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You just lost your job. Your partner broke up with you. You’re late on rent. Then, you dropped your iPhone in the toilet. “My life’s in shambles!” you shout. Had you so exclaimed, say, in an Anglo-Saxon village over 1,000 years ago, your fellow Old English speakers may have given you a puzzled look. “Your life’s in footstools?” they’d ask. “And what’s an iPhone?”

The post The shambolic life of ‘shambles’ appeared first on OUPblog.

In world politics, preserving order has an understandably sacramental function. The reason is plain. Without minimum public order, planetary relations would descend rapidly and perhaps irremediably into a "profane" disharmony.

The post Israel’s survival amid expanding chaos appeared first on OUPblog.

In the chaos of the internet, I missed Matthias Stork's response to critics of his video essay on Chaos Cinema, posted at Press Play back in December as "Chaos Cinema, Part III" (with the other two helpfully embedded on the same page). I watched it today after reading Steven Shaviro's text from a talk, "Post-Continuity".

Welcome to my back fence where I like to chat about writing and all things creative. I'm continuing my series on the nature of beginnings. I had an interesting chat with the multi-talented author Gail Carson Levine recently about CHAOS. Check out her blog for some ultra-fine writing advice.

Chaos is the study of systems that respond easily to change, especially at the beginning. These systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions. These conditions can vastly change the outcome of the systems. This sensitivity is called the butterfly effect. Initially, the wings of a butterfly can really set something like a hurricane in motion. If you look at the system later, a butterfly's wings will make little difference to the wild power of a hurricane. Yep, the beginning is REALLY important in a chaotic system.

I think that novels are chaotic systems, and this is why beginnings are such a bear. The first chapter of a novel is the place that beginning conditions are put in play. The first chapter will determine the course of the whole book. A book is very sensitive to changes in the beginning. The entire outcome rests on those first few pages. One of your goals is to find the butterfly wing events that set the engine of your story in motion. Yes, at times, this is like looking for a needle in a haystack. I've said it before. In the beginning, write a first chapter with a "tossability" factor. It's easier to back track from the hurricane to the butterfly wings event than the other way round for me.

Don't be hard on yourself if you've tried going at that beginning on your current work the twentieth time. Just take a deep breath and keep going. This process is delicate, complex stuff. You are David taking on Goliath. The good news is persistence is the key. You will move into the a solid pattern with enough tries. Don't give up.

Cast off into the deep waters knowing that you will find currents that will take you to distance shores. I hope you enjoy the journey this week. I will see you next week with some GOLDEN advice. :)

Now time for doodle of the week. I call this one, "Carpet at Seatac".


The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us, and in its secondary transfinite forms occurs all around us and even inhabits our minds.
Georg Cantor

My week started to go awry on a Wednesday, when my son was scheduled for his 2.5-year check-up.  Our "pediatrician" is one of those mega-offices employing two dozen practitioners in half a dozen different offices.  I picked up my son from school and sat in the waiting room for 10 minutes before learning that I was in the wrong place (wrong city, even).  No worries, I was told -- they could squeeze me in.  I might have to wait "a little while."  Were I using my brain, I would have canceled on the spot.  But of course there's that Mommy Guilt.  And so I drove and waited -- 1.5 hours -- to have my son seen for 5 minutes and to learn (as I already knew) that he is perfectly healthy, even if his projected adult height is 5'2".  I missed the start of naptime at school, so Mommy didn't get much work done that afternoon. 

Thursday afternoon, my daughter had a sedation dentistry appointment for two cavities so tiny they didn't even require novacaine or drilling.  Six hours and many tears later, we were finally home.  Success!  But again, Mommy didn't get much work done.

Friday, both kids had no school.  I had a conference call mid-day and somehow acquired a neighbor child for a play date.  Five minutes into the call, my kids got into a tug-of-war over a bag of Goldfish, with much shrieking entailed.  (Of course everyone knows when Mommy is on the phone with work, it's the best time to cause much mayhem.)  The highlight came (at a moment when the phone was not muted, naturally) when my daughter exited the bathroom, shouting, "Mommy, is my butt red?"

Saturday, my daughter woke up with sniffles, rubbed all the skin off her toe at a play date, and cried when we tried to leave her with a sitter, which we ultimately did not have the heart to do.

By Tuesday, she was home sick.  Wednesday -- more of the same.  Thursday she was better but not better enough to go to school.  I dragged her with me to the community college where I teach.  "It will be boring!" she wailed.  It was a 45-minute trip, and she asked to stop twice en route to use the bathroom.  Once we arrived, she asked for cereal.  She asked for a drink.  Finally, she tugged on my sleeve and said, "Mommy, is it okay if I sleep on the floor?"  And then she lay, flat on the tile floor in the middle of my classroom.  "Maybe we'll end early," I said to the class.   On the way home, I got a call from the air duct cleaners who had previously been scheduled to try to eradicate the odor of cat urine from all our vents (courtesy of one territorial kitty).  He (the man, not the kitty) was early; he did not speak English; and he was lost.  He called four times.  We beat him to the house and quickly departed for a hastily-arranged appointment to check my daughter for a UTI.  This time we made it to the right office, but my daughter refused to pee in the cup, so all was for naught.  We were sent home with a new cup, just in time to see the air vent cleaner (yes, I left a stranger in our house alone) depart.  Our house still smells like cat pee.  My daughter, meanwhile, was so determined not to pee in the cup that she "held it" for over 12 hours.  I decided this capability ruled out a urinary tract infection, master diagnostician that I am.

They say nature abhors a vacuum.  Our vacuum cleaner is, of course, broken.  

