On Pondering a Variant from Vindobonensis

My mind moves slowly,
as slow as the incoming clouds,
slightly faster than adagietto
though I hope to think
thoughts less vaporous
and more Viennese.

Tigers Update

I coined a nickname for the most recent Tiger, Aubrey Huff. It's "Half-Swing." I dubbed him this after watching last night's game in which he struck out three times on check swings. Half-Swing Huff.

It was nice to take two of three from the Angels in Anaheim. Not easy to do.

Fernando Rodney is only a little less roller coaster than Todd "Roller Coaster" Jones. I know because I haven't had to dip into my stash of antacids as much this season.

Quotable Leyland

Manager Jim Leyland on the reason Ryan Raburn has been hitting better of late:

"I told him that I was taking away his entrance music if he didn't start hitting. That's why he started hitting."

Standing Tall in the Corner

My favorite thing to peruse during the baseball season is the mlb.com overall standings board. I would get into Baseball Prospectus but I already have enough black-hole-time-absorption machines in operation. The regular standings have just enough to keep me occupied for about 5 minutes, and then I can move on, satisfied.

Today's contemplation: Runs Scored and Runs Scored Againts. Now, the teams I root for: MN Twins (Land of My Heritage) in the AL and LA Dodgers (Land of My Birth) in the NL are a giving me very different feelings in my tummy.

The Dodgers have been on a tear. Everything is right. Manny Ramirez is "being Manny" to the tune of beating the living crud out of the ball (Boston, we thank thee). The young starters are doing things that make me giddy. And is all of the exuberance something we can continue to count on or should we trap our happiness in a jar and look at it longingly in July? Apparently, contrary to this man's existence, plan on repeated euphoria Dodgertown: our Runs Scored: 119; Runs Allowed: 82; Expected Win-Loss Record: 14-7. Actual Win-Loss Record: 14-7.

On the other hand, the Minnesota Twins. Now, the Twins have been having a lot of problems. Their All Star, 2X Batting Champ Catcher has been out, coming back Friday against the Royals {anticipatory giggling}. The rotation, also young, has been garbage except for the #5 pitcher; this can be expected to get better. So, we have accumulated these numbers: RS: 85; RA: 113 which should give us the diametric opposite of Dodger-lation: an 8-13 record. What have we actually managed to do? 10-11, with a chance at .500 against Scott Kazmir tonight (not likely, I know, but why can't the good times roll?). The culprit? Being 4-0 in 1-run games. {guilty chuckle}. The Twins hereby thank the world for allowing them to miraculously and inexplicably not trash their season already, and hope you will not mind when we go on another ridiculous run in August-September to steal the division from some much more "expected" (i.e., deserving) winner.

Next Year, We Can't Miss This

Why didn't I find out about the annual Grilled Cheese Invitational, which is held in L.A., until too late? Probably because God is looking out for my cholesterol levels. But next year . . . .

Classic Rodney? Let's Hope So.

The Tigers were up 4-3 against the Rangers this afternoon in the top of the ninth.

Last year in this situation Jones would have made an appearance, and we would have broken out the antacids. This year, Jones is retired (in peace, we hope), and Fernando Rodney is our man. What did Rodney do today? Struck out the side in the top of the ninth. That's not the Jones spirit, but it's one we can live with.

Let the Record Show

... that Jim Caple's attempt at prescience is the only one that would not result in a November stoning were we to apply Old Testament prophecy standards to 2009 Major League Baseball Pre-Season predictions.

Therein: 13 out of 21 "experts" (variously defined) have the MN Twins getting to the playoffs; only 2 predict the Tigers to assert themselves (though the Tigers did snag the "Dark Horse" pick from Rob Neyer and Jason Stark, who are more "expert" than most). In fairness will I have to spot the Burglar some good odds this year?

On the eve of the real beginning of baseball: may injuries not be the bane of destiny!

Je aime le matérialisme

This may ring a bell with Burglar more than me since he has direct experience with freshman philosophy students who have "figured it out" after three lectures, but I couldn't help but giggle at this.

