CARS

I have been driving since I was 14, but I rarely think about cars. It's not something that interests me. They are a vehicle to get me some place, and as such, I do not think about them in any lyrical way. A poem is also a vehicle, but I have greater expectations from poems. I want a smooth ride, but I also want to end up some place magical. With cars, I want to get to the store, and I want a bump-free ride, and I want the car to not break down every three weeks. Right now we have a Dodge Caravan from 1998. It's rusting through on both side doors, and the back door has a hole in it from where it rusted through. It bumps a bit more than I would like, but it's paid for, and so, every day we drive it, is a day we're not paying a monthly.

But lately it's been breaking down a bit more, and it now has 180,000 miles. Should I nurse it through another year, or should I call it a day?

My wife is on a mom-board, and put the question to them. Some of these moms are fairly well-heeled, but some are just scraping by like us. Some have lawyers and doctors for husbands. I am only a college professor. All the well-heeled moms insist that Honda Odyssey is the best car. Dodge Caravan is a "POS" in their terminology. But if we got another one, for say, 4000 or 5000 dollars, for one with less than 40,000 miles, and if we had good luck with it, it would be far cheaper than getting a 2005 Honda Odyssey, which seem to start at about 14,000 dollars. It means I'd have to put 9000 dollars into a Dodge Caravan before I even hit the starting line of buying a Honda Odyssey or a Toyota Siena, or what have you.

There is also the greater issue of whether or not to buy American. American cars, for whatever reason, are pretty crummy. But they are also relatively cheap, and the local garages know how to work on them (they see plenty of Dodge Caravans, and the parts are plentiful, and some people say these cars are steadily improving). Since we're not buying new, no matter what, does it even matter if we're buying a foreign car? It's like buying a used book. The royalties don't go to the author, they go to the bookseller. At any rate, what follows is a fairly long comment stream that my wife's question provoked. Basically, I want quality. Why it is that American factories produce garbage cans on wheels is not really my problem. Why it is that Japan, or at least Toyota, produces such good, durable vehicles, is also not my question. Although it is a question, it's not one that I intend to answer here, nor is it one that I think President Obama can answer. But unless that question is answered, it is obvious that the American automobile industry cannot turn around. At any rate, check out this comment stream. It is long, but there is an overwhelming consensus, based on my wife's question:

We're looking to buy a used minivan. DH has heard that Toyota Siena
is a great one, but wanted me to ask my "mom board" for experiences
and recommendations on what else to possibly look for. We're both
totally clueless! So, which minivans have a good reputation for being,
well, good? Thanks for any help!


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I think the most recommended as far as reliability and quality are
Honda, Toyota, and Nissan. They will be your most expensive choices,
too.


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Tomorrw we're going to look at Honda and Hyundai. We have a Toyota
Sienna and love it but the lease is up at the end of April.

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How used are you looking at? If it's in the recent few years, top
recommendations have been Toyota, Honda and Hyundai.

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Don't buy a Ford Windstar - biggest POS ever, not that I am bitter or anything

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Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai
I love my Sienna, it is our second one. We will probably get
something different in the next 2 yrs. My DH wants me to get a
Suburban since we will have 5 kids, and i do not mind driving them. I
just want to stick with a van since the suburban will not fit in the
garage.

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Love our Odyssey (that is, as much as I love driving a minivan).
We have had 2 and not had a single problem.


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I bought I used Sienna and love it!!

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We have a Toyota Sienna and love it.

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Amen sisters to not getting a Ford Windstar, ours was a piece of junk,
we also have a Dodge Caravan, and I would not recommend getting that
either....

We just bought a used Honda Odyssey and honestly other than a Sienna,
they just don't get better than that. Shop around, we got a loaded
Honda Odyssey that was a leased vehicle so all the scheduled
maintenance was done on it, it has leather, all the options and a DVD
player which my kids love, we got it for under 10,000...Toyota and
Honda are more, but in the long run I don't know ANYONE who has owned
a Honda that has had problems, my best friends' Honda is still running
at 300,00 miles if that tells you anything! Good luck!!!



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We have a Honda Odyssey and love it. This our second Honda, and I
won't own any other brand now.

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we have a Honbda Odyssey and love it! It is GREAT!


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Another vote for the Sienna!

We bought ours used, from a co-worker of mine, it's a 2000. It was
6ish years old then, with 80,000 miles. It's now 9 years old, with
125,000 miles, and I have NO complaints. The alarm on it just died
this week, so I will have to look into that. I'm very diligent about
oil changes, maintenance, and if something breaks, I get it fixed
quickly. I believe it's worth it to give the vehicle a longer life.

This was my first Toyota, and I'm leaning towards only buying Toyotas
from now on. My BFF has a Honda Odyssey, she got hers brand new, and
loves it!

And, another downer vote for the Ford Windstar. My co-worker bought
hers brand new several years ago, and lots of stuff died quickly on
it. She tells everyone that Ford does not stand behind their products,
and she'll never buy another Ford.


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I have a 2005 sienna and love it. I bought it when it was a year old
and that saved me over $12000. I wanted a certified one so that it
was covered should anything go wrong (I also bought an extended
warranty)... anyhow...I've had to do nothing but regular
maintenance. I bought it with 15k miles on it and now it has almost
60k.

My last three cars were toyotas too (paseo, camry, and 4runner). We
are big Honda and Toyota fans.


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We're on our second Dodge Grand Caravan and I love it! Dollar for
dollar it was the best we could afford in our locale. The foreign
vehicles were just too few and too much. The only reason we have a
2nd one already was the first was involved in an accident and the sun,
moon, and stars lined up for us to upgrade to much better w/o more
money.

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Odyssey fan here. Be sure to test drive them both. Odyssey drives
like a car. I also prefered the dash setup on the Odyssey. But we
love our Toyota too. DH has a 13 year old Camry that is still going
strong. Happy shopping!


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We had a Ford Winstar and it was 4 years old when we got rid of
it...it was going downhill quickly and it wasn't even at 60000 miles
yet. We traded it in for a Toyota Sienna and I LOVE it!!!!!!!!!!


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We love our Hyundai Entourage. I don't know why, but I have never seen
another one on the road. It has all the bells and whistles and was
significantly cheaper than a Sienna or Odyssey with few options. And
the service has been stellar. We may even get another Hyundai when we
replace DH's car next year.


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Yes, same goes for Dodge Caravan - huge POS, especially if you want to
drive your car for more than 2 years without major repairs.

If I were in the market; I'd go with a Honda Odyssey


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We are looking to get a minivan here too in the near future and we are
going to either get a Honda or Toyota. None of the others got very
good ratings for holding up long term. We are the type that keep our
cars until they basically fall apart because we hate having a car
payment so we need something very reliable.

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We've been Nissan buyers for years. 2 Xterras and the Quest. No
problems with any of them.

