Elevator Encounter

(A milling mass, like a dust-storm, or a London fog, in the foyer.  As Times Square or Grand Central is quasi the cosmos in miniature, so might this little scene  be a model, in miniature, of Times Square.)

(A green delta lights up and dings;  beneath that, the doors depart, revealing a pristine lit parallelepiped, its interior  for the moment  devoid of life -- like a bandbox, but obliging. 

From out the foggy massing figures, two  independently  congeal, and enter that inviting space, which seemingly, like the gate in "Vor dem Gesetz", has opened precisely for them: a young woman, who has entered first, and a man, who enters after.  Upright, they come to rest.  Behind them, silently, the doors slide shut.)

For a time -- brief as the clock ticks it, yet deep by the mind -- no word is spoken, as either gaze ranges randomly, rather over head-height, idly picking out and imagining spots in the featureless beige (was it), flat plastic paneling, as though prepared to read any public signage there might be;  things like, “No Parking”; “Non sporgersi”; or “Post No Bills”.  In absence of any such, their gazes drifted, lightly, noncommitally lower, as though by the mere action of impersonal gravity;  until, by merest chance of so limited a geometry (had the two been but dots in a many-dimensional Calabi-Yau manifold, their gazes need never have crossed), they alit, upon each other.

“Mm-m.. Rather dreadful weather we’ve been having,” remarked the gentleman, truthfully enough, anent what the meteorologists had described, judiciously, as a “wintry mix”.  Yet said it, with a touch of emphasis only slimly supported by the banality of the observation;  so that a percipient semiotician, had any been present (invisibly, in the air) might have concluded that the manner here exceeded the matter in import.

And indeed, the young gentlewoman might well herself have been versed in the semio-interpretive arts:  for did not then, for an instant (no more), a touch of color mantle her cheek?  only to vanish, quick as the flicker of flame.

“Ahh… Come here often?” he ventured, soldiering on, though having received no explicit response to his first observation;  illustrating the vague ‘here’ with a faint and ineffectual gesturing towards the surrounding box, or possibly the containing building, voire the town,  voire  life on Earth.

At this, the damsel did reply.  “Only during this week of TDY; and today is my last day.”

Each now mum; each perhaps pondering this outwardly nugatory, yet ineffably  suggestive exchange.

Thus a profound silence now filled each several corner of the elevator, as it slowly, relentlessly, rose, towards, and finally beyond, another floor.  The only motion at all  was that of the elevator itself:  which, moving smoothly uniformly through Euclidean space, in accordance with Galilean Relativity, was not perceptible to the occupants in terms of applicable physics (and yet mayhap they do sense something, beyond the laws of kinetics:  as when the sleeper in the berth, on a night-train, somehow in dreams  tenses and senses when the conveyance enters the yet deeper darkness of a tunnel far beneath the Alps).

The third floor was reached; a light sprang on to that effect; and both he and both she  at once held their breaths;  and kept holding them, as the contraption eased to a stop, and the doors slid slowly open.  Was their twosome now to be adulterated?  Yet no-one got on;  and the doors, indifferent, slid shut again.

(Were this a murder-mystery, the burning question would now be:  What had happened to the presumable person on the third floor, who had pressed the summoning button?  Sudden heart-attack?  Kidnapped by a rival intel agency?  Taken up bodily to the Hereafter, in sudden Rapture?   Or snatched down to the Basement, by the Fiend? -- This not being a mystery story, we shall never know.)

Relaxing now, she smiled and said:  “False alarm.”

They both again fell silent, more comfortably -- we could almost say, companionably -- this time,  as the vertical chariot, as though drawn towards the zenith by some cosmic force, noiselessly effortlessly and ineluctably  rose to yet another floor:  and, this time unsummoned, breezed past it.

[Impatient, my experienced and worldly readers chafe:  What did he not say this, nor nodded she that?  -- But you were not there;  and the words we wished to say but never said, are like the small souls of infants who perished at birth;  and cannot be reclaimed, from their tiny unmarked graves.]

~

Again a lift, a lilt, as another floor is passed without isssue or incident -- passed-by, like opportunities;  passed over, like disinherited heirs.   He means to speak, but his lips are soundless.  She leans as though to gesture -- but stays her hand, sinking back like a river into its bed.

Meanwhile, unperceived, impassive, the world continues to turn.

