Election Day

Tomorrow is election day. It's the Phoenix City Council election. I know this because I received a sample ballot in the mail many weeks ago, and like any skilled and masterful practitioner of procrastination, I'm just now getting around to figuring out who these candidates are who are running for the council.

The sample ballot informs me that here in District 6, or, as I like to call it, The Six, I may vote for no mas de UNO of the following four candidates:

• NATHAN R. OSHOP
• BARRY PACELEY
• SAL DICICCIO
• DANA MARIE KENNEDY
  

The sample ballot then informs me of useful things to know, such as when and where to show up and what to bring for identification. But it doesn't tell me who these people or what their stances are. I figured I would go to the library and research each candidate and decide which one best represents my views so that I will be an informed, civically responsible voter tomorrow.

Fortunately, I don't even have to leave my apartment to become civically responsible, for the postman has delivered valuable aids in making my decision. Today in my mailbox awaiting me were two more pieces of mail concerning tomorrow's election.

The first piece was from Sal DiCiccio himself. It's a thick, full-sized sheet printed in red, white, blue, and yellow, and it says that Mr. DiCiccio "believes the highest priority for the City is the protection of our families and safety of our neighborhoods." It then goes on to laud his prior accomplishments as a city councilman along with displaying several photos of him. In one he's listening to a police officer to talk; in another he's listening to a fireman. What a great community-minded guy Mr. DiCiccio is! I too am for the protection our families and for the safety of our neighborhoods. Mr. DiCiccio must be the candidate who represents my views.

But wait! There remains that second piece of mail. I wonder what it says. I should read it if I am to determine which candidate best represents The Six.

The second piece is a slightly smaller piece, and it's printed in ominous grays with a touch of red. It says boldly across the top: "Sal DiCiccio: The Developer's Pal". The piece then describes how Mr. DiCiccio has taken money from developers and then done zoning sorts of things that are bad. After flipping to the reverse side of the piece, I then see a colorful green and blue layout with the name "Dana Marie Kennedy" across the top in a bold font. Below I am informed that Dana Marie Kennedy is for "smart growth" and "services and safety"—among other wonderful things. Wow. I too am for smart growth and services and safety.

With two great people vying for my one vote, I can tell that this is going to be a difficult decision for me, though admittedly that little thing about Mr. DiCiccio and zoning has me a little worried. And I haven't even started researching the other two candidates. I can only hope that they are for terrible things such as eating cute, fluffy kittens and telling dead baby jokes at inappropriate times because I don't know if I can handle three or even four super great candidates.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some civic responsibility stuff to go do.

Reading Log, no. 6-4

And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one's friends were attached to one's body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spider's thread is blotted with rain-drops, and, burdened, sags down. So she slept.

...

And as a single spider's thread after wavering here and there attaches itself to the point of a leaf, so Richard's mind, recovering from its lethargy, set now on his wife, Clarissa, whom Peter Walsh had loved so passionately; and Richard had had a sudden vision of her there at luncheon; of himself and Clarissa; of their life together; and he drew the tray of old jewels towards him, and taking up first this brooch then that ring, "How much is that?" he asked, but doubted his own taste.

Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway

I did not like this book. I did not like it because I was expecting something great, or at least classic, and instead I read something forgettable. While reading it I felt peeved that I was investing time reading something that I think has been arbitrarily selected for praise by snobby literary critics.

Or maybe I just didn't get it.

However, consider the following. Literary innovation, which is supposedly one of Mrs. Dalloway's accomplishments, is generally a good thing, but that does not mean that we should spend our time reading innovative books when such books' innovative ideas have since been improved upon and perfected in other works. Sure, read it if you're an English major working on your semester thesis. But don't put the novel on a list of the 100 greatest novels of the 20th century.

But maybe I just didn't get it.

If Mrs. Dalloway were first published today by a no-name author, I highly doubt it would be discovered to be a great novel.

Then again, maybe I just didn't get it.

I struggle to imagine a novel with characters I find any more boring than the ones that exist within Mrs. Dalloway. I couldn't care about the characters or the plot. Any messages concerning contemporary issues of the day were lost on me, and any timeless philosophical wisdom were too obscure to have been of practical use to me.

Or maybe I just didn't get it.

Reading Log, no. 6-3

At the door, she hinted:

"Mr. Bjornstam, if you were I, would you worry when people thought you were affected?"

