No Laughing Matter

Ghana won. That's OK, though; we've decided to move to Iceland, specifically Reykjavik, where the newly-elected mayor, Jon Gnarr, has promised free towels at public pools and a drug-free parliament by 2020.

Gnarr, you see, is a comedian. His election marks the culmination of the most successful protest campaign since Jesse Ventura won the Minnesota governorship. Gnarr, however, who representes Iceland's "Best Party," seems more refreshingly liberal--and certainly funnier--than "the Body." Selected highlights:

"No one has to be afraid of the Best Party because it is the best party. If it wasn't, it would be called the Worst Party or the Bad Party. We would never work with a party like that."

"With his party having won 6 of the City Council's 15 seats, Mr. Gnarr needed a coalition partner, but ruled out any party whose members had not seen all five seasons of 'The Wire.' . . . The Best Party. . . formed a coalition with the center-left Social Democrats (despite Mr. Gnarr's suspicion that party leaders had assigned an underling to watch 'The Wire' and take notes)."

“'Just because something is funny doesn’t mean it isn’t serious,' said Mr. Gnarr, whose foreign relations experience includes a radio show in which he regularly crank-called the White House, the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and police stations in the Bronx to see if they had found his lost wallet."

"Mr. Gnarr, born in Reykjavik as Jon Gunnar Kristinsson to a policeman and a kitchen worker, was not a model child. At 11, he decided school was useless to his future as a circus clown or pirate and refused to learn any more."

If nothing else, Gnarr's elevation provides hope for those of us who have long agitated for a Jon Stewart-Stephen Colbert ticket in 2012. Actually, make that 2016: Obama's got a pretty good sense of humor.

____________ or Not ______________

Every summer-and, in less-budgetarily fraught times, every fall and spring semester--the Solipsist teaches a class called "Writing Workshop: Grammar and Style." The other day, we discussed the desirability of avoiding the verb "to be" as much as possible: The verb certainly has its charms and has proven itself handy throughout the development of the English language. Problems arise, though, when one depends too much upon it. Boredom, for one. After all, when used as the main verb in a sentence, "to be" simply asserts that something exists, not that something happens. Even in an active sentence, the verb creates a feeling of passivity; not coincidentally, "to be" figures prominently in passive voice constructions, so, if one eschews its use, one necessarily avoids the pedantic passive as well.

The desire to avoid "to be" led to the development of "E-prime" (or "English prime") by the semanticist Alfred Korzybski, who sought to eliminate what he saw as the imprecision inherent in the common verb. Certainly, when one forces oneself to construct sentences without this familiar crutch, one finds it necessary to think carefully about words. One strives to identify the precise word to articulate the precise idea. One must resist thoughtless simplification.

We find ourselves unwilling to state unequivocally that the verb "to be" has no place in the world of letters. Think about the state of literature without it:

"Parisians thought it the best of times and the worst of times."

"Everyone acknowledges that a single man in possession of a good fortune must want a wife."

"'To live or not to live': A vexing question."

Still, any technique that forces students--or writers in general--to focus carefully on the words they use has a certain appeal. Want to challenge yourself? Try not "to be."

Morbidity (A Brief Post)

As is well-known to anyone who patronizes Yahoo! (and, really, who doesn't?), the homepage features an ever-shifting top-ten list of topics that are "Trending Now." As of this writing, the list comprises Salma Hayek, Jennifer Aniston, Adolf Hitler (ever see those three names in a sentence before?), Summer Recipes, Kellie Pickler, Transformers 3, Gregg Allman, Algae Bloom, Stock Prices, and Kim Kardashian.

Now, the only item on that list we felt compelled to click was Gregg Allman. Not because we're a fan. It's just that, whenever we see celebrities of a certain age--say 60+--on the list, we fear they've suffered a handshake with mortality. Turns out Allman has had a successful liver transplant (we wish him well). We think Yahoo! should really do something with the list to signal when someone is on the list for having recently experienced death. Gregg Allman was not such a big deal for us, but you can't imagine our relief when with quivering finger we clicked on Leonard Nimoy's name the other day. Turns out he was merely being honored by the Canadian town of Vulcan. Whew!!

Win, Lose, or Draw. Or, Better Yet, WIN!

At Wimbledon, the match between John Isner of the US and Nicolas Mahut of France, has been suspended in the fifth set due to darkness. That's not what makes this interesting. What makes it interesting is that the first four sets were actually played yesterday: The players spent ten hours playing today and still have not finished the fifth set. As we write, the set is tied at 59 games apiece. The match has already shattered every conceivable record for longevity, and there's no telling how much longer it will continue once play resumes tomorrow.

This is one of the great things about tennis: Somebody actually has to step up and win before the game can end. It highlights what we think is one of the major flaws with today's other headline-grabbing sport, soccer. It's incomprehensible that a major sporting event like a World Cup soccer match can end in a tie. What's even more outrageous, though, is the method that the soccer gods have established for settling contests where a draw is unacceptable (e.g., in elimination rounds at major tournaments): penalty kicks.

How can any sport's governing body allow a decisive victory to be earned through methods other than just playing the game? (For the record, we have a similar objection to hockey "shootouts.") The argument, as far as we can tell, is that, since it is so difficult to score in soccer, it could take an outrageous amount of time for a game to be settled through standard game play. To which we say, "Who cares?" The fans who have paid good money to watch the game or who are following passionately from afar will presumably enjoy every extra minute. And if the players get tired, at least they're getting equally tired.

