No nutshell large enough

As the 2009 recipient of the Suzan Nightingale prize for newspaper columns published in Alaska during the previous year — universally recognized as the world’s highest literary honor — I now face the same danger of career anticlimax that turned triumph into tragic farce for Alexander after conquering Persia, Ronald Reagan after leaving Hollywood, and Richard Daystrom after inventing duotronic circuits.
From this height, a decline looks unavoidable, but I have set my sights on another goal to at least prolong the pain. And while the Edward Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is not the Suzan Nightingale prize, it can still claim the distinction of a bar set so high that neither Walter Lippmann nor Walter Winchell reached it during their lives, and whose chances of ever doing so have only declined since their deaths.
EBLFC is like a TV show that doesn’t mind jumping the shark in the pilot episode. As a literary exercise, it blurs the line between the pointless and the superfluous, asking entrants to compose the worst possible opening sentence for a novel. That anyone reading this sentence already shares my high tolerance for unnecessarily complex sentence structures, irrelevant parentheticals and gratuitously recherché vocabulary goes, although obviously not without typing, at least without saying.
Either that or you’re German.
Yet I know restraint, having split only half the infinitives in this article so far. The name of the contest commemorates an author who knew none, an Englishman whose turgid style could stand eye-to-eye with that of Eichendorff, Kleist or Hoffman without flinching. Heck, it could take them all on at once, beat them around the ring, swipe their Menthos, and leave the entire post-Goethe pantheon gasping for a semicolon.
Amazingly, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) enjoyed tremendous success with Victorian readers, whose faultless judgment in wrought iron railings and which backward civilizations to colonize did not extend to their bookshelves.
Of course, modern readers have an answer to that in Jackie Collins. In the spirit of research, I once tried to read one of her books, since I make a modest living at writing but would rather make several thousand such modest livings, as she does. I found I lost nothing of the story by skipping every other sentence, then paragraph, then page, and finally chapter. The more mathematically inclined could see Collins’ style as the perfectly redundant literary manifestation of a Mandelbrot set.
But I digress. Of course.
The point is, Bulwer-Lytton is unreadable —and not in the cool way like “Ulysses” or “Gravity’s Rainbow.” Nobody pretends to have read his 1834 novel “The Last Days of Pompei” to score points with an intellectual chick. Witness the wisdom of the Hollywood rewrite. The classic 1935 film based on it kept nothing but the title. At least that’s what we all assume, since nobody has actually made it through the book since 1904.
During my stint as a newspaper editor, I have devoted most of my waking hours to the transmission of important information through clear, concise prose. But with the goal of winning this year’s EBLFC in mind, I did what anybody with a narrow range of outdated skills in a stressed industry would do during economic hard times.
I quit my job.
Would it make more sense to devote my energy to improving newspapers as a product, thus bolstering their status as an indispensable bulwark of democracy? Perhaps.
Do I marvel at my own ability to waste time composing such sentences? A little.
Are rhetorical questions a hackneyed and irritating literary device? Undoubtedly.
So here are my entries for this year’s contest:

The day began, like so many others, almost immediately after midnight, and continued virtually uninterrupted until the following midnight, despite Jeremy’s foredoomed attempts to construct a time machine without the calliope and live kinkajou usually associated with such devices.

I field-tested that sentence a few months ago, and was told it was too coherent for the spirit of EBLFC. So I tried again.

Theodosia’s gaze strayed to the kitchen window, through which she saw a dreary rain mottling Paul’s latest triumph, an abstract sculpture in concrete — an apt metaphor for life itself, she reflected, if only he had named it something other than “Up Yours, Manitowoc County Arts Commission.”

But I was enjoined to be more turgid. I took the criticism to heart and produced this third possibility:

It would be no wanton hyperbole to call Cecil Basingstoke-Weekes a giant among men, as it would be to call him one among musk oxen, and while to the great good fortune of the Godalming Society for Orthographic Reform’s reputation for scrupulous accuracy the latter expression never found its way past the lips of any of its members — due however much to their profound, if unsurprising, ignorance of a species rarely seen in that part of Surrey — it was the merest spite that prevented them from making use of the former.

This time the reaction tended to blank stares rather more than I intended, and I felt obligated to try one last time.

