Two quick things about The Recognitions. Gaddis has a preoccupation with the hesitancy of the artist. This was apparent in JR in the author who had spent years putting off and going back to his work detailing the effect of industrialized society (as catalyzed, apparently, by the player piano) on art. The book that author was working on was to be called Agape, Agape, which is the title Gaddis gave to his last short work of fiction, which I gather is an amplification of that theme. In The Recognitions, we’ve got Otto the playwright, who’s always jotting down what he thinks are heady things but who is really a complete buffoon. Esther even says to his face that if she could find a man with Wyatt’s ability and Otto’s ambition, she’d be in good shape. Esther too has a novel long in the works. And of course there’s Wyatt, with the painting of his mother he’s been working on for 15 years in addition to his lack of interest in producing an original work. It’s significant that Gaddis’s own output was a trickle (if you’re counting books rather than pages and quality of content) — that there were some 20 years between his first and second books, and that he published only three others (I believe) before dying in 1998 at something like 76 years old.

Now for quick thing number two. In addition to the treatment of art in The Recognitions, there’s fairly substantial treatment of science, and the medical profession more specifically. Take for example the fairly lengthy catalogue of the dreadful (and often misadministered) treatments Wyatt went through as a child in his near-fatal illness. There’s certainly a mistrust of medicine in the book. But it’s really more than that. Gaddis ties chemistry/pharmacy to alchemy and thus alchemy to medicine, and alchemy is a pretty clear extension of old rites of rebirth, transmutation, etc. Gaddis’s direct and indirect references to James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (the many-volumes work of anthropology that T.S. Eliot modestly noted made a nice little set of footnotes for “The Wasteland,” which has been said to gloss that small thing “the human condition”) make it clear that he’s interested in ritual and in the roots of modern day rites and ceremonies. This interest comes out also in his description of funeral procedures and his interludes about the church. I suspect what Gaddis is coming around to eventually is a treatment of both art and medicine as somehow untrustworthy (it’s a book about counterfeiting, recall), which really has more to do with the practitioners than with the particular medium of practice. Art and medicine and pretty much everything amounts to a sort of alchemy is the point I imagine he’s getting to, and alchemy is a bizarre fashioning of something out of nothing. That doesn’t mean that it’s worthless. Quite the contrary: If there weren’t something appealing about the idea, it wouldn’t be so prevalent in our literature and wouldn’t have been a serious pursuit of inquiry for hundreds of years.

My assessment is premature (I’m a sixth of the way into the book) and is probably way off base. I do think Gaddis is working toward a comparison of science and art (now that I think about it, this would make sense in light of the theme of both instances of Agape, Agape as I understand it) and that alchemy plays an important role in bringing the two together.

When we bought our house nearly two years ago, we had already looked at one house in the subdivision and marked it off our list on the basis that the subdivision seemed awfully far away from everything and that it overlooked some railroad tracks. When I say that the rejected house overlooked some railroad tracks, I mean that if you looked out the back window, you looked across a public street at the raised tracks maybe 100 feet away. I have the distinct feeling that if a fast-moving train derailed, its cars buckling against one another and ratcheting out from the sides of the track, this house would be obliterated.

We finally did decide on a house a little further up in the subdivision. It would take a fast-moving train indeed to reach us. It turns out that we’re not as far from everything else in town as we had thought we were — we’re just oriented differently than what we were accustomed to. We’re not right on top of everything, but we’re within 5 - 15 minutes of everything. This is a good thing. We love our house and our location. The only occasionally objectionable thing about where we live is the train, which backs up traffic in our area every once in a while, inevitably when one of us is on the way home and in a hurry to get to the bathroom or head right back out for an appointment.

There’s something intriguing — sort of old-fashioned and rural and dangerous — about living near trains. Train tracks make me think of gravelly-voiced hoboes. I can’t help remembering the older neighborhood kids where I grew up showing off the elongated pennies they had harvested from the tracks. Or the movies (Stand By Me perhaps most notably) that portray some of the danger associated with trains. And I can’t help thinking back to the numerous train track ghost stories I heard as a kid. There’s a moderately famous story that originated not too far from where I grew up known as “The Maco Light.” Versions of the story differ, but it goes basically that the rear cars of a train decoupled from the fore cars, naturally losing velocity and becoming a hazard for trains using the same track later. The lone engineer manning the caboose spots such an oncoming train and begins signalling furiously with his lantern to try to save the lives of the crew on the oncoming train. Whether he leaps from the caboose at the last minute or whether the caboose is stricken and he’s thrown off is up for debate, but the uncontested detail is that he’s separated from his head. Thenceforth, visitors to the site could see an odd light panning and bobbing around the area, and the explanation is of course that the engineer’s ghost remains, ever looking about for his lost head.

