Whatever happened to Zoot Suits?

I have avoided posting things about swimming, mainly because my target audience has little background on the subject, but not much background is needed to appreciate the vicious verbal attacks of some of swimming's most famous and (in some cases) respected people. A little background doesn't hurt though:

For the past year or so things have been escalating in the swimming world concerning the legality of the new suits, which are in some ways performance-enhancing. There is merit to both sides of the argument and far too many voices out there for me to have much to say on the subject.

Fred Bousquet is the fastest human in the water of all time, since he shattered the world record in France while wearing a suit that has since been deemed illegal by FINA (the international body that governs swimming).

Brett Hawke is the head swim coach at Auburn who coaches Bousquet and 4 of the top 16 fastest swimmers ever.

Craig Lord is an experienced and respected member of the swimming community who writes for SwimNews.com.

The Screaming Viking is just a strange observer of all things swimming.

This is an article posted on the Viking's blog.

Honestly? Twitter takes on Dickens. And Christ.

Classics by Charles Dickens, JD Sallinger and Jane Austen are among the novels to have been boiled down to a sentence by bookish readers of the micro-blogging site.
...
"What it is really good for is live-blogging events as they take place, and that can work for historical events too. Over Easter a church in the US re-created the death and Resurrection of Christ through tweets."

Read the rest of the article.

The Foreknown

When you approach a work of literature, is it necessary to know everything about the topic that the author discusses? Do you have to have an intimate knowledge of the political background in order to experience the true depth of Richard II or Henry V? I don't think so. Yet if you follow the link on the right hand side of this page to the David Jones Society website you will find that those who run the society are more concerned with the atmosphere, life, and place of Jones' content than about the literature itself. They even offer a tour of David Jones' birthplace and places of interest in his literature. These founders and administrators of the society are considered the foremost scholars on the literature of David Jones (William Blisset, Thomas Dilworth, etc.), yet they seem very concerned with discovering the background and life of the works. This is quite bothersome.

I had hoped that Randy Malamud in this article would make a strong argument against "Literary Tourism", but it seemed as if he was afraid to confront the issue head-on and caved in to the whimperings of the masses who romanticize the places of an author's birth or his culture. Fuck culture. The true literary artist does not evoke culture, but the beauty and truth that are inherent in the subject. The place, the culture, the history is a medium of truth, not the truth itself. That's not all though: the artist portrays what he sees, not what is there. So even if you were to stand on the exact same spot, reenact the exact same scene, and set the exact same tone, would you experience the same truth as you would by reading the literature itself.

Okay, so literary tourism is overkill, but is it acceptable or even necessary to discover the history of a piece or understand the political background? Yes, in a sense. If you know the story of King Henry V, then you will more fully understand Henry V, why certain characters are significant, and the setting will be easier to grasp. But you cannot go back in time and find Falstaff, you can't return to the globe and see Prince Hal, and you certainly cannot recreate the experience of 1415 in such a way as to "truly feel and see" what Shakespeare depicts in the character of Pistol.

Unpredictably Irregular Poetry Exposure #7

The dead swans lay in the stagnant pool.
They lay. They rotted. They turned
Around occasionally.
Bits of flesh dropped off them from
Time to time.
And sank into the pool's mire.
They also smelt a great deal.

-Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings

Unbelievable...

Property Relations in Mickey Mouse Cartoons

Property relations in Mickey Mouse cartoons: here we see for the first time that it is possible to have one's own arm, even one's own body, stolen.

The route taken by a file in an office is more like that taken by Mickey Mouse than by a marathon runner.

In these films, mankind makes preparations to survive civilisation.

Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being. He disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind.

These films disavow experience more radically than ever before. In such a world, it is not worthwhile to have experiences.

Similarity to fairy tales. Not since fairy tales have the most important and most vital events been evoked more unsymbolically and more unatomospherically. There is an immeasurable gulf between them and Maeterlick or Mary Wigman. All Mickey Mouse films are founded on the motif of leaving home in order to learn what fear is.

So the explanation for the huge popularity of these films is not mechanization, their form; nor is it a misunderstanding. It is simply the fact that the public recognizes its own life in them.

-from Walter Benjamin's "Mickey Mouse", 1931