I enjoy reading Mitch Berg's Shot in the Dark blog. I followed his bout of underemployment and his more recent success. I can relate, having been underemployed myself for a while. I responded to an Internet ad for a freelance writer with "deep technical experience" and I was selected as one of four writers on a long-term project for a well-known tech company. But there have been delays getting going. Then this morning I got a call from the ad agency where I used to work. They want a part-time copywriter to work on a quasi-technical project that will also last a few months. I can do some of the work at home. Hallelujah! When the other project starts, I can handle both, I figure.
Last Thursday through Saturday, I attended the annual conference of the American Chesterton Society, at the University of St. Thomas. It was wonderful, and I only regret not going to earlier conferences. There were interesting talks on Chesterton and Orwell, Chesteron and Sigrid Undset, Chesterton and E.F. Schumacher, to name a few. But the best thing was the great vibe: people of all ages, from high-school kids taking notes (!) at the talks, up to charming gents in their 80s, and everyone having a good time in a mellow, good-humored way. One custom I particularly enjoyed: beer and wine are free, while bottled water is $1 apiece.
Sunday, I watched the U.S. Open. It was great to see a chubby chain smoker win. The television crew seemed a little unsure of how to handle camera shots showing Angel Cabrera lighting up, but they seemed to decide to go with it, noting at one point that after a good holw, it seemed like a good time for a smoke. They also took note of pictures showing Jack Nicklaus puffing away 45 years earlier when the zopen was held at the same course. What was left unsaid was the sea change in governmental and public atitudes toward smoking that has taken place in the meantime. But they couldn't disparage one of the leaders in the tournament. It was fun to watch.
Posted by Finn MacCool
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Blogs and Reading Groups
James Lileks has taken over the buzz.mn blog of the Strib. He overwhelms the other posters by sheer volume, breadth of subject matter, and wit.
The prolific bloggers like Instapundit and Lileks and Captain Ed remind me of the Victorian novelists in their productivity--lots of quality stuff all the time. Trollope, one of my favorite Victorians, wrote every day before going to work at the Post Office, cranking out five hundred words or so each time. He made the mistake of telling us about his output in his autobiography, which did not endear him to the Flaubertian school of critics. Anyway, there is a Victorian work ethic with these bloggers that is an inspiration.
I have been posting again to Dickens and Trollope reading lists on Yahoo. There is one crabby professor from George Mason who forced me off a different Trollope list that she owned because I had the temerity to quote George Will quoting Trollope. That was beyond the pale to her wway of thinking. Other than that individual, I enjoy these reading groups very much. They are mostly composed of not academic specialists, just enthusiasts.
One person I recall who also ran afoul of this crabby professor was a guy named R.J. Keefe. He has a number of blogs, and on one he reviews the book reviews in the New York Times Sunday book section. He does not appear to have or need gainful employment, signing himself R.J. Keefe, gent., of Yorkville, New York. I see that he has a link to the professor, so they must have patched up their relationship.
Posted by Finn MacCool
The prolific bloggers like Instapundit and Lileks and Captain Ed remind me of the Victorian novelists in their productivity--lots of quality stuff all the time. Trollope, one of my favorite Victorians, wrote every day before going to work at the Post Office, cranking out five hundred words or so each time. He made the mistake of telling us about his output in his autobiography, which did not endear him to the Flaubertian school of critics. Anyway, there is a Victorian work ethic with these bloggers that is an inspiration.
I have been posting again to Dickens and Trollope reading lists on Yahoo. There is one crabby professor from George Mason who forced me off a different Trollope list that she owned because I had the temerity to quote George Will quoting Trollope. That was beyond the pale to her wway of thinking. Other than that individual, I enjoy these reading groups very much. They are mostly composed of not academic specialists, just enthusiasts.
One person I recall who also ran afoul of this crabby professor was a guy named R.J. Keefe. He has a number of blogs, and on one he reviews the book reviews in the New York Times Sunday book section. He does not appear to have or need gainful employment, signing himself R.J. Keefe, gent., of Yorkville, New York. I see that he has a link to the professor, so they must have patched up their relationship.