Occasionally, it occurs to me that it’d be cool to get the car up to speed and jump the tracks. My mental image of the daredevilry puts me landing the car with a whump and a vegetative crunch 100 feet beyond the peak of the hill in the landscaping that marks the entrance to my subdivision. In my mental image, I don’t toss my head back and let out rebel yell, but if my personality type were a little different, I suspect my mental me would find in himself a yeehaw that would make even the Dukes of Hazzard green with envy.

Many people seem to think that the sounds of the train might be bothersome. I believe it’s in the movie Se7en that the apartment rented by Brad Pitt’s character is assaulted by the rumblings (ok, the dish-breaking seizures) of a train that proves most disturbing. I don’t mind the train, though. In fact, I even like it a little. Maybe I’d feel differently if I lived just across the street with no substantial sound buffer between my bedroom window and the tracks.

I like to try to guess the speed of the trains from their sounds, though my guesses are usually way off. Sometimes, it’ll sound like the very apocalypse swallowing up my neighborhood, and I figure based on the roar that the train must be going about a million miles per hour, but it turns out that it’s just sitting at the intersection, apparently revving its engine. Other times, I’ll think the quiet train must be gliding slowly by, but I look and find that the graffiti on the cars is too blurred to read or that the cars are barely even distinguishable as single units. I’m not sure why, but I find the sounds of the trains comforting. The creative weenie in me wants to suggest that it has to do with emulated sounds of a heartbeat or of the womb, but that’s probably a stretch. I suppose it’s also possible that my appreciation for industry and achievement (trains are really pretty amazing, after all) instills in me a feeling, when I hear the trains, something like “the world’s still here; things are happening.” That too is probably a stretch, overthought. Most likely, it’s just white noise, an aural phenomenon I’ve come to identify with home.

The trains do make me apprehensive sometimes, though. But my own apprehension is rooted in nothing so silly (if entertaining) as a ghost story. I live in a rural area whose winding roads cross the winding tracks many times. The intersection with the outlet from my neighborhood is a favorite stopping place for trains. There are two sets of rails side by side, and my theory is that trains can’t be travelling on both sets at the same time (in either the same or opposite directions) because trains rock from side to side as they move. I imagine they’d bump one another with catastrophic results. So it’s not uncommon to see one train sitting while another’s going by, seemingly with only inches to spare between the two. It’s also not uncommon to see one train just sitting. The angle of approach to the hill the tracks sit on prevents you from seeing idling trains until you’re pretty much already on the tracks, and my heart has more than once leapt into my throat as I looked to my right only to see what momentarily appeared to be a train bearing down on me. I know rationally that the intersection is safe, but the involuntary adrenaline burst puts me on edge.

I saw an archaism as I crossed the tracks the other day. I would as readily have expected to see prospecters on a seesaw car as see what I did. A train was stopped to my right in broad daylight, its cyclopsian eye aglow. Off to the left, a man stood as if directing the train. This was odd enough, as trains use modern navigational systems now, probably tied in with GPS and fancy satellite scheduling programs. But what was really strange was that he was holding an old-fashioned lantern, red with a glass globe, and striking a pose straight out of a 19th century photograph. His head was intact, so my assessment of the Maco Light and similar stories stands. But I couldn’t help shivering a little at the idea of this unusual tableau vivant almost as a ceremony, a commemoration of some long past wreck, or as an ephemeral warning seen perhaps only by me, arisen out of the various fears and comforts I attach to the train tracks: Proceed with caution always. Look both ways. Accidents happen.

When you’re not publishing peer-reviewed articles but are writing or talking about what you read, you run the risk of seeming as if you’re bragging or trying to showcase your erudition, even if that’s not your primary goal. Of course, that’s always a secondary goal, but I don’t think it’s one that should be frowned upon. We do this in all things: One who is good at knitting knits; one who is good at singing sings. Or, to keep my examples parallel, one who LIKES to knit (or sing) knits (or sings). Doing so is self gratifying, and doing so publicly increases the likelihood that you’ll meet up with people who share your interests.

