coming up soon: Portland

*Four very amusing nephews who love visiting volcanoes (I think we’ll go back to Mt. St. Helens, which I saw with my brother in ’92).

*Rush concert with my brother and two eldest nephews. A wonderful high school throwback.

*A first chance to meet Prof. Michael Flower (who, among many other things, did the diagrams for The Quadruple Object).

*If time permits, idle leafing through Clement Greenberg’s marginal notes on Heidegger or other philosophers. Bizarrely enough, all his papers (and his personal art collection) are deposited in Portland, as I just learned a couple of weeks ago.

My first visit to Portland was in 2007, and it left a good impression.

Iowa City is always fairly silent in late June, but seems even more so this year.

musicians in the building

On my floor of the hotel is a clarinet player, playing very nicely right now.

Just above the registration desk is a saxophonist, and a brilliant one.

Iowa Republican poll

Here are the results from Iowa this morning:

Mitt Romney 23%
Michelle Bachmann 22%
Herman Cain 10%
Newt Gingrich 7%
Ron Paul 7%
Tim Pawlenty 6%
Rick Santorum 4%
John Huntsman 2%

First, as a 6th generation Iowan (the Harmans were here in the 1830’s before Iowa was even a state), allow me to say that I am appalled by Michelle Bachmann’s strong showing. While more competent than Palin, she is in many respects a more heinous politician. Why can’t the Republicans come up with a woman who isn’t an abomination?

Conventional wisdom says this poll is a disaster for Pawlenty, who is from neighboring Minnesota as well and has spent a ton of time in Iowa already.

However, Nate Silver (who knows a lot more about polls than I do, or than most other people do for that matter) says HERE that the results are actually worse for Romney– 38% of Iowa Republicans view him unfavorably, versus only 13% unfavorable for Pawlenty. In short, few people loathe Pawlenty, and they may be persuadable. (What Silver neglects to mention is that Pawlenty is a fairly boring man, which may hurt his persuasiveness.)

As for Romney’s 38% negatives, I *do* think the Mormon issue is hurting him here (though in other contexts it is overrated as a factor, in my opinion). A large portion of the Iowa Republicans are evangelicals, and might easily think of Mormons as “pagans,” or some other such adjective.

But in the end, I don’t really think it matters if Bachmann wins Iowa. New Hampshire loves reversing what Iowa does, and New Hampshire doesn’t seem like a Bachmann sort of place to me. They’d probably go for Romney.

Otherwise… Herman Cain seems like a Tea Party Special whose numbers will never go very high; Newt Gingrich is compulsively self-destructive and has too many enemies; Ron Paul is a guy with a fanatical but small following unlikely ever to capture the hearts of the rank and file; Santorum appeals to the far-rights and that’s all; Huntsman seems doomed to stay at around 2% all the way to the end.

That leaves Pawlenty as the one guy of the current group who could emerge. But again, he’s a bit of a bore. The big surprise emerger in 2008 for the Republicans was Mike Huckabee, and Huckabee is simply a likable guy, whatever you may think of his views about the Bible and science (and I happen to think they’re completely cracked).

It’s still early, but I am currently envisaging a Romney nomination after a bit of fussing from some evangelicals.

But again, I don’t see any of the current list defeating Obama, barring a 1929-style economic meltdown (which is not out of the question). Even a big terrorist attack probably wouldn’t bring down Obama now. The bin Laden thing (which Obama handled with class and with excellent decision-making) earned him enough national security credits that the Republicans are barely even mentioning defense right now. When was the last time that happened with a Democratic President? Probably under FDR, frankly.

Think about it… Truman got ripped for Korea and for firing General MacArthur. Kennedy got ripped for not being able to take out Castro. Johnson was ripped, and fell, for Vietnam. Carter was considered a national security laughing stock. Clinton was viewed as a draft dodger who shot missiles to distract the press from Monica.

