“Apocalypse Now” Small Group
For Lent — from February 25 (Ash Wednesday) to April 11 (Easter is the 12th)
All Saints United Methodist Church

COMMENTS

Apocalypse Now Links:
Introduction
Part One - Volcano
Part Two - 28 Days Later
Part Three - Children of Men
Part Four - “The War of the Lamb”
Part Five - “Revelation”

Part One — Volcano
Showing at the All Saints UMC Ministry Center, 7 PM, Friday, February 27

As we enter into the season of Lent we are called to reflection, repentance, and [renunciation]. Lent is a time of preparation when we look beyond human frailty and the brokenness of the world to resurrection, hope, and new life. We are reminded that our faith does not rise and fall with the financial markets but resides in the enduring love of God who is present with us as we struggle and strive to love God and our neighbors. This Lent can be a time when we recommit to practice every day the Wesleyan values to do no harm, do good and stay in love with God.

-Council of Bishops, UMC

Reflect - pay attention and think
Repent - turn around (from Jerusalem - the city - back into the wilderness)
Renounce - compulsions, empty pleasures, and addictions; renunciation demonstrates that you are free

[All quotes and images are employed under Title 17, “Fair Use” law, and no portion of this study is for profit.]

REQUEST FOR PARTICIPANTS - You decide whether you want to watch the movie first, then review one, some, or all of the Notes; or whether you want to review Notes then watch the movie afterward. Then share a bit about whether and how the order of viewing and reading might differ.

Notes on Volcano

Note (1)

The idea for viewing Volcano, which is neither the worst nor best of the genre, came about because it placed such emphasis on Los Angeles as its setting. Several years ago, I picked up a copy of Mike Davis’ superlative book Ecology of Fear — Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. This book comes with a strong endorsement for both content and style. Peculiar at first, the book is a mesmerizing page-turner of revelation about the reality and the myths of the effects of urbanization (an ecology) on culture and personhood.

Note within a note: Though Davis and others (like Matthew Lassiter, who wrote about Southern suburbanization, another facilitator-recommended book, The Silent Majority), would call themselves radical urban theorists (RUT), their actual research and publications place them in a more prophetic role in society today.

(A must-read for anyone who lives in the suburbs and wants to know how we got here.)

Reviewer Walter Kern wrote of Davis’ book,

Davis’ sixth chapter “The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles,” explores LA’s destruction in novels and film by hordes, nukes, quakes, cults, monsters, bombs, pollution, gangs, terrorism, floods, plagues, riots, aliens, volcanoes, sandstorms, mudslides, freeways, distopias, and more (pp. 280-281). I took the significance of Davis’ account this way: the fiction is an obsessive exploration of unconfronted dangers in fantastic terms, and it perhaps reflects a desire to break through the denial locking LA in a system of doom.

Here is a key point about many extremity stories; they are a public imagination of breaking out of inertia — inertia experienced as a “system of doom.”

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Note (2)

From: A Dictionary of Sociology |
Date: 1998 |
Author: GORDON MARSHALL |
© A Dictionary of Sociology 1998,

originally published by Oxford University Press 1998.

heuristic device Any procedure which involves the use of an artificial construct to assist in the exploration of social phenomena. It usually involves assumptions derived from extant empirical research. For example, ideal types have been used as a way of setting out the defining characteristics of a social phenomenon, so that its salient features might be stated as clearly and explicitly as possible. A heuristic device is, then, a form of preliminary analysis. Such devices have proved especially useful in studies of social change, by defining bench-marks, around which variation and differences can then be situated. In this context, a heuristic device is usually employed for analytical clarity, although it can also have explanatory value as a model.

Using films, readings, and cultural criticism to study social phenomena is employing them as heuristic “devices.”

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Note (3)

Volcano is a Hollywood production. It follows Hollywood formulas. It’s story contains a handful of pretty standard film conventions. It idealizes many aspects of reality, and it reproduces idealized archetypes, characters polished and idealized to give us some recognizable essence as viewers and participants in the film.

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Note (4)

Hollywood produces films that are generalized cultural commodities. Cultural because they are expressions of our social life, generalized because they are now almost universally available in American society, and commodities because the primary motive for making them is to accumulate monetary wealth.