Posted by Finn MacCool
Friday, June 1, 2007
My Father's Oldsmobile
I noticed a Olds Bravada parked on the street yesterday, the discontinued SUV from the discontinued badge of Olds. It reminded me of the ad campaign from the 90's, "It's not your father's Oldsmobile." One of the TV ads in the campaign featured a grandson of Ernest Hemingway, and the ad somehow linked the Bravada to the novel "Across the River and Into the Trees." I loved that ad. It had a cool-looking guy (actually, he looked a lot like Papa Hemingway). It had an organic connection to offroading; you could take your Bravada across a river and into some woods, although of course almost noone really does. It made me think of the line from the novel, something like "He closed the car door quickly and well," which is a delicously appropriate parody of Hemingway's style, by the master himself. It made me think how much I liked "A Moveable Feast."
I also thought about my father's Oldsmobile. As it happens, my father actually did have an Olds. I think it was a 1955, which we had after the 1952 Buick and before the 1959 Ford wagon. With Dad at the wheel, an unlit Pall Mall hanging from his lip, the family took the Olds across the country in 1957, an epic journey that lives in our memory. So the ad campaign was right on target as far as we were concerned. But on the other hand, wasn't "Rocket 88" one of the early rock tunes? Wasn't that a love song to a powerful V-8 engine? How come Olds didn't come to have the cachet of, say, the '55 Chevy? Too bourgeois maybe. Too close to Buick to be cool.
Speaking of ads with literary associations, the Nissan Murano ran a series of spots featuring "on road adventures," which I thought were conceptually clever. People don't really take their SUVs off road. They buy them for safety and capacity. So the ads showed people doing cool on-road-oriented activities, e.g., buying a cello in a used-instrument shop, or hunting down a first-edition Vonnegut and having the great good fortune to run into Kurt himself, so he could autograph your new purchase. The tone of those ads was pitch-perfect. All of us boomers who grew up with Vonnegut were hit where we lived, unless we had outgrown our youthful enthusiasm, which I had. But the whole idea of flasttering the reader or viewer was great: we know you are the kind of person who hunts down great cellos and first editions. Yea, right. We know that's BS. but we love it anyway.
Posted by Finn MacCool
I also thought about my father's Oldsmobile. As it happens, my father actually did have an Olds. I think it was a 1955, which we had after the 1952 Buick and before the 1959 Ford wagon. With Dad at the wheel, an unlit Pall Mall hanging from his lip, the family took the Olds across the country in 1957, an epic journey that lives in our memory. So the ad campaign was right on target as far as we were concerned. But on the other hand, wasn't "Rocket 88" one of the early rock tunes? Wasn't that a love song to a powerful V-8 engine? How come Olds didn't come to have the cachet of, say, the '55 Chevy? Too bourgeois maybe. Too close to Buick to be cool.
Speaking of ads with literary associations, the Nissan Murano ran a series of spots featuring "on road adventures," which I thought were conceptually clever. People don't really take their SUVs off road. They buy them for safety and capacity. So the ads showed people doing cool on-road-oriented activities, e.g., buying a cello in a used-instrument shop, or hunting down a first-edition Vonnegut and having the great good fortune to run into Kurt himself, so he could autograph your new purchase. The tone of those ads was pitch-perfect. All of us boomers who grew up with Vonnegut were hit where we lived, unless we had outgrown our youthful enthusiasm, which I had. But the whole idea of flasttering the reader or viewer was great: we know you are the kind of person who hunts down great cellos and first editions. Yea, right. We know that's BS. but we love it anyway.
Posted by Finn MacCool
Thursday, May 24, 2007
A Golden Age?
