The First Sentence of a Book

Recently I visited our local bookstore--Dog Ear Books in Madison, Georgia, an actual independent bookseller--and asked the sales clerk to suggest a good book to me. She recommended one, by a major author of military fiction and nonfiction, so I gave it the test I always apply to every new book: I read the first sentence.

If the first sentence of a book is no good, forget it. That's like going on a first date with someone and observing that person engaging in one variety or another of unattractive activity: you gotta figure that if he or she puts that kind of foot forward, it's only going to get worse from there. In the case of this particular novel, I found the first sentence bland and wordy. The author even used the phrase "rather vague," or something similar. If his first sentence--which he presumably worked on longer than any other in the book (or at least should have)--was that dull, I could just imagine how much more boring it would get as I went along.

So I said no thanks to that one, whereupon she showed me The Amber Room by Steve Berry. Now that was a good opening sentence (to the prologue, not chapter 1, which is what Amazon features): "The prisoners called him ears because he was the only Russian in Hut 8 who understood German." Good, simple language, with a minimum of window dressing, only being the "only" adjective I can pick out of the entire statement. No adverbs, no passive verbs, and though there's a verb of being in there, I think it works just fine; in fact, in some situations it actually sounds more flat to substitute an action verb for a verb of being. More important than the actual phrasing of the sentence, though, is what it achieves: It makes the reader want to know more.

When critics discuss strong first sentences, they often cite the opening lines of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms: "In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees."

No doubt about it, this is great stuff, a veritable model for the literature of the next century and beyond: lean, muscular prose, virtually bereft of unnecessary detail. Hemingway is famous for stating that nouns and verbs should do the work that writers usually assign to adjectives and adverbs, and few passages better exemplify his adherence to this aesthetic. However, for best single opening sentences, my two personal favorites are these:

Fiction: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

Nonfiction: Paul Johnson, Modern Times: "The modern world began on 29 May 1919 when photographs of a solar eclipse, taken on the island of Principe off West Africa and at Sobral in Brazil, confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe."

Copies of both books were given to me, the first in high school and the second in college, and in both cases I had no real intention of reading the entire book. I would read the first sentence, I told myself, and if it didn't interest me--as I was certain it wouldn't--then I would set the book aside and forget all about it. But that's not how it happened; in both cases, the first sentence acted as a lure to pull me headlong into the book, and these rank among my favorite books of all time.

As a partner in, and occasional first reader for, a literary agency, one of the things I look for in a manuscript sample--or, for that matter, even a query letter--is a strong first sentence. Again, I figure that if the writer hasn't worked hard on that one, the rest of the book will be weak as well. Obviously people can get away with a lousy first sentence: the writer to whom I referred above certainly did, but he's also well-established. For the rest of us, it's better to hedge our bets by putting our best foot forward--and by the way, I just used two cliches, either one of which would be a virtual death knell (oop--there's another!) in an opening sentence.

(And then of course there's the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, for which the objective is to write the worst possible opening sentence--an act that requires at least as much talent as a good opener.)

What's the Good Word?

Here are a few that I have enjoyed over the years:

Basilisk--a legendary reptile with fatal breath and glance.

Callipygian--having nicely formed buttocks.

Espiègle (es-PYOG[l])--frolicsome, roguish. (To paraphrase an observation by a character in a skit from Mad TV, "Richard Simmons performing rhythmic aerobics while dancing with a rainbow flag would not be as gay as that word.")

Mundungus--foul-smelling tobacco.

Oogamous--a form of gamete reproduction wherein a small mobile male impregnates a large immobile female. (I've known some couples like this.)

Sir-reverence--An archaic term that could mean either "an expression of apology before a statement that might be considered offensive" or "a lump of human feces".

Perhaps the Most Thought-Provoking Words of All Time

No, these don't come from the Bible or the Bhagavad-Gita, nor from any figure commonly recognized as a teacher or thinker. Rather, the source is The Flying Deuces, a 1939 Laurel and Hardy pic in which the two play a pair of fish-packers from Des Moines on vacation in Paris.