(This does not mean that these films are reducible to any one of these characteristics, or that there are not elements of the films that have to be described independently of these three categories… this is a “heuristic” breakdown.)

The scale of the industry which makes these cultural commodities has made it into an effective transmission belt of social values. Not necessarily an originator of values, but certainly a transmission belt. (There is, however, a value-degradation inhering in the production of film-as-commodity. Like the competition to produce junk food for kids, the competition at the heart of market relations creates an arms race of over-stimulation and sensationalism that makes jaded emotional junkies of us consumers.)

What differentiates the disaster or apocalyptic genre(s) of film from other films is the condition of extremity that is the setting and background.

So in addition to, and often mixed with, the transmission of social values — which may be diverse and situational, there is a circumstance that forces greater moral questions to the forefront of the story, often presented as ethical dilemmas confronting the protagonist(s).

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Note (5)

Before the film begins, there is the well-known 20th Century Fox intro, with the skylights and triumphal trumpets. Can we think about these recognizable corporate logos in any way as idols? If yes, then what does that mean for us, as church? How do we define idolatry?

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Note (6)

Background music and emotional intelligence.

Linda Kintz wrote a book called Between Jesus and the Market - The Emotions that Matter in Right-Wing America. Kintz is an alumnus, that is, from a right-wing evangelical (dispensationalist) family of origin; and she is not interested in demonizing the right, but in understanding people with whom she still retains powerful attachments of love.

She speaks of an emotional (or “affective”) intelligence that is inextricable from other dimensions of intelligence, of an enculturated emotional response — what she calls “resonance” — that undergirds an elaborate, emotionally-resonant belief system that “might be visualized as a closed set of concentric circles stacked one on top of the other and ascending heavenward: God, property, womb, family, church, free market, nation, global mission, God.”

Intelligence recognizes; and emotional intelligence recognizes patterns of thinking because a pattern of thinking is simultaneously associated with a pattern of experiencing, or “feeling.”

Our affective intelligence operates, even in our most instrumental and impersonal relations, in the same way background music operates in a film. Background music cues us on how we are to participate, as a member of the audience. Background music mobilizes a targeted “feeling.” It helps us know how to behave (even if it is our psychic behavior as viewer-participants). The emotional resonance of our own beliefs, in a similar way also cues us how to behave.

An experiment: Watch one scene from Volcano, whichever whole scene. When you’ve finished, switch to English subtitiles and mute the sound. Watch the same scene again. You’re still getting all the information, but the absence of the background music — that seems in the “background” when we watch uncritically — is dramatically apparent, and even felt as a minor kind of loss.

Resonance leads us places; so we’d be well advised to investigate to whose tuning fork we are responding.

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Note (7)

During the opening scenes of Volcano, there is a revealing series of social conflicts represented. [Think again of revealing — revelation — as a process of unmasking.] In “the business,” these are called, oddly enough, “reveal scenes.”

There is protagonist Mike Roark’s marital conflict; he is separated from his teenage daughter’s mother.

There is racial conflict in the confrontation between the young Black man who is seeking assistance for his neighborhood and a white policeman.

There is class conflict depicted in the public transportation demonstration and counter-demonstration, where Norman Calder (played by John Corbett), a wealthy financial speculator, confronts a Latina maid over the proposed route of a commuter train. Further along, Norman abandons his wife, the higher-minded emergency room physician who refuses to submit to Norman’s directive: “I don’t want my wife treating gunshot wounds. I want her treating tennis elbow.”

There is even gender conflict, though they softballed it more than the other social contradictions by having it played off with stoic humor by female protagonist, Amy Barnes, the government geologist, played by Anne Heche. Tommy Lee Jones’ “Mike” takes a very mildly (and therefore easily forgivable) macho tone with Barnes in their second encounter. (More on gender further along)

The almost bulleted precision of these conflicts — obviously part of a writer’s checklist of social contradiction — present this list of conflicts as constitutive of a general state of conflict, perceived as impending, like doom. This is an aspect of extremity used in apocalyptic (revelatory) literature and film, extremity to reveal (unmask) the characters’ true selves and the correct answers to the terrifying moral questions. The other aspect is for the condition of extremity to be understood as necessary to break up the doom of inertia… moral sloth… atomization… oppression… sin.

The serial presentation of these conflicts in the set-up phase of the film is foreshadowing the kairos moment that is about to interrupt this condition.

