September 2005 Archives

Bauhaus are coming, Bauhaus are coming, Bauhaus are coming!

The founding fathers of goth rock are playing at the Paramount Theater in Seattle on October 21st and I got my ticket yesterday!

Hooray!!

I've seen lead singer Peter Murphy on solo tours a couple times, but I've never seen the band despite their immense influence on my musical and fashion tastes in the late 80's and early 90's. Given that they haven't released new music since 1983, I was surprised that they were still touring and very happy that I chanced upon an ad for the show in last week's The Stranger.

In sorting through some backups today I came across HTML versions of many of my graduate school essays. I used to have a lot of fun spewing forth on topics such as the nature of authorship, the narrative structure of such-and-such a film, and what-not. Upon reflection, it all seems so pretentious and worthless.

Nevertheless, it's a source of content for this blog and serves as an illustration of the sort of person I was 10-12 years ago. So, here is the first of several of my old essays to be posted here: "Adventures in Authorland: or Rethinking Intellectual History and the Death of the Author"

This was written for a course in Comparative Lit, the topic of which was Neitzsche, Adorno, and Foucault. It was one of those "boutique" courses that reflected nothing more than the professor's personal preferences and/or upcoming book topic. At the time, I was heavily influenced by the "anti-theory" movement, which had already more-or-less peaked, and I sought every opportunity to attempt to shatter academic arguments by turning their own logic against them.

In this class, my topic was a huge stretch. Foucault had written "What is an Author?" but it was a relatively small part of his ouevre. I think I only mentioned Neitzsche in a footnote. Nevertheless, I earned an "A" for the paper and the course and probably felt all full of myself for laying waste to another academic battleground.

Of all the various arguments circulating against the concept of Intelligent Design, there's one aspect of it that I rarely hear expressed.

Adherents of ID use a rather facile analogy comparing a watch to a living organism. If a watch needs a watchmaker, they argue, than it follows that a living thing requires a Creator. They are quick to point out that "Creator" does not necessarily mean the Christian God.

Let's ignore, for a moment, the fallaciousness of the analogy comparing an inanimate object to a being comprised of living, self-replicating cells. And let's give them the benefit of the doubt on the Creator ≠ God bullshit rhetoric.

Let's take the claim at face value: a complex being/system requires a Creator.

Well, then, who created this Creator?

This is a slight variation on the question probably posed by every 5-year old forced by their parents to go to church. When I was around that age and asked my mother that question in reference to God, I got the standard cop-out answer: no one created God, he just always existed.

But if the main arguments to justify the need for the concept of a Creator in the first place are that life cannot have started from non-life and that humans are too complex to have evolved by chance, then the question has to be posed in terms of the Creator itself. Presumably the Creator would have had to have been pretty darn complex itself to have created, or even just initiated, such complexity. How, then, could it have just "always existed" or sprung up from nothingness? How could the Creator have not been "designed"?

And if you allow that the Creator sprung up from nothingness or wasn't itself designed, then why can't you allow that to apply to life? Science gives us all kinds of theories that describe and explain how life did arise from non-life and how organic complexity can be achieved through genetic anomalies and errors and, yes, by chance. What does Christianity or Intelligent Design give us to explain the means by which their respective Creators (who are not the same, remember) were created?

[sound of crickets chirping]

There was an amusing piece in the Seattle Times this morning in response to Ned Flanders'Michael Medved's comments that the film March of the Penguins affirms conservative Christian beliefs about the moral structure of an intelligently designed Universe. Medved said that Penguins was "the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing."

And now, a word from penguins is written from the point of view of a penguin, who notes:

We have an 80 percent divorce rate. We select mates in part by who shows up when. If last year's spouse isn't there when you get to the breeding ground, it's cool, you get busy scoring another one.

The New York Times weighed in on this topic a couple days ago and included a quote from Christian rag World Magazine's Andrew Coffin on the work that goes into protecting penguins' eggs.

That any one of these eggs survives is a remarkable feat - and, some might suppose, a strong case for intelligent design.

From his comment, one can presumably reason that the film depicts a high percentage of these eggs failing to survive. In fact, an article from Seaworld notes that:

a. Winter starvation may claim the lives of 50% of king chicks (Cherel, et al., 1987; Davis and Darby, 1990).

b. Emperor chicks may experience a 90% mortality within the first year of life (Sparks and Soper, 1987).

c. When mortality affects one chick in species producing two offspring of moderate size differences, it is usually the smaller chick that does not survive (Davis and Darby, 1990).

The case Coffin makes then, apparently, is that a high starvation and mortality rate coupled with parental neglect of weaker offspring is evidence of a Creator.

I went to see The Constant Gardener last night. John Le Carré is one of my favorite authors and I thought this was an excellent adaptation.

The last 15 minutes or so were difficult for me, though, as I was trying to keep myself from weeping uncontrolably.

The Seattle Times: Local FEMA chief had little disaster experience

Great. I'm already freaking out over earthquakes and volcanic eruptions; now, I learn that Bush's cronie-ism has spread to our region as well.

John Pennington, the official in charge of federal disaster response in the Northwest, was a four-term Republican state representative who ran a mom-and-pop coffee company in Cowlitz County when then-Congresswoman Jennifer Dunn helped him get his federal post.

Before he was appointed regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Pennington got a degree from a correspondence school that government investigators later described as a "diploma mill."

An article in last week's New Yorker [not on-line] explored the seeming paradox between our custom of tipping waitstaff in restaurants and the classless society that America seeks to be. The article reported that nearly 80% of diners prefer the tipping system to a fixed-price menu concept like they have in France. The author speculates that diners like the sense of control they have with tipping, even though most do not tip any more or less than usual regardless of the type of service they receive.

I've always been a pretty consistent tipper averaging around 17% - 18%. This got me thinking about another arena of tipping, however: the ubiquitous "tip jar" on shop counters.

I usually don't post stuff like this, and I know there's a lot out there in the "blogosphere" and even on mainstream news programs about the counter-spin to blame the pathetic emergency response to hurricane Katrina on local and state leaders, but I have been so incensed lately that I felt the need to vent and offer up a round-up of relevant "real" news (as opposed to what passes for news on Fox/ABC/MSNBC/CNN).