Greg Brown

Just finished watching Les Choristes in preparation for showing...

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 08:56:23 -0600

Just finished watching Les Choristes in preparation for showing it at the film series later today. It’s possibly the most predictable, profoundly-awful film I’ve seen in the last decade. I called the very last scene as soon as that character was introduced. Ugh.

Watching this with my high school kids RIGHT NOW. Still amazing.

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:43:33 -0600

Watching this with my high school kids RIGHT NOW. Still amazing.

"The narrative is fascinating to me. It’s a way of viewing personality, stories, gossip, fear,..."

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 12:06:27 -0600

“The narrative is fascinating to me. It’s a way of viewing personality, stories, gossip, fear, passion, success, and failure that rings true with me these days. It’s a shared story that has its own rules, rules outside of the rules of fairness or truth, and are more in line with the rules of entertainment, social hierarchy, and fun. And it’s not all-powerful. I think truth is still a more powerful entity, it’s just not always in the foreground. History, in a way, could be interpreted as an eternal battle between truth and the narrative.”

- Buster Benson, on narratives.

I love that last line. History, in a way, could be interpreted as an eternal battle between truth and the narrative. It’s the force of my unease towards too-slick histories like The Devil in the White City, and part of my interest in messier stories like Zodiac.

And I don’t think history is the only field of study that falls prey to this war between truth and narrative. In the popular consciousness, the theory of evolution still has problems taking hold because it simply doesn’t make sense to many people as a story of how the world came about.

Just as we need to rewrite our knowledge of the world as new truths are discovered, so must we create new forms of narrative to tell their stories.

Payday Swag Today I could finally afford to go into town, eat a...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:47:00 -0600

Payday Swag

Today I could finally afford to go into town, eat a non-cafeteria meal, and buy some more books… and I kind of went a little crazy in the process. From the top:

The Omnivore’s Dilemma is by Pollan, whose articles for the NY Times Magazine have been excellent. He got an unruly amount of buzz for this book, so much that his follow-up In Defense of Food got yet more buzz just for being the follow-up. I’ve been putting this off for a while, and slipping onto the “buy one, get one half-off” was enough to push me over.
Nixonland by Perlstein is the sequel to his brilliant book Before the Storm, which chronicles the rise of Barry Goldwater in the midst of an America being radically changed by the early 1960s. I’m about halfway through Storm right now and it’s blowing my mind on a regular basis. Expect a slavishly laudatory review sometime in the future.
Home by Robinson was also on my favorite table at Borders, and Robinson is an author that I’ve been meaning to check out for a while after seeing great quotes from this book posted on some Tumblrs I follow.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Kundera, in that nifty new “olive edition” that’s only $10 with a neat cover. I’ve wanted to read Kundera for a while, being recommended by both my girlfriend and Mills, and this looked like the opportunity to do it.
And the two DFW books, Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, are extra copies because I’ve loaned out mine to friends in other states. I’ve really been craving a re-read and I’m also getting my girlfriend hooked on DFW. She’s almost completely through Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, experiencing it with the same enthrallment and horror that characterized my first read too. We make a pretty good pair of people.

Not pictured are If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino - already given to my girlfriend to read - and two books she picked up on the trip: Old School by Tobias Wolff, and a volume featuring Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies in both German and English on facing pages.

And with that, my collection of books here in Michigan now exceeds the shelf I’m storing it on. I’m thinking about combining my books with my DVDs in a free-association shelving scheme. Liar’s Poker next to Michael Clayton? Sure!

Latest setback for the Large Hadron Collider: a bird with bread

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:28:00 -0600

Latest setback for the Large Hadron Collider: a bird with bread:

Yet another data-point in favor of the theory that nature abhors a Higgs boson.

