Long Overdue

Every snarling misanthrope and general curmudgeon should, at some point in his life, make a stab at his own version of Gilbert's "Little List" song from The Mikado. (Gilbert himself updated the lyrics as some became outdated and better ideas occurred to him, so there's a long-standing recognition that it's OK to do so. Well, that and, let's face it, the original lyrics include the word "nigger"--so seriously, we pretty much have to change them or else every boarding school production in America will be guilty of a hate crime.) Anyway, here's mine:



As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I've got a little list — I've got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed — who never would be missed!

There’s the people who bring infants onto overcrowded planes
All drivers who start signaling just after changing lanes
The shirtless man at football games who’s painted like a clown
The people who climb Everest and have to be helped down
And that scourge of all talk radio - the redneck jingoist -
I don’t think he’ll be missed—I’m sure he’ll not be missed!

I’ve got ‘em on the list – I’ve got ‘em on the list;
And they’ll none of ‘em be missed – they’ll none of ‘em be missed.

All college academics who write books that no one reads -
The gender theorist – I’ve got her on the list!
All those who think that Sarah Palin’s “what this country needs” -
And the 'vampire' novelist – I don't think she'll be missed!
The women who “drop everything” for “Oprah” and “The View”;
Men quoting Monty Python, “Battlestar,” and “Doctor Who”;
All those who not understand that “Warcraft”'s just a game.
All people who “despise L.A.” but live there just the same;
And those who do not bathe because they’re “eco-activist”--
I don’t think they’ll be missed—I’m sure they’ll not be missed!

I’ve got ‘em on the list – I’ve got ‘em on the list;
And they’ll none of ‘em be missed – they’ll none of ‘em be missed.

There's the starlets flashing cameras as they step from car to curb,
And the tabloid journalist – I’m sure he’ll not be missed.
All those who use emoticons and “backpack” as a verb;
They’d none of ‘em be missed, they’d none of ‘em be missed!
All talking heads with empty minds and mouths that fill the screen;
All debutantes who pitch a fit about their sweet sixteen;
All those who sit in coffee shops with laptops all ablaze;
All those who leave their cell-phones on at movies and at plays;
And baby boomer hippies who continue to exist -
They’d none of them be missed – they’d none of them be missed!

I’ve got ‘em on the list – I’ve got ‘em on the list;
And they’ll none of ‘em be missed – they’ll none of ‘em be missed.

Necessity Fulfilled

In debating the existence of God, philosophers must inevitably deal with what I call The Moment of Frustrated Necessity. That is, moments where one is decisively certain that something should be happening, but is not. I have returned from such a moment. Clearly, in a just universe ruled over by an all-knowing Creator, the following is what should have happened:


I am at the local market, and find myself in the frozen foods aisle, looking for (shocking, this) frozen foods, specifically strawberries and peaches. None is immediately evident, and I pause, brow furrowed, to try to place myself in the mind of the corporate manager who organized this place. Fruits are not vegetables, and therefore "Frozen Vegetables" seems a poor bet. Nor are they "Novelties"--Hmm. As I shift my weight back on one foot so as to tap the other in thought (yes, I actually do this), I am involuntarily aware of the song that is playing over the muzak.

It is "Let It Snow," though it is no version of this song I have ever encountered, and for good reason. This is not the bouncy, vivace piece popularized by such as Bing Crosby and Dean Martin. Oh no--this is "Let It Snow" re-interpreted as, as far as I can tell, a porn-movie torch-song. Drippingly ballad-slow, throat-heavy vocals that might be Michael Bolton, or at least someone trying to be him--a sickening ambition if ever there was one.

Mere transcription cannot do justice to the merciless cruelty of what I'm hearing; the singer sounds like he's trying to fake the sounds of a man trying to hold back an orgasm, and thus merely sounds life-threateningly constipated. Try to wrap your brain around it: "Oh-the-weather...(three-second pause)...outside...(three-second pause)...is-frightful...(ten-second pause)...But-the-fire (three-second pause)...is-so...(three second pause)...delightful..."

