Halfway down the Danube

Some Douglas Oliver

I have been on a poetry kick lately. One great thing about poetry is, it's portable! Here's the conclusion of Douglas Oliver's "The Jains and the Boxer".

The boxer's sounds interrupt plosively,
while the Jaina vibrate, so repetitive in consonant
that all is almost vowel, a continuous voicing.
We wish for that passivity, the single vowel of wonder,
unchanging reverence for the sacred. But we fall
into Frenchified voodoo sacrifice: the clean blow,
sudden slice at a cockerel neck. It's disgusting
to gain erotic victory at such a price.
The Jains know the flow of time free of harm.
The boxer knows its beat: destruction and renewal.
Poetic music flows, undulates, hits beats.

An on-going New York moment

There's a truck filled with explosives parked near the base of Trump Tower in New York City! But it's OK; it's clearly marked and there's a police presence around it. They're doing excavation blasting a block over.

It's still a little unnerving. The truck itself seems to be an armored car, not very different from the ones used to pick up bank deposits, except that it's painted fire-engine red and is plastered with warnings. Would the armor help, in the event? I dunno.

I don't think it's filled to the brim with explosives either. That would make a nice big hole.

I guess my main worry is Stupid Taxi Tricks. Taxis make the impossible happen on a regular basis.

Some Lorine Niedecker

The great Wisconsin poet. We're not usually thought of as a poetic people. Well, we aren't. But the impulse is still there. From the New Goose:

On Columbus Day he set out for the north
to inspect his forty acres,
brought back a plaster of Paris deer-head
and food from the grocers and bakers,

a wall-thermometer to tell if he's cold,
a new kind of paring knife,
and painted in red, a bluebottle gentian
for the queen, his wife.

And another from the same collection:

For sun and moon and radio
farmers pay dearly;
their natural resource: turn
the world off early.

And one from her later Homemade/Handmade Poems:

Consider at the outset:
to be thin for thought
or thick cream blossomy

Many things are better
flavored with bacon

Sweet Life, My love:
didn't you ever try
this delicacy -- the marrow
in the bone?

And don't be afraid
to pour wine over cabbage

It nicely encapsulates the Wisconsin philosophy of life. (Especially the fourth and fifth lines.)

Dante's Singularity

From the Paradiso, Canto I, verses 64 to 72:

Beatrice tutta ne l'etterne rote
fissa con li occhi stava; e io en lei
le luci fissi, di là sù rimote.

Ne suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei,
qual si fé Glauco nel gustar de l'erba
che 'l fé consorto in mar de li altri dèi.

Transumanar significar per verba
non si poria; però l'essemplo basti
a cui esperïenza grazia serba.

And Charles Singleton's prose translation:

Beatrice was standing with her eyes all fixed upon the eternal wheels, and I fixed mine upon her, withdrawn from there above. Gazing upon her I became within me such as Glaucus became on tasting of the grass that made him sea-fellow of the other gods. The passing beyond humanity may not be set forth in words: therefore let the example suffice any for whom grace reserves that experience.

I believe this is the first use of the word "transhuman", in any variation, recorded.

Recently, the term "transhuman" has been picked up by some of the more outré futurists. The science journalist Ed Regis has a hilarious account of their early escapades called Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition. Worth picking up, if you can find a copy. They've become both weirder and more mainstream since the dot.com boom. Right now, the current plan is salvation through better office equipment. Picture your personality running on a computer... forever! It's an interesting interpretation of "grace".

The metaphor to Glaucus comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, like many bits of mythology in Dante. (What a rich sourcebook the Metamorphoses has been for civilization! Alas that it has no gelatinous cubes.) In our modern times, one might suspect the erba or "grass" that Glaucus ate to be a little more potent than what might be plucked from a lawn.

But I don't know; that vision of biochemical grace is so 1970s. The current paradigm is all about computing power, instead of that hippie trippy opening the doors of perception stuff. Now it's all about, how many computations per second will it take to emulate a human brain?

I wonder how the concept of the transhuman will change once people achieve that goal. My guess is... it will be rather boring, except to specialists, like the development of the artificial heart; and the transhuman enthusiasts will hare off after another thinly sublimated religious impulse. Lee Smolin's subcreational universes, perhaps.