So it is with writing about what you read. I’ve been charged before with looking down my nose at people, apparently because I thought I was smarter than them. The situation this accusation emerged from was resolved (and this mention of it is not a plea for validation). It’s not that I think I’m smarter, but that I’m socially inept, clamming up often unless the particular discussion is one I can speak about intelligently. I guess I come across as a know-it-all, when really I’m just a guy who capitalizes on the conversations in which he can engage with any eloquence or more-than-common knowledge.

When I write in this blog about what I read, something else entirely is going on. In addition to being generally socially inept, my memory is fried (which probably doesn’t help social aptitude). During college, I read most of my assignments (we’re talking novels and epic poems and weighty treatises on things like the rights of man — am I inflating my erudition here?) two or three times just to keep the basic plot and general themes in my head for long enough to get through the course. And I’ve forgotten most of those just a few years later. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy the reading, and it wasn’t a conscious effort to be lazy (an oxymoronic concept!). I wonder sometimes if there’s something wrong with parts of my long-term memory or whether I just never trained myself to remember things. And I don’t know how to train myself now. I’ve managed to become an old dog. So the primary purpose of my writing about my reading within this blog is to have a record of some of the impressions I formed while reading. This blog, for the time being, is my memory.

If I get a little high-fallutin’ sometimes, I hope the person or two who stops by for a quick read will forgive me. It’s hard not to try to take up the mantle of the academic when you’re excited about something you’ve read and are trying to capture it all in a quick burst before it abandons you, leaving you dejected and ashamed and feeling really like a magnificent failure.

In looking around for the fancy “-phobia” word signifying a fear of kites, I ran across three things that this entry is not about: an episode of “Malcolm in the Middle” in which Dewey apparently puts to rest his dad’s fear of kites; the title of an episode of what appears to be an anime cartoon entitled “Marsupilami”; and a song by one Selma Booking entitled “A Cloud’s Fear of Kites.” I was unable to find the fancy word I wanted on the Web or in any of my books about strange words. Some “fear” words I did find that are of interest if not particular relevance include the following:

• sophophobia. the fear of learning, which I don’t have
• myrmecophobia. the fear of ants
• maledictaphobia. the fear of bad words
• phalacrophobia. the fear of going bald
• pogonophobia. the fear of beards, which I’m inclined to say I don’t have, as I have a beard, though it may simply be the case that I’m too frightened of it to shave it off
• taphephobia. the fear of being buried alive
• bromidrosiphobia. the fear of body odor, which I keep at bay by using lots and lots and lots of deodorant
• lepidophobia. the fear of butterflies
• nephophobia. the fear of clouds
• hypophobia. the fear of a lack of fear
• arachibutyrophobia. the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth
• bathysiderodromophobia. the fear of subways or underground trains

When I mention a fear of kites, I don’t mean that I have a fear of any of the following things listed in the American Heritage Dictionary under the entry for kite:

• Any of the light sails of a ship used in a light wind.
• Any of various predatory birds of the hawk family Accipitridae, having a long, often forked tail and long pointed wings (ok, if I saw one of these up close with its talons going for my eyes, I’d probably be afraid of it, but I’m not generally speaking afraid of these birds).
• A piece of negotiable paper representing a fictitious financial transaction and used temporarily to sustain credit or raise money.
• A bank check drawn on insufficient funds to take advantage of the time interval required for collection
• A bank check altered to show a larger amount
• (Ok, these last three freak me out a bit too, but they’re still not what I’m ultimately talking about.)

It’s the standard definition I’m thinking of: The diamond of paper held rigid by two sticks and followed by a tail of bows; or the standard arrow-shaped kite you can get at your neighborhood drug store in April. Or, in my case, a big multi-colored parrot kite complete with fluttering tail feathers. It is this kite that I flew today, the first time I ever remember successfully flying a kite.

I do remember going out to the practice football field of the high school I lived near when I was a kid and flying kites with my family. On one such outing, I was stung by a bee and found myself treated to a poultice of saliva and tobacco. I was too young to manage a kite during these outings. And I don’t remember ever getting a kite very far up in the sky on later outings when I had my own kite (gray and black like a jet with discongruous eyespots on the wings that in retrospect I imagine would have made such a real jet a pretty easy target).