I pause. I look around at the people shuffling past me--my disbelief is both confirmed and dispelled: they hear it too. Everyone hears it. And everyone either hunkers his head down a bit more, like someone trying to ride out a bitter blast of stinging rain, or else meets the eyes of a total stranger to exchange a little "Sucks, huh?" shrug of broken-spirited comradery.

I listen for a few more moments: "Oh-it-doesn't...(three-second pause)...show-signs...(three second pause)...of-stopping...(ten second pause)...and-I've-brought...(three second pause)...some-corn...(three second pause)...for-popping..."

No. No. This cannot stand. This cannot be allowed. I cannot live in a world in which this is allowed to happen. I drop my basket with an audible clatter, drawing the stares of the rest of the store.

"I'll just be a minute," I announce, generally, and then stride off, disappearing around an aisle and out of sight. Somewhere, there's the sound of a far-off door opening and closing, and then steps that fade into the distance.

The singer continues, and this is the transcript of what follows: "Oh-the-fire...(three-second pause)...is-slowly...(three-second pause)...dying...(ten-second pause)...And-my-dear...(three-second pause)...we're-still...(three-second pause)...goodb--hurk! (Dull thud and the sound of the microphone tumbling to the floor, several seconds of scuffling, then something heavy hits something less heavy) AAAAAAAH! Oh, God, you broke my--AAAAAAH! AAAAAAAH! Oh Jesus God, help me! Somebody help--he's got a--(A sound similar to the snap of kindling)--AAAAAAAAH! Christ! Christ! Holy Christ--that was my--why are you--AAAAAAAH! My God, you can't put that--it won't go in my--you can't---AAAAAAAAAH!! Jesus Jesus JESUS PULL IT OUT PULL IT OUT PULL IT OUT--(gasp)--Oh, God, thank you, thank--AAAAAAHHH NO NOT DEEPER NOT DEEPER AHHHHHHHH!!!! SOMEBODY PLEASE STOP HIM--he's putting--KEROSENE!!! THERE'S KEROSENE EVERYWHERE!!! PLEASE SOMEBODY DO SOME--(The scratch of a match, and a fwoomp--a lot a screaming follows. Then, the low sounds of someone trying feebly to crawl to saftey. Then, the unmistakable growl of a power tool. The voice that speaks now is thick and clogged, as if speaking through a chunky milkshake.) Oh no, no, no, no--NOOOOO--AAAAAAAH!!! Not my eyes! NOT MY EYES! NOT MY--AAAAAAAAH!!! (Several more seconds of screams, then sudden silence, then a wet gurgling sound that goes for about a minute. Then--)

My voice: (clearly out of breath) Be just a second, folks.

(Then, a moment later, the sounds of Nat King Cole singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." The store below gives a round of cheerful applause, and everyone goes back about their evening. When I return to the scene, peeling off a bloody tarp to reveal my own unstained clothes, I'm greeted with pats on the back and a sweet "Thank you, dear" from the old lady in the dairy section.)

That needs to happen.

A Very Belated Response To WALL*E

To be sure, this commentary is no longer current, since I'm only just now getting around to watching the damned thing at home, and not in the theater as God and Pixar (same thing?) intended. But better late than never, said the chemotherapist to the corpse, so here goes:

I was disappointed.

Wonderfully.

Allow me to explain. I watched the first ten minutes, then hit pause, and watched them again. Because I wasn't sure that what I had just seen, I had in fact just seen.

