Put your Facades where I can see them

Okay, okay, so we can learn a lot from the world of appearances.  

Barack Obama said, in his inauguration speech, that the time has come to put away childish things.  My dad said that this was from Corinthians, in the Bible.  

Quick facades-game:  Obama probably wrote some of his inauguration speech.  He also spoke it literally.  With his own input, he used a patchwork of quotes, but he probably used speechwriters, too.  He could have had a great deal of impact on writing the speech, or he could have had very little;  he could have only spoken the speech.  I don't mean any offense to Obamaniacs, but I just want to consider the different values of the speech.  

Quick point against things-in-themselves:  I dislike when anyone talks of intrinsic values.  Intrinsic means inside something.  If you ever have a true love who tells you about the intrinsic value of your combined love, get out of the relationship.  It means that he or she does not know what they like about you except that they should.  

There's still a lot of work to do with appearances, is all.  Likewise, there is something that college age indie rockers like myself do when we assess an artist's talent(s).  For example, Ween is a good band under this assumption because they write their own original songs, but opposing this is Britney Spears who does not always write her own material.  Somehow my friends and I don't like Britney Spears for this reason (among others).  There is a legerdemain (sleight of hand;  magic trick, shell game) that we are not getting exactly what we see.  It is especially part of the cognitive dissonance that part of us actually wants to know that Britney feels it when she says she loves her boyfriend, when in actuality she does not.  Combine this with new technology, where Britney's voice can be and increasingly is just played on the computer in order to write her songs, and now we have something where the singer does not even sing;  and the whole enterprise is something akin to pornography.  This is way too close to home with Britney Spears.  

But I disagree with this!  In the history of music, people have generally covered songs and used other writers.  The person who reads the speech is the one who is liable!  

Book Report: The Centaur

Just read Updike's 1963 The Centaur, about a boy and his dad. Here's the link to Wikipedia, which gives a decent rundown:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Centaur

Can't help but thinking of this one Death Cab for Cutie song:

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=face+that+launched+1000+shits&hl=en&client=firefox-a&emb=0&aq=-1&oq=face+that+launched+1000+shit#


The idea between the song and The Centaur is that both use a comparison of contemporary times to give extra meaning. By making these times symbolic of some mythology these themes hitch their stories to some greater thing.

The book takes on three or four different modes of presentation, which sometimes confuse the reader and other times make for interesting reading. One of these is a changing viewpoint between 3rd person omniscient narrative and 1st person narrative. Another mode was the way Updike interspersed mythology into scenes, sometimes wildly going off of the scene (wait, they're a bunch of talking Gods on Olympus, but they were two students eating lunch). I struggled for a time with whether or not George Caldwell would die or not.

Therefore, one problem is certainly the ambiguity, which Updike uses purposefully enough. Explaining this, I feel like I've already told you how this can get boring. There were a couple of times where I would put down the book just for the sake of putting down the book. It sometimes reads like a short story that Updike just kept on writing. Likewise, all of the classic Updike overly-sentimental metaphoric scenes are here.

The one chapter that affected me the most was the emotional climax of the book. This was directly after there was an obituary talking about Caldwell's death. The book is obscure enough that when I read it, I didn't have to believe it, but when the scenes blur and Updike talks the slightest bit about Caldwell walking the slightest bit ahead of the son, I felt as if the whole world were ending. In short, the gimmicks worked.