It’s remarkable, but despite some complaints (mostly from his own party) on Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama is probably the first Democratic President since FDR not to be taking constant harassment about national security weakness. Even the people who do complain about Obama on security issues are complaining that he’s too far to the right, not that he’s too soft.

great park

Whenever we take Cairo for a walk in Kent Park, I’m always surprised that a county park could be that nice. It’s almost at the level of a state park.

That’s one happy dog, and it doesn’t take much to keep him very happy at all times.

truck-train crash on the California Zephyr line

That’s the same line that took me from Chicago to Iowa, but the accident was much further west, in Nevada. HERE. Scary photo.

This actually happened a couple of days ago, so I’m not sure why CNN is just jumping on it now.

No names have been released yet, but I read the Tribune article in Chicago yesterday, and a good source said at least one Amtrak employee was killed. But they said 2 dead at the time, and now it’s up to 6.

“The Shadow Out of Time”

To me this is clearly the weakest of Lovecraft’s eight great interlinked tales.

It shares the same flaw of the entire second half of “At the Mountains of Madness”: a tendency to degenerate into a mere list of the amazing powers and deeds of alien races.

That’s probably not a bad definition of pulp, in fact. In pulp fiction the pen outruns the mind, and there’s an often completely arbitrary production of alien super-races (sci. fi.) or gunfights and tough-guy actions (detective).

What Lovecraft normally does so well is:

(a) make it very clear that his monsters escape the very categories of language and space-time that we would normally use to describe and understand them. He doesn’t merely assert this, which is what bad writers would do. Instead, he subjects his language to a powerful feeling of strain, all while letting us know that everything he has said is still not enough to grasp the horror in question.

(b) brings the readers along with him, leading them step-by-step to believe one thing, then another, then a still worse thing.

By contrast, “The Shadow Out of Time” feels more like notes for someone’s D & D campaign. It’s not a bad central idea that alien races would be projecting themselves forward and backward in time, becoming incarnated in the bodies of different past and future species in order to learn as much as possible about the world. However, in this case the reader is not led gradually to follow a slow revelation of this horror (Lovecraft’s highly effective trademark); it is simply asserted, and one is not inclined to accept the assertion.

In “At the Mountains of Madness” the dissonance is even harder to swallow, since the first half of the story is set up so brilliantly.

lazy Iowa Sunday

I’ll help my parents take Cairo the dog for his usual Sunday walk in a sprawling nature park a good drive from where they live.

And happy birthday to my mother today! We’re taking her out for brunch at her favorite place.

The part of Iowa City where I’m staying consists largely of university buildings hammered by the 2008 floods. (I’m nearly up against the river.)

Hancher Auditorium is apparently condemned, as is the Art Department (currently housed in the former Menard’s department store until they build a new facility). We’ve probably seen the end of university buildings along the river, except that the library is still there (they successfully sandbagged it).

2008 was supposedly a “thousand year flood” but I have a gnawing suspicion that global warming had something to do with it, and that it won’t be a millennium before the next catastrophic flood hits the area.

one photo from Baghdad

That’s Steve in the front row with the yellow tie. This is apparently a shot from his Baghdad trip. Nothing at all sinister-looking about the scene, just people working hard on a normal day to reform the curriculum as they were asked to do.

Another colleague wrote an hour ago to say he was in denial, and I’m afraid I’m still there myself. Bad things can happen by chance to anyone, of course. But there are certain people who somehow feel destined for tragedy, and Steve was not in any sense one of those. It was quite easy to imagine the next 15-20 years of his career, in fact.

Naturally, I won’t post any of the photos where he’s with his two youngest kids, which are of course the hardest ones to look at.

from the AUC students on Facebook

Also a number of photos up from his Baghdad trip– relaxing-looking shots of Steve sitting in a room with numerous Iraqi and other academics. It was quite shocking to see what an air of relative normalcy there had been on his trip, other than how it ended.

Iowa City

Relaxing as ever here.