In a Brainiac post this past weekend, I suggested that we distinguish between slacker movies (in which, usually, the protagonist winds up gainfully employed by the end) and idler movies (which may explore, but do not resolve the not always unhappy tension between work and leisure). We can all think of slacker movies, but what are the great idler movies?
I asked readers to send me suggestions, and you did.
Film critic and scholar Chris F., who sometimes writes for the Ideas section, nominated Aki Kaurismaki's "La vie de Boheme," Terence Fisher's "Night of the Big Heat" (an alien invasion movie that takes place on a small island off the coast of England whose residents don't seem to work), and Nicholas Ray's western "Johnny Guitar." About the latter, Chris writes:
It's never very clear what the Dancing Kid and his gang (Bart, Corey, and Turkey) are doing in their isolated
hilltop cabin.... At one point the Dancing Kid asks Johnny
Guitar to work for him as a musician. Johnny asks, "Just what is your
business?", and the Dancing Kid snaps, "Don't worry, I'll find one,
just play that guitar for me."
I'll get to some of the other nominations later. Keep sending them to me!
As Bostonians, but perhaps not Brainiac readers elsewhere, may have already heard, a suspicious device was found chained to a pole just outside Post Office Square, at the corner of Devonshire and Franklin earlier today. The bomb squad rolled up and, without further ado, detonated it: See the video.
I say "may have heard," because I've only seen this news reported by Fox, so far (thanks to Boing Boing's Mark Frauenfelder, who is just as obsessed with the Mooninite attack as I am). This raises the age-old question: If a suspicious device is detonated and the MSM doesn't cover it, was it actually detonated?
What was the device? Fox speculates that it may have been a traffic-counting device, which makes sense: What else do you ever see chained to a pole downtown, besides bicycles and newsweekly boxes? (Wait, WBZ-TV did have a short item on this story. They claim that the device was, in fact, a traffic-counting device.) One would hope that the bomb squad could recognize a traffic-counting device, though; one would also hope that the city would know all about the location of such devices.
The New Yorker has a rare Editors' Note in this week's issue, concerning Stacy Schiff's article of seven months ago (!) about Wikipedia. The New Yorker, which employs 16 full-time fact-checkers, prints very few corrections, let alone the more grave-sounding Editors' Notes. (I have come to believe, however, that it is not therefore to be inferred that the magazine is otherwise error-free; their threshold for printing a correction is clearly much higher than the Times's, where a misspelling merits a correction.)
The Editors' Note, the bulk of which is reprinted here on the Freakonomics blog, explains that one of Schiff's principal sources for the piece, a man who goes by the username Essjay in his role as an administrator of the site, which offers the option of anonymity, represented himself fraudulently. Schiff described him as "a tenured professor of religion at a private university," whereas he now says that he is Ryan Jordan, who "is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and ... has never taught."
A bit of pie in the face for The New Yorker, but not fascinating. More intriguing, however, is Wikipedia founding guru Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales's reaction to this imposture, also included in the note: "Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay's invented persona, 'I regard it as a pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it.'" Huh. It would have been so easy for Wales to publicly reprimand his administrator, but instead he weighed in in mild defense of fraudulent anonymity.
Perhaps this presages a split among the world's creators and reporters of knowledge. The New Yorker, if nothing else, stands for a model of elitism and meritocracy whereby only the best need apply. Wikipedia greets everyone and gives them all de facto and de jure equality. Who will win out in the Internet age? The bloggers vs. the journalistic mainstream, the wiki-guys vs the Enyclopedia-guys, the personae we meet in bars or those concocted online?
An interesting post about green issues in the wake of the all-global warming Oscars. (No one even mentioned the war! Is that good or bad?) First the blogger points out that the Tennessee Center for Policy Research has nailed Al Gore for being profligate wih his energy in his several large homes, particularly his mansion in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville. From the Chattanoogan, a home state paper:
Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh -- guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359.
Ouch on two counts. And who knows where the TCPR got this information. Gore has responded (to Drudge, actually, not the Chattanoogan) that he uses 100 percent green energy and purchases carbon offsets.
The Economist writer, however, goes on to say that these offsets, which essentially pay sources and companies that reduce carbon output, for instance by planting trees, don't work as advertised: "When you donate money to build a new windfarm, you don't take any of the old, polluting power offline; you increase the supply of power, reducing the price until others are encouraged to buy more carbon-emitting power." This argument is echoed at Marginal Revolution.
I'm not an economist, but I'm not buying this anti-offset argument. Electricity demand does not work like demand for plasma televisions. When Con Ed lowers the price in winter, I thank my stars when the bill comes. I do not decide to leave the lights on all day to bring the bill back to its summer levels. Why use more electricity because it's cheaper? I use what I use, striving to conserve but hardly being radical about it. I suspect that's the norm.
