2012.12.23 — Lullaby for Pi: Movie Review

Have you seen the small independent film Lullaby for Pi? No? Well, no surprise. This joint Canada / France production (2010) has received a rating of 6.2 from a whopping 205 raters in IMDb. But, more interestingly, a total of 0 (zero) viewer and critic reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. I found a French critic's review: Nicolas Gilli, which is on a France-based web-page and is in, no surprise, French. Nothing in the (English) Wikipedia. A Google search will bring up a couple of reviews, for example, The Hollywood Reporter's castigation that LFP is … a ludicrous romance so full of clichés and forced whimsy that it is nearly unwatchable.

Basically, this is a movie that for all intents and purposes, doesn't quite exist. I don't remember having heard anything about the movie, but came across it by accident while flipping through the movie listings on TV. And that is a shame! Okay, it hasn't gone completely unnoticed, as the tumblr people seemed to like it, and their blog is filled with images.

Synopsis: young brilliant musician goes into a deep depression with the death of his wife and stops music. Instead he spends his time in the hotel room where he first met her, waiting for her to call. A young woman, who doesn't want him to see her face and who lost several years of her youth to being in a coma, forms a friendship with him through the bathroom door. And, like magic, and with the help of the kindly chess playing hotel desk man, the two eccentric people tentatively and quirkily begin to live. He, again, she for the first time.

And it is the quirkiness that I can see being a thumbs down for some. Why? I've been struggling to articulate my thoughts, but it comes to what may be an odd split in the human population between those who delight in Magical Realism versus those who delight in cartoon violence or the un-magical realism of saccharine sentimental (happy / sad) movies. The emotional life of the characters is brought forward in the storytelling through exaggerated setting and character. So the young woman struggling to find her place in the world hides in the bathroom of the man having lost his place. Each have erected a wall between themselves and the world which, by the magic of life, is embodied in the locked bathroom door.

And thus we see a visual metaphor dance around the theme of finding/losing/rediscovering one's voice. The metaphor is re-enforced with the subplot of the young musician who has to struggle to keep his own musical voice while it is being excoriated by the good-intentioned father.

And, in the best of a magical realism typical of many Canadian writers, such as Barbara Gowdy and Margaret Atwood, the theme is explored in different ways. The young woman begins to find her voice using mute media: she uses film frames clipped from the movies she's paid by a theatre company to project and, with a kind of homage to Timothy Findley's novel Famous Last Words, journal writing on the wall of her loft that she would paint over until the day she met Sam…

This is a fun movie. The directing kept it light, and the performances by the leads are engaging and don't fall into maudlin sentimentality. Forest Whitaker as their unassuming spiritual guide was perfect in the role. The filmography is good and contributes to the story with its own subtle quirkiness. And the music is also excellent. As is noted, Charlie Winston contributes perfectly to the sound track, including Rupert Friend's extemporaneous blues/jazz 'hit' I'm in Love With a Bathroom.


★★★★☆

Director: Benoît Philippon
Actors: Andre Richards, Clémence Poésy, Colin Lawrence, Dewshane Williams, Forest Whitaker, Matt Ward, Rupert Friend, Sarah Wayne Callies


Finally, in the most peculiar and delightful of ways, LFP participated in a delicious as Pi fushigi on the day I watched the movie.

2011.06.17 — The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood: Finished

Margaret Atwood.
The Year of the Flood.
UK: Virago Press (Little, Brown Book Group), 2010.
ISBN: 1844085643.

☆☆☆☆☆ out of ☆☆☆☆☆.

TYotF is an excellent companion to Oryx and Crake. Actually, it was so good that I finished the book before I had time to create my 'begun reading' blog.

At a high level, it was fun to see how, and how effectively, Atwood played with the characters crossing between the two books. At a more subtle level, how Atwood dexterously extended and deepened the shallowness of the pleeb world was extremely funny, very sad, and disturbingly reflective.

This world resonated with me more than that of O&C's, including the characters. In part because it is more close to the world that I see around me including the seeds of her descriptive dystopia. I found Atwood's slightly exagerated characterization of the lunatics and their groups to be on point and very real. The Gardener's Hymn book was a source of aeternal delight because it was both satirical and true at the same time.

Also the product names and uses, the social past times and entertainments, all delightfully echoed our marketed world. And at the same time Atwood somehow managed to pay a delightful homage to the world described by Orwell in 1984, while taking it along its own self-consistent path.

I think that the characters were more finely drawn in TYotF, and not just the females. Adam One and Zeb began flat, but this was perfectly described as if through the eyes of the resourceful, ever sceptical Toby. And as Toby grew the men became characters and not caricatures.

Atwood's characterizations are powerfully, simply done. For example, the vanity of Ren's mother is delightful described by a daughter with a wisdom that is beyond her years and not quite grounded, but is at the same time told as if by someone still innocent as they would be after having lived in the Gardener's hippy-like commune:

'What are you doing in the closet, darling?' said Lucerne [Ren's mother]. 'Come and have some lunch! You'll feell better soon!' She sounded chirpy: the crazier and more disturbed I acted, the better it was for her, because the less anyone would believe me if I told on her.

Her story was that I'd been traumatized by being stuck in among the warped, brainwashing cult folk. I had no way of proving her wrong. Anyway maybe I had been traumatized: I had nothing to compare myself with (252-3).