A reader's guide to Halfway down the Danube

There seems to be a little confusion about who is who on Halfway down the Danube. I've compiled this little guide to clear things up.

This is my friend Doug. A self-made man, he's quite a guy.

This is Claudia. She's gorgeous. She's one lady who knows how to take care of herself.

By the way, my name is Carlos. I take care of both of them. Which ain't easy, 'cause when they met, it was murder!

I hope that clears things up. All of us are a little busy at the moment, but we hope to post more soon.

Two bumper stickers

... seen on parked cars between Prospect Park and Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

The first: I would fight for hippie chicks

The second: GOTT MIT UNS

Enough said.

Friday non-cat blogging

Since I have no cats (and this condition seems likely to be permanent) I thought I'd mention some of the things I've been researching lately:

The political economy of the American empire in the Philippines, 1898 to 1913. If you think the current situation in Iraq makes no sense, you have to read about the Philippines to understand what "no sense" really means. (Actually, the last part of that sentence is pretty much invariant no matter what you're thinking of.) Picture an occupation composed of one part Richard Perle, one part the Peace Corps, and one part your favorite spaghetti Western. That's about right.

The rise and fall of the mail-order house industry the US. I was inspired by Carrie at Bad Mama, who discovered her new home was actually an Aladdin house, built in Michigan, and shipped via rail several hundred miles to its point of final assembly some time in the late 1910s. You'd never know it.

(By the way, Peanut, Bad Mama's miracle elf princess, just underwent painful osteotomic corrective surgery. You might want to post some wubba.)

What else. I have a lot of notes on the history of epic poetry, and lately I've been influenced by the poet Alice Notley's idea of the "female epic". I'd like to work up something on George Eliot, H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, Notley's own work, especially The Descent of Alette, Rebecca Borgstrom's epic in progress at Hitherby Dragons, Nina Paley's Sitayana animations, and even the work of Ayn Rand, whom I will try not to present as a bad example.

There's also the other stuff I have on epic -- Serbian, early and later Greek, the blues, and the west African griot tradition [1] -- and also the continuing series on the Code of Lek. I have some cool parallels from medieval Icelandic sagas, the work of Ismail Kadare, and a short story of Howard Waldrop's. (Guess which one!)

And there's the long-awaited piece I have on the poetry of Lorine Niedecker. I find certain elements of her biography distressing, most notably her early relationship with Louis Zukofsky, who pressured her to get an abortion of their child (the doctor later told her it was twins). This makes me think much the less of Zuk, a poet I have long admired.

Meanwhile, HDTD friend Charlie Stross has put his new novel Accelerando online. It's good transhuman fun! And there's a good discussion of the alternate history genre at the literary blog The Valve. So that takes care of the geeky stuff.

[1] Can any Romanian readers tell me about the Tiganiada? I have come across very vague references in English about it. The New York Public Library has a copy, but I'd have to cognate my way through it, and miss any of the subtleties.

Alright, already

Because I have absolutely nothing better to do right now.

"It's funny how that's what's left at the end, isn't it? All the stupid stuff. Not 'War and Peace,' not James Joyce. Just the comics, the super heroes. ... Why do people get so ashamed of things? ... I mean, I really love those comics." -- Flex Mentallo by Grant Morrison

If you could have one superpower, what would it be and why? (Assume you also get baseline superhero enhancements like moderately increased strength, endurance and agility.)

Most superpowers are -- let's face it -- pretty useless. Firing energy bolts from my eyes would be kinda cool, but not very relevant to my current life as husband, father, and consultant. Though I suppose my three-year-old would get a kick out of it.

The ones that aren't useless... well, Charles Xavier's mental powers would let me make a difference in the world, yes. ("And now, Mr. President, let's talk about Supreme Court nominees.") That would be tempting. But I guess I really am a Burkean conservative at heart: I don't think I could trust anyone with that kind of power, including myself.

Super-intelligence would be pretty interesting. But wouldn't I get bored? And lonely?

Immortality. Been a fantasy of mine since I was a kid. (It's why Vandal Savage was always one of my favorite villains.) I'd get to see history from the right perspective. I'd be able to travel to all the places. I'd have time to read all the books!

