April 19, 2007
The Murders at Virginia Tech, the Media, and The Gift of Fear: An essay by Paul Streby
The recent horrific murders at Virginia Tech were of a depressingly common modern variety. Although violence has been with us since the Fall of Man, Columbine-type mass killings, assassinations, and terrorism have become a particular problem in recent decades. Certain depraved individuals crave attention for themselves or their insane ideas, and use violence to obtain it. The Unabomber, the man who shot President Reagan, the malevolent children who have murdered their classmates, al Qaeda, and many others have played the media like the proverbial fiddle.
Witness the unavoidable display of images of the Virginia Tech murderer on TV and major and minor print media. Certainly he took grim satisfaction – to the extent that such a creature can take satisfaction in anything – in knowing that the media would respond precisely the way they have. In addition to the likelihood that the attention lavished on this mad little monster is already feeding the sick fantasies of the next mass murderer, is it moral to assist this pathetic nobody in delivering his last insult, after the enormous injury he already inflicted?
I'm no expert on media ethics, but shouldn't the news media show a little restraint every now and then? What purpose is served by knowing what the now-dead killer was "thinking?" Does it serve any public good to publicize photos of him trying to look menacing?
More likely the opposite. I suggest you read The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence by security consultant Gavin de Becker (Little, Brown, 1997). It's located in the Main Collection at HM 281 .D36 1997 (see if it's checked out here). The overall theme of the book is using your instincts to minimize danger in various situations, but a section on assassins and the media is particularly apt here. Because the lurid attention paid to assassins and would-be assassins tends to make the crime more appealing to the losers who usually attempt it, in covering such cases, "I propose that we don't show the bullets on the bureau in the seedy hotel room; show instead the dirty underwear and socks on the bathroom floor." Focusing on the life of the murderer or murderer wannabe, treating him like a dangerous beast who requires an army of guards to restrain him, showing his childhood home ("just like the president"), and
- the type of gun he owned fired on the news by munitions experts extolling its killing power, the plans he made described as 'meticulous,' -- these presentations promote the glorious aspects of assassination and other media crimes. Getting caught for some awful violence should be the start of oblivion, not the biggest day of one's life (pp. 248-249).
The Gift of Fear has lots of provocative advice on dealing with potential threats from estranged husbands and lovers, troubled employees, deranged fans and other admirers, rapists, known and unknown stalkers, and others. I urge everybody – especially women – to read this book.
A final note. You may have noticed that I do not use the name of the murderer at Virginia Tech. This is intentional. I do not want to give him, or the other criminals I allude to, any free publicity, however small or insignificant. We should study their deeds out of unfortunate necessity, but may their names be forever blotted from human memory.
Posted by pgstreby at 02:46 PM | Comments (0)
July 27, 2006
New Reference Book...Basketball: a biographical dictionary
I am pretty sure that I ordered this book, and since I am the Thompson Library's resident Sports Person I suppose I should do a review of it. The title of the book is Basketball: a biographical dictionary and the call number is GV 884 .A1 B37 2005. This is a reference book, so it will be shelved on the third floor in the reference collection.
The editor, David Porter, is a professor of history at William Penn University in Iowa. Which means that I just learned something new right there, as I was not previously aware of the existence of William Penn University in Iowa. The contributors come from a wide range of professions including librarians, authors, professors, and athletic directors. Most are from academic backgrounds.
The entries are brief biographies of various people associated with the game of basketball, including players, coaches, and others. Most entries are about six paragraphs or so, and include several citations to other sources of information on the person in question.
Overall, this is a good reference work for anyone interested in basketball. I do have some bones to pick with the editor for not including enough women players and coaches, and especially for not including Detroit Shock standouts Swin Cash, Cheryl Ford, and most especially my favorite player and Flint native Deanna Nolan. Perhaps another volume just focusing on women in basketball would be a good idea. Perhaps I will write it myself. Other than that, I recommend this book to the hoops fan and researcher.
Posted by prygoski at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)
June 05, 2006
Feeling WICKED!
I saw Wicked at the Masonic Temple Theater in Detroit last week. Wickedly entertaining! If you don't have tickets yet you're pretty much out of luck this round. It will probably tour for years though. Read Gregory Maguire's Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West: a novel, followed by his sequel Son of a Witch: a novel, and eagerly anticipate its return. [Aside: Someone apparently really liked the books excessively--the Thompson Library no longer has copies. There are copies in the Hatcher Graduate and Shapiro libraries in Ann Arbor that can be requested using the "Get This" feature in the Mirlyn online catalog. I'd reorder tham, but there won't be any money until about November, budget craziness.]
The first book tells the familiar story of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz from the point of view of Elphaba, a young woman afflicted with green skin, who becomes a political radical and eventually the Wicked Witch of the West.
Son of a Witch, set after Dorothy has clicked her heels back to Kansas and the Wizard has flown off in his balloon darker and not as strong, but if you like Wicked, you won't want to miss it.
Posted by Dorothy Gae Davis.
Incidentally, I identify with the Wicked Witch, not with Dorothy.