It's been a long, long time since I actually saw it, so I may have a couple of details wrong, but essentially the scene is this. Heartbroken at the discovery that the woman he loves is already married, Ollie determines to throw himself into a canal of the Seine that happens to contain a shark escaped from the city zoo. Ever the faithful friend, Laurel has decided that he too will end it all, and they are just preparing to jump when a legionnaire stops and tells them that instead of committing suicide, they should join the French Foreign Legion. To which Laurel (as I recall) answers thus:

The French Foreign Legion?

I can't join the French Foreign Legion.

I've got to be in Des Moines on Monday!

Get it? I once tried to share this with someone in her early twenties and got a blank stare, whereas I've noticed that the older the person who hears this, the more likely he or she is to understand. Anyway, here's what I get out of that line: we may think we have priorities in life, urgent things that simply have to be done, but in truth our lives could end at any moment, and then those alleged priorities will be revealed as meaningless. Put in terms of the movie, it may seem important to get back to our fish-packing job in Des Moines, but if life itself is so conditional that one could choose to end it in the shark-infested waters of the Seine, then nothing is really mandatory--certainly nothing as unimportant as a fish-packing job in Des Moines.

Sometimes when I've gotten really wigged out about a deadline or a debt or some other such millstone, I've thought of those lines and drawn great comfort from them. Most of what we are forced to spend our time and energy on, simply as a matter of survival, doesn't ultimately matter. Whatever happens when we die, it's not likely we'll be thinking about those things. The ones we have loved, yes; the most treasured of our dreams and ambitions, yes; the sweetness of life itself, yes; but not the job packing fish back in Des Moines.

A few interesting links: an essay on the movie, which ends with Ollie's death and reincarnation (I'm not kidding); the official Web site of the French Foreign Legion; and finally, a historical marker honoring Hardy's brief residence in my own adopted hometown of Madison, Georgia.

Why Rome Failed--Part 3 or 3

In a couple of earlier posts, I discussed the subject of why Roman civilization--and with it, of course, the entire civilization of western Europe in ancient times--came to an end. This is a subject of more than passing interest to yours truly, as someone who has read and even published on the matter. And though of course I'm far from an expert, I do think I've gained a little insight from thinking about all this for some time.

Nothing that took place in Rome was really new from an intellectual standpoint: in terms of organization, engineering, and the military, of course, the Romans far exceeded the Greeks, but the underpinnings of their worldview were almost entirely borrowed from a much earlier generation of Athenians. Not only was the Roman economy, like that of the Greeks, completely dependent on slavery, but more important, the Romans subscribed to basic ideas about the universe that were common to Greek thinkers.

Though Plato and Aristotle differed on many points, they agreed on the idea that some are born to lead and the vast majority are born to follow. Plato's Republic develops this theme at great length, and Aristotle, in his Politics, maintains that the slave's physical work is a badge of his inferior condition. To these men, the most esteemed form of labor was mental; by contrast, the idea of actually working with one's hands--of getting one's hands dirty--was almost shameful. This is particularly ironic in Aristotle's case, since he was one of the first biological scientists to study the natural world at first hand, dissecting numerous animals with the help of his students. But there was a limit to his empirical commitment: like everyone else who's ever lived, Aristotle was still a man of his time and place.

To the classical mind, the work of the artisan was altogether inferior to that of the thinker, and thus when Hero of Alexandria invented the first steam engine, he saw it merely as a toy, and the potentially world-changing idea lay virtually unexplored for the next sixteen centuries. Even the great Archimedes, a fascinating character with a penetrating scientific mind on a par with that of Einstein or at least Edison, saw his inventions primarily as tools to serve the king and the military--not as a means to increase productivity.

Productivity: the ancients bore a deep suspicion of the very concept, because they tended to see life on earth as provisional, something carved out at the mercy of the gods, and not as something that the human mind could potentially improve. With its wariness of attempting to shape nature for fear of offending the gods, its disdain of invention as a mere form of tinkering not suited to great minds, and its lack of interest in finding ways to minimize labor for slaves, the classical world was doomed to die out. In fact, the really amazing things is not that it collapsed, but that it lasted as long as it did.

