Month: July 2005

The Joys of Used Books

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I’m rereading McKee’s bible of screenwriting, Story, to tighten up a script I’m working on. Some of it is helpful, some of it not…

What is especially not helpful: I don’t quite know what I was thinking, but I bought a used copy which has had at least 4 previous users from the look of the various pricing stickers.

Usually when I buy a used textbook I flip through it… but this time I must have neglected that step, because the margins are filled with the most insipid notes and observations imaginable.

Some of them are simple ignorance, like the circled word “triptych” and a question mark. Others are clearly someone trying to summarize something to get through the chapter for a class; except it’s clear they are picking phrases at random and not really internalizing anything. Some chapters have every topic sentence of every paragraph underlined. I remember seeing biology books like this, where literally every word which was not an article had been highlighted.

McKee name-drops Heidegger and Sarte, and the reader has underlined the entire paragraph and written “Heidegger” and “Sarte” in the margin. Yeah, uh, I didn’t quite understand these two sentences in this paragraph, so I’m going to attempt to summarize all of Heidegger to cater to McKee.

Bah!

Freegan

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Yay, I was wondering when Beatniks were coming back. Good work freegans!

Freegans are people who are concerned so deeply with the social and ecological impact of economic over-consumption that they choose to buy and work as little as possible and, instead, to live directly off the massive waste created by our modern society. Freegans avoid contributing labor or wealth to an economy based on materialism, explotation, greed and waste by refusing to participate in it. Instead of producing their own waste, Freegans sustain themselves off the already existing waste thereby curtailing garbage and pollution and lessening the over-all volume in the waste stream.

Web link of note: Freegan
(At http://freegan.info/)

The Internationale in 20 languages

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you know you want it you pinko!

Billy Bragg’s famous version does NOT use the original lyrics.

  • Wikipedia entry on the Internationale. Yes I know I am a Wikipedia whore.

Bragg version:

Stand up, all victims of oppression
For the tyrants fear your might
DonÂ’t cling so hard to your possessions
For you have nothing, if you have no rights
Let racist ignorance be ended
For respect makes the empires fall
Freedom is merely privilege extended
Unless enjoyed by one and all

Chorus:
So come brothers and sisters
For the struggle carries on
The internationale
Unites the world in song
So comrades come rally
For this is the time and place
The international ideal
Unites the human race

Let no one build walls to divide us
Walls of hatred nor walls of stone
Come greet the dawn and stand beside us
WeÂ’ll live together or weÂ’ll die alone
In our world poisoned by exploitation
Those who have taken, now they must give
And end the vanity of nations
WeÂ’ve but one earth on which to live

And so begins the final drama
In the streets and in the fields
We stand unbowed before their armour
We defy their guns and shields
When we fight, provoked by their aggression
Let us be inspired by like and love
For though they offer us concessions
Change will not come from above

Original (translated from French)- I never realized how toned down the modern versions are. Take note of the parts which deprecates messianistic religion, and the previous verse which calls for treason. Actually, I guess the verses are arranged by scale of rebellion- the last being a rebellion against God.

Arise ye workers [starvelings] from your slumbers
Arise ye prisoners of want
For reason in revolt now thunders
And at last ends the age of cant.
Away with all your superstitions
Servile masses arise, arise
We’ll change henceforth [forthwith] the old tradition [conditions]
And spurn the dust to win the prize.

So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.
So comrades, come rally
And the last fight let us face
The Internationale unites the human race.

No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we’ll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They’ll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We’ll shoot the generals on our own side.

No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
E’er the thieves will out with their booty [give up their booty]
And give to all a happier lot.
Each [those] at the forge must do their duty
And we’ll strike while the iron is hot.

Web link of note: The Internationale in 20 languages
(At http://www.hymn.ru/internationale/index-en.html)

Assassination Vacation

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What do you get when a woman who’s obsessed with death and U.S. history goes on vacation? This wacky, weirdly enthralling exploration of the first three presidential assassinations. Vowell ( The Partly Cloudy Patriot), a contributor to NPR’s This American Life and the voice of teenage superhero Violet Parr in The Incredibles, takes readers on a pilgrimage of sorts to the sites and monuments that pay homage to Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley, visiting everything from grave sites and simple plaques (like the one in Buffalo that marks the place where McKinley was shot) to places like the National Museum of Health and Medicine, where fragments of Lincoln’s skull are on display. An expert tour guide, Vowell brings into sharp focus not only the figures involved in the assassinations, but the social and political circumstances that led to each-and she does so in the witty, sometimes irreverent manner that her fans have come to expect. Thus, readers learn not only about how Garfield found himself caught between the Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds, bitterly divided factions of the Republican party, but how his assassin, Charles Guiteau, a supporter of the Stalwarts and an occasional member of the Oneida Community, “was the one guy in a free love commune who could not get laid.” Vowell also draws frequent connections between past events and the present, noting similarities between McKinley’s preemptive war against Cuba and the Philippines and the current war in Iraq. This is history at its most morbid and most fascinating and, fortunately, one needn’t share Vowell’s interest in the macabre to thoroughly enjoy this unusual tour.

0743260031

Letterboxing: the Plague Years

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I had always thought geocaching had sprung, fully-formed, from the skull of the geeky sport of orienteering, which is basically recreational map reading while running. But it is not so!

Geocaching is where you leave GPS coordinates listed somewhere for people to find… then they use their GPS to find a box buried somewhere which you left for them, along with maybe a notebook or prizes or something. Periodically you check the box for what mementos strangers left you…

But it’s very very very similar to letterboxing , an older hobby where you leave cryptic clues leading to the wherabouts of a buried box. I like the suggestion of leaving with your notebook a personalized rubber ink stamp, which the finder uses to stamp his own letterboxing log. He would also carry his own personal stamp, which he would use to leave a mark in the letterbox cache’s notebook. It reminds me of Japanese temples and other tourist stops, where they have stamps for any given place. I always stamped my big-ass road map of Japan with it. I think I have about half a dozen.

Letterboxing seems to me a very lonely hobby- maybe the kind of hobby you’d pick if you had some horrible disfigurement that made ordinary social interaction unlikely.

Or maybe, in the future, when plagues run rampant across the world and everyone stays their entire lives in their own quarantined village for fear of infection, letterboxing is a variant on the only way any inter-village commerce gets done. No human contact… Bandits cannot find your package, you know… they can barely read. Dirty untouchables. Be sure to autoclave the shipment when you find it! Be careful not to rip your environment suit! If you do, we won’t let you back in the village walls.

Letterboxing links:

Geocaching links: