The Last Walkyrie with the Guts of the Last Grail Knight

For all his huffing and puffing, Anthony Tommasini comes up with one of the most dully conventional lists of "classical" greats that you could imagine, a sophomore Music Appreciation curriculum whose boldest choice is putting Debussy right behind Schubert (Schubert? Really? Really?) and ahead of Brahms. But really, I just want to take this opportunity to say how much Wagner stinks, and how the idea that this cacophonous, overwrought, crackpot German noisemaker is "greater" than Chopin or Monteverdi or Ravel or Dvořák or Berg or even Tommasini's "beloved Puccini" is the worst idea since Wagner himself decided to set nine thousand hours of drivel for a four-hundred-piece orchestra and twenty-nine human bellows under the creaking, drafty, weedy stone edifice of a goofball Norse mythos that makes Marvel Comics read like fucking Homer. And don't even get me started on Parsifal, literally the most boring thing ever created by a human, five pulsing hours of musical Ambien during which a cast of singers wanders as aimlessly as the score, wondering just what they are doing there. The whole of Parsifal and the Ring, supposedly the most titanic artistic achievement in the whole of everything forever, is contained in Mozart's lunatic masterpiece, The Magic Flute, which rather than paying worshipful homage to all that dowdy legend, rather than achieving a transcendently flaccid stridency, if you can imagine, manages to make a marvelous hash of the whole lunatic business of Mystery and myth. I say that a big fat Sarastro intoning "O Isis und Osiris" is a more musically meaningful, and at a mere four minutes by the way, than the whole of Wagner. One day, not long from now, the whole Wagnerian corpus is going to collapse in on itself and form a pure sigularity of undeserved self-importance. Who's that, just beyond the event horizon, finally allowing himself a hearty chuckle? Oh, it's Mahler. Yeah.

Anyway, my exhibits for someone to take Wagner's place on the dumb list are in favor of another modern Frenchie. Here is the great bariton Gerard Souzay singing the opening of Ravel's last composition, the song cycle of Don Quichotte à Dulcinée and then the Beaux Arts trio playing the opening movement of the great, marvelous, extraordinary Piano Trio.

Herd the Nerd

I guess I will begin by admitting that Leonard Hatred is right. I do like Iain Banks, or Iain M. Banks, or whomever, whose anarchospacetopia, The Culture, is a fun setting for roaring space operas. The most entertaining of these is Excession, a novel whose main plot involves immense, self-aware spaceships trying to figure out what the fuck is up with a totally inscrutable object that appears one day near a star on the outskirts of the galaxy, although the best is Look to Windward, which deals in the morality of war, the nature of loss in a universe where technology makes the dead indelible, and the question of art and human (well, alien, but human-scale) genius where vastly greater and older intelligences exist and interact with we small mortals. For all its whiz-bangery and space-hopping, Windward has an air of Greek myth about it: its gods so much like us, and yet, not. All that said, the more recent Culture novels are dull, overlong, overwrought, shaggy-dog affairs that are fun to skim for geeky invention but succorless as stories.

Banks' best space-opera sort of book is actually the stand-alone novel The Algebraist, a kooky, violent story that admittedly also suffers from its own bloat and authorial indulgence, but whose Dwellers, slow-thinking, nearly immortal creatures of immense antiquity who inhabit vast civilizations in gas giant planets, their odd culture in a state of hilarious and perpetual fusty Edwardian decline, are the funniest and most delightful aliens in recent science fiction, one-part Lovecraftian monsters and one-part Upstairs/Downstairs. But his best novel (better than all the rest of his science fiction and better than all of his "mainstream" books as well) is Transition, a novel about a secret society of agents who "flit" between parallel worlds, a conspiratorial update of Asimov's The End of Eternity that I read twice in a row because I enjoyed it so much.