Today, we were entertaining the almost-four-year-old child of a couple friend who just had another baby. It had been windy last night, and we had the kite (an out-of-the-blue (figuratively speaking, though it could be taken literally) birthday present from a couple of years ago) in the car, so we decided to hit a park today and try to fly it. Mleeka flew it for a few minutes before landing it in a power line. Enter fear number one. I was sufficiently indoctrinated by the power company’s crudely-drawn cartoon commercials when I was a child to know that if you screw with power lines by doing such things as flying kites into them or attempting to get kites out of them, you’re looking for a cooking. This power line was thin and bent at the slightest provocation, so I wasn’t keen on tugging at it with the kite string lest it snap and fall down on me snakelike. So I cut the string. Luckily, the kite fluttered down a few minutes later thanks to a gust, and we retied the string and had another go, this time at a substantially greater distance from the power lines. It was my turn.

And I made a pretty good go of it. I got the kite pretty far up there, getting string burn on my hand as I paid out the line and guided the kite to prevent it from taking nose dives (of which it did several with what would surely have been catastrophic, beak-altering results for a real parrot). Now when I say I got it pretty far up there, I don’t mean that I got it way way up there. It was maybe 100 or 200 feet high, and I hear tell of people who get their kites so high that they’re unrecognizeable dots in the sky. The kite was high for me, but not high by a kite’s standards.

And the higher the kite went, the more apprehensive I became. I wasn’t afraid of kite as object. I wasn’t even afraid so much as increasingly uncomfortable about something I couldn’t and still can’t confidently put a label on.

I’m partially inclined to think my apprehension had to do with a perceived diminution of control: The higher the kite goes, the more influence smaller movements have on it; and the harder it becomes to steer; and the less attached it seems to the string, while at the same time it feels as if it must (or perish the world) stay on that string and in my sight and under my control. But I’m not sure that’s my issue. It may also have partially to do with my long-held notion that the reeling in of a kite is a Sisyphean task, that we tend to be reluctant to bring in the line when there’s a good wind, but as surely as we begin to bring it in, the wind picks up, the result being a kite in flux, never quite high enough and never home but always needing to be reeled in. Essentially, by flying a kite, you’re setting yourself up either to have to reel in a whole bunch of slack line once the string breaks at a point six miles from your spool or to keep up an Old-Man-And-The-Sea scale epic battle with the kite.

I suppose it’s uncertainty that gets my goat. That seems to be the unifying gotcha of both of my primary theories about this little neurosis. The closest thing to this in my phobia book is “kakorrhaphiophobia” — the fear of failure.

I first encountered the work of William Gaddis in his book J.R., which I selected randomly from the two or three of his books available at my local library. I heard about Gaddis as an influence on one of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace, who had also been compared to Pynchon and DeLillo, both of whom also were new names attached to works a few of which I later read. I kept forgetting about Gaddis until recently. J.R. is among the hardest books I’ve ever read. It’s one that you have to learn to read as you read it, and much of the text is cant and jargon with no immediate context. I was briefly inclined to suggest that it was a work of Impressionistic fiction, and maybe it does fit that description in some way, though Impressionistic fiction I’ve more recently learned tends to be work of a more personal nature. This distinction courtesy of the Holman and Harmon (formerly Thrall, Hibbard and Holman, I believe) A Handbook to Literature. After giving it some more thought, I’m inclined to label J.R. something closer to cubism. It’s a fragmented story for sure, done almost completely in unattributed dialogue (and it’s a long book, weighing in at 700 - 800 pages) with no transitions and precious few plot markers. As you learn to read it, you begin to see the larger story, and a vaguely unified whole emerges by the end of the book. It’s like nothing else I’ve ever read.

But this entry is about The Recognitions, another book by Gaddis that I’ve just begun. I had read reviews of this book after finishing the other, and it’s reported to be an even harder read, longer and at least as complex. I’m only 40 pages into about 1000, but I’m so far not finding this to be the case. The Recognitions reads sort of like something out of Steinbeck so far.

Because my memory’s bad and I think this is a book I’ll want to remember, I’m recording here some notes and impressions from the first few pages.

The blurb on the back cover describes Wyatt Gwyon as someone who “forges not from larceny but from love… exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters.” Further, “In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and the fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon’s forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch.” So naturally I’m on the lookout for things that suggest falsehood or counterfeiting.