I agree though to not get the Ford Windstar or consider even the
Chryler Town & Country. Both are a POS and give off so many problems.


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Another Odyssey fan here. We love ours. I recommend the Honda or Toyoto


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We have a 2007 Honda Odyssey EX-L with dvd and love it! We test-drove
both the Odyssey and the Sienna and preferred the way the Odyssey
drove. I would totally get it again, it rocks.


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Love my Odyssey.

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WE love our Honda Odyssey. We test drove the Toyota and the Honda and
preferred the Honda. Good Luck

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Another Honda owner here. I love my Odyssey.


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my husband is an insurance agent and we researched vans a lot before
deciding. Wanted something reliable and with good crash testing. We
have a honda and a toyota....recommend both highly

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I thought the only minivan out there was the Honda Odyssey!

We're on our second, and will never have anything else. (And all our
cars before that were Hondas, too, so you could say we believe in the
brand!) We've also convinced 5, no 6! other family members/friends to
buy an Odyssey and every one of them says they'll never buy any other
brand.

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I have several friends who have Odessys and they all love them so I if
I were to get another van that would be what I would get.

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I have a 2004 Toyota Sienna....it has almost 100K miles on it and is
just now starting to nickel and dime us to death The A/C is beginning
to have issues and I guess this is a well known problem on some of the
earlier model (2004 & 2005) Siennas.

Otherwise it's been a great little van, no major mechanical problems
and very reliable!

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Last week, we bought a 2009 Honda Odyssey EX-L. I really like it!

Are Freedom and Autonomy Enough?

Inching forward through the March/April 2009 edition of Foreign Affairs, I read through the article "How Development Leads to Democracy," by Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel.

The summary of the article reads, "Democratic institutions cannot be set up easily, anywhere, at any time; they are likely to emerge only when certain social and cultural conditions exist. But economic development and modernization push those conditions in the right direction by creating a self-reinforcing process that brings mass participation to politics and thus makes democracy increasingly likely."

The authors are professors of political science. Inglehart is at the University of Michigan, and Welzel is at Jacobs University Bremen, in Germany.

First off, let me say it is refreshing to read POLITICAL SCIENCE professors talking about political paradigms as leavens for various kinds of democracy.

The article opens by talking about the ways in which democracy has grown and shrunk over the last thirty years. Democracy in Bangladesh, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Russia, has retreated.

Bush attempted to create two new democracies in the Islamic world: one in Afghanistan, and one in Iraq.

The basics of democracy are that there is a solid middle-class which is used to thinking for itself. That's the foundation of Democracy. That was the situation for our founding fathers. It was the situation, they argue, even in East Germany, just before the wall came down. There was a large middle class of well-educated people.

In Iraq, this did not exist.

In Afghanistan, this did not exist.

It does not exist in Zimbabwe.

It does exist in South Korea, and in Japan, in Poland, and in Estonia. Such countries, they believe, will therefore make it out of the autocratic and into the ranks of the democracies.

This is good for several reasons: democracies rarely attack one another. They are self-sustaining, and enjoy a high level of cohesion, which means that they are not as likely to be festering with crime, which they are then likely to export. (The article does not discuss Mexico, or say whether it's a basket case or not.)

The article in fact is vague about religious convictions underlying prosperity. Are the gangs in Mexico composed of traditional Catholics, as the Italian Mafia was apparently composed of traditional Catholics?

One can understand that East Germany easily made the transition since it is largely a Lutheran area (the protests against Honekker began in Bach's church in Leipzig, and radiated out).

David Landes, in his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, argues that a Protestant background is likely to lead to wealth as well as literacy (the two seem to go hand in hand). He argues that countries that are able to build good clocks, will also build strong inventions in a variety of sectors, and he uses the clock as a kind of bellweather of the cultural health of a country. Countries without good clockmakers are hopeless.

Inglehart and Welzel offer different criteria.

"The desire for freedom and autonomy are universal aspirations," (43), they write.

How true is this of traditional African societies, or of people living under the Islamic system, or of the citizens of North Korea?

Once there is economic development, democratization will follow, the authors assert. But why didn't that happen in Saudi Arabia, or in Kuwait?

Why is it that Burma, once the richest country in Southeastern Asia, fell down the rabbit hole into the wonderland of Myanmar, reinventing itself as the poorest nation in Southeastern Asia?

David Landes argues that Protestant values underwrite economic expansion, as Protestantism leads to individual inquiry, which in turn leads to enterprise and a sense that each person must find their own career path, and do God's will. Something similar seems to be true among those of the Jewish faith, whose success closely parallels that of Protestants.

But Marxists want government to do everything for them, and Islam wants God to do everything for them. And there are still enormous numbers of Marxists and a growing number of Islamic proponents.

The authors assert, "Today, virtually nobody expects a revolution of the proletariat that will abolish private property, ushering in a new era free from exploitation and conflict" (36).

Have either of these authors visited with Humanities professors at their respective institutions? They would find a lot of nobodies, if they bothered to do so. Unlike Marxists, these authors believe in an actual transfer of power from the elites to the people.

"One can establish electoral democracy almost anywhere, but it will probably not last long if it does not transfer power from the elites to the people" (44).

Marxism of course offers to do this, but it doesn't. Power is retained by the party, which they slyly suggest will slowly wither away. Instead, in every Marxist country, power consolidates into the hands of the party, all other parties are outlawed, and even within the party, there are purges, in which the top-dogs slit the throats of all rival claimants within the party.

How do you transfer power from the elites to the people if your basic paradigm is either Marxist or Islamic? In Marxist countries the party controls all power in perpetuity, and the party in turn has a hierarchy ending in a number one who controls (effectively) everything. In Islamic societies the religious authorities have perhaps an even more powerful headlock on power. No one else is permitted to speak. No other religions are permitted to exist. Apostacy is the crime with which those who attempt to change religious faiths within Islam are charged. The penalty in many cases is death. This is true even in Afghanistan.

"Accordingly, it [Democracy] is closely linked to the degree to which a given public emphasizes self-expression values" (44-45).

Protestantism emphasizes an individual's clear link to God, without passing Go, and without having to be mediated by a priest, a Mary, or the party. Each individual is free to think for themselves, using Luther as the ultimate standard: "Here I stand, I can do no other."

These authors assert that religion is inevitably a backwards trend, one that grants too much authority to those in power. But Protestantism is precisely the opposite of this. It empowers each individual to speak directly to God, and with God, and to be a witness for what they think and feel. These authors actually cite Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant as the twin underpinnings for their thinking, without seemingly realizing that both of them were Protestant Christians (46).

