The Arrogant Emu

We needn’t expect our actions to be noble; we should be impressed that we’re capable of conceiving of nobility at all.

Why indulge revulsion at ourselves or others? Why not accept the eastern notion that all must be accepted? What is sin? Is there sin? Are Good and Evil of any use to us? Should usefulness be the criteria on which we judge something’s existence? Well, it’s certainly one of the criteria on which we judge the validity of a term for something. What should we desire? Should we desire at all? To stop desiring is to cease to exist. To stop desiring is to exist in harmony with the world. To stop desiring is not to react. To stop desiring is to react according to - what? Should we desire to exist in harmony with the world? Should that be the only thing we desire? Whence this notion of should? Is that not in itself an expression of desire? A distinction between Good and Evil? Without should we lose our capacity to judge an action. We lose our concept of time. We lose our concept of negation. (All insofar as they relate to action). Do we lose imagination? Are any of these things bad? Is that a pertinent question?

Well, without should we are slaves to our appetites, which will say should even when the mind abstains. To be slave to our appetites is to be a beast. Would this be a bad thing? I think it would be a step up for many.

To the should of the body must we oppose the should of the mind? Why? Because we can? We can be other than a beast, it remains to be seen whether other also means more or better. Even the beasts have an idea of more desirable,. Is better an extrapolation of more desirable? The closest analogy to it? The same thing, working from a different definition of desire? The first thing that distinguishes human from beast is the ability to ask for a reason. I will go eat food. Why? Because I am hungry. Why? Because my body needs food. Why? Because it wants to keep living. Why?

And here we are tipped off into the realm of the ind, as you always knew you would be. A mind-question can never receive a definite body-answer. It wants to keep liing. Why? Three possible answers:
-1-It just does. (de gustibus…)
-2- All living things desire to keep living. I am a living thing. Therefore etc. (same thing really, just implies desire as part of the definition of life, a sort of Newton’s First Law for life)
-3- For some reason.

And this reason can then be further questioned, but it will tip us off before long into God, the dead-end of the mind.

It wants to keep living because [living is good and it desires what is good]. Why? Living is good because:

-1- It just is.
-2- Good is defined as that which is, as opposed to that which is not, or some similar response that sees good and living, or good and desire, postulated together.
-3- God made it that way.

What a remarkably unproductive train of thought.

Soul On Ice 6/10 emus

While he succeeds in provoking thought, and is certainly eloquent, the political parts of the book suffer from the same problem as most revolutionary rhetoric. Ranging from t=I’m as mad as hell and not going to take it any more to the most lucid and clear-eyed exposure of a corrupt and dehumanizing system, this revolutin is primarily reaction. This society is intolerable, from its base to its height, its laws are lies, police are pigs, values are self-deception and principles are hollow; no man can know it for what it is and know himself for what he is, and accept this state of affairs.

All this may be quite true and important to realize, but what are you going to do once you’ve torn it down? If you define yourself by hatred of something, then in destroying that thing you’ve destroyed yourself. And if you define yourself by something other than hatred - by shared principles, perhaps, or ideas - then you expose yourself to the terrible danger that not only may some of your enemies share those ideas, but that some of your own may disagree with you. And where is the revolution now?

I think, though, that Cleaver realises or comes to realise this, which may be why the end of the book comes round to sex again, where reconciliation is definite, concrete, and with a firm hope of realization. By the end of the book (much like Souls of Black Folk) the author’s abandoned argument in favor of poetry. Perhaps I find that vision appealing because I like reconciliation and renewal better than hatred and strife, but I don’t think I’m wrong to prefer it so.

Brokeback Mountain: 6/10 emus
I’ve never seen a movie that so completely avoided gimmickry, especially given a premise that is basically a gimmick. I think it really must be down to good directing, since I was trying to articulate what kept it from being either boring or tacky. Sheer good judgement has to explain how to keep a movie that’s really quite slow-paced from dragging. Also, no pudding.

Jerry Maguire: 1 emu
This was not a movie. This was pasteurized movie substitute.

Stand By Me: 5/10 emus
Why was I not at all surprised to see that this was based on something by Stephen King? I haven’t read much of his stuff, but there seems to be a very consistent voice to it. Something very self-consciously American, something Interwoven With Grand Themes Such As Intimations Of Mortality, something strongly, almost simplistically plotted. A classic 5-emu movie.