But, again, lonely.

Flight is very tempting. I'd love to be able to fly. But I think I'd go with teleportatation... no distance limits, no conservation of potential energy or momentum, and I can take people with me.

No more car trips with the kids. I can see all my friends any time. And when I want good sushi, fresh from the lagoon... I'm there.

Which, if any, 'existing' superhero(es) do you fancy, and why?

Fancy as in like? I haven't really kept up. I was always a big Spider-Man fan. Top Ten is good story. The new Teen Titans cartoon is pretty cool.

Fancy in the British sense? Umm. Well, the question is in the present tense, so I can fairly answer "none". You didn't ask who I fanc_ied_ when I was, say, sixteen.

As often the case, Grant Morrisson has the last word. "How could you love anybody the way you loved Thundergirl?"

Which, if any, 'existing' superhero(es) do you hate?

As Carlos noted, a good writer can make a wretched character good, and vice versa.

I always disliked the Image superheroes and their descendants, though. Bulging muscles, bulging breasts, stupid stories.

OK, here's the tough one. What would your superhero name be? (No prefab porn-name formulas here, you have to make up the name you think you'd be proud to mask under.)

Something clean and simple, like Mister X.

For extra credit: Is there an 'existing' superhero with whom you identify/whom you would like to be?

Identify with: Is there a married superhero with kids whose stories made any emotional sense? There's a gap between "fantasize about" and "identify with", after all.

Like to be: No. They all have horrible problems, almost by definition.

Pass it on. Three people please, and why they're the wind beneath your wings.

Nobody got Charlie Stross yet? Tag. (Did you read comics as a kid, Charlie?)

Dragan Antulov, because I'm always interested in reading his take on things.

Mimi Smartypants, because I really like her stuff, and because there are too many Y chromosomes in this sequence. I doubt she'll take a tag from a complete stranger, mind. Perhaps this amusing little webcomic will serve to persuade her.

Writer's blog

This blog has been lacking new content lately. If I had cats, I could blog about them on Fridays! But I don't.

There's a game of make-up-your-own conspiracy tag going around, but since I seem to be a chain termination step in such matters (at least with my co-bloggers, unsubtle and slightly needling hint) there's not much point. Anyway, There Is No Conspiracy.

It's been 30 to 35 degrees C in New York City lately, which I have been enjoying immensely. After pneumonia, it's like being wrapped in a nice warm blanket.

My dad tells me to e-mail him every once in a while, just to say, "I'm not dead." He's very practical that way. Think of this post as the equivalent.

Foodie stuff: Brooklyn Weiss on tap is extremely good! Claudia, I am sure you are skeptical, but this is the real deal.

Math-y stuff: Herbert Wilf has several books available for downloading online, including generatingfunctionology and A=B. (Love that first title. Sounds like an album Blue Note released in 1958.)

Family stuff: my sister the engineer/architect/theater person has an entry in the Coney Island Parachute Pavilion contest. Sadly, she didn't win, but she had fun.

Geeky stuff: None to report. Honest.

Free time, threat or menace?

So I've been tagged again, this time by James Nicoll, who in turn got it from occasional HDTD reader Martin Wisse. It's even geekier than the last one:

If you could have one superpower, what would it be and why? (Assume you also get baseline superhero enhancements like moderately increased strength, endurance and agility.)

Seriously? I think I'd choose something non-flashy, like the power to heal (and explain how) or the power to translate perfectly (and explain how).

Which, if any, 'existing' superhero(es) do you fancy, and why?

Are we talking 'fancy' as in 'think are neat'? I always liked the second tier of DC's Silver Age lineup.

Or are we talking 'fancy' as in 'have a thing for'? Well, there's Issues Girl, High Maintenance Woman, Unattainable Lass, and the Slackerette. As Imelda Marcos used to say, hubba hubba!

Which, if any, 'existing' superhero(es) do you hate?

I don't think there's a superhero so wretched that the hands of a skilled writer could not make interesting. Or vice versa.

OK, here's the tough one. What would your superhero name be? (No prefab porn-name formulas here, you have to make up the name you think you'd be proud to mask under.)