Also mentioned is the fail-safe system that kicks in if the temperature rises too high for the metals to maintain superconductivity:

Had this week’s feathered baguette-packing saboteur struck in coming months, with a brace of beams roaring round the LHC’s magnetic motorway, the climbing temperatures would have been noted and the beams diverted - rather in the fashion that a runaway truck or train can be - into “dump caverns” lying a little off the main track of the LHC. In these large artificial caves, each beam would power into a “dump core”, a massive 7m-long graphite block encased in steel, water cooled and then further wrapped in 750 tonnes of concrete and iron shielding. The dump core would become extremely hot and quite radioactive, but it has massive shielding and scores of metres of solid granite lie between the cavern and the surface. Nobody up top, except the control room staff, would even notice.

"[Malcolm] Gladwell promised readers mastery of the complex and competitive world around them, if..."

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:10:32 -0600

“[Malcolm] Gladwell promised readers mastery of the complex and competitive world around them, if only they would accept the facile conclusions he extrapolated from the findings of the many endearingly eccentric, iconoclastic scholars and researchers who were busy applying the scientific method to the investigation of everyday living.”

- Maureen Tkacik, writing “Gladwell for Dummies” in The Nation. It’s a pretty sweet burn.

For all of Gladwell’s feints towards complexity, he always treats the world as amenable to both metaphor and science, understandable using our current cognitive tools and a little bit of hard work. It’s a fundamentally optimistic view, almost a throwback to the America in the ’60s when we imagined a world advanced by scientific inquiry - every problem the opportunity for a solution - all encompassed within a generation or two.

For all the assumptions that Gladwell goes through the motions of upending, he leaves intact our faith in the current course, running through a process of textual inquiry more palliative than curative.

slaughterhouse90210: “Stupidity is the same as evil if you...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:26:00 -0600

slaughterhouse90210:

“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”
— Margaret Atwood, Surfacing

See also: Mills’ post on the same, albeit without awesome Jeff Dunham burn.

I’m 21 suckars! My best friend Zoe is 21 today!...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:34:00 -0600

I’m 21 suckars!

My best friend Zoe is 21 today! Unfortunately, I had to be several states away when she finally got around to turning the big two-one. Hopefully we will manage to meet up somewhere in Kansas or Michigan and celebrate properly.

For now, this awkwardest-picture-I-could-find-on-Facebook will have to do.

"The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a..."

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:24:48 -0600

“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.”

- William Styron, quoted by Anne K. Yoder from the latest volume of the Paris Review interviews.

The writing I adore has always been about grappling with something - trying to wrestle it to the ground and encompass it within one’s grasp - whether it’s the crooked timber of everyday experience, or the ways that we try to connect with each other.

Maybe it’s just that function proves to be a wonderful organization-tool, or that I’m only able to explain why I like something in terms of its purpose. But there still seems to be something there, some element of essential empathy because I understand the kind of battle they’re fighting.

Are we past the expiration date for candid Halloween...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:25:32 -0600

Are we past the expiration date for candid Halloween photos?

Yes/No (circle one)

So I went as a Twilight super-fan for Halloween - complete with...

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:06:00 -0600

So I went as a Twilight super-fan for Halloween - complete with an incredibly tight Team Edward “What would I do without you?” t-shirt, “It never made sense for you to love me.” button, New Moon and Runs With Vampires bracelets (latter w/ charm), and an uncomfortably teen-girl New Moon fan-magazine. You wouldn’t believe the sheer tonnage of crazy shit at Hot Topic. I also half mussed my hair up in a lame attempt to imitate lame attempts to look like Edward the vampire.

As a measure of my success, about half the people I saw loved the hell out of it. The other half were horrified for humanity.

Yesterday we found a swarm of ladybugs that had somehow survived...

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:46:55 -0500

Yesterday we found a swarm of ladybugs that had somehow survived the first few freezes of Michigan’s autumn. They were kinda magical and kinda clingy.

Gratuitous Picture Of Yourself Wednesday: Try 1

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:29:41 -0500

Gratuitous Picture Of Yourself Wednesday: Try 1

This is what consciousness looked like in the 17th century.

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:29:46 -0500

This is what consciousness looked like in the 17th century.

I just finished writing almost three thousand words of quarterly...

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:16:00 -0500

I just finished writing almost three thousand words of quarterly evaluations, so I’m celebrating by playing some of the wonderful adventure game Machinarium. It’s a gorgeously-illustrated point-and-click puzzle game packed with character and life.