I like Charlie Stoss and Ken MacLeod. These two are often spoken of in the same breath, and I regret being so lazy as to do the same, but they really are similar in style and substance. MacLeod's Fall Revolution series is his strongest, although my favorite of his novels is Cosmonaut Keep, the first of a trilogy that regrettably grows weaker and more dissipated as it goes on. Keep, however, is a neat book set in a "second sphere" of civilization on the far side of the galaxy, and like Banks' better Culture books, it largely concerns itself with a human society that discovers itself, suddenly, to be a very junior partner in a very ancient civilization. Stross' Accelerando is really a series of linked, speculative pieces about something very much resembling, ugh, Thuh Singularity, and is a little gadgety for my taste, but Glasshouse, set in roughly the same universe but far into its future, is a frightening, sickening story about men and women forced into a an experimental recreation of a 1950s-inspired American town, a recapitulation of gender inequity and the depredations of labor in capitalism that reminds me of The Handmaid's Tale as told by a Kafka with a computer. Stross' Eschaton books, meanwhile, are less rigorous but more fun. Singularity Sky is the more classic of the two, and its The Festival is another great alien, or almost-alien, creation, but for my money Iron Sunrise is the better book--paced quickly, told with real verve, and featuring the best Space Nazis, no, really, ever.

I hated China Miéville's Perdido Street Station, hated The Scar, and hated Iron Council most of all. Steampunk sucks, guys; it smells like a Nine Inch Nails video. It wants to feel you from the inside. So I effectively wrote the guy off, but then I read The City and the City, a book about which reviewers climbed over themselves to haul out the adjective, Borgesian, and about which, for once, it makes sense--a police procedural set in a tatty, imagined, Eastern-European city that occupies the same point in time and space as a parallel city in a world much more like our own, which becomes less and less "science fiction" as the story progresses and much more about what we choose and choose not to see. Speaking of procedurals, there is a really great short story in The Insufferable Gaucho, a recent collection of a number of older Roberto Bolaño stories: "Police Rat," about, literally, a police rat.

Since I mentioned The Handmaid's Tale, and since this list is wanting for a woman, I should say that although I have mixed feelings about Atwood, I often find myself wondering why it is, exactly, that I like her, I did really enjoy The Year of The Flood, surprisingly, since I despised its preceding volume, Oryx and Crake. And I recently read The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, another post-flood (literally and metaphorically) near-ish future fiction that seems more prescient than anything else in the last ten years.

Less than Twelve Parsecs

Alas, George Lucas only ever destroyed Star Wars. But while Daniel Larison says all that needs to be said about Michael Lind's misapprehensions about the "Middle Ages" and weird affection for centralized bureaucracy, he says not nearly enough about Lind's lousy reading of the classic Stars of science fiction and fantasy:

If there was a moment when the culture of enlightened modernity in the United States gave way to the sickly culture of romantic primitivism, it was when the movie “Star Wars” premiered in 1977. A child of the 1960s, I had grown up with the optimistic vision symbolized by “Star Trek,” according to which planets, as they developed technologically and politically, graduated to membership in the United Federation of Planets, a sort of galactic League of Nations or UN. When I first watched “Star Wars,” I was deeply shocked. The representatives of the advanced, scientific, galaxy-spanning organization were now the bad guys, and the heroes were positively medieval — hereditary princes and princesses, wizards and ape-men. Aristocracy and tribalism were superior to bureaucracy. Technology was bad. Magic was good

I understand that Gene Roddenberry's retromod vision of the future had Kirk kissing Nichelle Nichols, but even before the stylish sixties gave way to the weird, hierarchical, technocratic dictatorship of The Next Generation, the United Federation of Planets played barely the part of a supernumerary. The governing organization always seemed to be Starfleet, whose motto . . . to boldly go . . . and shoot with lasers . . . Their missions of exploration always seemed to lead to armed conflict, and the bold, interracial, transspecies future had as a model of its money-free, egalitarian, merit-based society something more or less directly descended from the British Admiralty, circa Trafalgar.