Atwood's use of voice in the book is interesting. The young girl who becomes a women in the story, Ren, is told in the first person present. Toby, who begins as a young women is told in third person past. I'm not sure why this worked, but it did. I've thought about it, and I think it worked because Atwood was emphasizing the voice of the innocent child with an unconscious wisdom as being alive in the immediate present. Whereas Toby felt dislocated and outside of her existence throughout the book. I've given a small example of Ren abve, and now for Toby's character. Atwood's description is masterful, and takes the entire book. I'll begin with Ren's childhood description:

... The Gardener kids had nicknames for all of the teachers. Pilar was the Fungus, Zeb was the Mad Adam, Stuart was the Screw because he built furniture. Mugi was the Muscle, Manushka was the Mucous, Rebecca was the Salt and Peppler, Burt was the Knob because he was bald. Toby was the Dry Witch. Witch because she was always mixing things up and pouring them into bottles and Dry because she was so thin and hard, and to tell her apart from Nuala, who was the Wet Witch because of her damp mouth and her wobbly bum, and because you could make her cry so easily.
...
We could never make the Dry Witch Toby cry. The boys said she was a hardass — she and Rebecca were the two hardest asses. Rebecca was jolly on the outside, but you did not push her buttons. As for Toby, she was leathery inside and out. 'Don't try it Shackleton,' she would say, even though her back was turned. Nuala was too kind to us, but Toby held us to account, and we trusted Toby more: you'd trust a rock more than a cake (74-5).

Now, here's Toby through her own, 3rd person eyes:

Gradually, Toby stopped thinking that she should leave the Gardeners. She didn't really believe in their creed, but she no longer disbelieved. One season blended into the next — rainy, stormy, hot and dry, cooler and dry, rainy and warm — and then one year into another. She wasn't quite a Gardener, yet she wasn't a pleeblander any more. She was neither the one nor the other (116).

And, finally:

How old will I be, thought Toby, before I can be that calm? She felt cut open (127).

Toby's ambivalence was perfeclty described, and made the Gordener's ostensible silliness both more real and more endearing. This was no small feat of writing!

I won't say that this book is better than O&C, but rather that reading both books elevates them above what they are if read singly. I am strongly tempted, now, to re-read O&C to seek out the extended subtle overlaps between the two.

2011.04.24 — Oryx and Crake finished

☆☆☆☆☆ out of ☆☆☆☆☆.

This was a very well written, structured and characterized book. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Margaret Atwood.
Oryx and Crake.
Random House Inc.
Pages: 416 | ISBN: 9780385721677

Despite a few comments to the contrary that I read on Goodreads, the science fiction presented in the book is linked strongly enough to examples of current real world science to be taken seriously, as is Atwood's ecological links to the effects of global warming. And this is where it is dark, because the bleakness of the future is 100% plausible.

It struck me that some of the criticism against it from the science fiction readers is that in Atwood fashion it is the characters that drive the story and not the science, even as their situation derives from the science. In a peculiar way the science is secondary to the story, which makes it an odd sci-fi book, but in doing this Atwood has perfectly mimicked how the nuts and bolts of our science is secondary to us in our daily lives: the iMac I'm writing on and its connection to the world, smartphones, TV, radio, the automobile, all exist in my life with greater or lesser importance. However their creation, production and distribution are at best of passing concern. And so it is with the protagonist who, again in typical Atwood fashion, is a fully fleshed and flawed human who feels — and largely is — overwhelmed by life in a way that makes him somewhat unlikeable even as we can sympathize with his attitudes.

At one point Jimmy, the protagonist, having proved himself a poor student of privilege, wound up going to Martha Graham, a 3rd rate Arts university. I was amused by her pointed anti-school barbs, and by my finding them similar in spirit to those she wrote in The Edible Woman:

Jimmy had few illusions. He knew what sort of thing would be open to him when he came out the other end of Problematics with his risible degree. Window- dressing was what he'd be doing, at best—decorating the cold, hard, numerical real world in flossy 2-D verbiage. Depending on how well he did in his Problematcs courses—Applied Logic, Applied Rhetoric, Medical Ethics and Terminology, Applied Semantics, Relativistics and Advanced Mischaracterization, Comparative Cultural Psychology and the rest—he'd have a choice between well-paid window-dressing for a big Corp or flimsy cut-rate stuff for a borderline one. The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses, as he was soon in the habit of quipping during Happy Hour pickup time at the local campus bars and pubs. He couldn't say he was looking forward to it, this rest-of-his-life.

Nevertheless, he dug himself in at Martha Graham as if into a trench, and hunkered down for the duration. He shared a dorm suite—one cramped room either side, silverfish-ridden bathroom in the middle—with a fundamentalist vegan called Bernice, who had stringy hair held back with a wooden clip in the shape of a toucan and wore a succession of God's Gardeners T-shirts, which—due to her aversion to chemical compounds such as underarm deodorants — stank even when freshly laundered (229-30).

Amusingly, even as I enjoyed her satire of the trend of arts departments striving to be seen as corporately viable and important in our corporatist world, it was here that Atwood allowed herself to step oh-so slightly outside of character.

Morris Berman

The class 'Relativistics and Advanced Mischaracterization' will never exist on an arts' course calendar. Not that such courses don't exist! But instead they would be called something benign like 'Relativistics and Perceptions of Truth'. Lest you think I jest, Morris Berman cites an article about Stanford Business School ethics:

... In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle of 20 October 1985, David Lampert, himself a graduate of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, described the "hidden curriculum" of the school as "the subconscious destruction of democratic values." The school's "ethics" course, B295, is (or was then^*) a training in how to outflank any external forces attempting to limit managerial autonomy — things such as constitutional entitlements, property, civil rights, and so on.

The course teaches the future business elite "how to stonewall the media, how to present oneself on television and protect corporate interests, [and] how to manipulate the public and Congress ...." Student papers on issues such as the Love Canal come back with comments such as, "Why didn't you advise Hooker Chemicals to sue the journalists who exposed the story?" while an exam question in another course states, "Assume that the memorandum you are writing will be burned before it reaches the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice" (68).

