I’ve watched almost all of the first season of this David Mamet creation
over the last couple of days, and today in the public library, I noticed
that the volume it is based on, Eric L. Haney’s Inside Delta Force,
was held. Unable to resist, I’ve been reading it.
The thing that’s left me head-scratching in particular is that Haney
writes about (and gives a picture of) a letter written in Farsi on
Royal Saudi letterhead to be carried by all operators in the aborted
hostage rescue, asking the putative Iranian readers (as good Muslims) to
render assistance. Haney writes that they knew the helicopters were
going to fail, because of Navy turfmongering and Carter’s military
frugality, and intended to make it to the Soviet border to surrender
themselves.
I’m going to try something a little different and liveblog the Suns-Mavs
game tonight. The Suns are my team, which I suppose dates from the
spring of Nash’s first season with them (in particular, the playoff
series against the Mavs that year, which was very enjoyable on any
number of levels). Nash and I have much in common: we’re about the same
age; we both, ahem, excel at our chosen profession; Nash reads Marx and
Engels, and I usually play point guard in a pick-up game (more like
Eddie House, however, with less compunction about shooting); there are
shirtless pictures of both of us on my wife’s
computer (Nash in a whirlpool for the NYT Magazine, Goodwin covered in
fish guts–guess which one’s the desktop background?), etc.
I’m not entirely sure what’s happening in the last part of this. Retif,
or something by Moorcock that I can’t place?
Part of the blurriness is my indifferent scan, part the three-d
confection. I did like the chivalrous Bond, which might have been a bit
overdone in less subtle hands.
I’m fascinated by this idea, not only the muelos belief, but considered
as a general explanatory principle. The long paleolithic imprinted
various atavisms, but only some have archotic force. (Some could be
awakened). I suspect that Ted Hughes would have been interested in this
idea, had he read La Barre, which he very well might have.
Owls eat crows. (And ducks. I was startled at night walking through the
Duck Pond neighborhood in Gainesville by swooping owls intent on
ducklings more than once.)
In my set, at least, the way it worked was that you drove around certain
likely looking streets, forested coves,* and downtown loftways. Often
you would find those professing to surf or aspiring to thrash deathcore;
sometimes middle managers drooped from the weight of a mid-serveconomy.
You could brush with fame (I was preliminarily vetted by the
self-appointed handler of two transients who had written a book about
watching movies fume); chance did not altogether matter. You regained
your touch; you wore raincoats in winter to househosted shows of those
who did accept the deathcore challenge. (I stopped once for
Death, though it was on
Domino’s dime.**) A ghastly trident, a tame python in denuded myrtle,
the t-shirt marked “Camus.” A side-scrolling shooter that overwrote the
bootlog, making the offbrand deskplop quarterless and without charm.
Sensing trouble was afoot, Lynch told the students: “I don’t know what
he said, but I think I understand that he used a word from the Third
Reich. Let’s just look at it this way, it’s a new world now.”
I’m drafting a paper, in between several other projects at the moment,
on Lynch’s levels of existence and social class in Inland Empire, and
this recent swerve into what I’m going to assume is traditionalism
(see Mark Sedgwick’s Against the Modern World) is in fact
preordained–or, at least, predictable.
That night he and I had dinner and he told me what had happened. He
had kept up with Ali for a couple of miles into the country upriver
from the compound at N’Sele, but then he had begun to tire, and
finally he stopped, his chest heaving, and he watched Ali disappear
into the night with his sparring partners. In the east, over the
hills, the African night was beginning to give way to the first
streaks of dawn, but it was still very dark. Suddenly, and seemingly
so close that it made him start, came the reverberating roar of a
lion, an unmistakable coughing, grunting sound that seemed to come
from all sides—just as one had read it did in Hemingway or Ruark—and
Norman turned and set out for the distant lights of N’Sele at a hasty
clip. He told me he had been instantly provided with a substantial
“second wind” and he found himself moving along much quicker than
during his outbound trip. He reached N’Sele safely, jogging by the
dark compounds, exhilarated not only by his escape but by the
irresistible thought of how highly dramatic it would have been if he
hadn’t made it.
As I have a scholarly interest in Le Carre, I’ve noticed over the years
that Clive James’s opinion of his writing, delivered in the New York
Review, has been unduly influential. James suggested that his early
work was superior to the later because of increasing bloat. Here’s a
related example from his review
of The Honorable Schoolboy: “To start with, the prose style is
overblown. Incompatible metaphors fight for living space in the same
sentence. “Now at first Smiley tested the water with Sam—and Sam, who
liked a poker hand himself, tested the water with Smiley.” Are they
playing cards in the bath? Such would-be taciturnity is just
garrulousness run short of breath.”
Is where I spent my
weekend, and it was a
good conference, filled with smart, friendly* people discussing
interesting things. Smaller conferences seem to be much better, ceteris
paribus.
Further experiments with my laptop seem to indicate that it may have
been a hardware failure, though I’m not about to absolve Vista until
more facts are known. I anticipate learning much about Gateway’s
customer service in the next few days and do not wish to color the
experience with the dread reason suggests.
I’ve been reading the back issues of the New York Review
intermittently over the last few days. I’m still in the glorious era
when they would print things like
this [subscriber, though, given
the author, I suspect it’s online elsewhere].
It’s fascinating reading (with the increasingly strong feeling that
it’ll be anagnostian throughout for me with this venue) through this
admittedly narrow aperture of intellectual history. There are more
bird-books reviewed than you might think, and only Foucault and McLuhan
(and Ong) have, as of early 1968, made any appearance from the
theory-pantheon. Chomsky’s published “Responsibility of the
Intellectuals” and an account of a Pentagon protest, but there’s been
nothing about his linguistics. (I should add that I’ve been scanning the
table of contents and reading things which catch my interest, not doing
anything systematic, so it’s quite possible that I’ve missed something;
and I also know, if you’re curious, that this is well-covered ground,
even owning a book about the early years of the NYR, which might be
thought to be one of the more superfluous volumes in my collection.)