At the beginning of the book, young Wyatt’s mom dies overseas. She contracted appendicitis aboard a ship and was butchered by the ship surgeon, who it turned out was not a surgeon after all but a counterfeiter who had forged his papers. There’s falsehood number one. Within the first few dozen pages, there are several odd turns of phrase, descriptions of things in negative terms or in ways that suggest an uncertainty of appearance or validity, of which just a few follow:

• “Now he found himself rescued from oblivion by agents of that country not Christian enough to rest assured in teh faith that he would pay fully for his sins in the next world… bent on seeing that he pay in this one.” (5)
• “Since it is not true…” (5, just a couple of sentences later)
• “for to tell the truth, none of these excellent fellows knew for certain what a woman looked like” (9)
• mention on page 10 of a monk dissembling tears by rubbing quicklime in his eyes so that he might be remembered as “Epiclantos” or “weeping so much”
• Wyatt Gwyon’s dad manages to get his dead wife carried in a funeral carriage reserved for virgins
• The elder Gwyon, a minister, is open-minded about other religions and is chastized for it, though he seems one of the more humane and sympathetic of the early characters.
• By contrast, Aunt May, who plays a central role in Wyatt’s rearing, is a Pope-hating fundamentalist who preaches a doctrine of hellfire and suffering rained down from an apparently benevolent god.

It’s important to watch for duplicity of character in this book, I suspect, as the last two bullets (and the theme as noted by the cover blurb) suggest.

Something else of note is Gaddis’s use of a word new to me, “fainaiguing” as in “though some fainaiguing had been necessary at Italian customs, confirming it a fake to get it out of the country” (25). (Note yet more duplicity heaped on duplicity: a minister is having an original artwork certified fake so that he can get it illegally out of the country.) This must be the Italian word we bastardized to get “finagling.”

And finally (for this installment), Gaddis calls to mind an old story I had forgotten (which incidentally may not be irrelevant to the theme of counterfeiting/dissembling): “[Gwyon] was called back to the Seminary for a refresher course, and it was at that time that he developed a taste for schnapps, and started the course of mithridatism which was to serve him so well in his later years” (8). Again, we’ve got some duplicity here (along with a later mention of his forming a schnapps-sized hollow in a book in his study) — a difference between the behavior one might expect of a minister and what’s actually the case. But back to the story. I probably wouldn’t even have gotten the reference (glossing over it as a reference to mithraism) had I not recently been thinking of A.E. Housman’s poem “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff,” which was called to mind because I had begun rereading Paradise Lost. In “T,TiSS,” you find the line “Malt does more than Milton can/to justify God’s ways to man,” which is a reference to Milton’s suggestion that his goal in PL is “to justify the ways of God to man.” Housman also tells briefly in his poem the story of Mithridates, a king who, fearful that his henchmen would poison him, began taking small (and progressively larger) quantities of poison each day to build up a tolerance. (More duplicity here.) Of course this all coincidentally comes together very nicely. It’s also striking (to me) and a little weird that I had begun (and as quickly halted) a rereading of Milton’s Aereopagitica, in which he defends a free press and in which part of his argument is essentially that it’s how who’s reading something uses/interprets it that makes a book fit or unfit rather than the book itself. This meshes nicely with the idea of Gwyon as a minister who reads profane works but maintains a basic humanity that most would do well to emulate.

I love my laptop. It’s an HP 4560 with on-board wireless card, half a gig of memory, a 1.8 GHz processor, and more storage than I know what to do with. The laptop goes with me to work, where it hums pleasantly beside me, beeping once in a while to let me know I’ve got new email. I run Linux, which has some hardware compatibility issues with my model (the wireless card doesn’t work because there are no drivers for it — if I were more talented, I’d be able to write my own), but which otherwise is absolutely superb. I have a bona fide development environment complete with apache Web server, mysql, PHP, etc., at my fingertips, and even if I can’t get online, I can do programming and testing in this environment offline. I use OpenOffice.org as an office suite and find the latest Mozilla (and variants) to be excellent browsers. And best off, I get no more crashes, no more frozen applications that my most fervent CTRL-ALT-DELing still won’t shut down inside five minutes. Perhaps the best thing is that configuration of my laptop is transparent — I know how to get around under the hood in Linux. Now I’m not trying to pitch Linux here or to be a platform snob; I’m just noting that my laptop is pretty much my favorite computer in the world. The laptop to me is like the “Big Buddy” and “Kid Sister” dolls sold in the 80s, part of the jingle for which ran “Where ever I go, heeee goooes.” That’s my laptop and me, two peas in a pod.

But not this week, and probably not next week or even the week after. For a week or two now, my laptop’s been shutting down spontaneously. At first it was one every other day or so. Then it was once a day. Two days ago, it was every few hours. I noticed that the ventilation areas were staying very hot and that though the fan was going at full tilt, only a little very hot air was escaping the vents. When your computer starts overheating, you have to get it attended to before any damage is done to the board. Computers can cook themselves.

