennium Council.

I really want to set a novel there around the time The Evil was being filmed there!

Albuquerque Oulipo

In middle school, my friends and I used to play word games in the library after classes ended. We devised as many syllabic variations on spoonerisms as we could; we anagrammed like madwomen; we developed a weird letter-replacement game that now strikes me as something similar to the Oulipo plans for potential literature. This is as geeky as it gets, yet it filled me with pleasure as a thirteen-year-old:

My friend was fooling around with the find/replace option in a word-processing program and decided to substitute uncommon letters for common ones in a 'found text' (in this case, one of her English assignments). She then ran the spell-check on this now-garbled paragraph of entirely misspelled words and picked out new words from the spelling suggestion list. The result was a mess of spell-check-generated gibberish--but correctly spelled gibberish. When she rooted around, she found some funny word combinations that sounded poetic: "I pseudo-moo" was the one that stuck out. That phrase became the name of the game. (My friend later became a linguistics major.)

I was the second generation of this game. For some reason, I decided that my found texts would be only Steely Dan songs (I don't know why this is; it's probably a reaction to hearing Aja every single day of my early childhood. One of my dad's grad students humored me by reading them and remarking, "The best thing would be to put these back into the melodies of the songs."). I decided to modify the game by turning the mass of words into sentences; such an exercise required adding articles, occasionally shifting around words, and picking texts that didn't have many repeating words because it proved difficult to write very many sentences about, say, mooing or mimes. The memorable line that came out of this version was "Thor drugs you with soup." I made little zines of these exercises, but I don't know where they are now--probably that's for the best.

But I wanted to see if the constrained magic still worked, so I tried three substitutions using "Bad Sneakers" as a found text:

(In this substitution, a becomes ie, o becomes ele, t becomes m, and n becomes ck. There were several garbled words that got no hits on the spell-check, so I hit the space bar and made them into two or three non-words that were easier to replace. You'll see that mimes, ice, and eyelet become big preoccupations in these sentences. The thing I notice about including the pseudo-moo version is that nouns and especially adverbs are over-represented, but articles and prepositions are under-represented--probably because articles are shorter and usually contain the vowels and consonants that were substituted.)

Pseudo-moo version: Five chimes mime I check tiredly slicked melee heifer icy quick yells iced mocked iced elected melee chimp wheel silk’s here I check see men liveries mile kicks heel men mimes were gimmick hired iced mime fever slime excite viselike lack leek mages reel baleful envied iced I’m garlicky licks eke iced I’m lieu hack item men friezes relic iced I’m seal idle lackey helices wreck hay gazes cake sack me helmet bide screeners iced tea pickle collide my frock small epic leek men evacuee by revile camp wish tea brick similar iced tea lieges sum elf meekly melee speckled eyelet feline eyelet maverick up men scream eyelet weepier mime white mutedly heel eyelet gazes cake beige men helium delete eyelet meeker e falter tea feeble delete eyelet thick mime I defect’s see mime dims eel pick men vilely mime mere dirges jams fewer me.

Thor drugs you with soup version: Five mimes chime, so I check tiredly on the slicked melee of icy, quick heifers who yell.
I was iced, mocked, iced again, and then elected in a melee.
The chimp-wheel silk’s here. I check and see men in liveries for miles.
Mimes kick their heels, but the men were gimmicks, hired by iced mimes in a fevered slime.
He was excited by the mage’s viselike lack of leeks and reeled balefully.
I envied icy, garlicky licks eked out in lieu of the hack’s menu items.
Friezes, relics, seals-—I’m as idle as a lackey in these wrecked helices.
Hay, gazes, cake, a sack, my helmet, and me: I bide my time with the screeners’ iced tea and pickles.
My frock is a small epic of collided leeks and men evacuated by the reviled camp.
I wish for brick tea, which is similar to the iced tea made by my lieges, a sum of elves who speckled meekly in the melee.
“It’s feline eyelet,” a maverick man screams at the weepier mime, whose white face mutedly heeds the eyelet’s gazes.
As they gaze at the beige cake, the helium men delete eyelet meekly and falter from the feeble tea.
The eyelet is thick with deleted mimes and defects; I see mimes dimly among the eels.
Pick men vilely, or mime mere dirges and jams for feverish me.