The part to which I refer is the very end, where we are treated to the following.

"Really, the weather, it's not an important aspect for driving or protesting ... it's a simple material state, I think. So, people come out in the snow or in the summer, it really doesn't matter to them because they have a message they want to present to the congressmen and senators and they're gonna do it despite whatever happens."

Question: what do the protesters think about the significance or lack thereof of the simple material state of the globe?

Stat Challenge

Did everyone notice? Baseball started. Now I can finally procrastinate again.

In memory of losing FireJoeMorgan over the winter, here's a baseball-announcing puzzle.

Sunday, March 1st, bottom of the ninth, Twins-RedSox, two out, two on, Twins down by one. One Dustin Martin steps up to the plate. Since it's Spring Training and there are often whole games where I hardly know who anyone is, I wait with great anticipation for that ever helpful stat box to pop up. Here's what it said:

1-1; AVG: .750; RBI: 1; OBP: .667.

Is there any scenario in which this is possible? Ready ... go!

Oh, and lest our favorite label meet its end, the aptly surnamed Red Sox closer of the day, Hunter Jones, was slinging a textbook Classic Jones.

Tolkien My Mind

Since Tolkien is appearing all over this blog we might as well keep up the trend.

An interesting article by Courtney M. Booker tries to explain the progression from the publication of the Lord of the Rings in 1968 to the release of The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001. The central issue being why those who read the book in the 1970s and those born post 1990 had such different reactions to Peter Jackson’s visuals. Not necessarily: “I didn’t like it” vs. “I did,” but more “That is not at all how I pictured it” vs. “That’s perfect!”
To summarize and simplify, his progression goes: Lord of the Rings -> United States -> Fantasy Literature -> Role Playing Games (esp. Dungeons and Dragons) -> RPGs into Computer Games -> The Personal Computer -> Graphics Oriented Computer Games -> RPGs lost much of their “personalized” and “plot” aspects in favour of large-scale CGI effects -> Peter Jackson welds the new fantasy computer game look back onto the Lord of the Rings plot and characters. “The Fellowship of the Ring … can largely be reduced to a host of dramatic helicopter and swooping bird’s-eye-view shots of landscape, and a linear sequence of frantic hack-and-slash video-game scenarios … his interpretation moves through a series of scenarios in much the same fashion that computer games are structured. There is little time for character development or interaction; instead, stunning visuals and special effects are relied upon to breathe life into a fantasy realm encountered largely apace.”

I think his best example (for which Booker quotes B. Rosebury) of this is the scene in the mines of Moria, when the fellowship is nearly trapped by hosts of orcs. The scene is a page in the original book: over five minutes in the movie. “In the film … its theme seems to be: how very, very difficult it is to kill a cave troll. … [in the book] its focal point is the ominous fact that the orc-chieftain has selected Frodo for his spear-thrust.”

All of this I find interesting, and can agree with for the most part. However, Booker’s second major point, which he starts the essay with and concludes with (and so which seems to be his main axe to grind)—even though he spends almost no time in the body of the essay specifically arguing the point—is that (and this is a little hard to follow) Tolkien presents a “Medieval” world (or at the very least, that is how basically everyone reads him); there is no “religion” in that medieval world; one problem with present conceptions of the medieval world is that we don’t get and so ignore how religion fits into the medieval thought world; when we “role play” a medieval character or present him in a movie, or imagine him/her in a book, we assume the medieval character thinks in a crisis like we do (obviously a huge generalization here): with “logic and violence” (his terms); this is incorrect.

I’m going to let his final points alone, mainly because I find it too problematic to even begin talking about.