But I had. What I'd seen, if ended right then and there, would have been one of that rarest of things: a perfect work of art. The ten minute sequence that discovers Wall*E in total isolation (cockroach excepted), post-apocalypse, gathering seemingly random bits of junk and then returning to his crib to sort it out--his befuddlement over the cataloguing of the spork was sharp, but the poignancy of the tool-bucket full of cigarette lighters was better--and then watching the video of Hello Dolly! as a means of reminding himself of (though he's never known it directly), a world in which all these things had a place and a meaning that somehow gives them value and meaning in the present, despite the fact that they've been lost--the parallel between the accumulation of crap by the paper-thin WalMart company that led to the apocalypse, and the accumulation of that same crap by an innocent mind, which transforms it from crap into totems of uncomprehending nostalgia--that, folks, is so brilliant that I'm still getting goosebumps.

It's art, folks--it stands up to that kind of academic nit-picking in which I and my fellow ivory-tower inhabitants specialize. I could do a Heideggerian reading of those ten minutes. And a Marxist reading. I could use Camus's vision of Sisyphus to explain WALL*E's devotion to his clearly endless/pointless task. Don Quixote is in there, and Robinson Crusoe, and we can work our way all the way up to A Canticle for Leibowitz and Blade Runner if you like that post-modern stuff. Because there's Duchamp in there, too--just as a urinal seen in the right context is art, so too is a spork. Warhol? Mass production moving first into satire, then camp, then back into the objectivation of an image to the point of naive appreciation. It's there--it's a dense, brilliant, perfect piece of film. Like Salieri's description of Mozart's music in Amadeus: "Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall."

Which is where the disappointment comes in. Because I said to myself, "Dude" (I call myself 'Dude' in the delusion that I am, in my heart of hearts, easygoing and fun to be with--I'm not), "Dude,"I said, says I, "there's no way they're going to be able to keep this up." And of course I was right. Many moments came close to that opening 10 minutes--the space dance, the simple ability of robots to hold hands--suggesting that on some level, the humans who created them couldn't bear to give a creation the burden of awareness without the compensatory ability to feel connective joy--indeed, much of the movie is a beautiful illustration of the concept of "Only connect"--E.M. Forster took most of his greatest novel to make that point!--but no, it couldn't sustain it. It never dipped below the very very good--and such 'low' moments were rare. But it didn't hold on to that gem-like perfection, and that meant that there was a letdown when it failed to do so.

I'm not complaining, really. Perfection is such a rare, rare thing in art, and sustained perfection is damn near impossible. Dickens never wrote a perfect novel. Shakespeare? Please--Hamlet is one of the greatest achievements by any human being, and it's way imperfect. So few things are. Paradise Lost, yes. Heart of Darkness, yes. I think I could make cases for Turn of the Screw and Salinger's Nine Stories. But most works of genius are works that achieve flashes of insight that lift you out of yourself for a few minutes, then plunk you back down again. Such was Wall*E. And you know what? S'OK. Because that puts it in the company of Citizen Kane and Seven Samurai and The Rules of the Game and Casablanca. If the worst thing you can say of a work of art was that you only glimpsed perfection therein, um--that's a pretty fucking amazing work of art. Which this movie is. Plus, of course, it had robots.*


*I still prefer The Incredibles, mind you, because that had robots and Samuel L. Jackson. Case closed.

Do Not Buy This Book

I'm torn between so many impulses: nausea, of course, and tears are right up there. Laughter, to be sure, but so many kinds of laughter, from the low cynical chuckle accompanied a "what can you do?" shake of the head, to the high-pitched chest-heaving kind that one usually associates with the phrase "neighbors have described the suspect as quiet and well-mannered." But enough coyness; here's why:

http://regent.gospelcom.net/rcp/authors/dennisdanielson/

Let us be clear: someone has "translated" Paradise Lost into "English." And others have looked at this and deemed it appropriate: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/paradise-lost-in-prose/?ref=opinion. The attitude seems to be "Well, if it's something that makes the book easy and thus available to readers, why, more power to it!" And "It's not a 'translation,' per se; it's an interpretation that enables the original!"

With all due respect: Bull. Shit.