Palomina — for such was the name by which Fanny Metacarpal referred to herself in the privacy of her own thoughts — leaned against the drab doorway of her hovel, lugubriating in a mental landscape that owed much to the dreary aspect of similar hovels stretching into a Hoovervillian vista before her for its desperate Weltschmerz, strewn as it was with spiritual rubbish and emotional dirty laundry, and decided to go inside.

Was reading this column any more painful than watching Sarah Palin choose Bobby Jindall as her 2012 running mate at the exact moment a volcano erupted near Anchorage? You be the judge.

More stereos

Holy Resurrection Cathedral, but it's not that big and there's no bishop in Kodiak any more.

Mel Gibson memorial tower in Stirling, Scotland. (OK, William Wallace memorial, but there was a statue of Mel in the parking lot).

Kodiak welcome sign in front of former day shelter for homeless, now out of business.

Baranov Museum, aka Erskine House, aka Russian magazin, oldest building in Alaska (1808)

The Water Key needs repainting. Haulout planned for early June, volunteers receive exclusive souvenirs (really cool ones). Note Drew's officer burgee as D17 ADSO-PA.

In Ferry terminal parking lot looking toward Near Island bridge.

Kodiak Daily Mirror pressman Jeff Henderson standing next to mighty engine of freedom, March 2009.

You people think I can just roll out of bad in the morning and look this scruffy? No, sir, it takes work.

Stereoviews for use with Drewview

See previous posting for simple instructions on how to make the amazing Drewview stereoscope out of household objects.

Churchyard in Dunblane, Scotland, summer 2007


"Satchmo's Ghost Serenades Nessie Near Greenland"


Lion statue in front of Glasgow city hall, summer 2007


"Space Tourism"


Cheng Man-ching


"Haregaj sagxuloj de la 19-a jarcento cxirkauxsxvebas Zamenhofon"
(Hairy wise men of the 19th century hover around Zamenhof)


Tiller of the Discovery, one of Capt. Robert Falcon Scott's ships, from my visit to Dundee, Scotland, in 2007


"Portrait of the Artist as a Dead Man"

The Drewview

A stereoscope from household items

Thanks to the wheel of fashion, those of us with a penchant for vintage (what we used to call “second hand”) clothes and accessories actually lead every trend — if you wait long enough.
I introduced the Swatch to America in 1984. I liked the retro use of hands on a watch in an era dominated by those pre-LCD glowing digitals. I was also ahead of the curve on banded collars and green tea. Don’t come crying to me when you’re the only one on the block who doesn’t speak Esperanto.
Now the Hollywood buzz is all about a revival of 3-D, and this time I have published proof of my foresight.
I devised the following project for a children’s section of the Kodiak Daily Mirror (Dec. 19, 2006). I consider it by far the greatest achievement of my career in journalism.

Materials:
2 toilet paper tubes
1 pair 2.25X reading glasses
clear tape
1 business card
optional: paint or electrician’s tape



Construction:

1. As an optional improvement for opacity, you can wrap the toilet paper tubes with electrician’s tape, or paint the tubes. If you want to paint them for decoration, it might be better to do it before the other steps.

2. Pop the reading glasses lenses out of the frame. Tape a lens to one end of each of the toilet paper tubes. Call the ends of the tubes with the lens “A” and the empty ends “B”.


3. Tape the short end of the business card to the left tube about half an inch from the A end so that the card sticks up perpendicular to the inside edge of the lens (as if it were still in the glasses).



4. Tape the other short end of the business card similarly to the right tube. Now you can hold the tubes in position to put the lenses side-by-side like they were in their old reading glasses days, and the business card bends to form a bridge over your nose.


5. With the tubes held to make the bridge as in step 4, tape the inner edges of the B ends together to make the point of a V-shape.


6. Stereoscope is done. To view images, hold the viewer with the lenses up to your eyes and aim. You can adjust the viewer for the distance between your eyes by squeezing the bridge tighter or looser. When viewing, hold the image steady for a moment to let your eyes get a fix, then change the distance gradually to find the best position for the 3-D effect.

Making images:

I include some samples here from real life and some I put together from pieces. You can view them on the computer screen or print them out and make little cards. I calculated the specs so that the image to view (left and right halves taken together) is about the size of a standard playing card.