We know that; because we’ve seen many movies before. Someone with a different history in a different place, untrained as a participant in the movie experience, might not recognize all the ideas that we recognize in common, nor the emotional reactions to those ideas. We have all, as persons, learned in our interaction with culture and our own ecology, to experience the same resonance in reply to the same ideas.

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Note (8)

“Apocalypse” is Greek for “revelation.”

One of the most memorable and culturally inscribed reveal scenes in film for us is in The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy’s dog, Toto, sniffs out the pathetic man behind the machine that was The Great Oz.

In Revelation we will see a similar reference to actual idol-machines used by the Romans in the time of John of Patmos.

The process of revealing is the process of unmasking, unveiling. Every society we know uses stories to reveal how we are supposed to be. The stories themselves can be radically different, because stories are part of culture, and culture is determinative of and determined by personhood and our surroundings (ecology). That’s why local stories have such richness of detail; because a de-localized (cosmopolitan) ecology is abstract — and so personhood is abstracted, as well as the culture being homogenized.

Personhood, ecology, culture.

Stories are a universal cultural production, even though there is wide difference between stories. Stories are universal in spite of the fact that some stories are organic and some are commodities. The stories you tell about something that happened within the family, like the stories told at family reunions, funerals, and weddings, are stories told inside the family. These stories are never conceived of as anything except the preservation of the story itself. That’s an organic story. When a story is a means to make money, then that story is being commoditized. A commodity is a thing-for-sale. The objective of the commodity is not what the commodity does — that’s only an intermediate concern for the producer — it’s that the commodity will produce a return on a monetary investment.

No matter whether some stories are organic, some are commoditized, and many are both or somewhere in between, the central fact remains that stories are part of the formative process (of personhood, culture, and ecology) in every society. Many stories may be wrong; and many may even be stupid; but the story-itself is powerful because it has this proven formative ability.

Volcano is a Hollywood commodity. A car is a commodity, too; but that doesn’t mean that I don’t use my own car for what it does — transport me to places way beyond my walking ability at outrageous speed. This movie is also a story that does what stories do, like a car does what a car does. This story tells us how to be when we participate as a non-critical audience. To the critical viewer, however, the story tells us a good deal about who we think we are.

The story we live into as followers of Jesus is one of selflessness, sacrifice, and forgiveness.

The story in a television ad for women’s depilatories is that you are unhappy, but that with the acquisition of this product you can make yourself more valuable… and without it, you will continue to be un-valuable.

Each of these stories tells us how to be.

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Note (9)

The story presented in Volcano, in a very contradictory way, contains strong elements of a specifically Biblical understanding of the world.

The formative story for the Hebrews was captivity. The unique thing about the story in that place and time was that the captives themselves, and not the conquerers, were the protagonists of the story.

This begins what culminates with the Incarnation — the preferential option for the social underdog. With the “primitive” church, this anti-oppression bias was potently combined with a doctrine of spiritual equality (between master-slave, man-woman, Jew-Gentile).

In Volcano, this essentially Christian message of spiritual equality (though few people understand or acknowledge it) is mixed in with a fair amount of modernism (what Illich calls “perverted Christianity”) and a lot of patriarchal archetypes. The important thing to understand, however, is that the elements of selflessness, sacrifice, and forgiveness are not completely effaced in Christianity’s encounter with modernism.

This core belief in redemption through love — however it has been tortured in the service of agendas — has shown a remarkable resilience, even though epochs of absolute horror.

In this film, the savior is not the “shabby little shaman from Nazareth with the burning empathy for everyone he met.” The savior in Volcano is a government man; and his disciples are bureaucrats and technocrats, along with uniformed armed services.

The gospels spell out the exact opposite message — that the powers have been supplanted by the Kingdom of God, in cross and resurrection. Jesus of Nazareth was executed precisely because he refused to acknowledge the sovereignty of the principalities and powers. His was a political — not a religious — crime. But solely taking Volcano to task is inadequate. What can we find of the good? There is another grain of Christian sensibility (service) even in the disingenuous language about politics and government, called public service.

One apocalyptic theme in this film is the “good” of human solidarity. Another well-known theme within that is the theme of money becoming useless or meaningless. The unhesitating plot line crushes cars and explodes superstores in order to save a living humanity.