At last, the lift arrives at the last floor but one (the last  his own):  the very floor she had selected, when first presented with a panel of enticing choices…

The lit cage eases to a stop.  The doors, as fatefully as the Red Sea, part -- yet almost as though with a butlerish bow, to allow the lady to step off.  With a hesitant step, she moves to leave;  half out, half-turns, and forms a word -- but then says nothing.  And yet, for a moment, stands still amid the doorway, as he suddenly hies his hand;  and then, alarmed, alight, cries out:

Ah, lady!  Companion

for but a brief step up the rising path.

What then of PEGASUS --

Pegasus, pining and pawing the ground?

What of Pegasus, the white-winged,

gold-girt steed ??

Whereon, upon what fodder

can he feed ????

Then over her shoulder, not unkindly, yet ever more faintly as she withdraws and disappears:

Upon grass, sir;

Upon God’s  green  grass.

The doors close for the final time  upon their remembered co-presence;  and the lift resumes for the home-stretch, with a shudder  and something of a sigh.  And never again in this life, did those two ever meet.

[And at that, the Recording Angel writes finis to the page, and turns  another leaf.]

Scenes from Office Life

Today -- March 14 -- our office celebrated International Pi Day(***), by bringing in a whole bunch of pies.  (March 14 --  3   1   4 -- get it?   Not funny, just fun.)  Apple, cherry, banana cream, pecan -- you name it.   And amazingly, for every single one of those pies, the ratio of its circumference to its diameter was -- you’ll never guess -- more or less 3.14 !!   Thus proving the theorem.

(***)   Actually Interplanetary Pi Day, since the value of that transcendental constant  is invariant throughout the universe.

[For further glimpses of our office life, click here.

For more mathy funnies,  here.]

Daylight Savings threnody

Ask Not  for whom  the alarm-clock shrills:

It shrills  for THEE.

Rebonjour

Dans l’intimité toute impersonnelle d’un ascenseur, et après s’être descendus quelques étages,  c’est elle qui, la première, l’avait aperçu,  lui qui semblait ne s’apercevoir de rien -- de se reposer, les yeux mi-clos, pendant ces quelques précieuses secondes après une longue journée au travail, heureux de pouvoir rêver un petit peu avant de devoir sortir au crépuscule d’hiver, ou bien simplement  ne penser à rien du tout.

Et en fait, ce n’était peut-être pas à cet instant même qu’elle s’était rendu compte de ce qu’il était bien là, à  deux empans d’elle, dans ce compartiment de plus en plus privé  au fur et à mesure qu’il se vidait des autres passagers.  Mais elle n’avait pas voulu faire signe de ce fait, avant que la circonstance d’être enfin arrivés, ensemble, seuls (voire solitaires), à leur destination  au rez-de-chaussée, n’eût rendu inévitable la reconnaissance mutuelle, n’était-ce qu’à cause de son réflexe coutumier de gentleman qui, sentant enfin le lent et léger atterrissage de l’engin, regarde brièvement autour de lui, pour voir s’il n’y avait quelqu’un ou plutôt quelqu’une qu’il devait laisser sortir avant lui, sans même en faire signe (la chose étant entendue) si c’était une dame âgée ou un handicapé, ou bien, dans le cas contraire, avec un petit geste pour indiquer à des jeunes femmes que, malgré leur moindre âge, il leur accordait le privilège de leur sexe :  autrement, dans le cas assez fréquent où il ne se trouvait à côté de lui que de jeunes soldats en uniforme, il sortait lui-même sans hésitation, non point par sentiment de supériorité, mais plutôt en les saluant, pour ainsi dire, leur service militaire.

Enfin se trouvant devant l’inéluctable, et ne voulant pas que ce soit lui qui, le premier, la salue -- ou, pire, s’abstienne de la saluer (par méconnaissance  ou par dépit, elle ne saurait jamais) -- elle s’inclina légèrement de la tête, timidement, incertaine de ce que serait la réponse de ce monsieur tant redoubté.  Car ils avaient, l’un et l’autre, la sensation de s’être un peu brouillés, on ne savait déjà trop pourquoi (et en effet, ce n’était qu’à cause d’un différend voulu par un tiers, qui était proche d’elle, mais elle n’avait joué qu’un rôle insignifiant  dans l’affaire), avec ce résultat que, depuis assez longtemps, ils ne s’étaient plus vus, et ne s’étaient écrit que quelques lignes, sèches et correctes, de temps à autre, au besoin de la besogne.