(In making these observations, which imply a high valuation of technological and economic progress, I am well aware that such a view is not fashionable--that the very use of the term "progress" is as outmoded as the idea of gentlemen regularly wearing hats in public. But when it comes to the rudiments of life, I prefer the old school; besides, I believe that people who claim they wish we were all living in mud huts without cars or planes aren't fooling anybody but themselves. Nevertheless, I still claim Fight Club among my all-time favorite movies.)

Finally, as mentioned in earlier posts, a brilliant article by a Professor Haskell at Southwestern University discusses in greater depth the reasons behind the ancients' failure to develop machinery. Particularly fascinating is Haskell's identification of an unlikely hero in the history of civilization: the humble, hardworking medieval monk, in almost every way opposite to the artistocratic geniuses of an earlier age. The essay will give you a new appreciation of those little bald-headed men who got up every day when it was still dark, spent their days crushing grapes and such, and quite possibly saved the West somewhere along the way.

The Education of a Three-Year-Old

Joining countless young women before her--including one particular young woman who's been very much in the news lately--my three-year-old daughter has become intrigued with Tom Cruise. This all started because she was sitting on my lap when I was checking my AOL email account, and when a picture of him (related to all the current brouhaha about Katie, etc.) popped up, she said, "Daddy, who's that?" So I told her, and she kept asking me so many questions about him that finally I Googled his image and we looked at several of them. (Though none of the steamy stuff with Nicole from Eyes Wide Shut, of course.)

Anyway, she just kept on talking about Tom Cruise, and later on when she was sitting on the potty, she happened to look down and see a copy of Entertainment Weekly with his picture on it. With a very serious expression on her face, she asked me, "What color is Tom Cruise's dirt, Daddy?" To which I said, of course, "Tom Cruise's dirt is the same color as everyone else's, sweetheart." Let's just hope that she retains that lesson, one of the most valuable that life has to offer, as she grows up and begins to encounter the images, illusions, and falsehoods that surround us all in this world.

Real Food of an Aural Kind

I keep planning to make a post on something other than music--for example, the discussion about Rome begun below--but currently I'm at a high point of interest in music, so I'm just going to run with that.

(Record companies, take note: some of us were saying, five or six years ago, that if y'all would just make it easy for people to download music legally, and to sample music before buying, it would actually increase people's interest in your back catalogue. Good thing you finally started to catch on--after spending millions on legal fees, and losing millions more through illegal downloads. I, ahem, of course don't know anybody who ever downloaded anything illegally--just talkin' here.)

Anyway, I recommend a visit to the Alan Lomax Archive. Lomax was an American musicologist heavily active in the mid-twentieth century, and recorded hundreds of hours' worth of traditional songs by African Americans, southern whites, and members of other ethnic groups. It's an incredible thing that he did, a massive act of preservation, like saving a Victorian building or a hundred-year-old oak tree, and without his work, treasures of inestimable worth would simply be gone.

The Lomax site enables visitors to hear samples of all kinds of amazing material: for example, I was listening to work songs recorded at Mississippi's state prison, Parchman, in 1959. You can also hear old African folk songs sung by descendants of slaves living in coastal Georgia, as well as traditional ballads by mountain people in West Virginia, Cajun music sung by people for whom English was barely a first language, and so on. An amazing experience!

Recently I was thinking about the fact that the great rock musicians of the 1950s and 1960s grew up listening to the kind of music that took more than a little thought and effort to get into: for example, the haunted blues of Robert Johnson. And there are still artists today who dig deep into the roots of American music, but many more of them grew up with nothing beyond what was available in the popular culture of radio and MTV--songs that were second-, third-, or fifteenth-hand copies of much more authentic originals. It's as though the original rock icons such as John Lennon or Bob Dylan grew up on a diet of whole, natural foods, whereas a later generation sustained themselves on processed materials leached of most of their vitamins.

By that analogy, listening to the music at the Alan Lomax site is like eating fresh vegetables: sure it would be easier to consume junk food, and junk is always easier to appreciate, but in the end, you'll feel much better--and your body and soul will thank you--if you eat something that's good for you.

So stop by and establish an account--it's free. Samples come through iTunes, where a lot of the Alan Lomax recordings are for sale.