Remember the scene where the little boy, ash-stained in the opening scene of the film’s denouement. He looks for his mother among the similarly ash-stained and scrupulously diverse rescue workers. “Look,” he says, pointing. “They all look the same.” This highly manipulative scene is the commoditization process tapping into a shared and resonant belief in the “good” of human solidarity, and in equality before God of every human being — spiritual equality –

–once a violently divisive claim, especially as it had to do with gender. The most emotionally resonant scenes in this film are all — without exception — about the transformative power of human love and solidarity.

That the film industry — in the real world — operates on an absolute opposite, Spencerian, dog-eat-dog ethos, is not an embarrassment to the story’s representation of solidarity-as-good. It is a contradiction. It is an embarrassment to the industry establishment — and dominant classes of people more generally — in the face of an un-erasable Judeo-Christian communitarianism… the vision of which industry producers must admit into the story to achieve an emotionally resonant participation by the buying audience. The audience is a consumer; but the audience is also still human, still in search of meaning, and that meaning abides in the holy spirit that we believe to be manifest in authentically caring human fellowship.

This little boy’s scene is a story convention with its origins in antiquity; but alongside these ancient beliefs in “good,” the film’s story gives us conventions that are only recent reflections of the human condition. That is, there are conventions that are reproducing beliefs that are distinctly modern.

Man-Conquering-Nature is a huge (MODERNIST) cultural thought-cluster in this film, of course;

as is Man-of-Action as Savior; and Manly Men Fighting Fires and Crime. (One redeeming aspect of this film is that no one shoots anyone else, a huge relief these days, when wet and multiple murders are almost obligatory in films rated above G.)

There’s also a “real men don’t cut and run” thought-cluster in this film, when Roark tells the woman-scientist that he can’t follow her advice to order a general evacuation.

” I can’t do that, not ever!” he says.

Certainly, the film does a blunt portrayal of the government as a benevolent protector — facilitated by a Father-Protector figure who exercises absolute power… benevolently; but more importantly, as a tempo-task.
“Tempo-task” is a story convention. It’s a situation, imagined or described by the writer, that throws questions of huge necessity directly in front of a protagonist, forcing a dramatic reduction of time for the protagonist to make decisions. If s/he sees a situation that must be dealt with because failing to do so could have unthinkable consequences, then the protagonist has to suspend procedure, process, law.

Emergency is a very very common story line; and that’s why its so manipulable.

The stories with tempo-tasks are not just action novels or films; we have also seen tempo-tasks employed by political storytellers — the ones who told us that if we failed to attack Iraq, nuclear detonations might be expected soon in New York. Tempo-tasks are seldom used to portray the virtues of patience or peace. In fact, tempo-task scenarios are used to shut down any discussion of patience and peace.

“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud over New York.”

Remember that one?

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Note (10)

One device I particularly liked in this film was the setting of the La Brea Tar Pits as the first eruption site.

The statues of the Columbian mammoths (?) over the pits, with the sinister rumblings of inner-earth — that the audience is in on while the characters are not — gives a sense of time shifting from chronos-time, the time we measure (then enslave ourselves to) with clocks, into kairos-time, or God’s time… epochal event time, historical pivot time, something that doesn’t happen often, but when it does… well, a big change is coming. As an audience member, I see the mammoth with all the resonance of a small boy who was fascinated by enormous extinct species, like dinosaurs and giant mammals. One’s imagination reaches out to grasp time as containing these highly significant, and meaningful, punctuations… interruptions… macroforces.

Force majeure is the legal term for forces beyond the control of contractees. The vernacular for this concept is “an act of God.” One can almost experience a sweet surrender in the imagination of kairos-time. This is one of the attractions of this genre. It is an imaginary surrender on the part of the audience to a kairos event.