*Note: a quick search on Stanford's web page did not find B295. But a search for 'ethics' found 2135 hits, including such things as Empathy and Ethics - Drivers of Our Shifting Culture.

This is an excellent read.

2011.04.18 — A Payback and a "Nikita" Fushigi* or two. Finished 2011.04.16

If you were ever under the notion — I was going to say delusion — that the world travels in a straight line from birth to death, here is a fushigi, a totally bizarre one. Again, it originates from

Margaret Atwood

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

Toronto: House of Anansi Press 2008

ISBN 9780887848100

[And here are the links to the other Payback blogs:
2011.03.20; 2011.02.13; 2009.08.09; 2009.08.03.]

Oh! And before I could post this blog, I also finished Payback. And the second reading was well worthwhile, as the book has become considerably better than after the first reading. And I even like the ending better than I did after the first reading.

Addenda:

On 2011.04.20 Piers Morgan extended the fushigi-nature of Payback and this blog.

And then this morning, 2011.04.21, so did Atwood in Oryx and Crake, which I've recently begun reading.

A well deserved ☆☆☆☆☆ out of ☆☆☆☆☆.

Maggie Q

This fushigi is very strange because what begins in a serious philosophical book on the metaphysical meanings and nature of "payback" of debt and justice corresponds and completes in an American TV-series I watch called "Nikita", starring Maggie Q. Although, in the broader picture, maybe not so strange because Nikita's mission is to bring to an evil organization its just destruction — except that this particular episode made specific manifestation of what Atwood wrote.

So, to begin means starting with Atwood's description of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Nelson Mandala saw instituted in South Africa in a serious

Nelson Mandela

attempt to heal not only himself but a fractured society. With, it would appear from far away and with inadequate news coverage, some success. (And that capital 'L' life was able to lead me to creating a blog linking Nelson Mandela, who spent years in a prison, to an actress in a series that takes ex-cons and imprisons them for years in order to create assassins is, well, peculiar.)

Anyway, here's Atwood:

THERE ARE TWO antidotes to the endless chain reaction of revenge and

counter-revenge. One is through the courts of law, which are supposed to settle questions of the weighing and measuring and resolving of debtor/creditor issues in a fair and equitable way. Whether they always do so is of course open to a lot of questions, but in theory that is their function.

The other antidote is more radical. It is told of Nelson Mandela that, after much persecution, and when he was finally freed from the prison where he'd been put by the apartheid government in South Africa, he said to himself that he had to forgive all those who had wronged him by the time he reached the prison gates or he would never be free of them. Why? Because he'd be bound to them by the chains of vengeance. They and he would still be twin Shadow figures, joined at the hip. In other words, the antidote to revenge is not justice but forgiveness. How many times must you forgive? someone asked Jesus of Nazareth. Seventy times seven, or as many times as it takes, was the answer. So [Shakespeare's] Portia was right in principle, although she herself could not follow through [because in the end she was not able to proffer forgiveness to Shylock for his unbending desire to seek revenge against the so-called Christian trader who had unendingly harassed and humiliated him. Note: Atwood's examination of The Merchant of Venice within Payback was sharp and by itself would have made the book worth its cover price.]

Muslim religious law allows the family members of a murdered person to participate in the sentencing of the murderer: they can choose clemency if they wish, and it is recognized that this choice is a noble one, and will free them from their anger and sense of victimization. There are many other cultural examples in which a life is not taken in exchange for a life. A Native North American group presented a Proclamation of Forgiveness to the United States as recently as 2005¹, for instance—if they listed all the things to be forgiven I expect it was rather long—and I need hardly mention the astonishing Truth and Reconciliation process that has gone on in South Africa since the end of apartheid. You may think that all of this forgiveness stuff is watery-eyed idealism of the clap-if-you-believe-in-fairies variety, but if the forgiveness is sincerely given and sincerely received—both parts are admittedly difficult—it does appear to have a liberating effect. As we've noted, the, desire for revenge is a heavy chain, and revenge itself leads to a chain reaction. Forgiveness cuts the chain.

Now take a deep breath, close your eyes, and try the following exercise in historical revisionism. It's the eleventh of September 2001. After two planes have flown into them, the Twin Towers have collapsed in billows of smoke and fire.

Vengeful messages have been disseminated by al-Qaeda. The president of the United States goes on international television and says,

We have suffered a grievous loss — a blow has been struck at us that was motivated by a obsessive desire to harm us. We realize that this was the work of a small group of fanatics. Other nations might bomb the stuffing out of the civilian population where those fanatics are at present located, but we recognize the futility of such an action. Nor will we accuse any bystander nation of having been involved. We realize that acts of vengeance recoil upon the heads of the inventors, and we do not wish to perpetuate a chain reaction of revenge. Therefore we will forgive.

Just imagine the impact of taking such a position, not that there was a snowball's chance in Hell of this ever happening. Now imagine how much different the world would have been today if that position had in fact been taken. No ongoing Iraq war. No impasse in Afghanistan. And above all, no ballooning and ruinous and nation-weakening and out-of-control big fat American debt.

Where will it all end? you are doubtless asking yourself. That depends on what you mean by "all." As for this book, it will end with the next and last chapter, which will attempt to examine what happens when the debit and credit balances get even further out of control. This last chapter is called "Payback." I looked this word up on the Web and, in addition to several movies of that name, I found a site called ThePayback.com, which bills itself as "your home for all of your revenge needs." You can order anything over the Internet now, it seems, including "dead fish," "prank packages," and "rude lottery tickets."

But my final chapter will not be about sending a box of wilted roses to your detested ex-lover. It's more on the order of the mills of the gods, which grind very slowly, though they grind exceeding small (159-61).