Or, lui la regarda, mais ne semblait pas la reconnaître tout de suite -- non pas par quelque froideur que ce soit, mais tout simplement parce qu’il ne s’était pas attendu à la rencontrer ici, elle qui travaillait pour un bureau lointain, dans une autre ville, bien que pour le même patron.   En surcroît, elle ne lui semblait pas tout-à-fait familière de prime abord :  le visage pâle, et légèrement plus âgée après une année ou deux d’absence et (comme elle lui avait confié, avant la brouille) de maternité :  il fallait qu’elle se rassemble ses traits  sous son regard, se focalise, telle le négatif d’une photographie, qu’on laisse quelques moments mijoter dans son bain chimique.  Et puis, se rendant compte que c’était bien elle, il la salua de bon gré, s’informa de la raison de sa présence ici-bas, et demandait de ses nouvelles.  Allégée, elle le mettait au courant.

Ils parlaient de ci, de ça, en franchissant le vestibule, et en ajustant leurs écharpes et paletots.  Une fois dehors, ils prirent congé l’un de l’autre, correctement ;  leurs sentiers se scindèrent.

~

For another intimate glimpse 

at ELevatorINT,

click this:

Splendeurs et misères des ascenseurs

.

O Dark XXX

Part One:  The basics
A review of "Zero Dark Thirty"

My wife and I gave this movie a miss in the cinemas, owing to reviews that mentioned scenes of torture.  During such a scene in one of the later James Bonds, I popped out of my seat and strolled off to the men’s-room and looked at movie posters before venturing back in to the auditorium.   And I figured:  Why spend money on this. 

Also there was the allegation that the film accorded too great a role to the use of “enhanced interrogation” in eliciting the data-points that led eventually to the UBL snatch.   Actually, simply based on chronology of the affair, that allegation sounds plausible, since whatever the black site guys knew was pretty stale by the time those interrogations ceased;  even staler when the snatch went down.  However, artistic license and all that, that wasn’t a deal-breaker.  But being trapped in a torture-chamber with Surroundsound and a big screen, that was.

But last week, a couple of operational guys of my acquaintance  -- not cowboys, but the analytical, thoughtful type (met ‘em in a bar) -- recommended the movie, so I borrowed the DVD.

A couple of thoughts.

First, the torture scenes are much more than an interlude:  they dominate the first twenty minutes or so of the movie.   Just as well I didn’t try to see it in a theatre -- I would have walked out.  At home, at least, you can mute the sound and, if need be, fast-forward.

Further,  instead of the Evil Overlord or whoever  abusing Bond, in this movie  the torturers are supposed to be the good guys, and are played by very sympathetic actors.

Further still, well after that part is over (punctuated by a screenshot of President Obama on TV, saying “America does not torture”), the issue comes up again, not with visuo-dramatic necessity, but more like one of those agenda-grinding asides on “24”.   Challenged by an indifferent superior to prove that the unseen man in the Abbottabad safehouse is not Ben Laden, the analyst complains:

“You know we lost the ability to prove that  when we lost the detainee program.  Who the hell am I supposed to ask?  Some guy in Gitmo who’s all lawyered up?  He’ll just tell his lawyer to warn Ben Laden.”

(Jack Bauer could not have put it better.)  Apart from its overestimation of the value of torturing prisoners who have been out of the game for years by then (not to mention the silliness of the idea that the prisoners would not realize that we were interested in finding UBL unless we asked them, and that some random detainee’s lawyer would have comms access to AQSL),  this passage rings amiss, by the restriction of its horizon to HUMINT, to the exclusion of other “INT”s that one could mention.  

For a critique of the torture question, try this:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/07/disturbing-misleading-zero-dark-thirty/

~

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~

A word on the title, “Zero Dark Thirty”.   The phrase is wonderfully evocative, even if you go in not understanding it (which few outside the military will).  [For a similar situation, cf. the echoey movie-title “Memento”, which few viewers will realize has here regained its Latin force of a future-imperative verb.]  Only… unless I blinked, you leave the theatre likewise not understanding it.

