A hungover morning

I woke up this morning in a painful haze with swirling ceilings and heat. Sleep had been reduced to a meager couple of hours as I had to wait up for S____ to get home. She locked herself out and I wasn't around to let her in at Midnight when she got home. She almost had to sleep at her office. I felt awful.

Sadly though, I wasn't in much of a condition to remember. 4 or 5 tall whiskeys, and a couple of beers will do that to a guy. It was supposed to be a light night. Isn't that how the stories usually start. C___ and I agree to meet for a beer, V___ comes by, whiskey comes out, and we end up hitting Smith's Point dancing begins with a motley crew of reporters and lawyers.

It started out so promisingly too with light banter and idle conversations. Talks about Politics and Incas and lost Jews and ended up being about everything by the end of the night. Actually, in the interests of honesty, the night ended with conversations about genetics as well, but that conversation was had on the dance floor at the point. and very drunkenly. But it's not often you grab a dance partner at a ditzy republican bar who knows genetics.

And there was wine and women to be had for everyone. Everyone but C__ and I . C____ went home drunk and early. He wanted to bail before but he stayed, overstayed really. After a couple spilled beers he agreed that he should stagger across the bridge and back to his pad. While others searched out companions or company I merely danced.

It's a little like the Anansi Stories, the ones that say just because they're his stories he doesn't always win them in the end.

Now I sit in a coffee shop writing scripts and hoping that sobriety and sanity finds me here. I certainly am not in shape to go looking for it.

Work, work, work. It's a good thing.

I'm sure this elation with what I do will fade. I'm certain that at some point in the future I will spend my holidays avoiding anything to do with past civilizations or histories of foreign lands. I'm sure at some point I won't wander the streets slightly sad that I'm not supposed to be focused. And I'm sure at some point I won't spend my holidays in a coffee shop doing exactly the things that I shouldn't be thinking about on holidays. However, that day is not today, will not be tomorrow, and won't be soon.

You see after so many years as a freelancer, and a relatively broke one as well, I am elated to be back at work. It's true. My girlfriend laughs at me. She's never seen me smile like I do know and, to be truthful, it's been many years since I have. Life has not been good to me and when life isn't good, it's boring.

You see that is the true madness inducing part of poverty. It's not the money, and it's not the hunger, and it's not even the sadness of being unable to take a bus. It's the boredom. Orwell knew. Read Down and Out in Paris and London and you'll see it. My life wasn't that bad ever, but when you have to fall to Orwell and Dickens for comparisons to your living standards you definitely need help.

Even when I was doing work the work I was doing was boring. I'm not meant to be a secretary. And lest you think that a slight, a good secretary or Administrative Assistant, to use the modern moniker, is an invaluable thing. Good AA's should be rewarded with money and flowers and trips to Tahiti. They do an utterly thankless job and for me it's a dreary one. They are the cogs in the machine, the little grease-covered coils no machine will run without. However, it's dull work.

I need constant mental exercise. Reading, writing, thinking, planning (yes, I must confess some aspects of a planner) I need to be able to pace, mentally and physically.

Thankfully this new job allows me to do just that. It's fascinating stuff but it's intense mentally. And thank God for that.

My return to broadcasting at long last.

Hello Everyone

I know that I promised you large numbers of books this year and so far have only given you two. I’ll add the others shortly but I wanted to share with you why my blogging may suffer in the coming weeks.

You see, I’ve managed to land my dream job working at National Geographic. It’s astonishing and I’m so happy to have it; especially so now, at a time when National geographic is starting to trace the biggest question in humanity. Namely, who are we and where did we come from?

Through the wonders of modern genetics we are able to see now that we are all related, perhaps closer than we’ve ever known before. More importantly, we can now trace our ancestry across continents, across times and we can come to the very dawn of humanity. The birthplace of every man, woman and child on this planet: Africa.

