Inky Lives

Over at ASWOBA, my friend John has a thoughtful, touching post about watching the Texas Rangers play baseball.  Worth a read, for sports fans and Texans especially.

Journal 10/19/10

Sweet lord it makes me happy to watch the Yankees lose. To see them lose to a team from Texas  (Texas!) makes it all the sweeter. Gratifying, also. The work Cliff Lee and I did on his knuckle-curve is really paying dividends. He still hasn’t mastered it to the degree I’d like, of course, but it’s enough to beat the Yankees. And that’s enough for me.

* * *

The month has not been a good one. I’ve had a sinus issue of some sort, with the result that I’ve been having dizzy spells on and off for the last several weeks. I can’t concentrate, I can’t read, and I can’t write. After trying out a variety of cures, I’ve finally managed to get the matter in hand. Sinuses are draining, dizziness has diminished, and my brain no longer feels like it’s been encased in an inch and a half of dirty bulletproof glass. At long last I can resume work on I Heard A Fly—an opera based on the sexual politics of Emily Dickinson. Before I can write the libretto, I need to learn Dutch (this I use to underline her philosophical affinities to Erasmus, William of Orange, and that woman who was the lead singer of Roxette. I think she was Dutch, wasn’t she?) Man, this opera is going to rock.

* * *

The Bink celebrated my wife’s return from New York (she’s trying to expand her Louis Vuitton knock-off smuggling ring to the East Coast) by staying up all night chewing on a cardboard box we have in our kitchen. When we awoke this morning, the entire kitchen floor was strewn with small shredded bits of cardboard. Why did he do this? Who knows. We think it might have been the rain. It rained here last night and the Bink, though wonderful and sweet and cute, is not what you would call hardened. Rain is very scary. I guess. I don’t know. He’s a weird dog.

This Will Bring You JOY

...unless you don't like The Muppets.

In which case, frankly, joy is not a thing that you deserve.

Journal 9/20/10

Last week I got a job that involves working with a student in Arizona.  It's all going to be conducted over the internet, via Skype (or some such equivalent).  I have no idea what that will entail.  Nor do I fully understand why the mother (who lives in a large city) couldn't find an English tutor who lives in the same state.  Not that I'm complaining: a job's a job.  Still, it seems bizarre.  I guess maybe we are moving toward the day when no one needs to leave their house to learn or do anything. We can go into our holodecks and be taught by people on Pluto (we've also colonized Pluto, in this new world) and be the better for it.  Right?

* * *

All the hubbub about David Mitchell's new book got me interested in reading his last book.  For anyone who has the time, Cloud Atlas is, as reported, extremely excellent.  Because it's a book where the less you know going in the better, I'll say about it only that it manages to be both narratively compelling and formally complex.   Also, that it's main character is a wookie stevedore named Bomb.  (Okay, the last part's a lie.  But if there is a book with such a character, I want to read it).

Another recommendation: Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer.  A book about NOT writing--a topic you might think would get tiresome.  In fact, it ends up being at the same time funny and profound, insightful and engaging.

* * *

"The Problem With Incentives"

When we first got the Bink, my wife and I decided to try and train him to go to the bathroom indoors.  My wife ordered a large quantity of poster-sized absorbent medical pads from a hospital supply company, and we set about teaching him to direct his excretions.  Our first strategy involved negative reinforcement.  Any time he went to the bathroom somewhere other than his medical pad (which we taped down, each day, on the tile floor of a bathroom in our old apartment) we told him he was bad.  "No.  No!" we would say, over and over, while he looked up at us with a hopeful, fully uncomprehending expression.

Of course, this method worked not at all.  We neither of us could muster up all that much anger at his mistakes; even if we had, it wouldn't have mattered.  Dogs apparently do not usually respond to negative reinforcement.  Beyond that, it was hard to explain to him what, in fact, we were trying to negatively reinforce.  Even on the few occasions that we caught the Bink directly in the act of messing up our rug, it didn't obtain.  We told him he was bad, he looked confused, and that was it.  The mistakes continued.