"Huh? Kick 'em in the face! Say, if I were a sea-gull, and all over silver, think I'd care what a pack of dirty seals thought about my flying?"

It was not the wind at her back, it was the thrust of Bjornstam's scorn which carried her through town.

Sinclair Lewis
Main Street

The short version:

City woman marries small town doctor and moves to live with him in the country. Woman wants to revolutionize the town to make it better; townsfolk all resent her wanting them to be artistic and scholarly. Woman is dejected and must cope.

While reading it, I found Main Street to be a depressing book, but now that I'm insulated from the experience by a few months, I can state how great the novel is.

It's not particularly tragic, though there is some tragedy. Rather, what made Main Street a depressing read is its long, steady narration of doomed aspirations. Slowly our Carol falls into despair about her failing situation. That things will get steadily worse for her becomes clear early on in the story, and yet just exactly how things will play out is not clear. Along the way, Sinclair Lewis masterfully levels criticism every direction at early 1900s small town America that remains freshly relevant to modern day urban America.

I recommend Main Street. As such, I don't have much more to write about it and will leave the remainder of this post to Sinclair Lewis.

On young love:

Of the love-making of Carol and Will Kennicott there is nothing to be told which may not be heard on every summer evening, on every shadowy block.

They were biology and mystery; their speech was slang phrases and flares of poetry; their silences were contentment, or shaky crises when his arm took her shoulder. All the beauty of youth, first discovered when it is passing--and all the commonplaceness of a well-to-do unmarried man encountering a pretty girl at the time when she is slightly weary of her employment and sees no glory ahead nor any man she is glad to serve.

On privilege:

Carol rose. She suggested that the Thanatopsis ought to help the poor of the town. She was ever so correct and modern. She did not, she said, want charity for them, but a chance of self-help; an employment bureau, direction in washing babies and making pleasing stews, possibly a municipal fund for home-building. "What do you think of my plans, Mrs. Warren?" she concluded.

Speaking judiciously, as one related to the church by marriage, Mrs. Warren gave verdict:

"I'm sure we're all heartily in accord with Mrs. Kennicott in feeling that wherever genuine poverty is encountered, it is not only noblesse oblige but a joy to fulfill our duty to the less fortunate ones. But I must say it seems to me we should lose the whole point of the thing by not regarding it as charity. Why, that's the chief adornment of the true Christian and the church! The Bible has laid it down for our guidance. 'Faith, Hope, and Charity," it says, and, 'The poor ye have with ye always,' which indicates that there never can be anything to these so-called scientific schemes for abolishing charity, never! And isn't it better so? I should hate to think of a world in which we were deprived of all the pleasure of giving. Besides, if these shiftless folks realize they're getting charity, and not something to which they have a right, they're so much more grateful."

On conformity:

She had inquired as to the effect of this dominating dullness upon foreigners. She remembered the feeble exotic quality to be found in the first-generation Scandinavians; she recalled the Norwegian Fair at the Lutheran Church, to which Bea had taken her. There, in the bondestue, the replica of a Norse farm kitchen, pale women in scarlet jackets embroidered with gold thread and colored beads, in black skirts with a line of blue, greet-striped aprons, and ridged caps very pretty to set off a fresh face, had served rommegrod og lefse--sweet cakes and sour milk pudding spiced with cinnamon. For the first time in Gopher Prairie Carol had found novelty. She reveled in the mild foreignness of it.

But she saw these Scandinavian women zealously exchanging their spiced puddings and red jackets for fried pork chops and congealed white blouses, trading the ancient Christmas hymns of the fjords for "She's My Jazzland Cutie," being Americanized into uniformity, and in less than a generation losing in the grayness whatever pleasant new customs they might have added to the life of the town. Theirs sons finished the process. In ready-made clothes and ready-made high-school phrases they sank into propriety, and the sound American customs had absorbed without one trace of pollution another alien invasion.

And along with these foreigners, she felt herself being ironed into glossy mediocrity, and she rebelled, in fear.

On feminism:

"But was I more happy when I was drudging? I was not. I was just bedraggled and unhappy. It's work--but not my work. I could run an office or a library, or nurse and teach children. But solitary dish-washing isn't enough to satisfy me--or many other women. We're going to chuck it. We're going to wash 'em by machinery, and come out and play with you men in the offices and clubs and politics you've cleverly kept for yourselves! Oh, we're hopeless, we dissatisfied women! Then why do you want to have us about the place, to fret you? So it's for your sake that I'm going!"