Allow me to offer an analogy: A conductor produces a performance of Beethoven's Ninth that eliminates everything but the strings and percussion, claiming that this streamlined version, inasmuch as it is easier for the ear to follow, will open up the work to listeners who aren't quite musically experienced enough to listen to the original. He'd be howled from the podium, pursued by a shower of rotten fruit, and rightly so.

This is the ugly side of a society that believes that "All men are created equal" means "No one is better than me about anything ever"--that thinks that the quick path to stardom created by a few weeks on American Idol is a better, sexier way to greatness than pulling one's tired ass from low-rent venue from year to year until enough character and compexity is created to make the breakthrough legitimate. There is somehow the notion that things that are "hard" are never legitimately so, but are designed to be so in order to exclude you. That works of genius ought not to demand effort from us in order to appreciate them. To repeat: Bull. Shit.

Let me suggest something radical: if you can't read Paradise Lost, then you shouldn't read Paradise Lost. If you have to work at it--if you have to take a college course, or refer to the annotations, or struggle--then good. It should be a struggle. Most things worth doing require effort. This is particularly so of artists, and especially of poets. Shakespeare is hard. Chaucer is hard. Jonson and Spencer and Browning are hard. They're not hard because they "use all that-there fancy-talk"--they're hard because they're hard. Genius is hard--try reading Newton's Principia if you doubt me. Complexity of meaning requires our minds to occupy more than one place at the same time, which they can--but not without effort. So the notion that making Milton 'easier' is a legitimate enterprise is offensive and the kind of thing that makes democracies devolve into dictatorships. (Read Plato's Republic, if you doubt me--oh wait, that's hard, too.)

Look, I'm willing to compromise when it's another language--me, I can't read Greek, and yet Homer and Aeschylus and Sophocles have changed my life--I don't have enough Spanish to read Cervantes, and I'd be a poorer soul without Don Quixote. If you need a bridge to cross the gulf between nations, I'll let it go. But English is our language; it's the language that defines how we think, what we feel, who we are. And Milton, with the sole exceptions of Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson, has done more to enable the language to achieve heights and nuances of meaning--and has thus enabled us to achieve those qualities in ourselves. To suggest, then, that Milton needs to be dumbed-down--and that is exactly what this 'translation' is, let's not kid ourselves--means that we need to be dumbed-down--that we are too little in our thoughts and feelings to achieve Milton's level. We are not smaller than we were in his time--let's not allow ourselves to be self-crippled by demanding less than an honest effort. To do otherwise is to bitch and moan about how it's not fair that we're fat even though we're not willing to eat less or exercise. Effort is the only means to achievement--anything that life hands you is essentially hollow, which is why the children of the rich either go out and do something with their lives (FDR, JFK, Churchill) or degenerate into self-medicating gargoyles (anyone until 50 with the last name 'Hilton.')

Milton's poem is, among many many other things, about language itself--he tells us that he will attempt to "justify the ways of God to Man," and do so in the language of poetry. But much of the poem is given over to the inadequacy of any language to convey the meaning of the absolute or the divinely obscure--that humanity's frustration is that what we perceive and what it means and how we account for it in speech and action is just own great big godawful mess, and that the only individual who says what he means and means what he says is God, and that's what makes him God.

And yet the poem isn't about despair; it's about struggling against our linguistic inadequacies--about pushing against the limits of words to achieve something approximating the ability to say something--to really say it. For such a poem to be render user-friendly for them what ain't got the book-larnin' is sickening. It's a poem about how hard it is to understand things, and how we have to try all the same--and to corrupt that by making it 'easy' to understand is just...well, words fail me. (Which is kind of the point.) Shame on everyone who touched this slab of pitch and pretended they weren't defiled thereby, and shame on you if you support it.

In in particular, shame on Fish. Goddammit, Stanley, you know better. And if you don't, go back a reread the original, because you've forgotten why you got into this job in the first place.