The 14-minute long Beatles recording, "Carnival of Light," will finally be released, after 41 years.

How bad can it be?

... distorted guitars and drum-beats, gargling, church organs, and Sir Paul and John Lennon yelling: "Are you all right?" and "Barcelona!"...

"I said to the guys, this is a bit indulgent, but would you mind giving me 10 minutes? All I want you to do is just wander round all the stuff and bang it, shout, play it. Then we put a bit of echo on it. It's very free."...

The producer who oversaw the recording, Sir George Martin, described the track as "a kind of uncomposed free-for-all melange of sound".

Tags.

You may have noticed that I've started making more specific tags -- the various labels at the end of each post. There are so many posts on this blog that huge numbers build up in the broad tag categories. The "Obama" tag has 896 posts.

So I've decided to get more specific -- with that "boring Obama speech" tag I created today and "Obama songs," things like that. There is a danger I'll make a new tag and then forget to use it again, like "shut up and believe." I sort of remember to use "written strangely early in the morning," but probably not as often as I write something strangely early in the morning.

When I first started doing tags, I tried to keep it general, with things like "animals." Now, when I have a post about an animal, I make a tag for the specific animal. Then, I do a search for all the old posts with that animal, and I'm always amused when some particular animal has been the subject of a lot of old posts. Of course, there are many old posts for "dog" and "squirrel," but I was delighted to find out, after I did a new "alligator" post, that I had 10 posts that could take the "alligator" tag. I had no idea I'd been writing about dolphins.

And today, when I created the "lobster" tag, I saw that I had 16 posts that deserved it. I clicked on the tag to see a page of miscellaneous old posts. I'd forgotten the time we murdered a lobster for dinner. (Recipe for Chilled Pea Soup with Lobster, Crème Fraiche and Wilted Watercress reachable through that link.) "We were just squealing and shooting photographs a la Annie Hall." I wrote that back in 2005, so it not only pre-dated tags, it pre-dated YouTube. It makes me want to do this now:



I love all the many ways the blog lets me reach into the past 5 years.

"I had one [of my teeth] chipped out with a chisel. My teeth are just so big and white -- a homeless person would never have them."

"I wanted to break up my big, shining piano keys to five them a little character. Some might think I f**ked up my grill for nothing, but I just wanted to come up with some s**t to make the part unique."

That's Jamie Foxx. Crazy? But if it is crazy, then it's one more way he's getting into character for the role -- the schizophrenic musician Nathaniel Ayers.

***

Interesting use of the word "five." Presumably, not a typo. From Urban Dictionary: "To give, hand or pass something from one person to another (because your hand, which you use to pass the thing, has five fingers). Man, this food has no flavor. Could you five me the salt?"

"Intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way -- hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual..."

I want to talk about this passage from a footnote in the David Foster Wallace essay "Consider the Lobster" (at page 240 in the paperback essay collection):

My personal experience has not been that traveling around the country is broadening or relaxing, or that radical changes in place or context have a salutary effect, but rather that intranational tourism is radically constricting, and humbling in the hardest way -- hostile to my fantasy of being a true individual, of living somehow outside and above it all... To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant, but essentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

My questions:

1. Is Wallace saying anything about travel in general, or just intranational travel, or just travel that deserves the label "tourism," or just tourism that is also "mass"? If he's not saying something about travel in general, what is it about this subset of travel that deserves this special loathing?

2. What do these feelings have to do with being an American, and what is "pure" and "late-date" about it? Haven't there been "alien, ignorant, greedy" travelers all over the place and throughout the ages?

3. As we know, Wallace was deeply depressed and ultimately committed suicide, and is that the main thing that passage means?

4. On page 237, Wallace tells us that "lobsters are basically giant sea insects" -- lobsters and insects are all arthropods -- and that they are "garbagemen of the sea, eaters of dead stuff," so if we become "an insect on a dead thing," we're like the lobster, right? And therefore we shouldn't eat lobster, presumably. Or should we? We are after all hateful, in that view, so why spare the lobster?

"You can assess the true position of women in society by looking at its toilet queues."

Wednesday is World Toilet Day.