To make your own stereoviews with a camera, shoot one photo for the left image, then move the camera slightly to the right on the same horizontal plane and snap the right image. If there are people or animals in the picture, make sure they don’t move.

The distance between where the camera takes the two frames doesn’t have to be eye width. Depending on the distance to the subject and its size, you might get a better effect with a larger or smaller baseline. For example, if you shoot a building from across the road, you could try moving the camera a few feet for the second shot.

To make completely artificial stereo art, choose a background scene or pattern and place foreground objects on it (easy in Photoshop, but also possible by hand). Let that be the left image. Then copy that image, but move the foreground objects slightly left against the background to create the right image. The farther an object is moved, the more it will appear to stand out from the background, so you can place objects at different apparent depths.

Several online archives make old stereoviews available. Adjust the size on screen to about 66 percent for this homemade viewer, or you can print them out and reduce them with a copier to the right size. Mounting them on cardboard with spray glue makes them easier to use.
http://content.lib.washington.edu/stereoweb/
http://www.johnsonshawmuseum.org/
http://library.pacific.edu/ha/digital/spooner/index.asp

I am considering the design of a card holding extension for the Drewview like on the old-fashioned stereoscopes so you don’t have to hold the picture yourself.

Remember to use the awesome power of stereoscopy only for good, never for evil.

The universe is relatively fool-proof

What a time to live in America, when through talent, intelligence and hard work, a descendant of slaves kidnapped from Africa and brought to these shores against their will can grow up to become — the president’s wife.
Before and after the November election, a lot of pundits waxed on about how Barack Obama’s candidacy and victory show that anybody can achieve anything in this country. That kind of talk brings two question to my mind.
First, what do I have to do to get people to call me a pundit? I’ve been a professional journalist and columnist for years, and now everybody I work with is younger than me. I’m just sayin’.
Second, didn’t George W. Bush already prove that anybody can be president? With his (sort of) election, we showed that you don’t need competence, general knowledge or respect for the Constitution to occupy the highest office in the land.
So what’s the big deal with Obama, a handsome, charismatic, brilliant legal scholar?
It’s like Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays, two of the best players in the country, breaking the color barrier in major league baseball. They still had to sleep in separate hotels and eat at separate diners, and their middle- and lower-tier colleagues were all white. The game wasn’t really integrated until you could be mediocre and black, and still get a job with the Yankees.
Same for the White House. I’ll get excited about race and gender equality when we elect an African-American woman as incompetent as Bush to lead us into our next unjustified war.
Baby steps, I guess.
I have a colleague who would like to see Sarah Palin become president. Her arguments mirror those of B.D. in recent Doonesbury comics, so I won’t go into detail here. Suffice to say, she doesn’t consider a passing grade in high school geography a sine qua non to direct United States foreign policy.
I’m not sure what people see in these candidates the Republicans like to throw up, but I guess that’s why Karl Rove gets the big bucks. They attract people like Abraham Lincoln, Earl Warren and Colin Powell, then run Bushes, Palins and, bless his heart, Don Young.
According to one theory, average voters want to see someone like themselves in leadership positions. I’m far from the only one asking why we would want somebody as dumb as the average voter in the hardest, most important job in the world.
As against that, I can hardly argue anyone has a big enough brain to get us through what’s coming. Sometimes a no-win scenario deserves the name, and even if everybody handling luggage for the airlines were as smart as me, your bags wouldn’t get to the right destination.
The smartest human of the twentieth century was a devout, peace-loving guy who wanted the best for everybody. His work led directly to the invention of weapons that can wipe us all out, possibly starting next week in South Asia.
And maybe not. As Palin would ask, what does Indiana have against Pakistan that’s worth a nukyular war?
Even if Obama is as smart as Einstein and leads with the wisdom of Solomon, he can only buy Western Civilization a few years, at most. The whole human setup has reached a point that was probably inevitable from the day Oolgfrap figured out how to make the hot orange stuff out of sticks and leaves.
Apparently, Naeser’s Law applies even to the Almighty, which leads me to two more questions.
Will God tell the governor of Alaska to accept the Fox network offer, and what will people do if they schedule “Sarah” opposite “Oprah”?

Subatomic analysis of the vice presidential debate

Thanks to Sarah Palin, I finally have the difinitive response for foreign friends who ask me to explain the difference between Republicans and Democrats.

