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Many people seem to have a sort of love/hate relationship with poetry. People will recite even the most obscure song lyrics with an easy familiarity and almost a pride of ownership – as though those words were their own personal anthem, and the song’s authorship by somebody else merely a quirk of fate.

But if you quote from Eliot’s “The Wasteland” or Byron’s “Don Juan”, many people will just grow pale. Rather than an act of cultural inclusion, quoting poetry is often seen as a form of cultural exclusion.

I’m not sure I understand why this is. Is poetry really so fundamentally changed when you add a melody to it? Does verse set to music become magically transform from “high culture” to “low culture” – and only then become valid as a medium of emotional exchange and comfort between ordinary folk?

By common consensus all song writers belong to the people, but few poets can claim that distinction. Perhaps Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings and one or two others. There is a mysterious wall of perception between “song lyric” and “poetry”. And something there is that doesn’t love a wall… Can anybody shed any light here?

Isn’t it astonishing that our minds are capable of exploring an endless variety of hypothetical realities? Just as those alternate realities are not limited by the bounds of physics, neither are they limited by the bounds of any other constraint of plausibility, whether psychological, cultural or ethical.

Every time you pick up a novel, you are entering in a world that was created entirely within the mind of a fellow human being. That world can be vast – filled with nooks and crannies, minute details and cataclysmic events, never seen upon this or any other world.

When I was a teenager I read Mervyn Peake’s “Gormenghast” series. On the level of discovered worlds, I found it far more compelling than Tolkien. Not only was Peake’s fantastical world insanely detailed, but those details differed from our own in telling ways. There were physical differences yes, but – more important – were the psychological differences.

The driving forces within the people of “Gormenghast” bear only a tangential relationship to those within the people we know. They are recognizable by analogy, but only in the way that, say, an American might recognize a dinner of boiled cricket to be food.

Tolkien, in contrast, is far more conventional – and therefore less exciting in my book. His hobbits and elves think very much the way we do. They may look different, but they are essentially us, in thinly veiled guise of chestnut brown and kelly green. Only Tom Bombadil is fundamentally different (unless you count Sauron as a character). Tellingly, Bombadil never made it into the film.

Not that this is a fair comparison. Tolkien was far more concerned with mythology than with psychology. Exploring uncharted regions in mythology can a lot less disturbing than uncharted regions in psychology. Which is probably why Middle Earth is a much more popular place than the Castle Gormenghast.

As it happens, I just saw the film “Milk” this afternoon. So when Sean Penn won the Academy Award and gave that lovely and inspirational acceptance speech, I was not at all surprised.

The friend I saw the film with knows Mickey Rourke, and says that Mickey had said that he would be happy were his friend Sean to win, and he knew that the feeling was recipricated. So it came as no surprise at all to me when Sean Penn paid special tribute to his friend and fellow actor.

I thought the this year’s show did a much better job than usual in helping the TV audience to understand what all those various awards are actually for – and what is actually done by the many kinds of people who help make a film possible.

As somebody who has long worked in computer graphics, I was heartened to see that Ed Catmull has finally been foiled in his decades-long campaign to render himself utterly invisible while being by far the most important force behind the emergence of computer generated films. No honor was ever greater deserved.

And I was very happy to see that the writers had the best lines. Tina Fey and Steve Martin, in their few minutes on-stage, practically stole the show (I particularly liked Martin’s beautifully subtle dig at Anne Heche). Although Philippe Petit’s wonderful antics topped even them, reminding us all – in case we ever needed reminding – that movies are very much a visual medium.

I read a review today in The New York Times on a new book by David Denby – the film critic of the New Yorker – decrying snarky humor. In honor of that book, I humbly submit the following blog post. Please don’t hate me.

***

On a whim, today I did a Google search of “Obama is the Antichrist”. Because this is America, I knew something juicy would show up. Sure enough, this double-quoted phrase returns 37,600 hits. That’s very respectible in anybody’s book. Many people would kill to get 37,600 hits for their name. And I think there is no doubt that the act of killing someone would increase anyone’s hit rate – an incentive for cold-blooded homicide if I’ve ever heard one.

