Steppenwolf

The second round of those cheap orange cover Penguin classics is out and, on the strong recommendation of a friend, I bought Steppenwolf (amongst several others). Originally written by Herman Hesse in 1927 in, the translation I have is characterised by a fastidious German precision that involves longer sentences on average than their English counterparts, and a more exhaustive chronicle of the reality of the story.

Permit me to demonstrate what I mean; this from the preface to Steppenwolf:

The Steppenwolf, however, first threw up his sharp, closely cropped head and sniffed around nervously before he either made any answer, or mention of his name.

'Oh, it smells good in here,' he said, and at the same time my aunt smiled too. For my part I found this manner of introducing himself ridiculous, and felt somehow repelled by him.

'Well,' he said, 'I've come about the room you have to let.'

I did not get a good look at him until we were all three on our way up to the top floor. Though not very big, he had the gait of a big man. He wore a fashionable and comfortable winter overcoat and he was well, though carelessly, dressed, clean-shaven, and his cropped head showed here and there a streak of grey.

I have nothing against this style per se. It is as easy to read as anything else and, I must say, I am rather enjoying Steppenwolf so far. It is just that, as I am reading it, I am finding it hard not to be reminded of other stories that I've read that were (supposedly) translated from German:

I sit and admire my handiwork for a long time. So as not to make the ordeal unpleasant for him we make small talk on topical subjects, Roy somewhat muffled. At some point I must leave him to attend to Jetta's needs. When I return I find he has hopped out of my house, still wrapped in cling-film. The loss leaves me broken and pitiful. He never calls me. He sends no tickets. The police come and reprimand me. Jetta is taken away, although I get her back after a complicated legal process.

Don't get me wrong for a moment, I entirely accept that both authors do quite a good job of exploring an overwhelming sense of alienation from contemporary society. Each paints a grim and chilling picture of their respective protagonists trying and failing to function in the modern world. It is just that I find Herman Hesse a lot more enjoyable if I, as I read him, don't think about Ulrich Haarbürste wrapping Roy Orbison in cling film.

Women can't write about sex

Reasonably controversial thesis:

Women are not passionate enough about sex and concentrate too much on feelings to be able to write raunchy stories, the new owner of Britain's Erotic Review said on Monday.

By way of a dissenting voice, this is offered:

Kathy Lette, a former writer for the review, speaking on BBC Radio 4 on Monday, said a third of women were not achieving orgasm which showed men still had a lot to learn, with women well placed to teach them.

I'd say somewhere in the vicinity of 100% of men know how to have an orgasm. If nothing else, they've at least got that covered.

Terminator: Salvation

Far be it from me the to defend Terminator 4 as a movie. It convinced me that the robot antagonists of the film kind of had a point. Any species responsible for Terminator 4 is not a species whose extinction the universe would mourn too deeply.

I went into the film planning to mount a protracted and exhaustive satirical attack on the plot on my blog. Perhaps even compare it unfavorably to Lost. But then I realised that it actually failed to provide me with plot enough to lampoon. Rather than using a simple cut to move from one scene to the next, they instead used nuclear explosions.

But there are legitimate complaints to bring against it, and there are the illegitimate. The review of it in the Sydney Morning Herald contained this scathing and brazen critique of Terminator 4:

Connor knows that Skynet is after Reese; he also knows Reese is his father. Gotta find and save him, so that ... um, here's where I got confused. The original Reese (played by Michael Biehn) was killed at the end of T1, set in 1984. Still, he came from the future just like the Terminator, which makes you wonder how that was possible if Kyle died in 1984. And if so, how come he's alive in 2018? That's the thing about the past it is so what we make of it, at least in the Terminator films. Time bends, as Einstein postulated. Here, it's like a slinky coil, as slippery as it needs to be to keep the franchise going.

That mention of Einstein really makes me think that this guy gets it. For those unfamiliar with Terminator, I have prepared the following:

In Terminator 1 the protagonist of the series sends his father back to 1984 to a) protect and b) impregnate his mother. In the execution of a) he succumbs to the robot, and dies in the past. He is then born, some time before the events of Terminator 4, and appears in 2018, having not yet been sent back in time.

I want someone to sit the reviewer down and explain this to him. I want him then to realise, for the rest of his life, that the plot of Terminator: Salvation went over his head.

