A commenter justly calls me to task for typos and and asks why. (In the last post I left the second “p” out of purportedly. I won’t make any wisecracks about people not being able to figure it out, the commenter is correct in that it looks “unprofessional” and I’ve corrected it. (Or “unrofessional” as I originally had it.)

The mechanical reason is that the “p” key on my iBook has come unmoored and all “p”s require a greater effort to make them register. (Does anyone else have this experience: that iBooks begin to fall apart after 3 years and the extended warranties run out, and the best option then becomes not to repair, but to buy a new one? Wonder why?

But I have been negligent in using spell-check in part (originally “in art”) because I’ve been trying to do shorter posts, thinking that I’ll do them more frequently. But I think I only have a certain number of ideas that I don’t think are obvious, run of the mill and are worth bothering readers with. Many bloggers don’t allow this to inhibit them, I just can’t write anything for the sake of writing something.

And so when I do get an idea I think is a blog item I race to get it on the screen, on to the site in the improvisational, yes sometimes unprofessional way, that I thought was part of the spirit of blogging. Different from journalism and book writing that goes through layers of copy-editors, editors, proofreaders, all to the good for the most part. But different. More considered obviously. I think the form is designed for the not-too-over-considered and subsequent re thinking. Sharing first draft thoughts with readers and getting their reaction. I maintain that my misspellings are a sign of this blog’s un mediated authenticity! (only half-serious here)

Nonetheless I don’t think this is a widely shared attitude, or anyway when misspellings become frequent, some people’s tolerance for what I regard as the Kerouac-like immediacy of the blog can become irritating. So I will give in to The Man, if that’s what you want and go back to spellcheck, however much it inhibits my spontaneous creativity. (Kidding!) But interesting that Safari spellcheck still considers : “blog” and “bloggers” misspellings. And as I point out in discussing the blogger morphing of “teh” from misprint to deliberate alternative specifiersometimes typos can take on a life and dignity of their own.

BTW, iBook users, I’d like to hear if your machines start falling apart like clock-work after three years.

Have you been following the hacker-caused furor over the latest manifestation of the “Stormworm” virus? It seems that they’ve devised an ingenious temptation to click on their virus-infected video link. They send out mass emails with subject lines that seem to be news stories about the beginning of the Third World War, purportedly a U.S. invasion of Iran that has already involved nuclear detonations. If you open it, inside they invite you to click on the infected video link to see the mushroom clouds.

A list of “stormworm” World War III subject lines has been circulating among cyber security websites. It includes the following:

Here are some of the subject headings:

Iran USA conflict developed into war
More than 10000 Iranians were murdered
Negotiations between USA and Iran ended in War
Occupation of Iran
Plans for Iran attack began
The Iran’s Leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared Jihad to USA
The World War III has already begun
The begining of The World War III
The military operation in Iran has begun
The secret war against Iran
Third War in Iran
Third World War has begun
US Army crossed Iran’s borders
US Army invaded Iran
US army is about 20 kilometers from Tegeran
US soldiers occupied Iran
USA attacked Iran
USA declares war on Iran
USA occupeid Iran
USA unleashed war on Iran
War between USA&Iran
War with Iran is the reality now
Washington prefers to shoot first

The following is a selection of the body text:

20000 US soldiers in Iran http://xxxxxxxx.com/
Iran USA conflict developed into war http://xxxxxxxx.com/
More than 10000 Iranians were murdered http://xxxxxxxx.com/
Negotiations between USA and Iran ended in War http://xxxxxxxx.com/
Occupation of Iran http://xxxxxxxx.com/
Plans for Iran attack began http://xxxxxxxx.com/
The World War III has already begun http://xxxxxxxx.com/
The begining of The World War III http://xxxxxxxx.com/
The military operation in Iran has begun http://xxxxxxxx.com/
The secret war against Iran http://xxxxxxxx.com/
Third War in Iran http://xxxxxxxx.com/
Third World War has begun http://xxxxxxxx.com/
US Army crossed Iran’s borders http://xxxxxxxx.com/
US Army invaded Iran http://xxxxxxxx.com/
US army is about 20 kilometers from Tegeran http://xxxxxxxx.com/
US soldiers occupied Iran http://xxxxxxxx.com/
USA attacked Iran http://xxxxxxxx.com/
USA declares war on Iran http://xxxxxxxx.com/
USA occupeid Iran http://xxxxxxxx.com/
USA unleashed war on Iran http://xxxxxxxx.com/
War between USA&Iran http://xxxxxxxx.com/
War with Iran is the reality now http://xxxxxxxx.com/
Washington prefers to shoot first http://xxxxxxxx.com/

it’s almost an incantation of tribal fears. Almost like the EKG of that subdomain of the collective Unconscious where we collectively repress our nuclear war fears.