That the director (or producer?) would name a big-budget picture with a phrase so arcane, and not explain it within the movie, suggests that she was truly aiming it at the troops.   (After all, she also directed “The Hurt Locker”, which hewed more to the warfighter’s experience than to grand loose-limbed narratives of Hollywood.)   But here is a thumbs-down from an actual veteran of armed conflict, to whom the title was a turnoff:

It's a well-known saying in the Army, like "huah." And like huah, outside of basic training it's usually only used by overweight soldiers on profile who have way more bravado than balls. 

To me, the title embodies the stereotypical military bravado that started in Hollywood movies and was later adopted by soldiers who had seen way too many Hollywood movies.

I somehow got the impression from the Internet that the phrase meant (in more formal jargon), 0030 Zulu, or something like that.  Not so.  From another Army vet, Umm-Tha`lab:

The way we used it, 'zero dark thirty' was an amorphous thing. It was whatever ungodly time of the morning your first sergeant thought you ought to show up for his special treat of the day--and it usually equalled 0430.

~

The average viewer, attuned to the current American default narrative of female grievance, will assume that the reason she gets pushback from the higher-ups is that she’s a woman.   What people don’t realize is that, in the IC and in the federal government generally, people whose “office” is reduced to a cube in a pod (as hers is) do not generally get by-name credit for things at higher levels.  It is the job of your manager to take credit for what you do;  and the job of his manager to take credit for what he does;  and so on up the chain.  The very fact that she was included in an intimate face-to-face with the Director of CIA (he later seeks her out in the cafeteria  and has a one-on-one at lunch)  is already more than most folks expect;  her aggressive speaking up for herself ( Director: “And who might you be?”  “I’m the motherfucker who found Ben Laden.”), in evident rebuke to her immediate superiors, would in itself be enough to sink almost any career.   And indeed, the actual person upon whom this character is based, reportedly both occasioned and received much friction with her colleagues.

Believe me, I sympathize with her;  actually been in a similar situation myself.  But, just sayin’.

~

The business of her repeatedly scrawling in red lipstick on the window of her boss’s office, the number of days since the Abbotabad compound was found, with “nothing done”, was dramatically very effective (the most powerful scenes in movies  involve no spoken words).   It also recalled the litany on the nightly news during the Iran hostage crisis  (“Day 128 …”), which basically sank President Carter’s chances for re-election.  (Unfairly;  see our remarks on Argo.)

~

The advanced helicopters used in the raid, never before used operationally, had been specifically designed to minimize their imprint to sensors.  But in the movie, the rotors make one heck of a racket.  More cinematic that way, of course, especially as the shots cut between the silent room of monitors, and the actual aircraft.  But one wonders what the truth is.

Movies, and even television, have in recent years  gone to great lengths to make their foreign-language material authentic, even in exotic languages that few in the audience will appreciate.  This film does not.  Actors speaking in an accent to make you think they are Arabic, still grossly mispronounce many Arabic names.

~   ~   ~

Part Two:  A deeper look

“The Passion of Saint Maya”

Critics have quibbled over how this production does or does not  faithfully reflect “the facts”, and how it departs from the handling that they themselves might have imparted to the material, had it been they (contrary to fact) rather than she (as it happens) who went to the trouble of making the thing.

The broad-brush answer to such carping is:  “It’s Just a Movie”.   But -- is it?

Though it is made with the skill of a standard international thriller (the sky-shots of the Afghan camps are wonderful), at several points  its mission seems not principally to entertain.  Though with nothing of the feel of a documentary, the film yet feels obliged to touch certain bases in a way that is documentary rather than narrative.  As, the brief incident in which we behold a man alone in an office, making obeissances on an Islamic prayer-rug, as someone walks in.  The man is never explicitly identified, and interacts hardly at all with the other characters.  What is he doing there?   The jarring sight of the Muslim prayer-ceremony in the apparent middle of CIA headquarters, will baffle many viewers:  What is the point of this?  Surely this is the launching of some subplot?  But no -- the audience is left hanging. -- Aficionados will realize that this character is a reference to the head of CIA CT at the time (whose name has not been made public), and who is indeed a convert to Islam.  Further, he is a notoriously abrasive character;  we don’t get to witness this, but his pocked face alludes to it, for those who get the reference.  --  Likewise the movie’s opening:  no visuals, a murmur of indistinct voices, baffling to anyone who might be coming to this fresh, but which we who lived through it  recognize as the voices of the victims-to-be in the Twin Towers.