Deciding a World Cup match with a penalty-kick shootout is like deciding an NBA Finals game with free throws. Some may argue that many NBA games--close games--are effectively decided at the foul line, but that's different. When basketball players shoot free throws, they are receiving a sort of compensation for being victims of infractions by the other team. The whole notion of a penalty-kick shootout seems semantically flawed, if nothing else. What are teams being penalized for? Effective defense?

Baseball and basketball cannot end in ties. Football can, but it's extremely rare, and in the playoffs, no ties are allowed: The game continues until one team scores--legitimately. Isner and Mahut will keep slugging it out until one of them wins by two games (or until one of them drops dead of old age). The soccer gods should take notice.

(Addendum: Congratulations to the USA soccer team for its thrilling victory and World Cup advancement. If Americans are getting good at it, maybe soccer is a real sport after all.)

Give 'Til It Hurts, But Not to the Hurters

Ever since the IRS disallowed our tax deduction for sending an Amazon.com gift certificate to Hamas, we've understood that we are forbidden from providing material support to terrorist organizations. In a ruling today, though, the Supreme Court confirmed that even less tangible forms of support may not be offered to such organizations. The Court stated that the congressional ban on "material support" extends to such things as training or educational services--even training in such innocuous or even desirable areas as human rights or peaceful conflict resolution.

The plaintiffs argued that these services fell under the free speech protections of the first amendment. The defendants--in this case, the US government--argued that this was a case where freedom of speech takes a backseat to national security. We're not sure we see it that way: Freedom of speech may be curtailed in the name of security. The famous proscription against yelling fire in a crowded theater comes to mind. The plaintiffs, though, didn't want to yell fire in a crowded theater; they wanted to yell, "peaceful conflict resolution" in a crowded theater--a theater filled wiith car-bombers, no less. We fail to see how this would have posed a danger to anyone--except perhaps for the speakers, themselves.

At the same time, though, we can understand the Court's decision from a different angle--that of neutrality. In other words, we can understand the logic behind barring "material support" in the form of money: Even if the money is earmarked for charitable purposes (e.g., Hamas's provision of food or educational services to certain impoverished), the provision of these funds frees up money for Hamas to build bombs and buy arms.

(Digression: Just for the sake of clarity, we want to emphasize that we are using Hamas as an example of a familiar terrorist organization. We do not want to give the impression that we are sympathetic to Hamas at all. We're not. EOD)

Similarly, we understand a ban on certain "speech acts": a lecture on bomb-building, say, or the best ways to undermine the rule of law in democratic societies. One could argue that such speech--like cash contributions--is fungible: Such training could allow a terrorist organization to better employ its resources. The objection, of course, is that it is unlikely that Hamas has much of a budget earmarked for peaceful conflict resolution, so any information provided in this arena is unlikely to "free up" funds that would not otherwise have been used for destructive purposes. Fair enough, but as uncomfortable as we are with restrictions on free speech, we are even more uncomfortable with what arbitrary decisions on the speech to be restricted: Better simply to bar essentially all services to terrorist organizations, rather than picking and choosing the type of services that may be provided.

Of course, this means we must cancel our special al-Qaeda writing workshop, but we'll survive.

Shakespeare-esque Insult of the Day (A Brief Post)

WOS: "Thy speech is sleep fodder!"

Well Begun and All Done: The Castle in the Forest

The book: The Castle in the Forest by Norman Mailer.


Opening line: You may call me D. T.

Closing line: There may be no answer to this, but good questions still vibrate with honor within.

We suppose the Moby-Dick-esque opening informs the reader that we are in the hands of a first-person, perhaps unreliable, narrator. We are told that it is short for "Dieter," a former SS man who served directly under Himmler. Perhaps it also stands for "Der Teufel," as we discover not too far into this novel that our narrator is, in fact, a demon--and not just any demon, but the demon chiefly responsible for overseeing the development of young Adolf Hitler. The closing line seems nothing so much as an admission that, after slogging through some 450 pages, we are ultimately no closer to understanding what made a creepy, intellectually lacking little boy into the 20th-century embodiment of evil.

What's most disappointing about this novel is how it makes us feel nothing but contempt for its principal figure. Now, you may say, "Well, of course you feel contempt: It's HITLER!" But that's the point. We don't need to read a novel to find Hitler creepy and distasteful. If an author of Norman Mailer's stature is going to tackle the character of Der Fuhrer, we would expect it to offer some new (if imagined) insights into what makes him tick. The Castle in the Forest presents Adolf as a frankly charmless little boy, picked on by his older brother and put down by his father--but this reader, at least, feels no sympathy, perhaps because we constantly have in our minds what this boy will turn out to be--and we are shown nothing in his upbringing that could even begin to justify his later depravities. Maybe nothing COULD explain the depravities, but then, again, why write the book? At the risk of sounding prudish, we also found Mailer's preoccupations with excretory functions and incest (the latter being a major theme in the Hitler family tree) ultimately tedious.

The novel itself takes us only up to young Adolf''s teenage years, and we can only assume that Mailer had intended for this to be the first part of a multi-volume work. At least we hope that's what he intended because, if not, this is a fairly pointless book, a sad final act for a major American author.