Monthly Archives: December 2007

Knitting in Flight

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Carole is getting ready to do some international travel next week, so we have been going over the usual litany of indignities one is now subjected to in order to get on an airplane. Carole is also a knitter, which means she uses knitting needles, which are banned by the airline she is flying. Now it’s true that Carole has some big knitting needles that could cause a nasty puncture wound, but all she wants to do on the airplane is work on a a pair of socks. The knitting needles involved are larger than toothpicks, it’s true, but they are smaller than the cheap wooden chopsticks you get with Asian take-out. You would have to be some sort of fantastic ninja to use one of these things as a weapon. But of course the point of the regulations is not, as in the nauseating cliché, to “keep us safe.” No, the TSA regulations are intended to keep us obedient. In the most recent entry in his NY Times weblog Jet Lagged, Patrick Smith comes as close as anyone in the media to laying this fact before the public. He does not quite draw the final political conclusion — that obeying the airport screeners is intended to be practice for obeying any absurd regulation — but he gets everything else exactly right. The purpose of having to take your shoes off & go through a search of your belongings is to teach you to swallow your rage. Try this thought experiment: Imagine the whole enterprise transfered to a psychology laboratory & all the passengers turned into rats.

Update: Swiss Air let Carole take her knitting needles along, but she reports that ripped out most of what she knitted in flight because she made a mistake she “couldn’t live with” in the sock she was working on.

More on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

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Finished my read-through of the novel for next term. I’m going to be using Frankenstein to focus several issues — education, which I mentioned previously, will be central, especially as it contributes to our idea of what makes us human. Oddly, the book has hardly anything to do with science, as such, because Shelley glides over the actual biology, physiology, & biophysics of Viktor’s work, usually covering the moment in the text by mentioning the scientist’s “chemical instruments.” This is of course the gap that modern film directors have filled with elaborate laboratory sets consisting of sparking electrodes, bubbling retorts & the other iconography of science.

The character of Viktor presents the literature professor with a ready-made way of talking about modern conceptions of science as both potentially a power for good, but always with a potential for evil as well. That is, we have a cultural binary of the good genius versus the mad scientist. The madness of the mad scientist is linked, in the text, to the libido of his creation. Much of the plot is driven by the monster’s desire for a sexual partner & conversely by Viktor’s eternal delay of his marriage to Elizabeth.

In a plot filled with perplexities, it is a major perplexity why Viktor does not make a female monster who is unable to reproduce, since one the stated reasons for refusing to complete the second creature is that they might produce a “race of monsters.” What was the state of knowledge about reproductive biology when Shelley wrote? But then one can’t really read this book with an eye to carping realism: conceived in a dream, it has the logic of a dream. Mary Shelley, still an adolescent, whose mother died giving birth to her, pregnant herself while she wrote the story, evinces a good deal of anxiety about sexuality & childbirth. As well she might.

So is this novel the story of a failure to educate sexual energy? A failure to even understand its potential destructive power — as opposed to the pure creative  power of imagination. But even the imagination, misapplied as in Viktor’s case, breeds monsters.

Jr. High Politics

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When I was in junior high school in the sixties, you had to be a fan of The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, or The Beach Boys (this was southern California). Call it an early form of identity politics — it was pretty severe. You had to dress like your chosen group, wear your hair like them (as much as your parents would allow), and show contempt for the music of the other two bands. It was possible to shift allegiance, but the period during which you were without a firm identity produced high anxiety & resulted in social ostracism until you could establish your bona fides with your new band. I was thinking about this the other day when reading the comments on one of the lefty political blogs. Partisans of Hillary, Edwards, & Obama produced arguments that pretty much amounted to “My guy/gal is cuter than yours” & especially, the pop-paranoid, “It’s no fair the way everybody treats ________!” In other words, everything that my guy/gal does is the very definition of cool & correct & upstanding & well everything, whereas everything that your guy/gal does is uncool, suspect, disingenuous & extremely icky. It’s probably the same on the right-wing blogs, but I don’t follow them. In a way, such strong loyalty to a candidate shows a refreshing lack of cynicism, but it struck me as a strange way for adults to behave. So, which Democratic candidate equals which of the rock groups of my childhood? I think I got the order right above: Hillary is the cynical, tough Rolling Stones candidate, Edwards is the smart but traditional Beatles, & Obama is the basically substanceless Beach Boys candidate who presents his lack of substance as a virtue. Now, don’t ask me if Joe Biden is the Bob Dylan Candidate — you can only push an analogy so far. Besides, that was hight school & the comments I was reading were dead ringers for middle school snark.

Genevieve Taggard on US Immigration Policy

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Like many people, I’ve been appalled by the rise of nativist racism in the US in the last couple of years & in particular in the current presidential campaigns. I’ve wanted to write something & have twice sat down to attempt some kind of statement, if not an analysis, of the phenomenon, but both times I just wound up sputtering helplessly & inarticulately. This morning, though, I was working on the syllabus for my Modern American Poetry class next semester, when I came across “Ode in Time of Crisis” by Genevieve Taggard in Cary Nelson’s anthology [follow link for complete text]. Taggard, writing during the Second World War, eloquently expresses my own feelings. Here are the first two stanzas:

Now in the fright of change when bombed towns vanish
In fountains of debris
We say to the stranger coming across the sea
Not here, not here, go elsewhere!
Here we keep
Bars up. Wall out the danger, tightly seal
The ports, the intake from the alien world we fear.

It is a time of many errors now.
And this the error of children when they feel
But cannot say their terror. To shut off the stream
In which we moved and still move, if we move.
The alien is the nation, nothing more nor less.
How set ourselves at variance to prove
The alien is not the nation. And so end the dream.
Forbid our deep resource from whence we came,
And the very seed of greatness.

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Note: The companion website for Nelson’s Modern American Poetry is well worth looking at, providing commentary & background information on the poets in the anthology itself.

Xmas-Eve Meatball Sandwiches

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I had some leftover spaghetti sauce & some left over turkey sausage, so I made meatball sandwiches last night. For the meatballs, take about a cup of mild sausage, mix in three cloves of finely minced garlic, salt & pepper, some oregano, roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup panko breadcrumbs, & one egg yolk. Mix with your hand, then roll in more breadcrumbs & fry until golden brown. Hollow out the halves of some crunchy bread (I had some asiago cheese bread I’d made earlier), rub the outside with butter, place the halves for each sandwich on foil, slather the bread with lots of spaghetti sauce, cram in meatballs, grate cheese over meatballs, put the halves of bread together & roll them up tightly in the foil. Bake in a preheated 300° (F) oven for 30 minutes. To serve, let cool slightly, unroll from foil, serve with a salad.

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Note: I had erroneously been thinking of this sandwich as a Stromboli, which is clearly related, but not the same thing at all. I love it that the Stromboli originated, not on the island of the same name off the coast of Sicily, but in Pennsylvania & was named for an Ingrid Bergman movie! Now I can’t wait to make one. Italian, Mexican, & Asian street food is among the best arguments in favor of open immigration policies I can think of. I mean that seriously.