However, the premise that Tolkien’s world is “not medieval” because there is no overt religion, to my mind presents one of the problems representative of Medieval Academics. They don't get it either, even though they know they should. For starters, Tolkien was himself a professional academic “medievalist,” and as a literature-linguistics person I would argue more closely attuned to the intricacies of a “medieval thought-world” than 99% of historians. Secondly, any of his biographies point out that his interest in the medieval period and texts started at a very young age: if anyone in the modern world had their mind formed by medieval texts; if anyone could actually claim to possess a medieval mind in a modern age, it was Tolkien. Finally, for a medievalist, what should stand out to Booker is a medieval epic (which the Lord of the Rings, given its author and the way he created the text, is) doesn’t talk about religion as such. Where is religion and God in the Arthurian tales? Ever read Gawain and the Green Knight? About the only “religious” thing there is the setting of the Pentecost feast. Even in Spencer (who is a bit late), “religion” is present much more in allegory than in explicit plot sequences. How about that dramatic communion scene in Song of Roland?

Religion is so much a part of the backdrop that you don’t even need to say anything: it is just there, it is assumed. This is a point completely missed by those who continue to read medieval mystical texts as though they could also be Buddhist: if you’re careful, you realize it just doesn’t work. All of their apparent “loosey-gooseyness” assumes that the loosey-goosey experiential path to the Divine is at the same time taking place within, not apart from, the religious structure and thought of the Universal Church. It is a part of the church, not an alternative to it.

What is actually really interesting about the Lord of the Rings in modern (especially American) culture is the generation that Booker failed to talk about: those of us who were born from 1970 to 1985 or so, and grew up largely without larger-than-life computer games, but were formed by an early reading of the Lord of the Rings. We have the same claim to have intimately experienced that world as kids right now will have on Harry Potter: when you encounter books like that in your middle school and elementary years, they are going to fundamentally impact your imaginitive world for the rest of your life. One of the oddest things about my generation seems to be the movement (which I am a part of) to more “medieval” forms of Christianity: the high-church traditions of the Church of England, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox where the Christian life, where ‘religion’, becomes a rhythmic part of life in the way that it becomes a part of everyday life down to the way one behaves at card playing … so that an outsider may not at first realize that they are being immersed into a deeply Christian universe until it is too late, and they find themselves on their knees kissing the chalice …

Ents in Isengard

I feel somewhat apologetic for it, but I cannot help, at a certain level, feeling somewhat relieved -- yes, that is what I said -- at the economic crisis. Am I a jerk? Probably. Yes, I know how bad it will be for so many things that I like, and for so many people's real lives and real livelihoods: including those of us who have invested our all in the academic profession, which unfortunately is a surplus industry. Just this morning the Cambridge Crier announced that Cambridge University Press is cutting half -- half -- of its staff. That is not fun times for anyone's family. But we have been living in a bubble world where the face of the earth has become a video game; and eventually things had to break. And yes, there is that grim delight in destroying rot that Treebeard sings out so perfectly somberly in Isengard.

Michael Lewis says:
In the two decades since [the late 1980s], I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?

At least one other person agrees with me:

When I hear the stock market has fallen,
I say, "Long live gravity! Long live
stupidity, error, and greed in the palaces
of fantasy capitalism!" I think
an economy should be based on thrift,
on taking care of things, not on theft,
usury, seduction, waste, and ruin.
(W. Berry from Some Further Words)

I would be very bad at it for quite awhile, but I've always sort of wanted to be forced into trying farming ...

Father Brown : Chesterton :: Socrates : Plato?

I just read a G.K. Chesterton Father Brown collection for the first time: The Innocence of Father Brown. I was anticipating enjoying it, but I didn't. I mean, they were entertaining enough to keep me occupied for most of a sick day drifting in and out of consciousness, but really I was disappointed.

From a plot perspective, there is a crisis in fiction's requisite suspension of belief: the stories simply cannot all be true. For example, the initially thief, later comrade to Fr. Brown, Flambeau, shows up as the crook in way too many for it to be surprising that Fr. Brown figured him out ... again (Did you not recognize him? What is going on here?). For an innocuous country priest, he shows up in way too many random locations (unless he is really an absentee bishop); his own village is frustratingly undefined and between the stories there are just too many odd people, rich and suspect types around to be likely.

From a character perspective, Fr. Brown is a bit flat and frankly just a little bit annoying probably because he is not amusing (or rarely so); he's just a little bit too 'intuitive' for me: in quotations because often intuitive turns out to be "oh yes, I also happened to read the will which says X, which is the answer." Hmmm, very clever of you, Fr. Brown. He (both Fr. Brown and Chesterton) also plays all of his cards close to his chest -- usually in mysteries you expect to have to guess just one or maybe two random pieces of information to get the game.

