Your Thursday Boring Postcard from Michael5000

FAMOUS BANYAN TREE ...at historic Lahaina, Maui, Hawaiian Islands.  Planted in 1873 by W.O. Smith, it has spread over a full acre and shades most of the entire town square adjacent to the picturesque harbor and courthouse.

Provenance: Unknown.

March Madness: South and East Semifinals

March Madness: South and East Semifinals!!!

The Rules: For each of the pairs of flags pitted against each other, indicate your favorite.  Explication, derision, and/or analysis will not affect the scoring, but is nevertheless encouraged.  Each winner will advance to the Sweet Sixteen.

South and East Semifinals Voting Deadline: 9 p.m. PDT, Saturday, March 19.




East



Maryland vs. Massachusetts

Maryland

Massachusetts

District of Columbia vs. Rhode Island

District of Columbia

Rhode Island

South



South Carolina vs. Tennessee

South Carolina

Tennessee

Texas vs. Puerto Rico

Texas

Puerto Rico

Make your votes in the comments.

The Wednesday Quiz, close bosum-friend of the maturing sun

It's:

The new weekly game of knowledge, intuition, inductive reasoning, and willingness to risk public embarrassment in a friendly and moderately supportive environment!!

Answers come out Fridayish.


1. Who called Autumn the:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run....

2. Whose 1781 book Critique of Pure Reason is about... um...  something to do with the nature of knowledge. Or something.

3. This is a pretty representative painting by what artist?

4. Here is one of many possible recipes. What's the food?

5 cups cabbage, cut into bite-size pieces
6 Tbs salt
2 Tbs sugar
1 tsp to 2 Tbs crushed red pepper flakes (according to taste)
1/4 tsp fresh ginger root, finely chopped
1 clove garlic, peeled and finely chopped
2 green onions, finely chopped

1.) In a large colander, mix cabbage with 5 Tbs salt. Let sit for 3 hours.
2.) Rinse cabbage thoroughly. Gently squeeze out excess liquid.
3.) Place the drained cabbage in a large glass bowl. Add the remaining ingredients and mix thoroughly.
4.) Cover tightly with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature for 1 or 2 days.
5.) Chill before serving.

5. It's the third largest city in India and, by some measures, the eighth largest urban area in the world. And its name isn't spelled the way it used to be.

6. What country is this?

7. What fictional character famously found a solution -- kind of -- to the Kobayashi Maru test?

8. It's the highest point in Tanzania.

9. Where are we?

10. If you want to buy something in Sweden or Norway, you better have some __________.

----

The tie-breaker: What are some words that you like -- as words -- that begin with this week's letter.

Put your answers in the comments.  Gently squeeze out excess liquid.

The Reading List: Rabbit Redux

Rabbit Redux
by John Updike

Rabbit Redux is the first of three books on the Reading List listed under the omnibus entry “the other Rabbit books after Rabbit, Run.” Rabbit, Run itself isn’t on the list, and hasn’t been reviewed in these here pages, because I’d already read it when the List was assembled. It’s a book that inspires passionate devotion – I believe it is occasional reader Chuckdaddy’s favorite book – and also heartfelt detraction. In fact, I can already sense frequent commenter Elaine readying herself to emphasize that she very much dislikes the Rabbit books, and in fact I’m hoping that she will offer a pithy yet cogent statement of the case against. No pressure, Elaine.

For my own part, I found Rabbit, Run an almost exhilarating piece of prose writing. Updike at his best deploys language masterfully, like some sort of grim homegrown Nabakov. I am especially fond of the unbroken opening sequence in which the protagonist Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom comes home from work, unexpectedly snaps from the banality and disappointment of his everyday adult life, and half-consciously sets out on a road trip that almost, but not really, propels him out of the deep rut that has been lain down for him. Rabbit’s epic and often pyrrhic battles against that rut continue through the remainder of Rabbit, Run and pick up again, ten years later, in Rabbit Redux.

Some things about Rabbit Redux that I found to be, you know, good.

The Novel as Time Travel. Rabbit, Run conjured up a vivid picture of the late 1950s, a time when urban decay was beginning to emerge amidst a general prosperity. I wasn’t around for that time, but in reading Updike I felt immersed in the rhythms and textures of a just-slightly foreign land recognizable from photographs, from old magazines, from the family albums that I don’t usually look at because there aren’t any pictures of me in them yet. Rabbit Redux is set in 1969. I existed then, but only just; my memories begin in the world that had just staggered out of 1969, and there is an amazement of detail in Redux that vividly brings that time back to life. As a forty-something in 2011, I am consistently amazed at the precision and depth of Updike’s research and memory – before remembering that the book went to press in 1972. The abundance of cultural reference must have given Rabbit’s adventures a tremendous immediacy at the time; but for us people of the future, it is as if Updike deliberately set out to leave us a rich and well-stocked time capsule.

