O’Donnell is a very insightful guy. He thinks about politics better than anyone I know of. This is amazing.

In 1855, Walt Whitman self-published the first version of Leaves of Grass. This version of the book was only 95 pages long and did not include the poem “I Sing the Body Electric.” It would have to wait for the 120 page, 1871 edition. (The final edition was 438 pages in 1891.) Don’t believe the many sources that claim the poem was published in 1855. Regardless of the extra 16 years, this is by far the first time anyone wrote or (following Chomsky) said these words:[1]

I bring this up only because there seems to be a lot of confusion over this point, because a lot of people have borrowed from Whitman without mention. I suspect many were more influenced by Ray Bradbury than Walt Whitman. Bradbury does mention Whitman. In the screenplay of The Twilight Zone episode “I Sing The Body Electric” (Season 3, Episode 35) three lines from the beginning of the poem are heard. I assume it is based on an earlier short story with the same title. It is a strange little tale about a widower who needs someone to care for his children after their mother dies. Human replacements like nannies and babysitters don’t seem to be working, so they go to a company called “I Sing the Body Electric.” This company creates an electronic grandmother—who looks human—for the family. With her love and care, the family is saved. Then she goes back to the factory. The crowd goes wild.

Today, most people know Whitman’s line from the song sung in the film Fame. You can watch and hear it in all its glory on YouTube (more and more stuff on YouTube is not allowed to be embedded—I don’t know why). Alan Parker makes it all work far better than it deserves; the man is amazing. The song itself only includes the one line; the rest of the lyrics (which are pretty cheese if you listen) are by Wade Lassister. (Sorry Wade, but the song wouldn’t have been a hit if they hadn’t been.)

When you think of “I sing the body electric,” you have Walt Whitman to thank. Certainly Bradbury gets some credit for moving the line into science fiction (although it does seem obvious). All the others are just lifters. That’s fine: Whitman belongs to us all. But he ought to get the credit.

[1] This is the first of nine parts—most much longer.

I had planned to write about some important differences I noticed in the Beckett on Film version of Krapp’s Last Tape and the play itself, but I finally got around to watching Lars and the Real Girl and I had two thoughts about it: one emotional and one technical.

No Third Acts

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote in The Love of the Last Tycoon, “There are no second acts in American lives.” And ever since it has been fashionable for people who don’t know a lick about dramatic structure to say he was wrong. They usually assume it means that people don’t have second careers—that is how simplistic the thinking goes. It is never mentioned that this quotation is not from some party that Fitzgerald attended and thus is his opinion, but from the half-finished first draft of a novel. Should we assume that Melville preferred to be called Ishmael, because that’s what he wrote in Moby Dick? Of course not. And the same logic should be applied to Fitzgerald, especially given that he might have removed the whole line had he lived long enough. (This is highly doubtful; it is a great line.)

There are first acts in our lives: things go wrong. There are second acts, too: things get more and less complicated. There are not third acts in our lives: there is never any resolution. Much of the brilliance of Waiting for Godot is that its structure is life: every day is a minor variation on the day before. There are no conclusions; nothing is ever resolved. In this way, life is one long second act: complication after complication; we do better sometimes and worse others. Even on the most trite level where we try to cram birth, life, and death into the three acts, there are no third acts; birth and death are not acts—they are events. Fitzgerald’s life itself shows this. Yes, he died. But did he have a massive heart attack just as he typed that last period of that last novel? No. He died having almost half his planned chapters undone: 14 out of 31. It was second act all the way up to falling dead off that armchair.There are no third acts in real life.

Which brings us to Lars and the Real Girl. What are we to make of such a movie? The first half of the film is very funny. Nothing can quite compete with a sex doll in a wheelchair, holding a prayer book in the middle of a church. That is effortless comedy. The second half of the film is a tragedy. The film is basically Love Story with a sex doll and a fourth act tacked on to make everything work out. Since I knew this was the course the film would take from the moment the sex doll arrived (the filmmakers had to lay a little—surprisingly little—groundwork for the fourth act to work), I found myself sobbing throughout the second half of the film—certainly as much as I did during Love Story.

Did the happy fourth act ending make me happy? Of course not. It was just a cheap trick, anyway. And if I don’t think there are third acts in real life, I certainly don’t believe in a follow-up. In real life, far from getting the girl, Lars doesn’t even get his sanity back. Some days are better than others—just like it is for the rest of us.

