"Worse still than real dreams, mine or yours—sandier mouthfuls, ranker lies—are the dreams of characters in books and movies."

Writes Michael Chabon:

Nobody, not even Aunt Em, wants to hear about Dorothy’s dream when she wakes up at the end of The Wizard of Oz. As outright fantasy the journey to Oz is peerless, joyous, muscular with truth; to call it a dream (a low trick L. Frank Baum, who wrote the original story, never stooped to) is to demean it, to deny it, to lie; because nobody has dreams like that. Nobody has dreams like the dreams in Spellbound, either; or like those in Little Nemo in Slumberland, Alice in Wonderland, Inception...

If art is a mirror, dreams are the back of the head. A work of art derives its effects from light, sound, and movement, but dreams unfurl in darkness, silence, paralysis. Like a recipe attempted in an ill-provisioned kitchen, “dreamlike” art relies on substitutions: dutch angles, forced perspective, absurdist juxtapositions, arbitrary transformations, and, as Peter Dinklage’s character points out in the film Living in Oblivion, a lamentable superabundance of dwarfs.

Here's that scene in Living in Oblivion. (Shorter clip here. Buy the whole movie here. It's really good.)

I feel like I should make some wisecrack of that book written by the now-President of the United States, "Dreams From My Father." Who just signed that "Dream" law. Dreams figure big in political speech, for a few reasons.

"Unbeknownst to reporters, the State Dining Room had... been transformed into a secretive White House Wonderland."

According to the new book by Jodi Kantor.

Tim Burton decorated it “in his signature creepy-comic style. His film version was about to be released, and he had turned the room into the Mad Hatter’s tea party...

“Burton’s own Mad Hatter, the actor Johnny Depp, presided over the scene in full costume, standing up on a table to welcome everyone in character.”

ADDED: And:

The president's aides decided the party would send the wrong message at a time when the Tea Party was on the rise with its message against Washington's excesses and unemployment had risen sharply to ten per cent.

"White House officials were so nervous about how a splashy, Hollywood-esque party would look to jobless Americans or their representatives in Congress, who would soon vote on health care that the event was not discussed publicly and Burton's and Depp's contributions went unacknowledged...."

"I'm not aware of any meetings about 'the antiwar march hare in Madison.'"

My new iPhone's Siri program just got closer than ever before to understanding a question I asked, which was: "When is the anti-war march here in Madison?" I know there's an anti-war march today, and I'm trying to find out when. To be fair, Googling my question doesn't pull up the answer either.

But I love the robotic intelligence that substitutes — for "march here" — March Hare:



Hey! It's a tea party!

UPDATE: I just asked "What time is the Badger game today?" and was understood exactly and the phone immediately brought up the official UWBadgers site. So... go iPhone. And... go Badgers!

UPDATE 2: The phone seems to have figured out how to understand me. I asked "What's the best blog written by a law professor?" and it got it word for word. It wouldn't express an opinion however, but asked if I'd like it to "search the web" for the answer. That is, want me to Google that for you? I tested it with "Who's the best Republican Party candidate for President?" and, again, it offered to search the web. The iPhone is opinion neutral. And it's not cruel neutrality. You need a human being to get cruel neutrality. The robot provides bland neutrality.

I'm trapped in a Blogger blog and I can't get out.

Maybe you are wondering why I said this blog was going to move out of Blogger and onto an independent site. I made the decision after a harrowing experience in which Blogger suddenly deleted my blog, without explanation and without any information about what I could do about it. My effort to get help through the Google forum brought some truly weird bullying from a moderator over there, but after I blogged about it, two Google employees contacted me, interacted with me personally, and got the blog back up. I was glad for that help, but it got me looking for a better service, and I have been working with very good people who are trying to get me set up with an independent WordPress blog.

Unfortunately, we discovered that my blog archive cannot be extracted either by the simple device of using the "export" function in the Blogger software or through the ingenuity of my new tech people. We've gone back to those Google employees who helped me after my blog was deleted, and they say they are trying to help, sounding quite sincere about giving me personal service, which I appreciate. Two weeks ago, they told me that they had an "engineer" working "actively"on extracting my archive. We've followed up, and we've been assured this active effort continues, but still, no archive extraction.

The problem is the size of the archive (with over 20,000 posts and nearly a million comments). If anyone is blogging in Blogger, they need to know that there is an upper limit to what Blogger can handle without losing functionality. Had I known what that limit was, I would have gotten out before I hit it. I feel like I can't get out at the door — I do wish I hadn't blogged quite so much!....

Alas! it was too late to wish that! She went on growing, and growing, and very soon had to kneel down on the floor: in another minute there was not even room for this, and she tried the effect of lying down with one elbow against the door, and the other arm curled round her head. Still she went on growing, and, as a last resource, she put one arm out of the window, and one foot up the chimney, and said to herself `Now I can do no more, whatever happens. What will become of me?'

I can do no more, whatever happens. What will become of me?

UPDATE: Email from Google says: "Good news. We've improved our systems and have now exported your blog. It's 1.8G of XML representation.... Thanks for your patience." All right then.

"Home Secretary Theresa May has confirmed there was 'contact' between the Duchess of Cornwall and one of the protesters who attacked her car."

"But she did not confirm reports the duchess was poked with a stick during student protests on Thursday."

Poked with a stick! The Duchess!