But that’s only half the journey, only half the excitement. We can also trace the mutational clock as it ticks through the generations of man. As this metronome swings it’s monotonous tick we can see man leave Africa, enter Australia, India, Russia, and finally across the Icy tundra to Europe and the Americas.

We are now the dominant force on the planet, and we are sprung from a common source. Spencer Wells, has been tracking the journey for the Genographic project, a continuing effort to find out how we came to occupy every corner of the planet. But what do we do with this information? Well, National Geographic is making films about it. It’s what they do, or rather I should say, what we do. You see, alongside the National Geographic Television and Film department, I’m going to be making them.

If you want to shoot me ideas, they’re always welcome. Post them here, or send them to my email.

But there’s a lot to do, more to learn and movies to make.

It’s time to go to work.

Bradley

The 50 book Challenge #3: Underground, Haruki Murakami

In a day and age where there are daily fears of terror attacks on mass transit systems, it’s useful to remember that even were such an attack to occur tomorrow (and god willing it won’t) it wouldn’t be the first. Japan has already had an attack of this nature. The Aum cult had several members walk onto the Tokyo transit system with packets filled with Sarin nerve Gas. It killed several people, injured hundreds more. There was no rhyme or reason to the attack. It simply destroyed lives.

But the question I always ask is who is it that was affected? What were they doing there? Why were they there? Who were they seeing? Haruki Murakami asks similar questions in underground and he asks them of everyone he can. He reaches the subway personnel that cleaned up the spilled nerve agent and pay the costs of their duty to this day; he talks to the brother of a woman so badly injured that 5 years later she is still hospitalized and has severe mental, physical and emotional problems; and he asks members of Aum why they still affiliate themselves with the group. What’s more, he presses them, as any reporter would, to tell more about life in the cult and why these brilliant minds are a part of it. He takes their claims with less credulity. But he gives them every opportunity to speak their piece.

It’s not Murakami’s usual cup of tea. Stories like Norwegian Wood or the Wind-Up Bird Chronicles are beautiful stories of madness and heartbreak: Poe without the darkness. They are poetic and moving, often with eroticism mixed in. Not here. Underground is a straightforward reportorial account that any journalist would be proud to call his own.

What’s shocking about the book, and it is surprisingly shocking, is how normal it is. Now as a Washington Resident on 9/11 I am familiar with the Terror on a clear and sunny morning. But that was fundamentally an attack on institutions. The attacks in London and Madrid last year more accurately parallel the Tokyo Gas attacks. Each one was aimed at a large group doing nothing more than passing through the wrong place at the wrong time.

The victims Murakami talks to are all fairly well educated, most were headed to work and many didn’t want to remember. Most had tried to put it behind them, some mentally, some physically. But through it all you perceive the tenderness that Murakami demonstrates so beautifully in his novels. He is empathetic and active in his quest.

My only complaint is that it does get fairly repetitive the more you read it. As interesting as the people are, there are so many of them that they blur together after a while. Murakami has always struggled a bit with the middle sections of his books and he does so again here. However, like always his strong style and deep attachment to his characters, his interviewees in this case, keep you reading.

God and Science

Every once in a while, usually after long periods enmeshed in the scientific and political journals I love to read, I am reminded that I do like religion. I always have. Even in my most severe fights with the Church, I was okay with religion, just not any religion I found. And every once in a while I see the brief flash of religious life flicker across my eyes.

I’m envious of believers. The world to them seems so complete. Is there a whole in logic? Fill it with god. Need direction in your life? Ask God, he’s got the map. Can’t find a girl? Well, the bible only talks about Mary being a virgin It never mentions God’s sexual status so he may have some pointers.

But then I look at the zealots, the ideologues and the partisans who take religion and morph it into a cudgel against others. They forge it and mold it and beat it until it is crafted into the slave driver’s whip, the crusader’s sword, the Jewish ghetto, the little boy packed with explosives. It is used as a cloak to hide ignorance and bigotry, and it says that the world should not change.