A fascinating take by two Harvard graduates on their disappointing experience as Rhodes Scholars. Oxford's not as great as its academic reputation suggests, is the gist: classes are taught by post-docs, dons avoid students and tend to flee for U.S. colleges, the library has weaknesses. The two wish they'd known about this earlier and advise Harvard students to think twice before applying for the prestigious prize. They claim to speak not out of bitterness, but in a spirit of candor.
Two thoughts: 1. No news here. Their account is particularly harsh -- compellingly unvarnished -- but the outline is conventional wisdom. Did neither of them ever talk to a professor about Oxford before arriving there?
2. The piece will have zero impact. Ninety percent of the appeal of the Rhodes (not unlike that of a certain local university to whose students the authors direct their appeal) is the winnowing process itself, not the final payoff.
A while back I wrote about a site that, when fed a clear picture of you, will spit out a list of celebrities who look like you. Some of them were decidedly B-list stars, but I wasn't complaining. The whole thing was an exercise in vanity; my results included women, which got my attention, and they included Mary-Louise Parker and Greta Garbo.
But now we've got some Israeli people working on not matching us as we are but making us more beautiful. There is no consumer Web site or software yet from these folks, just sample pics and a demo video (with a long load time). Depressingly, I thought, the money quote of the Israeli article about these researchers is "Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is merely a function of mathematical distances or ratios."
But of course digital beautification isn't new (although the use of standard algorithms is interesting). I mean, what's Photoshop for? This public service ad for the Dove Self-Esteem Fund rather dramatically demonstrates the way that stylists and techies work together to plump, slim, and primp until a model looks better and better, just to the brink of eerie perfection.
Ever since I learned that the Mooninite lite-brites were inspired by "LED Throwies" that were developed by the Graffiti Research Lab, I've been interested in the GRL's (mostly) impermanent, hi-tech graffiti techniques. In a desultory fashion, I've been tracking developments in that area. So, two new things to report:
1. L.A.S.E.R. Tag: Developed by GRL, premiered in Rotterdam early this month. A hand-held laser pointer is used to tag (graffiti-speak for "write on") the side of a building, say, at which point a camera discerns the contrast of the laser on the building, and then a DLP video projector outputs the tag. It all happens so fast that it looks like you're using the laser pointer to actually tag the building. See the video clip. Looks fun.
2. Guerrilla Lighting. Teams of volunteers create "transient lighting designs" by using high-powered flashlights, battery-powered LED projectors, luminous dot lights, and so forth. OK, this one is probably frowned up by the GRL, because it was developed not by graffiti artists but by London-based lighting designers, architects, interior designers and manufacturers, "all of whom are keen to draw attention to the possibilities, and importance of, lighting in the urban environment." But from the onlooker's perspective, it's still very cool to see.
John Leahy, responding to my observations on the inadequacies of Microsoft's grammar checker, asks a question I didn't have space to address: "Is it grammatically correct to start a sentence with And?"
Well, it's OK with Yahweh, at least according to all the English versions of Genesis I've seen: "And God said," "And God made," "And God saw," and so on.
But the grammar checker was programmed to obey a lesser authority -- someone's high school teacher, probably -- and it says no to And, But, and Or at the start of a sentence. (Strangely, it ignores initial However, another common teachers' fetish.)
Is there really such a rule? Coincidentally, the issue comes up in a discussion today on Language Log. Commenting on a seriesofposts at the Daily Telegraph's website, Mark Liberman notes that public griping can create or enshrine baseless linguistic prejudices: "Sentence-initial however, for example, annoys many people who would never have noticed it if they hadn't been trained to do so."
And he quotes fellow linguist Arnold Zwicky on the mythical rule of no-initial-conjunction, or NIC, which is rejected by the American Heritage Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, among others:
Paul Brians, collector of common errors in English, labels sentence-initial coordinators a "non-error". Bryan Garner denies, all over the place, that NIC has any validity. Even the curmudgeonly Robert Hartwell Fiske tells his readers that there's absolutely nothing wrong with sentence-initial coordinators. . . . NIC is crap.
But still it lives on, as what I've called a zombie rule. . . . Hardly any usage manual subscribes to it, but it is, apparently, widely taught in schools, at least in the U.S., with the result that educated people tend to be nagged by a feeling that there is something bad about sentence-initial and.
But there isn't -- no matter what your editor or your grammar checker says.
Evan, I meant to blog about that but got swamped. I cannot get enough of this story. We'd be remiss not to mention the excellent Globe story today, plus some additional blog comments and linkage by its author, Geoff Edgers.
I'd be pretty cautious at this point about accepting the details of the "confession" -- and Edgers quotes other skeptics, too, who are sure the wife was in on it. Caught, the hoaxer suspiciously spins a tale that's much like the original story -- designed to exculpate his wife and attract sympathy. But who knows?
The Globe piece has some delicious details: An eyewitness account of Hatto's abilities in the studio, circa 1970 (thumbs down) and the long-anticipated reaction from Richard Dyer, the retired Globe critic.