So here’s my question: what would be your first e mail of the apocalypse.How would you imagine the start? What would you say to a friend or lover, if you’d just heard a bulletin that nuclear detonations had begun? What would you put in the subject line? And/or what would you put in the body of the text, if it looked like the long goodbye was upon us?

The question–one of the most vexing in literature and literarry studies–and life itself goddamit–has been troubling me of late. It’s about a much debated line (and revision and escision of a line) in W.H. Auden’s famous World War II poem, “September 1, 1939″.

it’s a heartbreakinly despairing poem, but in Auden’s original version there was this ambiguously uplifting line: “We must love one another or die”.

At first I heard a variation of the phrase on an NPR flashback to the voice of LBJ in the famous 1964 presidential camaign ad, the one known as “Daisy”, the one featuring a child child picking flowers that ends with a nuclear explosion filling the tv screen and the ominous voice of LBJ intoning: “We must learn to love each other or we must die.”

Then I saw another variation of the line used as an email signature by a commenter on Daily Kos. This one read: “We must love one another and die.” (ital. mine).It was not a careless error. (at least I don’t think so).

The back story to this variation is that for some reason Auden took an immense disliking to the original phrase, struck the verse in which it appeared from subsequent reprints of the poem and refused to allow the poem to be rerinted at all.

Then in one instance he did allow it to be reprinted as “and die”.

What are we to make of this? The general assumption is that Auden thought the original version too treacly, too faux uplifiting. In a poem otherwise devoted to bitter despairthere’s this line that could have been lifted from “All We Need is Love” and probably made a college dorm poster in the 60s.

“We must love one another and die” certainly avoids being too chipper, but does it suffer from the obverse flaw of being too rigidly despairing: we are condemned (that’s how “must” reads in this context) to love each other and die which makes death all the more horrid. Love is not a choice but the first act in an inevitable tragedy. True the first version implies in a certain respect that if we love one another we will not die, which is a lie or a delusion.

In the first piece, his anonymous sources (see Roger L. Simon’s post on the subject of Hersh’s sources, a post I was unaware of when beginning this one, i.e. no collusion) led Hersh to strongly imply that either there was no raid at all, or the raid wasn’t about a nuclear installation but about testing Syrian (and Iranian) electronic defenses for an attack on iran, or that if there were an attack on an installation it wasn’t nuclear.

If he believes any of that now he is pretty much alone. What are you gonna belive though, photograhic evidence or Sy’s “sources”?

And now in his latest “we’re about to attack Iran” piece, Hersh may or may not have reliable sources, but he’s unreliable on one key fact. A fact that is at the very heart of the reason for the controvesy over Iran: The 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iranian nuclear aspirations.Of course he’s not alone in getting it wrong; most of the media misread it as well, and its authors admit it was written for nuclear insiders. But aren’t reorters, particularly Sy Hersh, who cover these things supposed to be sophisitcated enough to get something like this right. Especially after their error was pointed out to them two months ago.

Here’s how Hersh describes the NIE:

“The request for funding [covert ops inside Iran] came in the same period in which the Administration was coming to terms with a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, that concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003. The Administration downplayed the significance of the N.I.E., and, while saying that it was committed to diplomacy, continued to emphasize that urgent action was essential to counter the Iranian nuclear threat. President Bush questioned the N.I.E.’s conclusions, and senior national-security officials, including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, made similar statements. (So did Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee.)”

First sentence: wrong. The N.I.E. did not conclude to even the most naive reader that Iran had “halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003″. It concluded it had halted one previously hidden program on the development of nuclear warheads. Nuclear weapons programs consist of three aspects: 1) warhead design 2) production of nuclear fissionable warhead fuel either plutonium or highhly enriched uranium and 3)delivery systems such as ballistic misiles.

Warhead design is the easiest of the three, the if the program had been halted in 2003–that is if you believe U.S. intelligence on this question. (True, it has been wrong on about everything else in the WMD area in that period, but here it’s politically convenient to make it the Gold Standard.) Nut the halt inthe 2003 warhead program says nothing about the other two aspects of the program, and in fact the 2007 N.I.E. acknowledges uranium enrichment and weponisation has continued as has ballistic missile work. And warhead work may have been halted because there was little else left to do.