Some of the Great Covers of All Time

Just in case there's any confusion on the subject, when an artist performs a song written by someone else, it's not necessarily a cover: the song has to have already been made famous by another artist. Thus when the Monkees performed songs by Neil Diamond (e.g., "I'm a Believer"), those weren't necessarily covers because, if I'm not mistaken, ND hadn't already performed them; or at the very least, we think of the Monkees' version of "Believer," not Diamond's, as the definitive one. By contrast, UB40's 1983 version of Diamond's "Red Red Wine" would most certainly be considered a cover.

Anyway, on iTunes I saw another user's list of what he considered the greatest covers of all time, and was immediately struck by how much my own list would differ from his. For example, he didn't list what I consider to be, hands-down, the single greatest cover of all time: Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower," as performed by Jimi Hendrix. Another great fave of mine is a cover of Hendrix, the Cure's "Purple Haze" (1993). Also high on my list is another Dylan cover: "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" as performed by Them, the group that featured Van Morrison before he went solo.

Several of the early Beatles' covers of 1950s classics--e.g., Chuck Berry's "Roll over Beethoven"--deserve to be on the all-time best list, as does MC5's cover of Berry's "Back in the U.S.A." (Incidentally, it's easy to see that both "Back in the U.S.S.R." by the Beatles and "The American Ruse" by MC5 are conscious tributes to Berry without actually being covers.) On the other hand--and here my wife will disagree with me hugely, because it so happens that ELO and Linda Ronstadt are on her current playlist--I don't think that ELO's "Roll over Beethoven" or Linda Ronstadt's "Back in the U.S.A." really add anything interesting to the originals.

The same can be said of "All Along the Watchtower" as performed by Dave Mason, as well as Mahogany Rush's 1979 cover of Hendrix's cover of "Watchtower." Ditto for "Killer Queen," first performed by Queen in the 1970s and replicated almost note-for-note (but without the same passion) by Travis c. 2000. On the other hand, Ted Nugent's 1979 version of "I Want to Tell You," a George Harrison Beatles song, preserves the energy of the original, yet Nugent manages to make the song his own. And I personally think Siouxsie and the Banshee's 1984 version of "Dear Prudence" is almost as good as the original.

My current favorite cover is Tim Buckley performing "Sally Go Round the Roses," an adaptation of an old Irish song made famous in 1961 by the Jaynettes. The fact that the original was rather mysterious-sounding, and seemed to contain lesbian overtones highly unusual for that time, and that Buckley's version is imbued with his own tragic character--illuminated in the chorus about going downtown and drinking oneself blind--only adds to the intensity of the experience. Also notable, though not nearly as much so, is a version of "Sally" recorded by Grace Slick with the Great Society, the band she fronted before leaving to join Jefferson Airplane.

This was the picture I had been going to put up before, to go with the post just below this one--itself reconstructed from one accidentally destroyed earlier. (Are you following this?) Actually, at one time, there was a real purpose for my including the picture from Gladiator--i.e., other than pleasing those readers who might want to look at the volatile Mr. Crowe--and that was to say that as someone who had just finished writing a three-volume ancient history not long before seeing the movie, I was impressed by its historical accuracy.

Yes, the filmmakers seemed to imply that printing existed in Roman times when they showed what looks like a printed flyer promoting gladiatorial games, and worse, the movie is built around the idea that Roman civilization was somehow restored in c. A.D. 200, when in fact that's when it began its terminal decline. But there were no stirrups on the horses (these did not appear until c. 450), and the story fit plausibly with real events (e.g., that Commodus really did want to be a gladiator.) Furthermore, when you compare it to a piece of pure cheese like ABC's Empire is likely to be, then you can really appreciate how great Gladiator was.

Dirty Hands, Lead Pipe, Chinese Walls, and the End of Civilizations (Followup to Post on June 9 Below)

As I was saying before I managed to delete my own post last week, in a fascinating but unfortunately out-of-print book, Enemies of Society, British historian Paul Johnson discusses the reasons why civilizations go into decline, and naturally this involves a great deal of discussion regarding Rome.