Self-expression is not necessarily a good in and of itself. Think of Britney Spears, or Paris Hilton, or the decadent authors of France such as Jean Lorrain. If the self is corrupt, that which is expressed will be corrupt. There has to be a basic set of guidelines, which Protestantism seems to offer. Moreover, there must be a valid sense of the laws (in Protestantism, they stem from the Ten Commandments). Otherwise, people are expressing themselves in ways that lead to divorce, sexual diseases, lack of respect for one another, harming the innocent, and so on.

I find the theory that is espoused here to be half-right and cockeyed: autonomy and self-expression are necessary but not sufficient. Total autonomy can lead to a Sadean sensibility, and a feeling of being cut off from the community. Someone like Ted Kazinsky could be said to be expressing himself, and to have had autonomy. The results were far from laudatory.

Total self-expression can lead to bizarre forms of decadence, and a lack of respect for others: leading to self-absorption, and a lack of respect for law. The self is not necessarily something to which one should turn for guidance, as it's likely to yield only violent selfishness.

The authors do nod in this direction, when they write, "...a society's heritage... whether shaped by Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, Confucianism, or communism -- leave a lasting imprint on its worldview" (38). While they recognize that these heritages are remarkably "resilient" they do not opt for one heritage over another (as David Landes so clearly does, and which is why his theory is better than that of Inglehart and Welzel).

Our authors don't want to deal with comparative consequences, especially if it might mean that Protestantism comes out ahead.

They perform a sleight of hand on p. 39, where they look at all religions across the board and argue that a strong emphasis on religion within a society is linked to a poorer society, and imply that it is better for a society to be atheistic. This is sloppy casuistry, because they do not control for different kinds of religion. Islam, animism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Protestantism (there are about 1200 denominations of Protestantism in the US alone) and other religious faiths, are not all equal. Certainly some of them would top atheism, in the long run, in economic development, as well as providing a background for Democracy, while others would fall far short. By lumping them all together, our mischievous authors manage to cast a dark aspersion on all religious faith.

Meanwhile, the atheism which they indirectly espouse can lead to selfishness in every arena of life.

These authors posit that "individual freedom and self-expression," (40) are goals that should be set above all others as the necessary and sufficient conditions for Democracy to occur and that a "tolerant outlook" will therefore be derived where those two factors are most in play.

This is almost certainly incorrect. Where there is total toleration, there is also a revival of Marxism, and other totalitarian ideas (the great ouburst of freedom in the sixties led to selfishness and to the me-generation of the 80s, and also to a revival on the one side of Marxism, and to the other side of bizarre cults, of which the Manson family was the forerunner, and Jonestown and other cults of suicidal depravity were other premonitory instances.

Individual expression and autonomy are necessary but not sufficient. Freedom and autonomy may be universal aspirations, but equally true is that almost everyone wants a set of higher values, a religious faith, a program that unites all. Being atomized into a self-expressing and autonomous individual like Britney Spears, is not enough to make for an adequate society.

I grade this essay, after grade inflation, with a C+.

ORGANIZED CRIME

Organized crime is now very difficult to prosecute. It isn't like the days in which a single jewel thief romantically operated out of his apartment in Marseilles. Now organized crime operates almost like a corporation. They have lawyers, and hitmen (it costs 50 dollars to kill someone in Mexico, and about a thousand to kill someone in the USA), and they have a corporate structure behind them, a phalanx of cutthroat businessmen, who mean business.

One could argue conversely that many corporations operate like organized crime syndicates. AIG knowingly did business without enough collateral to cover their investments and when the economy crumpled, they were such an enormous aspect of the economy that the People now have to bail them out. If this isn't robbery, what is?

The hydra-headed corporate nature of crime families keeps the Hell's Angels out of prison, and they are only the most salient of many motorcycle gangs operating throughout the country. There are probably fifty gangs with at least 500 members now operating throughout the USA. They have lawyers, and they own territory, like nations.

On a more international level, the Somalian pirates that kidnap tankers at a million dollars ransom, are organized crime families, or one could almost argue organized crime nations.

Zimbabwe, Myanmar, North Korea, even China itself, are beyond all law. Their corporate structure is such that no one can prosecute their top echelons or bring them to justice.

Individual crime is somewhat romantic, and kind of charming. A jewel thief operating along the French Riviera at least looks good in the old talkies. Today, however, whole nations, whole groups, are turning toward crime, and are beyond the reach of any law. Al Qaeda's hydra-headed structure allows it to operate in many countries and yet it operates at a level seemingly beyond any legal radar, finding lawless tribal areas in Pakistan to inhabit, where it in turn becomes the law. A law of the lawless, a law unto itself.

The Duke Group of 88 were able to strike out at the lacrosse players of Duke University and to create a climate of terror on campus, but have not themselves been charged with anything, and seemingly operate in defiance of any law.

The Marxist notion of alliance through self-interest has been increasingly successful in creating sub-countries inside of countries into which no law can penetrate.

The Manson family was perhaps the last big corporate structure to be taken down. Their failing was not having lawyers on their staff. Manson tried to go toe to toe with the legal system, but without a legal education. That was a mistake, but it's not a mistake that many other gangs are going to make. Manson's was perhaps the last of the disorganized crime families. From now on, the police will face increasingly organized crime families who hide behind a phalanx of lawyers (Manson not only fired his lawyer Gary Hinman, but probably ordered him killed, too, as he died shortly after being fired, in mysterious circumstances).

Government and police have to have open records, and have to follow procedural rules, and now are increasingly questioned even when they use a Taser. Meanwhile, they can be shot by machine guns and long-range rifles, and do not have the ability to respond in kind. Tankers off the straights of Hormuz are sitting ducks. Terrorists march into high-rise hotels in Mumbai and slaughter at will, but it's against the law to go into any tribal areas in which terrorists are known to reside and to respond in kind.

Police work was originally designed to match up against the solitary criminal, the lone creep. But with the nature of organized crime, the police and even national armies appear to be out-organized, out-gunned, out-financed, and out-finessed. We used to like the films of Clint Eastwood in which a vigilante addresses the absence of justice in westerns. Vigilante justice marks a breakdown in the law. On an international level, we have yet to see a Clint Eastwood type who takes justice into his own hands and takes out criminal nations, or destroys piratical syndicates. I predict that our next big cinema stars will trade off that stereotype. Clint Eastwood goes international, or goes after corporate crime. There will be new areas into which artificial bullets will fly, giving us some sense that order is righted, at least temporarily, and vicariously, via the big screen. There will be lots of fun special effects, at least. Personally, I would prefer that something resembling law would retake the whole world not only in outer realms, but in the moral realms within nations, and persons, too.

OBAMA

Obama won the election by throwing cheese curls at the nation.

I never thought I would thirst for the ice water of Hillary Clinton, or hunger for the raw steak of John McCain.

Can the nation live on cheese curls? How long?