Batman Begins: 4/10 emus
Normally what I give less than 5 emus I wouldn’t watch again - not the case for this movie. This gets under the average because it could have been so much more. This could have been a seven or eight emu movie if it had had moral and artistic coherency. If it had decided to pick one theme (the relation of fear to justice) and work around that, rather than trying to work in as many superhero buzzwords as possible (Revenge! Responsibility! Individual! Society! Justice! Vigilantism! Etc!). If it had put real effort into building up a the visual experience of the urban rather than putting its real effort into a chase scene. Given the limitations of the medium, it couldn’t expect to answer any of the questions it raised - but it could have raised them so well, and it just didn’t.

Match Point: 5/10 emus
I want to give it fewer emus, actually, because watching it was such an unpleasant experience. Still, it wasn’t badly done, I guess. Simple, (is luck really good for you?) but simplicity is not necessarily a vice in a movie. It’s just that of all the vices to watch in operation, cowardice is the least interesting. It may have been his intention to discomfort the audience, and that’s why it gets as many emus as it does, but I would have preferred to see the process of resolution started somewhere, if only in the audience’s minds.

Tamou (not his real name, obviously) came by the NGO to show us his report card. “Okay, okay,” I said, skimming the lines, “but do better next year… wait!” His class rank was not 30th, as I had thought, but 3rd. “Not bad,” I amended. “You’ve done well. But you know that you can do even better.” If this had been in the United States, or he had been my kid, I would have praised him more lavishly - for a boy who has barely enough to eat to be third in his class is a remarkable achievement. But here you don’t praise children much to their faces, it encourages laziness.

He’s a very smart, very curious child, maybe nine years old. Most children, if they see me in my office or my my house, ask me for cent francs (about 20 cents) or a photo or something shiny that catches their attention. Tamou looked attentively through the stack of books on my desk, and asked me for a book. I handed him a stack of magazines, warning him that they were in English. Nothing daunted, he began to flip through them, occasionally sounding out a word. “Here are some Africans,” he said, as he came to an Economist article on Thabo Mbeki. “Spe-ci-al report. They are from Nigeria.”

“No, they’re not, they’re from South Africa,” I said. Tamou (another unusual action in an African child, who would usually accept the correction of his elders without question) pointed to the shirts of the soldiers surrounding Mbeki. Sure enough, they were African Union troops, whose badges, hardly big enough to be read, said NIGERIA ARMY. “Oluwadare,” read the boy off the name tag of the foremost. “That means ‘God is able.’ It’s his name.”

“Do you speak Yoruba?”

“No, but some people in my neighborhood do. I live out by the market, by the old lady’s boutique. I saw you there one day. You were arguing over the price of butter.”

“She was trying to charge me 100 francs more than the price!”

“You should be careful with her,” observed Tamou, turning the page and analyzing a photo of Desmond Tutu.

On the report card, the teacher had noted that Tamou, while undoubtedly capable of doing the classwork, was an ‘enfant turbulent’. And as a responsible adult in his life I should be reproving him for this, but I can’t find it in me to condemn the fact that he is too intelligent and too lively for the stultifying atmosphere of a classroom. I just hope it doesn’t get squashed out of him as he gets older.

Faust: 6/10 emus
How can I give such a classic a rank under seven? Five million Germans can’t be wrong! It might be the translation, I have to say. Some of the prose parts were quite well done, but the verse was graceless and unspirited.

Sex for One: 3/10 emus
I mean, really, what are you supposed to say about a book on masturbation? There wasn’t any real rigor to her arguments or ideas, but then, I kind of suspect that wasn’t the point. She’s fairer than most people who call themselves radical feminists. On the whole, it’s a book about sex by someone who really likes sex, much like a book on waterfowl by someone who really likes waterfowl.

The Consolations of Philosophy: 6/10 emus
I kept expecting this book to turn out twee, but it kept pleasantly surprising me. It’s obviously done in a very relaxed and lighthearted style, but it’s not philosophy for dummies, more like the after-dinner conversation of someone who’s spent a great deal of time with books and who has found a balance between analysis and application. The longest section is the one on Montaigne, whose personal and wide-ranging style clearly holds a special place in the heart and the thought of the author
.

Choke: 7/10 emus
I’ve been trying to figure out who Chuck Palahniuk reminds me of. I’ve only read this and seen Fight Club, but there’s a very strong kinship of theme and tone between the two, and it definitely reminds me of somebody. Poe? I’ve never seen the doppelganger more magnificently done than in Fight Club, but Poe’s not really moral enough. It’s nobody British - it has none of the self-moderation and sly good nature of a British author; only the Americans (and possibly the Russians?) are as fierce in existential causes. Hawthorne, I think. Yes, Hawthorne, though more in the short stories than the long.

Fight Club 6/5 emus
Actually, the movie was better. Not very different from the book, but feeling like the sort of revisions that a good writer might make.