Meanwhile, if we must read Star Wars as something other than someone talking that old hack and fraud Joe Campbell a leeeetle bit too seriously, then let me just remind you that the "advanced, scientific, galaxy-spanning organization" was an evil empire run by a cyborg monster and an evil wizard, and that in almost every visual detail its model was not the New goddamn Deal, but the Third fucking Reich.

The Fix Is Win

My friend Dennis may be a sports fan, but he's obviously not a betting man, because if he were, he'd know that the 3 points by which the Steelers are favored is just the home field advantage, and the odds on the game are otherwise even. Are the Steelers loved by the critics? Seems to me they are consistently underrated despite their long-time winning ways, mostly because of that old "grind and win." No, they don't play pretty. They never have. They play football. Anyway, whatever the sports press thinks, TV's gameday announcers hate 'em, especially that fucking Bengal Collinsworth, who deserves to have every swoopy hair tweezed from his oily scalp, one at a time.

Let me throw in with Mike Tomlin. I like Rex Ryan, and I like Jets football. I'm glad they beat the Pats, although I won't be satisfied until someone gets Ray Lewis a bus ticket from Baltimore and a knife with Bill Belichick's name on it. They're a smart team, and they play a banging, gritty game, but they'll suffer from a poorly-manned offense and a defense geared toward quarterbacks. Yes, Santonio Holmes is a great reciever (you're welcome), but Sanchez is a mediocre passer--a talent, yes, but a bad decision-maker with accuracy problems, which is why Holmes is always getting props for tapping both toes inside the line before he bounces into the bleachers. Roethlisberger isn't actually a quarterback, meanwhile; he is a football player, or, alternately, a living sasquatch, a distinction with a difference, frustrating though that may be every time an opposing team runs him over with a truck, fits him for lead sneakers, and tosses him in a river without a yellow flag for miles. The Jets' blitz wasn't very effective against him in the regular season, but even if they manage to overwhelm our still-ragged O-line on Sunday, it won't affect his game. The Ravens sacked him thrice on every offensive down, and he still beat them. Brady used to get credit for being the most unflappable QB in the league, but the smart money says it's Big Ben, who is either too big, too strong, too smart, too dumb, or some impossible combination thereof to feel the effects of injury and single-play failure; who can go through a windshield and come to training camp anyway.

"Keys to the game." Goddamnit, Suisham, keep those kickoffs on the ground.

Every Standardized Test Score Is Infinite; There Is No Difference

Emma Schutzius, an eighth-grader at George Washington Middle School, said educators should focus on keeping kids interested in learning. "We are not just walking, talking test scores," she said.

-WaPo

How right you are, Emma. You are marching, struggling, conquering test scores. You are the test scores with which America will vanquish China and Taiwan, France and Japan, Borneo and Mozambique. You are the statistical embodiment of the triumphal national character, the Thelamic dynamo from which emenates the collective national will.

Horses of a Feather

It is odd to find oneself accused of football provincialism by a goddamn-Jets fan . . . like finding yourself accused of hockey hickdom by an Islanders man. I won't entirely discount Dennis' thesis. Pittsburgh was a bit of a football backwater in the pre-merger days, and Joe Namath's New York Jets did play some killer ball, but Dennis seems to think no one is watching as he lines up on the sideline to trip the next thirty-five years of post-merger football, when Namath could no longer hack it and the team became an embarrassment to everyone except for seventeen contrarian Brooklynite Reform Jews who didn't want to root for the Giants. Rex Ryan has made the Jets fanworthy again over the last couple of years, I'll credit him that, but in a town whose combined Manning-Sanchez quarterback empire looks and plays like something Ben Roethlisberger would brutalize over a couple of Jagerbombs and a urinal, you'll pardon me if I take their teams' good luck and fans' resilience with the same skepticism I bring to the calorie count on a Primanti Bros. sammich. Meanwhile, that "rigid specimen of the Rooney family" has got one more ring than the olympics.