In the tale of the fraudulent pianist, which Chris has blogged about here, another chapter: Hatto's widow, William Barrington-Coupe, in a reversal of earlier statements, has admitted that passages in his wife Joyce Hatto's publicly released recordings were "plagiarized" in a (successful) effort to improve their quality. The twist here is that Barrington-Coupe says he did it, and without his wife's knowledge. He says he wanted to promote the illusion that Hatto was finally being recognized for her excellence at the end of a long career.
Gramophone magazine has broken the story, and it's really the stuff of art:
Although she kept up a rigorous practice regime, Barrington-Coupe says that Hatto was suffering more than she admitted, even to herself. Recording session after recording session was marred by her many grunts of pain as she played, and her husband was at a loss to know how to cover the problem passages.
Until, that is, he remembered the story of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf covering the high notes for Kirsten Flagstad in the famous EMI recording of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde." Surely something similar could apply here, he reasoned. He began searching for pianists whose sound and style were similar to that of his wife, and once he had found them he would insert small patches of their recordings to cover his wife's grunts.
Ah, but of course "what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive." Soon the well-meaning widow was replacing whole blocks of Hatto's playing, it appears, and now there are calls for him to reveal just how much was replaced and with what exactly. A sad story, but also operatic.
The new issue of the London Review of Books has a great piece of criticism by the consistently excellent Michael Wood, about Richard Powers and his latest novel, "Echo Maker," winner of last year's National Book Award on this side of the pond. In Wood's view, none of Powers's previous novels, and there are quite a number, "quite manages the extraordinary patience and tough compassion of 'The Echo Maker.'" Wood characterizes Powers's work extremely well, and identifies his central theme as the nature of human identity, especially as distinct from the thinking capacity -- you might say the soul -- of new machines.
At the end of "Galatea 2.2" the Richard Powers figure decides he has stumbled into 'any number of public inventions': 'That we could fit time into a continuous story. That we could teach a machine to speak. That we might care what it would say ... That someone else’s prison-bar picture might spring you. That we could love more than once. That we could know what once means.'
This passage, and Wood's entire review-essay, calls to mind a central theme of Larry McMurtry's delightful short memoir "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen." McMurtry, author of course of "Lonesome Dove" and "Terms of Endearment" and the screen adaptation of "Brokeback Mountain," underwent bypass surgery some years ago and now feels that with machines both breathing for him and pumping his blood, he lost in some crucial sense the persistence of identity over time. Am I the same person who stopped breathing hours ago? He didn't feel he was, and thought, in Powers's words, that such a thing would be a "public invention" -- "[t]hat we could fit time into a continuous story."
The blog of the Institute for the Future of the Book notes a very interesting interview with one of computer science and consumer computers' old hands, Alan Kay. He was the leader of the group that invented the graphical user interface, found on all PCs, and ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet. He also was or is a fellow at Apple, HP, and Disney. In the words of the interviewer, "He says the push to make PCs easy to use has also made them less useful; their popularity has stunted their potential." This is a consistent and I believe correct view of television, but I haven't seen it applied to computers; most people, for instance Steve Jobs, think computers aren't intuitive enough to use right away, and have based their business models or programming energy on ease of use.
In one sense, though, Kay is a backer of au courant tech thinking. The future will be, he says, collective uses of computing power and people power, a la Wikipedia but with more leadership and organization. Describing the environment in computer science in the '60s, he says:
If computing was going to amount to anything, it should be an amplifier of the collective intelligence of groups. But [computer scientist Doug] Engelbart pointed out that most organizations don't really know what they know, and are poor at transmitting new ideas and new plans in a way that's understandable. Organizations are mostly organized around their current goals. Some organizations have a part that tries to improve the process for attaining current goals. But very few organizations improve the process of figuring out what the goals should be.
Sounds a bit like the places I've studied and worked.
Yesterday saw the launch of WordSource, a new online dictionary that incorporates crowdsourcing: Users can rate words (?!), upload photos, add tags, and so forth. You can look up words by typing them into the address bar of your browser. Intrigued, I looked up "metempsychosis" by visiting http://word.sc/metempsychosis.
Now, it might be a fine idea to add a social element to an online dictionary. But WordSource's "tagging" function is just silly. It permits users to tag any term with a preselected phrase, including:
I failed my English test when I spelled this word wrong.
This is the perfect word in my eyes!
I love the arrangement of letters in this word.
Quite frankly, this word bores me!
Yech, why bother? The idea seems to be to create the MySpace version of a dictionary. Just what the world needs.
For the sake of experiment, I tagged "metempsychosis" with the pre-selected phrase "This word is always on my mind." (I'm guessing nobody else will do that.) And I created a hangman game. I also uploaded a photo -- I was urged to use a photo of a person, and to include the word "WordSource" in the photo -- of my puppy. If it shows up on the page later today, we can officially close the book on this silly experiment.