Modern Films Are Too Long

Lars and the Real Girl is typical of modern films. It comes in at about an hour forty-five, and yet has only about an hour’s worth of content. The first act is way too long, the second act barely exists, its third act is interminable, and its fourth act is just silly. It helps that all of these acts were extremely well done: the dialog and scene construction, art direction, lighting, acting, even editing in as much as it was allowed. I’m sure the editor could have made a near perfect film with the material she was given: it just would have been, as usual, about an hour long.

The first thing one learns as a novelist—even a failed one—is that some stories just don’t lend themselves to a novel. A novel requires a lot of material. Well, so does an hour forty-five film. I wish filmmakers would learn that.

One of my favorite movies is Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (I think it is better than the play). This is probably because of my love-hate relationship with Hamlet and how it shows that Tom Stoppard understood That Bard’s play far better than That Bard. The thing about Hamlet is that it isn’t a good play, but it is a very interesting play. Frankly, I think the reason scholars love it so much is because it makes no sense and they think That Bard couldn’t possibly have written something bad, despite the overwhelming evidence.

Hamlet runs about four and a half hours long, and yet in one brief speech in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (the movie and the play), Rosencrantz sums up the ridiculousness of the plot in one short speech:

To which Guildenstern (pretending to be Hamlet) replies, “I can’t imagine!”

Maybe it is more correct to say that this is what Hamlet ought to be. The truth is, at the start of the play, Hamlet is upset that his father is dead and that his mother married his uncle, but not that he was screwed out of being king. Regardless, he is just sad and disappointed. It is only when his father’s ghost tells him[1] that his murder must be avenged[2] that Hamlet starts behaving badly.

So the play should really be about a guy who gets screwed out of being king and as a result, does something about it. Instead, we get all this nonsense about Claudius killing Hamlet’s father. In truth, the play would be much better if it were told from Claudius’ standpoint. He has a real problem on his hands with Hamlet, who he would just kill except that his wife (and the only reason he is king) loves her only son dearly. None of this really matters except that Hamlet shows all the signs of being a first draft That Bard never got around to fixing.

What I find interesting is that I learned a new word that almost seems as though it were created for Hamlet. In Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, while the title characters are watching the tragedians rehearse, they see Gonzago being murdered by his brother. Guildenstern remarks, “Not exactly fraternal.” To which Player responds, “Not exactly avuncular, as time goes on.” I had heard the word “avuncular” before, but I didn’t know what it meant, so I looked it up. It is basically the same as “fraternal” except that it is for uncles instead of brothers. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines it thus:

So now I know a new word, and have more proof that Tom Stoppard understood Hamlet better than That Bard.

[1] Typical of this long-winded play, it takes 15 minutes from Hamlet being told of his father’s ghost to him actually seeing it.

[2] Hamlet’s father says it in, again, typically long-winded fashion, but here is the critical bit:

I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg’d away.

I just watched the full half-hour interview of Jon Stewart on Bill O’Reilly’s show. The first half of it is quite worth watchin:

The best you will ever do in a political argument of this type is get your opponent to admit that you make some good points, just as Jules says to Vincent at the beginning of Pulp Fiction. But this is rare—especially in a public setting. The way I know I’ve won an argument with someone is when their argument keeps getting changed. This is how I know that Stewart beat O’Reilly all to hell. O’Reilly starts out by saying that no one should be allowed to the Whitehouse who has defended a cop killer. Stewart brings up two examples of others who have done so without O’Reilly flying into a rage (most important, Bono who visited Bush Jr. in the Whitehouse), Suddenly, it isn’t about the fact that Common wrote approvingly about someone he claims was wrongly accused of killing a cop; now it is about the fact that Common visited this person in jail. And it goes on like that. If the argument went on long enough, O’Reilly’s entire case would be that Common has a high-carb diet.

O’Reilly is not really what most people think he is. He has a number of liberal positions on gun control and early-term abortion. But these are just the smokescreen of an smart hater. The entire appeal of his show (and most of Faux News) is that it allows angry people something to be angry about. So O’Reilly has these nice beliefs so he can say, “I can’t be pigeonholed.” But the fact remains that his show is only about anger. He could be a socialist and still do his show. Politics doesn’t really matter. What matters is, “Look at this outrage!”

I’m late getting to this, but I wanted to comment on something that President Obama said on 60 Minutes: “Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn’t deserve what he got needs to have their head examined.” So I guess I need my head examined—but people have been saying that for years, so it shouldn’t shock me that the President of the United States has joined the chorus.