I was thinking how much I enjoy reading blogs. They consitute a golden age of writing and argument, instantly available and free. Part of the pleasure is iliterary--the joy of well-turned phrases. In the phrasemaking department, Lileks writes at a consistently high level. Today, he tackles his Strib colleague Nick Coleman on gasoline prices, and puts in Coleman's mouth some comical bits of inarticulate rage. Last year he described the new Walker Art Center as looking like an "angry robot god." I have used Bleats in my classes to illustrate similes and metaphors.
But the pleasure is also that of argumentation. What can match the back-and-forth of the writers on The Corner, for instance, or the logic of a Eugene Volokh? (Law professors in general make good bloggers.) Who combines humor and logic and fact so well as Tom Maguire on Plamegate or the Duke lacrosse miscarriage of justice? Mark Steyn, of course, is sui generis, although I must say I like him and Lileks better in print than on Hugh Hewitt. Writing gives you the chance to edit and polish. The mots tend to be more juste, less adulterated by the exigencies of the moment.
The other great benefit of blogs is that they provide a perspective usually missing from the MSM. Here are two current examples. The New Yorker this week has a Talk of the Town piece on Rachel Carson. It lambastes the Bush administration for gutting environmental regulations, to favor rapacious corporate interests. But the piece avoids all mention of the great debate about "Silent Spring" and DDT, and how the ban on its use has cost a great number of lives in poor countries because of the resurgence of malaria. Blogs have made the argument that Rachel Carson has indirectly been responsible for thousands of preventable deaths.
The other example concerns another Rachel, the U.S. Attorny for Minnesota, Rachel Paulose. The Pioneer Press today breathlessly reported that Monica Goodling admitted to considering party affiliation in the selection of Paulose. The PP is shocked, shocked to discover politics playing a role in political appointments. But as Powerline noted, there may have been a U.S. attorney appointed by a president of the opposite party, but it's not how things are done usually. More proof that the center-right blogosphere serves as a welcome counterpoint to MSM bias.
Posted by Finn MacCool
But the pleasure is also that of argumentation. What can match the back-and-forth of the writers on The Corner, for instance, or the logic of a Eugene Volokh? (Law professors in general make good bloggers.) Who combines humor and logic and fact so well as Tom Maguire on Plamegate or the Duke lacrosse miscarriage of justice? Mark Steyn, of course, is sui generis, although I must say I like him and Lileks better in print than on Hugh Hewitt. Writing gives you the chance to edit and polish. The mots tend to be more juste, less adulterated by the exigencies of the moment.
The other great benefit of blogs is that they provide a perspective usually missing from the MSM. Here are two current examples. The New Yorker this week has a Talk of the Town piece on Rachel Carson. It lambastes the Bush administration for gutting environmental regulations, to favor rapacious corporate interests. But the piece avoids all mention of the great debate about "Silent Spring" and DDT, and how the ban on its use has cost a great number of lives in poor countries because of the resurgence of malaria. Blogs have made the argument that Rachel Carson has indirectly been responsible for thousands of preventable deaths.
The other example concerns another Rachel, the U.S. Attorny for Minnesota, Rachel Paulose. The Pioneer Press today breathlessly reported that Monica Goodling admitted to considering party affiliation in the selection of Paulose. The PP is shocked, shocked to discover politics playing a role in political appointments. But as Powerline noted, there may have been a U.S. attorney appointed by a president of the opposite party, but it's not how things are done usually. More proof that the center-right blogosphere serves as a welcome counterpoint to MSM bias.
Posted by Finn MacCool
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Demise of the Right?
The New York Times last Sunday had a big article on "The Right" and its possible demise. Has the paper ever run a piece on the possible demise of the left? I don't think so.
The terms left and right come from the arrangement of seats in the French parliament, so the presumption underlying the terms is that there will always be a continuum of political opinion, not that one or the other side will disappear. The article asserts that the right in America (with no attempt to distinguish among various schools like paleocon, crunchy con, neocon, etc.) is thought by some (the writer carefully dissociates himself from this happy prospect) to have suffered a fatal blow from the deposing of Paul Wolfowitz and the death of Jerry Falwell. That's like thinking liberalism was finished because some Democrat eminence grise like Averill Harriman died and Bill Clinton was impeached. Incidentally, the article says that Bill Clinton was not impeached; that is incorrect: he was impeached by the House, but not convicted by the Senate.
