Not The Bourne Ultimatum after all

I did a dumb thing. I was on a very boring business trip, and I needed something else to read. So I bought a book. Despite my usual aversion to buying books republished with movie scenes on the cover to encourage more sales, I did in fact buy The Bourne Ultimatum. I couldn’t help it! The back matter was intriguingly written and I wanted to know what happened. So I bought the book, and I read it.

In and of itself, that was not the dumb thing. The dumb thing was reading the book just a few weeks before the movie of the same name came out. I mean, I have nothing against a good Matt Damon action movie. He’s good-looking, the action was fast-paced, there was lots of suspense and intrigue. It wasn’t a bad movie, nor were its predecessors. And if you’ve never read any of the books and only seen the movies, they even make a great deal of sense. (For a series of contrived spy action movies, I mean.)

However, and I admit that it is entirely my own fault that this annoys me, they have nothing to do with the books. At all. Yes, they star a character named Jason Bourne who lost his memory and turns out to be a super spy. But at that point, pretty much all plot similarity is abandoned, leaving me to wonder why they didn’t just give the character, and the movies, different names, and just not deal with buying the rights to the books or whatever at all. Because it would have been a lot easier, and then the script writers wouldn’t have had to feel so wracked with horrible guilt for completely erasing the plots of a perfectly good series of books for a new generation of people. (And if they do not feel this crushing guilt, they should.)

On This Day in 1961

The Berlin Wall was erected. Actually, in the very beginning, it wasn’t a wall at all — it was simply barbed wire. It lent itself to scenes like this, of East German border guards easily escaping to the West. It’s been 46 years since then, and we continue to blindly build walls, thinking it will solve our conflicts (see Cyprus, Northern Ireland, Israel or Iraq). Of course, a wall has never solved a conflict, only delayed and complicated its resolution.

Perhaps in November, on the anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall, I’ll write more about this, one of my “favorite” subjects. But until then, you’ll have to make do wondering, like me, how middle-aged Swede Eija-Riitta Eklöf-Berliner-Mauer celebrates today. Ms. Eklöf-Berliner-Mauer, a self-described “objectum-sexual,” claims to have been married to the Wall since 1979. That makes today her hubby’s birthday. Do you suppose she bakes a cake? (If you have access to a library, you can read more about objectum sexuality in the short, original article, “Relations with Concrete Others: (or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Berlin Wall)” by Dominic Pettman and Justin Clemens.)

Nashi — the Kremlin’s Youth Movement

The New York Times has produced a 12-minute video about Nashi (Ours) which, despite some incorrect translating, is worth a watch.

When I studied abroad in Moscow in 2001, the youth groups V Puti (In Motion, literally “On the Way,” a clear pun on Putin’s name) and Idushchiye Vmestye (Walking Together) were just becoming active. At the time, following a nationwide gathering in Moscow, the Moscow Times broke a few stories about the young people who became group leaders because they were given free cell phones, and about all of those who boarded buses and traveled hours in tee-shirts with Putin’s face on them to march for a couple hours, who had been promised a free day and activities in the capital many of them had never visited. They complained to interviewers when these promises — the singular reason for their participation — were not upheld.

The video outlines similar motivations for Nashi’s activists today: free summer camp, seminars and trainings, the hope to rise in Russia’s biggest companies or within the government. If you have to identify Garry Kasparov, the chess champion who has recently taken up opposition politics, as an American citizen or march with some war veterans on Victory Day, well then so be it.

How much these young people really believe, despite their willingness to espouse this rhetoric, is entirely another question. Just as one journalist in the piece notes how well this youth movement imitates independent political action while in fact acting as a puppet of the Kremlin, these youths may be convincingly imitating followers to disguise their purely selfish motivations for participation.

A common claim not touched upon in the video is that Nashi may soon become too popular for the Kremlin’s own good, that the imitation of protests and staged actions develops a cadre of politically experienced youth, and that they may have in fact created a monster which will ultimately come back to haunt them. This supposition, though not unimaginable, of course remains to be seen.

As sure as the sun will rise

When I moved several months ago, one of the major tasks I had to face was finding a place to live. While personal matters (living close to my significant other) were certainly the primary factor in my choice, I, like most people, considered a wide array of other issues as well. Things like the cost of rent, proximity to my new job and the grocery store, the neighborhood around where I live, and the lack or availability of particular amenities like air conditioning in the dwelling all factored into my decision.

While driving to work today, I realized that there was a hugely important consideration that I had entirely neglected, and which I suspect most other people entirely ignore when looking for a new home. Since I’ve moved, I have found that my commute to and from work has been notably less onerous than it used to be. This is strange to me, because my drive is not really any shorter than it ever was, and if anything, the traffic is worse. In spite of this, my whole experience is improved by the simple fact that I now live East of where I work.

Living to the east of my workplace is great because it means that when I am driving into work in the morning, I am heading West, with the rising sun at my back. In the evening, driving Eastward home, the setting sun is once again at my back. Prior to my move, the opposite was true.

New Blogroll Additions: Geek Buffet Writers and Other Post-Grinnellians

Some new additions to the blogroll for you:

Our own poetloverrebelspy (aka Hilary) has started another blog, Less Than a Shoestring, “Budget Travel Tips for People with No Budget.” As she says in her introductory post:

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of budget travel advice from newspaper writers with $100/day accommodation budgets.

Hear, hear! We will read on with interest.

