China's Greenhouse Gas Emissions Threaten to Double
Beijing, China: Upset over all of the attention the recent financial crisis has been getting, China's greenhouse gas emissions decided to fight back. Not content to remain silent, they have threatened to double in size unless full attention is paid.
"We used to get stories written about us all of the time," said China's methane emissions, "but now all you hear is money this, crisis that; mortgages over here, bailouts over there. We need to get people's attention back on what's really important here: us."
A mere two years ago, many stories (such as one in the Christian Science Monitor) were being written about how China's greenhouse gas emissions were becoming the largest in the world. Now that news has mostly faded behind stories of the world's economic crisis.
"We're still the biggest, you know?" said China's carbon dioxide emissions. "We haven't gone anywhere. The highest levels in the whole world. And that was before the Olympics. What's it going to take to get a little respect?"
Apparently, doubling in size. "I know we were the biggest, but who respects that these days?" asked China's ozone emissions. "All anyone respects is extremes, so that's why we're going to take it to the next level: two times what we are now. Unless our demands are met."
Those demands include 20 reporters devoted to full-time coverage, as well as at least 5 cover stories every two weeks. "It has to be real covers, too," said China's nitrous oxide emissions. "We're not going to count The Sacramento Bee. Try to pull anything like that, and we'll be talking three or four times our present size."
Climate scientists warn that the results could be disastrous. Australian mathematician Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo claims that it will just take "simple things" to keep China's emissions down. "We just have to give into their demands if we want to keep this planet inhabitable."
Reminded of recent trends in globalization, Dabo Guan of the Electricity Policy Research Group at the University of Cambridge in England warned that if the demands are not met, other country's emissions could follow suit. "That," he says, "would be a dangerous path."
The financial crisis could not be reached for comment.
Friday Not-So-Random One
It's been a long time. A real long time.
- Damien Jurado
The song Ohio by Damien Jurado has been running through my head for the past few days. I originally heard it on a mixtape 1 given to me by a friend of mine, I think because I didn't know who the Mountain Goats were2. It's an eclectic mix, but this song was one that really stood out.
It's a sad song. The first way this becomes apparent is the music, and especially the tempo. But there is also something haunting about the lyrics. I'm not precisely sure what it is that brings this out. I mean the story isn't exactly full of thrills, but there is something in the way that it is told that brings out the
It's a simple story, and I have come to like these sorts of stories a lot. Being away from America, I find one way to keep in touch is the stories told on This American Life3. They seem to collect just a piece of what it means to be living in America. It's similar to what Studs Turkel did with his oral histories. Sometimes the best way to learn about things is just to listen. The stories are also a lot of what I like about many of the Mountain Goats and Pedro the Lions' songs.
To return to the original song, there is something about the style of the song that gives it depth. It is possible to think of the lyrics as metaphorical, but except in the broader sense of all words being metaphors (and the horses passing4), most of them can be taken straightforwardly. I think it is this fact that gives it its depth: the fact that we can take this simple structure and add on to it and adapt it so that it fits in with our worldview. There is something allegorical about it.
To think about it more, below is a video for the song I found made by high school students. For those who didn't grow up nearby5, the city pictured here is Boston. One of the interesting things about the video is they adapt a lot of the song literally; some say too literally. Does this add to it? Detract? Judge for yourself.
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This one was a real mixtape. On a cassette and everything, with a nice collage as a cover. ↩
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A problem that has been corrected, many times over. ↩
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I just recently found out it started out being called "Your Radio Playhouse". I think everyone can agree that the name change was a vast improvement. ↩
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Yes, similes are metaphors. No, I will not argue about this fact. ↩
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And can't extrapolate from the location of the course. ↩
First! Friday Random One
Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
In the feminist blogosphere, it is a tradition to do a Friday Random Ten, where you user your iPod (or whatever) and listen to and list 10 random songs. I first came across this tradition through Lauren at Feministe, but she isn't sure who started the trend.
