Tolstoi on Chekhov

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Ann Althouse.]

Excerpt by Peter Gnedich, “Memories,” from The Book of Life (1922):

Lev Tolstoy sincerely loved Chekhov, but did not like his plays. He told Chekhov once, “A playwright should take the theater-goer by the hand, and lead him in the direction he wants him to go. And where can I follow your character? To the couch in the living-room and back””because your character has no other place to go.” They both””Tolstoy and Chekhov””laughed at these words.

Chekhov told me later, “When I am writing a new play, and I want my character to exit the stage, I remember those words of Lev Nikolaevich, and I think ”˜Where will my character go?’ I feel both funny and angry.” Chekhov’s only consolation was that Tolstoy also did not like the plays of Shakespeare.

I never liked Chekhov’s plays, and I find myself agreeing with Tolstoy about them, although most certainly not about Shakespeare’s works. When I was younger, I was annoyed by the way Chekhov’s plays circle lazily around themselves, featuring boring people doing mostly boring things. I’d had enough of that in real life! It was only later that I realized his plays were about ennui and boredom, and had something to say about depression and loss, missed opportunities and lives of regret.

But I still don’t like them. And they are almost impossible to act (unless, perhaps, you’re Russian), especially for high school or college students.

Question about that drone

The New Neo Posted on by

In the thread about the drone captured by Iran, “Mr. Frank” made the following comment:

The military wanted to destroy the drone on the ground. Obama turned down their request. Why?

I was curious to see whether this was the case. Because the comment contained no link, I Googled it and found quite a few comments of the same type on various discussion boards. But all I could find as the source of the information was this statement by Dick Cheney:

“The right response to that would have been to go in immediately after it had gone down and destroy it,” Cheney said told Erin Burnett of CNN’s’ “OutFront”

Cheney said the president had three options on his desk but rejected all of them. “They involved sending somebody in to try to recover it or, if you can’t do that, and admittedly that would be a difficult operation, he certainly could have gone in and destroyed it on the ground with an air strike,” he said.

“But he didn’t take any of the options. He asked nicely for them to return it. And they aren’t going to do that,” Cheney said.

Interesting. Cheney doesn’t say where he got his information, but I assume it was from military sources annoyed at Obama.

Of course, there’s no way to tell whether it’s true or not, or what the risks of such an air strike would have been in comparison to the risks of letting the Iranians examine the drone and learn from it. I read somewhere (unfortunately, can’t find the source at the moment) that the design of the drone makes it resistant to the reverse-engineering Iran claims it’s undergoing. It’s almost impossible to know whether that’s true, either, but if it is then the capture of the drone would be most valuable to the Iranians for propaganda.

But here’s my question: why don’t drones feature a mechanism by which they can be destroyed remotely if they fall into enemy hands? That would seem to be a rather obvious plus to incorporate into the design, but this is hardly my field of expertise.

Rescue 911

The New Neo Posted on by

When my son was little in the 80s and early 90s, the whole family used to love the TV show “Rescue 911.”

It was one of my guilty pleasures. A reality show that featured staged reenactments of actual 911 calls and their aftermath, it was something I watched often although I learned that people would make fun of me when I’d talk about it so enthusiastically. It was on TV in reruns for a while, and although even those ended a long time ago I still recall many of the most dramatic and/or touching tales.

Did I say “touching”? Yes. Rare was the show (most of them featuring three or four vignettes) when at least one of its tales didn’t make me cry.

Was I a softie? Maybe. But part of the reason the show engendered such emotional responses was that the episodes were believably done, and part of the reason for that was that the actors were frequently the original participants, who often seemed to experience a sort of psychodrama effect during the reenactments. Another reason was that you never knew how it would end (unless you saw the original participant narrating at the outset; then at least you knew that that person had survived). Most had happy outcomes, but not all by any means.