TIME

Further note (10)(a) from Ivan Illich on “devices,” epistemology, and the need to shift epistemology in order to understand the dead (from The Rivers North of the Future, Chapter 18, “From tools to systems”:

A little while ago, I spoke about Father John Considine, the Maryknoll priest who convinced John XXIII to enlist the Church in the Alliance for Progress. The idea of these missioners was to help these poor people, and to help meant to provide those people with means, with tools, that they didn’t have — with electricity, penicillin, decent legal devices, instrumentally conceived knowledge. This was taken for granted. It’s as difficult to put an epistemic parenthesis around concepts like instrument, tool, device, technique, as it is to put a parenthesis around norms or rules in ethics. As soon as we speak about conscience, someone will invoke norms according to which a conscious man ought to act. As soon as we speak about help, as a result of my love for you, my benevolence towards you, we will think about empowering you by providing you with some device or technique… [T]he very idea of the tool as a special type of causality has an historical beginning, that the idea of the tool takes mature shape in Scholasticism in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Almost absurdly, but correctly, we then spoke about the discovery that angels who are pure spirits require tools, which are planets, in order to act as God’s governors in the ordering of the world. We can consider time between the century in which I am so much at home, the twelfth century, and today, by speaking of it as the epoch of technique, or tool-making — “tool” being something that incorporates, materializes, or formalizes a human intention, and can be picked up, or not picked up, by a person who wants to pursue the goal that corresponds to this intention. It is marked by the omnipresence of instruments: eyes are instruments for seeing like cameras, concepts are epistemic devices, laws are tools for the ordering of society.

How much of what happens in Volcano involves the use of instruments, tools, technology?

Can you better relate this notion of epistemology — how we know — by reading Illich’s interview remarks, then returning to the film to watch the role of instruments? What does it mean about our differences with people who lived, say, in the tenth century, when this conception of a tool — as an ever-more-abstract category — did not yet exist. A hoe was a hoe, not the same as a scythe. Calling them both “tools” is adding one degree of abstraction to the language, and so to our thinking.

How do our tools, and our conceptions of tools, as represented in the film, represent our (1) ecology, (2) culture, (3) personhood? A traffic jam is part of a physical environment. Look for all the cultural artifacts in any scene of the film — billboards, television, radio, automobiles, roller-blades… And how much does one’s personhood now depend on what one “does” (that is, does for pay); and to what degree is that identity associated with the “knowledge” of particular technologies (tools)?

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Note (11)

Love the comic cutaway scene (comic cutaways relieve us in the audience of any anxieties that the story’s tension will be unbearable) with two working-class employees of the museum that’s hosting an exhibition of Hieronymus Bosch. The two working stiffs are hauling out paintings and loading them in a truck to rescue them from the erupting volcano.

The first worker says, “This Hieronymus Bosch is heavy.”

“That’s because he deals with man’s inclination to sin, ” replies his partner, “in defiance of God’s will.”

To which the first worker — grunting as he loads the “heavy” picture — replies, “I didn’t mean it that way.”

Ha ha.

Some clever script writer weaseled that cutaway scene into the film, and we should deeply appreciate it. Never hurts to put some theology in the story; and Bosch’s paintings depicting Hell are a must-see. Hieronymus Bosch was an important medieval Christian artist; and his artistic themes represent a now bygone idea about the cosmos… the world. Bosch’s depictions of Hell retain their powerful creepiness even to this day.

Bosch is part of our religious tradition, but in order to understand him, his paintings, and his audience when he was making his art, we have to figure out how he and his audience knew things. We have to study the context, a context of which we have no firsthand experience… in fact, a context we know little about at all.

One of the words suggested for a look or re-look in preparation for this study was “epistemology.” Epistemology is “how we know,” and its not dictated by “reason,” but in the totalizing experience of the non-linear relations between personhood, culture, and ecology.

Hieronymus Bosch was enculturated into a different epistemology than we are. If we try to know Bosch on our terms (modern terms), we are lost. Bosch is dead, and the direct memories of his time are all dead with him. We, as the living, are obliged to seek to understand the episteme — the world view — of Bosch and his contemporaries. That’s the only way we can hope to understand what the painter wanted to say, and how his own medieval European audience participated in saying it.

The difficulty of understanding “how we know” things is that the term knowledge contains an element of misleading certainty around with it.

“We are — at last — the possessors of real knowledge.” How many times has this particular form of hubris popped up in history?

This misleading certainty is compounded with semantic confusion when, for example, people are translating ancient, and not so ancient, texts. Even in the same language, words acquire new meanings, and new experiences engender new words. Imagine you are living 100 years ago, 1909. Now let’s play you a few lines of dialogue from Volcano:

(1) “I don’t want my wife treating gunshot wounds; I want her to treat tennis elbow.”