When you follow the links, you find the expected assortment of nut-cases, most linking the ascendence of this particular Democratic candidate to the end of the Universe. The very idea of an “antichrist” presupposes that the Universe actually cares about our little planet and the strange two-legged creatures buzzing around on its surface. We are so full of ourselves, aren’t we?

Just to be fair, I then did a Google search on “McCain is the Antichrist”. Disappointingly, I got only 3200 hits. So it would seem that John McCain (assuming that is the McCain being referred to) is less than 1/10 as diabolical as Barack Obama. Imagine how disappointed McCain and his advisors must be, after all of the time and effort they put in last autumn to pierce the public consciousness.

And then I did one more search. OK, this is not fair, and I apologize in advance. I just had to do it. I mean, wouldn’t you? For completeness, I did a Google search on “Palen is the Antichrist.” Three lousy hits. And every one of them actually said “McCain/Palen is the Antichrist.”

That is just so unfair. She must be very disappointed.

Last night we went to a concert of breathtaking intensity. Every moment was a revelation, and these successive revelations piled one atop the other, in seemingly endless cascades. At some point I looked around at the faces of others in the audience. There was rapture everywhere. I saw smiles of recognition and delight, and some tears that I believe were tears of joy. Some listened with heads bowed, others moved unconsciously to the music, lost in old memories rediscovered.

And I realized at that moment that many of these people were coming to this concert with their entire life in tow. Some were hearing songs that they had adopted as personal anthems more than forty years ago. You could see the resonance of lives telescoping in the faces of listeners, of past and present fusing and coming majestically together.

And in this moment of intensity I understood a strange thing about human existence. We are all so unique, so particular, so very much ourselves – each unlike any other. My feeling of seeing the entire world from my head, of being the narrator of an unfolding universe, is your feeling as well – only in your case you are the narrator.

And so all of human reality is experienced from the point of view of these separate hard, shiny points of light, each one compact and tensely coiled. Identity is not at all spread out or diffused among us. There is no “half-way identity” between you and me. Everything is all or nothing – seen either through my pair of eyes or through yours.

Together we work to create a consensual illusion of a common vantage point – that is part of the process of socialization. But it is an illusion. In our essence we are like the tiny nuclei of atoms or the stars in the heavens. The core of each essential self is concentrated within a tiny speck of locality, whilst the distance separating us is inconceivably large – a vast empty liminal space between incandescent points of living light.

The reason we value our greatest poets, like the one who brought so much comfort to so many last night, is for the way they help us to create the illusion that there is something other than empty space within the vastness between us. We listen to their voices, and we do not feel alone.

They were lost in conversation, the two of them
On the street as though it were just another day
I had not even seen her for five years
She looked the same, in that brief moment
Before I made myself look away

They might have seen me, or maybe not
It might make no difference at all
Or all the difference in the world
Five years of accumulated pain, and wondering
All resolved in a moment

I was happy for them – am happy for them –
For me the betrayal was always in the mystery
Why such anger? Why friendship so rejected?
Questions I have asked myself every single day
Because there was nobody else to ask

But today was the day of revelation
The first day when I know for certain
That the cobwebs that have covered my heart
Can at last be cleared away, to make room
For whatever may come next

Many people go to movies to see visions of the future. There is that gee-whiz moment when you see some fantasy version of future technology, and a little voice in your brain says “I want one of those!”

Just to list a few of many examples – the “Star Trek” transporter, “Star Wars” holovideo (well ok, that one is really a rip-off from “Forbidden Planet”), the “Minority Report” gesture wall, or flying cars from countless films like “Blade Runner”, “Back to the Future” and “The Fifth Element”.

One odd thing about all of these things is that their gee-whiz factor stems partly from their very unreality. We know in our gut that these are visions not from our real future, but from the future as it might exist in some alternate universe. Each of them breaks one law or another that we sort of already know about, even if we’ve never really thought about it before.

The transporter violates so many laws of physics, from the laws of thermodynamics to laws of computational complexity, that it fairly screams “Not really possible!” Similarly, the coolness of the holovideo lies precisely in the fact that it seems to defy fundamental laws of optics – “projected” light is bending and scattering in mid-air, without bouncing off of anything. (Full disclosure: We actually worked on something like this in our lab a while back, but we cheated. Our “holodust” system bounced light off the dust in the air).