MY ANTI-COMMUNISM FLARES UP

MY ANTI-COMMUNISM is something like arthritis. It flares up now and then. This particular round was caused by a blog post on Steve Shaviro's blog. He had a positive discussion of a communist conference that took place at Birkbeck (a big British university in London), in which Zizek, Bourdieu, Michael Hardt, and other major communist lit-crit figures gathered together, and the conference actually ended with the singing of the Internationale.

In the comments at his post, many posters were very eagerly dismissing the past of communism, and arguing that it is all in the future. To which I wanted to salt the wound, with:

QUOTATION: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
ATTRIBUTION: George Santayana (1863?1952), U.S. philosopher, poet.
Life of Reason, 'Reason in Common Sense,' ch. 12 (1905-6).

However, I am now so unfailingly polite, that I didn't toss this bromide.

I try very hard to be kind to communists, because I recognize that they have fallen into a kind of sickness.

But the fact is that communism is so horrifying that to me any mention of it is like news of an outbreak of the black plague. Shaviro was my chair at the University of Washington, and he was a monstrously erudite, and ingenious companion on that arduous journey. I loved him, and I even loved his cat, Weasel (in spite of being totally allergic to Weasel, at least he didn't have a single communist bone!). And yet when I see Shaviro falling into the grippe of communism, I want to sneeze. At the same time, I always wonder if this isn't just a fashion, like disco (I also failed to get with disco, and never once danced under the luminous ball, something I regret), and so, as with Flower Power and other peace movements that I never quite was able to flow with, I do think that the matriarchal philosophy of communism has at least one avatar whom we must resuscitate. If we are going to be communists, let's never forget the communes of the sixties, with Charles Manson's Family as its penultimate groupuscule.

Manson is the ultimate communist, who embodies all the quintessential traits:
1. He's anti-bourgeois
2. He uses race as a marker (racism of one kind or another is a pattern that you find in almost all Marxist thinkers including in Marx himself who said that the anarchist Ferdinand Lasalle had "the dirty blood of a negro Jew" (Letters to Engels, 245).
3. Manson shared everything except authority.
4. His vision of a perfectly happy human family in which God no longer existed, and in which he himself was God, is a trait that you can find in all other Marxist megalomaniacs from Ceausescu, to Tito, to Mao, to Stalin, to Pot, to our current Marxist megalomaniacs like Michael Hardt and Kim Jong-Il (whose father quite explicitly plays the role of God to N. Korea in that he is the leader of the country FOREVER).

However, I don't want to demonize Charlie Manson through association with these nutcases. Because in many ways Manson was the best that communism has to offer.

1. He killed very few of his followers (compare Stalin's purges, or Mao's Cultural Revolution, in which millions were offed, or Pot's destruction of half his population, or Ceausescu's silencing of all opposition). Manson, within the family, was almost egalitarian by communist standards. If you're thinking of percentage of people killed, Manson killed very few. He destroyed a famous actress, and perhaps as many as a half-dozen others. Again, in his favor, I would like to emphasize that he killed very few insiders. The ranchhand named Shorty is perhaps his only real insider murder. By communist standards, this shows a very enlightened individual.

2. Manson retained the loyalty of his followers during thirty years of imprisonment. (Only "Tex" and Linda Kasabian turned against him, and probably only in order to save their own hides. All or most of the others remained steadfast followers. Compare how Ceausescu's entire nation turned on him, and hunted him down, and today it would be the very rare member of Securitate who would come out as a Ceausescu-phile. Against all odds, the vast bulk of Manson's family has remained steadfast in comradeship.) This loyalty must be based on a fervent love that Charlie created in his followers. His Family was based on Love, not Fear, which is sort of different for communism, which thrives on terror.

3. In terms of theoretical and stylistic importance, Manson's writings are superior not only in style but also in terms of content to most of the communist dictators of the last century. He has imagination, and verve: something lacking in Stalin, Ceausescu, and Pot (the latter of which left no writings). Manson stands in a class of his own in this regard, and even contributed a B-side of lyrics to a Beach Boys record -- something no other communist dictator has ever achieved. The important rock artist Marilyn Manson named himself after the communist leader, and more than a hundred rock bands have recorded Charlie Manson's songs. Manson was also known as a fabulous dancer. No other communist dictator has overtaken a dance floor as Manson did just before the days of disco. It is said by some that Manson unleashed the movement known as disco, and that John Travolta studied Manson's moves in order to formulate his own, said to be only the palest of imitations.

If we really want to be communists, let's perfect our dialectical steps, AND GET THOSE HIPS TO SHAKE.

(Actually, as I reread this post, and Shaviro's post, I am not entirely certain that Shaviro and his commenters aren't joking about wanting to revive communism. Perhaps this is all a joke, and I was the only one who didn't get it.)

The Paradox of Communism

Communism proffers a communal possession, such that everyone has enough.

It invariably creates exactly the opposite of what it posits. (Examples are legion, but one could cite Stalin, Mao, the Ceausescus, Kim Jong-Il, etc., and think of the famines and shortages that occurred during their administrations.) Instead of everyone owning a portion of the polity, it is invariably one man who owns the entire country, brooking no rivals.

Capitalism more closely resembles the competitive rivalry of nature itself, and may thus be more ecologically sustainable.

(Note: the above "photograph" of Kim Jong-Il may or may not be an accurate image. The leader of North Korea has probably been dead for five or more years. Heights of the various doubles differ, and no one is certain. Kim Jong-Il's dad has been dead for a decade or more, but is the putative leader of North Korea for eternity.)

St. Paul and All That

St. Paul rallied whole communities to Christianity. I have yet to make a single convert.

I thought I had only to mention the phrase "Lutheran Surrealism," and whole countries would fall into place, and that the walls of cities worldwide would shake.

I know exactly what LS is, and what it does, and it feels to me like the greatest invention ever. But it may be an invention that is useful only to me. I wanted to keep the avant-garde alive, and to give it an ethical framework, based on real principles rather than on flimsy demographic criteria.

Perhaps either no one else needs this (ever so likely), no one else wants this (possible), or everyone just has to roll their own.

MATH VS. LANGUAGE

One of my hopes in studying math over the last year had been that it could provide a totalizing precision that would allow me to dispense with other sloppier forms of language altogether. But mathematics deals only with distances and quantities. It doesn't deal with anything more paradoxical like emotions or beauty.

What mathematical language gains in terms of precision, it loses in terms of expressiveness.

The calibrations of limits in turn limits mathematics to observable and empirical reality. Other realities are perhaps better accessed and expressed by other means.

All mathematical equations can be put in ordinary language. But poetry, ethics, dessert recipes, love letters, funeral orations, and discussions of the weather, cannot be translated into math. Even if it's true that mathematics is infinite (numbers never end, as you can always add one more), language is much more infinitely infinite, in that it not only contains mathematics, but all other domains of human thought, and thus is larger than math by a ratio of billions to one.

