Friday Fun Times

Lets say I'm feeling a little mild 10 nostalgia these days; urged on by gorgeous tribute videos like this one:




10 may not have been "my" Doctor -- peace out, 4 -- but Tennant deserves endless, endless props for making the Doctor face mortality in a way he had never done before.

A Universe of Possibilities for the Microsoft Office Paperclip

Well, something like the paperclip --  it's a stapler. A red stapler, to be precise.

Ah, the joy of geekery injokes!

A thousand thanks to my buddy Minerva for picking this up for me when I totally dropped the ball and missed the release date! (Now, of course, I have a standing order at the Million Year Picnic and will not have that issue again.)

I feel I should say right off the top that I am not a huge comic book/graphic novel/term of the month fan. I feel like I kind of missed the bus with them. The stories are often fantastic -- I love Joe Hill's Locke and Key, for example, but that takes very little effort! -- but I often find the art itself somewhat distracting and in larger works like Neil Gaiman's Sandman the changes in artist from story to story induce a kind of narrative motion sickness. I'm trying to get better about this because I realise I'm missing some fantastic genre writing by some authors I really love -- as well as the stories by the authors I haven't met yet.

Anyway, the new IDW Doctor Who series might be about as easy an introduction as you could wish to see. It's a lousy introduction to Doctor Who -- you better have seen all of Season 5 and paid attention while you were at it! -- but the story is a light, fluffy piece of foolishness without even a dim corner: did you ever wonder what spam and the TARDIS would do to each other? Well, here's your answer!

There are nods to Office Space and the later seasons of Red Dwarf among others and the whole thing ends on a nice, happy, slightly snarky note. Very light fun for a cold, grey Boston day.

"...just one fucking thing after another."

And, y'know, I have yet to come up with a handier, one-phrase description of history than Rudge's from the last act of The History Boys. I'm sure there are professional historians out there for whom it sounds like anathema but, well, I only have my master's degree in history, so I barely count as professional!

Anyway, I thought for this Monday since my photos have been so boring lately -- it's difficult taking good wintertime photos when you A) have no tripod and B) can't really take off your gloves to take a picture because it's so damn cold. Possibly this is how I know I'm not a National Geographic-style photographer? If it's a choice between a photo and my fingers, I choose my fingers. Anyway, the point of this post is I thought I might comment on the highlights of my recent history reading since I've been on a serious non-fiction kick.

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, John M. Barry. It's all in the title, to be quite honest with you: the post-World War I influenza pandemic. Although Barry uses the word 'pandemic,' which to me has global or "broader than one country" connotations, the book focusses quite tightly on the US. In fact, if you read this and come away with the idea that the US suffered more than almost anywhere else not only in the influenza pandemic but also World War I, that would be understandable. Widening the focus might have been a good idea from a historical point of view, but might have ruined the point from a medical point of view -- indeed, even from a history of medicine point of view --, since what Barry is interested in is the origin of the disease (somewhere in the midwest, apparently) and the scientific "struggle against the virus." It practically comes with its own soundtrack. Scientists are noble, disinterested, honest beings struggling valiantly to save a doomed humanity. Ok, I'm oversimplifying a little and I'm not doing Barry any favors but my suggestion would either be to go through with a highlighter and pencil and deconstruct his narrative or read it so quickly you don't have to think too much.

I wouldn't recommend it as serious academic reading, but it's on the same level as, say, a Simon Schama talking-head documentary about the history of Britain. You will almost undoubtedly learn something, but it may not be quite the thing the author intended that you learn. One thing I will say -- Barry's explanations of the medicine and science accompanying the 1918 influenza pandemic are fantastic. He has a solid knack for making what are, for me anyway, nearly incomprehensibly complex scientific concepts seem, well, quite simple or at least visualizable.

The Perfect Summer, Juliet Nicolson. Nicolson is Vita Sackville-West's granddaughter, so when she writes this kind of history, it can sometimes be less a history, and more a recounting of family gossip. This doesn't make her light, fluffy history of the summer of 1911 in Britain any less readable. The word that comes immediately to mind is "charming." If you read this and E.F. Benson's Dodo novels back to back, you'd have an...interesting, if totally one-sided, vision of Britain before the war. Nicolson makes a laudable attempt to have her story cross class lines, talking about working-class protests, the rise of the labor movement, and activist women in factories.

Nicolson is very good at pulling out personal narratives and details to give her story dimension and life and she claims several personalities as central to her story, including socialite Lady Diana Manners and poet Rupert Brooke. Also tangential to the narrative she constructs are figures including Siegfried Sassoon, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Stephen, and Queen Mary. The anecdotes she chooses are always amusing and the whole book is a light, enjoyable read.

Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century, Ruth Harris. Less fluffy; not even remotely charming; very, very interesting. So the Dreyfus Affair, yes? 1890s France; there's a spy in the French army; a Jewish officer is accused and sentenced: is he innocent or not? Well, the verdict is in, folks, and the dude was about as innocent as you can reasonably get. In fact, even after the French government made him spend lots and lots and lots of time on Devil's Island -- not a nice place -- he wanted to be reinstated in the army after his innocence was proved. One of the heartbreaks of his post-Affair life, according to Harris, was that he wasn't allowed the retroactive promotions he would have received had he remained in the service normally.

