Just a reminder: the Red Cross's stock of blood is down, as it always is, during the summer when high school and college blood drives drop off.

I have an appointment to give at the House of Representatives on Thursday. I hope you too can find time in your schedule.

Give Life

Sonnet 278, William Wordsworth
(Recently introduced to me by a friend, and—I can only assume—a friend of Crescat)

The World is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn,—

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

I've had thoughts, before, about physical law in the world of J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter. I'm glad to find that I'm not alone in my pursuit of description of magic in this series. In this week's issue of Nature, we find Jeffrey M. Craig, Renee Dow, and MaryAnne Aitken wondering about the genetics of magic:

[...]Wizards or witches can be of any race, and may be the offspring of a wizard and a witch, the offspring of two muggles (‘muggle-born’), or of mixed ancestry (‘half-blood’).

This suggests that wizarding ability is inherited in a mendelian fashion, with the wizard allele (W) being recessive to the muggle allele (M). According to this hypothesis, all wizards and witches therefore have two copies of the wizard allele (WW). Harry’s friends Ron Weasley and Neville Longbottom and his arch-enemy Draco Malfoy are ‘pure-blood’ wizards: WW with WW ancestors for generations back. Harry’s friend Hermione is a powerful muggle-born witch (WW with WM parents). Their classmate Seamus is a half-blood wizard, the son of a witch and a muggle (WW with one WW and one WM parent). Harry (WW with WW parents) is not considered a pure-blood, as his mother was muggle-born.

There may even be examples of incomplete penetrance (Neville has poor wizarding skills) and possible mutations or questionable paternity: Filch, the caretaker, is a ‘squib’, someone born into a wizarding family but with no wizarding powers of their own.[...]

The authors do not explore the possibility of wizardry being a multigenic trait, which might explain its relatively low abundance in human populations, as well as other attempts at explaining different wizarding classes (e.g., bad wizards, and squibs).

Since Josh Chafetz (along with Eugene Volokh, Jacob Levy, a few co-bloggers, and others) is one of the people whose model inspired me to start blogging, I feel I should note his decision to leave the blogosphere in the face of more pressing commitments. And this is all the more true since Josh has, like me, just finished his first year of law school here, albeit with a considerably more illustrious path before winding up here.

I seriously considered giving up blogging once I entered law school. Indeed, I encouraged co-bloggers to write more so that I could have more freedom to go days without posting, tried to stop posting quite so much ephemeral fluff, and so on, with the theory that as classes, classmates, and reading edged out the more tenuous academic commitments here, I could sort of fade out, if that seemed appropriate.

That hasn't happened. To be sure, I blog less than I did during the height of my time being bored in England, and several friends of Crescat tell me that the blog (or at least my contributions to it) are becoming mired in ever more legal obscurity as the year wears on. [Randy Barnett also told me that he's seen a sharp drop-off in quality, but que sera sera.]

But I hadn't reckoned with the degree that law school would simply change my blogging, not replace it. This is not only because of the free wireless access and my frustrating inability to get called on in Con Law, but also because it turns out that on a wide number of legal subjects, the discussions going on in our little egg-headed corner of the blogosphere are just as enlightening as the ones going on at 127 Wall Street. To be sure, this is not the forum for a detailed historical discussion of the 9th Amendment, and I do read more pages of law review articles every day than blog posts. But things like the SCOTUSBlog's symposia, the Picker MoBlog, and the ubiquitous comment-fights at PrawfsBlawg make the scholarly community even larger.

And this is to say nothing of the ever-more-persistent food-blogging around here (especially by super-co-blogger Raffi), and so on. I simply think in blog posts much of the time, a fact I find rather alarming, but have simply surrendered to for now.

It is highly possible that once I, like Josh, start generating actual legal publications, that fretting about them will take the place of many of my half-baked musings here. But it also seems likely that I will be unable to resist coming back for more at least until graduation.

Plus, since the deluge of controversial thoughts here has probably already done any damage that can be done to my future career prospects, what have I got to lose?

The Perfectionist: Rudolph Chelminski

This post has been a very long time in coming - I read the book covered here more than a month ago, and have a long list of other books to write about. But procrastination apparently does not produce more interesting observations, and so I figure I should at least acknowledge that I've hit the 50 book target.

In any case, The Perfectionist is one of the best books I've read this year. It's good because it works on the level of food enthusiasm, first and foremost. Chelminski has an excellent knowledge of both food and professional kitchens, and he uses both to great effect in telling the tragic story of Bernard Loiseau, the great chef who killed himself on mere rumours that he would lose his third michelin star. Where Chelminski knows his point is obscure, he uses footnotes worthy of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, pithily explaining the intricacies of French cuisine, and the French restaurant world. And yet, Chelminski does not seek to crucify the Michelin guide, or the other restaurant guides that seem to have driven so much of Loiseau's professional life. He views their actions with sympathy, and tries to show that they know too well the stinging prestige they hold in their hands. On the food level alone, The Perfectionist is a wonderful achievement.