Lullaby: 5/5 emus
The thing is, Neil Stephenson did the viral-information thing better, because he explained it more. It does have a good premise (or half-premise, what do you call one thing among many that constitutes the primary source of action in a book) - being able to kill people with your thoughts and what effect that has on you; sort of a Ring of Gyges thing.

Naked Pictures of Famous People: 4/10 emus
Well, funny, but nothing lasting about it. I found Jon Stewart’s ‘America: The Book’ to be a really gifted piece of satire, and most of these essays are comparative non-entities.

Till We Have Faces: 10/10 emus
If I give ten out of ten emus to anything, I would have to give it to my favorite book in the world - since really these emus aren’t measuring anything objective, but merely my reaction to the book.

Lessons of the Masters: 8/10 emus
Is this by the same Steiner as our Steiner Lecture is named after? I wonder if he ever gave any of these pieces as a lecture at St. John’s; I think they would have been very well received. It’s refreshing and reinvigorating to hear teaching expounded in its nature as among the very highest of vocations, since it’s something that’s so easy to take lightly. But being able to stand up in front of a classroom and talk about what you know doesn’t make you a teacher, any more than sitting in front of a screen and banging out words makes you a writer.

Emu! Thanks, Hayden!

After preening myself for having redesigned the website, I have now succeeded in breaking the comments. I’d ask you to advise, but you will notice that you can no longer comment because it will not believe that you have entered text.

…he plays a vast and perverse game of telephone.

I went to the RIPEM church last Sunday. What exactly RIPEM stands for I am still not sure; I just know that the Beninese love them their acronyms almost as much as Peace Corps does. There’s a significant Nigerian population in the congregation, so the service was bilingual. Actually not so much bilingual as quatri- or quintilingual. The chief preacher would begin in English from the podium, sawing the air, jumping around and followed at a distance of about two feet and two seconds by his translator, who transmitted his words in French. Then, after a delay of another second or so, the translators in the audience would pick up the thread of the sermon in Fon, Ibo, and Nagot, their fellow-speakers clustered around them. The effect was remarkably similar to that of Babel, and when the head preacher would stop speaking, there would be a waterfall effect in the cacaphony that filled the room, as first one voice and then another reached the end of their translation.

Of course, translating under pressure like that, it’s inevitable that you’ll miss things. This may be why sermons here tend to be very simple and involve a lot of repetition. The pastor generally has one point he wants to make, and makes it over and over again for an hour and a half, until everyone’s gotten it.

Further difficulties are introduced when your translator doesn’t really have a complete grasp on one of the languages. And what are you supposed to do when the preacher uses a word that you don’t know? You can hardly stop him and ask him for an explanation. A man was translating into Fon once, from a preacher delivering his message in French. “And when Jesus came into the synagogue, everyone was troubled (s’affolait)!” thundered the preacher. The translator made his best guess. “When Jesus came into the siganou (lunch pail), everyone was afogweto!” Now afogweto sounds a lot like affolait, but unfortunately it means ‘having your feet tied together.’

There are a number of amusing examples like this. I won’t go on, but I’ll just leave you with a thought that must have disquieted the congregation. The pastor wanted to tell them that Jesus was au courant with everything they did, but, to judge by the translation, Jesus was to be found in the electrical wiring.

I just got a letter from Libby, marked “missent to Sierra Leone”.

The Master and Margarita: 8/10 emus

First, a note on the numerotation. I’m adopting Martin and Nate’s habit of assigning a certain number of my token creatures to works of art that I happen to come across. And teaching in the Beninese school system, where 20/20 is a score reserved for God alone and 10/20 means not ‘failure’ but ‘exactly average’ has changed my views on awarding points. I’m not sure how many books I’ve read that would get 10 emus - certainly a very small number.

8 emus is an excellent score, alors, and The Master and Margarita is an excellent book. I read, in the introduction, that the author was involved in stage-producing Don Quixote, and I can see its influence. Not only in the narratives stacked within narratives, but in the compassion which the author has for his characters. Not by denying humans their evil, be it understood, but by forgiving them for it.

After all, if you were going to deny the evil in human beings, you would hardly center your narrative around the activities of Satan. Professor Woland (as his papers say) is the devil for whom you have sympathy. A tempter, to be sure, and a spreader of misery and mayhem, but the heart of his effectiveness is not in being tremendously wicked, but in stepping back and letting humanity be wicked for him. He’s a bureaucratic demon as well - not in the sense of Lewis’s undersecretary Screwtape, but a demon over whom bureaucracy has no power. Papers, telephones, currency - all the safeguards of a state - have no hold on him at all. And that’s part of what makes it such a subversive book. If you’re relying on the state to keep the devil out, you may find yourself without your head, without your money, or locking yourself into a madhouse simply for safekeeping.