The Supreme Court has taken 2 cases challenging the constraints of election law.

Adam Liptak reports:

... Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, No. 08-205, arises from “Hillary: The Movie,” a film by a conservative advocacy group released early this year, when Mrs. Clinton was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. The question for the court is whether the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law of 2002 applies to the broadcast of a feature-length film and to television advertisements for it.

In January, a three-judge panel of the Federal District Court here said the film was an “electioneering communication” with only one point: “to inform the electorate that Senator Clinton is unfit for office, that the United States would be a dangerous place in a President Hillary Clinton world and that viewers should vote against her.”

The panel added that advertisements for the film must include spoken and written disclosures, among them that “Citizens United is responsible for the content of this advertising.”

Citizens United said those requirements were unconstitutionally burdensome. The spoken disclosure, the group told the Supreme Court, “takes about four seconds to narrate, making 10-second ads virtually impossible and 30-second ads difficult to do.”

The McCain-Feingold law prohibits the use of corporate treasury money, including that of nonprofit issue advocacy groups, to pay for much electioneering communication in a window of 60 days before a general election or 30 days before a primary election. James Bopp Jr., a lawyer for Citizens United, said in a statement issued Friday that “the notion that a feature-length movie can be banned is a return to the days of government censorship and book-burnings.”

Before you leap to a conclusion about what the answer ought to be, watch this trailer for the movie:



Doesn't that work as an anti-Hillary ad more than as an ad for the movie? A movie could be made just as a device to immunize ads from the usual requirements.

Using the iPhone as an eBook with the app Stanza.

I'm a sucker for eBooks. I bought a Rocket Book years ago and, in the last year, a Kindle. (Here's a vlog I did comparing the 2 quasi-rectangular objects). And I haven't much liked either of them. I complained about the Kindle here, and I haven't touched it in months. I have to remember not to throw away hundreds of dollars on eBooks!

But now, here's an app -- Stanza -- that makes the iPhone work as an eBook. It's free, so if I don't like it and don't use it, I won't have to feel like a chump. Anyway, it works nicely. I've set my font size. The print is, of course, bright and clear. And you don't turn pages, you "cover flow" to the next page with a finger swipe.

The on-line libraries are fun to browse. For example, I can see a list of the most commonly assigned high school books. The top 5:

1. "Pride and Prejudice," by Jane Austen
2. "Jane Eyre," by Charlotte Bronte
3. "Wuthering Heights," by Emily Bronte
4. "Death Comes to the Archbishop," by Willa Cather
5. "The Awakening," by Kate Chopin

Notice anything? Has high school become Women's Studies? Well, to be fair, the next 20+ are by men: "Heart of Darkness," "The Divine Comedy," "Don Quixote," "A Tale of Two Cities," "Crime and Punishment," etc.

It's also interesting to see what books are most popular among those who download free digital books. From the Freebooks list, #1 is "The Art of War." Hmmm. The top 6 are by men, and #7 is good old "Pride and Prejudice." (When did that get to be the greatest novel ever written?) But generally, this list is pretty masculine, and I'm glad to see it's not all novels. Charles Darwin ranks high. So do Freud and Nietzsche. From the Project Gutenberg list, Albert Einstein is #1, followed by Confucius, "The Art of War" again, and Plato's "Republic." The Gutenberg crowd is really ambitious. What's the top novel for these folks? "Siddhartha"!

Anyway, highly recommended, if only for the fun of browsing lists of what other people read. But I've downloaded a few things to read in full.

The Office of the President-Elect speaks!

Listen up!



I'm afraid he's going to be boring! Did he say anything other than what we already know? There's a big economic problem. Mmm hmm. A fair amount of my attention focused on the almost-readable writing on that thing in the lower right-hand corner. Is that the pot that plant is in -- maybe it says "Arthur" -- or a separate plaque sort of a thing? Anyway, he said something about how the country can "rise again" and how we all need to sacrifice because we all "rise or fall" as "one people." All this rising and oneness...

ADDED: Given the Mad Magazine reference above -- at "Arthur" -- I feel compelled to add:



AND: Tigerhawk asks: "Did I hear the word 'malaise'?"