The “Minority Report” wall seems vaguely plausible until you start to think how it would feel to hold your arms up in the air all day, just to use your computer. It wouldn’t be very pleasant. But that’s precisely the point. We are being told, on a subliminal level, that this is not really our future, but a fantasy of our future.

Flying cars actually exist, but they are noisy, they consume alarming quantities of fuel, and their powerful ducted fans tend to create very unpleasant effects upon anyone unfortunate enough to be standing underneath one. This one is really a fantasy not about flying cars per se, but about effortless anti-gravity. In other words, a leap from real physics to fantasy physics.

Ironically, many of the innovations that have turned out to have the greatest impact on our lives are the least visible. We never notice the air conditioner (until it stops working). Yet it has completely transformed our nation’s landscape. For example, without A.C. there could be no office buildings or other high rises in places like Atlanta Georgia – still be fairly rural agrarian communities.

Similarly, the washing machine was a revelation when it first arrived on the scene. Hard as it is to imagine now (society has evolved quite a bit), many women were once virtually slaves to laundry – needing to spend large numbers of hours each day hand-washing clothes for a family.

There are many inventions like this. Completely unglamorous – we don’t even notice them – but they have transformed our lives, in some cases vastly for the better.

Perhaps the real importance of an invention can be measured as roughly inverse to its gee-whiz factor. Certainly not always, but often enough that it might be a useful yardstick (aha, another really useful, if unglamorous, invention…).

I have been watching the furor over the public release of information that baseball star Alex Rodriguez used an unapproved steroid around 2003. What I don’t understand is why he is being made into the villain of the piece.

So many people have expressed public rage toward him. Clearly taking enhancement drugs was not heroic, but neither was it all that out of the norm for that time. The voluntary testing in 2003 (with guaranteed privacy) was initiated precisely because organized baseball was aware that the taking of enhancement drugs – which was not yet clearly regulated in 2003 – was likely pervasive, and deeply embedded in player culture. The goal was to change that culture by initiating regulations – which was done the following year.

The worst you can say about A-Rod was that he claimed in interviews that he’d never taken performance-enhancing drugs. Lying in interviews is certainly not heroic behavior, but neither is it illegal. The fact that people are so upset by that speaks mainly to our crazy collective fantasy that sports figures are supposed to be something other than what they are – highly talented professional entertainers. It’s a little like saying that because Amy Winehouse is a great singer, she also needs to be an exemplary human being. Who are we fooling here?

But I’m not here today to talk about A-Rod. He’s not the villain of the piece. The villain is whoever took the fateful step, along what was apparently quite a long chain of steps – to make this privileged information public.

We might start with the federal subpeona of the test results during the 2003 BALCO investigation, but it’s clear that these federal investigators were operating with every expectation that the information they had seized would not become public, so they are almost certainly not our villains.

I understand that the leak was provided by four different anonymous sources – which is what gave Sports Illustrated the confidence to print the info. I would argue that the true villainy here is shared, in various amounts, by those four sources and the decision-making managing editor of S.I.. Compared with these folks, A-Rod is as innocent as a lamb.

Why do I say this? Because what these people did is attack you personally – you who are reading this. You put confidential medical information down in a lease or a contract, you provide confidential information about your child’s behavior problem to his teacher – under written guarantees of privacy. You type your private phone number into a Web form that explains it will never release that info, or look for informatoin using a search engine after reading the policy that clearly states your query terms will not be shared with anybody. You talk to your doctor about your wife’s bouts with depression, and her fears that her condition might become publicly known.

You do many things in the course of a day or week or month that involve a clear and explicitly stated contract of privacy. What these villains have done is take that away from you. Your rights, your privacy, the ability to shut your door and have a private conversation. Apparently none of it is real – your silly little illusion that you are entitled to the simple dignity of having people honor their word to you.

This is what has been taken from you by the villains of the piece. And you will not get these things back that you have lost unless the law recognizes that a crime has been committed – against all of us.

So the next time you rail against A-Rod, please keep in mind that you, or even your child, could be next.

Today I took the great plunge.