Regardless, as I said in my first post I tend to think badly of shorter forms of things. I like the long, drawn out thought. This also means I tend to prefer albums to individual songs. When I'm on the youtube, I watch videos for songs, not albums, because that's what's given to me. And you can find some great shit there. (And also elsewhere.)
But I prefer the album as an art form. I like the ups and downs and just the feeling of completeness that comes with a great album. I like the juxtapositions and analogies and everything. A well-done mix-tape1 can also be a work of art, but I usually stick to original albums.
So this is the start of a new tradition here. Each week2 I will start up my music player (set to random and shuffle by album) and listen to one album. I'll put up some sort of review here. I think the review will depend on which album it is, whether it's one I know by heart or one I hadn't listened to before. The latter will be a good opportunity to clean my collection out of some junk. I also envision speaking about lyrics a lot, given the format of the site.
So the first in the series is . . . Stop Making Sense: Special New Edition by the Talking Heads.
Interesting beginning. I got turned on to this album from an ex-girlfriend. We watched the film it was based on, which was pretty amazing. This was during a period where she was determined to watch all the classic rock movies3 (Stop Making Sense, The Wall, Tommy, etc.). I'm not sure where she ended up in that quest.
Anyway, the film is great. The whole thing is full of such great energy and feeling. I'm not the Talking Heads' biggest fan, but there's something in the film that makes it eminently appealing. A little crazy, but undeniably awesome. This special edition of the CD from the film includes extra songs that were in the film but not on the original CD.
Starts off with Psycho Killer, the Talking Heads' song I have the most history with. I first learned the song at the summer camp I went to as a kid4. We song a lot of songs together, and many of them were rock/pop/etc. songs before I really knew what popular music (or any music, really) was. So I loved this song before I understood it or had any context for it (other than the long-haired cook who rocked it to bits).
Then comes Heaven, which I like, and a few songs which have energy, but don't stay with me. Burning Down The House and Life During Wartime follow, and if you don't want to get up and jump around, then I don't know what to say to you. I don't know if I can keep up the one-by-one conceit (which was my original plan for every Friday Random One). We'll end it here.
I will say it took me a while to get what Once In A Lifetime was about (I think the same ex explained it to me), but I always liked it. And Take Me To The River might be my favorite track and I just found out it was by Al Green. I'll have to look into it5.
I don't have much to say about this album's lyrics. It didn't strike me as one of the most important parts. I'm not saying it's not well written, just that the lyrics don't leave me with pictures beyond their inclusion in the songs.
So, I'd recommend this album to just about anyone, and probably the movie as well. We'll leave with the opening scene in the film (Psycho Killer):
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No, they aren't tapes these days, but I think that name sounds best. ↩
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Note that it likely won't happen every week. For example, next week I'll be in the land of Zeus and Hera and am unlikely to post anything. ↩
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That's classic rock movies, not classic rock movies, although they somewhat overlap. ↩
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I'm sure I will have more to say about this camp in time. It did much to form who I am. ↩
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I just saw a version from Al and I gotta say I like the Talking Heads' version better, but that's always influenced by what I'm exposed to first. ↩
Stolen Lines
Pigmaei gigantum humeris impositi plusquam ipsi gigantes vident.
(If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.) - Sir Isaac Newton, in a letter to Robert Hooke in 1676
It is a relatively common phenomenon to demand originality from writers. A charge of plagiarism is a damning one, whether it be in academia, fiction, newspapers, or histories, with the additional consideration, as we have seen not too long ago1, of fiction within memoirs.
The call for sources goes beyond just plagiarism; a dispute in the feminist blogosphere was interpreted by some as about plagiarism, but those asking for change didn't claim their words had been stolen, just that there should be some recognition of the work put in by minority authors. Here was a call for acknowledgments of the giants who supplied the shoulders (shoulders, it should be noted, from a group that has frequently carried burdens with no recognition).
These demands are a relatively new occurrence2. The literary Western canon3 is rife with examples of "borrowing." Ancient playwrights regularly drew from common stories. Shakespeare, that epitome of dead, white, male writers, at the very least drew heavily on other sources and at most outright stole. Denouncements of plagiarism are recent, and come generally from a modern understand of what property is (see a good general overview of the history of plagiarism).