And on the meaningless of everything:

Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth; that its love and prosy sageness, so important a few years ago, so gladly offered now, are rejected with laughter.

Reading Log, no. 6-2

He became my favourite teacher at Petit Séminaire and the reason I studied zoology at the University of Toronto. I felt a kinship with him. It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers and sisters of a different faith, and every word they speak speaks of faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason will carry them--and then they leap.

I'll be honest about it. It is not atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while. We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt, so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Yann Matel
Life of Pi

This story will make you believe in God, or so it claims. I realize that this sort of thing is a marketing ploy to increase book sales, and yet still I take the comment seriously enough to challenge.

But first, the short version:

Boy name Pi tells story of being stranded in lifeboat in the Pacific for 227 days. Also in the lifeboat are a tiger named Richard Parker and, initially, a few other animals. Through boy's resourcefulness, boy and tiger survive. (Tiger eats other animals.)

But wait! There's a surprise twist! Boy then tells a parallel story of being stranded in a lifeboat, but instead of being in it with a tiger and, initially, a few other animals, he's instead in it with a few other humans. Boy admits to partaking in the savage act of cannibalism.

Boy then poses question: if you can't prove either story then should you not believe in the better one, the more comforting one? (That's the first one, in case you're wondering.) As a bonus, the tiger story has one chapter devoted to a carnivorous island, which is way cool!

And so that's how it's suppose to go with all of us. Given that we can't prove God's existence one way or the other, should we not choose to believe in God? -- the more comforting option compared to the one that involves difficult questions and few answers?

Yann Martel has proposed a modern equivalent to Pascal's wager: you can't know for sure, so you may as well make yourself comfortable. It precludes the possibility that there exists an ethical consequence for belief, and I find it irresponsible.

The twin fears of death and of lack of external purpose drive a lot of people to do and believe tremendously irrational things. Answers, not questions, assuage those fears. But answers, not questions, stymie progress. Clearly there's a balance to be struck between pain and comfort, and so it seems reasonable that the best of theological positions would strike some similar sort of balance.

Richard Parker was not in that lifeboat. Perhaps Pi should have better followed his father's advise?

But I learned at my expense that Father believed there was another animal even more dangerous than us, and one that was extremely common, too, found on every continent, in every habitat: the redoubtable species Animalus anthropomorphicus, the animal that is "cute", "friendly", "loving", "devoted", "merry", "understanding". These animals lie in ambush in every toy store and children's zoo. Countless stories are told of them. They are the pendants of those "vicious", "bloodthirsty", "depraved" animals that inflame the ire of the maniacs I have just mentioned, who vent their spite on them with walking sticks and umbrellas. In both cases we look at an animals and see a mirror. The obsession with putting ourselves at the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologists.

Reading Log, no. 6-1

Rachel even had to ask me in one of her emails whether I stopped reading
too. No, no, I replied. I still read. It's just that I stopped blogging
about reading -- and everything else, for that matter.

But the days are getting noticeably shorter. Lately, the weather has
turned, and I'm no longer cursing Phoenix but instead anticipating the
ensuing forty-six weeks of easy times. School is back in session, and
that means the city has plenty of school zone speed limits ripe for
breaking. Things reset; old routines reassert. It's only fitting I write a
reading log.

Like with a procrastinated school project, this catch-up reading log is
a monster. It's too long to expect even my most bored readers to slog
through, and so I'm breaking it up into separate posts for each book.

* * *

By the standards of all earlier ages, it was Utopia. Ignorance, disease, poverty, and fear had virtually ceased to exist. The memory of war was fading into the past as a nightmare vanishes with the dawn; soon it would lie outside the experience of all living men.

With the energies of mankind directed into constructive channels, the face of the world had been remade. It was, almost literally, a new world. The cities that had been good enough for earlier generations had been rebuilt--or deserted and left as museum specimens when they had ceased to serve any useful purpose. Many cities had already been abandoned in this manner, for the whole pattern of industry and commerce had changed completely. Production had become largely automatic: the robot factories poured forth consumer goods in such unending streams that all the ordinary necessities of life were virtually free. Men worked for the sake of the luxuries they desired: or they did not work at all.