(o becomes ai, e becomes ough, n becomes w, t becomes v. This is just the edited version of the sentences. I never want to use the word vouch again. Or yoyo. Or adverbs in general.)

If I vouch the way of the moths I have cawed, I’d hardly have sawed in vain against the rougher wily pig.
Years add mewing weight to the aerogun chimp.
Through what sin’s hour can I caw my soul, though I vouch for the balking ladybugs?
Hail and vermouth are gouging roughly, vying hard for addition.
I have fought, assailed, and ought to have caved to the viewing magi, whose aid waylaid me.
Bouillon unheard, I’m gaining wise dough and I’m laughing.
The van vouched for frail rawness; I ought to add I’m said to be an alias.
Her hair wrought into a haughty whoosh, the Taiwan moth sought ham in a bad swoon.
The gory haiku about pitas, cicadas, and my furloughed scampi aided me in vouching my weight by radio.
The ivy, wavy in viral silver, aided a lark gouging sums of airy maids.
The yoyo wrought vainly sloughed off frugally.
Yoyos were in vogue among the hares, who shrugged as though they thought they were tougher.
Have thorough voodoo shady in the hail while I yoyo from Taiwan.
The sow coughed for days after the vermouth moth vouched.
Fair in a fatal day, the hawk yoyo-ed among the cows, sowing detached aqua in the village.
Have a haughty, rough digit jut from your fair mouth.

(a becomes u, n becomes rm, s becomes qu, t becomes g, o becomes ee. My imaginary rum collection gets more and more disgusting. Oh, and I've added two actual text messages I sent last night re: ANTM. See if you can find them.)

With five hogs in muumuus, I cured the hurdles augured by the hour.
Gee, it was louder on the rim that year: the rummy mermen were eerie and I was a mere chimp squirming on the wheel.
Here I cure the queen ladybug with this gull’s karma I heeded with a grimy urge to gag her.
The hurt-rum hogs formed four queues to excel as the uglier germs in the muggy melee.
Jay wants "desolation-fabulosity!" while standing next to a car on fire.
This beetle-curd rum I’m jeering as impure is the rum I’m laughing at as I rearm from my bug-rum freezer.
I’m queen among the aldermen, but my heresy whirs in their eardrums.
You’ve queered me, hemmed me, and murmured “gee!” as I’ve budded from a kernel of rum.
My prime celadon firearm makes the queen prim.
The germs are overdue in the rudder cage.
The wig you groom as unique is the rummy gear you lunge at as you quit.
Beef is merely supreme in my eyes.
Tyra can communicate with dragons.
The flu makes my eyes gaudier.
“Up?” he queried, eyeing the weird hog.
The Whig’s suede heels stretch from eye to eardrum.
The bugs and hogs deem my eyes gauche.
My fear is my fee.
Eels deem eyes harmful on hogs, but the deer’s queen ditches the rim elegy in the valley of hogs.
The dagger genre brings joy and fear to me.

A protester dead in Georgia?

There are unconfirmed reports that a Georgian man named Zurab Kilasonia has died from injuries inflicted by the police. (See background here and here.) The story seems to be disappearing, and may have been falsely reported.