Posted by dgdavis at 09:08 AM | Comments (0)
June 02, 2006
Just Six Numbers
By Martin Rees
New York: Basic Books, c2000.
Main Collection, call number QB 981 .R367 2000
This short book (only 173 pages including the index) delves into the six numbers that are especially significant to cosmologists. If the values of any of these numbers were slightly different the universe would be very much different - if it existed at all.
The first number is Ν (nu), and it is huge. It measures the strength of the electrical forces that hold atoms together, divided by the force of gravity between them.
Another number is Ε (epsilon), whose value is 0.007. This defines how firmly atomic nuclei bind together and how all the atoms on earth were made.
The cosmic number Ω (omega) measures the amount of material in our universe.
The next number is the cosmological constant, Λ (lambda), which measures the cosmic repulsion. Our existence requires that Λ should not have been too large.
How tightly stars and galaxies are held together can be expressed as a ratio between the force of gravity and the amount of energy needed to disperse them. This ratio is the fifth number, Q (Q, of course).
The sixth number is the number of spatial dimensions in our world, Δ (delta).
The details of all of this make for some very thought provoking reading. Even the author's asides are fascinating. He describes how there is an absolute limit to how short a time and small of a distance that could ever be measured. It seems that our microscopes and electron microscopes keep improving, so how can there be a limit? It takes more and more energy with ever-shorter wavelengths to see finer detail. At some point the energy concentration would be so high that the quanta would collapse into a black hole. "This happens at the 'Planck length', which is about 10 to the 19th power times smaller than a proton…." Light would take 10 to the minus 43rd power seconds to traverse this distance, and so this is called the 'Planck time.' We can never measure distances smaller than the Planck length and we could never tell which event came first on a time scale smaller than the Planck time.
Reviewed by David Hart
Posted by dahart at 02:49 PM | Comments (0)
Eraserhead: A film by David Lynch
Media Collection
Call number: DVD ABSU ERAS
Eraserhead is certainly far from the strangest movie ever made, but elephants aren't the biggest mammals, either. If you've seen director David Lynch's Mulholland Drive or Blue Velvet and thought them too weird for your tastes, then don't bother with his earlier Eraserhead – you definitely won't like it. But if Lynch's malformed villains, strange props, and missing body parts are your kind of thing, read on...
It's hard to say what Eraserhead is about – it boasts spare dialogue, fantasy sequences that are difficult to disentangle from the film's surface action (if you can call it "action"), not much plot, and no discernible moral. To borrow from Homer Simpson, it's just a bunch of stuff that happens. Or, more accurately, a little bit that happens in the bleak life or equally bleak dream world of Henry Spencer, whose absurdly improbable hairdo (which would put Don King and Cosmo Kramer to shame) presumably supplies the film's title. (Or not, as a scene at a pencil factory suggests.)
Henry is a working stiff living in a grim, shabby industrial environment in which almost everybody acts like a dolt. One of the only normal human beings in his world, a beautiful woman – possibly a prostitute – in the apartment across the hall tells him that his estranged girlfriend Mary has invited him to dinner at her parents'. Henry goes there – reluctantly – and amid an artificial roast chicken that bleeds and moves its legs, a catatonic grandmother, and ominous power failures, Henry is informed by Mary's mother that he has fathered a baby. Mary protests that they aren't even sure it is a baby, but next thing he knows, Henry is sharing his tiny apartment with Mary and their monstrous offspring, trying to be a good father.
What is it that he sired, though? It certainly acts like a baby. But did Henry actually have sex with his girlfriend, as her mother demanded to know? He never really answers her, and Mary's disdain for him suggests that their romance went unconsummated. That's not to say that he isn't the father; poor Henry seems to have been the victim of an ethereal disfigured man who early in the movie used a machine lever to propel a single gigantic sperm cell (or perhaps a homunculus) from him while he slept.
Enormous sperm cells are a recurring sight in Eraserhead, for example, dropping onto a stage where a deformed woman smilingly crushes them with her feet. She is a fantasy of Henry's, who dwells behind his radiator, dances (sort of), and sings, "In heaven everything is fine…" Her bright-white cheeks look as though she has two baseballs in her mouth, bulging enough to match her large blonde hairdo. Is she a personification of a mushroom cloud?
That possibility occurred to me that last time I watched it (my fourth or fifth viewing). The movie hints at some sort of post-apocalyptic setting by its depiction of human degeneration at both an individual and societal level. Does Henry wistfully recall the bomb that somehow spared him for a lifetime of drudgery and joyless relationships, and does he anthropomorphize it as a creepy seductress? One who is behind the radiator? I don't know. It's a stretch. You could also interpret the movie as a satire of the dehumanizing nature of industrial society, or as a Freudian nightmare, or in a number of other equally plausible ways.
As with the comparatively mainstream Mulholland Drive, any explanation you can come up will explain only so much of the film. Just when you think you have it all figured out, you remember a scene that doesn't fit into your carefully woven interpretation. But that's part of the enjoyment. Is Eraserhead a surrealistic work of social criticism, or a depiction of universal fears, or David Lynch's subjective, nightmarish vision? I suspect the answer is "yes."
Posted by pgstreby at 10:34 AM | Comments (0)