Nowadays, you see these borrowings almost exclusively in adaptations from one for to another. This pattern exists chiefly in film adaptations (who hasn't heard a complaint about the lack of "original" stories for movies?). Beyond the obvious examples (Troy), we see it in modernizations of older themes (e.g., West Side Story, 10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless). Imagining one of these latter adaptations as being exclusively in a written form is difficult. The transformation between media seems to lend these borrowings a cachet that doesn't exist elsewhere.
These considerations are further complicated by recent4 debates over copyright and intellectual property. What constitutes fair use? What license should something be released under (Creative Commons, GPL, etc.)? The Internet has made these questions far more pressing.
I will not try to claim that I have never downloaded something of questionable (at best) legality, but nor will I dismiss the idea that such piracy is stealing (I think the label is apt). I have a desire to support artists/creators, but little desire to support those who view the bottom line as the highest goal to aspire to. These are thorny problems, unlikely to be solved fully here.
All my favorite singers / Have stolen all of my best lines.
- The Alkaline Trio, in the song Blue Carolina.
So what does all of this pontificating mean for this site? This site is a personal one and, as such, is likely to cover a broad range of topics (violating one of the top rules for generating traffic). I will try to follow modern conventions (citations, hat tips, etc.) on acknowledging sources (a task made miles easier by the format of the web). But it's important to keep in mind that acknowledging the underlying sources of everything is a task as impossible as tracing back every cause leading from the Big Bang to the present moment - there is simply too much of my thought based on others' to track it all.
Recognizing that there's nothing new under the sun, this site (I) will not try to present an alternate reality (one of shiny, brand new things). Each post should take as its starting point a quote/idea/sound/whatever from somewhere else and use it to build a line of thought. The quote from the Alkaline Trio is an attempt to show that one of the things I appreciate in those I listen to is the ability to express something I didn't even know I wanted to say. This should be an outlet for me to build on and improve those thoughts.
I take seriously the question Milan Kundera raised in The Art of the Novel (one that has only become more pertinent with the rise of the Internet): with the thousands of voices out there, what value is added by raising your own?5 I also share the concerns of Shelley Powers about the lack of longer, more developed thought on the interwebs. It is such concerns that have kept me from blogging or even commented much, despite my avid reading.
I have started this site as an experiment, both with my own writing and with website design/coding (which is why this is not hosted at Wordpress or the like). It is my hope that this site will force me to write, which will help it to grow. As a teacher of writing, I know that the best way to be a good writer is to write. A lot. It is also useful to have an audience, which is where you, the reader, come in. My hope is that any audience I gain will be mutually supportive in our task to find meaning amongst the modern world.
We may not all be giants, but I believe we can still help each other to see farther.
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Time measured here in Real World Time (RWT), not Blogging Time (BT). ↩
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And now time is being measured in terms of the history of writing, a very long time indeed. ↩
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The problems with this canon (lack of diversity, etc.) should be acknowledged, but it is still a reference point, especially from a school such as the one I attended. ↩
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I guess this is back to RWT? It actually seems like a focus on internet issues, so maybe BT. ↩
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Note that this is an extreme bastardization of anything Kundera has ever said. It might even been from Testaments Betrayed. Unfortunately, both of those books are across the Atlantic right now where I can't get them and truly expand on them. (Maybe a future post?) I do know that the idea stuck with me from him, so we'll start there. ↩
About Aaron
Aaron is an English teacher in Brno, Czech Republic (see a map of Brno). He was raised in Massachusetts, with ties to New Hampshire and Vermont. He got a B.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John's College, the first three years spent in Annapolis and the last in Santa Fe.
He is currently pursuing a Master's degree (and more????) in implementing Information Technology in educational settings, a main impetus behind the development of this site. He works with open source software, in large part because he aspires to live in a world like Mark Pilgrim's. This site is currently being run on Drupal (because it's open source) and hosted on Host Papa (because it's somewhat green, while still being very cheap).
He can be reached either through the contact form at his name, or by email at his first name at stolenlines.net.