(2) “I’m sure you’re aware that the continents are like giant rafts, floating on a sea of molten lava.”

A mental exercise: Pretending that you are a 30 year old person living where you are right now in 1908, in how many ways are these two snippets of dialogue very, very strange to you?

Dead. All. A common symbol on medieval Christian art was a skull.

As you are, I once was. As I am, you shall be. Be ever mindful of death.

(The skull was Adam’s.)

For we the living, the meanings of the dead require us to seek them by studying their context, their way of knowing. It requires an “epistemological shift.”

The last step of this study group is to critically read the Book of Revelation. It was written, to the best of our knowledge (no pun intended), around 96 AD, in Asia Minor (now Turkey and Greece). Very different time. Very different place. For us, that would be as if the crucifixion had happened at the end of World War II. People were still alive from when it happened.

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Note (12)

Other biblical/Christian references in the film:

The literal self-sacrifice of Stan Olber (played by John Carroll Lynch), the public servant who fatally leaps into flowing lava in order to rescue a subordinate, is a scene of special gravity while Stan is walking toward his certain death breathlessly and tearfully reciting “Hail Mary.”

In one scene, Mike Roark and Amy Barnes are catching a breather, when she states that Los Angeles is finally reaping what they’ve sown in foolishness (a direct example of the Los-Angeles-comeuppance theme that Mike Davis cites). Roark responds by saying, “It’s a foolish man that builds his house upon the sand.” To which a pleased Amy Barnes responds, “Matthew 7:26, a favorite of geologists.” And so the two characters signify their intersubjectivity with a bible verse.

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Note (13)

Excerpt from David Cayley’s Introduction to Rivers North of the Future - The Testament of Ivan Illich:

…Illich makes a … convincing evisceration of the myth of the secular when he claims that contemporary Western societies are in no sense post-Christian but rather constitute a perverted form of Christianity. He shows … that a whole constellation of modern notions, most too obvious even to raise a question in most minds, are distortions of Christian originals — from “the citizen” on whose shoulders the state rests to the services which are its raison d’etre, from the planetary “life” that right-thinking people want to conserve to the technology that threatens it. And he further claims that these notions would have been unthinkable without their Christian originals. They owe their very existence, in other words, to the ancestry which they distort, deny, and conceal.

Illich, with admitted trepidation, calls this view “apocalyptic.” His hesitancy is understandable, since this word, as it is now used, tends to evoke fundamentalist fantasies of divine vengeance or the gruesome cataclysms that have become a staple of popular cinema. But Illich uses the word in its literal meaning of “uncovering” or “revelation.” For him, the contemporary world reveals an evil that can only be grasped when it is understood as an imposture, or simulation, of the Samaritan’s unforseen and unforseeable response to the man in the ditch. Evil, traditionally, was an absence, a forgetfulness of the good. Illich points to a new kind of evil that appears only when the good is replaced by “measurable values” and transmogrified into an “institutional output”. (quotation marks added for emphasis)

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HOMEWORK (optional):

Write your thoughts — any format or style that is comfortable for you — on what we’ve discussed so far with regard to one of the following:

(1) The Ecology-Culture-Personhood Triangle.
(2) Unacknowledged Christian themes in Volcano.
(3) Epistemological shifting in the study of the dead.
(4) Chronos versus karios time in Volcano.
(5) Revealing as unmasking.
(6) Extremity, ethics, and tempo-tasks.
(7) Apocalyptic art and the theme of comeuppance.
(8) The Christian ethic culturally reproduced (in performance) in an industry that operates with an anti-Christian ethic.
(9) Art as commodity.
(10) Viewing the film Volcano as if you are living in 1908 (to show ideas that were not yet available to understand Volcano).

Closing Quote:

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

- John 1:9-13

REMINDER: This is not a study that requires anything. The depth of participation is your choice. It can be an occasional pastime, or a a college course. It is also free to share with anyone and everyone; and it is not restricted — obviously — to Lent. Comments sections are also now open (but will be moderated, so comments will not go up immediately). CHANGE TWO with apologies — Comments are disabled here, and will all go to the Feral Scholar web site linked here. Click it on, and comment away. Again, apologies while I work out the glitches.

Posted by stan in Analysis