Let me make one thing clear: there are a lot of people whose deaths would make the world a better place and Osama bin Laden was definitely high on that list while he was still alive. I’m not sorry that he’s dead; the world is a better place.

Justice Was Done?

My first complaint is: was justice done? We are at war with al-Qaeda, so we have put them in the place of a country. As far as I know (and I am no expert on this, so I could be wrong), it is against the rules of war to attempt to assassinate the leaders of the country we are at war with. For me, this is like the torture debate. Even if those we fight torture our people, we do not torture their people because that is not who we are. President Obama touched on this when he talked about how we provided bin Laden with an honorable funeral.

Of course, that’s all fantasy because we aren’t in fact at war with al-Qaeda. This was a police action—albeit, carried out by the military. Osama bin Laden was akin to a guy who hires a hitman to kill his wife. All the people who actually killed the roughly 3000 people on 9/11 are dead. So I’m against the military storming the bin Laden compound and shooting him, but not for the reasons you might think. So far as I know, bin Laden ran into a small room when he saw the troops. When the troops entered the room, they found bin Laden hiding behind two of his wives. The troops pushed the women aside. I have not heard any credible reporting that bin Laden was even armed, much less prepared to shoot. In other words, he could easily have been taken alive. But he wasn’t and it is clear why: this was an assassination mission; they had no intention of taking him alive.

That’s what police do, right? They don’t just shoot suspects. And let us not forget that in our culture Osama bin Laden was just a suspect. I think he should have been treated like the banal criminal who he was. Now he’s a martyr for the cause.

The Good Guys

My second complaint is why it is such a big deal that those 3000 deaths were American. Iraqi mothers don’t grieve when their innocent child are accidentally (I use the term advisedly) killed? For that matter, are the wives and children of bin Laden not grieving over his death? Death is death and let’s not let ourselves believe the myth that American lives matter more just because we happened to live in the same country.

But I’m a child. I still hang on to all those ideals I learned in civics classes. I still believe the Cold War rhetoric that taught me that we were different from those other countries that tortured and invaded and set children against their parents. But intellectually, I know: we do torture, we just call it something else; we do invade, we just claim we have just cause or have been invited; and we set children against their parents as all over the nation school children are told to report to the police their drug using parents. But emotionally, I still believe we’re the guys in the white hats. Although Obama didn’t mean it this way, I do need to have my head examined.

As I was browsing through Strunk and White[1] for an upcoming article, I noted some examples of the “wrong”‘ way to write a sentence and the “right” way. And, of course, I agreed; even though I am not a “Strunk and White” man[2], it is hard not to agree with them on most matters grammatical. There is a very big difference between grammatical analysis and writing, however. Consider the following example from the 50th Anniversary Edition of Stunk and White.

I know the second is grammatically correct, just as sure as I know there are times when a writer would rightly use the grammatically wrong construction.[3]

How can I say this? How can I defend it? Very easily it turns out. When I write a sentence, paragraph, article, or book, I just don’t care if the writing is grammatically correct. I just care that the writing works. For example, in a recent song, I wrote:

The issue isn’t that this is poetry and it is okay to play with words and syntax in poetry. I would do and do do the same thing in prose—I just can’t think of any examples at the moment. My point is, however, that while Strunk and White and Fowler and Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences and The Chicago Manual of Style are important to anyone who wants to write well, one must be willing to let them all go to hell. This is writing, not grammar school.

[1] I don’t mean to be cryptic. The book is The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White (Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little). But everybody calls it Strunk and White—perhaps because there are many other books with this title (but none that I know of are about English grammar; they are about things like interior design and knitting) or because writers are a bunch of pretentious twats. On second thought: it is definitely because writers are a bunch of pretentious twats.

[2] Roy Blount Jr. wrote, “After Scott Simon interviewed me on NPR about whether the word ‘e-mail’ needs a hyphen (yes it does) [No it doesn’t! -FM], some listeners, including friends of mine, wondered why I had answered in the affirmative when asked, in passing, ‘Are you a drunken white man?’ Those listeners misheard. ‘Strunk and White man’ was what Scott said.”

[3] In this sentence “sure” is an adverb and does not need an “ly” to announce how I am using it!