And this is actually very challenging, this idea of forgiveness. And so I was thinking about this, from a personal perspective and on how it has a connection to the Dog Whisperer, who repeatedly avers that dogs are always ready to begin anew by living now and leaving the past behind, forgiving the past by being completely in the moment.

Nothing too interesting until I watched on Thursday night (2011.04.14) the latest episode [Season 1, Episode 18 - Into the Dark] of a rather corny and inconsistently written American series called 'Nikita'. I've always been a bit of a sucker for shows with the underdog fighting the good fight against all odds, and this one is doing a generally good job of it. Anyway... what made this a fushigi is that the episode ends with one of the rogue assassins (Owen), who was crazy for revenge in this episode, experiencing a change of heart, and announcing his need to forgive the evil he has done and that has been done to him. It was an amazingly tight fushigi.

Notes:
1. To be a bit Chomsky, it is interesting that I do not remember the news talking about a 'Proclamation of Forgiveness to the United States' from the Native Americans. (Nor does my wife recall this, and she watches a lot of news and has a good memory.) I am curious: do you remember reading or hearing of this document?

Fushigi addenda:
2011.04.20
Tonight I was slightly less than half listening to "Piers Morgan Tonight" while doing something else. (I'm not a fan, but am stuck with my wife turning to it.)

But this time something the second guest, Stacey Lannert, said caught my ear. Until tonight I did not know of her existence or story, which is that as a young woman she was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for having killed her father.

She has since been given clemency by the Governor in recognition of the extenuating circumstance of her shooting her father — prolonged sexual abuse since childhood — and because of her having made the best of being in prison and becoming a model citizen.

Anyway, what caught my ear was when Morgan questioned her about blaming those who hadn't believed her story before, during, and after the trial. Her response was pure fushigi: paraphrased from memory, Lannert said that if she were to continue to blame them anger and hate would ruin her life. So, once again, the 'Truth and Reconciliation Commission' rears its head.

As I was writing this addendum I thought about the clip of the interview that Morgan's producers chose to web-cast. And it struck me as being a particularly American choice in that it focused on the child sexual abuse part of the story. Which is important to the story, of course. But what is far more important than that is her demonstrated power of choice after consequences: choosing to be alive and big hearted in prison, choosing to forgive those who had failed her childhood and who had failed her trial.

When I did my research, I discovered that Lannert had been a guest on Oprah. And, I here thank Oprah and her producers, for putting the real actual transcript on the web page! From that transcript, Lannert says:

"I finally have been able to fuse [my father and the abuser]. I had to in order to forgive myself for the action that I took, because there were moments that I missed my father," she says. "I had to forgive him in order to be able to forgive myself, but there's a difference between forgiving and forgetting."

Stacey says she forgave her father because she didn't want to face the alternative. "If I don't forgive him, then I'm in prison—it might not be a physical prison, but it's a psychological prison. You know, I was incarcerated and I was free in my heart. The rest was geography."

2011.04.21
This morning, on a sleep in day, I picked up Oryx and Crake while waiting for my wife to wake. I opened it to my book marked page, and read:

Not that Snowman passes judgment. He knows how these things go, or used to go. He's a grown up now, with much worse things on his conscience. So who is he to blame them?

(He blames them.) (p.79-80)

Life is interesting.

2011.04.09 — Payback 2nd time (cont'd) and an odd fushigi* or two

While reading Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for World Dominance I was also re-reading Margaret Atwood's fascinating little big book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.
The second read is proving invaluable because the subtlety and depth of her ideas need more than one reading to appreciate them. Besides promoting thinking, Payback would seem to also promote curious fushigis. (Click on link to see definition.)

Noam Chomsky

The first fushigi in this round of reading begins with my recent viewing of a Chomsky interview by BBC's Jeremy Paxman, Tuesday, 8 March 2011, in which Chomsky describes his concern about the presence of antinomianism in American political and economic leadership with an example of each. He doesn't use the word 'antinomianism,' but that is what he is describing.

I've transcribed the relevant bits from the interview here:

@19:47minutes
NC: ... Take a look at the new Congress, for example. Just about every new congressional representative that came in last November is a climate denier. In fact the congress has already moved to ban funding for the most mild environmental efforts, and furthermore, unfortunately many of these people are true believers. The head of one of the congressional sub-committees, new Republican, explained that global warming can't be a problem because God promised Noah that there wouldn't be another flood. Others are supported —

JP: But why do you care about stupid people?

NC: Stupid people?! These people have power. And they're carrying out actions! They're carrying out the actions which are defunding possible efforts to do something about these crimes. Furthermore they're backed by major concentrations of power. The major business lobbies for example, have announced that they're funding big propaganda campaigns to convince people that this doesn't matter. These are serious issues. Incidentally if you want to look at stupid people we find them all over the place. For example we happen to be right in the middle of a huge financial crisis. People have noticed. You can trace that back. A lot of it comes from a fanatic religious belief in what's called the efficient market hypothesis. It's pure fanaticism. Dominated the economics profession. Dominated the federal reserve. The one consequence was that when an eight trillion dollar housing bubble developed totally unrelated to any fundamentals; completely off the hundred year history of housing prices, the profession — the feds the central bank — say it wasn't necessary to pay attention because of efficient markets. Is that very different from God promised Noah?

Okay, so while this isn't quite antinomian, it has the same flavour. (And, of course, I do find it an interesting logical slip that the congressman who expressed that belief has failed to include specifically whether or not God was referring just to His own actions with regards to a cataclysmic flood, or those of men as well.)