I had hoped that mathematics would give us a more reliable method of discussion, and that its smallness would be made up for by its precision. It turns out to be a valuable and necessary method of discussing reality, but not sufficient for all of life's porpoises.

Nice weather we're having

You?

Two new Temping reviews!

I keep getting reviews of my novel Temping. They come in dribs and drabs.

I was checking out Goodreads yesterday, and someone named Alissa had posted this about Temping (with four stars):

"I had a hard time getting into Temping. The initial chapters seemed kind of vague and distant, but I kept reading and was rewarded for my perseverence.

This is a darkly humorous tale about a long-time temp who on the advice of a psychiatrist seeks to establish a less transient life. Through a series of events he ends up getting married, moving to Finland and teaching comedy with a demented midget clown for a boss. Naturally, he ends up playing a high stakes game of badminton against the midget clown.

This is a quirky book that reads quickly once one gets into it. It's realistic fiction with a touch of the bizarre, that's worth checking out if you are looking for something a little different."

Meanwhile, the monk John Hanson (currently on leave until April 11 for Lent) wrote in his last post this:

so i'm swingin today
to the pianovibes of Dave Brubeck
and the inspiration of Max Jacob
i also recently finished
a novel written by KIRBY OLSON
the title - TEMPING
a very fine and humorous story
about schlepping through life
in abject uncertainty and
dare i say
bewilderment
i strongly support the avid reading
of such literary trash
it is good for the soul
and you will chuckle
that's the main thing

I'm glad for reviews of the book that mainly like it. Sometimes I am worried. I have been compared to Tolstoy and Kafka by some reviewers, and called enjoyable (Booklist), while an anonymous reviewer at Kirkus Reviews said that Temping was a "heavy-handed satire" (of what, exactly?). I like serious long reviews the best. The one by Douglas Robinson in the online journal California Literary Review is amazingly good, even if there are parts of the book that he hated (the ending), and Lutheran Forum's reviewer liked it, and was the only one to get the Lutheran sub-text, and enjoyed it, but most importantly devoted a lot of thought to her article. I've gotten probably thirty reviews now, and have enjoyed all of them, but all of them, too, remind me of the Sufi parable about the blind men and the elephant. All of them see something in the book that I myself did not.

"To be is to be perceived," said Bishop Berkeley.

THE LUBRICIOUS AUTHENTICITY OF THE ART WORLD, and ITS NEGATIVE OTHER, LUTHERAN SURREALISM

Since the dadaists the notion that the artist should deliberately make crummy work that cannot be turned into a commodity has been almost a norm in the negative work of cultural critique that the avant-garde took on. Marxism stipulated that capital had to be abolished. Some artists turned inward, and some participated in the market, by launching toilets (Duchamp), cans of shit (Manzoni), chunks of rotten meat (Beuys), and even scrupulous copies of the dollar itself (?) into the art market. Launched from a high enough level, much of this negative work found itself recuperated and commodified into museum-class objectification. Beauty was replaced as a sham by ugliness, representation was replaced as a sham by abstraction, as one artist after another sought to kill art, and to replace its sham commodification with the authenticity of the spear thrust through the face of the false beauty of the Victorians (Monet replaced Manet only to be replaced in turn by Money), while secretly hoping to be noticed, and hence commodified, back into the art history books, back into the golden horde of the golden society people whom we liken to lepers, not before kissing their feet while getting kicked by those selfsame feet, atrocious yellowing of the nails and spurs (as well as batteries) included.

All aesthetic objects, even if they are deliberately ugly, run the risk of commodification. Today, even the ugliest object (a t-shirt soiled with authentic automobile oil), can get recuperated, and sold for millions (Jasper Johns).

Some therefore have turned inward, and give their work away, as did the mail artists (Ray Johnson's work is neverthless now worth hundreds of thousands).

But everything scribbled retains its aura, its authenticity, and the more it denies this, the more the artist stands as an outsider, the more fiercely the market recuperates the work (lop off an ear, as did Van Gogh, and watch out -- the market impulse is to send the price into the stratosphere).

Is there then the possibility of an authentic exchange based on the use value of the ugly? Is there the possibility of an affirmation of the beautiful that doesn't run the risk of becoming sappy along the lines of Rod McKuen's works (whose poetry made him rich, even though most today reject it), or the affirmations of a Billy Collins (whose charming surrealism many today reject because of their uneasiness with its commodification). Language poets argued against the commodification of language by a crucial inspection of every word, every nuanced verb, steam-pressing all commodification out of it, and yet angry that their work is not on the shelf of every Barnes & Nobles throughout the land, and winning each and every Nobel. Flarf poets joked about the lyrical, and yet still wanted to win prizes, and receive professorships. What can be done? What authentic move is left to be made?

The return to Protestantism is simultaneously to return to the most rejected of citizens (Christ!), and also a rejection of the negativity of the art market which affirms nothing more than rejection of the art market. Christianity, especially of the mainstream mainline variety, is precisely what is needed today, coming as it does in the wake of a century of the rejection of Christianity, with very few blue chip artists who were Christian (Georges Rouault, Marianne Moore, Joseph Cornell -- Catholic, Presbyterian, and (?) Seventh Day Adventist), and now of course our dear Makoto Fujimura.

To return to the images of our Savior, bloodied before the Roman world, forgotten by all but his most immediate family and circle, trashed, and left to rot, and yet nevertheless recuperated into the center of the most miraculous cultural transformation of all time, in which many of the greatest artists of western history participated: Grunewald, Durer, Fra Angelica (the list is endless), and in which the leaven within the lumpenproletariat included the rising of all western nations, even finally the Catholic ones, as they themselves sought to reform from within, launching Franciscan and Jesuit reinterpretations into the spraying toilet that the dogma had become, until Christianity within art ends, or comes to a near stop, about the year 1920, when World War I, and the rise of the Marxist challenge, nearly destroys the Christian artistic tradition, rolling a boulder into the mouth of the toilet, insisting it was all shit, and nothing pure that would slake the thirst.

Protestants participated in this corking in that they turned violently against the art world and refused to put new wine (blood) into the fountain of love that the church had been for so long. They had ceased rendering ever since the iconoclasts under Carlstadt, angrily viewing depiction as falling within the censure of the First Commandment, and the trend increased throughout the 19th century, and became almost a truism throughout the twentieth century that all rendering was false. Why is it then that today, we sense something authentic, something dear and genuine, in the renewed attempt to bring the two worlds together and that to render unto Christ, is once more the greatest rendering of these rendered kingdoms, and that to do so is to allow a fountain of our Savior's blood to run as pure as the fountains of eternal youth that our Christ proclaimed? Perhaps it's because those two worlds are so far apart, that the tunneling that LS has done over the last four years seems at last about to impart a new and greater union between the kingdoms, about to unplug the toilet (can I possibly bring all these metaphors together?), and initiate a certain hilarathon, a transcendent sparkling festival of something thought unthinkable, and therefore all the more possible for its being thought impossible for so long: a Protestant art, Protesting now not only against the worldly glory of the Catholics, but the unearthly criticism of the world of capital posed by the negative dialectics of the commie underground, plumbers unions, who had turned off the fountains, firmly, and they thought, for good. Can what's old be new? Can we put what is perennially new (our blood) into new bottles? Can we? Huh?

