plus ça change ...

An old colleague from our days in the tape backup biz was in town, and without giving it much thought (although it was Friday,) we decided to go to the fabled Old Town (a.k.a, the Odd Town Tavern, famed in story and song, but mostly in the Wood-Charles News Service.) Lo and behold, we were seated at the same old long table in the back, under the same old nude painting. The same old Liz (not that old - certainly not as old as the nude painting, anyway) was on hand, as she used to be. We ate peanuts, drank beer, and told the same old stories of life in the world of employment.

Afterward, we went to the Wine Bar at the Earle, a block away, and were waited on by Felipe, another Old Town alumnus. Except for the fact that they fled the decaying urban grittiness of downtown Ann Arbor for the sanitary tracts of Zeeb Road and I-94, we could have made a real night of it and ended up at Metzger's. The only real change of any import is that you can now see where we were on Google streets, since they've thoughtfully photo'ed the whole bleedin' town.

Labor day morning

Momentarily excited

By the headlines: "McCain chooses Palin as running mate!"

But then I thought, "Wait, he's not a US citizen."

A mind is a terrible thing ...

I was annoying an old acquaintance with this, recently, and I thought I'd annoy you, too. The concept is: song parodies based on lurking in a barn. One of them is a contribution, the rest are my fault.

John Fogarty
Left a good job in the city,
lurkin' in a barn every night an' day

Bob Dylan
I ain't gonna lurk in Maggie's barn no more

David Allen Coe
Take this barn and shove it, I ain't lurkin' here no more

Traditional
I've been lurkin' in the barnyard ...

Dolly Parton
Lurking nine to five
Hay up to the ceiling
Crouching in a barn
With a rustic feeling

Loverboy
Everybody's lurking on the weekend,
Everybody's lurking in a barn ...

John Lennon
As soon as you're born they stick you in a manger,
And everything they do just makes you feel stranger,
Till you just cultivate an aura of danger,
A lurking class hero is something to be

Herman's Hermits
Babbadeebiddy DOOO.
Well I was lurking in the barn
(Late last night!)
When all the window shades were drawn
(Way down tight!)
I heard the raucous serenade
Of idiots on parade
(Idiots idiots idiots idiots on parade!)

Bachman-Turner Overdrive
I've been taking care of business, what's the harm?
Taking care of business and lurking in a barn

Ran across my copy ...

Of Richard Campbell's book, Managing AFS: The Andrew File System, which put me in mind of the following review I wrote for the old Wood Charles News Service, back when the book came out. I asked Richard if he would mind seeing this rubbish hit the streets again, and he was gracious enough to agree.

---

CAMPBELL'S NEW BOOK SHOCKS, INSTRUCTS

Managing AFS: Andrew File System
Richard Campbell,
Prentice Hall

Reviewed by: J. Francis McLuggage

Ann Arbor: I come away from "Managing AFS," Richard Campbell's new ... what? Novel? Autobiography? Prose Poem? ... thinking of nothing so much as Dos Passos' USA Trilogy. The work shifts, sometimes gently. sometimes with wrenching suddenness, from narrative to stream of consciousness, much as Dos Passos slipped back and forth between the lives of his fictional characters, biographical sketches of Woodrow Wilson and Samuel Gompers, and the lyrical, autobiographical sections he called "The Camera's Eye." Just so does Campbell weave his tale of "Andrew," the lonely, androgynous nexus of "Managing." And as we slip into and out of the disturbing, disturbed universe of Campbell's manufacture, so we come to feel like Dos Passos' Camera -- an eye, dispassionately observing.

In the beginning, "Andrew," is born of bohemian parents, caught up in the moment of drugs and casual sex on and around the Carnegie-Mellon campus ("... clients could mount practically anything, anywhere they wanted ...") We are gradually led to know that money was tight, mostly by the author's obsessive repetition of the (oddly misspelled) word, "cash." This concern with position is echoed in Andrew's often-expressed desire to be "well-connected" -- or is it another, perhaps darker, kind of connection he wishes for? Although political dogma is not a central feature of the book, there are hints that the young Andrew may have been dabbling. For example, he muses, apparently to himself (or possibly to "Vice," one of his dream- companions), "There is no ultimate limit to the size of a cell..." A cell in cold stone reality? A cell in an underground movement? Or the cell of mind? Is this a political tactic or a despairing comment on the futility of enlightenment? We are left to decide.

By mid-book, as Andrew matures, we find him struggling with the dualities of his responsibility. He tries to justify to himself the compromises he's made with his life, saying to David, another possibly imaginary interlocutor, "The rules are simple and sensible." But he also admits his rationalization of circumstances: "Once you are on a read-write path, it is difficult to get off." And again, "If you've made your cell visible to the outside world, it is difficult to make it invisible." "... the threads continue forever once started ..."

Later on, David reappears in what is probably a fantasy sequence involving folk dancing. Campbell effortlessly, in an almost Joycean voice, encapsulates an entire evening's pastime with the two-word phrase, "klog david." The joyful abandon of the moment soon turns to remorse, though: "... poor decisions will turn into immutable legacies." The sinister Ethan threatens blackmail, and Andrew is driven to contemplate black crimes: "Ethan's personal groups can be deleted outright ..."