Whenever I see this religious darkness I, as so many of my friends, hold up a light of reason in an attempt to banish the darkness and often banish religion in its entirety.

But through the years and contrary to popular belief the church has funded, supported, and otherwise sponsored its own scientists. These men and women don’t distort science as does the Discovery Institute, a hotbed of Intelligent Design. They don’t eagerly look to the holes in evolutionary theory with carnivorous glee, rather they embrace science as a means to understand creation. They are the flecks of light in the darkness; the stars of reason and rationality breaking the void of blind doctrine.

One such star is Father George V. Coyne, SJ.

Coyne is the Director of the Vatican Observatory and a man more schooled than I in the ways of the universe. His science is solid and placed in reverence as the equal of faith. He so eloquently deflates the argument of the Intelligent Design theorists that it would be wrong of me not to let him speak for himself:

How are we to interpret the scientific picture of life’s origins in terms of religious belief. Do we need God to explain this? Very succinctly my answer is no. In fact, to need God would be a very denial of God. God is not the response to a need. One gets the impression from certain religious believers that they fondly hope for the durability of certain gaps in our scientific knowledge of evolution, so that they can fill them with God. This is the exact opposite of what human intelligence is all about. We should be seeking for the fullness of God in creation. We should not need God; we should accept her/him when he comes to us…It is for reasons of this description that I claim that Intelligent Design diminishes God, makes her/him an engineer who designs systems rather than a lover.

The universe as we know it today through science is one way to derive analogical knowledge of God. For those who believe modern science does say something to us about God, it provides a challenge, an enriching challenge, to traditional beliefs about God. God in his infinite freedom continuously creates a world which reflects that freedom at all levels of the evolutionary process to greater and greater complexity. God lets the world be what it will be in its continuous evolution. He does not intervene, but rather allows, participates, loves.

Religion need not be the enemy of science, Science should not be the enemy of God. Both are helpful in letting us understand who and what we are in this world. While I still have more passion for subatomic particles than sermons, I’m happy that there are those whose lives involve maintaining perspective in this potentially schismatic area.

50 Book Challenge #2 Eats, Shoots and Leaves

Eats, Shoots, and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, is the most readable grammar guide since Professor Strunk's "The Elements of Style" (now in an illustrated version). I'm not kidding. It's a truly enjoyable read for those of us who like reading about these things and if the New York Times is to be believed that's a lot of us. Much of the information is superfluous at best -- after all who really needs to know the history of the italic font -- but Truss's enthusiasm is infectious.

The remarkable thing about the book is that as a manifesto it's not bad. I'm not ready to become one of her proposed guerilla grammarians, armed with correcting fluid and I don't think she really expects anyone too. Certainly if I were to correct the grammar on the protest posters plastered on subway escalators and traffic lights I'd never make it to work. But I noticed the shoddy grammar this morning; I noticed it in my writing; and I noticed it on this blog.

I've long said that every writer alive benefits from the value of a good editor. They make you better, they help you focus, they keep you working. They are the punctilious coaches forever on the sidelines of the literary and journalistic world. Occasionally it's nice to have people like Professor Strunk and Ms. Truss remind us that the coaches are there for a reason, and that if you listen to them you really can get better.

Even though no insurgency has arisen over italics in the years since the book has come out, and the ardent apostrophers and paranthesis partisans remain dormant; I would welcome a grammarian guerilla war and smile should I fall in it, my body of work riddled with elipsis, hacked by slashes, and beaten into a comma coma.

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Next: With all the fears of terror on the transit system it's time to go Underground with Haruki Murakami.

The 50 Book Challenge-#1 The Master and Margarita

I've decided to take up the 50 book challenge.

The basic premise is simple. Read 50 books in a single year and blog about them. Now for those of you who don't know how eclectic my life is these posts will document it.