Antihero Ascendant. Willful without ambition, Rabbit the character often falls short of the kind of behavior you might hope for in your literary protagonist. Indeed, he is often a real jerk. An asshole. A prick, if you will. But yet there is also a real humanity about him, if you dig deep enough. If he can get a conviction into his thickish skull, he has the courage of it. If situations force him to interact with those unlike himself, he is capable of starting to see the world from their point of view. In Redux we see Rabbit beating his wife, but making sure not to hurt her too much while doing so; standing up to the racism of his neighbors, but mostly because he doesn’t like their attitude; and acting out dozens of other instances of tempered spite and half-hearted kindness. Like most of us, he is adrift in a sea of his own wasted potential. Really, I think many of us who become fond of Rabbit, the character, do so because we recognize ourselves in him. Perhaps this is also true of people who hate Rabbit.

Words, Words. Updike writes in the present tense, which is sometimes thought to lend emotional immediacy to a narrative . For me, however -- I don’t know why -- it creates a little bit of intellectual distance, giving the action a slight quality of abstraction. Indeed, Harry Angstrom is treated just a little like the subject of a case study. But then much of Rabbit’s life experience is shaped by his history as a local basketball star, so Updike’s present-tense prose has the function too of serving as a play-by-play, picking up the story where the radio announcers who called the games of his glory days left off.

Stream-of-consciousness writing is deeply etched into Updike’s Rabbit books, so deeply that you could easily read through them without realizing that the implied outside narrator is frequently taking you on jaunts through his character’s thought processes. Here’s a passage from late in the book, with Rabbit in his childhood bedroom thinking about how he used to fantasize that it was a train car in motion:

And for a while there had been a stamp collection, weird to remember, the big blue album with padded covers and the waxpaper mounts and the waxpaper envelopes stuffed with a tumble of Montenegro and Sierra Leone cancelleds. He imagined then that he would travel to every country in the world and send Mom a postcard from every one, with these stamps. He was in love with the idea of traveling, with running, with geography, with Parcheesi and Safari and all board games where you roll the dice and move; the sense of a railroad car was so vivid he could almost see his sallow overhead light, tulip-shaped, tremble and sway with the motion. Yet traveling became an offense in the game he got good at.

You could spend a lot of time thinking about that paragraph. For one thing, it represents Rabbit’s entire life history within a few sentences. It also follows the contours of a immediate thought process, from the slight marvel that one used to collect stamps (“weird to remember”) to the tactile memories of the experience (“waxpaper mounts”) to the still-remembered specific knowledge involved (not “stamps,” but “cancelleds”). The sentences are third person, but from a first-person point of reference – not “his mother,” but “Mom.” You could fret over whether that last sentence is an exquisite conclusion to a chain of thought that rambles through games, travel, and nostalgia, or is just a little too much – as I did myself, enlisting Mrs.5000 into the fretting for good measure. But you could also – and this is my point, I think – zip right through that paragraph without worrying about the language, yet absorbing a rich sense of the moment, and the character’s sense of muted regret at the loss of his childhood ambitions.

Some things about Rabbit Redux that I personally felt as weaknesses, although that certainly could just be my own opinion.

Where’s Janice? Rabbit’s wife Janice, something of an empty dress in the first book, begins to emerge in Rabbit Redux as an interesting, nuanced, well-realized character. And then she disappears for the bulk of the book. This is more than just crabbing about the book that Updike didn’t write, because it creates a real asymmetry within the narative. We are given to expect that there will be a certain volume of Janice there, and then she is gone.  If that feeling of absence is a deliberate creation on Updike’s part to make us share Rabbit’s experience, than he is indeed one clever sumbitch.

Incidentally – I am not, and never have been, a woman, but be that as it may I’m not sure that Updike is remarkably successful at really getting inside the thinking of his female characters. I mean, I think he does a better job than most men writing in 1971 did, and I salute that he was giving it the old college try, but did he get there? Maybe some of you of the female persuasion would care to address this issue? Maybe not? OK.

C’mon, really? I usually push back against complaints about the plausibility of the scenario in a work of fiction. The unlikely parts of a story are after all usually the premise, the element that makes the fictional or factual aspects of the story noteworthy, that makes it worth reading or writing about. So sure, events in Dickens (or in most novels, really) are driven by preposterous coincidence. But this is what makes his novels interesting stories, with plots, rather than descriptions of daily life in Victorian England.

