Italian scientists have discovered a way to replace the expensive silicon in solar panels with blueberry pigment You cannot make this stuff up. Whatever else it will be, our future will be indescribably weird.
Saw "The Madness of King George" a night ago and found myself, to my surprise, somewhat annoyed--I usually love Alan Bennett's work. For those of you who haven't seen it, King George III goes mad (historians now believe as a result of the hereditary eyzmatic disorder porphyria). He is tormented by doctors and forced into seclusion by his conniving son. But, just as he's about to be locked away for good, he's given a new doctor with strange, modern methods and is cured.
Okay, nice story, but not true. George went mad periodically for the rest of his life, and the Prince of Wales did eventually take over. So the catharsis of the movie--which is blatantly historical--is fraudulent. Furthermore, the "methods" of the hero-doctor involve slinging the King into a restraining chair (think of an electric chair without the metal cap where all the real business is conducted), then keeping him bound and gagged "until [he] learns to behave." The scene where George, formerly a King in all his confidence, suffers an outbreak of compulsive talking, then walks over to the chair and meekly offers himself to be strapped down, is heartbreaking.
"The Madness of King George" reduces authentic mental illness to a two-year-old's tantrum. It's lesson is that we can conquer anything--if we can just be masters of ourselves. This is a comforting idea. Unless you're gay. Or bipolar. Or mortal.
It's very British of the old school, that locked-down ethos that caused so much quiet suffering, and loud alcoholism. That attitude seems to be changing now, thank goodness, but "The Madness of King George" is nothing less than a paean to the proverbial stiff upper lip. And, in my opinion, a load of bollocks.
Barry Trotter (Book 1)
The Hogwash School for Wizards was the most famous school in the wizarding world, and Barry Trotter was its most famous student. His mere presence made sure that every year twenty candidates applied for every open spot, no matter how rapacious Hogwash's tuition became. As a result, Barry and the school had come to an unspoken agreement: regardless of his grades, Barry could remain at Hogwash for as long as he wished. He had just begun his eleventh year...Freshman
Sleepy with boredom and gassy from lunch, Hart Fox sat in the hard plastic chair outside his dean's office. A kid walked in the door, pink detention slip in hand, bobbing his head a little so that the purple spikes of his mohawk didn't get bent on the transom. He slumped down next to Hart. Hart nodded--he remembered tis joker from sophomore American History, constantly arguing in favor of anarcho-syndicalism. Was his name Henry?...Sophomore
Arcing lazily through the air, the Frisbee smacked against the window. “Ooo-oo!” a chiseled and shirtless boy teased as it wobbleplummeted to the ground. “Sarah's in troub-le!”The beauty-boy was righter than he knew: Of all the windows on campus to hit, this one was the worst. It belonged to Stutts’ Professor of Clandestine Affairs, Glenbard North, who had destroyed more students than there were blades of grass on the freshly resodded Old Quad below...Coming Soon!
All you really gotta know is, I'm writing new things constantly and the more I write, the better my books get. So if you've read my earlier work--and millions of you have--we should keep in touch. This fall, at least one and maybe two new books will be available: a Dickens parody AND a comic mystery loosely based on The Beatles. Drop me an email at mikesnewbooks[at]gmail[dot]com, and I'll be sure to let you know release dates, special deals, etc.Thursday, December 14, 2006
Saturday, December 9, 2006
Beautiful Trow quote:
From George W.S. Trow, via an essay about him in The New York Observer: "America is a glory of a country, and a glorious idea for a country, and we would be saved now by the love of it if the idea of the love of it hadn’t been strip-mined and left ugly.”
About sums it up, doesn't it?
About sums it up, doesn't it?
Friday, December 8, 2006
Nice appreciation of GWS Trow in Slate
Stephen Metcalfe sums up writer George W.S. Trow and his major work, Within the Context of No Context. It's a reasonably good read for people interested in such things.
The scion of a prosperous New York printing family, Trow was a prime mover in the revivication that turned the Harvard Lampoon from a snotty finals-club tipsheet into something quite splendid. In addition to helping National Lampoon get off the ground, Trow wrote for The New Yorker back when that was more akin to an Oxbridge donship than to magazine work: lifetime employment among a collection of overbright individuals simultaneously more influential than they probably should've been, and yet much less influential than they thought they were.
Reading that back, it sounds harsh; I don't mean it that way. Trow and his ilk were extremely good at whatever it was that they did--you cannot question their seriousness or devotion, and the chasing of the dons from The New Yorker hasn't been an unalloyed good thing. The current magazine's closer connection to timeliness and pop culture, which replaced an unwavering adherence to a completely internal, idiosyncratic, persnickety sense of quality, has given The New Yorker many of the flaws of the current culture...while keeping its Olympian self-satisfaction intact. It's Baby Boomer magic: all of the arrogance and exclusivity, but none of the redeeming seriousness of purpose. The old magazine disdained the mass taste, and this squareness allowed it to champion worthy things that didn't fit into the marketing machines. Now, The New Yorker is as likely to profile Tim Allen as a Nobel Prize winner, and in a world glutted with entertainment, that's not really progress. It's to Trow's credit that he excused himself after Tina Brown arrived. Coming from money allows one to stand on principle; it's one of the things we look to them for, to remind the rest of us that it is possible.
