Wouldn't it be nice if he were older? (with apologies to the Beach Boys)

The lament, "The kids're growin' up so fast these days," has become almost proverbial. It may be important to keep in mind that kids often seem to grow up fast "these days," no matter which century we live in. Below, I am reproducing the romantic/sexualized poem, "To Ethelinda, on her doing my Verses the honour of wearing them in her bosom," written by the eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart.

"Happy verses! that were prest
In fair Ethelinda's breast!
Happy muse, that didst embrace
The sweet, the heav'nly-fragrant place!
Tell me, is the omen true,
Shall the bard arrive there too?

"Oft thro' my eyes my soul has flown,
And wanton'd on that ivory throne:
There with ecstatic transport burn'd,
And thought it was to heav'n return'd.
Tell me, is the omen true,
Shall the body follow too?

"When first at nature's early birth,
Heav'n sent a man upon the earth,
Ev'n Eden was more fruitful found,
When Adam came to till the ground:
Shall then those breasts be fair in vain,
And only rise to fall again?

"No, no, fair nymph--for no such end
Did heav'n to tee its bounty lend;
That breast was ne'er design'd by fate,
For verse, or things inanimate;
Then throw them from that downy bed,
And take the poet in their stead."

Yes, as you might immediately observe, the author is indeed somewhat obsessed about certain anatomical features. Despite some myopia in artistic vision, however, it's a very well-written poem: there's some nice playing with body/soul metaphors, space (poet and poems occupying the same place), etc.. While I might have picked a loftier theme, all in all, I'd have been pretty impressed by my own poetic ability if I wrote such a poem at the age of 29.

The weirdness factor is that Christopher Smart apparently did not write this poem at the age of 29, nor even at the hormonally-charged age of 18. At least according to him, he wrote it at 13. And Ethelinda, the subject of his poetic fancy, was 9! at the time. (Not 9! as in "9 factorial," which would be disturbing for the opposite reason; instead, I mean "9!" in the sense of "What are you thinking, this is a 9-year-old! There is no excuse for your eyes to be wantoning on her ivory throne!")

This leads to a strange aesthetic situation. Traditionally, we more highly respect an artistic work when we know the artist is younger: for example, some of Mozart's pieces are most noted not because of their craftsmanship and brilliance, but because Mozart was only five at the time he composed them. But in this case ... I just keep thinking, "Smart, couldn't you have at least waited to write this until you were 22? Then she'd at least be old enough to vote!" I don't want naively to presume that just because the age thing grosses me personally out, it's intrinsically icky--I recognize Smart was living in a different culture, and at a different time--but dang it, I want to say it conforms to objective standards of ickiness!

Taste Test for a True Prophet

As the Biblically erudite might know, it can be a tricky business to discern the true prophet of God from the false prophet of God. True prophets can seem wacky, occasionally incorporating nudity into their prophetic exploits; on the other hand, false prophets are notoriously zany. So, how can you tell whether someone is being Biblically wacky, or merely heretically zany? I believe I have established a guiding principle from Ezekiel 4:15 and II Peter 2:20. According to Ezekiel 4:15, a characteristic of the true prophet is that he will "bake [his] bread over cow manure." According to II Peter 2:20, the mark of a false prophet is that he will "return to [his] vomit." In conclusion, when testing (or tasting) the spirits, manure=okay, vomit=off limits.

(Later clarification.) Technically, II Peter 2:20 just says that false prophets are like dogs who return to their own vomit. So, to be more precise, we can say that eating literal manure-baked goods is okay, but eating metaphorical vomit is blasphemous.

Haunted Axe-Fiend Copper Mansion!

This past weekend, in order to celebrate evil, my wife and I went to a sort of "haunted Halloween theme park." I'm not really sure what makes it "haunted"--it seems to me that someone could come up with a perfectly rational explanation for why chain-saws are able to stand in the air while someone is holding them. Sadly, my wife blogged about our visit first and took all the good material, but I'll try to come up with something.