Harris takes this fairly basic story -- often reported in terms not much more complex than I have used -- and breaks it down. And then breaks that down. And then breaks that down again. The Affair divided its partisans into two fairly basic groups: Dreyfusards (innocent) and anti-Dreyfusards (guilty). Given that the Affair itself was highly charged with anti-Semitic feeling and that anti-Dreyfusard propaganda often took on a tinge that Nazi propagandists might have envied, these two "sides" often look like White Hats and Black Hats in historical hindsight. Harris' aim here is to show where that isn't quite true; a more honest retrospective might show a whole bunch of Grey Hats, with a lot of shades of grey. Leading Dreyfusards might have hated Jews personally, but thought the damage to France's reputation as the leading light of fraternal democracy being done by Dreyfus' imprisonment was too much to take. Anti-Dreyfusards, on the other hand, might have had no particularly strong anti-Jewish feeling, but have wanted desperately to support the army once the verdict against Dreyfus was given.

Harris' analysis can get weighty at times and I'm not saying this isn't a dry read. You might want a pen and paper handy to keep note of names and dates because, brother, does she go through it by the detail. You will know more than you ever wanted to know about who forged what and when. But she also makes a fascinating argument about the emergence of French nationalism, nationalism in general, and the creation of an ideology and how that may, or may not, play into state- and/or nation-building. She also picks at the perception of the Affair as an anti-Semitic precursor to Nazi Germany and at the reputation of the anti-Dreyfusards as proto-Nazis or National Front members.

So there you have it -- a few additions for your next library list.

Anxiety*

No, I'm not suggesting you should be anxious right now.

It's Saturday -- you should kick back with your favorite beverage at hand (personally, I favor coffee), some nice music playing -- or perhaps Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! is on? -- and scroll lazily through your RSS feeds, pausing to close your eyes and doze at key moments -- like when you get to something boring. If you have a pet, perhaps you could stroke it at random intervals...unless it's a turtle or an iguana or something. In which case, it's probably not quite such a stroke'y situation. Maybe a grape would be welcome, though.

No, today, I've got a brief book review for you of Yoga for Anxiety, by a husband-and-wife team, Mary and Rick NurrieStearns. As you can see from the author line above, Mary, at least, is a certified counsellor and many of the personal narratives in the book come either from her patients or from personal experience, both hers and Rick's.

This is a pretty helpful little volume. For, me I found the last few chapters -- the yoga poses and everything else to the end -- to be the most interesting and useful. The yoga poses are beautifully illustrated with black and white photographs although the instructions for getting in and out of poses might be a bit sketchy; I have bad luck following flow instructions in books anyway! The meditation instructions are really good -- clear, unpretentious, very straightforward.

Will the book confirm your suspicion that yoga and meditative practice will help anxiety (diagnosed or otherwise)? Yes. Will it give you horror stories about people whose anxiety is 1000x worse than yours? Oh, yes. Does it sometimes have weird evangelical Christian overtones? Yes; those are kind of awkward moments.

I think the authors are, laudably, trying to broaden their potential audience as much as possible; perhaps they are evangelical Christians themselves, I have no idea. I've rather specifically avoided finding out, to be honest. And I know yoga can have a kind of rocky road for Christians, particularly those of a more evangelical/conservative persuasion, because of the perceived "religiosity" of the practice. I think this is a fascinating question and, were I better informed, I'm sure I could go on at length about it, but I'm not, so I won't. I prefer to think that the NurrieStearns's aim is to try and reach the widest possible audience of people for whom these techniques could be helpful and that's pretty much everyone because I know very few people who don't at least get a little anxious before making a speech. They draw examples and inspiration from anywhere they can: if it calms your nerves to repeat that God loves you, they're happy with that; if you'd rather chant om, they're happy with that, too.

My real quibble with the book is how much time is spent right up front -- the first third or so of the book -- i an outline of types of anxiety and what feels to me like a kind of self-diagnosis guide for anxiety disorders. I get fidgety around that sort of thing because I think it can play into a variety of personal issues and when it comes to something that's as potentially serious as a mental health issue like anxiety, it's important to get an outside view, preferably a professional outside view. It's like going to a doctor to get a sprained wrist taken care of; yeah, you probably know what you did; yeah, you probably know what to do for it; but in order to get it taken care of in a way that will let it heal well, it might be a good idea to ask someone whose job it is to make it better.

There are a lot of journal prompts and "reflect on your answers to these questions" and "return to the entry you wrote for the prompt XXX and consider YYY." I didn't find those prompts that useful and it would have been nice to have a few more "and if you find yourself freaking out before you have a chance to write this journal entry, try this" ideas. I'm also not a huge journalizing-type person; I used to be, but I'm not now for a whole variety of reasons none of which are pertinent here. If you are a regular journaler (journalist? journaler...? I don't know. If you write a freakin' journal!), then these prompts might be absolutely fantastic for you and I'd urge you to check the book out and have a go.

Once they do get down to brass tacks, so to speak, the tacks are really useful: actual everyday techniques for use on the spot, so to speak. And constant reassurance that this is a process: some things will be useful; some won't. Some days you will love your practice; some days you will want to throw it out the window. Keep at it; keep trying; keep coming back.

 *Disclaimer: I am not a yoga teacher. I hold no certifications. All opinions here are only my own and only opinions and should be taken as such.

Friday Fun Times

Nice -- nice.

When Is It Important?

Explanation for lack of Wednesday post: I'm learning a new job; my Internet connection at home has been kind of hit-and-miss; and, most importantly, I'm waiting for delivery of my very own copy of the Season 5 DVDs.

I want to wait and rewatch the season enders before blogging about them; I remember mostly what I wanted to say but there are some details I want to check before just plunging ahead and making myself look foolish.

So, in the nature of a consolation prize, have some old series bloopers (probably NSFW):