Josh, I came across a rant by a classics professors today that chimes well with that bibliophile blogger's observation about "Ghost Rider." Undergraduates, he complained, may read (sometimes) -- but they're ignorant about books as physical objects:
They ... believe that something printed in 1865 or 1945 is "really old" (I wish I had a florin for every student who has said like words to me in breathless astonishment while holding some frankly unremarkable volume from [the library's] stacks as though it were a Hittite tablet) ...
Speaking of "Ghost Rider," Tom Nealon, proprietor of Pazzo Books in Roslindale, has an amusing post today on the bookstore's blog about the movie.
I mentioned earlier today that Johnny Blaze, the movie's hero, is morbidly obsessed with books about black magic. Nealon, an expert in rare books, writes of the books Blaze is shown reading:
There was an "ancient" tome -- presumably meant to be 16th or 17th century -- except that it was in a very typical turn of the (20th) century binding used for encyclopedias and religious reference works. A large ornate binding was panned past that I would swear was from about 1950.... Not one book appeared to be from the 17th century -- the golden age of witchcraft and satanism -- and the engravings that they showed all looked to reprinted on 20th century paper.
"Ghost Rider" had a $120 million budget, one hears. Sounds like they spent about $120 on the books.
Although I'm a (mostly former) cellist, I don't have too much to say here. Except that the performance of Ravel is shockingly good. The harmonizing when the motif returns might be the best part. Two bows! The guy from around the back deserves kudos for bowing and fingering under conditions of obstruction. The prinicipal performer maintains his concentration awfully well, too, and can really play.
I saw "Ghost Rider" last night, in which we learn that Johnny Blaze, a stunt cyclist morbidly obsessed with books about black magic and diabolicalism (for obvious reasons) was obsessive-compulsive even before he sold his soul. In one scene, Eva Mendes reminds him that, when they were teens, he once spent a $10 roll of quarters in a photobooth. Which reminded me of Babbette Hines, editor of the excellent found-photo/found-document books "Photobooth" and "Love Letters, Lost" -- I wrote about the latter book for Ideas.
Hines is also proprietor of Found:photo gallery in Los Angeles. The gallery specializes in one-of-a-kind vintage "vernacular photography," i.e., snapshots. Every once in a while, Found:photo mounts a themed exhibition of its snapshots. These collections are mesmerizing -- they reveal something about the collective unconscious (ever since the amateur camera was invented, we've used it to photograph naked women, Christmas scenes, people holding cameras, and -- oddly enough -- people watching TV), and at the same time they're gorgeous.
"I Do My Thing And You Do Your Thing," from thefoundphoto.com
Walter Benjamin claimed that the act of collecting rescued objects from the mercenary world of exchange and bestowed upon them an almost magical significance; this is certainly true of the photos in "Shh, I'm sleeping," for example, which range from a 1940s silver gelatin print of a child asleep in a highchair to a 1970s snapshot of a young man napping in what looks like a dorm room.
This week, Found:photo unveils its latest themed exhibition: "Pet Love." A must-see.
UPDATE: A reader sends a link to this website dedicated to vintage snapshots of pit bulls.
Not surprisingly, William Logan's harsh assessment of Hart Crane, in his recent review of the new edition of Crane's Collected Poems, elicited a flurry of angry letters to the Times Book Review this weekend.
Writing of "The Bridge," for instance, Logan had offered this dismissal:
Much of "The Bridge" seems inert now -- overlong, overbearing, overwrought, a Myth of America conceived by Tiffany and executed by Disney.
A trio of letter writers came to Crane's defense in this week's Review. One, Warner Berthoff, professor emeritus of English and American literature at Harvard, wrote:
Whom shall we pay attention to? Robert Lowell, who spoke of Hart Crane as "the great poet" of his American generation and "at the center of things the way no other poet was"? Yvor Winters, who wrote that he "would gladly emulate Odysseus and go down to the shadows for another hour's conversation with Crane on the subject of poetry"? Or William Logan, whose disparagement disfigured your pages in reviewing the Library of America edition of Crane’s poems and letters?
All three letters are worth a read, and though it's likely just a coincidence and nothing more, note that all three Crane defenders are from Greater Boston. If the Brooklyn Bridge crowd can't be entrusted with Crane's legacy, it's the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge folks to the rescue!
Geoff Edgers continues to write about the case of the evidently "plagiarizing" pianist, Joyce Hatto, over on the Globe's Exhibitionist blog. But the bizarre situation raises so many questions -- about classical-music criticism in particular, about the influence of "human interest" detail on critical judgment in general -- that extends well into Ideas territory, too.
If this is the first you've heard of Hatto, or even if it isn't, this piece by Denis Dutton -- the man behind Arts & Letters Daily and a professor of aesthetics at the University of Canterbury -- in the Times today is a must-read.
Brainiac has registered its fascination with Second Life before. It's an online virtual world that increasingly mimics ordinary life -- more accurately ordinary American society -- with the major caveat that the "people" are custom-made by the real people at their computers, and are thus better-looking and better all around. There are speeches by Internet gurus and other bigwigs like logorrheic judge Richard Posner. There's a local currency that is bought and sold online for real dollars. There are malls and billboards where real multinational corporations buy ads and sell their wares.
It's uncanny.
Now Second Life, somewhat surprisingly for a utopic world of American origin, has developed a vibrant and radical political life. As I found out on 3 Quarks Daily, January brought a protest that turned into an all-out riot, almost rapturously described on certain blogs:
And so it raged, a ponderous and dreamlike conflict of machine guns, sirens, police cars, "rez cages" (which can trap an unsuspecting avatar), explosions, and flickering holograms of marijuana leaves and kids' TV characters, and more. By California time, the battles often culminated at 2am, 3am, and even later into the small hours of the American clock, when Residents in Europe are most active. So amid the exchange of salvos, the chat log was choked over with pro and anti-Le Pen curses, most in French. And when the lag was not too overwhelming to stream audio, the whole fracas was accompanied by bursts of European techno.
The target of the demonstration, as you might have guessed, was far-right French politican Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National party, which strangely maintains a Second Life headquarters. Vive la revolution.
Some of Morris's funniest lines: At 8:39, he said of Ellen DeGeneres, "This woman is the perfect host for the year 'Little Miss Sunshine' will win." (I read that as a left-handed compliment.) At 9:37 -- "Leo and Gore. A boy and his middle-aged robot." At 10:49 -- "What is this 'new' song, and why is Celine Dion singing it? If it's a Morricone tune, my apologies. But it sounds like what Katarina Witt would've skated to during her 'Champions on Ice' program."
At 12:02 -- "Forest Whitaker ... saved his most coherent speech for last. Although, that raised arm at the end was totally Idi Amin." At 12:19 -- "I like that a bald Jack Nicholson and super-svelte, reliably batty Diane Keaton made the [Best Picture award] announcement: They looked like a really chic Fester and Morticia."
Good stuff! Hope he gets to take the day off, today.
Last night's Oscars, which lacked the dramatic moments of some past years, highlighted in brief snippets the work of what is called the Foley artist, after an early practitioner, Jack Foley. Even in an age of digital editing on Avid or Apple and computer-generated imagery (CGI), movies still rely on old-school technicians who generate enhanced sound for movies, after filming, using tools of the trade, like shoes on their hands, "thunder sheets," and dead leaves for crinkling noises.
Foley art was shown during brief clips of the sound editing and sound mixing nominees and were given their 15 minutes in a performance of a so-called sound effects choir, which did it all by mouth and microphone.
Here's an interview with a Foley artist who contracts with televised wrestling. After being struck with a piece of aluminum siding by a neighbor from a halfway house, this guy decided that should be the sound of a body-slammed wrassler hitting the canvas. And so it was.
Moving on from the Generation Jones vs. Generation Obama question, here's another moniker debate for you.
Over at Slate, Marisa Meltzer takes a look at slacker movies from last year (Clerks 2, Mutual Appreciation, The Puffy Chair), and makes a very important point about how, in these and other cinematic tributes to slackerdom, "if male slackers are stuck in a permanent state of adolescence, all deep thoughts and long talks and sleeping in, then women are agents of growing up and getting a grip, two things that could harsh any slacker's mellow." So true, and so unfair!
Even more importantly, Meltzer addresses the philosophical question of what slacking is all about:
Being a slacker isn't actually about underachievement. Slacking is about a different standard of achievement, eschewing corporate work to follow your passion, however obscure or lacking in formation. If what you really want to do is go on tour with your band Hey, That's My Bike!, or spend time in coffee shops making collages for your conceptual zine about Barbie, slacking reminds us that those are valuable pursuits.
I couldn't agree more. In fact, I once penned an entire "Idler's Glossary" in order to make the same point. In doing so, however, I decided that -- despite Richard Linklater's noble effort to redeem the term "slacker," I preferred the term "idler." I mean, we do need to distinguish between the underachiever and the alt.achiever, right? So I use "slacker" for the former and "idler" for the latter.
As I put it in the "Glossary," paraphrasing something Oscar Wilde said about Taoism:
Unlike the idler, in whom work and leisure have combined to become something fine, the slacker remains unhappily trapped in that dichotomy.
Meltzer is aware that slackers are prone to being unhappily trapped in this dichotomy, and points out several lame attempts to resolve the tension in these movies. She concludes:
If these movies are meant to celebrate slacking, why must the slackers always give it up at the end? Sure, everyone likes a character arc, but there are many ways to be an adult between the extremes of the wake-and-bake and the morning commute.... After two decades of slackers on film, the genre hasn't grown up -- it's just moved to Brooklyn.
Again, great point. But maybe the problem is that these movies aren't about idlers. They really are about slackers. Has a great movie been made about idlers? Sure, the French New Wave directors made several. Richard Linklater's entire oeuvre (including School of Rock) is about idlers. Perhaps Meltzer is looking for idlers in all the wrong places.
