May 25, 2004
J.K. Rowling on the Web
A small bit of news for the Harry Potter fans among you: J.K. Rowling now has a website. (The Guardian describes the launch of the website and the world premiere of the third Harry Potter movie here.)
I wish I could tell you that the site is amazingly exciting, but it's not. It's a little busy for my tastes, but given that I'm at least 15 years older than the site's target audience, I don't really mind; I've learned a handful of things from the site so far, namely, that Ginnie's full name is Ginevra, that there was originally going to be an unpleasant Weasley cousin in the fourth book, and that Crookshanks is half Kneazle. (No, I have no idea what that means, though I'm sure that a quick websearch would enlighten me.) The most interesting parts of the site include some of Rowling's notes on the book, as well as her discussion of scenes she cut from her novels. (Nearly Headless Nick was originally going to sing a song about how he died, for example.)
Overall, then, I'd be really intrigued with this site if I were a kid. Given that I'm a doddering old history grad student, I think it's kind of cute.
May 24, 2004
Cool Word of the Day: Cryptomnesia
In yesterday's New York Times Sunday Magazine, Christopher Caldwell discusses the recent controversy over whether Vladimir Nabokov got the idea for Lolita from a 1916 story by an obscure German writer; that story, also named "Lolita," describes the male narrator's obsession with a young girl. I didn't find Caldwell's article terribly interesting (the same issues have been dealt with more compellingly by other writers), but it did introduce me to a delightful new word: cryptomnesia.
Continue reading "Cool Word of the Day: Cryptomnesia"The New Yorker on Obama
This week's New Yorker has a nice profile of Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for the Senate here in Illinois. Here's a priceless anecdote:
[Congresswoman] Jan Schakowsky told me about a recent visit she had made to the White House with a congressional delegation. On her way out, she said, President Bush noticed her “obama” button. “He jumped back, almost literally,” she said. “And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was Obama, with a ‘b.’ And I explained who he was. The President said, ‘Well, I don’t know him.’ So I just said, ‘You will.’”
With any luck, Bush won't get the chance to know Obama very well: I hope that we'll be electing Obama and throwing out Bush in November.
(For more on Obama, check out his campaign blog, which may or may not include his campaign theme song.)
May 23, 2004
Sunday evening links
I'm just back from a weekend trip to Berkeley, and I'm too tired/lazy/busy to write anything substantive of my own. Instead, here are some recent articles that have struck my interest:
- In The Times Literary Supplement, the University of Chicago's Wendy Doniger reviews a new book on Tantrism. What interested me most wasn't just Doniger's description of Tantrism, but her account of how the interpretation of Tantrism has changed and become controversial in India:
Just as pizza, once a Neapolitan speciality, spread throughout Italy as a result of its popularity in America, so Tantra's reputation in India was significantly affected by its notoriety in Europe. Today, many scholars both within and without Hinduism insist that the sort of hard-core Tantra that White describes never existed and that Tantra has always been solely a technique of meditation. When scholars of this ilk encounter the blatantly sexual statements of the hard-core texts (and the Tantras do contain statements like: "The body of every living creature is made of semen and blood. The deities who are fond of sexual pleasure drink semen and blood"), they interpret them metaphorically, somewhat in the manner in which rationalizing Greeks interpreted their own myths as allegories.
That's just a brief sample; read the article for more. - Scott McLemee has two neat articles out this weekend. The first, a brief review in The New York Times, discusses whether crowd behavior by "the masses" is irrational. The second is a Newsday review of Simon Sebag Montefiore's new Stalin book:
The problem with the book comes not from the abundance of anecdotes and details, but from Montefiore's unwillingness to throw any of them out. That reluctance precludes building any kind of meaningful structure. An enigma of totalitarianism -- one of the things that inspired Orwell, Arendt and others to think hard about it -- was its effort to destroy the difference between the public and the private realms. It made them both equally subject to the absolute demands of ideology. In effect, Montefiore does the same thing, but by reducing everything to the dimensions of trivia.Before reading "Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar," for example, I did not know that one member of the British delegation to Moscow on the eve of World War II was the author of a book called "Handbook on Solar Heating." And now I do know. But why? That, like Soviet history itself, remains an enigma.
