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Argo


I finally saw Argo the other night. It was still playing at the E Street Cinema in downtown DC.

And it was good.

I hadn’t seen any of the Oscar nominated films at that point, but I did see the awards and knew that Argo had won best picture and, having finally seen it, I had to ask, ‘was this a mediocre year for film?’

Because Argo is not a best picture winner, least ways not in any sort of a halfway decent year for movies. While watching it, I was enjoying myself, but whenever my mind went to that best picture prize, all I could think of was the eminently superior spy flick of a year or so back, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which not only didn’t win best picture, but possibly wasn’t even the best filmed version of the novel.

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My World Begins


There are some holes in my world, the one I created for the Dungeons & Dragons game I am DM’ing. I admit it. So shoot me. Or don’t and keep reading.

Finian (a deft halfling thief), Teague (an incautious and potty mouthed singer and poet), and Regdar (a lifelong military man) start out as low level officers on a semi-important island within a distinctly unimportant empire.

Having created a world on my own and having done so in a somewhat haphazard fashion (I had a draft in my head, but not much more than that), it put the players at the awkward disadvantage of not really knowing as much about the world they were in as they really should have. I’ve tried to fix that over time, but that’s also been haphazard.

Below is the intro to the small part of the world where I dropped them:

The Sunward Empire is a series of twenty-seven islands, ruled by gnomish sorcerer, the Sunward Emperor. His wife (by tradition) is the Windward Priestess, a human. Together, they are not just the ruling secular authority, but also the head of the national religion, which worships the sun (Kaji) and the wind (Raag). In matters of secular governance, the Sunward Emperor leads, and the Windward Priestess in matters of religion. However, the Emperor is also a religious figure and the Windward Priestess a figure with real secular authority. They are not, typically, referred to by their names, however, their names (Verkef and Alriat, respectively) are widely known. The Sunward Emperor and Windward Priestess are chosen a college of gnomish arcanists and a college of human clerics, respectively. The gnomish and human cultures dominate the Sunward Empire.

No one island is more than a day from its nearest neighbor and the Empire can crossed by boat (in good weather) is ten days, east to west, and five days, north to south. The islands are in the middle of (usually) calm ocean, between the western continent of Loe and the eastern continent of Goa. The Empire, as a whole, is self sufficient, but regular trade does come from the peoples of the two continents, but little is known about the civilizations of either (technologically, most of the traders seem to come from cultures that resemble the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian civilizations of the late bronze and early iron ages).

The empire is peaceful and mulitcultural. The dominant groups are gnomes and humans, but there are large populations of dwarves and elves and halflings.

Each island is jointly governed in local matters by an appointed governor and council whose makeup is determined by local traditions (some are reasonably democratic, but most are de facto group of the heads of leading families).

The characters are based on the westernmost island, call the Throughward Isle. The island council is made up of a group of leading citizens. When someone dies, the remaining figures pick his replacement (this council has no females and is fairly chauvinistic), almost always from amongst the oldest families or leading merchants. The council has two factions: one is led by an elf named Aelat and the other by a halfling named Anderaz. The governor is a human named Maloud and is also the commander of the imperial garrison, consisting of about forty soldiers. The garrison is larger than most (except for the capital island of Hazakis) in order to be able to send half or more on expeditions to act as marines.

In addition to being a significant trading location, Throughward Isle also has the largest iron mine in the Empire.

The characters are officers in the garrison. They may either be native to the island or have recently been transferred. The commanding officer (Maloud) and most of the garrison are human.

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Weekend Reading – What Worth A Book?


Calculating the value of brick and mortar.

I want to be a bibliotherapist.

It wasn’t all Thanksgiving turkeys and apple pie; there was also being flayed alive.

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Healthcare Spending


I want to scream and break the tv or tear up the newspaper every time I hear some right wing pundit or simpering politician (I’m looking at you, Paul Ryan) talk about the unaffordability of government healthcare (stuff like Medicare and Medicaid).

You see, when the government cuts back on healthcare spending, that money isn’t saved. It’s still spent on healthcare.

Let me try to explain this. Let’s say I make $500 a month and my wife makes $2000 a month. So we make, as a household, $2500 a month. We have a doctor’s bill this month of $200. I can pay it. She can pay it. We can split it up. It doesn’t matter. It has to be paid.

That’s healthcare. Unless we are prepared to let folks die… we, as a nation, are spending on healthcare. The $2500 is the money available, as it were. My $500 is the government’s income and my wife’s $2000 is the everyone else’s income. One way or another, that money is coming out of our national income.