But. [mild spoiler ahead]  If Updike was aiming for “a brilliant portrait of Middle America” – Life magazine’s words, not his – he needed to keep the action within the recognized parameters of Middle American behavior. And sure, one hears that lots of crazy stuff was happening in the late 1960s. But did people like Rabbit start hosting people from radically different backgrounds as permanent houseguests in their shabby suburban homes? I suppose that nothing technically impossible happens in this book, yet I was distracted throughout the middle half by a persistent feeling of events not ringing true.

And On That Note

I will now wind up what I intended to be a quick, three-paragraph review of Rabbit Redux. I wouldn’t want you to think of me as long-winded.

March Madness: Second Round Results

EAST

The top four seeded flags in the East division galloped into the Sweet Sixteen over the course of the week, with three outright routs. Maryland found more love than hate, beating up on New Hampshire 25-6, while favorites Rhode Island and DC each ran up a score of 27-4 against Connecticut and Virginia, respectively. The only real contest was in 5th-seed Delaware's contest with 4th-seed Mass, with the Bay State coming out on top by a slim 17-14 margin.

SOUTH

There was even less suspense in the South division, none of the matchups were even close. Third-seed Texas destroyed North Carolina with a unanimous 26-0, setting up another red, white, and blue showdown for second-seed Puerto Rico, which disposed of Arkansas 24-2.

Elsewhere in the South, third-seed South Carolina beat up on Alabama, 22-4. This sets up an interesting showdown with fifth-seed Tennessee, which blew by the pelicans of Louisiana with a decisive 21-5 vote.

NORTH

Second round drubbings continued in the North and West divisions, with only the contests between fourth and fifth seeds conjuring up anything like suspense. Third seed Indiana led the onslaught against hapless Nebraska with a punishing 25-1 score. First seed Wyoming's 24-2 rout of Michigan and Ohio's 22-4 runup on Montana represent a combined referendum of 71-7 against the last three seal-on-blue flags left in the tourney.

Missouri's bears stayed within reach of Iowa's eagle, but could never quite close the margin; the fourth-seed horizontal tricolor state eventually fell to the Hawkeye State, 15-11.

WEST

The first and second seeds in the powerful West division announced their presence with authority, with #1 Alaska trampling on the Northern Marianas 25-1 and #2 New Mexico mounting a decisive 21-5 victory over popular California; by all appearences, California's flag is the first that a large number of voters feel genuinely sorry to see leaving the contest.

Things were a little more interesting in the middle rungs, where sixth seed Colorado kept it respectable, garnering nine votes to put up against Arizona's seventeen. Washington and Hawaii, meanwhile, were too close to call until the final bell; when the smoke cleared, Hawaii's banner emerged on top, 15-11. The West semifinals will therefore feature contests among the four most recent states to join the American Union -- although not by any means, however, the four most recent flag designs. Action resumes Thursday!

March Madness: The Sweet Sixteen

The Sweet Sixteen is now in place.

As a number of people have pointed out, this has not been a tournament for drama thus far.  What is a ball without a Cinderella story?  And yet no flag with deeper than a fifth seed has survived the first two rounds.  To a certain, very limited extent, this is due to the vagaries of the brackets and the seeding order, both determined (were you wondering?) in a highly informal process as I was relaxing on the couch on Christmas afternoon.

Much more so, it is because most of the flags of the American states and territories, to a greater or lesser extent, stink.  All we have really done so far is winnow out the worst of the batch.  There are a few possible exceptions: a flag I like better than y'all do (Louisiana) and one y'all might have liked a whole lot better than I do (American Samoa); at least one pretty good one that got squeezed out (Cal) and at least one that is in, but very likely doomed (but I would not want to openly predict the vote).

We're left with sixteen contenders, and my guess is that we'll start to see closer votes and tougher choices.  After all: there can only be four regional champions, and only one winner overall.  Semifinals for East and South will open simultaneously on Thursday; semifinals for West and North will open on Friday.  L&TM5K readers can "enjoy" a short burst of more conventional content; Vexillophiliacs can stay up late Monday to see who will come out on top in the Hawaii/Washington showdown.

Happy Daylight Savings Time in participating locations!

Your Sunday Boring Postcard from Michael5000

HOLDEN TOWN HALL
Main Street
Hancock Common
Holden, Massachusetts
Built 1836

Provenance: Sent by occasional L&TM5K commenter and Map of the Week guy Dug, November 2010.


Extra Bonus Sunday Boring Postcard Link!!