Like Luther, we reject not only the worldly wealth of the Papal riches, and its monasteries glorying in sacred relics, but we also reject the Gnosticism of the Marxist isolato, with his internal turn away from any and all community, any and all hope, any and all love, any and all faith in America and its Main Streets and postcards and town squares with their fountains. We affirm marriage, as the center and most beatific of God's gifts. We affirm children, as the product of that union. We affirm Main St., with its mom and pop shops, its card stands, its ice cream stands, its souvenir stands, even its tiny water fountains that runneth all summer beside the pool. We affirm the blue heron as it glides into the river basin. We affirm the blue whale, as it sings its Lutheran hymns in the glorious depths. We affirm the hoot owl, upside down on a branch. We affirm capital, and the individual vote, honesty, heroic decency to neighbors, Helen Keller's ardent struggle to communicate with her caretaker, we affirm baptism and the kindness of Christians around the world, as they struggle to make a difference in the lives of the poor in spirit. We affirm missions to blue chip galleries, and attempts to convert the culturally anointed, we affirm just about anything, and we even affirm nothing, as being really something. We affirm the untouchables of India, the Tibetan people's right to religious liberty, we affirm the colors of the sea and the shadows on the mountains and the valleys, we affirm the first flowers whatever they were, and however they came about whether it was by evolution or by God's design, and the honey bee's pasttimes, the rainbow trout's eight seconds of memory, Haitian Lutheran aid workers fallen before mobs of thugs, the mathematicians at Princeton who worked on and solved Fermat's Last Theorem, poets who work in attics to articulate the aroma of the persimmon in China's perennial presence from its poetic past. We are not negative, nor do we appreciate negative dialectics (except insofar as we reject them, and wonder over their loveliness, likening them to the loveliness of our ancient nemesis, Erika Kane, who is the newest version of Lilith, queen of whores). We affirm any and all transcendent thinkers who think that the value above and beyond this world redeems this world, and its pear trees, peach trucks, watermelons, work stoppages, work outtages, and overemployment, and let's not forget sewer systems and spark plugs and fire ants, we affirm the likes of Albert Schweitzer, and Albert Einstein, and the Dalai Lama, Mother Theresa, and all and any figures of kindness who stretch out their fingers and arms to others, in the most threatening because the most vulnerable of all gestures: Love.

The art world is negative! We negate its negation! Two negatives equals a positive, not only in the world of art, but in the world of religious faith! Together enjoined, at last, and forever! The love of all opposites and their final reckoning: in a Fountain of Faith and Flowers.

IN CARS I TRUST

Friday morning the car was still squeaking so I stopped into County Tire Co., and had two mechanics look in the engine. They told me I had a cracked alternator, and that I should leave the car there, because it might otherwise suddenly seize up and the whole engine could be destroyed. I trust the guys at County Tire Co., so I did that. However, this meant that the rest of the day would be insane, as I was now on foot.

At 2 pm I had a meeting with the Provost and the other members of the Spanish language committee to talk about the criteria for the search. This was a good thirty minute hike. As soon as it was over, I had to hoof it again.

At 3 pm I had to help my wife with the birthday party for the eight-year-old, Tristan.

Saturday morning I had to be in Oneonta to help to judge the Spelling Bee for the four-county area.

I was worried that I would be carless in the morning, so I went to get a state vehicle, because I was acting in my capacity as a professor on Saturday morning. I went to get the car just before the meeting with the Provost. I got it, although it came with all kinds of stipulations, and then got to the meeting, and to the awful party (for me, all parties that include more than two people are terrible). When I was a child, I always just had one child over for my birthday. I hated having two friends at once. You can't talk about anything important, and so the conversation just dribbles along, never touching on anything important, and you finally think, why am I even alive?

The birthday party consisted of eleven children who felt differently and loved throwing grapes, running into the wall at full speed, rugby scrums consisting of screams as someone went under the pile and got joyfully pummeled, pizza and frosting all over tiny faces (I wiped them as fast as I could go), and one child who stayed two hours late because his mom couldn't come to get him because a horse had escaped from a barn. All in all, five hours of mayhem. At points I thought an hour had passed but barely three minutes had ticked by.

The next morning after going thoroughly over the 500 words on the word list (etymologies are fascinating!) I drove the state vehicle to the Spelling Bee. There were 27 nervous children, four nervous judges, a nervous host, and a hundred nervous relatives in the audience. I would like to talk about specific children, and the way in which they misspelled specific words, but I am forbidden to discuss the words used (although I did use the winning word in this post, I'm not telling which one it is), because they are standard across the nation, and some of the 300 regional bees have yet to meet. God forbid I should help any little bee with her buzz.

Just before we began the two-hour process, another judge turned to me and said, "I'm sure glad I got the email about having switched the word lists!"

My heart leaped.

This guy (Paul French, Astronomy, SUNY Oneonta) then told me he was joking. He was a funny guy.

On the way home I stopped at a Tobacco/News stand on Main St., and bought the new issue of Foreign Affairs. They have an article in it that argues that we should get out of any country that has a high corruption rating and therefore cannot sustain a democratic government, since they have no idea about fairness. Without that basic notion, you can't have a democracy. This meant we should get out of Iraq, Somalia, Vietnam, and any country that isn't primarily Protestant, and thus already in possession of a democracy. A follow-up article on Cambodia said that corruption is so systemic, so endemic to the nation, that developers have been known to get the police to round up a whole city block in Phnom Penh and dump the residents out in the jungle. The police don't care, since they have been paid off by the developers, so the dumpees don't even think about going to the authorities. If they did, they might get shot on the spot.

Demolitions begin, and condos put in. It's that simple! Corruption begins in first grade in Cambodia. Unless you bribe your teacher, you have no chance of passing the grade. Most Cambodians do not get past third grade. Democracy is just a joke in such countries.

I drove home the back way up Prosser's Corners, and across the muddy but now passable road up over to Catskill Turnpike.

I then dropped off the car in the lot, and walked a mile in the rain to County Tire Co. I finally arrived, but couldn't get my car out of the lot because the blue gates were shut. A sign said no one would return to help us get our cars out until Monday morning at 8 am. How am I supposed to get my kids to school on Monday morning?