But here’s the kicker.

I can negotiate with the doctor to pay 10% less. My wife cannot do that, because she doesn’t have the negotiating gene (not true in real life). So if I ask my wife to pay all or part, the total bill will be higher, because I can get the same healthcare for less money.

The government, by virtue of being a far larger player than any individual person, can negotiate with doctors, hospitals, and drug companies over what it will pay for things. As an individuals, we really can’t. So when that healthcare spending is pushed onto us as individuals, it is a guarantee that more money is spent on healthcare and less on everything else. These stupid plans put forward by mathematically challenged children like Paul Ryan will not save the nation any money. Like that household in the example, I can make my wife pay for more of the bill, but it’s all coming out of our household income, so the solution is not to argue over which half of the household pays the bill, but rather to look at how the household as a whole can save money. Paul Ryan and his crew want to push the bill onto us, saying, see, it will save money. Which is just stupid. It just means someone else pays. That someone is us. And we’ll pay more. Ugh.

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Midweek Staff Meeting – No More Books For You!


Amazon trying to kill the free Kindle e-book? (not that I object – too many free e-books sets a bad precedent for how we view and treasure art, literature, and literacy)

Actually, it would be nice to have someone in charge who actually cared about preserving the brick and mortar business.

Barnes and Noble giving up on the Nook? (I hope not; I own one and enjoy it, though it would be nice to see them focus on their core retail business)

If a poet dies in the forest, does anyone notice?

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The Continuing Saga Of Dungeon Master Coffee Philosopher


We’re still doing it. DM’ing an original Dungeons & Dragons campaign. We’ve even added a new player, a friend of mine of several years who looks likely to hang around for a while (I think he was reassured that everyone in our little cabal is over thirty-five and has a professional career).

I worked up a plot of sorts and have a broad idea of where that plot will lead. But I was never great at plotting, so it’s nice that the party has taken off and done their own thing. Abetting that, I’ve tried to insert a certain randomness into the mix – mainly through the cheap trick of die rolls that select a random encounter from list, which list sometimes also includes key plot points, thereby encouraging folks to go off on tangents that I hadn’t ‘planned’ to happen yet.

As you can see, I’m still somewhat obsessed with limiting the ‘directedness’ of the game – not directing the players don’t the paths I want.

Have I ever explained what’s going on?

No?

Maybe tomorrow.

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The Anthologist (New Year’s Resolution, Book Eight)


The Anthologist is a novel about poetry.

I hadn’t planned to be reading it now. I bought the book during an epic binge at the Strand in New York (I was also victimized by poetry collections by William Carlos Williams and Ron Silliman and a nice, hefty tome of Marx). No question, I intended to get to it. After a fashion, it’s a book that I’ve been meaning to get to since it came out several years ago. I don’t read very much contemporary fiction, barring genre fiction, but I used to and hoped to use this to get myself back in the habit.

But, my plan was to make some more headway into The Wheel of Time or perhaps finish the final volume in Brin’s Uplift Trilogy.

For some reason, I read a bit of The Anthologist when I should have been finishing up Pope, but there was such a strange connection between the two that I knew it had to come next.

The narrator is a mediocre to minor poet who write free verse but loves to read rhyming poetry and is flailing in an effort to complete a paying gig: the writing of a lengthy (forty page) introduction to an anthology of rhymed poetry.

The narrators lengthy discursive internal monologues on poetry just brought to mind what I had learned and felt diving into Pope.

So that’s why I read this book next and not something else. I’m reading something else now, so I guess it all evens out.

The Anthologist is driven by chronology, rather than plot. You see, the story, at least until the very end, where something like a climax and resolution occurs, is the internal narration of the narrator, a semi-successful poet name Paul Chowder. The internal narration is driven by chronology because Chowder, the character, is driven by procrastination. The book is a chronicle of the narrator distracting himself to avoid working on this introduction to an anthology (hence the title) that is supposed to be working on. The pleasure comes from both the head shaking chuckles inspired by how he weasels around buckling down and getting to work, as well as his erratic, discursive monologues about poetry and the history of poetry. Interspersed are some ‘interactions’ with dead poets (seeing some great poet in the supermarket, for example). You know they’re not actually there and Chowder isn’t trying to convince the reader of their reality. While interesting, I don’t actually see the point nor necessarily feel that they fit terribly neatly into the whole.

That resolution I mentioned is, invariably, unsatisfying. The voices in one’s head (not talking auditory hallucinations here, just the running commentary we all have with ourselves and which makes up the bulk of this novel) do not end, they do not resolve themselves. As a result, any ‘ending’ was pretty much always going to feel rushed and inadequate. And so it was, but that’s okay. He kept that part very short, so that parts that will still linger a month from now will be the lovely stuff that came before.