Last night it occurred to me that I might be able to go to YouTube and watch some of the shows. Sure enough, that turned out to be the case. In fact, one could spend many many MANY hours doing so. Therefore I warn you that if you’re of a certain cast of mind, this activity could be addictive.

YouTube doesn’t feature all the episodes, but an awful lot of them are there. I chose to watch the following one first, almost at random. I didn’t remember seeing it originally and still don’t remember whether I did, but it didn’t disappoint this time. Something about these little girls (who now would be grown women) touched my heart—their sweetness and kindness, and then the surprising twist at the end when…well, I won’t tell you. Watch for yourself:

It struck me as I watched this episode and then several others that, even though it was only 20 years ago, it seems longer ago than that because the people seem quite different from now—more innocent, more loving, more old-fashioned in some basic way. Maybe it was just these particular people, of course. But maybe there have been more changes in the culture since then than I realize.

Boys won’t be boys, and men…

The New Neo Posted on by

…aren’t being rewarded for being men:

If women have adapted well to the new economy, the same cannot be said for many men. Why not? It easy to paint the rise of working women as the reason why working men are losing ground, but that’s an oversimplification. In Boys Adrift (2007), psychologist Leonard Sax argues that men aren’t getting the training they need and blames the education system. The school curriculum is all wrong for boys. They’re taught reading and writing at too young an age. Competitive activities and hands-on learning are discouraged. Boys are reprimanded when they show an interest in war and violence. Taken together, these changes lead to the “widespread belief among the children themselves that school isn’t welcoming to real boys.” Restless and bored, boys are diagnosed as ADHD and medicated accordingly. If Tom Sawyer were a boy today, says Sax, he would be on Adderall.

Sax makes his case well, but I don’t believe the challenges facing men can be pinned solely on a female-centric education. Schools by themselves can’t affect a child’s life trajectory as much as we sometimes imagine. Overlapping political, economic and cultural factors are far more significant.

Government social programs are the culprit for the libertarian scholar Charles Murray. In a 2010 address to the American Enterprise Institute Murray relates the story of the janitor:

“When the government takes the trouble out of being a spouse and parent (through a range of government social programs like welfare, healthcare and daycare), it doesn’t affect the sources of deep satisfaction for the CEO. Rather, it makes life difficult for the janitor. A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. Think of all the phrases we used to have for it: “He is a man who pulls his own weight.” “He’s a good provider.” If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away. I am not describing some theoretical outcome. I am describing American neighborhoods where, once, working at a menial job to provide for his family made a man proud and gave him status in his community, and where now it doesn’t.”

Murray’s poignant description of the impact of welfare state programs is on the mark; it has been played out to devastating effect in many inner-city communities. However, the moral hazard created by government overreach is overstated for those men in working class and middle income communities whose lives have been dislocated by the recession and long-term economic changes.

Journalist Hanna Rosin describes a group of men in Kansas City who could be Murray’s janitors. In her essay “The End of Men” (Atlantic, June 2010) she calls them “casualties of the end of the manufacturing era.”

“The 30 men sitting in the classroom aren’t there by choice: Having failed to pay their child support, they were given the choice by a judge to go to jail or attend a weekly class on fathering, which to them seemed the better deal. Like them, he [the social worker running the class] explains, he grew up watching Bill Cosby living behind his metaphorical ‘white picket fence’ — one man, one woman, and a bunch of happy kids. ‘Well, that check bounced a long time ago,’ he says…’All you are is a paycheck, and now you ain’t even that…What is our role? Everyone’s telling us we’re supposed to be the head of a nuclear family, so you feel like you got robbed. It’s toxic, and poisonous, and it’s setting us up for failure.’ He writes on the board: $85,000. ‘This is her salary.’ Then: $12,000. ‘This is your salary. Who’s the damn man? Who’s the man now?’ A murmur rises. ‘That’s right. She’s the man.'”

It’s a case of unintended consequences—or, if you believe this is all part of the left’s plan, it would be a case of intended consequences.

