quasigrecian thoughts

[calimac]

1. The Asian earthquake/tsunami seems to be turning out to be the worst single natural disaster in centuries. Oh my. Now would be the time, if we had a president like Bill Clinton or even Ronald Reagan, for him to make a moving statement that would focus our grief and concern. As it is, I feel curiously unfocused and distanced from this tragedy.

2. But what I mostly wonder is, how difficult is it to use several hours' warning to tell people to get away from the beach? Claims that it's difficult to predict where a tsunami will strike are irrelevant: directly across open ocean from a quake this size it's sufficiently likely to make it worth the trouble.

3. Susan Sontag died. Sorry to say I've never read much by her. But the outpouring of abuse she's taken since 9/11 seems senseless to me: what she said at the time was overstated for effect but nothing more than that, and nothing at all to get all hot about.

4. supergee took a Music Quiz, or that's what it's called. Actually it's an Esoteric Varieties of Current Pop Music Quiz. I can't even take the quiz: I don't understand what half of the statements mean. Of course, I don't understand the answers, either: I have no idea what Emo, Industrial, Ska, or Hardcore mean as types of music, or what the difference is between Indie and Indie Rock. My favorite types of rock/pop music are early 70s Electric Folk, equally early 70s Art Rock (very selectively), all periods of Acoustic Singer-Songwriter, and mid-60s Studio-Experimental Concept Songs, in that order. I don't need a cryptic quiz to tell me that, and I doubt any of those categories register on this quizmaker's brain anyhow.

5. Found in library, a newish (2002) collection of essays by David Lodge, Consciousness & The Novel. Not as interesting as The Practice of Writing or the fantastically informative and entertaining The Art of Fiction, both of which I own copies of, it interested me most for its lucid surveys of Evelyn Waugh's early novels and John Updike's Bech books, two bodies of work I've dipped into but don't know well. I was also amused by Lodge's introduction to a description of Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2.

I discovered this book only recently, perhaps because Powers is not as well known in Britain as in America. ... His work tends to be categorised with genre fiction like the techno-thriller and science fiction rather than literary fiction, and the title of Galatea 2.2 encourages such a misapprehension. In fact he is a very literary novelist, and Galatea 2.2 is not the name of a spaceship or a distant star, but an allusion to the myth of Pygmalion.

I'm inclined to think we sci-fi guys still have a ways to go before even the sympathetic literati take us seriously.

Comments

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

re 4. I took the quiz, guessing at the answers I couldn't figure out, and got "indie" at 58 %. Since I'm with you on the early 70's Electric Folk, any era Acoustic Singer-Songwriter (particularly if they're Canadian, Scottish, or British) fronts (though I have a strong streak of 80s Pop/Rock and Lite Metal (Def Leppard, Blue Oyster Cult, etc.) and World Music and a huge honking streak of 70s/80s/90s Celtic Electric Folk (Battlefield Band, Tannahill Weavers, etc.) to complicate things), I have no idea if anyone would ever do a quiz that would take my tastes into account. Though at least "indie" is closer than the other categories, even if I've only heard of one of the bands they recommend and don't like it.

[jerrykaufman.livejournal.com]

Susan Sontag was one of my Culture Heroes. I've read a number of her essay collections and nonfiction books. I'm sorry she's gone.

Sontag

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Any particular recommendations to start with?

Re: Sontag

[jerrykaufman.livejournal.com]

It's been years since I read them, but I'd suggest Against Interpretation, a collection of essays (it includes an essay about the connection between Japan's memories of being a-bombed in WWII and their cycle of Godzilla movies), and On Photography, her book on the ways that photography has affected our culture.

[milwaukeesfs.livejournal.com]

Regarding tsunami warning, you need to realize that in a lot of areas that were affected there were no phones and not even any paved roads. Probably no one owns a short-wave radio or has any electricity to run it if they did. Some of the "governments" are merely the current crop of victorious thugs and lack the organization to protect their otherwise valuable serfs. I had great sympathy for the dillemma of the British and American seismologists who were the first to percieve the quake and realize that they had no colleagues in Indonesia to contact to warn. I can just imagine the raction they would have gotten calling the Indonesian or Indian embassies: "You're a what?" I do wonder what calling the BBC and getting a bulletin out on the World Service might have done--.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Somalia, yes, but Phuket? The entire nation of Sri Lanka?

[milwaukeesfs.livejournal.com]

Very interesting article in New York Times on line today, at: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/international/worldspecial4/31wave.html?hp&ex=1104555600&en=41eeabf20494d0e5&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Apparently, it took a while for scientists to assemble the data to realize what they were seeing. The major tsunami warning center is focused on the Pacific ocean, and has no local sensors in the Inidan Ocean, which has not been an area of concern. By the time thay had enough data points to realize the true magnitude of the earthquake, it was already too late for Phuket and Sri Lanka. They did try to call embassies on the African coast, but apparently not much happened.