As leader of Republicans for the last eight years, George W. Bush established a precedent for distinguishing the parties, a simple litmus test we have sorely needed since the ascendancy of nylon and polyester put paid to Pat Nixon’s cloth coat. So Bush will be remembered for giving the English-garbling world “nukyuler” for a lot longer than anybody remembered constitutional checks and balances.

In her debate with Joe Biden Thursday, Palin repeatedly took up the nukyular mantle with an insistance worthy of a commander in chief. Her opponent subtly defended the Democratic-approved stance, meeting Palin’s verbal detonations by inserting the high-taxing, big government watchword “nuclear” into the gaps not otherwise filled by “darn” or “doggone.”

It swayed her no more than Biden’s pointed hints about the U.S. general in Afghanistan. Maybe her references to Gen. McClellan represent abortive attempts by the spirit of Abraham Lincoln to slip Palin some classical eloquence from the Great Campaign Trail in the Sky. He probably feels responsible for using up all the Republican literary mojo at Gettysburg and his second inaugural.

However it started, the Republican preference for mangled prose and malapropisms now stands as fundamental policy.

Some people probably still believe Colin Powell left the State Department becaue of disagreements about doctrine or pique over being used and humiliated with his U.N. speech in favor of war against Iraq. In the event, the problem was his un-Republican habit of expressing complex ideas in coherent, well-formed sentences. The lesson has not been completely lost on Condy Rice, who avoids meaningful content even while risking her job by correct pronunciation.

Both of them need to remember their roots and pay attention to the example of previous Republican SecState Al Haig, who used the power of his office to make “impact” a verb.

Deep down, that’s the kind of leadership Joe Six-pack, Jane Chablis and Bob Bacardi really want. Not, as Mike Dukakis impotently put it, a president “who can think and talk in complete sentences.”

OK, that was Jon Lovitz, but his version of the debate got higher ratings.

Now, I would like to support an Alaskan on a major ticket, but Palin and the Republicans have taken a stand that reveals an ugly prejudice against my ethnicity. As a copy editor-American, it falls to me to stand up for our rights before the Republicans tack a rider onto the next Wall Street bailout bill that legalizes spelling “barbecue” with a q.

The backers of English-only laws are also overwhelmingly Republican, begging the question of how they propose to govern without violating the statutes every time they open their mouths. If a federal law were in place, Congress would have had no choice but to begin the impeachment process immediately following President Bush’s first State of the Union.

So no Alaskan in the Blair House this time around. It’s disappointing, but if you care at all about the basic rules of pronunciation our founding fathers believed in, your choice in November is clear.

Excuse me — culear.

How to face the end

In six weeks, every subtle difference and shade of opinion in America will disappear into the Manichaean excersice of choosing between two candidates. You have that long to decide what to give up, expectations-wise.

A lot of truisms and their related spoofs start out, "There are two kinds of people in this world …"

I have correctly derided all of them, usually with no more rhetorical effort than it takes to refute a creationist. But one binary characterization of all humanity requires a little more attention, lest any more people get sucked into believing it reveals a deep, meaningful insight into two camps neatly divided by their respective weltanschauungs.

Some people drive straight in to parking spaces and then have to back out when they leave. Other people back in to park so they can drive straight out when they leave.

(Maybe some confused people — the sort who tell pollsters that they trust Republicans more than Democrats with fiscal policy — sometimes park one way, sometimes the other.)

Obviously, the total time either strategy requires for parking and leaving is exactly the same. So why pick one or the other?

Your facile psychologizer would conclude the back-inners have more foresight and are willing to invest their effort against a future convenience.

As one of the deeper-thinking back-outers, I know better.

Behold my logic: Someday the world will end. Statistically, I will most likely be parked when that happens, so any time potentially saved when pulling out of the parking spot never happens. The extra 20 seconds it would take to back in when parking gets wasted.

Since the two parking methods are time-neutral until that day, it makes more sense to drive straight in and use what may be the last 20 seconds of the universe to do something meaningful. I plan on recalling some of my favorite "Peanuts" cartoons, the ones where Snoopy puts on sunglasses, leans against a tree, and sums up all of existence in the last panel.

The real lesson? I drive too much.

Meanwhile, don't be the kind of person who thinks there are two kinds of people in this world. It's an overestimate.

Here's Joe Cool, ready for the end.