Readers who wish to suggest idler movies, or defend the moniker "slacker," please get in touch.
Early humans had a few specific utterances, from howls to grunts, that became associated with specific objects. Crucially, these associations formed when information transfer was beneficial for both speaker and listener. And in this way, the evolution of cooperation was crucial for language to evolve.
But this theory has been impossible to prove....
Until now, although proof is still a strong word. Enter an experiment involve robots with self-improving software for brains:
The breeding robots ... forage in a virtual environment containing "food" and "poison" sources that could only be told apart at close range.
Theoretically, the efficiency of food foraging could be increased if the robots transmitted information to one another about the location of poison but in the case of food, there is a downside to announcing finds because rival robots could then compete for the same resource.
...
The team found that communication evolves rapidly when [robot] colonies contain genetically similar (related) individuals, or when evolutionary selection pressure works primarily on the "group" level.
Crooked Timber picks upan Irish Times story that the tech firm Sandisk, which quite possibly made the memory card in your digital camera or the memory expansion chip in your computer, is avoiding paying millions in US corporate tax by funneling their profits through their Irish office. From the Irish Times: "By accounting for such revenues in Ireland, they take advantage of the 12.5 per cent rate of corporate taxation on their profits, a rate that compares favourably with other EU states and the US." Crooked Timber adds:
The US is pretty vigorous about reclaiming taxes from citizens living abroad, but has been curiously supine in its attitude to the various schemes that US companies have come up with to relocate revenues outside the taxman’s grasp.
A commenter there adds that Microsoft is also remarkably adept at this, to the tune of depriving Uncle Sam of half a billion dollars a year. (I can't confirm that.)
This phenomenon is well-documented in a book called "Offshore," which pays special attention to the notorious shelter that is the Cayman Islands. There one can find shell companies that consist solely of a PO box and are untraceable due to lax local banking laws, but that are probably tax dodges for prominent multinational companies.
The Times, in a piece that got an A1 ride yesterday, takes up, once again, the tale of the gyroball, which, as I've noted before in this space, Ideas was on to long before Dice-K was a household name. A time that a lot of Sox fans, thoroughly bored by the blanket coverage Matsuzaka has received before ever throwing a pitch in a game, now remember fondly.
The Times piece adds something to our understanding of the pitch in that it's the first piece I've read that interviews Kazushi Tezuka, who the Times credits with inventing the gyroball. (Ideas caught up with Ryutaro Himeno, who co-authored, with Tezuka, the book that set the gyroball story in motion.)
But there's still a lot that's puzzling about this story, and I'm still not convinced we have a game-changing pitch on our hands here. The Times piece has some nifty diagrams showing how the gyroball spins (i.e., like a football), and a description of Tezuka throwing gyros in Scottsdale, Ariz. But take a look at that description:
The pitch started on the same course as a changeup, but it barely dipped. It looked like a slider, but it did not break. The gyroball, despite its zany name, is supposed to stay perfectly straight.
“That’s it!” Tezuka said, laughing hysterically on the mound. “That’s the gyro!”
Tezuka seems to think the pitch works in part thanks to the element of surprise, but I can't get over the fact that what he's describing is a not-very-fast pitch with no movement. I believe we already know about that kind of pitch, and even have a name for it: the gopher ball.
I've seen these tasteless jokes around Boston, but a friend sends a photo from Washington, DC, where this image was pasted to a building:
If only the cops in New York, or at least Philadelphia, would blow up something obviously harmless, so Bostonians could start feeling better! In other Mooninite-related news, objects that were, at first, worrisome -- but upon closer inspection were (one might imagine) obviously not bombs -- continue to be detonated by police, in Santa Fe and a town in Ireland, reports Boing Boing. Santa Fe... nope, doesn't make me feel any better.
John Brownlee, of the Wired magazine blog Table of Malcontents, opined this morning about why this sort of thing keeps happening:
One of the problems with escalating law enforcement (and, particularly, escalating SWAT style law enforcement) is that these groups are created in small towns that don't need them out of a sense of paranoia and then find themselves constantly having to justify their funding. That's the reason you have SWAT teams kicking in the doors of high schools and aiming their rifles at kids heads for petty drug busts. That's why you have bomb squads exploding a purse found on a subway platform. And that's what caused the entire city of Boston to panic in the face of a coordinated Mooninite attack of Lite-Brites.
Ideas editor Wen Stephenson points out that generational signposts and touchstone figures or idols are usually not in fact the exact contemporaries of the generation they shape: the heroes are older.
Speaking for myself, a '75 baby, the folks who have had major cultural impact among my peers were the "Friends" (now in their early 40s), the Seinfeld gang (a bit older), the Simpsons creator (53), Dave Eggers (six years older, but especially popular with those who are/were about 10 years younger than he), the Brat Pack (mid-40s, as Josh pointed out), Yo-Yo Ma (a personal favorite, 51), Springsteen (57!), Conan O'Brien (43), "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (would you believe Judge Reinhold is 49?). You get the point.