Hersh sentences two and three:wrong. the Bush Administration didn’t down play the signficance or question the conclusions of the N.I.E.–the implication being there are critics within the Bush administration of the NIE, who argue, contra the NIE, that Iran had not abandoned its nuclear weapons program. No: he gets what the NIE says all wrong. The N.I.E. did not say Iran had abandoned its weapons program. One hesitates to say it but that Hersh paragraph means he either didn’t understand or deliberately misrepresented the N.I.E.

Any one who has read the background briefing on the Israeli/Syrian September 6 raid (which can be found here downloadable under “ODNI Syria briefing pdf” (as Hersh must have, to be taken seriously on this subject) will see where and why Hersh gets it wrong.

I’m specifically referring to the reply to reporters on pp. 15 and 16 of the briefing, where a “senior intelligence official” responsible for the NIE says: “The unfortunate choice of words in our NIE caused you all in the press to misrepresent what we were trying to explain. {There are] three parts of the [Iranian] program; they halted one narrow piece of it which was a secret prgram–weapons-head design. They continue with fissile material [highly enriched “bomb grade’ uranium]; they continue with ballistic missile systems for delivery. So we don’t know where it [the Iranian nuclear weaons prgram] is at the moment.”

At last someonne in the “intelligence” community willing to say “I don’t know”!

Their explanaition for the”misrepresentation” “all of you in the press” were guilty of: “We had not planned to make unclasssified key judgments available to the public therefore we wrote our estimate for a very sophisticated audience, believing or understanding that they understood…”

But shouldn’t reporters like Hersh who make sweeping statements about these matters have a “very sophisticated” understanding of them?

Evidently not.

It’s a perennial, never to be resolved debate. Although I don’t think it has to be a debate! I don’t think you have to choose sides! You can choose both. Although I do believe that you have to recognize there are, I’m not sure how to put it precisely, different levels of imaginative incandesence.

Here’s my friend Elizabeth Wurtzel writing in The Guardian about why some of us can love some Bruce, without diminishing the stature of Bob.

It’s mostly about Bruce but here’s her conclusion which turns upon the distinction between Bruce and Bob:

“Never quite the genius of language that Bob Dylan is - no one is nor will anyone ever be - what Springsteen lacks in lyricism, he makes up for in communication: he is among us in a way that Dylan is forever separate. Bruce is always hoping his audience will get it; he’s going for comprehensibility in all the places where Dylan might be looking for his own laughable obfuscation. That’s the richness in all Springsteen lyrics: the narrator feels for everybody - the good and the bad, the ugly and the gorgeous - and most especially for the person out there who happens to be listening to, or reading, the words. Bruce Springsteen is, above all, a songwriter of the people, for the people, by the people”

There’s a lot about that I’d agree with, although I tend to think that Dylan’s love songs are among the most oure comprehenible, almost primal even written. Think of “I’ll Keep It With Mine”, “If You See Her Say Hello”.

What I suggested to Elizabeth was another possible way of distinguishing them, one that overlaps in a way with hers. Earnestness and irony. I’d say that Bruce is always earnest. Bruce gives earnestness a good name, an urgency; he understand sthe true imortance of being earnest. . Dylan is sometimes earnest (in the love songs and some of the protest songs0 but never far from irony.

In fact the one time Bruice went for irony “Born inthe U.S.A.”, a lot of people misunderstood, calling it a patriotic anthem. Ron Kovic wrote a book that became an Oliver Stone movie, both withthat titlem nobody understood them as
“patriotic anthems”, but Bruce had the ability to invest the grandiosity he meat as ironic with an inerradicable earnest sincerity that made the irony easier to mishear. (Dylan is capable of misleading you with his beguiling melodies:It took me a while to realize that “Positively Fourth Street was a bitter insult revenge song because it’s melody was so (ironically I now realize) cheery and catchy.

I think another way they part profoudnly is the way they write about loneliness. Bruce makes it seem like all loneliness is alike (like all happy familes). for Dylan almost all loneliness is different. (”The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”)

I wonder if readers can suggest other distinctions–or convergences– in the comments.
;

Okay, it’s been a while, but I made a vow never to post something just for the sake of posting, and isn’t one really important Big Idea worth several less consequential ones?