After almost two years of sticking with my now woefully out of date WordPress version 2.3 for this blog, I finally upgraded (just a little while ago) to the latest and greatest – WordPress version 2.7.

That’s quite a leap of faith in free software. Four entire versions of a software package – ages and ages in the world of computers. And I couldn’t do an automatic upgrade either, because the menu item you’re supposed to use didn’t even exist yet in my ancient rickety old version.

So I took the great courage leap into the unknown, manually transferred all my content files over onto the ftp directory, edited the config file by hand, and jumped back on in.

And lo and behold – it works perfectly. Without a hitch. All kinds of new functionality, and fancy new controls behind the wheel, while all of my posts and images and your comments went seamlessly over to their new places.

I was so awed and inspired that I took a moment to make the following tribute, an amateurish if heartfelt bastardization of WordPress’s own logo. Gosh, I hope they don’t sue me…

Just for a lark I watched the 2007 action/scifi film “Next” over streaming internet. Not a very good movie, but then it wasn’t trying to be. All it retains from the Philip K. Dick story “The Golden Man” is the idea of a fully precognitive individual – one who can see all possible futures, and continually choose the outcome he likes best. My theory is that the filmmakers, realizing that the source story was unfilmable, considered it a point of pride not merely to dumb it down, but to make the dumbest, most ludicrous version they could think of.

Certainly anyone who watches this film, even if they enjoy it, will come away with that ooky feeling you get when you know your intelligence is being insulted. As if somebody wanted to tell about Albert Einstein, but decided to make it easier by changing “E = MC²” to “E = M + C”.

But I do give these filmmakers credit. An adaptation this over-the-top stupid could not be the result of mere hackery. My theory is that these are people possessed of great skill and finesse who worked hard to ensure that any idea or plot point that might conceivably be good or challenging or thought provoking was carefully excised from the final product. And that the bad ideas, the real howlers, the ones that leave you shaking your poor aching head and thinking “how the hell did this get in?” were lovingly produced and preserved on celluloid – to serve as an eternal testament to the perverse genius of these folks.

And just so that you realize they are doing all of this on purpose, they deliberately leave in one magnificent scene – a wonderful if shameless ripoff of “Groundhog Day” and “51 First Dates” – in which we watch the hero try every possible way to pick up a chick who is light years out of his league, until he hits on the one that will work.

But the idea of an individual who sees and selects from all possible futures is itself a good one, which deserves to be explored more often. I thought Stephen Spielberg and company did an excellent job with Sandra Morton’s character in the film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s “Minority Report”. Rightly, her precog was portrayed as something vastly alien, with a psychology utterly unlike any we would recognize. And Morton is one of the few film actresses around with the talent to pull off that kind of role while maintaining the audience’s sympathy throughout.

In some sense, that entire film is built around the masterful scene in the mall when Tom Cruise and Morton are escaping the authorities together. That is not only the point in the film when you realize the awesome power she wields, but also the first time you are allowed to see reality from her bizarre perspective.

Coincidentally I am rereading “Watchmen” after many years, in anticipation of the forthcoming movie release. Alan Moore treats the character of Dr. Manhattan – an omniscient and omnipresent mutant who used to be human, but who now can see into the future and manipulate space and time – as a source of fascination as well as a kind of rueful comedy.

Dr. Manhattan is clearly nonplussed by the ordinary mortals he encounters, as they are nonplussed by him. Their intense drives, their earthly lusts and passions, the fact that things matter to them, these are concepts he has trouble holding onto. The only human challenge still left to him is to avoid drifting away altogether, to remember why anything might actually matter. In spite of his coldness, we care about the character because Alan Moore makes us see that this is a struggle against mortality – for Dr. Manhattan to lose his last vestige of humanness would be to lose all sense of meaning, which is a kind of death.

In contrast, the creators of “Next” have directed Nicholas Cage to do one of his hyperbolic personality riffs – but in this context it makes no sense at all. Cage makes a sincere attempt at a performance, but it’s all just silly. Why would this character show distress and fear about events that he knows will never happen? Why is he getting so worked up when the audience already knows he is never in danger? The whole thing is like watching a movie of somebody else playing a video game – when you already know the game was rigged.