Meanwhile, most Georgian opposition parties have come together to support a single candidate: Levan Gachechiladze, aka "Buckwheat" (Grechikha in Georgian). Levan is the brother of Giorgi Gachechiladze, aka "Utsnobi" ("the unknown", right), an eccentric musician and DJ who, like most of the opposition, opposed both Eduard Shevardnadze (Georgia's last president) and Mikheil Saakashvili (Georgia's current president). I don't know much about either Gachechiladze's politics, but I can promise you that you've never seen a music video quite like Utsnobi's "Zamtari Ertad" ("winter together"), in which a company of traditional ceremonial Georgian dancers conducts their stage pageantry in Georgian bathrooms and stairwells. (By straining the limits of my Georgian, I can tell you that "Patara gogo!" means "little girl!", and the repeated final refrain is from a nursery rhyme: "Achu! Achu! Achu, tsqeno! Saad unda gagacheno?", "Giddyup! Giddyup! Giddyup, horse! Where do you want to take me?" Also see his "Velodebis Mzes", which offers a great glimpse of Georgian city life and environs). I can also tell you that long ago I once sang a composition of my own, a satirical version of Utsnobi's song "Sikwaruli Daprinavs" ("Love Flies"), to one Mikheil Saakashvili in his office in the Ministry of Justice of Georgia.

Below, a man about to be beaten by a masked government supporter. Who these people are has not been made clear, but there is speculation that they are national youth group members who were brought in as extralegal enforcers. Perhaps police on their day jobs are harder to motivate; there are reports that at least one police group chose to stand down and not participate in the crowd dispersal.


(Someone said the man about to be struck is "Jorbenadze", perhaps meaning Avtandil Jorbenadze, a former minister under Eduard Shevardnadze.)

"...the government uses the methods of Ceausescu and as a result the end might be Romanian"

Here is a list of statements made on air on the Georgian television station "Imedi" that lead to its being shut down. (See my previous posts about the crisis in Georgia here and here.)

November 2

Imedi “Chronica” 09:00

Kakha Dzagania: “Nothing will stop this wave; it will be followed by victory”

Imedi “Chronica” 14:00

14:50 Levan Gachechiladze: “We will destroy the violence, we will destroy the prisons, and we will destroy scoundrels”

14:50 Shalva Natelashvili: “…in order to achieve it, the government must resign”

Imedi “Chronica” 15:00

15:02 Konstantine Gamsakhurdia: “…People are ready for action; the evil is strong because the good people are inactive, and so we must act!”

15:06 Zviad Dzidziguri: “…the funeral ceremony [of the government] started today, in front of the Parliament building, and will last only for few days… we all request Georgia without President. The verdict is already announced, we must send this Government to the political dustbin, as we did with many others before...”

Imedi “Chronica” 17:00

17:42 Irakli Tsereteli: “…Let’s siege the Parliament, let’s siege the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and if the Government will not talk with us, on your behalf the “national assembly” [opposition coalition] will declare Mikheil Saakashvili toppled..”

17:46 Gia Berdzenadze: “…annihilate these anti Russians!”

Imedi “Chronica” 18:00

18:11 Badri Patarkatsishvili: “… with the long planned methods, we will succeed to have the government that will be the people’s government”

18:31 Jondi Bagaturia: “…with this Government our country has no future and it must resign, at this stage, peacefully…”

Imedi “Reakcia” 23:00

00:53 Tina Khidasheli: “…then come there [in front of Parliament] tomorrow and let’s finish with Saakashvili”

November 3

Imedi “Chronica” 15:00

15:09 Levan Gachechiladze: “we will reveal our future plans of our decisive struggle to fight this dirty regime”

15:21 David Berdzenishvili: “don’t make a choice [appeals to the government] between the fates of Milosevic and Ceausescu”

15:47 Gubaz Sanikidze: “We should tell the Government what you [people] think… there is no way to cooperate with the Government, this is excluded”

15:49 Konstantine Gamsakhurdia: “we will say very soon that our patience is running out”

21:22 Bezhan Gunava: “this demonstration is the peaceful riot of Georgian people, when the government has no chance other then resignation”

4^th of November

Imedi, “Kronika” 13:00

13:44 Koba Davitashvili: “the government uses the methods of Ceausescu and as a result the end might be Romanian”

17:30 Gia Tortladze: “I promise to all honest prisoners that they will be rescued after this government leaves”

18:16 Vladimir Zhirinovski: “I believe that Georgian people wishes democracy and they will achieve it; let everything be decided by parliaments; create parliamentary republics in Georgia and Ukraine, and we will try the same in Russia”