The departure from normal dramatic narrative conventions  goes deeper.  As with Gibson’s “The Passion”,  “Zero Dark Thirty” is less a movie in the conventional sense, than a ritual re-enactment, like a medieval Mystery Play.

(See our review of Mel Gibson’s movie, along exactly these lines, along with that of another account of the via dolorosa, “March of the Penguins”.)

[Blogger’s note to self:  All right!   We have managed to discover a parallel between a CT movie, and our lieblings-lubie, penguins.  Well played, Dr J!  Take the rest of the day off.]

[To be continued, when we have finished celebrating.]

.      . . .       . . .

[To resume]

Though formally a thriller, there is little actual suspense, since we know how each segment is going to turn out, if we have been paying attention to the newspapers.   (Here reality itself is the spoiler.)

This sort of intertextuality, rather than robbing the exercise of interest, actually lends weight and moment to the segment leading up to the sneak attack at Camp Chapman in Afghanistan.  No time need be wasted on exposition (and what little there is, will again be perplexing to the uninitiated -- an over-the-shoulder reference to “the Jords”).  We know what is coming, Fate cannot be swayed;  Fate takes its own solemn time arriving, as we watch, soundlessly, the distant dust of what must be the fateful vehicle, arriving from over the Afghan wastes.   For someone who did not know the backstory, this sequence would be somewhat unsatisfying;  a director who was making up a drama out of whole cloth  would not have shot things this way.   The rhythm here is that of tragedy, in the classical sense;  the unfolding, like that of the old ballads -- fragmentary on the surface, its upcroppings united beneath the sea.

Again like “The Passion”, and like the whole Christian narrative from the beginning to the end of Time,  the telling is centered on one figure.  It is not that there are no striking supporting characters, but that is about all they really do:  support.  They do not have interesting interactions among themselves, independently of her obsession.

Two apparent exceptions to this insight  dissolve upon analysis.

            (1)  The movie opens with a charismatic male interrogator at a black site, hogging the screen, accompanied by no more than a couple of black-clad minions, suited-up in a sort of burka;  you cannot tell anything about them, and are not curious to know.  At this point, the movie looks as though it might be about him;  or at the very least (since you have heard about the female director, and the female lead) that he will be the nemesis / bonding-buddy / love-interest of la jeune première, when it shall please her  eventually to make her entrance.

But no:  She makes her entrance as she makes her exit;  for as they leave the torture-chamber, with its sickly light, and come out into the broad day,  one of the chrysalis-figures  suddenly unzips, and sheds its skin -- pupates before our eyes:  And there stands the rarest, most silk-skinned, Sèvres-cheekboned redhead  we have ever seen.

Look deep into my ... eyes ...

[To be continued, when we all shall have caught our breath...]

[Resumptio]

            (2)  At one point, in the empty light-lit corridors outside the seat of power, it briefly seems as though we might get some lateral action of interest, as one CIA executive bids his higher-ranking colleague  to stay a bit;  gripping his sleeve (as it were) to ask:  Dost thou not believe on this new gospel? 

The superior replies with an allusion to that false prophet who went before:  “Remember, I was in the room when your former boss pitched WMD’s to the President.  We have to be sure.”

But the supplicant will not be thus turned aside.  Yea, granted there be obscurity in the signs and portents, but what if [She] is right?  And can you afford to be wrong?  -- The latter is a version of Pascal’s Wager.

So, it isn’t really interpersonal;  the two figures are playing their ritual role in the frieze that runs around the temple.   To those of us who get the references without even thinking about it, the scene is satisfying, economical, well-played, and right.  Whereas those in the audience, whether from youth or inattention, have not previously studied the underlying evangelium, and who miss the allusion to George Tenet’s “slam dunk” moment, forever etched in memory, will be nonplussed, standing about like shepherds tending their flocks by night, aware of  signs in the sky  but knowing not what these do mean.

The movie ends magnificently.  For now the gospel tale is told;  “It is finished”.   All the earth rolls away like a carpet, as Maya steps into the space-ship transport-aircraft that is to take her bodily up to the upper regions.  The attendant (and we only see one: ecce angelus;  there is no visible crew) quips “You must be someone pretty important;  this whole plane is just for you.  (This echoes the revelation of the gate-keeper at the end of “Vor dem Gesetz”:  »Hier konnte niemand sonst Einlaß erhalten, denn dieser Eingang war nur für dich bestimmt.«)

And then he utters a casual question, seemingly a throwaway line but it turns out to be the last line of the film, and pregnant with a deeper sense:

“Where do you want to go?”