No... but he did go on at length about the extent to which everything sucks, and that we are going to need a massive new government-run energy program, and that it will involve a lot of "sacrifice." Sorry to say, I have not heard a politician sound so much like Jimmy Carter since, well, 1980.

The role of religion in passing California's gay marriage ban.

Here's a NYT article by Jesse McKinley and Kirk Johnson:

Less than two weeks before Election Day, the chief strategist behind a ballot measure outlawing same-sex marriage in California called an emergency meeting here.

“We’re going to lose this campaign if we don’t get more money,” the strategist, Frank Schubert, recalled telling leaders of Protect Marriage, the main group behind the ban.

The campaign issued an urgent appeal, and in a matter of days, it raised more than $5 million, including a $1 million donation from Alan C. Ashton, the grandson of a former president of the Mormon Church. The money allowed the drive to intensify a sharp-elbowed advertising campaign, and support for the measure was catapulted ahead; it ultimately won with 52 percent of the vote....

First approached by the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Francisco a few weeks after the California Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in May, the Mormons were the last major religious group to join the campaign, and the final spice in an unusual stew that included Catholics, evangelical Christians, conservative black and Latino pastors, and myriad smaller ethnic groups with strong religious ties.

Much further down in the article, we see that this call for funds came after Prop 8 opponents were raking in huge sums, including "$3.9 million at a star-studded fund-raiser held at the Beverly Hills home of Ron Burkle." The "Yes" side needed to keep up with that and had to worry about a barrage of advertisements featuring appealing celebrities, such as the lovely Ellen Degeneres ad that "No on 8" released on October 17.

It bothers me that these 2 parts of the article are so widely separated, because it makes the "Yes" side look like it was playing a fearsome offensive game, when it was on the defense.

***

The article also says that "[b]y mid-October, most independent polls showed support for the proposition was growing, but it was still trailing." Is that right? According to Pollster, Prop 8 was leading by double digits through September, but that support was slipping, so that by mid-October, it was only up by +8. If Pollster is right, "Yes" needed to fight to regain the ground that had been lost to "No." And despite this effort, "Yes" continued to slip, down to +5 in late October, and from there to the election result, a mere +4.

So what did this infusion of support from Mormons really do? It didn't turn everything around, did it? It seems as though it only worked to allow "Yes" to hold on to enough of its earlier support to win.

***

The article also has some interesting discussion of the door-to-door effort: "Mormons made up 80 percent to 90 percent of the early volunteers." The percentage sound high, but I'm curious about what "early" refers to. One could exaggerate by choosing the relevant point in time to count the percentage.

The canvass work could be exacting and highly detailed. Many Mormon wards in California, not unlike Roman Catholic parishes, were assigned two ZIP codes to cover. Volunteers in one ward, according to training documents written by a Protect Marriage volunteer, obtained by people opposed to Proposition 8 and shown to The New York Times, had tasks ranging from “walkers,” assigned to knock on doors; to “sellers,” who would work with undecided voters later on; and to “closers,” who would get people to the polls on Election Day.

Suggested talking points were equally precise. If initial contact indicated a prospective voter believed God created marriage, the church volunteers were instructed to emphasize that Proposition 8 would restore the definition of marriage God intended.

But if a voter indicated human beings created marriage, Script B would roll instead, emphasizing that Proposition 8 was about marriage, not about attacking gay people, and about restoring into law an earlier ban struck down by the State Supreme Court in May.

“It is not our goal in this campaign to attack the homosexual lifestyle or to convince gays and lesbians that their behavior is wrong — the less we refer to homosexuality, the better,” one of the ward training documents said. “We are pro-marriage, not anti-gay.”

I've never read this detailed a discussion of how canvassers try to persuade voters. Personally, I do not even answer my door during the election season, and back when I did, I would never get into a conversation with someone about how I would vote. I'd just try to get rid of them. But I suppose plenty of people actually stand there and discuss the issues, and I'm not surprised to hear that canvassers have alternate scripts depending on how the prospective voter answers an introductory question. It's not devious or worrisome -- in general -- to have a Script A and a Script B, is it?