Atwood Photo fushigi

So, here is Margaret Atwood discussing the soul being pawned in the sense that the soul, like a pawned item, is redeemable from 'original sin.' And her discussion moves to those who do not need to redeem their souls because they belong to a special cadre, the antinomians, who are neither tainted by original sin nor can create sin regardless any action or inaction they may or may not take.

The debt load of sin you've inherited from Adam — "Original Sin" as it's known — which has been added to through your own probably not very original sins — can never be repaid by you, because the sum total is too large. So unless someone steps forward on your behalf your soul will become (a) extinct or (b) a slave of the Devil in Hell, to be disposed of in some unpleasant way. Various of these ways are described by Dante, where Hell is ruled over by a really horrible version of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado,

ingeniously bent on making the punishment fit the crime. If that's too medieval for you, a shorter rendition can be had in the sermon on Hell incorporated into James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

During their lifetimes, all souls not in a state of grace or actually sold to the Devil fully and finally are believed to be in an intermediate condition; in peril, but not fully damned as yet. Christ is thought to have redeemed all souls, in theory at least, by having acted as a cosmic Sin Eater — he took everyone else's sins upon himself at the Crucifixion, where, with Geshtinanna-like selflessness, he offered himself up as the substitute human sacrifice to end all substitute human sacrifices — thereby redeeming the huge Original Sin debt. But individuals must also participate in this drama: in effect, you must redeem yourself by allowing yourself to be redeemed.

Thus all the souls of the living can be thought of as residing in a pawnshop of the soul, neither entirely slaves nor entirely free. Time is running out. Will you be redeemed before the clock strikes midnight and the Grim Reaper arrives — or, worse. Old Nick in his red suit, ready to pop you into his infernal collecting sack? Hang by your fingertips! It's never over till it's over!

This is what gives the Christian life its dramatic tension: you never know. You never know, that is, unless you're a believer in the Antinomian Heresy. If you are, you're so certain of your own salvation that even the most despicable things you do are right, because it's you doing them. Here's a summation of this position, taken from a 2005 article in the London Telegraph in which the author, Sam Leith, suggests that Tony Blair, the ex-prime minister of England, was in the grip of this heresy:

Roughly put, antinomianism — and this will have to be roughly put, since I make no claim to be a theologian — is the idea that justification by faith liberates you from the need to do good works. Righteousness overrides the law— which was, arguably, the PM's position on Iraq.

It can be seen, in some way, as the squaring of a tricky theological circle: the Calvinist idea that the Elect have been singled out for salvation as part of the divine scheme long before any of them were twinkles in the twinkles in their ancestors' eyes. If justification by faith, rather than by works, is the high road to heaven, the logical extreme of the position is that works don't matter at all.

Divine grace, over which we'have no control, brings about faith. Faith brings about salvation. Ergo, if you're not touched by grace, there's nothing much you can do about it except look forward to an immensely long retirement having your toes warmed by the devil in the pitchfork hotel.

If, on the other hand, you are one of the Elect, whoop de doo: Jesus wants you for a sunbeam and no amount of bad behaviour is going to prevent him seeing you right. This is a pretty crazy view to take, most of us would agree, and historically it has tended to be discouraged by both civic and religious authorities for rather obvious reasons. But there it is ('Blair Believes He Can Do No Wrong: Just Ask the Antinomians" Telegraph.co.uk 2 March 2008.)

Since politicians, at least in the English-speaking West, are showing an increasing tendency to drag religion into politics, it would seem fair for the electorate to be able to question them on their own theological views. "Do you believe that you personally are irrevocably saved, that any graft, fraud, lying, torturing, or other criminal activities you may engage in are fully justified because you're one of the Elect and can do no wrong, that to the pure such as yourself all things are pure, and that the vast majority of those you say you wish to represent as their political leader are vile and worthless and predestined to fry in hell, so why should you give a damn about them?" would seem to be an appropriate lead-off at question time(68-70).

And that is the first of the odd little fushigis this book has brought me while reading it and Chomsky.

The second one is similarly amusing, but perhaps a bit more so because it connects to my last blog on Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival. And what makes it additionally amusing, at least to me, is that it brings an example of the curious nature of the unconscious. I read Payback last year, and so its contents have at least passed from my consciousness and into my unconscious. So, you can take this with some salt. In my Hegemony or Survival review I wrote:

I ask myself whether or not the expanding bankruptcy of what were once viable public school systems is an accident due to incompetency and delusion, or part of the concomitantly expanding corporate and wealthy tax 'breaks' that have been successfully enriching the wealthy and, with the delusion of Wal-mart wealth, impoverishing everyone else? I am siding on the planned side, because under-funding public schools would help impoverish the poor and enrich the people who run the country by contributing to one of the biggest growth industries in the USA — the expanding prison system.

So, after writing that, without any conscious memory of having read the following, I wind up re-reading:

..."paying your debt to society" didn't often mean a fine. Instead it meant an execution or a jail term. Let's ponder this in the light of everything we've said about the debtor and the creditor as joined-at-the-hip twins balanced on the two sides of a scale, with equilibrium arriving when all debts are paid. If the person being executed or jailed is the debtor who's thought to owe something to somebody, and if that creditor is society, in what way does society benefit from the execution or the incarceration? It certainly doesn't profit financially, since it costs a bundle to put people on trial and then lock them up, or cut off their heads, or disembowel them, or burn them at the stake, or electrify them so that smoke comes out of their ears, and so forth. So there must be some other kind of payment intended.