After many days of watching me "work," Kate made me proud by declaring that she wants to be a writer when she grows up.  Or a cowgirl, she later amended.  Yee-hah! 

***
Someday all these crazy years will make me a better writer and not just insane, right?  Someone please reassure me if you've made it this far!  Does anyone have any tips for Butt in Chair that don't involve shaving an

We woke this morning, at approximately 3am, to the sound of heavy rain. Startlingly, it did not seem to be coming from the open window next to the bed, but within the house. It is interesting how quickly we went from "deep sleep" to "wildly awake". It turns out the toilet tank on the third floor spontaneously split down the side last night.

I suspended this blog before John McCain suspended his campaign to work on the economy, so please vote for me on election day. My running mate is an androgynous simulacrum of Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman who spends most of its time arguing with itself about the role and value of government in effecting meaningful change.

I will be de-suspending the blog soon, though, because today I am going out into my backyard to talk with the squirrels about my plan for the economy, a plan that rests its many tentacles on a single bodily proposal: to release all non-violent offenders from prison to make room for various denizens of Wall Street. And to provide free feather boas to everybody who wants one.

Oh no! One of my cats just ate the Squirrel Majority Leader! The squirrels are in an uproar! The whole economic plan is now in jeopardy! Bad kitty! BAD!

My friends, I'm afraid I'm going to have to suspend the blog for a few more days while this crisis is resolved.

 ***Theodosia Throckmorton (Theo for short), the young daughter of the curator of the Museum of Legends and Antiquities in London, is very busy these days. The year is 1906, and the world’s western powers are busily excavating the treasure

A twentieth-century life
by Marc Aronson
Viking 2007

Part of a new series of biographies put out by Viking I was really looking forward to this one on RFK. I was hoping we had finally come to the place where the history of the latter half of the twentieth century would balance out the tri-war arc (Revolutionary, Civil and Second World War) that tends to dominate in textbooks. While Marc Aronson's contribution to this correction might have been welcome the book suffers from trying too hard to do too much.

In telling RFK's life story Aronson goes for a big-picture approach, attempting to give the scope and scale of RFK's world as well as his world view in attempting to define the man. In and of itself this isn't a bad thing but it takes a deft hand to draft a portrait that is both clear and contextual, and it takes greater caution with the way that information is supported. A person's life isn't always encapsulated in easy-to-understand chapters but like any good story it has a beginning, middle and end and, unless the subject has invented a time machine, generally moves in a forward direction through time.

No, I'm not suggesting that the only way to tell a person's life is a narrative a-to-b sequence of events, but the narrative being told needs to feel like it's moving forward in a way that will make sense to the reader and in the end provide them with a clear portrait of the subject. There are moments where history is condensed, where events months apart are casually referenced as taking place one after the other. Where dates are necessary they are given, but often they are presented as reference for other events in a way that provides both milieu and is deceptive.

Let's also be honest about the fact that most biographies written for children are provided as resources for school lessons, not likely pleasure reading, and in that light require a certain level of comprehension so that they can be used in reports. They can even be biased (and Aronson shows hint of his love of Bobby every time he makes sure to underline the man's faults, like an apologist) so long as they honest and clear in their appraisals.

Aronson's picture of RFK is presented deep within the soup of history that belongs to the Kennedy clan, alternately zooming in and out to show Bobby's place and influences. At times, especially in the first half of the book where his older brothers are showcased as foils, the book feels more like a biography of the Kennedy's than an examination of RFK. The book is muddled and slow to gain momentum: you could easily skip the forward, introduction and first two chapters of the book. Chapter One is designed to be one of those book-ending vignettes of Bobby on the presidential campaign trail just before he is assassinated but it presumes a reader born at the end of the Clinton administration has enough historical knowledge to appreciate the tension of this pending event. Aronson makes those sort of assumptions throughout which I think is a mistake.

In an attempt to keep the text breezy Aronson traffics in the unsupported statement, or sentences that must be taken on face value but still raise questions. At the democratic convention he reports that Lyndon Johnson and his aids were disorganized and inefficient, compared to Bobby and his crew, but doesn't explain in what ways or how this was crucial to the process. Further on he makes cursory mention of the buying of delegates in advance of the convention assuming the reader both understands how convention politics works, to say nothing of the electoral college. Throughout Aronson presents information in a way that only makes me want a second opinion, which if nothing else is a distraction from the story at hand.

He also makes spotty use of the attempt to make the book relevant to modern readers that tend to make it look silly. To bolster the idea of RFK coming from East Coast wealth but able to make himself empathetic with farm workers and civil rights activists Aronson points to the tough talk in rap music, to rappers who talk about "keeping it real", while raking in wealth and fame that pull them far from the real streets they rap about. In trying to discuss how unmoored RFK was following his brother's assassination he uses Phillip Pullman's example of what happens when a character in one of the 'His Dark Materials' books loses their animal daemons. What Aronson fails to point out in all this "relevance" is that while RFK was shrewed about his public image it was only after his older brother was assassinated RFK and he was finally free of the insecurities he had been held under since birth, that what he lost was also a personality pegged to always trying to prove he was as good as his brothers, to himself, to his father, to the world. I think that might have deserved a paragraph.

In the end I do think Up Close: Robert F. Kennedy can serve as a catalyst for a history-loving teen or tween to use as a jumping off point for delving into the 1960's. One look at the bibliography full of adult titles proves that there's a need for more age-appropriate materials but that shouldn't prove too much of a hindrance to the hungry.

There are other books in the Up Close series -- I'm looking forward to seeing what Ellen Levine does with Rachel Carson, and another on Johnny Cash by Anne E. Neimark that I might check out -- so I'm going to hold out hope that this was an anomaly.