Like James Nicoll, I would follow Ralph "Elongated Man" Dibny's lead. As with the Internet, I don't need sock-puppet identities.

(Was 'mask' just used as a verb, meaning 'to act as a superhero'? OMG, it was. And I understood it. I feel dirty.)

For extra credit: Is there an 'existing' superhero with whom you identify/whom you would like to be?

Gah. No. Really, no.

Pass it on. Three people please, and why they're the wind beneath your wings.

Ah, the payoff! John Holbo, Jim Henley, and my co-blogger Doug; because I can, and because they've all thought more deeply about this superhero thing than I ever have.

PS book tag reminder! You know who you are.

Nothing here - but there, oh look!

I'm sorry about the recent lull here on HDTD. Doug's in Albania, the nanny is sick, my mother-in-law is visiting and my life is just full of stupid little things like paying bills, filing insurance claims and making sure the boys don't kill each other. So, nothing interesting to read here at the moment until Doug comes back (today! yay!)

However, if you haven't yet, please read this.

Albania again

I'm back in Albania again.

I owe our friends over at A Fistful of Euros some posts, so most of my Albania-blogging will be going on over there. Here's my first post.

I'll try to post here too, as time allows. In any event I'll be back on Saturday.

The Hostages Are Back

So Romania's hostages got freed.

This will be old news to our Romanian readers, since it happened nearly two weeks ago. Non-Romanian readers may not have noticed that Romania had three hostages in Iraq. (Hardly anyone outside Romania seems to have.) Two reporters and a cameraman, they were taken on March 28 and released nearly two months later, on May 22. They had a very frightening and stressful time, but seem to be basically intact. The whole country is very happy that they're back.

Once you get beyond those very basic facts, though, things start to get weird.

What follows is from Transitions Online, but TOL puts all its stuff behind a pay-only wall after a few days, so the link is to the front page. (Check it out anyway, it's really good.) I'm quoting Romanian journalist Razvan Amarei now.

It now appears that they were victims of a plot by the two businessmen of Arab origin who had organized and financed the trip: Mohammad Munaf, their guide and translator, played the role of the fourth hostage for 55 days, while his business partner, Omar Hayssam, was apparently pulling the strings behind the scenes.

Omar Hayssam is a very wealthy Arab-Romanian. There are a surprising number of these. They're not recognized as an official minority, but there are probably enough of them that they could be if they tried.

Why? Well, Ceausescu liked the Arabs, is the short answer. He enjoyed hobnobbing with Arafat and Qaddafi, and signed agreements that brought thousands of Arab students, technicians and businessmen to Romania. Some of them stayed.

The day after the hostages returned to their families, Bucharest officials issued arrest warrants for Omar Hayssam and Mohammad Munaf. They could face between 10 and 15 years in prison for their role in the abduction if convicted. Munaf is still in U.S. custody; Hayssam has been in jail since April, charged with various financial felonies.

True. About a week after the hostages were taken, the Romanian government arrested Hayssam for "tax offenses". He's been in jail ever since.

There are reports that over 30 other people -- mostly Arab-Romanian or Arab -- have been arrested here in Romania, but it's not clear if that's true or not.

According to the Romanian General Prosecutor’s Office, Omar Hayssam’s bizarre plot was to unblock his bank accounts –- frozen as part of an unrelated financial investigation –- pay a fictitious ransom, and become, when the hostages were released, a “national hero.” The investigators said he was hoping all his previous crimes would then be forgiven. But they also discovered that Hayssam had been financing several Sunni terrorist organizations, though they did not specify which organizations.

An anonymous Arab businessman based in Romania was quoted by the daily Averea as saying, “Munaf got involved in the kidnapping at Hayssam’s order... Munaf is Hayssam’s servant more than his partner.”

Hayssam has rejected all the accusations. He said Munaf organized the trip in order to impress the Iraqi authorities, since he was planning to bid for a public tender for the procurement of 25,000 tons of sugar. “I only put him in touch with the journalists. I didn’t pay for the trip, and I didn’t plan the abduction,” Hayssam told investigating magistrates.