So I was at a “retreat”, up the Hudson at a strange Shining like resort called “Mohonk Mountain”. It’s the sort of place non-New York tourists don’t tend to go, but I’ve found it fascinating. spooky, increasingly intruiging the past couple of years. In the dim corridor outside my room this time were sepia toned pictures of dignataries from the past two centuries who had stayed in these rooms. Across the corridor from me was a photo of the son of the founder of the Baha’i faith (much persecuted for it tolerance) who attended a conference here in 1912 of the International Arbitrtration Association (not a good year for arbitrting as it turned out). The palque next to the photo said he’d delivered a talk on “The Oneness of Human Reality”. And then there were these two pale little twin girls I kept seeing in odd corners of the hotel (kidding!)

Get the picture, though: Washington Irving, Hawthorne,Stephen King, Edith Wharton. the Oneness of Human Reality. Which is why, I think, walking one of the endless mazy corridors I came up for some reason an idea about Many Worlds Cosmology theory and its relationship to the controversy over “Intelligent Design”.

If you’re familiar with the Many Worlds variation of the Coenhagen School of quantum reality (and if not, why not: it’s only the key debate about the nature of Being and “human reality”)–that there is no “causality” in the sense of “Hidden Variables” that explain subatomic events. We only know that statistically a certain number of alpha particles in somme unstable larger atoms will decay but which ones? Nobody know why one and not another. What makes this particle decay and the one next to it not.Einstein hated it, this causeless casuation; he wanted to find hidden variables. But most of the physics world now agrees with his Copenhagen opponent, Niels Bohr.

But in the Many Worlds school of thought, every time a particle decays it creates a separate universe in which it decays and the others don’t, but there are a virtual infinite number of other universes in which a virtual infinite number of differnt particles decay.We just happen to live in the one arranged like this, but there could be other arrangements or at least other subatomic outcomes.

In a sense, everything comes true in one of the Many Worlds or another. All kinds of universes are created every moment and some never last more than an instant.

Where does “Intelligent Design” come in. It grew out of a resistance to randomness, to causeless causation, to the idea that random particle collisions could cause life and random mutations could shape and fine tune evolution. There has to be designer or at least a Design if not a God.

But the “Many Worlds” theory provides an explantion for the problem of the apparent evidence of design in our universe, and the evolution of creatures to apprehend it: It just happens that we live in one of the many, many, many worlds in which there is apparent evidence of design. But there may be no design and no designer we just lucked out into living in one of the Many Worlds that created us by chance but surrounded us with apparent but not real evidence of design and designer. The chance of our world existing and looking so well (or stably) designed is infinitesimal but when you’re dealing with an infinite number of worlds, the chance is virtually certain.

So those who believe that we live in a world that sems to contain evidence of intelligent design are right intheir observations of the evidence, but wrong about the source of the evidence. it’s like the lineinthe Dylan song “The bricks lay on Grand Street…they all fell there so perfectly, it all seemed so well timed.”

We’re in the universe where the “bricks” just happened to falll into what look like well designed patterns. “It all seemed so well timed.” But it was just luck.

Anti evolutionists like to use the argument thta random mutatins are so unlikely to have created a feature as “irreducibly complex” as the eye. They compare it to a tornado going through a junkyard and leaving behind a perfectly micro engineered tv set. Unlikely. But in the Many Worlds theory, we just happen to live in a world where a (metaphorical) tornado did just that.

, But that doesn’t say anything one way or another as to whether there is or was an Intelligent Designer.

Just thought you’d want to know.

it’s a song called “True Love Will Never Fade” that opens Mark Knopfler’s (You know, ex-Dire Straits) new album called Kill to Get Crimson (don’t ask me why).

It’s a simple sly heartbreaking thing, that I’ve been playing on CD-repeat for hours. (Here are my thoughts on binge listening.

“True Love Never Fades”: On the surface a story about a tatoo artist who falls for a girl who I think wants him to ink “True Love Will Never” on her along with a picture of them. (Or maybe it’s just about the way a tatoo is a way of tryng to stave off fading through it’s sharp etched permanence. It opens with the tatoo artist wondering whether there’s an afterlife–”I don’t know if there’s a forever”–or everything, implicitly, fades away.)

Aside from conjuring up (as every fade away reference must) Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” (and the Stones cover), it makes you think. If love has been true than even if it comes to an end, the truth of it when it was there will won’t fade away. It exists for all time, just as it was. Love is love, not fade away.

But all of this is beside the point. It’s just an amazingly, ravishingly beautiful song and made me realize how many amazing songs Knopler has written.

I mean I’ve been a life long sucker for “Roller Girl” (She’s Makin’ Movies). Anyone have any other Knofpler or Dire Strait faves?