***

"The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh my dear paws! Oh my fur and whiskers! She'll get me executed, as sure as ferrets are ferrets!"

Brainstorming signs for the "Restore Sanity" rally: "I finally thought of a sign 'Feed Your Head' a la: When logic and proportion has fallen sloppy dead..."

"... And the white knight is talking backwards and the Red Queen's 'Off with her head' Remember what the doormouse said 'Feed your head, feed your head:."

That's just one person over at the "Rally to Restore Sanity" Facebook page. I don't know how much of a trend it reflects. But there's something a bit strange and unpredictable about drawing out the people who are supposed to be the sane ones. Who are the people who get into the idea that they are sane and other people are crazy? It will be interesting to see what kinds of signs these characters come up with. "Feed Your Head" indeed.

Reminds me of the time I went to a John Kerry rally (in Madison) and photographed this sign:



Speaking of trippy, the "Sanity" Facebook page keeps flashing the numbers back and forth. See the updates on yesterday's Sanity post.

At the Strange Mushroom Café...

(Enlarge.)

... how can you explain yourself, if you are not yourself?

Lawprof David Trubek tries to fathom the furlough here at The University of Wisconsin.

You may have heard of Governor Doyle's plan:

The Governor’s furlough mandate, established in response to the State’s projected budget shortfall, requires an effective cut in pay for all full-time, 12-month employees equivalent to 16 days over the two-year period July 1, 2009 through June 30, 2011. The resulting furlough time off (FTO), required by the Governor and approved by the State Legislature, is required for all State and University employees, regardless of the funding sources used for their individual salaries and benefits. The mandatory furloughs result in a 3.065% annual pay reduction.

What's been hard for us faculty members to understand is not the reduction in pay but the requirement that we refrain from working on particular days, as my colleague David M. Trubek writes here in email that he's given me permission to republish.

The Tale of Purloined Work: Humpty-Dumpty Cracks the Case

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." (Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 5)

Everyone at The University of Wisconsin will have their pay cut by about 3% and will be “furloughed”—told they do not have to work—for a corresponding period of time. But it turns out that we not only don’t have to work, we are being told we cannot work. The guidelines ban any kind of work during furloughs, anywhere. This means that even if you are at home you are not supposed to read professional material, get and send emails, make calls, use a smart phone, etc. Employees who violate the work ban can be disciplined.

Some people think this rule is irrational, impractical and unjust. Irrational because no one is harmed if we choose to work even if we are not paid. Impractical because of the way many of us work in many locations seamlessly combining work and leisure and using electronic media of all types. Unjust because if people place a high value on work, the policy not only takes away some of our pay; it also takes away working time we value for itself.

Because I am troubled by this policy, I set out to find out how we ended up with what seems like an absurd rule. I did some internet research and think I may have discovered the tortured path that led to the work ban. Because it felt that we, like Alice, had fallen down the rabbit hole, I also sought guidance from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Here is what seems to have happened:

1) The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) has two categories of employees: exempt and non-exempt. An exempt person must be paid their full salary for any week they work, however many hours they actually put in. If an exempt person is furloughed, they would still have to get full pay. Non-exempt employees, on the other hand, can have their pay reduced pro-rata with a reduction in their hours. People in “learned professions” are exempt if they earn more than $455 a week (whether paid on an hourly basis or not), have specialized education, and do work that requires advanced knowledge in a field of science and learning.

2) Needless to say, faculty and some other academic personnel are classified as exempt. If the rules governing pay for exempt employees were to apply, the UW would not be able to get salary savings from furloughs because the law requires they be paid in full no matter how many hours they work.

3) Since that would defeat the whole purpose of the plan, the only solution is to turn an exempt employee into a non-exempt employee. Since classification depends on the level of education and the type of work people do, you might think this cannot be done by the stroke of a bureaucratic pen. But, remember: we are down the rabbit hole where impossible things are done every day. So, it appears that the University is going to temporarily declare that teachers and other exempt employees are non-exempt for the time period in which the furlough falls. Then, it will specify a number of hours they should work. This will be less than the number of hours they normally would work so it will be OK to cut their pay proportionately.

4) But now we come to Catch 22 (even in Wonderland there are catches). If a non-exempt worker puts in more than the hours specified, the FLSA requires that they be paid overtime. So, if the goal is to reduce everyone's pay, these workers not only have to be told that they only have to work fewer hours: they must be kept from exceeding that number of hours lest they trigger a legal claim for overtime. And that is the source of the guideline that tells us we cannot do any kind of work as well as the requirement that people must certify that they did not work.

In Wonderland all this seems very sensible. But isn't it based on an impossible thing? The FLSA's tests for which status one falls in are objective. One is exempt if one has a certain type of training and does a certain type of work and it doesn’t matter whether the employee is paid on an hourly or salary basis. So since the nature of our education and our work hasn’t changed, and merely putting us on hourly pay for this period cannot affect our classification, how can the state reclassify us as non-exempt?

To answer that, I refer you to Humpty-Dumpty:

When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - - that's all."
(Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 6)

Exactly how cute are you allowed to be after the age of 40?

Is this going too far?



Oh, go ahead and trash her, but I love Helena Bonham Carter! She's beautiful and adorable. I loved her in "Room With a View" and "Howard's End." She was perfect for that sort of thing, and also perfect in the completely different sort of thing, the fabulous "Fight Club." And — look! — she's the Red Queen!