As Wen said, Obama was past college when the Brat Pack flicks came out; he wasn't the target audience at all, especially since the film was so self-consciously about the '80s teenager.
Moreover, as Josh briefly noted, the concept of a generation is pretty hazy and questionable. People are born continuously, and they are each affected by cultural or political events and people slightly differently but also in much the same way. In my own example, Watergate was huge whether you were 25 or 55 at the time. So maybe we should be looking at the people Obama himself actually idolized or defined himself against. Now that would be instructive. Let's ask him that, not "boxers or briefs."
I've received an impassioned missive from Brainiac reader James A. about the generation born between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s. It's not impossible that James A. is a "sock puppet" for the author of a forthcoming book on Generation Jones, but here's the letter:
Obama's generation already has a name, a name that is already quite well-established: Generation Jones. I realize that you mentioned GenJones in your article, but only with a passing reference, while also mentioning "Generation Obama," "The Brat Pack Generation," and "The Repo Man Generation," as if all four of these monikers are used to describe this cohort. But the reality is that the latter three monikers are basically never used to describe this generation, while Generation Jones is a term that has been used frequently in major media, in hundreds of newspaper/magazine/TV/radio pieces about this heretofore lost generation between the Boomers and Xers.
Generation Jones is already a household term in many Western European countries, and is fast becoming that in the States. I just recently came upon more examples of the speed with which Genration Jones is becoming an entrenched part of our vocabulary: from the bible of demography -- American Demographics Magazine -- devoting a cover story to GenJones, to the many references to GenJones, by name, I've encountered, made by top political, business, and entertainment leaders. My sense is that within the next several months, bolstered by the major media book tour I heard about in a recent radio interview with Jonathon Pontel (about his soon-to-be-released book "Generation Jones"), that Generation Jones will be a household term in the States as well.
The reason I'm going on so long about this, is that I'm a GenJoneser, and like many others in my age group that I've discussed this with, I'm damn glad that my generation finally has a label that stuck, along with a growing consciousness of what it means to be a Joneser. Obama could be the first GenJones President, and that is exciting for many of us in his generation.
OK, I'll bite: What's the GenJones worldview? What would a GenJones president do differently than a boomer president? We need answers.
Now for something completely different. If you like little psych experiments, you'd be wise to listen good. Literally.
Someone in Norway -- perhaps a science researcher but it's hard to tell in Norwegian -- has posted a video online that illustrates the so-called McGurk Effect (funny name). The effect is in essence an interaction between vision and hearing that takes place beneath the perceiver's consciousness. We are all, it seems, reading lips when someone talks to us.
Watch the man in the video (very Norwegian looking, by the way) make the same sound repeatedly and try to identify the sound; is it "da" or "ba" or "ga"? Midway through, close your eyes or look away. The sound is suddenly different, and crystal clear.
Another video of the same phenomenon, even more dramatic, is here.
Wow, that's quite a line from Yglesias, but an even more remarkable one from LSS. Throwing a rock through the window is quite the violent and strangely evocative sexual metaphor.
It's also, I think, very misguided and dated. The image calls to mind the old saw, said by grand dames in '50s movies to women engaging in premarital sex, "Are you going to have him buy the cow, or are you going to keep giving away the milk for free?" That image of sex as the sacred property of the woman is off-putting, to me, but not as off-putting as Stepp's image of sex as a form of lasting damage. (Yes, you can fix a broken window, but Stepp seems to regard it as a scar on the shiny new house, forever to be regretted.)
I must admit that in my conservative -- or perhaps it's romantic -- soul, it worries me to see acts of intimacy conceived of by "the young these days" as, ya know, no big deal. Much has been made of the casual performance of oral sex among teenagers. Caitlin Flanagan wrote a somewhat flippant but concerned article about this, and a blogger named Sara Nelson had a perceptive comment, in the course of a longer discussion about sex: "Yes, her daughter is more likely to [give oral sex] in high school than she was -- but she's also much much more likely to receive it."
Perhaps Stepp would call that mutual prostitution. And a part of me half agrees. But it's certainly not an act of exploitation, as Stepp seems to believe.
Evan, I haven't read the Sessions Stepp book, but one line from it, plucked from a review in the Washington Post, seems to have caught everyone's attention. Addressing young women, she writes:
Your body is your property. . . . Think about the first home you hope to own. You wouldn't want someone to throw a rock through the front window, would you?
Your body is your property. Think about the first home you hope to own. You want to have a big party and invite all your friends over.
Other riffs, by other bloggers, were less printable.
I'm not sure Meghan O'Rourke added anything to the debate, in Slate. I don't have any great answers myself, but neither "What's wrong with lots of random hook-ups?" nor "Barricade your house till you're married -- even if you get married at 40," quite seem like the message I'd want to send my hypothetical daughter, or my non-hypothetical son.