Are we troubled then, to hear that the "Yes" canvassers had alternate scripts that depended on whether the prospective voter was open to arguments that the right answer was God's answer?

***

The NYT article is headlined "Mormons Tipped Scale in Ban on Gay Marriage." That's a hefty assertion, and it comes after attacks that have targeted Mormons.

[Michael R. Otterson, the managing director of public affairs for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints] said it was too early to tell what the long-term implications might be for the church, but in any case, he added, none of that factored into the decision by church leaders to order a march into battle. “They felt there was only one way we could stand on such a fundamental moral issue, and they took that stand,” he said. “It was a matter of standing up for what the church believes is right.”

Was that phrase "order a march into battle" really justified? Should journalists use the metaphor of religion as war and imply that religious people have set aside their powers of reason and judgment and simply take orders from leaders? Otterson spoke of religious people having moral values and taking political positions based on those values. Surely, that is acceptable. Of course, Otterson has plenty of motivation to downplay the vision of churches wielding the power to impose religious dogma upon the general populace.

Mr. Ashton described the protests by same-sex marriage advocates as off-putting. “I think that shows colors,” Mr. Ashton said. “By their fruit, ye shall know them.”

That's the last line of the article, and I can't tell if the NYT wanted us to laugh at Ashton. "By their fruit, ye shall know them" is a Biblical verse -- Matthew 7:16 -- but quick Google shows that there are gay rights t-shirts using the phrase, exploiting the double meaning of "fruit." Did the Times mean for us to view Ashton as a clueless scripture-spewer?

Inside the courtroom.

In the previous post, I told you I was going to take my fisheye lens to the Wisconsin Supreme Court today.



You can read descriptions of what is in the courtroom murals here. My favorite one -- in the center of that picture (enlarge) -- shows:

...the trial of Chief Oshkosh of the Menominees for the slaying of a member of another tribe who had killed a Menominee in a hunting accident. It was shown that under Menominee custom, relatives of a slain member could kill his slayer. Judge James Duane Doty held that in this case territorial law did not apply:

. . . it appears to me that it would be tyrannical and unjust to declare him, by implication, a malicious offender against rules which the same laws presume he could not have previously known...

Judge Doty acquitted Chief Oshkosh of the charge. They became friends.

This is the same legal issue depicted in the 1965 movie "Dingaka," which had a profound effect on me when I saw it as a teenager.

Here's another picture, of the courtroom, from behind the bench:

Moot Court Day: a vlog.

Here's the U.S. Supreme Court case I talk about: Ableman v. Booth.

UPDATE: In the vlog, I say, "I think it's from all over the country," but I think wrong. It's the intra-law-school contest. Photos of the courtroom soon. The problem involved the 5th and 6th amendment rights to counsel and had some complicated material about dual sovereignty. The criminal procedural part of constitutional law isn't something I teach -- except to the extent that it intersects with Federal Jurisdiction -- so it was tricky getting up to speed on the doctrine. I needed to read Texas v. Cobb, a case about a terrible double murder:

After a short time, respondent confessed to murdering both Margaret and Kori Rae. Respondent explained that when Margaret confronted him as he was attempting to remove the Owings’ stereo, he stabbed her in the stomach with a knife he was carrying. Respondent told police that he dragged her body to a wooded area a few hundred yards from the house. Respondent then stated:

“I went back to her house and I saw the baby laying on its bed. I took the baby out there and it was sleeping the whole time. I laid the baby down on the ground four or five feet away from its mother. I went back to my house and got a flat edge shovel. That’s all I could find. Then I went back over to where they were and I started digging a hole between them. After I got the hole dug, the baby was awake. It started going toward its mom and it fell in the hole. I put the lady in the hole and I covered them up. I remember stabbing a different knife I had in the ground where they were. I was crying right then.”

ADDED: I see that an episode of "Law and Order" was based on the Cobb case, with Ludacris playing the role of the murderer:

"Look, I'm guilty of murder here, so I'm not going to make any excuses," Ludacris starts. "I stabbed her with my knife, and then I killed her baby. ... I dug a hole and buried them, and there's where they've been for the last three years. Should I write it down now?"