It was One World. The old names of the old countries were still used, but they were no more than convenient postal divisions. There was no one on Earth who could not speak English, who could not read, who was not within range of a television set, who could not visit the other side of the planet within twenty-four hours...

Crime had practically vanished. It had become both unnecessary and impossible. When no one lacks anything, there is no point in stealing. Moreover, all potential criminals knew that there could be no escape from the surveillance of the Overlords. In the early days of their rule, they had intervened so effectively on behalf of law and order that the lesson had never been forgotten.

Crimes of passion, though not quite extinct, were almost unheard of. Now that so many of its psychological problems had been removed, humanity was far saner and less irrational. And what earlier ages would have called vice was now no more than eccentricity--or, at the worst, bad manners.

Arthur C. Clarke
Childhood's End

The quick version: A race of extraterrestrials seemingly possessing omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence enter into earth orbit, establish contact with humans, and direct changes for human affairs to improve conditions for everyone and everything on the planet. Humans learn to deal with their new paternalistic masters.

What would such a utopia look like?

Apparently it would involve people watching a lot of television, people having a lot of sex, and people spending a lot of time driving cars. But I assure you such a world is totally different from ours -- the cars are flying cars. But are the cars carbon-free, too? Unknown.

Clarke wrote Childhood's End half a century ago, back when the world was still infinite. What would the novel be like if it were written today, now that the world is becoming annoyingly finite? That's a question I repeatedly asked myself throughout the book.

Ignoring technological obsolescence for the moment, overall the image Clarke paints of utopia is convincing. People separate into two groups: the passive consumers and the active self-actualized (ineffectual though they may be). Either way, people are instilled with a unqualified happiness that belies a certain emptiness, a certain non-humanity. This is chillingly denoted in a passage describing the head Overlord's foreboding assessment of the utopic world he manages:

They would never know how lucky they had been. For a lifetime, mankind had achieved as much happiness as any race can ever know. It had been the Golden Age. But gold was also the color or sunset, of autumn: and only Karellen's ears could catch the first wailings of the winter storms.

And only Karellen knew with what inexorable swiftness the Golden Age was rushing to its close.

Perhaps we in the 21st century are living in the Golden Age and all without the assistance of those devilish Overlords.

This guy is SO you!

It's not intentional that I'm unique. Or, more accurately, it's not my aim to be unique. It just happens that I think most people make poor life choices and I care not to tread down all the same paths as them.

And yet this week I received no fewer than three instances of different people telling me about three different people and how those people are like me. Or maybe it's that I'm like them. The funny thing is that the three people to whom I was compared all, well, have something wrong with them. Or so that's how it's perceived.

Here are the three comparisons, in the order in which I received them:

1. From my sister, Rachel, via email:
   

   from Rachel
   to Craig
   date Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 6:20 AM
   
   

   Jason (and me, some) started watching Showtime's "Dexter" this weekend. Jason actually loves and managed to squeeze in the entire first season in addition to demolishing the upstairs flooring and re-piping all the upstairs hot water. Anway, have you seen it? The premise is a guy name Dexter is a serial killer but he's a hero because he only kills really bad people. Troubling? Yes! No, what's freaky is this guy is SO you! Do I need to run a background check?

2. From Laura, via text:
   
   

   From: Laura
   They made a movie about you. We must go see it!
   7:55A Fri Jul31
   
   From: Craig
   You too? My sister wrote me saying there's a tv show about a serial killer who's just like me.
   8:10A Fri Jul31
   
   From: Laura
   Nice! Please dont target brunettes from long island. Anyway my movie has a guy with Asperger's.
   8:22A Fri Jul31

3. From Coworker Neil, via office email:
   

   from Coworker Neil
   to Coworker Craig
   sent Fri 7/31/2009 11:53 AM
   
   Is this you in 40 years time?
   
   http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111091624

(The last one, the one from Coworker Neil, is about a seventy-six year old homeless retired engineer who died and bequeathed $4M to various non-profit charities, including $400K to NPR. There, I saved you the trouble of laboriously dragging the mouse cursor to the link provided; clicking it; and, gosh, reading a whole article!)

So there you go. People who know me take me for a socially inept, serial-killing homeless miser. Sounds like a pretty good life choice to me.