Day: February 25, 2007

I sometimes wonder whether it’s Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, Operation Enduring Freedom, or the tsunami that will come to be seen as the formative disaster of our time. I suppose the tragedy is that it’s all of them.

Actually, I think the formative disaster of our time may have to be the nomination and election of George W. Bush as our nation’s president.

Gaiman has also been making some very good points about the whole recent The Higher Power of Lucky controversy, including at the top of that post above.
I’ve been a little distressed and surprised to hear some of the people I know come out in favor of the book being pulled from schools lately. I understand the good intentions that often lay behind that impulse, I think, the belief that parents should decide what books their kids should, or should not, be exposed to. But denying that right to other parents is still censorship, and I’m actually a little offended by the idea that that’s somehow okay, just so long as that’s what the majority wants.

Removing one book from a public school library doesn’t simply keep it out of the hands of a kid whose parents object. It keeps the book out of the hands of all the kids at that school, regardless of what their parents think or prefer. I think there are much better, and more effective, options available to parents than having a book pulled from the school library. I think there are better options than trying to police every stray idea that a child might accidentally be exposed to.

A pair of medico-literary sleuths claimed last week to have tracked down the illness that haunted Scrooge. They concluded that Charles Dickens brilliantly observed the symptoms in A Christmas Carol.

Robert Chance Algar, a Californian neurologist, and his aunt Lisa Saunders, a medical writer and physician, believe that the affliction that made Scrooge a byword for miserliness and redemption was Lewy body dementia (LBD), a disease so complex that doctors did not include it in the medical lexicon until 1996.

Pointless, mainly, because Ebeneezer Scrooge is a fictional character and his “symptoms” are whatever Charles Dickens (inadvertently) made them to be. I think the standard reading of a miser’s Christmastime redemption is a lot more likely than Algar’s reading — and, while nevertheless a new and interesting view of the text, I think his theory sort of drains a lot of the life out of it.

Then again, this is probably equally pointless, and yet I find it sort of fascinating:

The Tommy Westphall universe hypothesis, an idea discussed among some television fans, makes the claim that not only does St. Elsewhere take place within Tommy’s mind, but so do numerous other television series which are directly and indirectly connected to St. Elsewhere through fictional crossovers and spin-offs, resulting in a large fictional universe taking place entirely within Tommy’s mind.

There are a lot of obvious problems with this theory, but then again it’s not really the sort of thing that can be proven or disproven. It’s just an interesting thought experiment.