His confession is so cold, so matter-of-fact, you might get chills...

Ah, but see? They toned down the facts. What really happened was too terrible to use in a fictionalized story. It's too maudlin.

If you want to know if Cobb was executed, the answer is no:

Following an order from the U.S. Supreme Court, Gov. Rick Perry [on June 22, 2005] issued 28 commutations that will require death row inmates who were 17 at the time they committed their crimes to serve life in prison...

"While these individuals were convicted by juries of brutal murders and sentenced to die for their heinous crimes, I have no choice but to commute these sentences to life in prison as a result of the Supreme Court ruling," Perry said.

The inmates with commuted sentences are: ... Raymond Levi Cobb...

At the Sun Glass Café....

... where we love shadows and light, transparency and obscurity, you can talk about what you want.

"His maleness resounds from every monomaniacal sentence," said Germaine Greer about Malcolm Gladwell (Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, etc.).

"There is no answer to everything, and only a deluded male would spend his life trying to find it." Oh, so she's dissing men when she asks why women don't write large!

Women, she said, are too sensible to try to write such broad-sweep theses. "They are more interested in understanding than explaining, in describing rather than accounting for."

In praise of detail work. Which Greer is not doing.

"The perfect smackdown": "Is Barack Obama white?"

IN THE COMMENTS: Bissage said:

I remember vividly the time I was carrying my books, walking to summer school, when some bullies threatened to beat me up.

I countered with the perfect smackdown: "Oh yeah? Is Gerald Ford a cocksucking little faggot?"

I spent that summer in a wheelchair.

"It was the olfactory equivalent of a Coen Brothers' film."

"It was a flop, perhaps (but not necessarily) because it was essentially unwearable, with hints of burning rubber, smoking tar, the pitch in fresh asphalt and charred guiac wood."

Chandler Burr writes perfume reviews. I admire that capacity. To perceive odors and to put it in writing. Impressive! The quote above is about M7. Here's what Burr says about Déclaration:

I smelled it again recently and was shocked by the degree to which it is, in fact, a hard-core French masculine. It’s a tiny bit X-rated (the sensual, unwashed-armpit thing; this is simply a serious dose of cumin, which smells like sweat) and elegant in the way that Frenchmen can be elegant: rather strong come-on, slightly overpowering, narcissistic, but alluring if you’re into that sort of thing.

Suddenly, I am!

"Good Morning America" pals around with Bill Ayers.

I'm "live-blogging" my view of the video.

-6:19: ABC has glossy graphics swirling Ayers's book "Fugitive Days" at us. The book is being "re-released." Oh! So this is a book tour.

-5:58: The interviewer, Chris Cuomo, insists "you did have a meaningful relationship with Barack Obama, didn't you?" Ayers does nothing but evade. He knew him like thousands of others, and "like millions of others worldwide, I wish I knew him better." That answer is pure bullshit.

-5:16: Cuomo attempts to follow up: "You used the term 'family friend'..." Cuomo is obviously working from notes, trying to act the part of a reporter capable of asking follow-up questions, and Ayers has to tell us where the phrase "family friend" came from, because it's not something Ayers just said, it's something he wrote in an afterword to his book. Ayers then launches into his prepped statement about how he didn't want to talk during the campaign, when people were using a "dishonest narrative," but he knew Obama on a "professional" level, like "thousands of other people." "Thousands of other people" is Ayers's favorite phrase.

-4:12. Yeah, he and Obama were on a board together, Ayers concedes quickly when pressed, then moves to the purely abstract level: This notion of "guilt by association" is wrong. And you know what the "interesting" thing is? Voters didn't buy the argument of guilt by association. Ugh! I don't care about your political analysis! Tell us the facts that you know. As for the shortcomings of guilt by association, we can do our own analysis. What you have that we don't is the information about the substance of the relationship, and you're being as slippery as possible. You think we don't notice, don't you? Ayers is relying on our dullness.