I suppose the first thing that stuck out to me was the notice of what objects were verboten. During the period of standing in line, I had long opportunity to contemplate whether the contents of my pockets corresponded to anything on the massive checklist. For example, I was forbidden: "knives, mace, guns, weapons of any kind, lighters, flashlights, profanity, and physical contacts." (And those are only the items that I can remember!)

No "Knives, mace, guns, or weapons of any kind?" It seems a little (pardon the pun) overkill; isn't it just enough to say "no weapons of any kind?" I mean, I suppose somebody could try to claim that their knife was just for cutting steakburgers. Maybe someone would say the mace was just funky aerosol. But come on, I can't really picture your everyday gun-wielder saying, "This is not a weapon; it's a way of life." Omit needless words, people! And "No profanity?" I'm all for respecting the delicacy of children's ears, but did this mean that I would only be allowed to be scared poopless?

No "physical contacts?" (And what's with the plural?) Okay, so here we are at a theme park which will depict axe-wielding violence for us, but we can't depict a little hand-holding love? What would Jesus say? "No flashlights?" How am I supposed to figure out which parked car is mine when I go looking through the field that has no landmarks? (Okay, I guess it only took us about five minutes of anxious searching to find my car.)

Given the cold weather, it was nice that most of the attractions had roofs on them. However, since all of the place names seemed similar to me, the names blurred together. For example, the "Haunted House" is different from the "Axe Murder Mansion," which is not to be confused with the "Copper Canyon Massacre." I suppose I have a paucity of vocabulary when it comes to death, so I just called them "the haunted one," the "axe one," and "the one next to the axe one," respectively. The "Axe Murder Mansion" seemed particularly ill-named. First of all, since the crazy-looking dude effigy outside the mansion was holding two axes (perhaps Bush's "Axes of Evil?"), it should have been the "Axes Murder Mansion." Second of all, once I got inside, I don't really see how the axe was involved. For example, inside the mansion, there was a perfectly intact skeleton sitting and reading a book. Even now, I can't figure out how in the world that the axe and this skeleton's death can be remotely connected: did the axe murderer chop off the guy's arm (presumably while the person was running away), sew it back on, and then place him in front of a book? That seems like rather more genteel behavior than I would have expected from the snarling crazy guy effigy outside.

My wife notes that "the scariest part of the experience was undoubtedly the dark maze in which one couldn't see anything and had to grope around for the door, hoping that the person one had just bumped into was one's actual spouse and not either a member of a different party or one of the workers." I agree that it's scariest, but for a different reason. I didn't really mind bumping into the people behind us, because they were obnoxious loud kids who probably deserved being accidentally trodden upon. No, I suppose what bothered me was that these pesky kids would get to the exit first, and beat me. (Now I understand why the Scooby Doo gang provoked fear and hatred wherever they went.) I was scared, "What if several hours pass, and they close the attraction down, and they have to say, 'Hey, Leonard, take a look at the dork who couldn't find his way out!'"

Expand Your Jargon 3: Author Function

Who is the author of this prestigious blog? "Why, Leopoldtulip," you say. Who is the author of the esteemed Hardy Boys Casefile Mysteries, which are much more grown up and involve international intrigue unlike the traditionally sissy Hardy Boys mysteries? "Why, Franklin W. Dixon," you say. At which point literary theorist Foucault laughs at you, because you have played right into his hands!

Why, you ask? Because there's no such person as "Franklin W. Dixon," and a lot of people have written Hardy Boys mysteries over the years. The name "Franklin W. Dixon" is just filling a classification function--it helps us to group certain texts together (manly Hardy Boys mysteries) and exclude other texts (girly Nancy Drew mysteries). Similarly, "Leopoldtulip" isn't somebody's real name. Someday, the person who calls himself "Leopoldtulip" hopes to get an article published, and when he does, you had better believe the article isn't going to say it's by "Leopoldtulip!" You see, I use the moniker "Leopoldtulip" to group together certain texts, i.e. goofy ones. I'm not going to include my serious scholarship here. Neither am I going to include something as mundane as a shopping list. I include entries that accord with my Leopoldtulip persona. This blog constructs the AUTHORitative "Leopoldtulip canon," if you will.