No Steeler fan worth his city's inability to spread road salt is allowed to believe in victory, though. I will cop to that particular provincialism. We are a primitive, superstitious people. We believe ourselves not only to be the most referee-despised team in the league, but also, actually, the worst football team in history, every victory a bizarre gift from an inhuman and incomprehensible gridiron god. I expect the special teams to abandon their lanes, the O-line to collapse, Flozell Adams to come in for an injured Troy Polamalu about forty seconds into the first quarter and subsequently hold every single Jets offensive player simultaneously, for a total aggregate penalty yardage of five touchdowns, a safety, and two hardboiled eggs. Chris Kemoeatu will get pushed into the backfield, trip over his own feet, and actually cause Heinz field to tip up away from the river. Ben Roethlisberger's giant, mutant hands will make a roundhouse fake, holding the ball through a full 270 degrees of motion, at which point it will fly out of his hand and through the uprights behind him, being ruled a field goal. Final score: Jets 40, Steelers 4 and a half.

You Too Can Become a Rapist Quarterback, in America

N+1 is as good an argument as any for the mass firebombing of American Universities, a full-on Stalinist purge of every degree-holding American as an Enemy of the People. I myself might be consumed on that pyre, but fuck it, it would be worth it to watch that gang of smugly illiterate post-graduate fuckers go up in the same flames. Meritocratic is not the antonym of elitist. Hell, the two terms are partially synonymous. The former names a conceit in which we pretend that the elite are selected through merit, skill, acumen, etc. It's still an elite. I mean, what to do with a statement like:

To the first idea, that cultural vocations are uniquely elitist, there is more truth than is fun to admit. Majoring in literature or art history rather than economics or biology, never mind hotel management or marketing, suggests a certain privileged indifference to material concerns (even when this rests on actual indifference instead of piles of money). And if you’ve gone into serious debt by attending college, afterward you’ll have noted that it’s the do-gooding NGO or the progressive magazine that expects you to take an unpaid internship, and the publishing house or academic department that offers you a pittance. Goldman Sachs and Google, which pay real salaries, seem in this sense less addicted to exploitation, and more interested in income redistribution, than the Nation or the Yale English department.

Jobs at Goldman and Google are not a fair wage for factory workers, a decent living for grocery clerks. A vanishingly small portion of America works for immensely wealthy technology and finance firms. It is a clever observation that, because these types of jobs "pay real salaries," a few internet engineers and finance-industry made men can quickly pay down educational debts, but it is also entirely a non sequitur. Many middle-class children do work for NGOs. Poor kids struggle through school and then become social workers, English teachers, poets. Rich kids get jobs at Citigroup. The idea that all poetry students are children of privilege, hence elite, whereas biology majors overrepresent struggling, self-funded, kids-of-the-working class just hoping to get hired on by GlaxoSmithBarney or whatever is patently absurd, empirically groundless, and beside the point.

It’s the US armed forces, pop stardom, and professional sports that confer prestige and power in the most egalitarian ways. Otherwise it’s an elitist society with a meritocratic alibi that we’re running.

Pop stardom? Professional sports? This is crackpot Rawls at its finest. Because a lot of elite athletes started as poor kids, ergo sports are egalitarian due to some perverted sense of equality of opportunity? Does the writer even know what egalitarian means? On any given Sunday, the NFL fields approximately five ten thousandths of one percent of the population of the United States. Professional sports, better than anything, demonstrate the incoherent opposition of elitism and meritocracy. They are both the most elitist and most meritocratic of institutions. Which is fine for ballgames, but not exactly a model for equality, let alone, ye gods, egalitarianism.

Blood Liberal

As a Jew--ha-ha, boo-yeah, suckas!--okay, uh, as a Jew-ish America, let me just say that the idea that Sarah Palin has commited some unspeakable indecency by using the phrase "blood libel" in the manner that she did is totally unfair and almost completely incorrect. In fact, I propose to you that she used the phrase in a perfectly proper and appropriate fashion.

