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Tom Tomorrow writes:

So, let’s talk about evil for a second. The president has used the term so often and so clumsily that it has begun to lose meaning, become part of the background noise of the culture, easily tuned out. And that’s unfortunate, because it was an act of evil. This is what the patriotically correct crowd doesn’t understand: you can try to understand how such a thing could have happened, what factors could drive men to such extremes–and still consider their acts evil, beyond redemption. No rational person would be so foolish as to pretend that the Holocaust was not evil, and yet no one would argue that the Nazi party simply sprang into being fully formed, unaffected by historical context.

Caitlin R. Kiernan writes:

I’d be willing to suppose that at least 50% of good writing is just knowing when the hell to shut up.

And me? I write…well, nothing really. Maybe it’s that I’m too tired, or too hungry, or too cold — or maybe it’s because I think that everything I write has to be perfect, exactly the right words in exactly the right order, and I worry about what I’m going to say, or how I’m going to say it, when really I should just be getting words on paper or screen and worrying about revising them later. I agonize over words and phrases, struggle with beginnings…and so I rarely get past them. Even when there are ideas in my head — and there are many — stories seem to stall somewhere in their first few sentences because I’m unwilling to accept them as works in progress. I’m unwilling to accept the initial problems in my prose. I never want to leave in something and move on if it isn’t quite as good as I think it could be. But I need to allow myself the freedom to fail, the freedom to fall flat on my face, to write something that isn’t perfect, to just write.

We’ll see how I feel after lunch.

“God does not play dice with the universe.”

“Albert, stop telling God what to do.”

– Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr in conversation

All roads, it suddenly seems, lead to Texas. Everywhere I go, there’s another weblogger headed to Austin for SxSW, and I can’t help but suddenly feel tragically unhip as I realize that the most interesting I have to do this weekend is buying a couple of pairs of pants and maybe seeing a movie. Besides, Austin is a really neat town to visit (unless they’ve changed it in the two years since I was there), and I don’t get to see enough of my friend Sharon who lives there.

I also didn’t get to see — how’s that for lamest segue ever? — Copenhagen when a production came to Penn State in mid-February. My parents saw it on Broadway though, and I think it’s partly the fact that they liked it so much that led me to read playwright Michael Frayn’s defense of the play in this month’s New York Review of Books. He writes, in part:

One of the most striking comments on the play was made by Jochen Heisenberg, Werner Heisenberg’s son, when I met him, to my considerable alarm, after the première of the play in New York. “Of course, your Heisenberg is nothing like my father,” he told me. “I never saw my father express emotion about anything except music. But I understand that the characters in a play have to be rather more forthcoming than that.”

This seems to me a chastening reminder of the difficulties of representing a real person in fiction, but a profoundly sensible indication of the purpose in attempting it, which is surely to make explicit the ideas and feelings that never quite get expressed in the confusing onrush of life, and to bring out the underlying structure of events. I take it that the nineteenth-century German playwright Friedrich Hebbel was making a similar point when he uttered his great dictum (one that every playwright ought to have engraved over his desk): “In a good play everyone is right.” I assume he means by this not that the audience is invited to approve of everyone’s actions, but that everyone should be allowed the freedom and eloquence to make the most convincing case that he can for himself. Whether or not this is a universal rule of playwriting it must surely apply to this particular play, where a central argument is about our inability, in our observation of both the physical world and the mental, ever to escape from particular viewpoints.

What do you do when you want to write something, when you have the time to write something, but real life won’t offer you anything to write about and the most interesting thing you can find to talk about online is something like the Smurf Name Generator? I’m Phlegmy Smurf, by the way. Pleased to meet ya.