Of course there is really no one reason for the fall of Rome, but rather many. Some of these are at the material level, a couple of my favorites being the matter of the lead piping and the building of the Great Wall. In their celebrated plumbing systems, the Romans used lead, which they called plumbum--hence the chemical symbol Pb, as well as the words plumbing, plumber, etc. They had no idea, as we do now, that they were poisoning themselves. It has even been suggested that the inordinate propensity for madness among Roman leaders (Caligula and Nero are just the most well-known, but there were many others) may have partially been a result of lead poisoning.

An even more intriguing material cause for the empire's downfall was an event begun hundreds of years earlier and thousands of miles away: the building of the Great Wall of China. Though the Chinese continued building the wall sporadically for some fifteen hundred years, they began its construction in c. 200 B.C. under the leadership of the nation's unifier and first emperor, whose family name became the name of the country as a whole: Ch'in Shih-huang-ti. (Who, by the way, was such a tyrant that Nero and Caligula seem like sweethearts by comparison.) Though the building of the wall involved millions of slave laborers working literally to death under almost unbelievably brutal conditions, the wall itself was successful in its original purpose: to drive out the ferocious Hsiung-Nu people from the northern frontiers. The nomadic Hsiung-Nu gradually moved westward, and by the time they arrived in eastern Europe in about A.D. 300, they had come to be known as the Huns. Notably more aggressive than the other tribal peoples at Rome's doorstep, the Huns pushed the Ostrogoths westward and started a domino movement that marked the beginning of the end for the Western Roman Empire.

Fascinating as these explanations are, though, they only relate to physical causes for Rome's downfall. Rome had always been surrounded by tribal peoples eager to invade, but for many centuries Roman civilization had been strong enough to push the invaders back. Clearly what really killed Rome was something at the spiritual level, a loss of animation at the heart of the Roman psyche.

Johnson identifies this sickness as the same one that once prevailed over my part of the United States: slavery. Though the Greeks and Romans respectively created the democratic and republican forms of government, their own societies were far from free, and in fact depended completely on slave labor. As Johnson notes memorably, Rome's triumphs were buoyed on "oceans of human sweat." Not only was slavery morally wrong; it was economically inefficient. In such an environment, as in the American South centuries later, there was little incentive to develop labor-saving technology, and when the Roman Empire ceased to expand by conquest, so did its "wealth" in the form of slaves.

But the use of slave labor in Greece and Rome was one (albeit particularly significant) factor in a larger picture that, I think, really explains why the classical world ran out of mental power. Though Johnson rightly notes that the Greeks and Romans created the first middle classes the world has ever known, and that these middle classes helped bring about their societies' greatest cultural and scientific advances, the idea of a middle class went only so far in classical times. In a non-capitalistic economic system (that is, in a system whose principal economic activity is not the production or distribution of goods and services), it is impossible to have a very large middle class. Further, in the absence of economic freedom, ultimately societies devolve to the two poles that seemed at one time to constitute the natural state of humankind: a tiny knot of aristocratic rulers and scholars surrounded by a vast sea of dirt-poor subjects.

Basically, as I hope to discuss in a later post, I believe that what destroyed the ancient world was a combination of an aristocratic mindset--by which I mean a belief that some men are naturally better than others, and that physical labor, practical employment, and generally getting one's hands dirty are demeaning--as well as a devotion to maintaining established conditions in nature and the world. These ideas of mine are heavily influenced by a fascinating essay I first read ages ago, "Why Did the Ancients Not Develop Machinery?" by Halford Haskell of Southwestern University. If you're interested, you can find the essay here. (Or you can read my own far less informed version later.)

This Is Hilarious!

Check out Conan O'Brien's Walker: Texas Ranger clips:

First segment

Second segment

Third segment

Fourth segment

And be sure to see the fifth segment, in which Chuck Norris himself shows up on the set of Conan's show, as well as this inspired collaborative video.

Jane Fonda Talks to Tom Hayden--But Not That Tom Hayden

Unlike my beloved father-in-law and many others of my elders for whom I have enormous respect as veterans and men, I'm not taken much to fulminating about "Hanoi Jane" Fonda. Over the years, I've been more than willing to believe that, like a lot of other former admirers of totalitarian regimes, she grew up and realized that America, with all its gross commercialism and support for right-wing dictators overseas, was a heck of a lot better than a system of barbed wire, machine guns, concentration camps, and the constant drone of pep-rally propaganda.