I walked home in the rain: another forty-five minutes. Going through town I noticed an art opening. I went in, and it was about Nature and the Catskills. About twenty elderly artists standing around. No children. I ate cheese and crackers and decided not to drink wine. I was so wet I was afraid I looked like a bum. Portraits of owls, cows, crows, and tractors and trout were prominent on the walls. One artist named Larry Engels had transformed discarded objects into animals. A sneaker had its tongue torn in half to resemble a bird's wings. A baseball glove had its fingers separated to form into a crab's legs. I didn't like them at first, but this morning when I woke up I thought of them, and saw their cleverness.

This morning I couldn't bring the kids to church. Groceries were running out. Without a car, you can't do much.

Meanwhile, the kids at the birthday party had been so wild that they apparently dislodged the cable for the cable TV. So now there is no car and no TV. But the Internet still works. I finally pried the children loose from Club Penguin and other sites in order to put out this distress signal. I'm really ok. There is some canned soup, and I have the rest of the Foreign Affairs issue to finish, and perhaps the car place will bring the car in the morning in time for school.

We're not as badly off as our friends Nick and Irma. They commute to NYC during the week. The pipes in their country house burst last week, and they are busy drying the house before they get black mold. Just the same, Irma took time off this afternoon to bring over some Finnish candy from her recent trip to Finland. The candy is deliciously salty. And we're not as badly off as the poor of the third world, who live in countries without law, and without even the concept of fairness. We take cars and fairness for granted in this country.

GUNS

I never discuss guns. They make me nervous. I've never fired anything more than a BB gun, and with it, I once capped a black-capped chickadee. I remember the tiny red dot that appeared on its white heart, as it stopped singing, and fell from a branch one November day in 1967, when I was eleven. It was the last time I fired a gun.

I remember that during the Vietnam War I wondered if I would be drafted later on. It felt odd to think that I would have to shoot the communists. I didn't want to do this. Even then, I considered communists to be terrible, as if they were waves of the living dead, and someone had to shoot them. But I didn't want to do it. I never even liked playing army when I was a kid. I did it a few times, but I tried to divert the game into something where no one ended up dead.

Like kick the can, or Parcheesi.

Today, I still believe in the police and army, just as I believe in funeral services, prisons, and ice hockey, but those specific industries are not industries in which I would wish to be employed. Thank goodness there are people willing to do them, and who would be good at them.

Last year I held a gun at Wal-Mart. It was a camouflaged shotgun. I nearly fainted as I held it, and the man behind the counter tenderly retrieved it, and said, "Guns are not for you, I think, sir."

I had to sit down to regain my bearings.

But I believe we have to have them, even if they are not for me. I believe that people should be able to eat meat, even though it makes me dizzy to think about slaughterhouses. I think tigers should be able to hunt deer. It's how the world was made. It's not as if you can sit a tiger down and give it a good stern talking to. Even macaques rape, in order to demonstrate their Billy Bob superiority.

(The other night I saw a bobcat on campus! Very exciting! It looked ferocious, and yet it ran from me, in terror!)

The existence of teeth in our mouths indicates the evolutionary fact that we are meant to rend meat, and that we were not meant to be saints. Or at the very least, sainthood is a startling option that few must take. Luther banned saints, and their depiction, which had been a mainstay of Catholic artistry. Luther put a stop to the production of idols.

But he never banned the military, nor the police, and said it was important that someone serve as a hangman. I believe in this.

The black-capped chickadee falling still haunts me, nevertheless. Once a bird dies, it can never be brought back to life. All the doctors in the world can't make it go again, or retrieve its melody. It's not a machine that can be repaired. Its soul has departed, its song no more.

I'm an advocate of the hypocritical oath -- do least harm, but maintain access (by others, and even myself) to arms.

PEACE, MAN, LIKE, MAN, LIKE, LIKE

I have no idea what they're doing down in Washington. I don't even know what they're doing in the village hall. Something, probably. I'd really rather in most cases that everybody just get busy doing nothing. Whatever happened to tiddly winks, or building houses of cards, or working on Fermat's Last Theorem, if Sudoku's over your head.

Years back, or was it months, I wrote to Brett, who has a rather manana-esque feel to him, rather relaxed, unless he gets on that rodeo horse, the Democratic war horse of absolute peace, when he gets a little rowdy, and tries to prove that the red states are blue, and the blue states are red:

"I think Brett's links would all be like moveon.org or that kos thing.

Everyone on the right is now complaining because they've discovered that Obama's dad was Kenya's version of Zimbabwe's Mugabe. He apparently wanted to dispossess whites and Asians, and give everything to his homies.

So now people are saying that "My Father's Dreams," is a barely disguised Mugabiesque text, and that he's going to make America into Zimbabwe if he becomes president.

Well, at least that will reverse the immigration debacle (I always try to look on the bright side).

As for McCain, he seems to be war-crazy. He honestly does.

All the candidates want to do enormous things in four years, and enormous things cost money.

I'd like a prez who did quiet things and didn't care to build pyramid schemes either for his friends or for his or her own memes. Just function, Jack, or Jacqueline.

I'd almost prefer a president who'd play checkers with the nieces while sipping pink lemonade, and meanwhile, checking on the border, and slyly checking up on Al Qaeda within our borders.

Maybe fix the pothole down the street if it's not too much to ask.

Other than that, a good doctor should just do about nothing. That's what I'd prescribe for America. I'd like an absolute do-nothing for prez, who slowly gets us out of the debacle of Iraq, and out of the Mid-East, tries to firm up our existing institutions, and basically doesn't go on some big ego-trip of trying to totally redo the medical care situation, or try in four years to liberate the earth from fanatics.

Have the Dalai Lama over for whatever it is that Dalai Lama's eat, and sleep a lot.

I'd like a president who sleeps 18 hours a day, like Oblomov, and rarely makes any personal appearances, and orders fairly healthy sandwiches from the chef, and perhaps asks other people to get up and exercise if they want better medical conditions.

And I'd like the president to bring back Postum. The world is too sad without Postum. I can't take it."

So far Obama's all up in arms over this bailout thing, and is pitching money at it frantically. But I haven't heard Postum mentioned even once. What's happening with the Postum bailout? Anybody? And the pothole down the street? Nobody's touched the thing, and it looks like terrorism, to me. Natural terrorism, if there is such a thing, but terrorism just the same just ain't natural. I'll bet after all this bailout stuff is over, still no Postum, and I'm still having to adjust as I go around the curve to avoid that pothole. Whatever.

RICOCHET RABBIT

I was reading Curtis Faville's blog this morning, and he cited early influences, and gave a list of twenty books. This apparently was itself a ricochet off Ron Silliman's blog, in turn a ricochet off a meme circulating that is to touch upon twenty influential books that got you started as a writer, in turn a ricochet from Peter Davis' book Poet's Bookshelf, which lists books from some of our more renowned poets on what they keep nearby.