But the book is not just the story of a great chef brought low by ambition. It's a warning to all of us in whom ambition runs strong. Because Loiseau's story could just as easily have been that of an investment banker or a lawyer, or any other profession in which pressure runs high, and the rewards for the highest success are so compelling. It's in this guise that the book spoke most clearly to me - particularly as someone who's struggling with exactly the question of how fully I'm willing to subordinate my life to professional success. The temptation is very strong to simply say that Loiseau was fundamentally a melodramatic man, and that I and my friends would escape even a milder version of his fate. But one you're caught in the maelstrom, I'm not sure that's true.

In any case, The Perfectionist was a worthy read for number 50. Get it as soon as you can.

Sonnet 97 by Pablo Neruda, translated artlessly by yours truly:

One must fly nowadays, but where?
Wingless, planeless, fly doubtless:
Unfaltering steps have already fallen,
not lifting the feet of the traveler.

One must fly at every instant
like eagles, like flies and like days,
one must conquer the ring of Saturn
and establish new bells there.

Now shoes and paths are not enough,
now the ground does not suffice for wanderers,
now roots cross the night,

and you will appear in another star
relentlessly transitory
finally turned into poppies.

For the curious and concerned, I am now safely ensconced in New Haven once again, thanks to a rather improbable flight from South Bend to New Haven (via Cincinnati); for now I have abandoned the dear Volvo, which seems to have lost its transmission somewhere along the 80-90 toll road, and will soon be nursing its wounds back in Bloomington.

This actually marks the second time I have presided over the total loss of that Volvo's transmission; the first time was over four years ago, at what we continue to call "the ill-fated new year's party" (that was actually held in late December). The party involved falling down stairs, a friend lighting herself on fire, spinning 180 degrees off an icy downhill hairpin turn, and eventually the Volvo lying in my best friend's lawn as we ill-advisedly tried to "rock" it out of a snowbank by shifting repeatedly from "D" to "R".

No such abuse happened to the car this time around, but a few scant hours before I did receive my first speeding ticket of my life (and going considerably slower than Professor Markel), which in retrospect should have struck me as a bad omen.

There is one nice thing to be said for being suddenly forced to abandon one's car in northern Indiana and take to the skies. All of that sitting around at Jordan's Volvo and the South Bend and Cincinnati airports gives one a great deal more free time for reading.

For example, I picked up and breezed through Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. If Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires is the sort of thing to make you want to become a professional restaurant critic, Kitchen Confidential is the sort of thing to make you never ever want to become a professional chef. Or to let one anywhere near your kitchen. Or your friends. Bourdain claims the thing was written not for the sensationalism or even for the restaurant-going audience but merely for those who have worked in the restaurant biz. I am dubious. He must have known, or at least hoped, that his tales (Restaurants serve five-day-old fish! They save the worst parts of meat to be cooked "well-done"! They deep-fry them, too!) would titillate. And they do. The book is fascinating, in its own slightly dreadful way.

Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, on the other hand, is not at all dreadful, and it is just as fascinating. Everybody who writes about this book seems to feel all right revealing the central conceit, so I suppose I will too. The narrator and the main characters are all clones bred for the purposes of organ donation, but being fully sentient ensoulled human beings, have a rather complicated view of their own place in the world. As with Ishiguro's other characters (c.f. The Remains of the Day; When We Were Orphans) this sort of not-quite-self-conscious ruminating about their own complicated place in the world makes up pretty much the whole book. I agree with Amber that the book does it very very well, partly because the clones thoughts about their place in the world are surprisingly, well, complicated, rather than rote rebelliousness or total mindlessness.

But this is as good a place as any to take serious issue with her potshots at Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (see both her post on Never Let Me Go and to a lesser degree, on O & C itself). As I understand Amber's complaint, it is that Oryx and Crake is science-fiction, but it is trite science-fiction, where the ideas are unoriginal and already worked over by the better writers of the genre. If I am right that this is her complaint, it is quite wrong. Oryx and Crake is not science fiction, and does not try to be. It is instead a dystopia, a related, but importantly different, genre.

In science-fiction novels it might be fair to grade an author on how cleverly and creatively she can dream up new possible worlds, new inventions, new mysteries, new masteries, new horrors. But in a dystopia, the goal is not to shock readers with the new, it is precisely to use ideas that are already in semi-common currency, and show how close we are to a horrible new world. Where science-fiction invents, dystopia merely tries to remind; where science-fiction tries to show a world very different from our own, dystopia tries to show us how close we are to the precipice. It is, if you will, a reductio ad absurdum of the here and now.

Indeed, as Richard Posner pointed out in his able TNR review, Atwood's borrowings from the classic dystopias (and similar books) are obvious and sometimes overt: Orwell's "proles" are her "pleebs"; her intellect-castes come from Huxley; her pigoons come from Wells; and of course, her narrator is Robinson Crusoe, as the chapter titled "Footprint" makes quite clear.

In this Q&A she admits to the Orwell borrowings, while dancing around the question of whether her book is "real sci fi". In her essay on the book she is even more explicit:

Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction, not a science fiction proper ... it invents nothing we haven't already invented or started to invent.

Ishiguro explores ... what are we, what are we for, and does it matter that we are what we are and that we are for what we are for?