According to MSNBC, Donald Trump has announced that he will not run for President of the United States. This is no surprise. I don’t know any reasonable person who thought he would. But the question remains: why did he pretend he was going to run? I don’t think it was to improve the ratings of his show; I think it was just a chance to get a whole lot of attention and he is addicted to attention. This comes on the heals of his “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” moment with President Obama. Trump said he would show his 2010 tax return if Obama would so his long-form birth certificate. Well, Obama showed his long-form birth certificate (which pretty much put an end to Trump’s entire platform), but Trump didn’t show his tax return. But we already knew that Trump was a liar, so no big deal.

Many have said that Trump would not run for President because he would have to give up his show. I don’t buy that. Sure, he makes a lot of money from the show, but it isn’t much compared to even the lowest estimates of his net worth. His net worth, however, is the reason he won’t run. A major part of his “brand” is that he is super rich: multi-billion-dollar rich. If he had run for President, he would have had to disclose how much money he makes. Most recently, he has claimed that he is worth $7 billion. But we all know what a liar he is. If it turned out that he was worth less than a billion dollars, it would have destroyed his celebrity and therefore his life.

Thus, we won’t have Don Trump to kick around any more!

PS: I have a huge soft-spot for ol’ Tricky Dick. Such is my love for the man that I have written an entire puppet play about him. I’ll post it if anyone asks (and no one will).

Almost every day—often many times per day—I ride the Santa Rosa City Bus. Inside each bus are signs that explain (1) the cash fare price for riding for a two-hour period, (2) the City Pass price for riding for a whole month, and (3) the Ticketbook price—ticketbooks being a collection of tickets that are equivalent to a single cash fare. This is what it looks like for the cash fare:

Fare Type       Price
Adult           $1.25
Youth           $1.00
Half            $0.60

The “half” price is for senior citizens and the disabled. I’m sure you can see the obvious problem right away. Sixty cents is most definitely not half the adult fare. But okay, I’ll go with it. After all, there is no longer a half-cent piece, so they couldn’t charge our older riders 62.5 cents. But make no mistake, while youths are getting a 20% discount for being (what?) youthful, oldsters are not just getting a 50% discount for being old; they are getting an extra 2% discount for accounting ease. Thus, they get a 52% discount.

Things get even worse when it comes to the ticket books. Here are the prices:

Fare Type       Ticket Number   Book Price      Ticket Price
Adult           50              $60             $1.20
Youth           40              $38             $0.95
Half            40              $22             $0.55

First note that adults must buy more tickets: 50 instead of just 40 for the youths and oldsters. This seems wrong. Adults are already paying more than the others. Why should they have to buy more tickets at once? But this is a minor, if annoying issue. The more important issue is the per ticket cost.

The per ticket price for adults and youths is reduced by five cents per ride—hardly a great incentive to buy a ticket book. And note that the youth ticket price is a greater percent discount than the adult ticket price (5% compared to the adult 4% discount), even though adults are forced to buy 25% more tickets at once. The bigger annoyance here is the half ticket price. Santa Rosa City Bus, in its infinite wisdom has chosen to give these riders a five cent discount too, even though they already have a 52% discount. What’s more, they skipped the opportunity to reverse the cash fare inequity by making ticketbooks $25 for 40, and increased it by giving half fares an even larger discount (an 8.3% discount compared to the adult 4% discount). An adult ticket is $1.20, but a half ticket is not $0.60 as logic would dictate—it is $0.55!

It is only when we get to the monthly passes that the full extent of Santa Rosa City Bus’ innumeracy is seen. Here are the prices:

Fare Type       Price
Adult           $40
Youth           $30
Half            $20

At long last! For monthly passes, the half fare really does cost half of what the adult fare costs. Of course, this fact only proves that the errors on the daily fare and ticketbook prices are no fluke, and rather the result of ignorance or laziness. But the monthly pass prices are not without problem—this time with the youth prices. When paying daily, youths get a 20% discount compared to adult riders; when paying monthly, they get a 25% discount.

The reason for all of this is to make all of the numbers even and easily remembered. One can tell this by just perusing the numbers. Of course, it would be much more memorable if a 40 pack “half” ticketbook cost $25 rather than $22. So in the end, one is left with the conclusion that whoever set these prices did it cavalierly, without regard to logic or aesthetics.

It is worth noting that Sonoma County Transit—which is not nearly as good a transit company—does not suffer from these problems. Whoever set their prices, did it correctly. As a result, I am not mentally assaulted every time I board a county bus the way I am every time I board a city bus.