Librari[d]an

Yeah, I’m boycotting the 2008 summer Olympics. And by boycotting I mean not watching them and refusing to talk about them. This photo from the BBC is from a feature about Parisian demonstrators going crazy over Tibet and mucking up the torch run. If there’s one thing that France has a long and glorious history of, it’s student demonstrations and riots.

Highlights include:

• A Green party activist being tackled by security guards as he tried to intercept the torch-bearer (Stephane Diagana) at the Eiffel Tower.
• “On the tower itself, protesters unfurled a huge banner criticising China’s human rights record and depicting the Olympic rings as handcuffs.”
• Torch-bearers were repeatedly “targeted” by demonstrators, resulting in the torch being extinguished three times during the run. It was also concealed in the Olympic bus.
• A torch ceremony at the City Hall was canceled entirely.

:: Bibliography ::

• In pictures: Paris torch protests. BBC News. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/7335043.stm (7 April 2008).

L’amour de l’étymologie is a feature exploring the etymology of English words. Today’s definition is mesmerism. You may occasionally find this noun capitalized, for reasons that will be made evident presently.

Mesmerism, unlike most words, is derived from a rather modern proper noun. Mesmer was the surname of an 18th Century Austrian physician, Friedrich Anton Mesmer. The -ism at the end was probably borrowed from the French word mesmérisme, which first appeared in print in 1973.

So what, exactly does this word mean? People often use it as a synonym for hypnosis, but they’d be wrong. (For derivative terms, like mesmerize, the conflation is often considered acceptable.) The Oxford English Dictionary defines Mesmerism as a chiefly historical word, which refers to “A therapeutic doctrine or system, first popularized by Mesmer, according to which a trained practitioner can induce a hypnotic state in a patient by the exercise of a force (called by Mesmer animal magnetism)”. It could also mean “[1] the process or practice of inducing such a state; [2] the state so induced, or [3] the force supposed to operate in inducing it.” (Brackets are mine.)

The adherent of Mesmerism, a mesmerizer, can use mesmerism (1) on a mesmerizee, using mesmerism (3) to induce a state of mesmerism (2). Nyuck!

In 1778 Mesmer relocated to Paris after other physicians in his homeland accused him of being a sham. Six years later, in 1784, Louis XVI of France commissioned a group of scientists to evaluate Mesmer’s claims. (One of which, if memory serves, included sitting in a bathtub full of metal filings.) Some of the top minds of the time participated in the evaluation, including Benjamin Franklin and Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. Franklin is the first recorded English speaker to use the word in writing. In 1784 he wrote that “Some think it will put an End to Mesmerism.” I’d like to know what that  something was. But I guess it’s irrelevant: Despite there being no scientific grounds for Mesmer’s practices, they remained wildly popular into the late 18th and early 19th centuries. For example, Edward FitzGerald exclaimed in an 1889 letter than “Miss Martineau has been cured of an illness of five years by Mesmerism!”

However, it is true that one of the most hilariously insane and unspeakably dense humans was an anti-mesmerism crusader. Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the cult religion Christian Science, believed that mesmerism was real, but kinda evil. Go figure.

:: Bibliography ::

“Mesmerism.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2008. 11 Jan. 2008 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/findword?query_type=word&queryword=mesmerism&find.x=0&find.y=0&find=Find+word>

I read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle last summer and enjoyed it immensely despite reports from Japanese speaking friends that the translation was shoddy. After a glut of library-related non-fiction, I decided I needed another story about a plucky, slightly damaged person overcoming that oh-so-Murakami black, nameless, ancient Evil.

I intended to read After Dark, but it was out of the library. I placed a recall on it - shameless I know - and took out Kafka on the Shore.

Kafka on the Shore surprised me. It started off amazingly well with pseudo-historic military documents chronicling a strange event (the “rice bowl” incident) in a remote Japanese village during World War II. However, it soon veered into melodrama. (Truth be told, I’m not sure it ever navigated back out.) A story about a bodybuilding, fifteen year-old runaway? No thank you. Although still turning the pages, the story didn’t really engage me again - save for a confessional-esque return to the “rice bowl” - until Miss Saeki showed up with her enigmatic song, elegant mien, and nebulous back story. In retrospect, I think Kafka on the Shore was a pretty good novel; occasionally heavy-handed, it was not as compelling or finely crafted as Wind-Up Bird, but not too far off.

After Dark, in comparison, blew my socks off. The power of this book comes from it’s very brevity. Murakami can be verbose; after the fifth or sixth time he has his characters talking about how this-or-that is like a metaphor you may imprecate carpal tunnel on the man. In After Dark the time constraint (approx midnight to seven p.m.) forces him to cut away the dead wood and forge only the most interesting, adamantine bonds between his motifs: The invariably male embodiment of the id/Evil, the hero(ine) striving to regain an interpersonal rapport thought severed forever, the fear that H/historical damage may be irreparable, etc.

The invariable question: Is After Dark better than Wind-Up Bird? I don’t know. I think it might be. However, it does lack the magnificent historic scope we found in the latter work. In short, the jury’s still out on that one.

This season I scored an aluminum Christmas tree at the Salvation Army! And let me tell you, Charles Shulz got it all wrong when he criticized them in A Charlie Brown Christmas. They were depicted as the embodiment of the holiday’s commodification: an economical and soulless alternative to the charming tradition of decorating a real tree. At the time, adopting this reactionary opinion was acceptable. Nowadays, I’ll take you to town if you talk smack on my delightful, foliose foil tree.

Let’s challenge the arguments - both past and present - against the aluminum tree (in brief):

1. Consumerism - Schulz’s baseless, Marxist criticism. Consumerism is consumerism, whether the tree has been raised on a farm or synthesized in a factory. The alternative, cutting a tree down in the wild, is simply not environmentally responsible.

2. Anti-tradition - It’s common knowledge nowadays that the tradition of the Christmas tree is rooted in pagan, Germanic folk traditions. This, combined with the fact that tradition is inherently fluid, sort of undermines any pro-tradition arguments. Let’s move on.

3. Ugly - If you’re reading this you’re using the internet, and if you’re using the internet you know how ugly the world can be. Can a glittering, silver, tree-shaped apparatus be any uglier than some of the .jpgs you’ve come across? I thought not. Of course, accidentally seeing heinous images on the net is very different from bringing something into your living space. My answer to this is that standards of beauty differ widely, and that aluminum trees come in a variety of colors. (Pink! Gold! Hurrah!)

4. Nostalgia / kitsch - The intellectual’s criticism of an aluminum tree is that it cultivates nostalgia and encourages sentimentalism, locating the best part of our lives in a highly Romanticized/fictionalized past. This is especially pertinent to the time when the trees themselves were introduced in the United States–the late 1950s. To remember the fifties fondly is, apparently, complicity in a sexist, racist, and ultimately conservative world view. I reject this criticism because it is a reductive way to envision an entire decade of a nation’s history. I also reject it because nostalgia plays no part in my enjoyment of an aluminum tree; I just like the way multi-colored lights play on the metal.

5. Dangerous - Aluminum trees are metal. Christmas lights have an electric current running through them. Put them together and the whole double wide goes up in flames. Happily, those of us with a lick of sense will not suffer from self-immolation.

Please consider a (second hand) aluminum Christmas tree next year. (If it must be a plastic pre-lit type, get one with LED lights! They use less electricity.) I will think you a better person for it.