Interesting. Munaf, as noted, is "in custody" in Iraq, presumably in American hands. Romania has 850 troops in Iraq, which is a lot for a country that's neither the US nor Britain. (Last time I looked, Romania was the seventh largest troop contributor to Iraq. As other countries pull out, they might be up to sixth by now.)

The first rumors regarding Hayssam’s and Munaf’s involvement in the affair started circulating immediately after the kidnapping. Omar Hayssam, a prominent Syrian-Romanian businessman whose $100 million in assets puts him on the list of the 300 wealthiest Romanians, compiled by the magazine Capital, claimed on 30 March that the kidnappers had called him to demand a ransom of $4 million.

The media soon discovered the close relationship between [hostage] Marie-Jeanne Ion’s father, Social-Democratic Senator Vasile Ion, and the two businessmen. Hayssam said he and the politician were “friends,” but Ion, a former governor of Buzau county, denied this, saying he knew Hayssam as he knew many of those doing business in his county.

"Former governor" means "former prefect", I think, which is not exactly the same thing. A Romanian prefect is appointed by Bucharest. It's a bit as if the US President could appoint state governors. As such, he's usually a heavy political hitter. Prefects have traditionally had... how to put this delicately... many opportunities to engage in extracurricular activities. There are clean prefects, but "former prefect", in Romania, instantly brings certain things to mind.

Anyway:

The authorities may have unravelled the plot behind the abductions, but many questions remain, chiefly how the kidnapping ended.

“It was a 100-percent Romanian action, and I want to thank the secret services for everything they’ve done,” President Basescu stated. But others reported the Iraqi police and the coalition forces also played a major role in the action.

To add to the confusion, the Arab news network Al-Jazeera broadcast a tape on the day of the release, showing the four hostages and one of their kidnappers reading a statement attributing their release “to the pressures of the Muslim community in Romania and of the Saudi Muslim cleric Salman Bin Fahad.”

"Muslim community in Romania". Somehow I don't think they're referring to the quiet and retiring Turks of Dobrogea.

The relief of the former hostages was palpable. After a moving reunion with their families, they were placed in a double quarantine: medical and informational. “This period will help them to get back to their ordinary life,” Dr Florin Tudose, chief of the Psychiatric Clinic at Bucharest’s University Emergency Hospital, told the media.

[...]

The government’s statements weren’t much more substantial. The prime minister said that no ransom had been paid, while the president assured Romanians that no negotiations on its present or future foreign policy had taken place – a reference to a possible troop withdrawal from Iraq.

[...]

“When everything is over, we’ll hold a press conference,” Basescu told impatient journalists, adding that some information would only be made public years from now.

Fifty years, he said. He also said that Romania did not pay any ransom for the hostages, nor make any sort of commmitments. Which seems a stretch, but there it is.

Interestingly, the country seems to be accepting this. (But then, Romania has plenty of fifty-year-old secrets that have never been revealed.)

So it's possible we'll never learn the truth about what happened. Presumably bits and pieces will emerge when the hostages start talking, and when Hayssam goes on trial.

Or... maybe not. This is a big deal here, and highly politicized. The whole country was waiting for the hostage situation to be resolved (there were enormous photographs of them in public places, with BRING THEM HOME printed across), and getting them out intact -- and finding a villain, and a suitably wicked non-Romanian villain at that -- has sent President Basescu's popularity over the moon, at least for now.

A strange ending to a strange story.

The Last Defender of Bucharest

A Romanian friend sent us this picture (under the fold). The memorial commemorates the last stand when Bucharest fell to the Germans in 1916. It stands by the main road north to Ploiesti and the airport; we've driven past it a hundred times. The inscription says "The Last Defender of Bucharest".

Personally, I think the dog looks very alert.

Tag! you're it.

Charlie Stross has book-tagged me! Ow. This is like a chain-letter in blog form. Should be self-explanatory.

1: Total number of books I own: oh, goodness. The vast majority is still in storage. I got fifty or so with me. Call it two thousand. I sold about three hundred in the recent cull, which put a noticeable dent into the collection.

2: The last book I bought: Whispering Nickel Idols, Glen Cook; Trash Sex Magic, Jennifer Stevenson; What's the Matter with Kansas, Thomas Frank.