Yet as I think about it now, the sort of mental growth transition I'm describing is not all that common. Most "useful idiots" (Lenin's term for western leftists who uncritically praised his regime) never grow beyond that stage; otherwise they wouldn't have been "useful idiots" in the first place.

Susan Sontag, a former admirer of Castro's Cuba, seemed to have made that transition in the 1980s, when she denounced her former stance; but she lost all the respect she'd regained from thinking people when, immediately after 9/11, she published a savage piece in the New Yorker that blamed America for the attacks and extolled the terrorists as heroes. Then again, there was no real moment of realization and repentance on the part of George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, or most of the other "useful idiots" depicted in Paul Hollander's Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (an amazing book about how otherwise intelligent people returned from visits to Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, and other such slaughterhouses with glowing reports of freedom and prosperity). Generally, "useful idiots" either die unrepentant or, like Noam Chomsky , they just keep on babbling and presumably feeling good about themselves.

Actually, has any "useful idiot" ever grown up? I thought that this rubric described Joan Baez--i.e., that she had been a supporter of North Vietnam who later recanted--but discovered that from the beginning, she (unlike Fonda) was a true anti-war (as opposed to anti-U.S.) activist who refused to denounce America itself and even openly expressed support for American POWs held in Vietnam. A far cry from Jane Fonda, as this article notes. Still, there have been these examples of growth, but they usually occur before the individual entered the limelight: for example, long before writing 1984, George Orwell lost whatever Communist sympathies he might have had when he encountered Stalinism close-up while fighting for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. In the famous words of Lloyd George, "If you're sixteen and you're not a socialist, you don't have any heart; if you're sixty and you're still a socialist, you don't have any brain."

Anyway, back to Jane Fonda. Every few years, the subject of her support for North Vietnam comes back up, and she manages to somehow half-heartedly apologize without really apologizing, and then the same debate rages, and so on. Hence a recent article I read in U.S. News and World Report, where she was interviewed by Thomas Hayden--who, as he himself noted humorously, is not to be confused with Fonda's former husband Tom Hayden. In the piece, Fonda blames "the right wing" and "the men who lied to them [the soldiers] and sent them" to Vietnam. She may or may not have a point there, but none of that exonerates her for her support of a system that, both before and after it triumphed, used torture and imprisonment on a mass scale, prohibited free movement of its citizens, and generally imposed a degree of repression far beyond anything experienced under your run-of-the-mill U.S.-supported right-wing military dictatorship.

Ironically, the only time communist Vietnam was ever subjected to broad censure in the West was when it did one of the best things it ever did: invade Cambodia in 1979, bringing an end to the far more repressive regime of the Khmer Rouge (of whom Chomsky was a leading admirer.) But Fonda never denounced the Vietnamese regime in any meaningful way, nor has she subjected her own actions to any kind of honest scrutiny. In fact, what struck me most in her responses to Hayden (and in other interviews of the kind) is her arrogance and sense of entitlement or privilege as a member of America's uncrowned elite.

So perhaps the best understanding of Jane Fonda goes far beyond ideology, politics, war, etc., to matters of the psyche, the conscience (or lack of it), and so forth. In attempting to illustrate for the uninitiated just what it was she did back in the day, I went searching for web pages cataloging her offenses. Most of what I found was far too tendentious to post--even if the anger of the veterans who wrote such pieces is perfectly understandable. But then I found a more neutral, but still critical, piece here, and it helped me understand "Hanoi Jane" much better. Turns out that in an earlier incarnation, she was, in the words of Hank Holzer (Aid and Comfort: Jane Fonda in North Vietnam) "the poster girl for the U.S. Army Recruiting Command." The little-known fact that she had once promoted the U.S. war effort, then made a 180-degree shift without a great deal of apparent soul-searching, only illustrated that, as Holzer said, "there really was nobody home in the values sense."

Introduction to what lies below

[Okay, this is a bit long and erudite, but I believe you'll find plenty of interest here. More posts in the future, no doubt, about the Partridge Family, gross TV commercials, and other topics that fit more properly within the confines of the typical blog.]