Where indeed?  Quo vadis?

Romam vado    iterum crucifigi

Alone now, quite alone.  (“Eloi, eloi…”)  And from her liquid eye, down her perfect cheek, there rolls:  a tear;  then two …

FINIS

[Update]  Bonus ludic link (courtesy of Snarla):
http://www.neatorama.com/2013/12/14/Santa-Dark-Thirty/

[Linguistic footnote]  For the evocative phrase zero dark thirty, compare the German Stunde Null ('the cold grey dawn').

The Gluttony of Delicacy

I have been re-reading The Screwtape Letters, in which C S Lewis identifies a complexus of emotion and self-deception he calls the “gluttony of Delicacy”;  a Google search suggests he may himself have coined this trenchant term, though he is as likely to have translated from some medieval original (we invite our Latin readers to elucidate this).

A fine post on this subject can be found here:

http://danielhumphries.livejournal.com/10951.html

Lewis’ tart description, obviously taken from life, evoked an image in my own mind, of a scene witnessed at work this very week. 

*     *     *

~ Commercial break ~

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwzOXzZWUik

We now return you to your regularly scheduled essay.

            In the crowded and tumultuous cafeteria at work, one has often occasion to witness the following fascinating tableau:  beneath a little cone of silence and private light, a woman stands, as though in a trance, before the soup-tureen, for minutes on end, gently ladling up a selection of the really best bits of some dish of mixed composition,  fishing these bits from the bottom  and then tipping the ladle at a particular angle, allowing the liquid to slowly run off like swill, and be left for -- well, for whatever;  for the dogs to eat, we suppose.   Ladling and straining, filtering, sifting,  periodically inspecting the results of her labors with a critical eye, as the fops and grandees at Versailles used to examine their morning stool;  until at length and at last, she can come up with a florilegium of only the really truly just tastymost little niblets.

            One needn’t be a queen or a grandee, to feel entitled like one.  In aspect, this particular specimen in no wise resembles that sylph-like princess, who tossed and turned the night, atop a pile of feather mattresses, sensing the pea beneath the bottommost.   Nor that dandy, who, asked how he flourished, replied:  “Suhh -- I grow thinnah and thinnah…”   This particular specimen is a 4x4 (or 4 x 4 x 4):  four feet tall, four feet wide, weighing around 400 pounds.  Mais nonobstant:   Somewhere, she senses, at the bottom of this fat pot, hidden by gross shreds of lesser vegetables, there lurks a pea, so sweet, so small, so tender,  that it is destined for her puckered appreciative lips, and for none others.   And so she filters, and fishes -- like some patient angler fishing for the wise old catfish at the bottom of the pond, who has never been caught, lo these forty years…

            From a distance, this might seem but small gain for so great a labor, since an expenditure of fewer than six seconds could grab you a plain ladle or two of the steaming nourishment, and you’re off to the races.   But she does not mind nor grudge this labor, for it is a labor of love:   of love,  she fancies, for those truly most tastiful little mini-nibbles,  which the coarser sensorium of her coworkers would be too blunt to appreciate.  And yet in truth, it is not such merely perceptual or sensual gluttony that moves her (a sin, but a base one, shared with our cousins the swine, thus one that gives the Devil but little  whereon to practice his craft), but rather the gluttony of Delicacy, in Lewis’ barbed phrase:  the gluttony of self-love, self-love in abundance, great whipped-creamy sensuous swirls of it:  of love,  not ultimately for the fruits of this earth and their savor:  but for her own dainty taste-buds, each one just as pretty as a peach;  and her own cultivated capacity to thrill at the unprecedented delicacy of her own sensations.

            And so she idles, and ladles;  sighing in disappointment when the previous minutes’ labors somehow fail to have finally and consistently winnowed it all down to an acceptable selection of the nonpareil (a disappointment for which she shall have to compensate herself later  with an extra couple of chocolates) -- then dumps it all back in, slowly stirs the pot, and patiently resumes her quest;

            -- while behind her, their stomachs growling, lungs groaning, eyeballs starting from their heads,

            her fellow-workers have collected in a lengthening, but stagnant and unadvancing queue;  standing and fidgeting, tearing their hair:  gasping;  teeth gnashing;  going blind;  praying for death...