Against Nokia

There are moments in your life when you are expected, even required, to send a text message consisting singularly of the term "Toss pots". Today was my day, ladies and gentlemen. The events precipitating the sending of the message are largely unremarkable, and this is not the forum. I have standards, if I were to allow onto my blog the level of self indulgent inanity required to relay to you that story I would be a very poor blogger indeed. No, our sights are set far higher.

I began by opting to reply to the catalyst message, and was given a blank slate upon which to compose my barb. I typed the first word, toss: 8677. The word 'Tops' appears at the behest of the ever chipper and helpful Nokia predictive text program.

"No, you scallywag," I playfully said to my phone, "I don't want to write 'tops', that would gravely mislead the recipient as to my estimation of the original message's content. I shall press asterisk in the hope of finding the desired 'toss'."

This I did twice, and I was met with 'Toss'. But not before having the phone unhelpfully suggest the word 'Voss'. My phone assumed that, rather than using the word 'toss' in any capacity, it was more likely that I wanted to discuss Voss by Patrick White in a text message.

Phone, I've had you a while and I've spoken about books on you a lot. Maybe you got the wrong idea after I read Midnight's Children and started raving at length on the virtues of magical realism to everyone I rang. But, and listen closely phone, Patrick White is terrible.

Phone, I am not entirely sure where the border between magical realism and insane bullshit lies, but I am sure Voss falls somewhat short of the former. Towards the middle of the 19th century a German explorer and an Anglo middle-class girl start a telepathic-but-not-really relationship as he travels across Australia, getting dysentery.

Now phone, you may be asking yourself how exactly that sounds sillier than the plot to any other magical realism book, and you're correct in your estimation. Just trust me when I say that Patrick White is bad. So we'll have no more of this in the future, OK?

Utegate

News Story from 2011:

Calls for the resignation of The Federal Minister for Water and Climate Change, Penny Wong, have been growing ever louder since it came to light that she has been receiving payments from NSW farmers in return for exempting them from the Murry-Darling water buy-back scheme. The scandal, dubbed "Watergate", is by far the largest political crisis to rock the Rudd government.

Batman You Say?

I am marking exams at the moment. In a strong field, this is perhaps the most unpleasant ordeal to which PhD students are subjected. What do I need to get me through this? Music, of course. My mind is otherwise too occupied by trying to follow what can most charitably be termed "cavalier" mathematical arguments to really appreciate anything that requires a less passive role for the entertainee.

What sort of music? Something uplifting! Maybe something that will assure me that all my bad days will end. Aha! I have it! Bad Days by The Flaming Lips!

Oh, wait. When I hear this song, I am not uplifted at the notion of one day having all my bad days end. I am reminded of Batman Forever, because of its inexplicably good sound track.

Instead of a promised, brighter future, upon hearing that song, I think of this.

What a terrible couch, where did he even get that fucking couch? Fuck you Joel Schumacher.

Christopher Pearson

Dave occasionally says that conservatism died in 1215. Christopher Pearson goes back farther than that when deciding where someone falls on the ideological spectrum.

For many, the decisive test is where you stand on constitutional questions and, at least since the heyday of imperial Rome, the notion of a conservative republican has always been an oxymoron.

What is he talking about here? How conservative Peter Costello was.

He also says this, which also annoys me.

When Costello entered the debate on freeing up access to RU-486, an abortion-inducing drug, his rationale for supporting the bill was embarrassing. He didn't argue from first principles but from his experience. His wife had been unconscious with a life-threatening cerebral abscess while pregnant and her doctors feared the pregnancy could compromise the effectiveness of medicine they were using to treat it. Happily, as it turned out, both mother and child survived, but he came to the conclusion that a termination ought to be an available option. On that basis he later argued that he ought not to deny others access to abortion.

Without wanting to trivialise what must have been an agonising situation, the moral he drew from it must stand as one of the great non-sequiturs of public policy debate in the Howard era. Classical moral theology has for centuries recognised a husband's right to choose to save his spouse's life at the expense of the child's, if the medical advice is that he has to make an either-or choice. But no moral theology worthy of the name could conceivably extrapolate from an extreme case and conclude that anyone who wanted it should have easy access to an abortifacient as ofright.

They should gather together every single piece of work that falls under the heading of Classical Moral Theology, and put it into a single collection entitled "The Complete Classical Moral Theology" and then shoot it into the sun.

Twitter

Take that, Ayatollah!

I thought I would never be happy for at existance of Twitter.