Finally, one of us hit on a solution.  Instead of negatively reinforcing bad behavior, we decided to positively reinforce the actions that we wanted.  This entailed following the Binks around for most of the day, and giving him a treat whenever he went to the bathroom on his pad.   This worked almost at once.  Within a week we went from about a 65% success rate to one in the high nineties.  Even when we left off monitoring him, Binks figured out a way to come and tell us when he'd gone to the bathroom and deserved a treat.  (He walks up to where we are, stares into our eyes, and wags his tail until we get up and inspect the pee pad.  It looks a little like this:

Everything was wonderful; we'd just moved into our new house, and the newly finished hard wood floors were staying pristine.   To compensate for the fact that we were now giving our eight pound dog four or five extra snacks a day, my wife reduced the size of his meals.  We also reduced the size of the treats.  At this point, the usual reward is a maybe a single Cheerio.

What's interesting, though (and part of why I recount the story) is that without intending it, we've taught  the Bink that he should go to the bathroom as often as possible.   Every time he pees, he gets a Cheerio-so why not do it as often as he can?  Instead of holding it in, and waiting till he has to he goes whenever he has the slightest urge.  He also knows that it's better to go when one of us is at home: if no one's here, who will give him a treat?  (We have a rough two-hour statute of limitations on the bathroom reward process.)  So insofar as it's possible, when we're not not home, he waits--saving all his...activity up till one of us gets back.  Then, it all comes out.

It's not that I see our 'pay for play' treat formula as a mistake: I'd rather have him pee a few more times a day and have it all be in the right place than have him going on our rugs.  It does, however, illustrate one problem with incentives.  Inevitably, you'll get some of the behavior that you're trying to encourage, but you won't get all of it.  You'll get the surface of what you want, but not the underlying form.  There's a valuable, valuable lesson here for people currently trying to craft a new economic stimulus.  I don't know exactly what it is.  But the Bink, I'm fairly certain, does.

"It's finished when it no longer belongs to you"

Brian Eno has always been an artistic hero of mine.  (I think he's the Ezra Pound of our generation).  This interview with him, which I just found on Pitchfork, is well worth reading, containing as it does so many insights like the one below:

I'm old enough to remember exactly what happened to ABBA. When ABBA were around, to admit that you liked them would have condemned you to absolute coventry. No one would talk to you because you liked ABBA, because they were considered to be hopelessly pointless pop. Now, of course, everyone likes ABBA. Everyone realizes that they made some great music, and you're allowed to like them now. Kitsch is a way that posh people admit to themselves that they like things that ordinary people like. In my opinion.

A Favorite Haiku

Even in Kyoto--
hearing the cuckoo's cry--
I long for Kyoto.


-Basho
(trans. Robert Hass)

Fiona Shaw Performs Part of The Waste Land

...better than I could have ever imagined it could be done.  This is the real mojo.

"Do Not Speak To Me When You See Me"

This is for all my peoples from Texas, and for anyone interested in the life of a Texas oil man in the wild and wooly 1970s....

A Little Nabokov

 Is Pnin Nabokov’s best book?   Passages like this one make me think it is:

How should we diagnose his sad case?  Pnin, it should be particularly stressed, was anything but the type of that good-natured German platitude of last century, der zerstreute Professor.  On the contrary, he was perhaps too wary, too persistently on the lookout for diabolical pitfalls, too painfully alert lest his erratic surroundings (unpredictable America) inveigle him into some bit of preposterous oversight.  It was the world that was absent-minded and it was Pnin whose business it was to set it straight.  His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence.  He was inept with his hands to a rare degree; but because he could manufacture in a twinkle a one-note mouth organ out of a pea pod, make a flat pebble skip ten times on a the surface of a pond, shadowgraph with his knuckles a rabbit (complete with blinking eye), and perform a number of other tame tricks that Russians have up their sleeves, he believed himself endowed with considerable manual and mechanical skill.  On gadgets he doted with a kind of dazed, superstitious delight.  Electric devices enchanted him.  Plastics swept him off his feet.  He had a deep admiration for the zipper….