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Jurgen Klinsmann Needs To Do One Thing Before World Cup Begins


I mean, besides, obviously, qualify for the World Cup.

And my ‘one thing’ is kind of an overarching thing that will involve a lot of moving pieces. But to put it simply: build the United States Men’s National Team around Jozy Altidore.

He will be 24 in 2014 and 28 in 2018, so we can at least expect him to be around and performing in the next two World Cups (and possibly on the bench in 2022). So he’ll be approaching his peak at next World Cup.

He’s scoring goals left and right in Holland. And while the Eredivisie may not be the best league, it still produces quality play and players and no one else looks likely to be producing at a comparable level in a comparable (or superior) league.

If we’re going to score goals and win games – not just now (when older players like Dempsey can take up the slack), but in two years (when Dempsey and, if he’s back, Donovan, will both be on the wrong side of thirty) – USMNT coach Jurgen Klinsmann has to find a way to get Altidore to start scoring and producing for the national team. It’s not optional. He can’t say, well, he’s just not able to produce for us, so we’ll do something else. No. There is almost zero chance of an attacking player in his mid to late twenties stepping to a high enough level to win us some games against the world’s best by then (not impossible – someone like Terence Boyd or even Juan Aguedelo could improve dramatically and also begin playing for a higher tier league, but it seems unlikely that it will happen soon enough).

So build the team around Altidore. AZ Alkmaar, like many Dutch teams, play a 4-3-3 with a attacking central midfielder that makes it something of a hybrid betweena 4-3-3 and a 4-2-3-1. Either way, Altidore is the man in the center. And while other players are by no means afraid of taking shots, the wingers/wide forwards and attacking midfielders have a brief to supply service to Altidore.

Now, I haven’t seen enough his club games to really say what, uniquely, the team does to get the best out of Altidore, but surely the coach of the United States Men’s National Team could find someone in the Netherlands with a tivo who could send him some game footage. What I have seen suggests that, while he’s hard working and just play as a pure poacher, he stays fairly high up the pitch; he’s got good speed, enough to beat most central defenders, but more often uses his strength to muscle himself some space amongst opposing defenders.

Do they play with speedy wingers? Then start putting speedy players like Brek Shea and John Gatt on the wing, even if there are better players out there, because it’s about what’s best for the team (and what’s best for the team, at least in the attacking third, is what’s best for Jozy).

Do they play with a wide player who’s more of a wide forward who uses their own goal threat to create space for Altidore? Fine, then play Dempsey on the wing.

Or are they players who depend less on the speed than on the quality and precision of their service into the attacking areas? Paging Graham Zusi, Freddy Adu, Sacha Kljestan, and Landon Donovan.

Does the attacking midfielder play close to Altidore, almost as a second striker? Then put Dempsey behind him.

Or does their trequartista play deeper and control speed and tempo and look for the killer pass to start the counterattack? Freddy Adu, maybe, or take a gander Jose Torres and Kljestan in that spot.

Or does that player make fast runs from deep? Donovan or Mixx Diserud should get a look then.

I don’t care. We just don’t have another striker who is reliably scoring goals at a high enough level. Put aside whatever tactical ideas you have, Jurgen, and start figuring out what helps Jozy score goals.

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The Automatic Detective

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Do Poetry Slams Do Nothing For The Cause Of Poetry?


This essay, Poetry slams do nothing to help the art form survive, struck a chord with me.

I have always had mixed feelings about slams. And I have always felt that the quality of poetry heard in poetry slams is lacking and certainly it works against innovative and experimental poetry (try reading Gerard Manley Hopkins or John Ashberry in front of a mirror and in a slam style and then ask yourself how well they’d hold up).

The only division in poetry is between those people willing to take the time to read it and those who will not.

Nathan Thompson, the essayist wrote that line in refutation of the idea that slam poetry is a democratization of poetry. He writes, not without merit, that ‘Most slam poems are not strong enough to be published in even minor poetry journals.’

Slam poetry is not a substitute for… poetry. In some ways, it’s like the girl in school who can hit the high notes and who sounds great, but then you hear Billie Holiday sing Strange Fruit and how she can do it with subtlety, tone, and emotion and without even raising her voice.

Perhaps. I don’t know. I just with slam and performance poetry were used to also direct audience members and participants towards the great mass of poetry culture, from Homer to Natasha Trethewey.