If we were still operating on a strict Mosaic eye-for- an-eye repayment scheme, there would be some sense to the execution part—that is, if the individual being executed had murdered someone. One dead body would result in another dead body, thus balancing the scales. But doing time in jail isn't an obvious equivalent of anything—that's why the jail-time verdicts for any given crime vary so widely from era to era and from place to place — and the material benefit to society is not only zero, it's considerably less than zero, because it's not the jailed criminal who's actually paying for anything, it's the taxpayer. And the two commonly heard justifications for locking people up ~ as a deterrent to other would-be crime committers, and as a way of accomplishing the moral improvement of the locked-up person—don't appear to work out very well in money terms. Education is a better and cheaper deterrent, community service a better and cheaper moral improver.

Alas, the kind of payment actually meant by "paying for your crimes" really amounts to vengeance. So the debit side — the crime itself, and the ruination it may have caused to others — and the credit side — the self-righteous gloating, the feeling that the scum-bucket is getting a well-deserved comeuppance — can't really be translated into cash equivalents at all. Similarly, some debts can never be money debts: they're debts of honour. With these, it's felt that other forms of payment must be exacted, and these other forms most often have to do with the infliction of nasty blunt- or sharp-implement procedures on other people's bodies. "Hamlet, remember," says the ghost of Hamlet's father, but he doesn't mean that Hamlet should go to Claudius and say, "So, you murdered my dad, that'll be a thousand ducats."

Hamlet, remember me. I.v.

He means that the accounts will not be balanced until Claudius is dead, not of old age but of revenge at the hand of Hamlet (124-5 my emphasis).

So, is that a fushigi or simply an example of the unconscious expressing itself in a curious way? I think it is both because even though what I wrote in my review is a paraphrase of Atwood's comments, how does that explain the timing of my writing it within a day or so of my 'accidently' re-reading? And it is possible that many fushigis are in fact creative expressions of the unconscious, especially the collective unconscious.

And there is one more flavour to add to this strange brew.

While re-re-reading Atwood's discussion on the difference between revenge and justice while preparing this blog, the 'eye-for-eye' bit brought to my mind the episode "Bangers in the House" of David E. Kelley's

David E. Kelly

series 'Harry's Law'. In that episode the lawyer was asked to provide a balanced judgement on the behaviour of two gang members in different gangs who were antagonizing each other because of a girl. The brilliant, skilled and experienced lawyer, Harry, was unable to fulfill this function because her notion of justice was inadequate to deal with what was required to make a fair judgment. In this case fair needed to mean that both of the gang leaders, who each felt aggrieved by a member of the other gang, had to feel that balance had been restored between them. The balancing justice that was needed was quite creative, and on the surface appeared brutal.

In light of my re-reading this section of Payback this isn't a fushigi, but it sure is a curious example of how themes or ideas being explored in life oftentimes overlap in odd, or even metaphorical ways. And by the way, I am thoroughly enjoying 'Harry's Law' and would like it to make it, so please give it a try. The episodes are mostly available on line — I think.

Photo fushigi addendum. As I was cobbling this thing together, I stumbled into just one last fushigi.

Just before finishing up I decided that I wanted to patch in an image of Atwood, so I did a Google 'search and grab'. It turns out that there are a lot to choose from — 467,000 in .09 seconds, according to Google. So many choices, so little time. But I got lucky, and saw on the first page an image that looked like her talking, which fit perfectly with what I wanted to do. It is the the one you see above. However, in order to copy the image I needed to connect to its link, which turns out to be a on-line edition of a British newspaper's story about Margaret Atwood being shortlisted for Canada's national business book award for, yup, Payback. Now that is truly strange, in no small part because I had no idea that such an award existed, let alone that Atwood had been shortlisted for it or that Naomi Klein won it in 2001 for No-Logo.

2011.03.20 — Language & Responsibility, Payback and a fushigi

This fushigi blog began in the blog "2011.03.18 —Language and Responsibility - Finished 2011.02.24." But even though it began with Noam Chomsky's Lang. & Resp., I'll begin here with Margaret Atwood.

In Payback she mentions the idea of a 'mental organ' associated with the concept of debt. She doesn't use the phrase 'mental organ' — that is a phrase from Lang. & Resp. — but this idea forms the pith of this fushigi. She refers to 'gene-linked configurations' as building blocks to what makes us fundamentally Human Sapiens Sapiens. Here is what she wrote:

... perhaps debt exists because we imagine it. It is the forms this imagining has taken — and their impact on lived reality — that I would like to explore.

Our present attitudes toward debt are deeply embedded in our entire culture — culture being, as primatologist Frans de Waal has said, "an extremely powerful modifier — affecting everything we do and are, penetrating to the core of human existence." But perhaps there are some even more basic patterns being modified.

Let's assume that all of the things human beings do — the good, the bad, and the ugly — can be located on a smorgasbord of behaviours with a sign on it reading Homo sapiens sapiens. These things aren't on the smorgasbord labelled Spiders, which is why we don't spend a lot of time eating bluebottle flies, nor are they on the smorgasbord labelled Dogs, which is why we don't go around marking fire hydrants with our glandular scents or shoving our noses into bags of old garbage. Part of our human smorgasbord has actual food on it, for, like all species, we are driven by appetite and hunger. The rest of the dishes on the table contain less concrete fears and desires — things such as "I'd like to fly," "I'd like to have sexual intercourse with you," "War is unifying to the tribe," "I'm afraid of snakes," and "What happens to me when I die?"

But there's nothing on the table that isn't based on or linked to our rudimentary human patterns — what we want, what we don't want, what we admire, what we despise, what we love, and what we hate and fear. Some geneticists even go so far as to speak of our "modules," as if we were electronic systems with chunks of functional circuitry that can be switched on and off. Whether such discrete modules actually exist as part of our genetically determined neural wiring is at present still a matter for experiment and debate. But in any case, I'm assuming that the older a recognizable pattern of behaviour is — the longer it's demonstrably been with us — the more integral it must be to our human-ness and the more cultural variations on it will be in evidence.