One of these days I'll read the book, but McLemee's review confirms my suspicion that I can afford to wait a while. Perhaps a long while. - Today's Boston Globe ideas section features an article by Scott Stossel on John Kerry, Sargent Shriver, and Catholics in American politics, as well as a brief account of life in Vorkuta, a former Gulag center in Russia's north. I may comment on these articles more later on...
- Today's New York Times Magazine features a fascinating article on New York city firemen who've left their wives for the widows of firemen killed on September 11. (The article bordered on overly invasive, I thought, but it was still fascinating.)
- At Crooked Timber, Maria Farrell has posted a brief entry on George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire," a series whose next volume I eagerly await.
- In The Moscow Times, Michele Berdy discusses Russian colloquial and idiomatic expressions associated with going to the bathroom. (If she had been feeling evil, she could have really embarassed a lot of her readers with her column this week by making up some amusing expressions and convincing unsuspecting Americans that their conversational Russian is much better than it really is...)
- What can you learn about the "mutation rate" among first names? Why are parents more likely to be inventive when naming daughters than when naming sons? This Economist article touches on these questions.
- Mark Schmitt has posted some really good entries at The Decembrist, including a theory about the Senate (and about whether something has gone fundamentally wrong with that body) and a discussion of religious freedom in Texas (where Scientology qualifies as a state-recognized religion, but Unitarianism doesn't.)
As always, I may add more links later. I may also just wait and write an original post in a day or two.
May 19, 2004
Reality TV and Public History
A year ago, the online history journal Common-Place featured an article on an upcoming TV show in which historical documentary-making and reality TV would come face-to-face: Colonial House. To produce that program, 26 "colonists" spent six months in a mock settlement on the coast of Maine, talking, working, acting, eating, and thinking as if they were residents of a 17th-century community. Colonial House is going on the air this week, appearing for two hours on May 17, May 18, May 24, and May 25.
Big, Green, and Ugly
As many readers of this blog undoubtedly know, Shrek 2 is being released in theaters today. The reviews have been very favorable so far, and I enjoyed the first movie in the series, but I feel an unusual degree of ambivalence about the sequel.
For those of you who don't know, the character Shrek--an ugly, green ogre--was first introduced in a children's picture book by William Steig. Steig died last fall at age 95 and was best known as a cartoonist at The New Yorker, but his book Shrek has won him a cult following in certain circles. A.O. Scott briefly mentions the book's popularity in his review of Shrek 2, concluding with a paragraph that captures some of my distaste for the first movie in the series:
Mr. Steig's "Shrek" is a celebration of ugliness that also happens to be one of the most beautiful children's books ever written, with respect both to its pictures and its prose. Of course it is unfair to compare that slim volume to the franchise it has spawned, which is a phenomenon in its own right. Certainly "Shrek 2" offers rambunctious fun, but there is also something dishonest about its blending of mockery and sentimentality. It lacks both the courage to be truly ugly and the heart to be genuinely beautiful.
Scott's lament reminds me of my own main criticism of the first Shrek movie: the first half of the movie acts as if it's a "daring", "subversive" cartoon that will turn the traditional fairy tale on its head, but in the end, the movie's central plot conceit was a reversion to the formulas it was supposedly mocking. The result is a movie most notable for its unfortunate synthesis of cynicism and sappiness. Continue reading "Big, Green, and Ugly"
May 18, 2004
Religion and the White House
This week's Village Voice features a fascinating article by Rick Perlstein, discussing the White House's consultations with apocalyptic Christian groups before it announced its new Israel policy:
The e-mailed meeting summary reveals NSC Near East and North African Affairs director Elliott Abrams sitting down with the Apostolic Congress and massaging their theological concerns. Claiming to be "the Christian Voice in the Nation's Capital," the members vociferously oppose the idea of a Palestinian state. They fear an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza might enable just that, and they object on the grounds that all of Old Testament Israel belongs to the Jews. Until Israel is intact and David's temple rebuilt, they believe, Christ won't come back to earth.Abrams attempted to assuage their concerns by stating that "the Gaza Strip had no significant Biblical influence such as Joseph's tomb or Rachel's tomb and therefore is a piece of land that can be sacrificed for the cause of peace."
The article is a fascinating look at the bizarre world of one of the president's main constituent groups--the extreme religious right.