Never mind that Paul Wolfowitz was clearly set up by Europeans in the World Bank who did not care for his distasteful connection to the Iraq war or his emphasis on not conducting business as usual. Never mind that Falwell had not been a significant player in national politics for years.
The article also posits without evidence that the right arose in the 1950s, which as we all know was a terribly uptight period, filled with repressions that were released in the following decade. But if the right did not exist before the 50s, who opposed FDR? What about John Adams? Randolph? Calhoun? For that matter, what about Edmund Burke? I recommend the NYT reporter peruse The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk.
The terms left and right come from the arrangement of seats in the French parliament, so the presumption underlying the terms is that there will always be a continuum of political opinion, not that one or the other side will disappear. The article asserts that the right in America (with no attempt to distinguish among various schools like paleocon, crunchy con, neocon, etc.) is thought by some (the writer carefully dissociates himself from this happy prospect) to have suffered a fatal blow from the deposing of Paul Wolfowitz and the death of Jerry Falwell. That's like thinking liberalism was finished because some Democrat eminence grise like Averill Harriman died and Bill Clinton was impeached. Incidentally, the article says that Bill Clinton was not impeached; that is incorrect: he was impeached by the House, but not convicted by the Senate.
Never mind that Paul Wolfowitz was clearly set up by Europeans in the World Bank who did not care for his distasteful connection to the Iraq war or his emphasis on not conducting business as usual. Never mind that Falwell had not been a significant player in national politics for years.
The article also posits without evidence that the right arose in the 1950s, which as we all know was a terribly uptight period, filled with repressions that were released in the following decade. But if the right did not exist before the 50s, who opposed FDR? What about John Adams? Randolph? Calhoun? For that matter, what about Edmund Burke? I recommend the NYT reporter peruse The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Totalitarian Streaks
I was reading a blog by Rich Broderick, who teaches at a local community college and at the Loft, a Minneapolis literary organization. Wow. He thinks that the new U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, Rachel Paulose, is part of the Bush right wing conspiracy to take over. Part of the proof? Paulose is a member of the Federalist Society. Ann Coulter is also a member, so thr group must be beyond the pale, not really conservative but Jacobin in its radicalism. QED. Didn't that sort of argument used to be called guilt by association? Wasn't that a MCCarthyite technique?
Actually, I do recall something I like about Broderick. Some 20 years ago he wrote a piece about the decline and fall of Control Data that refused to add to the hagiography that surrounded William C. Norris, the company's famously independent-minded first (and almost last) CEO. I saw a more typical piece only a few months ago, after Norris's death. I think it was in The New Yorker. Broderick's piece correctly laid the blame for the company's collapse squarely on Norris. Having spent seven years at the company, I saw firsthand the pernicious influence of Norris's lack of interest in growing the business by paying attention to important trends. Instead, he seemed more interested in his social programs.
Also today I read on SCSU Scholars that the College Republicans at the College of St. Catherine staged one of those "affirmative action bake sales" that seem to rile up the left so much. What I found interesting is not that the usual suspects didn't like the bake sale; they are seeking to silence this different point of view by having the school revoke the group's officlal status. There is a real totalitarian streak, more worrisome to me than Rachel Paulose.
Posted by Finn MacCool
Actually, I do recall something I like about Broderick. Some 20 years ago he wrote a piece about the decline and fall of Control Data that refused to add to the hagiography that surrounded William C. Norris, the company's famously independent-minded first (and almost last) CEO. I saw a more typical piece only a few months ago, after Norris's death. I think it was in The New Yorker. Broderick's piece correctly laid the blame for the company's collapse squarely on Norris. Having spent seven years at the company, I saw firsthand the pernicious influence of Norris's lack of interest in growing the business by paying attention to important trends. Instead, he seemed more interested in his social programs.