We had a Web server at my work do this a few months back. It kept shutting off spontaneously, and when we cracked the case open to check the cooling system, there were scorch marks. Makes the phrase “blazing fast” ring not only true but almost literal.

So I took my laptop in to Best Buy last night. They have to send it in to a repair shop, and it’ll be gone for a couple of weeks. Of course, retailer monkeys tend to be slaves to Windows, so they’ll wipe the hard drive and install Windows afresh. Which isn’t entirely a bad thing. I rsync my data over to my desktop system periodically and did so just before taking my system in. I’ll just need to reinstall the OS and zip the files back across the network when I get my system back. I’ve run RedHat 9 for a while and am thinking I might try something else. Maybe I’ll see how Fedora looks. In the meantime, I’m hating life .

I watch a lot of TV and have gone back recently to some of the Renaissance drama I studied in college, and there’s some overlap, particularly within that respectable genre popularly known as reality TV.

Let’s back up and think for a minute about genre. The word means type or form. Most of the time when we’re talking about genres, we’re considering the difference between poetry and fiction and essay (for example). But you can zoom in a little closer and think of genre in terms of story type. At the movies, Romantic Comedy differs from Horror (usually). On TV, “Law and Order” is substantially different from “Everybody Loves Raymond.” So too do you find differences in other media, such as Renaissance drama. Two of the more common genres in the drama of that period include comedy and tragedy, and more specifically revenge tragedy.

Comedy for the purposes of this discussion is a little different from the stanard “funny ha-ha” test we tend to apply to determine whether or not something is a comedy. Rather, it’s the literary form in which initial disarray and conflict (typically among couples) are resolved and result in marriage. “As You Like It” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” stand out among Shakespeare’s more popular plays. Another play I just finished entitled “The Dutch Courtesan” epitomizes the genre as well. Today, the literary form is embodied in pretty much any movie Julia Roberts or Hugh Grant stars in. Think for a moment about one that brings the two actors together: Notting Hill. Recall that the male and female lead are quickly attracted to one another and almost immediately find themselves busted apart by a major conflict. Grant’s character finds himself trying to fill the round hole left in his love life with various square pegs of women, and the movie resolves when the two characters are able to reconcile and form the couple that the plot dictates was meant to be. This is classic comedic form. It’s not the movie’s sprinkling of humorous scenes that makes it comedic (from a literary perspective) — though comedies do tend to be full of these humorous scenes — but is the resolution of conflict into the unification of wayward couples.

Think also for a minute about “Romeo and Juliet.” This early play starts out as a comedy and turns to tragedy. Two houses are at odds and the natural resolution for the conflict is the marriage of children of the two houses (at least within the context of feudal/royal courts that informs the play). And things are heading down that road until Juliet fails to get the message that Romeo is safe. At this point, the play turns to tragedy. Had she gotten his message, the two would have been married, the houses unified, and the plot tied up in a nice little package complete with sing-songy chorus at the end asking the crowd to applaud (common in Renaissance comedy).

Revenge tragedy is a little easier to describe because there’s nothing about the name that’s ambiguous as there is in “comedy.” In revenge tragedy, somebody’s angry and will stop at nothing to achieve satisfaction. More often than not, in his quest for vengeance, the revenger himself takes a fall. Revenge tragedy almost always closes with a scene in which most of the players die and a new authority figure steps up to guide the future toward happier circumstances. The most familiar example of this genre for most people will be Hamlet, in which, not surprisingly, a whole bunch of people are killed at the end and Fortinbras swoops in to set things right in Denmark. Within this blog, I’ve also written a quick synopsis of “The Revenger’s Tragedy,” which follows the formula dead on as well.

Now, to get back to my title, what I’m working toward is a supposition that one of the newer genres of TV show provides a superb example of these dramatic genres in modern times. As I’ve pointed out, it’s easy to find the comedic form on TV and on the big screen today. But revenge tragedy is a little harder to come by. Soap operas come close, and shows like Springer have elements of revenge tragedy in them. Where these fall short, I think the oxymoronic genre reality TV comes much closer. What’s more, reality TV provides us with a bizarre combination of the two genres.

Let’s start with pure revenge. The best example of this can be found in the early airings of Survivor. Once the novelty of being on a deserted island with a bunch of new people wears off, contestants begin to plot against one another, begetting circumstances favorable to vengeance. Participant X is spurned by participant Y, who goes out of his way to cause problems for participant X, get her voted off the island, etc.