18:30 Paata Davitaya: “we have no way backward, our homeland and religion stand behind us; many law enforcement officers are mobilized here and I want to appeal to them that their duty is to serve people; therefore, I ask them to stand together with people and defend them, and do not fulfill [government’s] criminal orders”

Imedi, “Droeba” 21:00

21:09 Giorgi Targamadze: “if it was people’s will 4 years ago [talks about “Rose Revolution”], people’s will should govern 4 years after as well”

5^th of November

Imedi, “Kronika” 09:00

15:12 Paata Davitaya: “I appeal to my friends in the Ministry of Internal Affairs and General Prosecutor’s Office to stand together with people and do not fulfill violent orders, today the frontline is here [in front of parliament]”

15:22 Zviad Dzidziguri: “Misha [appeals to President] you will soon be toppled down..... this will truly be in this way....our demonstrations will aggravate every day”

18:02 Kakha Shartava: “after we get rid of them [government] soon, you will see that we are better off.... what will be afterwards? this has long been thought, calculated, written and agreed...”

7^th of November

Imedi, “Kronika” 10:00

10:16 Gia Gachechiladze: “either you [government] or us! we will sacrifice ourselves for this cause. I ask everyone ... Vake, Vera [Tbilisi Districts] to come out and stand with us. Georgia’s destiny is decided here”

Imedi, “Kronika” 12:00

12:01 Koka Guntsadze: “we appeal to all Georgians to come here at 2 o’clock to finish with this government”

12:02 Jondi Baghaturia: “all Georgians should rise up and force the government to their knees”

14:05 Koba Davitashvili: “yet for several days people demand from us very radical measures; I will say openly, people ask us for the new revolution”

Imedi, “Kronika” 09:00

14:02 Levan Berdzenishvili: “we can be engaged in dialogue only on one issue: when and at what conditions president will resign, who has committed crime against humanity”

16:05 David Berdzenishvili: “we will arrest everyone who is related to break up of demonstration, illegal arrests.... we receive information that Nino Burdzhanadze wants to meet with us, we refuse....we refuse”

16:21 Gubaz Sanikidze: “the days of this government are counted... we should finish this government”

15:28 Goga khaindrava: “I promise to law enforcement officers: everyone who participated in break up of demonstration, used tear gas, or cudgels will seriously be punished and no masks will save them.... now I am heading to there.... now I am planning to put an end to this criminal regime leaded by terrorist Saakashvili”

15:33 Giga Lortkipanidze: “today is the end of this government; I can not doubt in this even for one minute”

15:41 Goga Khaindrava: “Let’s gather at Rike [place in Tbilisi] and pass sentence on these cannibals and terrorists”

Imedi, “Kronika” 18:25

18:35 Badri Patarkatsishvili: “nobody should doubt that my entire financial resources, up until one cent, will be used to liberate Georgia from this fascist regime”

A few of these do pass from statements of electoral intent to the realm of fomenting open rebellion, though none calls people to arms. That some of the more mild quotes are included makes me wonder if the government and ruling party is able to distinguish between political disagreement and traitorous rebellion. "Let everything be decided by parliaments"?

I am hearing that while few supporters of the government disagreed with moving police to break up the demonstrations, some have disagreed with the shutdown of Imedi. There is talk of Imedi being back on the air soon, and of government restitution for property damaged in the police raid, but that damage sounds extensive and some may be irreplaceable.

Schaden-Frere-Jones

Did I mention that I loathe Sasha Frere-Jones?

But after that Wilco (right) and Tweedy, presumably under the influence of other indie bands, drifted from accessible songs toward atomization and noise. On “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” the lyrics are embarrassing poetry laid over plodding rhythms. (“Tall buildings shake, voices escape singing sad, sad songs, tuned to chords strung down your cheeks.”) The album features synthesizer squeaks and echoey feedback-, which fail to give shape to the formless music. A little more syncopation would have helped.

"Jesus etc." is one of my favorite indie rock songs. It's also an inexplicable example to choose--Frere-Jones is a