I remember the first time I was excited as a teenager by a poem was by John Suckling's Out Upon It! written in the 1630s. New influences came soon enough. A friend of mine had an older brother involved in the New York art world, and he had left a book called Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara on the toilet. I read those over and over, amazed at how they flew. Then I started reading Kenward Elmslie as a corollary to those poems, and especially liked the poem Girl Machine, and how he sung it later when I invited him to Seattle to read. E.E. Cummings is a poet I no longer like but who seemed charming even down to the line breaks. Poets came to my high school and spoke. One had a name something like Van Brunt, and he had a poem about road kill, and how he was helping to bury a dead critter by running over it. I loved this poem! I wish I could remember the name of the poet, and the poem. Eastern Pennsylvania high school, and a poem about road kill, 1974. Anybody know it? The man looked a little Jewish, perhaps, short, with thick blue lips. Did his last name have a Van in the middle?

Then in 11th grade I was floored by a book called the Gentleness of Wolves. And Kahil Gibran knocked me out. Those two now are just farts. And then there was Kerouac's Railroad Earth. At college I read the surrealists and always particularly liked the wistful humor of Philippe Soupault's poetry. I had books by Pierre Reverdy, and Paroles by that other poet, Prevert, translated by Ferlinghetti, and Desnos' last poems found in his pocket at the camp, and many other French poets, such as Henry J.-M. Levet, and Aram Saroyan's poem about French poets. French language is the background to something like a fourth of English, but something like two-thirds of my favorite writing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Origins_of_English_PieChart_2D.svg


Thanks to a pie chart I found in the comments pages at Curtis Faville's blog by Georgie Porgie.

Gary Snyder's poem Hay for the Horses was wonderful. I liked Reznikoff's poems immensely (still a huge influence). John Clare. Through James Tate I discovered Guillaume of Aquitaine and through that, Pound, who never meant beans to me except one poem about an angry tomcat, and Eliot, who meant even less, except I loved his cat poems, and Marianne Moore, whose letter on the Edsel I loved.

Finally Corso, who I thought was better than all these others and spoke directly to me. He's maybe the only poet of whom I can say I like the whole oeuvre, everything he's done. The only other poet I can say that for is Marianne Moore. I think their Christian orientation is moving to me, along with the humor, and the indirection.

I never liked John Ashbery. I never liked Robert Lowell. I only like one poem by Charles Olson. There were some poems I liked by Siv Cedering Fox. I always smell cedar when I see her name. I like a lot of Romanian poets: Tzara, Codrescu, and now the new one, Valery Oisteanu, and the woman, whose name I can't remember!

But maybe I'm just as drawn to prose and prose poetry: Brautigan, Wodehouse, Paule Barton (Haitian prose poet), Willie Smith's Oedipus Cadet, Bukowski, but more than anything it's a phrase here or there that has an unusual edge. I liked Bukowski's line about digging an inch long yellow tail blackhead out of his wife's back, or his wife digging one of those out of his neck. It's not a sentence I would want to repeat, but it gives me an instance of a high water mark.

More and more too it's philosophers I like: Gadamer, lately, the Relevance of Beauty, Locke on Two Treatises on Government, and historians, like David Landes, who argues for the relevance of religion in economics (why the Catholic and Muslim countries don't work, but the Lutheran and Jewish ones do).

It's rarely whole books that stick in my craw, but a few images, an idea, often engrained in a phrase. Natalie Angier talking about how the moon was knocked out of the earth by a comet. A trillion atoms on the head of a pin. Sentences full of momentous upheaval and humor. Lichtenberg's aphorisms. Mary Midgley on woodchucks as being of equal interest to poets and scientists. Gary Snyder on rivers as national boundaries. Arto Melleri's poem "Johnny B. Goethe," which sounds better in Finnish.

Euclid's elements, the ten commandments as conceived by Luther, two kingdoms (the greatest intellectual invention of all times), Klossowski on how every image is a cover story for another darker image, Ichazo's enneagram, Calvin Coolidge's tiny press release, "I do not choose to run for president in 192-".

Fermat's Last Theorem

I read a book this week called Fermat's Last Theorem, by Amir D. Aczel, originally published by 4 Walls 8 Windows. It's a history of the resolution of the theorem (really a conjecture, since it wasn't proven) by Pierre de Fermat, a French mathematician, who first noted in 1637 in the margins of a math book that x to the nth power plus y to the nth power would never equal z to the nth power when the nth was more than a square. Fermat worked at night and during other times in his busy schedule as a jurist, creating proofs that changed number theory. Mathematicians study things like tides and moon phases and show how periodic phenomena has regular patterns, like the lacy doily about his neck (which might have also served as a coffee filter).

One thing you discover reading books about mathematicians is that they are a lot like poets, right down to the mad lives that they lived. Some of the mathematicians described in the book (Galois, in particular) was virtually a romantic poet in how he lived, died for a harlot in a mindless duel, leaving behind a theory of mathematical fields that was later useful in proving Fermat's Last Theorem.

But in this case a seemingly stable man named Andrew Weil solved the theorem in 1993 after working quietly for seven years in his house at Princeton. You can follow a video here,

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8269328330690408516

which shows Weil discussing the problem, and shows him working on his notepads. What's neat is to watch his emotional highs and lows. He nearly weeps when he talks about how he finally got it. Beauty is a very important aspect of the problem to mathematicians.

I think mathematicians are very much like poets. Note in the video, though, how thin the mathematicians are. Poets are often a little top-heavy, and they are not so neat in their appearance. Mathematicians appear to be rail-thin and rather fastidious. I think that they forget to eat, so they don't get the sauces all over themselves, but perhaps there is some other reason, too. Perhaps they are so interested in FORM, they would never let themselves get out of SHAPE. This is a forty-five minute documentary that shows some gorgeous forms, and many intelligent people talking about their breathtaking discoveries that I only distantly understand. It's a pure discovery of some kind, and even though I didn't always understand what was being said, I wept. The intensity of the forms, and the bizarre associations and leaps of intuition were just wonderful. The theorem in question doesn't appear to have any practical applications such as a better way to make peas boil, but then what poem can do that?

I also don't know how to connect this to Lutheran Surrealism, except for the fact that it is mentioned in the book that a mathematician named Euler had come up with a proof of God's existence. Catharine the Great had a number of great minds she was supporting at court, and she liked to make them cockfight.

"The empress asked Euler to argue with Diderot about the existence of God. Diderot, in the meantime, was told that the mathematician had a proof of God's existence. Euler approached Diderot and said gravely, 'Sir, a + b/n = x, hence God exists; reply!' Diderot, who knew nothing about mathematics, gave up and immediately returned to France" (48).

The author also mentions that mathematicians like to go to cafes and drink coffee and argue, just like poets. Mathematicians are a natural ally of Lutheran Surrealism, just as much as the untouchables of India. We ought to draft in as many as we can.