(But it’s not the revenge so much as the general spitefulness that counts here.)

Rands in Repose, a blog I ran across while reading Slashdot headlines last week, introduced me to a condition playfully called N.A.D.D., or Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder. The threshold Rands suggests for determining whether or not you’re a victim (or is it a beneficiary?) of the condition is that you’re working more than 10 windows on your computer at any given time. When I read the article, I had six tabbed terminal windows open to five different systems (one with a mysql session going) and four tabs going on my main browser. On my laptop (these first tasks limited to my primary desktop system), I had a couple of browser tabs, a terminal, and two email accounts open. And on my third computer (a PC, which admittedly I seldom use but keep handy for those times when I have to check some code on the platform), I had an FTP session, a couple of terminal windows, and two or three other applications going. Sometimes I also have a terminal services session open into one of our Windows servers with multi-taking going on there as well. I think I qualify as a sufferer (beneficiary) of the condition.

I had been planning to jot a note about this for a day or two but hadn’t had time. When I went back to RinR today to review the article, I saw that he had written another about checking his referer logs and even responding to another guy who had referred to the N.A.D.D. article. So now I feel like a copycat, not only for picking up the N.A.D.D. article but because by doing so now, I come across as if I’m making some cheap move to get recognition or mention in another blog. Not so, for whatever it’s worth.

In my own referer news, within two days of starting this little blog, I was googled. I didn’t figure it’d happen that fast. There’s apparently some degree of interest in “The Revenger’s Tragedy” that my synopsis attracts. Here’s hoping I didn’t screw it up too badly. This takes me back to my early days on the Internet: When I was first learning to post files in Web space while in early college (the Web was still in its infancy), I posted a bunch of little essays entitled such lofty things as “On Death” and “On Love” and “I’d Rather Be an Onion.” There was also an essay on William Golding that I wrote in high school. It was a bad essay. Really bad. As in I hadn’t even read one or two of the books I had written about. But it was a 10-pager, by golly, and I wanted something longish to post in my fledgling Web space. There wasn’t much about Golding on the Web at the time, so my essay got a fair amount of attention and I believe, sadly, has been attributed in “scholarly” works produced by foreign students of English literature. Once, a high school teacher in one of the Dakotas had the students in one of his classes write me their thoughts on “Lord of the Flies,” and I agreed to engage with them in the interest of teaching them to use the Internet as a research tool. I still find the occasional reference to the essay out there and hereby apologize to those who have used it as anything but a foil for respectable literary criticism.

In the course of writing this entry, I’ve checked into a couple of database issues, combed through some server logs, run upstairs twice, read several emails, collected a book I had loaned to somebody, discussed the merits of XML vs. database storage (coming down in favor of the database) with regard to an upcoming project, and discussed with a coworker the fact that my laptop’s CPU is slowly cooking itself. Yeah, I think I’ve got a case of N.A.D.D. Do you suppose I’m eligible for any kind of benefits?

When I was a kid, I always wished I had a name like Mark, a good common name that somehow seems to connote tall, dark, and handsome. Not surprisingly, I was short, husky, and freckled. My name was odd, the only instance of it in my small town that I ever heard of. Once in middle school, one of a group of friends who often came over and played basketball after school saw a carton of my parents’ cigarettes (”Doral” brand) and took to calling me Doral afterward, insinuating that my parents had named me after their smokes. That stung a little. I was later (indirectly) avenged, though, as that friend was made sport of at All County band rehearsal: One of the high schoolers, commenting on the friend’s really pretty hot mom, said that if his mom looked like that, he wouldn’t quit breast feeding until he was 20. It turned out that my name also rhymed with barrel and sterile, this last of which stuck. Being called Sterile Daryl (an assault on my, um, manhood rather than a nod to my cleanliness) really bothered me quite a bit, and I was glad to learn recently with the news that Mleeka’s having a baby that I am in fact not sterile. Or that the milkman’s not, maybe. A name that worked me up into an even greater lather was “Fried Dudley.” This moniker was hurled at me by a big red-headed bully in a childhood friend’s neighborhood. I never figured out where the name came from, but this guy (Tony, I think he was yclept) would lumber toward me, contorting his face and calling “Friiiied Duuddddley” in his best gravelly adolescent voice. I complained about this to my mom once, and she taught me the old saying we all know and loathe: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me.” Tony begged to differ, suggesting that if he wrote “Fried Dudley” on a rock and threw it at my face, it’d sure hurt.