[Randbemerkung: 

 Dr. S. Freud, late of Vienna,  imagined he had identified the root (or, as it were, rootlessness) of the Prickly Princess syndrome -- aber  Ausführung schenke ich mir.]

*

Für psychologisch tiefgreifende Krimis,

in pikanter amerikanischer Mundart,

und christlich gesinnt,

klicken Sie bitte hier:

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

*

[For further such delicacies, check this out:]

http://www.linguasacrapublishing.com/justice.html

 [Update]  Wikipedia has an unusually fine survey here:

       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluttony

.

On the Anthropology of Elevators

[TippyTop S#cr#t//  Handle via EL(evator)INT channels only ]

Military theorists have, since ancient times, considered the special range of tactical conditions afforded by such close-quarters theatres as the elevator.  Who can forget what Clausewitz said, in his classic Vom Aufzugskriege, answering the objections of Napoleon to the original exposition of Sun Tzu?  Since no-one could forget that, I need not remind you.

And thus it was with the wily Prussian analyst’s strictures well in mind that, pushing the “down” button on the sixth floor of 2B, I heard the double-ding of an arriving elevator and (well-schooled in European etiquette) bowed slightly to allow the one other expectant passenger, a young woman of indeterminate description, to precede me into the Hurt Locker or so-called “battle box”.

Although my fellow passenger herself   seemed to represent no immediate threat, being rather scrawny about the wrists and ankles, you never know who might get on at intervening floors.  Accordingly, I immediately adopted my invariable stance, standing in a far corner, and facing outward along the diagonal:  thus affording an ideal field of vantage, and limiting the range of possible angles of attack to a mere ninety degrees, as against 180 for a median spot along a wall, or a full 360 (you are doomed to die) in the deadly center.   This system has worked perfectly for me;  in all my years at the Fort, I have never suffered a successful elevator attack.

Quite other was the strategy of my lift-mate.  She too retired to a corner -- cattycorner to my own -- yet, incredibly, unaccountably, faced towards the wall!!!  This we might dub the Ostrich Strategy, familiar from children who, closing their eyes, chant “You - Can’t  - See me!”   Such a stance might provide a certain psychological comfort to the cortically challenged, but militarily  it’s a non-starter.  Anyone -- well, not I, being a gentleman, but, some bounder, someone really ill-bred -- might easily seize the tactical advantage thus afforded, and commit some outrage upon her person, involving ogling and groping  and uncalled-for insertions  or who-knows what-all-else.

~

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Clothiers to gentlemen since 1917

~

For further insight into the sociodynamics of elevators, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/11/users-guide.html

What do you say after you say “Hello”?

Suppose, as you show up at the office, someone asks you how you are.  What do you do?

A common-enough dilemma.  But consider this classic response (from “24”, Season VI):

Jack Bauer (calling in):  “This is Jack.”

Bill Buchanan (coolly, as usual):  “Jack.  We haven’t been able to reach you.  Are you all right?”

Jack: “Yeh, I’m fine.  But all the members of the back-up team have been killed.”

Think what a hit you’ll make at work, with a come-back like that!  A rueful grin, a “what can you say, it’s Monday” shrug, a nod that you’ll be soldiering on, even though every member of your back-up team has been killed.

("But enough about me.  How was your weekend?")

[Note to the uninitiated:  Being on Jack Bauer's back-up team  is a little like being the "#3 in al-Qaeda" or "the new Number Two" on "The Prisoner":  very high turnover.]

Note:  This post’s title is that of an excellent book by psychologist Eric Berne, which I much enjoyed in Berkeley, lo these many years ago.  He also wrote the classic Games People Play.  Out of sentiment and idle curiosity, I looked him up in Wikipedia… only to learn that he had been thrice divorced.

Qui custodiet  ipsos custodes?  Miserere nobis, domine.

~

Office etiquette:  More from “24”

Chloe (Season VI), to her hospital-bedridden husband, shortly after he has been brutally tortured by a team of sadistic terrorists:  She slaps him, then says:

   “Why don’t you stop feeling sorry for yourself, and get back to work!!”

[Note to the uninitiated:  Contrary to what a normal person would think, this incident is not intended by the network  to put Chloe in a bad light.  The viewer is supposed to shout, “Yeh, what’s with that guy?  What a pussy-wipe!”

This is, after all, the series that Dick Cheney  beats off to.]