Particularly impressive is Campbell's subtle weaving of psychological thematic material with changes in Andrew's mood and mind. From a deep, almost pathological worry about money, his character can go to a childlike, playful fatalism over it, repeating, "dcachehits, dcachemisses...," Andrew-speak for easy come, easy go.

What bothers the thoughtful reader, though, no matter how impressed he is with the structure or craftsmanship of Campbell's work, is the theist implications that -- perhaps -- poke their heads, like unwanted philosophical woodchucks, up from the humanist mainstream of Andrew's life-tale. Is there a God? Is Andrew God? Is the commune of information a kind of God in itself? We wonder, as the book concludes with a suggestion that Andrew's destiny is to become, "... a ubiquitous resource, omnipresent and dependable."

--

Richard Campbell is a founding member (some would say the founder) of the Ann Arbor Drinking and Thinking Society and a boating enthusiast. He runs a Manhattan-area Bed and Breakfast. "Managing AFS" is his first novel.

--

Ed. note: Shortly before going to press, we received an angry note from Mr. Campbell, claiming that our reviewer had completely misunderstood his book. In Campbell's view, it's a technical volume about some kind of computer thing or other. What the hell does he know? If we allow artists to start determining the meaning of their work, think of the impact on the humanities industry. You want a lot of unemployed Art Historians and English Lit PhDs wandering around downtown Ann Arbor, getting run over by Mini-vans and undertipping the wait staff? Jeez.

-- 30 --

Art imitating life, apparently

As many devotees of Michael Palin's inspired turn as Pontius Pilate will remember, he had a couple of friends, one very great friend, in fact, in Rome whose names inspired uncontrollable mirth on the part of the common soldiery. The straight line that leads to this marvelous piece of character acting is supplied by John Cleese, who says, "It's a joke name, Sir ... like Sillius Sodus or ..."

Well, turns out that the room full of monkeys on typewriters that make up the translators of ancient Latin texts have given us at least one ancient with exactly that name: Silius Italicus. Ran across him in a book on the Etruscans, about whom he apparently had something to say. According to easily available sources (the only kind I consult,) Silius was a kind of proto Robert McNamara, doing bad things for a while, then being really sorry about it, later on. Look him up on the net, if you're interested (either of 'em, Silius or McNamara, don't matter to me.)

Covert gear for waterfowling

Those of you in Michigan are probably aware that our largest tourist attraction is not the Great Lakes, our fabulous (if underfunded) state park system, nor even Zingerman's. It's the Cabela's store, down in Dundee, along M-23. I won't go into the various theories explaining Cabela's popularity, but I would like to draw your attention to a couple of really outstanding products, highlighted in their recent "Waterfowling" catalog.

First, there's the Webfoot Confidence Cow Decoy Apparently, you wear or crouch inside this thing in order to sneak up on unsuspecting ducks. And even more importantly, there's Quivering Duck Butts. Just in time for holiday giving. In fact, the catalog has page after page of this stuff, all to help you outwit ... ducks. Now, I'm a lapsed hunter, myself, and I certainly have no moral qualms about hunting, but if I was as unsure of myself as to believe I needed all this disinformation gear, just to run a fast one on a duck, I think I'd hang up my 12 gauge.

Archaeologists aren't historians, apparently

Two issues back, Archaeology magazine ran a short bit on some maritime work that had finally turned up the remains of "the (sic) HMAS Sydney," a warship sunk in WWII by a German armed merchant cruiser. The article referred to the Sydney as a "battle cruiser." Among what I assume were many notes sent to the magazine, there was the following, from me:

"Although it's interesting that the wrecks of the Kormoran and HMAS Sydney have been located (Archaeology, July/August, pp11) , I should point out that the Sydney was not a "battle cruiser." That term refers to a type of fighting ship built in small numbers, primarily during the naval arms race that preceded World War One. A battle cruiser was in size and armament similar to a battleship, faster, and with much reduced armor. By the second world war, when the Sydney - Kormoran engagement took place, there were only a few remaining battle cruisers in service -- HMS Hood was an example, and some authors would include the German "pocket battleships" Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. The Sydney, in contrast, was a light cruiser, virtually without armor, and armed with weapons roughly the equivalent of those on the Kormoran. Had she been a battle cruiser, the chances of the Kormoran sinking her would have been vanishingly small.

Finally, your editors should note that it's not proper to refer to a British commonwealth warship as "the" HMAS Sydney, since the acronym means His (Her) Majesty's Australian Ship; use of the definite article is thus syntactically incorrect."

This month, they ran a tiny correction.

Shoals of Herring

Give this a listen. One of these days I'll tell you all about Ewan MacColl.

Just on the off chance ...

One of our close friends has recently entered the fromage biz. She maintains that I was the first one to make any cheese shop quips. In case you're one of the 3 or 4 people, world-wide, who aren't familiar with it, here's the initial version of the Cheese Shop Sketch.

Later versions, both audio-only and a live stage version, performed in the US when Python were on tour, tweak the dialog a bit, substituting, for example, a more explicit adverb in the phrase "I don't care how excrementally runny it is, hand it over with all speed." Nevertheless, the version linked here remains the original, doctrinally pure reading of the text.

For those interested, culinary concerns were a continuing thread in the work of M. Python, ranging from such oblique references as the fish-slapping dance to the more thoroughly explored themes of deliberately-introduced harmful substances and the iconic rat tart exposition.