-3:11: Cuomo says that people do want to know about a candidate's relationships. This sets Ayers off justifying his actions during the Vietnam War era: Part of the "dishonest narrative" was to "demonize" him. "Let's remember, what you call a 'violent past' -- that was at a time when thousands of people were being murdered by our government ever month." Ha! I told you "thousands of people" is his favorite phrase. "And those of us who fought to end that war were actually on the right side. So if we want to replay that history, I would reject the whole notion that demonizing me or the Weather Underground is relevant."

-2:34: Cuomo cuts off Ayers -- who was about to plunge into a second point -- to try to deal with the question whether Ayers's violent past is relevant to what we think of Obama. Cuomo has a hypothetical: If McCain had launched his political career in the home of some anti-abortion activist who'd blown up clinics -- "but never hurt anyone" -- don't you think we'd find that relevant? Ayers's argument is that during the Vietnam War, the despicable acts were being carried out by our government. So then, the anti-abortion terrorism would be fine too if only we believe the abortion is murder? We can see that Ayers is simply unrepentant, and the hypothetical falls by the wayside.

-1:53: Ayers says he never hurt anyone (as if co-conspirators are not responsible for each other's acts) and repeats his oft-quoted self-justification: "I don't think we did enough." He adds: "Just as today, I don't think we've done enough to stop these wars. And I think we must all recognize the injustice of it and do more." So if Obama associates with Ayers now, he is associating with someone who thinks the United States has conducted and continues to conduct despicable unjust wars that must be stopped. If Obama had presented himself as having this kind of militant, anti-war attitude -- this fundamental belief that the American government is doing evil in this world -- he would never have been trusted to become Commander in Chief.

-1:19: Pressed again on the relationship, Ayers lectures us again at the abstract level: "guilt by association... has a long and tragic history in America." See how he makes that rhetorical move every time? He's asked about something specific about himself, and he switches the subject to something much larger -- and more abstract. He also loves to remind us about America's failings. Don't look there. Look here.

-1:05: Now, he's driveling on about how Obama is willing to listen to "a lot of people, from a lot of walks of life." Oh, I would guess Obama is willing to talk to thousands of people.

-0:44: Cuomo sees an opening. Oh, so then Obama sought you out. He wanted to hear from you. That means something. Ayers denies that Obama sought him out. "The truth is we came together in the civic community, around issues of school improvement, around issues of fighting for the rights of poor neighborhoods to have jobs and housing and so on. And that's the full extent of our relationship." That is Ayers's best point, really, and it's odd that he didn't say that in the beginning. If Ayers really cared primarily about helping Obama, he would have made this his central talking point.

-0:20: Ayers follows up that best point with a mini-rant, which ends the segment: "This idea that we need to know more -- like there's some dark, hidden secret link -- is just a myth, and it's a myth thrown up by people who wanted to kind of exploit the politics of fear, and I think it's a great credit to the American people that those politics were rejected. The idea that we should continue to be frightened and worried, you know, barricaded -- is falling down, and it should."

The idea that we need to know more is a myth? He's telling us we shouldn't need to know more, that we're paranoid or fear-mongers if we demand more information. Ridiculous! If we think there is more information, we get to ask. If there truth is there's nothing more to the story, fine. But to condemn us for wanting to know more is absurd.

We didn't find out enough about the man we elected President. We were made to feel that it was wrong to ask. I don't need to hear an avowed terrorist bitching about other people supposedly "exploit[ing] the politics of fear." A terrorist deals in fear, and I assume he'd like to control what inspires our fears. Fear the American government, he says, but don't fear Barack Obama.

Don't look there! Look here! I'll decide for myself what ought to be feared.

IN THE COMMENTS: Joan said:

How disappointing the Cuomo did not talk to Ayers at all about his agenda for school reform, and whether Obama agrees with those ideas. We can all agree that Obama does not support terrorists and repudiates what Ayers did with the WU. What is of most concern to me is what Obama thinks of Ayers' present work, which is just horrific for all that it is nonviolent.

AND: There is a second part to the interview. Here. It looks like the "book tour" part of the interview that Cuomo alludes to in Part 1. Feel free to watch it. Maybe I will later, but for now, life goes on without William Ayers.