I'm not proposing a stamped-in-tin immutable "human nature" here — epigeneticists point out that genes can be expressed, or "switched on," and also suppressed in various ways, depending on the environment in which they find themselves. I'm merely saying that without gene-linked configurations — certain building blocks or foundation stones, if you like — the many variations of basic human behaviours that we see around us would never occur at all. An online video game such as Evercjuest, in which you have to work your way up from rabbit-skinner to castle-owning knight by selling and trading, co-operating with fellow players on group missions, and launching raids on other castles, would be unthinkable if we were not both a social species and one aware of hierarchies.

What corresponding ancient inner foundation stone underlies the elaborate fretwork of debt that surrounds us on every side? Why are we so open to offers of presenttime advantage in exchange for future though onerous repayment? Is it simply that we re programmed to snatch the low-hanging fruit and gobble down as much of it as we can, without thinking ahead to the fruitless days that may then lie ahead of us? Well, partly: seventy-two hours without fluids or two weeks without food and you're most likely dead, so if you don't eat some of that low-hanging fruit right now you aren't going to be around six months later to congratulate yourself on your capacity for selfrestraint and delayed gratification. In that respect, credit cards are almost guaranteed to make money for the lender, since "grab it now" may be a variant of a behaviour selected for in hunter-gatherer days, long before anyone ever thought about saving up for their retirement. A bird in the hand really was worth two in the bush then, and a bird crammed into your mouth was worth even more. But is it just a case of short-term gain followed by longterm pain? Is debt created from our own greed or even — more charitably — from our own need?

I postulate that there's another ancient inner foundation stone without which debt and credit structures could not exist: our sense of fairness. Viewed in the best light, this is an admirable human characteristic. Without our sense of fairness, the bright side of which is "one good turn deserves another," we wouldn't recognize the fairness of paying back what we've borrowed, and thus no would ever be stupid enough to lend anything to anyone else with an expectation of return (10-3).

I think this is interesting in itself, but now I here is one of the references to it in Lang. & Resp., brought up, here, by Mitsou Ronat, Chomsky's interviewer:

N.C.: We may think of universal grammar as the system of principles which characterizes the class of possible grammars by specifying how particular grammars are organized (what are the components and their relations), how the different rules of these components are constructed, how they interact, and so on.
M.R.: It is a sort of metatheory.

N.C.: And a set of empirical hypotheses bearing on the biologically determined language faculty. The task of the child learning a language is to choose from among the grammars provided by the principles of universal grammar that grammar which is compatible with the limited and imperfect data presented to him. That is to say, once again, that language acquisition is not a step-by-step process of generalization, association, and abstraction, going from linguistic data to the grammar, and that the subtlety of our understanding transcends by far what is presented in experience.

M.R.: The expression "mental organ" has appeared on occasion in these hypotheses...

N.C.: I think that is a correct and useful analogy, for reasons we have already discussed. The problems concerning this "mental organ" are very technical, perhaps too much so to enter into detail here. A particular grammar includes rewriting rules, transformational rules, lexical rules, rules of semantic and phonological interpretation. It seems that there are several components in a grammar, several classes of rules, each having specific properties, linked in a manner determined by the principles of universal grammar. The theory of universal grammar has as its goal to determine precisely the nature of each of these components of the grammar and their interaction. For reasons we have already discussed—having to do with the uniformity of acquisition of a highly complex and articulated structure on the basis of limited data—we can be sure that universal grammar, once we have understood it correctly, imposes severe restrictions on the variety of possible rule systems...(180-1).

I think that this is an interesting, albeit little, fushigi. But the idea of a 'mental organ' relating to language is particularly fascinating, and I explore it more fully on my blog Lang & Resp.

2011.02.13 — Payback 2nd Time

Since reading this the first time in 2009, I knew that I would be re-reading it, especially in conjunction with my putting together my anti-economics course, Economics Demystified. And so, the re-read is simply delightful, as I'm taking my time to think about her arguments and observations. (And I will be blogging, soon, I hope, a curious fushigi between something Atwood wrote and Noam Chomsky in Language and Politics.)

Very early in the book (p3-6), Atwood talks about the role of 'faith' in how money/debt functions. I am incorporating her text into my lecture notes, but it is interesting enough to post here. Given that it is a bit longer than what copyright rules allow, I've included links to the publisher for those who would like to purchase this excellent book.

Margaret Atwood

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

Toronto: House of Anansi Press 2008

ISBN 9780887848100

So, from Payback: Are banks like tooth fairies?

We kids of the 1940s did usually have some pocket money, and although we weren't supposed to talk about it or have an undue love of it, we were expected to learn to manage it at an early age. When I was eight years old, I had my first paying job. I was already acquainted with money in a more limited way — I got five cents a week as an allowance, which bought a lot more tooth decay then than it does now. The pennies not spent on candy I kept in a tin box that had once held Lipton tea. It had a brightly coloured Indian design, complete with elephant, opulent veiled lady, men in turbans, temples and domes, palm trees, and a sky so blue it never was. The pennies had leaves on one side and king's heads on the other, and were desirable to me according to their rarity and beauty: King George the Sixth, the reigning monarch, was common currency and thus low-ranking on my snobby little scale, and also he had no beard or moustache; but there were still some hairier George the Fifths in circulation, and, if you were lucky, a really fur-faced Edward the Seventh or two.

I understood that these pennies could be traded for goods such as ice cream cones, but I did not think them superior to the other units of currency used by my fellow children: cigarette-package airplane cards, milk-bottle tops, comic books, and glass marbles of many kinds. Within each of these categories, the principle was the same: rarity and beauty increased value. The rate of exchange was set by the children themselves, though a good deal of haggling took place.