So, Fr. Brown is more in the Sherlock Holmes type of loner genius, but he doesn't have any problems and he doesn't have a mysterious past, he's just apparently heard the detailed (meaning exactly how I did it) confessions of every type of criminal, and he is pure, and very philosophic (also kind of obnoxious to me).

In other words, the books are a bit tedious because they present Chesterton's almost apologetic for his take on the Catholic worldview versus the rest. He seems to have been more interested in making points about priests (being "cloistered and pious" doesn't mean they don't know the ways of the world; in fact they know the ways of man more intimately than anyone else because that is their "profession"), in general the Catholic Church's teachings (confession of sins is simultaneously both freedom and a sufficient penance; Catholicism is the worldview of reason; the fundamental thing that must be seen about mankind is that we must look inside and admit that everything is not alright, the church's approach to sin and sinners - confession - gets many more and better results than that of society, etc.), skewering various groups in society for their incompetence, destructiveness, insufficience (socialists, new pagans, English evangelicals, teetotallers, calvinists, etc.), or making a sort of broad moralizing point: as man lives in sin his sins get smaller and smaller (meaning I think more and more personal), and meaner and meaner (meaning more and more vicious).

Through each of his stories he gets across fairly bluntly a related point on one or several of these. Now, I grant this is a point I usually find interesting and most always agree with. What I object to is use of the genre, which caught me by surprise. Perhaps if I pick up a Father Brown collection again, my approach would be to try to read them as Platonic dialogues. The plot is not exactly an accidental happenstance to the philosophy therein, but it is definitely subservient to the point being made, though in the best dialogues the plot is itself also that point. It is as though Chesterton formulated a moral truth to himself and thought, 'now how can I get a Fr. Brown case to exemplify this?' Thus, in their own way these tales are enjoyable, but don't expect the literary delights of Dorothy Sayers.

Sunlit Silence

I like to classify poets in my own mind in a couple of ways; or rather, there a few major categories of things that I think poets do, and some do some categories better than others: the best poets in their best poems strike a perfect balance. One set of my categories is "idea" and "music". George Herbert was such a fantastic poet he usually was musical, but I think his poems are more driven by thought/idea. T.S. Eliot is the same; but for both, their best poems cannot be understood without reading them as music, without sounding them. Gerard Manley Hopkins was the paradigm "music" poet -- in many of his poems, I have no idea what he is saying, but I will read them again and again just to hear the birds singing. Another set of categories are the senses -- poets usually focus on a couple of the senses when they create a scene; again with Eliot as an example, I think he focuses on sound and movement, less so on smell and textures, little on sight.

Wendell Berry is one of the easiest to categorize, I think: in my categories he is an "idea" poet and a "sight" poet. Thus at his best he is a good but not great poet; at his worst he is an essayist pressing "enter" every couple words and after a handful of poems you feel as though you've read several philosophy essays, and you can see a lot of birds and trees, but can't hear or smell or feel them very well. For instance what if his poem (left) were just lightly edited with an eye (haha) to its sound (yes, I am making criminal presumptions, but the sound of the last line as he wrote it criminally offends the injunction therein and if he did that intentionally then he is too clever by half and that proves my point anyway):

... Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

Accept what comes from silence.
[delete]
Of the little words that come
from the silence, like a prayer
prayed back to one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence whence it came.
~from Further Words, "How to be a poet (to remind myself)"

On the other hand, here are some of his poems I have been enjoying, in order of increasing excellence.