If the decline of the Eastern Establishment interests you, Trow's Context is worth a read; also good is Nelson Aldritch's Old Money. Though the particulars change from book to book, the central thesis is simply this: the Eastern Establishment withered away when it could no longer project a set of values strong enough to compete against the commercial/celebrity culture--what Metcalfe calls "hustler culture."
Coming as I do from more-or-less broke Midwesterners, I have a soft spot for the Eastern Establishment, which was nice enough to let me bed down with them for four years at Yale. But the solidity and memory that it represents to me--a sense of the individual in history that I have such affection for--doesn't really exist anymore. I'll quote Metcalf:
This shift, like most things in life, is a mix of good and bad. On the good side, there's more mobility than ever before--the circumstances of one's birth matter less and less. On the bad side, though, success has shrunken to a single skill: manipulating the media, the masses, or the market. Learning how to work in the world of commerce and celebrity--hardly ennobling pursuits, not really worth the sweat of a lifetime (just ask anybody who's "made it")--has become the only field for ambition.
Here's a bit of proof: at least according to one Princetonian, "starting a revolution" is the same as launching a cross between Rolling Stone and GQ." The youthful hyperbole can be excused--we're all there at some point in our lives, though most of us manage to keep it off the internet. But the dream of celebrity, of stardom through entertainment, is as paltry as it is common. When our best-educated, most able young people cannot think of a finer future than the well-compensated manufacture of shiny objects, something's deeply wrong. Person by person, generation by generation, I fear we'll become unequipped to do the serious work of society. And the worst thing is, we won't know it's happened, until a test comes and we find ourselves wanting, quoting "Seinfeld" lines to the onrushing tsunami. I suspect the homeless and the hungry suspect it's happened already.
Oh well, back to writing comic novels!
The scion of a prosperous New York printing family, Trow was a prime mover in the revivication that turned the Harvard Lampoon from a snotty finals-club tipsheet into something quite splendid. In addition to helping National Lampoon get off the ground, Trow wrote for The New Yorker back when that was more akin to an Oxbridge donship than to magazine work: lifetime employment among a collection of overbright individuals simultaneously more influential than they probably should've been, and yet much less influential than they thought they were.
Reading that back, it sounds harsh; I don't mean it that way. Trow and his ilk were extremely good at whatever it was that they did--you cannot question their seriousness or devotion, and the chasing of the dons from The New Yorker hasn't been an unalloyed good thing. The current magazine's closer connection to timeliness and pop culture, which replaced an unwavering adherence to a completely internal, idiosyncratic, persnickety sense of quality, has given The New Yorker many of the flaws of the current culture...while keeping its Olympian self-satisfaction intact. It's Baby Boomer magic: all of the arrogance and exclusivity, but none of the redeeming seriousness of purpose. The old magazine disdained the mass taste, and this squareness allowed it to champion worthy things that didn't fit into the marketing machines. Now, The New Yorker is as likely to profile Tim Allen as a Nobel Prize winner, and in a world glutted with entertainment, that's not really progress. It's to Trow's credit that he excused himself after Tina Brown arrived. Coming from money allows one to stand on principle; it's one of the things we look to them for, to remind the rest of us that it is possible.
If the decline of the Eastern Establishment interests you, Trow's Context is worth a read; also good is Nelson Aldritch's Old Money. Though the particulars change from book to book, the central thesis is simply this: the Eastern Establishment withered away when it could no longer project a set of values strong enough to compete against the commercial/celebrity culture--what Metcalfe calls "hustler culture."
Coming as I do from more-or-less broke Midwesterners, I have a soft spot for the Eastern Establishment, which was nice enough to let me bed down with them for four years at Yale. But the solidity and memory that it represents to me--a sense of the individual in history that I have such affection for--doesn't really exist anymore. I'll quote Metcalf:
The hustler-elite, meanwhile, converted the old WASP hegemony into a pair of useful minstrels: the preppy and the yuppie. The preppy is the old country club nonstriver who never got the memo and so recluses stupidly within a set of dead social conventions. For her part, the yuppie is all too happy to play by the new rules. After mastering semiotics at Brown, she puts to use her new knowledge by creating content … well, by, for, and about the exciting world of content!
This shift, like most things in life, is a mix of good and bad. On the good side, there's more mobility than ever before--the circumstances of one's birth matter less and less. On the bad side, though, success has shrunken to a single skill: manipulating the media, the masses, or the market. Learning how to work in the world of commerce and celebrity--hardly ennobling pursuits, not really worth the sweat of a lifetime (just ask anybody who's "made it")--has become the only field for ambition.
Here's a bit of proof: at least according to one Princetonian, "starting a revolution" is the same as launching a cross between Rolling Stone and GQ." The youthful hyperbole can be excused--we're all there at some point in our lives, though most of us manage to keep it off the internet. But the dream of celebrity, of stardom through entertainment, is as paltry as it is common. When our best-educated, most able young people cannot think of a finer future than the well-compensated manufacture of shiny objects, something's deeply wrong. Person by person, generation by generation, I fear we'll become unequipped to do the serious work of society. And the worst thing is, we won't know it's happened, until a test comes and we find ourselves wanting, quoting "Seinfeld" lines to the onrushing tsunami. I suspect the homeless and the hungry suspect it's happened already.
Oh well, back to writing comic novels!
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