~

~

Synthesizing these two lessons, we must discounsel any member of the IC from attempting to bug out of husbandly duties  using that line:

Husband:  “Sorry, honey, I’ll be late to dinner.  All the members of my back-up team have been killed.”

Wife (slow burn;  slapping her palm with a rolling-pin):  “And just what sort of an excuse is that?”

Parting Shots

Making the rounds at my workplace, spiraling out as it gets forwarded and re-forwarded, is a letter of resignation from someone who worked there for over thirty years, apparently storing up bile the whole time.   He names names;  his screed has the fascination of a multiple-vehicle auto-accident.

And now here is one from an economist making a noisy departure from the IMF, wherein he pops a dart at DSK’s replacement at the top of the Fund:

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/19/business/imf-economist-letter/index.html?hpt=hp_c4

20-year veteran Peter Doyle says he is "ashamed to have had any association with the Fund at all."

Referring to Lagarde -- who recently completed her first year in the role -- Doyle says, "even the current incumbent is tainted, as neither her gender, integrity, or elan can make up for the fundamental illegitimacy of the selection process."

"There are good salty people here," Doyle signs off, "but this one is moving on. You might want to take care not to lose others."

Since the Strauss-Kahn/Lagarde matchup is franco-français, it is interesting to see how this kerfuffle is seen over in France:

http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-eco/2012/07/20/97002-20120720FILWWW00581-l-incompetence-du-fmi-denoncee.php

Sample comments from readers:

Si on commence à prêter attention aux gens qui crachent dans la soupe après l'avoir mangé !

~

le FMI ne sert à rien; il est inféodé aux theories de Milton Friedmann qui ont été mises en application en autre au Chili sous le regime de Pinochet.

~

Et encore une fois la compétence se fait virer par la suffisance. Lagarde était nullissime en France. Il n'y a aucune raison qu'elle se soit améliorée au FMI.

~

"le gros de la crise est derrière nous".
(Christine LAGARDE, le 20-08-2007, BFM)

A User’s Guide …

A User’s Guide  to interpersonal etiquette

at the Natural Zoography Administration:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXa9tXcMhXQ

Deutsch gefasst:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQrb85O3HQA&NR=1

~

[Excerpts from the recently declassified official intake manual, Howdy to Newbies, chapter “Your First Day on the Job”.]

Welcome to the Natural Zoography Administration -- or, as we like to call it, “Z” Group!

Your very first impression as you enter the main building, will be the apparent plethora of Large Moving Objects;  there is the alarming possibility that, on closer inspection (not recommended), these might prove to be People.

This is not the place to rehash the vexed question of the Existence of Other Minds (naturally, we favor the negative, and are writing this purely for our own amusement):  suffice it to say that you will never have to deal with these creatures, whatever they may be, once you are safely ensconced at your workstation crunching numbers.  The whole problem lies in getting there -- running the gauntlet of Meatspace.  And the most trying passage of this ordeal  is your ride up the elevator to your floor (or down, if you work in one of the many sub-basements, which in your case is more than likely).  Here you will be trapped in an airless confined space, with no escape, packed in with alien and threatening beings who are probably ogling your personal deficiencies in sneering detail.

Here’s some advice from an old hand:  This is a great time to scrutinize the tips of your shoes !  These are endlessly fascinating, manifesting such qualities as form, hardness, and hue -- to name just a few.   You will spend many happy hours over the course of your lifelong career here at “Z”, becoming ever more deeply acquainted with these faithful fast companions.  They will become your best friends, more than making up for the absence of real ones.

How like a screen-saver are they  in their infinite variety !   Each day they are a little different.  See how that piece of gray lint  clings to the very tip of one !  And there -- behold -- a bit to the side, some dust-motes have clumped.   Count how many of these objects you find, on each foot.  Subtract the leftmost number from the number on the right.  Now do the reverse.  Notice how  collectively  they form a pattern.  That pattern may be meaningful.  Study it further, taking mental notes.  That pattern is trying to tell you something.  Something essential.  Something you desperately need to know.  Some formula that will protect you against those who mean to do you harm.   Aliens surrounding you right here in the elevator, beaming you with evil eye-waves.

Such reflections should smoothly get you through the ride.   [Note:  It is not intended that, thus absorbed, you should continue to stare at your shoe-tips as the elevator goes up, then down, then up, then back, all day long  till the sun sets in the west.]