Also, even though it’s been in the blogroll since the blog started, I thought I’d take a moment to highlight another blog by a Geek Buffet writer. kidsilkhaze (aka Jennie) reviews books extensively over at Biblio File. Given that she is a children’s librarian, she focuses mostly on children’s and young adult literature, but occasionally throws in other stuff she’s been reading as well. Whether or not you intend to read the books she’s talking about, the reviews are always interesting, so read it even if you don’t have kids in your life to buy books for.

And finally, Body In Motion is a blog being written by another graduate of Grinnell, our dear alma mater (for most of us here, anyway). The author is an international public health worker, currently between posts, but soon on her way back to Africa. She was most recently posted in Congo. Interesting reports from places not many of us go, about important issues most of us don’t experience first hand. Plus, interesting travel.

Not that we have a travel or book bias here or anything…

Have We Forgotten How to Vacation?

Author Walter Kern recently attacked the idea that Americans are vacationing less and working more while supposedly on vacation. He describes the basic problem thusly:

. . . a nation of remarkably productive, often well-paid workers who are becoming increasingly reluctant to pause from their labors and refresh their souls — a nation whose cash-drenched corporate employers typically don’t pay for much time off (less than two weeks annually, on average), a nation whose globe-gripping federal government is the only one in the whole industrialized world not to legally require generous periods of paid kick-back-and-hang time — is a nation that’s socially screwed up, particularly in comparison with European countries like France, which orders its citizens outside to play for the entire month of August and a few other weeks spread through the year.

He argues that workers are afraid of obsolescence when others perform their tasks in their absence, perhaps better than the vacationer, while at the same time, both workplaces and our daily lives contain ever more elements of the escape that vacation is to provide, citing day spas and movie theaters as new temples of rejuvenation. Thus, so Kern, the desire to vacation less is rooted in market-wide job insecurity; and we’re not as vacation-starved as it appears, as we take mini-vacations through a number of activities which have become mainstream enough to appear in every strip mall.

Yet can a weekly yoga class take the place of a four-week vacation every summer? I believe the answer, very clearly, is no.

Jonathan Coulton

I like the nerdcore and all, but when it comes down to it I prefer the nerd rock. I was never really exposed to too much popular music as a kid. One summer I went to camp and heard a friend’s They Might Be Giants CD (Apollo 18), and I was sold. I somehow went years without actually hearing the songs again, but through all that time I never forgot the haunting melody to the Fingertips song that went “Please pass the milk please” and my all time favorite, “I’m having a heart attack.”

Well, I’ve found a new obsession. Jonathan Coulton is a one-man nerd brigade. For one thing, he’s embraced the Creative Commons copyright system, which speaks to the decidedly nerdy interest in intellectual property. He gives away many of his songs for free on his website, and the rest can still be listened to for free at the site.

Hyperwhite Rap

As a timely follow-up to the NYT article about Mary Bucholtz’s linguistic research on geeks as a subgroup, yesterday they had another article about the phenomenon of geek rap, better known as nerdcore hip-hop. While Language Log has already covered more of the strictly linguistic aspects of this, I had to write about it as well.

I was glad to see an article about this so soon after the first article. When I was discussing the first article with some friends, I thought that Bucholtz (and the writer profiling her) had missed something with the emphasis on the way nerds eschew “cool”/”black” slang in their language. “Hasn’t she ever heard of nerdcore?” I asked. Given that her study group was just in high school, and studied nearly 10 years ago, I suspect the answer is no, but even so, Weird Al was around back then. (Witness his song, “White and Nerdy.”)

The NYT nerdcore article strikes me as a little weird, because it focuses so much on MC Chris (aka Mr. Ward), who appears determined to bring nerdcore into the mainstream.

In conversation, Mr. Ward was quick to point out that the term “nerdcore” — coined by fellow rapper MC Frontalot in 2000 — may be too self-limiting, because “nerds” are hardly the only children of the ’80s who were raised on Transformers, Indiana Jones movies, and Public Enemy.

It also opens with a scene of MC Chris tut-tutting at his fans for being unable to join him in a singalong of a mainstream pop song.

And when MC Chris invited the audience to join him in a campy singalong of the saccharine Sean Kingston hit “Beautiful Girls,” the boisterous crowd suddenly grew uncertain, devolving into an awkward mumble that sounded like a few hundred high school wallflowers simultaneously being turned down for a slow dance.

“We nerds,” MC Chris clucked in mock-disapproval. “We got no rhythm. We can’t do nothing right.”

This seemed really weird to me, because it seems to be quite counter to the feeling I get from both my own geek community and the nerdcore I listen to. The bit of the article focusing on MC Frontalot, (who I admit I am partial to, hence his presence in the sidebar,) seemed more representative of the less apologetically geeky community:

Death of the Author

There are Harry Potter spoilers in this post AFTER the break.

Amazingly enough, as a children’s literacy professional, I am on several email discussion lists about (wait for it) children’s literature. Shocking, I know.

So, just in case you live in a cave, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out on July 21st. Hopefully you won’t be surprised to hear that most discussion lately on these lists has revolved around the adventures of some teenage wizards and final showdown with big bad Lord Voldemort.

But here’s what’s gotten everyone’s panties in a twist–the fact that J. K. Rowling has the GALL AND NERVE to go on live television and in live chat sessions with fans and give them information about the lives of her characters that didn’t make it into the epilogue.

Now, I’m no literary theorist. But, apparently, there’s a school of thought by one of the big philosopher names I’ve never read nor studied, about the Death of the Author. And that’s what these people are arguing for. The book is the only evidence we get of the story– everything beyond what is on the page is up to the reader. If she hasn’t published it, it doesn’t count. And therefore all of her interviews, answering fan’s questions, are narcissim and unfairly intrusive on the reader’s experience.

Excuse me?!