This should give you the basic idea behind Foucault's conception of the "author function." Foucault emphasizes that the name of an "author" is always performing a certain role that is different from a proper name. Foucault gives the example, "If I discover that Shakespeare was not born in the house that we visit today, that is a modification which, obviously, will not alter the functioning of the author's name. But if we proved that Shakespeare did not write those sonnets which pass for his, that would constitute a significant change and affect the manner in which the author's name functions."

The question we might ask ourselves is, "Why would it make a bigger difference to us that 'Shakespeare' didn't write Hamlet versus 'Shakespeare' was born elsewhere?" The easy response would be to say, "Duh, because it is a bigger difference," but this begs the question. Sure, Shakespeare "the author" is big-time important to us! He's as American as apple pie! (Um, I mean, as English.) But it's not as if Christians are facing existential crises because they don't know who wrote I and II Samuel. What makes authorship such a big deal in some situations and not others? What makes Shakespeare's authorship a bigger deal than what color his eyes are?

So, what's the point of all this? I still find myself asking that question. I think part of the point is to imagine what it would look like if "author" didn't fill this function. Foucault notes that if the "author-function" lost its prominent role, we wouldn't be hearing the traditional questions like, "Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else?" Instead, we would be asking metalevel questions, "What difference does it make who is actually speaking?" What does it reveal about us and our own preoccupations?

In a future blog entry, I'm going to employ the idea of the "author function" to discuss how "authorship" functions when an author has been announced as dead, and he/she disputes this to the contrary.

Feeling Too Secure

I like Ingdirect. They pay me interest. But their efforts to make me feel "secure" have me a little freaked out. At first, all I needed to do in order to log-in was to type my moniker and give a code number I selected myself (at least, that's all I remember having to do). Slowly, they have increased the complexity of their demands. They have given me an account number I have to look up every time, since it's so long. I also have to be able to answer one random question (e.g. "what are the first three digits of your social security number?"). Now, they've added a feature so that every time I try to login from a different computer, I will have to answer _five_ questions (such as what school I attended, the name of my first pet, etc.)! Finally, So that I feel "secure" and know I have logged on at the right site, I will see an image and phrase of my choice. (I guess it's so that I don't accidentally give my personal information for some website pretending to be Ingdirect.) I guess all these precautions are nice, but ... I don't know. It's kind of like when Great Starts breakfasts (frozen meals with sausage, hash browns, and scrambled eggs) started advertising, "made with real eggs." You're supposed to feel re-assured, but really, what you start thinking is, "I always just assumed they were 'real' eggs. Hey! Why don't they say 'made with real pig?' Oh no!" Similarly, I can't help but get rather worried that ingdirect is doing all these things to make me feel secure. Was there some scandal in which they gave away customer code numbers, and they're trying to fix their image as "reliable" and "secure?" What if they come up with so many questions that even I won't be able to figure out how to login successfully?

Still, I have to say that the "image and your own phrase" idea is pretty neat. Not so much because it's reassuring, but because, if you give the matter sufficient thought, it can be rather entertaining. For instance, you could pick an ugly animal image, and your phrase could be, "My Aunt Bertha." In my case, I chose the image above, along with the phrase "Beowulf." If you would like to know why, see this article. I can't really "recommend" the article in the sense of agreeing with anything that it says, but I do find the logical leaps amusing.

P.S.-would you like to have your own image and phrase at ingdirect? Would you like to deposit $250, get $25 bonus, have a savings account for which there is no minimum, have an interest rate of 4.4%, and earn Leopoldtulip $10? Just send an email to Leopoldtulip@yahoo.com, and he can recommend you (you don't get the $25 unless you're recommended by someone). Kidding aside, Ingdirect has done a fine job of giving me money over the years. It's a great service, and they support dinosaurs.

What's Green in Black and White and Read all over?