Obama: all the Republican candidates are the same because…

The New Neo Posted on by

…they’re all Republicans.

Somehow I don’t think that’s a good approach for Obama to take in his re-election campaign. After all, most polls indicate that a generic Republican does better against Obama than any of the individual candidates we actually have. Emphasizing their generic Republicanism is more likely to enhance their chances of being elected than reduce them. Emphasizing their individual and personal failings and crochets seems much more likely to do the trick.

But why am I giving Obama advice, anyway?

Sad,…

The New Neo Posted on by

…fascinating, but extremely chilling reading: what happened aboard Air France 447.

And here’s an article written two years earlier by the same author, long before the black boxes for Air France 447 had been found. In it, he speculates on what might have happened to the flight. It’s interesting to compare his guesses at that time about the flight’s scenario to the facts as later revealed by the cockpit recordings:

Without the box’s data, the only physical evidence of the airplane available to investigators was the mangled wreckage. From the way it had been deformed””in particular, the way the floor of the crew’s rest compartment had buckled upward””French investigators determined that the fuselage hit the water more or less intact, belly first, at a high rate of vertical speed. Added to the ACARS messages and the satellite weather data, the evidence began to conform to a possible scenario.

By 10:45 pm, 10 minutes after the last radio transmission, the plane hit the first, small storm cell in the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Fifteen minutes later, it hit a larger, fast””growing system. And then, just before its last ACARS transmissions, the plane hit a whopper, a multicell storm whose roiling thermal energy rose more than 3 miles higher than AF 447’s altitude. Buffeted by turbulence, near the heart of a strong thunderstorm, the pitot tubes froze over. Lacking reliable speed indicators, the airplane’s computerized Flight Management System automatically disengaged the autopilot, forcing the co-pilots to fly the airplane manually.

Without autopilot, the pilots had no envelope protection restrictions, which are designed to keep the pilot from making control inputs that could overstress the aircraft. This is particularly dangerous for airliners at high altitudes. The thin air demands that airplanes fly faster to achieve lift, but they still must remain below speed limits. Flying too fast can create a phenomenon known as mach tuck, when supersonic shock waves along the wings shift the aircraft’s center of pressure aft and can make it pitch into an uncontrollable nose-dive. Flying too slow can cause a plane to stall.

Seems to me his got it pretty close to the truth.

But what was going on in the minds of the hapless pilots when they made their fateful decisions will never really be known.

[NOTE: The comments to the first article are excellent as well, many of them by pilots.]

The decline of the duel

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m reading—slowly, slowly—Steven Pinker’s long but fascinating The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Don’t laugh at the title because it seems absurd. Pinker presents a strong case to defend his thesis (although so far I’m only slightly into the book). I don’t agree with everything in it, but it’s certainly thought-provoking.

Here’s a little passage I just read about dueling:

Formal dueling was not, of course, an American invention. It emerged during the Renaissance as a measure to curtail assassinations, vendettas, and street brawls among aristocrats and their retinues. When one man felt that his honor had been impugned, he could challenge the other to a duel and cap the violence at a single death, with no hard feelings among the defeated man’s clan or entourage. But as the essayist Arnold Krystal observes, “The gentry…took honor so seriously that just about every offense became an offense against honor. Two Englishman dueled because their dogs had fought. Two Italian men feel out over the respective merits of Tasso and Ariosto, an argument that ended when one combatant, mortally wounded, admitted that he had not read the poet he was championing.”

Things have changed, haven’t they, among the aristocracy. Not so much among gangs.

And they’ve certainly changed in politics. Refresh yourself with some details of the story of the fatal duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton.

And the hottest woman of all time is…

The New Neo Posted on by

…(drum roll please)….

Jennifer Aniston???

Are you kidding? Please look at the woman on the left, and then compare her to the two others:

Aniston and Spears don’t even look like women, they look like girls. And although they’re attractive enough, you can see equally attractive teens every day at your local mall.

I don’t get it. But then again, I’m not a man.