It’s just a flash game, so you can play a three-level demo at the Machinarium website. It does require some cleverness, though, so be warned.

“H1N1 Vaccine Polio Serum, it is reported, has already...

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:52:17 -0500

“~~H1N1 Vaccine~~ Polio Serum, it is reported, has already killed and maimed children; its future effects on mind and body cannot be guaged(sic). This vaccine drive is the entering wedge for nation-wide socialized medicine, by the U.S. Public Health Service, (heavily infiltrated by Russian-born doctors, according to Congressman Claire Hoffman.) In enemy hands it can destroy an whole generation.”

My current favorite game is finding old things that sound like new things.

"Kansas City linebacker Mike Vrabel has one touchdown catch this season, approximately one more..."

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:27:42 -0500

“Kansas City linebacker Mike Vrabel has one touchdown catch this season, approximately one more touchdown than any running back on Kansas City’s roster.”

- Patrick Hruby, encapsulating the Chiefs’ awful 1-6 record in one sad fact.

Then and Now

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:02:30 -0500

During the Civil war:

Sometimes the pressure of burials at [Richmond’s] Hollywood [hospital] became so great that as many as two hundred bodies would be awaiting internment. Chaplain Joseph Walker explained how he worked to be at once respectful and efficient in his treatment of the dead. “It was our habit to have one service for several bodies that were uncovered in adjacent graves varying the service to suit the numbers, or have a general service over the coffins while still above ground.” Strangers visiting the cemetary often joined these observances, providing mourners for those who had died far from home and claiming their lives and sacrifice for the broader community of Virginia and the South.

The emergence of this impersonal connection with the dead, one independent of any direct ties of kin or friendship, was a critical evolution in the understanding of war’s carnage. The soldiers being interred did not belong just to their friends and relatives; their loss was more than just a diminution of their own families; these men were more than simply individual selves. In rituals like those at Hollywood, the fallen were being transformed into an imagined community for the Confederacy, becoming a collective in which a name or identity was no longer necessary. These men were now part of the Confederate Dead, a shadow nation of sacrificed lives to be honored and invoked less for themselves than for the purposes of the nation and the society struggling to survive them. These soldiers could no longer contribute to the South’s military effort, but they would serve other important political and cultural purposes in providing meaning for the war and its costs.

Now:

There are few contemporary conflicts for which a definitive death-toll is available, far less a comprehensive account of all the social, psychological, and structural effects of the conflict. Yet the “need to know” is keenly felt within any society that has had catastrophic loss - by relatives, by local communities, and by the society at large. For example, establishing the exact death-toll at “ground zero” in New York after the attacks of 11 September 2001 was about far more than deciding how culpable the bombers were: it was about honouring and humanising the dead, coming to terms with loss, and constructing a lasting memorial. In working meticulously towards establishing these kind of truths, investigators spoke of a “communal desire for a number whose exactness might bring some comprehension to the incomprehensible”

The former is a selection from This Republic of Suffering (page 82-83, paperback edition), a book by Drew Gilpin Faust covering the role that death played in the Civil War. She notes that “of all living things, only humans consciously anticipate death; the consequent need to choose how to behave in its face — to worry about how to die — distinguishes us from other animals. The need to manage death is the particular lot of humanity.”

The latter, from a recent proposal to account for every life taken in the course of war or conflict, is this latest iteration of the dead as a entity unto themselves. They were once put to use strengthening the resolve to wage war, but are now called upon to warn against its dangers.

CNN.com redesigned their website today to downplay the newspaper...

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:45:00 -0500

CNN.com redesigned their website today to downplay the newspaper feel and make it look more like a magazine, but the new “NewsPulse” feature reveals it’s still the same old CNN.com we know and loathe. Or love. Maybe both.

"Small Worlds" by David Shute

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:05:32 -0500

"Small Worlds" by David Shute:

A lovely little game that’s just about exploring landscapes; the map reveals itself as you travel through it, slowly revealing the overall environment. Very relaxing and wonderful.