All of that changed when I got a job. The job paid twenty-five cents an hour—a fortune! —and consisted of wheeling a baby around in the snow. As long as I brought the baby back, alive and not too frozen, I got the twenty-five cents. It was at this time in my life that each penny came to be worth the same as every other penny, despite whose head was on it, thus teaching me an important lesson: in high finance, aesthetic considerations soon drop by the wayside, worse luck.

Since I was making so much money, I was told I needed a bank account, so I graduated from the Lipton tea tin and acquired a red bank book. Now the difference between the pennies with heads on them and the marbles, milk-bottle tops, comic books, and airplane cards became clear, because you could not put the marbles into the bank. But you were urged to put your money in there, in order to keep it safe. When I'd accumulated a dangerous amount of the stuff—say, a dollar—I would deposit it at the bank, where the sum was recorded in pen and ink by an intimidating bank teller. The last number in the series was called "the balance"— not a term I understood, as I had yet to see a two-armed weighing scales.

Every once in a while an extra sum would appear in my red bank book—one I hadn't deposited. This, I was told, was called "interest," and I had "earned" it by having kept my money in the bank. I didn't understand this either. It was certainly interesting to me that I had some extra money — that must be why it was called "interest"— but I knew I hadn't actually earned it: no babies from the bank had-been wheeled around in the snow by me. Where then had these mysterious sums come from? Surely from the same imaginary place that spawned the nickels left by the Tooth Fairy in exchange for your shucked-off teeth: some realm of pious invention that couldn't be located anywhere exactly, but that we all had to pretend to believe in or the tooth-for-a-nickel gambit would no longer work.

However, the nickels under the pillow were real enough. So was the bank interest, because you could cash it in and turn it back into pennies, and thence into candy and ice cream cones. But how could a fiction generate real objects? I knew from fairy tales such as Peter Pan that if you ceased to believe in fairies they would drop dead: if I stopped believing in banks, would they too expire? The adult view was that fairies were unreal and banks were real. But was that true?

Thus began my financial puzzlements. Nor are they over yet (3-6).

Payback: Finished 2009.08.09

☆☆☆☆☆

Finished, 2009.08.09

Began 2009.08.03

Lots in this book to think about.

And some curious examples of how language points to the meaning society has placed and places in things. For example, did you know that a mortgage is a death pledge? ('Mort' death, 'gage' pledge.)

And did you know that there are two (at least!) distinctly different versions of the Lord's Prayer? Until this book I absolutely did not know this, and the difference is puzzling. Here's how Atwood writes it:

... Among the things we memorized [in school] was the Lord's Prayer, which contained the line, 'Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.' However, my brother sang in an Anglican boys' choir, and the Anglicans had a different way of saying the same line: 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.' The word 'debt — blunt and to the point — was well fitted to the plain, grape-juice-drinking United Church, and 'trespasses' was an Anglican word, rustling and frilly, that would go well with wine-sipping for Communion and more ornate theology. But did these two words mean the same thing, really? I didn't see how they could. 'Trespassing' was stepping on other people's property, especially if there was a No Trespassing, and 'debt' was when you owed money. But somebody must have thought they were interchangeable. One thing was clear even to my religiously addled child mind, however: neither debts nor trespasses were desirable things to have (44-5).

[The Wikipedia has a quite interesting discussion on the several versions of the Lord's Prayer, which includes a version that uses 'sin' in place of 'debt/trespass'.]

Perhaps most interesting is that she looks at history in a way that fully discloses how limited is the thinking of our society — if a society can think. In my reading between Atwood's lines, I see her having reaffirmed C.P. Snow's caution that societies do not learn from history, as they fixate on current practices as unswerving truths of what has always been. Atwood's link between what is acceptable social practices and sin is most remarkable, and erudite. And her link between language and these sin/truths is delightful and powerful. For example, at one time lending was far more sinful than borrowing, and now lending is perhaps the cornerstone of the modern economic/social truth, i.e. of capitalism's supreme ultimate authority of truth-in-proper-society, and bad debt-management a sin.

For me this book re-emphasizes the 'truth' that, in general, the people least capable of leading us are our formally educated graduates of business and leaders of industry. Because generally, they have no history beyond numbers, these forward thinking leaders take as meaningful today's numbers for tomorrow's quarterly report with no eye to the rise and fall of civilizations.

I did find the closing ghost of the re-told Scrooge story a bit ... I am tempted to say sappy and perhaps a bit preachy. I hesitate writing this, even as I write it, because I am not sure how it could not be written 'preachily', given the story-line it is emulating, and its purpose. But ... I don't know. Perhaps I am reacting against its glimmer of hope, given that I am not hopeful. And that brings up a curious emotional wrestling match — is it because I am not in my nature hopeful that I, like many who watch Alistair Sim's Scrooge transform against all odds, feel tears of joy/relief well up in my eyes? Hmmmm.

But even this irritation does not take from it any ☆s. On the other hand, perhaps because it has pricked at my beliefs irritatingly, it is more than worthy of the five stars I have given it.

Thank you Ruth T., for lending me the book. It looks like I will now be going to buy my own copy to re-examine and mark-up.

Payback: Begun - 2009.08.03

My friend and serious book worm Ruth T. finished reading...

Margaret Atwood

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

Toronto: House of Anansi Press 2008

ISBN 9780887848100

... the other week, and promptly lent it to me as a book I would like.

And thus I began my read August 3, 2009.

Finished 2009.08.09

There is no question that Atwood can write, and from the opening sentences you can feel that you are going to be entertainingly informed and challenged. Looking forward to finishing this one.