Actually, that was the beginning of my original post tonight, part of which is preserved below, before I screwed up and accidentally erased most of the entry. Turns out that when you publish a post and then decide to un-publish it, even though you've previously saved it as a draft, the entire post--draft and all--disappears. Thank God for the "Recover Post" button, which brought back at least part of what I'd written.

And by the way, ladies, this all happened because, in making a shameless pop-culture reference to the movie Gladiator, I was trying to figure out how to include a picture from the movie in my post--figuring a shot of Russell Crowe would always go over well with a mostly female audience. Then again, in view of his recent troubles, perhaps it's better to leave him out of the picture. (BTW, the Mercer, where he did his little stunt, is a fabulous watering hole and a favorite hangout of my wife Deidre when she's in NYC.)

The bottom line is that, whereas I originally set out to post on the subject--ironically enough--of how societies collapse as a result of failure to progress in technology, I've ended up with a truncated post that just stops in mid-sentence. Maybe I'll rewrite it at some point, if anybody cares about subjects such as the role of lead piping and the Great Wall of China in bringing an end to the Roman Empire.

Dirty Hands and the Collapse of Societies (Well, Part of It)

[Okay, this is a bit long and erudite, but I believe you'll find plenty of interest here. More posts in the future, no doubt, about the Partridge Family, gross TV commercials, and other topics that fit more properly within the confines of the typical blog.]

Right now I'm re-reading a fascinating book by Paul Johnson, Enemies of Society, which unfortunately is out of print. I've never much liked the title, which is a little sensationalistic and also deceptive, because the book is really not about a conspiracy against civilization (as its title suggests), but rather about the reasons why societies fail. This is also the subject of the much more recent Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, who ranks among our greatest living thinkers on issues of knowledge, technology, society and progress or regress.

In discussing how societies fail, inevitably scholars look to Rome, whose downfall has been the subject of thousands of works. Among these was Augustine's City of God, written in the aftermath of the Visigoths' sack of Rome in 410. (This event, a three-day rampage that left the city devastated, is what many historians cite as the true "fall of Rome"; by contrast, the actual collapse of the western empire sixty-six years later was a relative non-event.) At the time, many Romans blamed the tragic events of August 410 on the fact that they had foresaken the pagan gods of their forebears, whereas Augustine maintained that the opposite was true: they were being punished because they had been slow to fully embrace the Christian god.

More than a thousand years after Augustine, Edward Gibbon took exactly the opposite approach in his epochal Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, blaming Christianity for Rome's collapse. Despite Gibbons' achievements as a historian, his thesis regarding Christianity does not hold up to scrutiny; if anything, Christianity helped reinvigorate what had long since become a dying society.

Since Gibbon, scholars have put forward a number of explanations for Rome's collapse, almost all of them plausible as contributing factors. For example, the Romans' choice of material... [for why this post runs out, please see above.]

The Reverse Gerund: Should It Be a Capital Offense?

Deidre and I were talking today about gerunds (verbs turned into nouns; e.g., swimming), and that soon got me onto one of my favorite soapboxes: what I call--for want of a better term--the reverse gerund. By this I mean a noun turned into a verb, a particularly heinous example of which is "to gift". There was also a commercial some time back that referred to "a better way to office," while more common examples are "to message," "to text," etc.

I don't know if it's just me, but for reasons I can't quite identify, I think the reverse gerund is a horrifying abuse of the language. Perhaps it's because it has an immediate sound of jargon, of insider talk; or perhaps it's just cutesy. Of course, reverse gerunds have been with us for a long time, probably as long as gerunds themselves--I think nothing, for instance, of saying that I'm "posting" to my blog--but they seem to have undergone an almost virus-like proliferation in recent years.

Okay, so maybe the use of the reverse gerund is not the worst offense out there in this world, but it's still one that makes my flesh crawl. Now that I've ranted, I'm going to go off and television, then bed. When I wake up, I'll breakfast... and so on, I suppose, until I afterlife.