When you have a name like mine that’s not staggeringly common, it’s weird to have to say it. Marks and Johns have to say Mark and John all the time because 65% of the people they call by name on a daily basis are Marks and Johns. But there aren’t a great many Daryls, at least in my neck of the woods, so when I find myself having to say my name, it feels weird in my mouth and sometimes comes out sounding weird. There was a skit (I believe a recurring skit) on Kids in the Hall featuring a guy named Daryl, but it was pronounced “dah-RILL” rather than “DARE-ul,” and I’m glad, as that character was a weirdo, more socially inept than I like to admit I may be.

I’ve often tended to think of “Jason” as a very modern name because the kids named Jason tended to be cool or somehow very trendy and by extension cutting-edge and modern. It’s a very old name of either Hebrew origin (meaning “God is my savior”) or Greek origin (meaning “healer”) that has a fairly prominent place in mythology. If I couldn’t have been a Mark, I wouldn’t have minded terribly being a Jason.

My daughter’s name is going to be Lennon. That’s my middle name, after my grandfather who died when I was very young. My parents were fundamentally opposed to naming kids after family members because doing so stands to hurt the feelings of those whose names aren’t picked. But when I was on the way, my grandfather was very sick, and I believe the story goes that they hoped giving me his middle name would make him feel good. I don’t know that they thought it would heal him or anything (maybe if I were named Jason in the Greek tradition), but they thought he’d dig it. I’ve always liked my middle name. Sadly, none of my originally given names (more on that in a minute) can be pronounced without some joker piping up: “Daryl” (”Where’s your other brother?”) “Lennon” (”So’re you a communist?” [I don’t spell it for people until after they make this crack]) “Houston” (”Houston, we have a problem.”) All in all, I’m pretty happy with my whole given name, though; three good strong trochees are hard to beat.

Of course, shortly before I got married, I screwed that all up by infixing Mleeka’s name between my middle and last names. What I lost in trochees, I got back in spades in initials, though. It’s my two middle initials (or one middle and one of two lasts — complicated, huh?) that prompted me to call this blog “Two Ells.” I dig having two ells. I’m like J.R.R. Tolkien: D.L.L. Houston. The only real downside is that I get LL Cool Jay jokes, but those are pretty rare. But back to the reason I fiddled with my name. Mleeka felt kind of weird about changing hers. And not unreasonably so. She spent the first twenty-some years of her life with one name, and all of a sudden, just because we’re signing a document saying we’re officially recognized by the state as a couple, she has to go and change her whole name? Your name is your identity. Without it, people would have a hard time getting your attention in a crowd. I don’t blame anybody for feeling weird about making a change like that. It’s a bigger deal (if a less painful one) than chopping off your little toe or having your appendix removed. She tried to browbeat me into changing my name, or at least adding hers to mine, and I feigned disgust at the idea. Honestly, it did strike me as a little odd, emasculating in a way, as it’s a known fact that it’s the woman who changes her name. But I went through with it in secret and delivered the name-change documents to her for the holidays one year. I didn’t want to drop Lennon, though, so I just kept four names. Part of what’s cool about our having the same blended last names is that our kid can share our name without either of us having to drop our own. (As I live in Tennessee, I might have gotten around this problem altogether by simply marrying my sister, but alas, she was already spoken for by the time I came of age and means for marrying.) And not having a different name from our kids was the main thing keeping Mleeka from changing hers.

So I was pretty stoked when Mleeka proposed Lennon as the name for our little girl. Called Lennon Learn Houston, her name would be a subset of mine. Now I’m not all hung up on carrying on names and having things or people named after me (I could have cared less whether Mleeka changed her name to mine, for example), but it’s just cool to have a kid whose name is exactly three-quarters of your own. It’s not narcissism so much as a fascination as with little nesting dolls that turned me on to the idea of this name. But this nifty Vinn diagram of names wasn’t to be ultimately: Mleeka wanted to commemorate her treasured grandmother in the name of what will most likely be our only child, so she’ll be Lennon Louise Learn Houston. As she’s the one squeezing the baby out and all, I suppose Mleeka can claim a right to have the major role in naming our child. And while I’m not fond of the name Louise, I do think it’s cool that she’ll have not two, but three, ells and four initials, like her Pop.

Oh, and I almost forgot:

Daryl Daryl bo baryl
banana fanna fo faryl
fee fie mo maryl, Daryl

This is my baby.