3: The last book I read: The Descent of Alette, Alice Notley. Working on: Alabi's World, Richard Price; The Makioka Sisters, Junichiro Tanizaki; and (still) Henry, King of France, Heinrich Mann. (Hank does not have his brother Tom's skill.) Professional books I am reading in chunks: The Politics of Property Rights: political stability, credible commitments, and economic growth in Mexico, 1876-1929, by Haber, Razo, and some guy named Noel Maurer.

4: Five books that mean a lot to me: probably best to go in chronological order.

1. The Bible. You know, I'm the only person I know who has been exorcised? Not the full Catholic ceremony, but still. My childhood was a little like the Addams Family. Anyway, the (absolutely bland) church I attended as a child let me read the Bible during sermons and Sunday school. Why not? And let me tell you, the Bible is one strange book. I learned it pretty well. Concordances showed me new ways to organize my thoughts; the translations of John 3:16, how different languages were from each other; the footnotes, how different concepts mapped differently from language to language. Socially, I learned that people would lie about, distort, or not even bother to check the most important book in their life if they thought they were right.

2. The Encyclopedia Britannica. When I was eight years old or so, I picked up the idea of binary trees. My mom was going back to college and leaving her programming texts around for me to read, so it was possibly from there; but the first use I made of it was based on the game Twenty Questions. It struck me that you could classify everything in the whole world, if you came up with the right tree. Over a million types! So I sat down with a big pad of paper and went through our brand-new Encyclopedia Britannica, looking for tree-like bases of organization. (Although I didn't know it at the time, this was the Mortimer Adler edition of the Britannica, which helped my search a lot.) I knew about the Linnean system from somewhere, and that became the basis for the 'living' half. The other stuff was more complicated. My parents thought my project was cute; I wasn't a very good explainer. I think I got to the eighth level or so.

3. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid, Douglas Hofstadter. I'm still not sure why I spent that summer with relatives. First my maternal grandparents, in the fields and pastures of Brown County, then my paternal uncle and his wife in the "big city" of Green Bay. They were all of fifteen miles away from each other, but they might as well have been on different continents. The only thing unifying those stays were my trips to the Brown County Public Library, where I'd return to the same book every time, Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork. Eventually my aunt checked it out for me. At first I grooved on the Lewis Carroll interludes. Then I started messing with Hofstadter's formal logic system, played with his toy model of the DNA-RNA-protein replication cycle, thought weird thoughts about recursion. Later that summer my uncle taught me calculus.

4. The Citadel of the Autarch, Gene Wolfe. By the time I got to college, I had this terrible fear of being uncultured. My dad speaks six languages, plays the violin, paints, gardens; my mom has four degrees (only the second person in her family to go to college!) and more books than I do. And me, I used to read penny-dreadful by the box, in breaks between textbooks. Hmm. Even I could tell that was a little unbalanced. So I set out to better myself. This probably wouldn't work with someone who didn't love reading for its own sake already, but I sat down and made lists. Read everything on the lists. Looked around to see what else was like that. What was important? Why was it important? A new list, of literary criticism. What were they teaching? I was on a rather narrow course track, but I could read the syllabi. Eventually I would sneak in to classes that fit my schedule. I was hungry. Starved.

I had a box from the Science Fiction Book Club that I hadn't opened. It just didn't appeal to me any more. Very few people I met wanted to discuss science fiction _and_. And I wanted that 'and'. Maybe you can tell. One day, more out of guilt than anything else, I opened that box. I was a little burnt out. I sat down and started reading Gene Wolfe's series. Hours passed.

Near the beginning of the fourth book, there is a scene where a captured prisoner of war, whose language consists only of Maoist slogans, tells a folktale in his native idiom. A folktale told entirely in Maoist slogans, with a running translation.

By the end of that scene I was standing up, pumping my fist in the air, shouting and not even knowing I was shouting. One of the most brilliant, bravura pieces of sheer technique I have ever read; and though I am a little more jaded now, I still think it's incredible.

That's only four. Well, I will only tag four people.

5:Tag five people and have them do it on their blogs:

1. Doug
2. Claudia
3. Carrie at Bad Mama
4. James Nicoll at More Words, Deeper Hole