Virtue Ethics and Taste

If you have any interest in ethics, morality, or philosophy, you should read this.  Excellent excellent stuff.

Journal 7.29.10

Thinking about the movie Tristram Shandy (A Cock And Bull Story) which I saw last night.  A darling of the humor cognoscenti, Steve Coogan, the movie’s star, has never done that much for me.  The Alan Partridge Show especially (the chief vehicle of his fame) I found obvious and mean.  But I in general dislike the new trend toward humor of embarrassment, the cringe-inducing Borat stuff.  (To me The Office, e.g, is at best 50% unwatchable.  I fast forward through all of Steve Carrell’s tedious mugging). 

Tristram Shandy, however, turned out to be excellent.  Realizing the book is both too large and various to readily submit to adaptation, the producers aimed instead for a translation.  The movie is a thing unto itself, but one related in aim and method to the book.  So, for example, thirty minutes in, the “movie” of the book (characters in eighteenth century garb acting out the story of the novel) essentially stops.  From then on, focus switches to the actors.  Their story dominates.  Coogan, the director, and the producers worry about how the film should end; they try to drum up money for a large-scale battle; debate the merits of doing a battle; consider having a love interest (eventually bringing in Gillian Anderson).  Coogan’s girlfriend shows up with their infant son and fatherhood—a big theme of the novel—is gone into.  Just as the book in many ways ends up a book about a book, so too the movie is movie about making movies.

It all sounds wearingly ‘post-modern,’ I know, but like the book, the movie’s disassembled, self-referential, endlessly digressive nature feels necessary--even exciting.  Both in their way try to tell a coherent story.  They aim towards meaning—they just can’t get there.  So, in the book, the world is too expansive, too chaotic, for Sterne to contain it within one story.  Thus the endless stops and restarts, the metastasizing plots—everything has to be fit in.  Every story needs another twenty to explain it.  But in all this excess, there’s joy, richness, a sense of overabundance, which keeps the reader more or less content.  (Not all readers.  Samuel Johnson famously hated it).  A ninety-minute can’t approach that same abundance, so humor becomes their approximation of joy.  And it is, generally, very funny (though in a dark dry British way).  Coogan, like Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, plays a caraicature of himself.   Vain, selfish and petty, he hovers on the edge of complete jerk-iness for most of the movie.  All sorts of excellent minor roles, as well—the aforementioned assistant, the simultaneously insecure and patronizing second lead (Uncle Toby), and, my favorite, a historical expert brought in to advise the crew on how to stage the battle of Namur, a shaggy gentle man whose rumpled sheepdog look belies a ferocious contempt for the tendency in modern film to get the details of their battles wrong.  (Cold Mountain comes in for some great savaging.)

  *  *  *

Slowing down on Vineland, another post-mod hallmark, though one whose digressions feel much less necessary.  Now deep into the backstory of a secondary character, which is both unfunny and tedious.  Interesting that in Vineland as in Lot 49 the central figure is a woman.  Not sure how well either’s ‘femaleness’ is rendered (having no way to compare) but my sense is: not very well.  Zoyd is by far the most interesting figure in Vineland.  What’s NOT that interesting is the super familiar badass female ninja woman, DL.  What is it with adolescent-ish men and ass-kicking women?  (Tarantino, Joss Wheeden, whoever writes all of Angelina Jolie’s crap-ass stuff….)  As soon as you start to build a story around the ability of someone to administer instant death via touch, you’re done.  Or so I feels….

 *  *  * 

To limit: my use of the word ‘interesting.’  One of the emptiest the language provides….

 *  *  *

Two TV shows that have become almost unwatchable: Entourage and So You Think You Can Dance.  The former has exhausted itself of stories; I think its time is up.  The latter has merely made terrible choices this season, both in its contestants and its format.  The cast now is filled with craftsmen but devoid of artists.  Everybody's young and bland, and their inabilities only register more sharply in proximity to the All-Stars.  Dispiriting stuff.