Dickens

“Introduces children into his stories that he may kill them to slow music” (J. M. Barrie).

Just as an adjutant to this rumination.

Imagine working on Wyndham Lewis, as I do, or other dubious figures under such a regime.

Nowitzki Throws Stackhouse under Bus

Phenomenal post-game interview there.

I’m paraphrasing:

“The guy’s been in the league for ten years, so I figured he’d know you had to hit the rim to keep the clock running.”

“I was wondering what in the hell he was thinking.”

I wonder what he’d have had to say if Horry had somehow hit that last shot.

R. C. Zaehner, Orientalist

I read Mysticism Sacred and Profane in high school, like just about everyone else, I suppose (excuse me: “I reckon”), and I did not know until this day that Zaehner was involved in the great game. Even suspected of being a Russian spy, he was.

There’s also the matter of what he would have thought about the current nuclear apocalypticon.

Olaf Stapledon in the ODNB

Robert Crossley’s entry is here. Needless to say, I’m glad to see this.

Clancy and I have been visiting my family in North Carolina (you can see some pictures). Everyone seems to have a lab or retriever where I grew up, and they tend to run around unfettered. Driving out to go fishing early in the morning, I’ve noticed several trotting back purposively, for breakfast perhaps, from a morning swim. At a little marina eatery, a pack of them barked at me from a distance, ran up, and proceeded to give me the “perhaps you’d like to throw one of these sticks into the nearby water for us to retrieve” look. You’re up for it, they implied. Are you aware of how entertaining this would be for us both? Etc.

Reflections on the Playoffs

I don’t root for professional basketball teams out of some mere locality. North Carolina, during most of the time I lived there, did not have a pro team; and, while I detested Michael Jordan and UNC when I was very young, I gradually became a Bulls fan during his career. Aesthetically, perhaps, the Bulls were not the best team during the entirety of their championship era; but they certainly kicked the hell out of New York, Utah, and Miami in terms of watchability.

Sets

What do the following words have in common?

beat
bumf
cackle
combativity
congery
hog-wash
shot
thing
vaticinatory

That’s right. All of their OED quotations cite Lewis’s The Apes of God. Is it as accurate of a systasis as the Amazon SIPs? Maybe not. But still.

Honor Cultures

I’ve read with some interest a SEP article on experimental approaches to moral psychology by John Doris and Stephen Stich. In particular, their citation of Nisbett and Cohen’s Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South (Westview, 1996) caught my interest, particularly the description of the “asshole” saliva experiment (with a member of the team quaintly described as a “confederate”). I’m skeptical of the historical and sociological explanation of the origin of the Southern honor culture sketched out in the article, though I know that Bertram Wyatt-Brown has written extensively about it, and how do you isolate the causal factors responsible for the perceived hormonal changes? I’m reminded of the argument in Lem’s The Chain of Chance here, though probably for caliginous reasons.

My Expert First-Round NBA Playoff Predictions

I know that we’re nearly two days in.

East

1. Pistons over Bucks in four.

I haven’t watched a Bucks game all year, including today’s.

2. Pacers over Nets in six.

This one seems easy. The Pacers are a playoff team. They are always much deeper than they appear. Stojakovich is good for at least ten points and two rebounds per game. That’s every night. That kind of steady production is going to be too much for the Nets to overcome. The Nets were also slumping a bit towards the end of the season.

Meds

A not surprising article in the Post today reviews an article by Lisa Cosgrove coming out in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics that demonstrates the close ties that experts on mood disorders, including all of those who have written the relevant entries in the DSM-IV, have to the pharmaceutical industry.

I’m curious about how often we’ve seen in recent American television the effects of the diagnosed refusing their meds. There was the episode of Lost I briefly mentioned a while ago, the episode of Buffy it seemed indebted to, the fourth season of 24, and perhaps intermittent parts of The Sopranos. In almost every case, it was a liberatory gesture with attendantly dire consequences (though the reality-distortion metacommentary of the first two complicate this considerably).

The Previous War with Iran

From Richard Clarke and Steven Simon’s NYT editorial

While the full scope of what America did do remains classified, published reports suggest that the United States responded with a chilling threat to the Tehran government and conducted a global operation that immobilized Iran’s intelligence service. Iranian terrorism against the United States ceased.

Clarke implies here that he of course knows that there was such a chilling threat and global operation. His book also suggests that war with Iran was much closer than generally realized after the Khobar bombings. The threat I can imagine easily enough, but I’m quite curious about what the global operation was exactly. Subsequent and previous events both seem to indicate that widespread covert intelligence operations such as this have not traditionally been the strong suit of the secret agencies, and I’m not aware of any published accounts of it–again, quite unusual.