Also today I read on SCSU Scholars that the College Republicans at the College of St. Catherine staged one of those "affirmative action bake sales" that seem to rile up the left so much. What I found interesting is not that the usual suspects didn't like the bake sale; they are seeking to silence this different point of view by having the school revoke the group's officlal status. There is a real totalitarian streak, more worrisome to me than Rachel Paulose.
Posted by Finn MacCool
Friday, May 4, 2007
The New Yorker
I've been reading The New Yorker since the 50s. In college, my subscription copy arrived in my mail slot every Friday afternoon, making for an enjoyable start to the weekend. (I had a student subscription, which cost, as I recall, $4 for the year.)
Like many others, I did not like the politicization of the magazine in the late 60s, which filled the Talk of the Town pages with antiwar pieces then as well as now. I also missed the quirky columns on subjects like Ivy League football and trains; these subjects, like nightclubs and boxing, were dropped over time. Still, there remained the cartoons and the ads, although I liked both more in the past. But the occasional piece still succeeds in winning my attention and repaying it, e.g., many of James Surowieki's pieces on finance.
But an article on Hugo Chavez a while back illustrates what is wrong even with the financial or economic stuff. The gist of the article was that oil companies, despite their opposition to Chavez, were finding ways to work with the new leader, showing a realism and flexibility at odds with (and better than) a reflexive conservative dislike for the leftist. What does this view make of the latest news from Venezuela, of further nationalization of oil production in the country. Sounds to me like the reflexive conservative reaction was the correct one all along.
Then there was a piece about an interview with a Hezbollah official in Beirut, around the time of last year's war. Maybe it was before the fighting actually began. The article describes meeting this guy for ice cream and having a civilized chat. What are we suposed to make of this account? That we should not demonize Hezbollah? That they are regular guys and we should get to know them better? That we should discount their pronouncements about death to Jews and Israel as mere posturing? That we should ignore their murder of innocent civilians? Talk about cognitive dissonance! But the piece didn't take up any larger argument, only the narrative of the meeting, leaving us to draw conclusions about the humanness of this guy and, presumably, his fellow members of Hezbollah. I could not do it, knowing what else I know. It was like reading a piece about a Gestapo official in his free time, who shows a friendly and human side at home. In their effort to have a different take, the magazine succeeds only in being willfully blind to reality.
Posted by Finn MacCool
Like many others, I did not like the politicization of the magazine in the late 60s, which filled the Talk of the Town pages with antiwar pieces then as well as now. I also missed the quirky columns on subjects like Ivy League football and trains; these subjects, like nightclubs and boxing, were dropped over time. Still, there remained the cartoons and the ads, although I liked both more in the past. But the occasional piece still succeeds in winning my attention and repaying it, e.g., many of James Surowieki's pieces on finance.
But an article on Hugo Chavez a while back illustrates what is wrong even with the financial or economic stuff. The gist of the article was that oil companies, despite their opposition to Chavez, were finding ways to work with the new leader, showing a realism and flexibility at odds with (and better than) a reflexive conservative dislike for the leftist. What does this view make of the latest news from Venezuela, of further nationalization of oil production in the country. Sounds to me like the reflexive conservative reaction was the correct one all along.
Then there was a piece about an interview with a Hezbollah official in Beirut, around the time of last year's war. Maybe it was before the fighting actually began. The article describes meeting this guy for ice cream and having a civilized chat. What are we suposed to make of this account? That we should not demonize Hezbollah? That they are regular guys and we should get to know them better? That we should discount their pronouncements about death to Jews and Israel as mere posturing? That we should ignore their murder of innocent civilians? Talk about cognitive dissonance! But the piece didn't take up any larger argument, only the narrative of the meeting, leaving us to draw conclusions about the humanness of this guy and, presumably, his fellow members of Hezbollah. I could not do it, knowing what else I know. It was like reading a piece about a Gestapo official in his free time, who shows a friendly and human side at home. In their effort to have a different take, the magazine succeeds only in being willfully blind to reality.
Posted by Finn MacCool
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