When I was a youngster, I knew just what I wanted to be when I grew up. A super-hero. In fact, I'd be perfectly open to starting my superhero career in kindergarten, if that was what the Lord wanted. After all, God was all-powerful and all-wise: He must have placed this desire on my heart because He was going to use me as an instrument for His divine butt-kickin', right? My favorite super-hero of them all was Green Lantern. When I was 5, I prayed the longest prayer I had ever before prayed (in fact, perhaps it is still the longest!): in humble supplication, I beseeched God that He would send me a Green Lantern power ring. I gave God detailed instructions about where He could place the ring for me to find when I woke up. I waxed eloquent to God on all the selfless, beneficent deeds I would do with the power ring, such as replacing my grandmother's ugly grandfather clock with a beautiful green grandfather clock. Basically, Green Lantern's power is that he could make anything he wanted, so long as it was green. Now that's what I call real ultimate power!

Inexplicably, God must have put the power ring in the wrong place, and I never found it. Nevertheless, I still have a certain nostalgia when I think of Green Lantern. To this day, I remember his oath: "In brightest day, in blackest night/No evil shall escape my sight/Let those who worship evil's might/Beware my power, green lantern's light." So when I saw that Amazon was selling the first 20 issues of Green Lantern in paperback, that it was under $10, and that it was eligible for their "4 books for the price of 3" promotion, how could I refuse?

Sure, the early issues were campy. Sure, they were ethnically offensive, as Green Lantern is befriended by his "little Eskimo greasemonkey," named "Pieface," whose stock-phrase interjection was always "jumping fishhooks!" But the biggest problem with the paperback is that the collected stories represented Green Lantern's world in black and white. Literally.

I know, I know. It might not seem like a big deal that DC reprinted former color comics in black and white. Yes, black and white does work on a nice metaphorical level about simpler times, when the differences between right and wrong were more clearcut. It might even seem to work well on the aesthetic level: after all, you might think that a black and white grandfather clock is more pleasing to the eye than a green one. What you fail to take into account is a critical point in the Green Lantern mythos: because of an impurity in its composition, the power ring cannot work against anything that is yellow, which means every issue involves a case in which the ring does not work.

It is interesting to note that the publisher of Green Lantern, DC, got its name from "Detective Comics." DC comics often do offer more mysteries to be solved than do their counterparts at Marvel comics. For example, in Superman 122, Superman's sidekick Jimmy Olsen is dreaming rather loudly, "Foreign diplomats ... to see you ... president Superman," and an overhearing Superman thinks to himself, "Seems Jimmy is dreaming I'm President in the future! But ... it's impossible for Superman ever to be the chief executive of the U.S.!" The caption taunts the reader, "Can you guess why Clark is so positive that Jimmy's dream could never be fulfilled?" Since I am a super-sleuth, I guessed the right answer! For those of you less sleuthful, Superman reveals at the end, "If you'll read the constitution of the U.S....You'll find a provision which states that only native-born Americans can ever be President!" You see, you had to perform detective work and critical reasoning skills to realize that Superman was born on Krypton. Otherwise, he would be President.

I bring in the "Detective Comics" background to point out that DC only intended some elements of the story to require detective-work. While readers might be meant to puzzle out, "How is Green Lantern going to get out of this one?" they weren't supposed to have to guess, "What color is that menacing creature thing?" Knowing whether something is yellow or not becomes of crucial importance in understanding what's going on. I do have to admit that, much of the time, Green Lantern does try to keep his color-blind readers in the loop: for example, on the cover of Showcase Presents #24, Green Lantern informs his readers in a thought bubble, "Yellow beams from that monster's eyes...weakening me...making me powerless to resist." But other times, you just don't know. For example, in Green Lantern #8, when Green Lantern travels to 5700 A.D. to fight evolved gila monsters which are called Zegors, he notices, "the eye-blast of that Zegor and my power beam--are cancelling each other out!" Is it because the power beams are yellow, or because they are beams of magnitudinous power?

Sometimes you can get really faked out--there was a time when Green Lantern's power ring wouldn't work on a red missile, because it turned out it was really "infrayellow," which is just like "infrared," in that you can't see it, but it's there. (Scientists might call it "Infrayellow of the gaps.") As a detective, I had to piece together that not only did the missile not appear yellow to me, but it did not appear yellow to Green Lantern, except that it really was invisibly yellow, even though my first guess was that it was invisibly yellow, but only invisibly yellow to me and visibly yellow to Green Lantern and his original readers. Do you see how confusing this gets?