First of all, the blood libel that I keep hearing people talk about in deploring her comments is not THE blood libel. Indeed, the blood libel against Jews was not that they murdered gentile children and used their blood in religious rituals, which was an occasionally potent folk belief that popped up persistently but intermittently in the middle ages, but rather the Church doctrine that Jews had killed Jesus, that they as a "people" bore collective guilt for his execution.

Anyway, until the phrase was deployed in an Unapproved Manner, it was understood to have a certain plasticity, and while it was never in wide, general usage given its understood significance to Jews, you could still hear it, from time to time, referring to exactly that to which it refers: the libelous manufacture of guilt, often collective guilt, for a crime committed by one's assumed or perceived peers and allies.

Farewell My Son, Farewell from the Machine

I have been asked what I think about this cry from Freddie at L'Hôte, so I have to admit to my bemusement at what seems to me to be the central complaint of the piece:

Many neoliberal bloggers maintain an unspoken but meticulously curated policy of not allowing left-wing criticism to enter their rhetorical space.

Is this a plea for belonging? A complaint about link-backs? If you want to get Matthew Yglesias to throw some traffic your way, your best bet is to spend a few posts calling him "an odious, totalitarian, albino squirrel," at which point he will harumph over to twatter and send five thousand liberals nattering off in your direction to tell you that you are a fool, a crank, and a reactionary whose, uh, um, policy preferences will ever come to pass, hosana, eli, hallelujah. Yes, but a very tall and naturally thin reactionary with full and beautiful lips. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh, yes. The inclusion of genuine, authentic, bite-it-like-a-golden-coin leftwardishism in the rhetorical condominium association of the rump American liberal-slash-democratic-socialist faction.

Plainly I come to this particular form of writing from a different non-rhetorical space than Freddie; I certainly don't conceive of this sort of thing as some kind of political activism, and although many of my sympathies are with people of the left, or the far-left, or the far-far-left, or wherever one goes before the sidewalk ends, I do not think of myself as a leftist. So to me, the question of how one gets to be included in the conversation, the discourse, what have you, is essentially meaningless. The reason that a conservative militarist like Matthew Yglesias does not spend a great deal of time acknowledging the socialist critique of redistributive economic policies within the context of global capitalism is that there is no viable socialism within the context of global capitalism. Just ask this Eurozone! The idea that rent-seeking careerists within the media apparatus of the American state are somehow allies in a social and economic struggle is completely absurd. Wondering why Matthew Yglesias ended up writing reliably, banally conservative opinion pieces on his blog when he was once a man of the left is like wondering why Joe Blow, Attorney-at-Law ended up creating corporate tax shelters when he was once an undergraduate student of poetry. He did not find new beliefs. He got a job. I am exquisitely doubtful that Matthew Yglesias has any beliefs so to speak. He has an internalized range of opinions which he repeats and rearranges for publication, just as an assembly-line robotic arm has a programmed range of motions that it repeats and rearranges while putting together the latest light truck.

By the way, there are of course plenty of left-wingers and far-right kooks and privileged anarchist faggots and conspiracy theorists and lawd only knows what else writing on the internet.

Update: Empirical proof, by the way.

The Fork Calling the Chopstick a Utensil

The American government, dba "the Obama administration," and by extension The New York Times, have discovered that large states have multiple centers of power and interest, that titular heads of state do not wield divine and unchecked authority, and that different interests and constituencies exert influence in purportedly communist China, just as they do in allegedly democratic America. This is to be lamented. China cannot "act decisively" to do the things that we want it to do, even if it wanted to. It? Well, it raises the question: what is a China? The whole thing is couched in tones of revelation and surprise. Now of course, no one is surprised that large businesses often act in very similar ways even though their corporate governance structures are different, even though one produces cars and the other produces boner pills. And yet somehow when the institutions in question are large states like China and the US, these same sorts of distinctions are taken to be absolutely fundamental. One major superstate is much like another? China is in many ways just like the US? YOU DON'T SAY!

Suddenly, Everyone's a Jets Fan