The New Big Star Album

Deidre pointed out that I was a little blase regarding the very interesting news from the Divine Miss Angela (please see below) regarding a new album by Big Star. For those who don't know anything about them, here's a good article from the Austin Chronicle prior to the group's appearance at the South by Southwest Festival (another entry in the Rock Snob's Dictionary, btw) last year.

The new album is supposed to come out in August, and will feature original members Alex Chilton (vocals, guitar) and Jody Stephens (drums). Chilton first made a name for himself in the 1960s as singer for the Box Tops ("The Letter"), but much more significant is his work with one of the most influential (if unknown) American bands of the 1970s. After Big Star folded in 1974, he went on to a rather strange solo career, shades of which were--IMHO--prefigured in Big Star's third and last album (Third/Sisters Lovers), which is filled with haunting sounds and images and unusual instrumentation.

The version of Big Star that recorded #1 Record in 1971 also included singer/guitarist Chris Bell, whose songwriting talents rivaled Chilton's, and bassist Andy Hummel. Due to differences with Chilton, Bell quit the group after the first album, and later died in a car crash, and Hummel left after the second album, Radio City, when it was clear that the band members' dreams of fame and fortune would never come to fruition.

The upcoming album was recorded at Ardent Studios in Memphis, where the group cut their seminal (a big Rock Snob term!) albums in the early 1970s. Chilton and Stephens are joined by Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow of the Posies, who have performed with them off and on since the first Big Star "reunion" at the University of Missouri in 1992. As for what the album's going to sound like, we'll see: I've tended to be a little skeptical of comebacks, though I always love to believe in the idea. Who knows? Maybe this time around, the world is ready for Big Star.

The Homeless Mannequins Hoax

My wife Deidre won't remember this until she reads it here, but this happened when we were in London a few months ago. She had lived there before, but it was my first time in the city, and she was acting as tour guide. At the moment we first came in view of the houses of Parliament, she wanted my full attention on what we were seeing, but I had turned my attention elsewhere: to a homeless guy sleeping on the pavement. "Do you think he's real?" I asked, to which she replied with a look both of annoyance and of concern that her travelling companion might have gone 'round the bend.

I may have spoiled the moment, but I wasn't insane. I was thinking of something really strange that I had read on the Net a few weeks before. It's from the lovely people at Rotten.com, purveyors of all sorts of nefarities, and it concerns a guy who supposedly developed a huge moneymaking enterprise based on using mannequins as homeless people. If you want to read it, you have to go about halfway down the page, to the place where it says:

"I'd rather give my money to homeless people," she chuckles.

The page, and the tale it tells, could elicit all sorts of fulminations about modernity and postmodernity, alienation, desensitization, etc., but those are pretty obvious, so I'll just leave them off. I will say, though, that all moralization aside, it was a pretty creative idea--right up there with ManBeef.com. (This link is to an About.com Urban Legends piece that allows viewers to see the original, now-defunct, Man Beef site. If one simply types in www.manbeef.com, as I did initially, one enters a sort of porn clearinghouse--not, surprisingly enough, a gay porn clearinghouse, as the name might suggest.)

As I am always fond of saying, "Whatever you're looking for, you'll find plenty of it on the Net." And of course you'll find plenty you're not looking for--like the aforementioned.

Shaun Cassidy: Surprising "Indie Cred"

This is a followup to those readers--all female and more or less my contemporaries--who posted hear mentioning their former (?) adoration of Shaun Cassidy. Turns out he has a surprisingly high standing with true "rock snobs," judging by the entry on him in Musichound Rock: The Essential Album Guide, which begins thus: "Oh, quit your damn snickering. His teenybopper status notwithstanding, Keith Partridge's younger brother was actually a pretty good singer, and he had good taste in material as well." Turns out no less a figure of awe than Todd Rundgren worked with him as a producer.

For that matter, Shaun's older brother David has accrued far more respect than most of us (males) would have guessed in the early 1970s, when my own older brothers used to ridicule him in some pretty choice terms. He won my heart a long time ago, with his inherently self-deprecating role as host of VH1's 8-Track Flashback, and now I discover--again, thanks to MusicHound--that he has played with Mick Ronson, known for his work with Lou Reed and other luminaries. (And Ronson has an entry in the Rock Snob Encyclopedia [see below]. Need I say more?)