Still, it makes you appreciate the little things you take for granted. Like not being color-blind. Like gila monsters not having eye beams. Like infrayellow rays bouncing harmlessly off of us all the time, when for Green Lantern, it was a matter of life and death. Maybe I'm lucky I couldn't find that power ring after all.

Note: I'm not sure where the "infrayellow" story takes place, so it's possible I misremembered that it involved a missile. I don't have the patience to read the entire book over again, but if you find out the answer, let me know.

Later Later note (Nov. 13, 2006): an anonymous commenter found the quote! I was indeed misremembering the missile connection. Anyway, check out the comments to discover the infrayellow reference in context!

Crazy about Snakes on a Dahlia

Every once in a while, people feel the need to go out and do something crazy. In my college days, this might mean dancing naked around a fire, listening repeatedly to the Cranberries' "Zombie" song for three hours in succession, or going out on the rooftop and shouting "Yawp!" But as we get older and settled and eat vegetables regularly, the standards for what constitutes craziness might change. As they should. I think if my standards for craziness mandated a 24-hour marathon of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I would break down and forever despair of acting crazily again.

This past Friday night, we acted crazy. Not "acting" in the sense that we were the mere semblance of insanity: au contraire, we imbibed the very spirit of married craziness. It started off non-crazily enough, as insanity often does, while we were at our computers working. Several months ago, my wife took a twenty minute Blockbuster survey and was rewarded with complimentary Fandango movie tickets. The task of figuring out how Fandango works is an even more daunting task than a 20 minute survey, so we both ignored the ticket offer until Friday, two days before the offer would expire. Consequently, we decided that we would be just a shade of wacky: on Friday at 7:30 pm, we would see Black Dahlia (because my wife enjoys mysteries), and on the following day at 4:30 pm, we would see Snakes on a Plane (because I love guyness). Little did we know that the situation would soon escalate beyond our wildest dreams of wackiness.

Accidentally, when we ordered the tickets for Snakes on a Plane, we didn't change the request from "Friday" to "Saturday." As a result, we had tickets for a Friday 4:30 pm movie and a Friday 7:30 pm movie at two different theaters. What should we do? Naturally, our first thought was to think about serving others, and we sent out an email offering the free tickets to our graduate student friends. Inexplicably, two entire hours passed without any response, and my wife had to leave for an on-campus meeting at 3 pm. In that moment--faced with the possibility of two tickets to the dollar theater (a total value of three dollars) being lost forever--we resolved to do our part. Why not watch both movies? Were we wimpy? Were we frightened by a couple of namby pamby little movies, even if they were both rated R? No!

Now, we might tend to think that "crazy" people are people who have turned their rational faculties off. This is far from the case. As John Locke argues in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, crazy people "have [not] lost the faculty of reasoning .... Madmen put wrong ideas together, and so make wrong propositions, but argue and reason right from them." So, when we had the crazy idea, "We ought to watch both movies," we did not stop employing logic. In fact, we carefully employed strategery, plotting different scenarios: "What if the previews before Snakes on a Plane delay the movie and we're running late?" "We skip the credits and eat at McDonald's." "How can we get to Snakes on a Plane on time if I have a meeting on campus?" "I'll go on campus with you so that you don't have to drive back home." You see, craziness isn't just something that comes to you; you must be a careful steward of craziness, nurturing it so that it can grow into something beautiful, like a kumquat.

All in all, we were impressed by our craziness prowess. Sure, we did start to weaken sometime during Black Dahlia, but that's only because it's such a bad movie. Of course, so is Snakes on a Plane, but in a good way. Black Dahlia is a pretentious artsy film that, like Icarus, spreads its wings to fly too close to the sun, and tragically falls to its doom. Snakes on a Plane is an unpretentious movie that, like Icarus, involves a flying object; however, its flight ends in triumph. And with Samuel Johnson shooting a hole in the plane while it's still in the air. Awesome!