"The Future."
For God's sake, be done
with this jabber of "a better world."
What blasphemy! No "futuristic"
twit or child thereof ever
in embodied light will see
a better world than this, though they
foretell inevitably a worse.
Do something! Go cut the weeds
beside the oblivious road. Pick up
the cans and bottles, old tires,
and dead predictions. No future
can be stuffed into this presence
except by being dead. The day is
clear and bright, and overhead
the sun not yet half finished
with his daily praise.
~In a Country Once Forested
{See? Some good lines, but mostly the essayist who presses enter a lot}

"II."
When we convene again
to understand the world,
the first speaker will again
point silently out the window
at the hillside in its season,
sunlit, under the snow,
and we will nod silently,
and silently stand and go.
~ Sabbaths 2000
{Now, there is some "sound" here, but mostly this is the marriage of vision and idea with the emphasis still on idea; the next with a more balanced role for vision}

"III."
As timely as a river
God's timeless life passes
{though "passes ... passes ... past", I would
prefer "flows ... flows ... through"}
Into this world. It passes
Through bodies, giving life,
And past them, giving death.
The secret fish leaps up
Into the light and is
Again darkened. The sun
Comes from the dark, it lights
The always passing river,
Shines on the great-branched tree,
And goes. Longing and dark,
We are completely filled
With breath of love, in us
Forever incomplete.
~Sabbaths 2000

And finally, Wendell Berry at his very best (which is very good):

"VI. (for Jonathan Williams)"
The yellow-throated warbler, the highest remotest voice
of this place, sings in the tops of the tallest sycamores,
but one day he came twice to the railing of my porch
where I sat at work above the river. He was too close
to see with binoculars. Only the naked eye could take him in,
a bird more beautiful than himself killed and preserved
by the most skilled taxedermist, more beautiful
than any human mind, so small and inexact,
could hope ever to remember. My mind became
beautiful by the sight of him. He had the beauty only
of himself alive in the only moment of his life.
He had upon him like a light the whole
beauty of the living world that never dies.

Irony Alert

"Pope Clarifies Luther's Idea of Justification."

I'm sure Luther appreciates the help.

Panic! Averted.

The title of the article that caused my panic: "Jones Returning as Tigers' 'Pen Coach."

What! How could they bring back Todd Jones to coach their bullpen! Our bullpen is ruined.

Wait. Did that say "Jeff Jones"? Okay.

Only Slightly Disappointed

I just finished reading a book of poems. The poems in the book were not what I expected them to be. I suppose that if a Pottery Barn catalog were converted into a book of poems, the result would be something quite like the book of poems I just finished reading.

I have no idea

The following quote was written about a particular candidate in the upcoming presidential election. I am keeping the author and the candidate in question (if you really want to know, you could google a phrase) to illustrate the point that this comment could be said about any person and their support of any candidate, anywhere. We can only hope that, when the author of this comment read his own article in the paper the day after writing it, in a flash the irony struck him and he chuckled at himself.

This is one of the many points at which narcissism becomes indistinguishable from masochism. Let me put it plainly: If you want someone just like you to be president of the United States, or even vice president, you deserve whatever dysfunctional society you get. You deserve to be poor, to see the environment despoiled, to watch your children receive a fourth-rate education and to suffer as this country wages -- and loses -- both necessary and unnecessary wars.

It is cool that I get to determine the society I will live in based on the simple tell-all inclination of whether I want someone "just like me" to be president or not.

I think, if we were to take the author seriously the choices before all of us are:
1. Live a reprehensible life and wish for someone morally upstanding to take over my government for me because I am busy choosing to be despicable.
2. Live a morally upstanding life and wish for someone who is a moral turd to take over society simply so that I will not deserve the hell that I will thereafter live in.

Further suggestions from the floor are welcome.

C-c-c-c-coffee

Sometimes what you keep hoping is true, really is.

Jane E. Brody is our heroine.

Reading Lakatos and Plato's "Timeaus" in the Afternoon after Babysitting in the Morning

Insight may be nothing more than guessing --
modestly, courageously -- but still some
questions answer themselves as if divined.
For example,
"Why should we notice the little girl
whose budding humanity -- in full
bloom already -- makes it difficult
to put the cap back on the
juice and easy to love the
cosmos in its all-fangled beauty?"

End of an Era (a.k.a., Sales of Antacids Will Now Be Falling Off)

No more Jones. It was fun (or something) while it lasted.

The new closer is Fernando Rodney.