Bad Dreams and Bad Writers

For whatever reason, I've been having a lot of strange dreams lately, usually of the terrifying variety. Well, they don't terrify me, but they should be terrifying--vampires, werewolves, etc., and not the silly kind from recent movies and books. They're notionally terrifying. But last night was the worst of all. I dreamt that Michigan's football team lost to Connecticut, and then, despite the fact that in real life we play Notre Dame the following week, we lost to a MAC team. How do I go back to the supernatural mass murderers? Eleven days remain...

I wonder if the paranormal serial killers in my dreams are symbolic of the approaching storm of classes, deadlines, school observation, and eventually student teaching that makes me wish I were back in ED 402: Reading and Wrinngsdf Zzzzzzzz. Maybe I should get some of that work done. Alternatively, though, I could use some of my Best Buy store credit and buy Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Game of the Year Edition for twenty bucks. Ah, sweet time-wasting classic RPG goodness. Now I wonder if any future employers are going to be reading this. Hmm.

In literary news, the (former?) head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, wrote a book. Whether or not it is supposed to be autobiographical escapes my mind, but it's fiction. Walter Russell Mead, one of the few interesting thinkers and good writers left in political writing, purchased and read a copy. His review confirms for me everything I ever thought about Dr. Pachauri, and about his fellow international elites. Here are a few quotes from Mead's column (which you should read in its entirety):

The intellectual vapidity and narcissistic self satisfaction of the book is unsurpassable. Politics, science, religion: characters spout the most shopworn cliches in the apparent belief that they are uttering profound truths.

...

The most troubling possibility, however, is that Pachauri doesn’t criticize or undercut Sanjay in the novel because he doesn’t recognize Sanjay for what he is. Some reviewers have spoken of Sanjay as an idealized version of Pachauri: this is Rajendra Pachauri as he would like to be and Rajendra Pachauri’s Sanjay is his portrait of a hero.

This is a truly chilling thought — that the global environmental movement might have accepted someone whose ideas and culture are this vapid and banal into its leadership.

...

Although it remains unclear whether Pachauri is the Sinclair Lewis or the Babbit of this story, the satirist or the unintentional and unknowing butt, Return to Almora is a vicious and deflating portrait of international civil society and the Great and the Good. Vapid and unthinkingly fashionable intellectuals and activists drift in and out of international conferences and fancy hotels, propelled on gassy clouds of consensus, chattering like the characters in Cole Porter’s “Well, Did You Evah.” Professors, business people and officials swirl pointlessly around one another, feeling good about themselves while getting little or nothing done. There is a great deal of compassion for the poor, but nobody breaks a nail.

This sort of thing never fails to remind me of M. Night Shyamalan's disgustingly self-serving opus, Lady in the Water. The bad guy is a film critic, the writer/director himself plays the author whose book will inspire a sort of messianic politician. (Is "messianic politician" the oxymoron at the heart of the Left?)

Many classicists firmly believe that Cicero's rhetorical, philosophical, and epistolary writings reveal him as an egotistical gasbag. I've always been skeptical of that, because it seems unlikely that anyone that prolific and obviously intelligent would have the necessary lack of self-awareness to lay himself open to such an attack. Rather, it has always seemed to me that such criticisms come from a combination of cultural distance and disdain for that aristocratic, conservative defender of the old republic, which most classicists see as having been doomed, not worth saving. It is movies like Lady in the Water, and books like Return to Almora, that make me seriously think I might be wrong about all of that.