I will be writing mini-reviews for each of them and would be happy to receive any recommendations that are floating about. I'll also link to the Abebooks search list for that book. For those more familiar with the marketing Giant Amazon you may not have heard of AbeBooks.com. It's a website made up of thousands of second hand and independent bookstores from around the world. From the offbeat to the exotic, if you want it odds are you can find it here. They even have a rare book section where anyone whose interested can get me some un-birthday presents.

To start things off with the weird let's go with The Master and Margarita.

I picked up this book on the recommendations of several beautiful Russian Girls I was fortunate enough to spend New Year's with. Between the bantering about books and the oddity of the plot summary I was hooked.

You see, The Master and Margarita is not just a fantasy; it is a Satanic fantasy. But it's fantasy and magic come in a form more familiar to Gabrielle Garcia Marquez than Timothy Zahn.


What intrigued me enough to pick it up was that it is referred to as a Satanic Fantasy, and indeed there is no other way to describe it. The plot is easily summed up as a sort of demonic "Death takes a Holiday" Lucifer, becoming bored in hell, wanders through the bourgeois society of post-revolutionary Russia. Hijinks ensue.

What's fascinating is that the work alternates between touching romance, modern chaos, and shocking biblical heresy, effortlessly moving between the three. It is by turns tragic and comical, fantastic and yet utterly human.

The biblical line follows the death of Ha-Nozri (Jesus). Ha-Nozri is not a prophet with a vast army of followers, but instead a simple decent man followed around by Mattu Levi. Ha-Nozri complains that Levi is writing down all the things he's doing and keeps getting everything wrong. Of course the standard biblical events follow, the freeing of Barrabas, the death on the cross, and the destruction of the temple, even the death of Judas but these events so leaden with portent in the biblical retelling seem to gain a levity when Bulgakov rids them of their religious trappings and makes them more plausible and more enjoyable to hear about.

The modern era storyline is as gruesome as the crucifixion. Peoples are decapitated by train cars, have their heads are ripped from their shoulders, and a good number of the characters end up in the insane asylum.

But the madness of the events never impacts the pace of the work and it never seems frenetic. Instead the work is a nice leisurely stroll through a demented philosophy and an exceptionally bizarre little world.

Next up: Grammar gone wild. Stay tuned.

Questioning Alito

Let’s get something on the table.

I don’t care about Roe v. Wade.

Alito’s hearings have become a battle over abortion. This was inevitable but let’s look at some things.

Roe v Wade is one case. The precedential basis makes it virtually impossible to overturn in its entirety. I don’t care whether its precedent, super precedent, super duper precedent or amazo-spectacular precedent this involves one issue. ONE ISSUE.

The Supreme Court handles so many issues that to obsess over this one concern really limits our understanding of the court and its Justices.

More important are issues of the interstate commerce clause, the establishment clause, the role of congress, the use and abuse of executive power, affirmative action, and so many others. These involve not one case but the entire docket. I’m happy to hear Alito’s answer to how he sees precedent but I doubt a man of his extensive training and mental acuity will be giving wildly divergent answers when he’s asked it again. Alito dances around questions everyone knows he’s not going to answer and yet they take 5 minutes to ask the questions.

A journalist given 30 minutes with Alito would be able to write a 2000 word feature. Even silent, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank has written extensively and revealingly about Alito using only a sentence or two gathered outside of a formal interview.

Let’s get to the questions, cut the speeches and find out what is really going on. Durbin was a good example, Feingold was not. We get to try this once more in the second round.

This time let’s cut the crap, expand the number of questions and get to the heart of a serious judicial investigation. This is the Supreme Court here. As everyone has wasted time saying, it’s a lifetime appointment. Democrat or Republican, rip off the kid gloves and go to town on Alito. Find out what he really believes, how he really thinks.

I neither support nor oppose Alito. I don’t know enough about him. Unless the Senators start getting tough with him and truly clarifying issues, I doubt I will when this is done either.