*I think the blogger I link to may be quoting from an actual conversation with Yglesias. Anway, can't find the quote on his blog.
In the cyclical world that is the issue of the romantic and sexual climate in the US, another entry -- and perhaps just another (attempted) swing of the pendulum: WaPo staff writer Laura Sessions Stepp, whose name unfortunately already has an Emily Post-ish schoolmarm ring, has written an alarm-sounding book about the "hookup culture" of kids today called "Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both." Stepp sees college students hanging out in packs, forgoing the intimacy of dates or one-on-one conversations, and then hopping in the sack, usually after a night of drinking.
Meghan O'Rourke has written a mostly negative piece for Slate on the book called, edgily but also charmingly, "In Defense of 'Loose' Women." O'Rourke has a subtle analysis, but you could reduce her thesis to "what's wrong with hooking up?" She sees a generation that finally views work and achievement as more important than romance, and therefore more likely to keep a hookup or a sexual hang-up in perspective.
Relationships have been replaced by the casual sexual encounters known as hookups. Love, while desired by some, is being put on hold or seen as impossible. Some girls can handle this; others … are exhausted physically, emotionally and spiritually by it.
Klein's riposte: "Doesn't that also describe...relationships?" One of his commenters clearly isn't hip to Stepp's tsk tsks, either: "Is there really a pervasive 'hook up culture'? I guess I missed it by 10 years. Damn '90s...."
I got a few angry letters last year, when I challenged Time magazine's claim, in a major Time cover story, that the debate over global warming was over. Certainly, I wrote, the consensus leans toward the view that humans are causing global warming, and it will have significant negative effects. But there are still a few major meteorologists and climatologists out there who dispute their peers' findings. I, like most journalists, wrestle with the question of how to make use of this small minority: If we quote people like MIT's Richard Lindzen in every story about global warming, does that give them a voice disproportionate to their numbers? (The Globe's Alex Beam highlighted Lindzen's views in this recent column.)
So I'm hardly one to quash debate. But the conservative National Review's new blog, Planet Gore -- it launched last week -- is an embarrassment to the cause of global-warming skepticism. (Some contributors to the blog are outright skeptics of many of the claims by scientists about global warming and its effects; others appear to accept them but think more scientific research, not conservation or economic regulation, is the proper response.) Here's the mission statement:
NRO [National Review Online} has gathered a team of experts to report and comment on the myriad scientific and economic issues surrounding the global warming debate. So check back regularly for informed news and views about climate change, alternative energy, environmental activism, and of course, Al Gore's carbon footprint.
So far I count six contributors on the blog -- none of whose credentials appear to be provided on the Web site. So I did some Googling. Here's whom NRO has tapped for their expertise:
1. The online editor of National Review.
2. A "Web manager and blogger" from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a pro-free-market think tank.
3. A senior fellow at the Discovery Institute (best known for its work in defense of creationism), with a Ph.D. from the Princeton Theological Seminary.
4. An English "expat businessman," who writes a popular economics blog.
5. A senior fellow at the C.E.I., with a BA from Oxford, an MBA from the University of London, and a "Diploma of Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine." (I'm not sure what this last is.)
6. A resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, with a doctorate in environmental science from UCLA and a c.v. filled with stints at pro-free-market think tanks.
I'll correct those descriptions if NRO decides to post more information. Everyone is reasonably smart and witty, and at least three of the bloggers appear to be have knowledge of economics and statistics, which is certainly relevant. But really: Not one climatologist or meteorologist? No one thought to call, say, a chemist who studies the issues involved?
Compare the above credentials with those of the contributors to Realclimate.org, whose views are more in line with Al Gore's.
I'd love to read a blog co-written by Lindzen and William Gray, of Colorado State, two of the best-known, best-credentialed dissenters from the global-warming CW. But NRO's contribution to the debate, so far, is awfully, awfully feeble.
[Credit: I learned of Planet Gore via Best of Both Worlds, whose author raises an eyebrow at the presence of the theologian from the Discovery Institute.]
UPDATE: I've added links to Planet Gore and its mission statement, which I failed to include the first time around.
In the ongoing battles over copyright in an age when dissemination is impossible to control -- a favorite topic of mine, Brainiac readers know -- another interesting frontier: the world of Japanese anime cartoons. According to a blog post by media and pop culture theorist Henry Jenkins, one anime outfit in Japan is choosing not to run scared from viewer trading nor sue copyright violators, but instead to capitalize on the international spread of videos whose subtitles have been supplied by fans ("fansubs"). They encourage the viral marketing and inject their own urging to support the commercial release of the products into the pumping bloodstream.
Jenkins notes that Bostonians can look forward to a conference at MIT beginning Feb. 28 called Cool Japan, where anime fans will be very much at home. Also worth noting: Thoughtcast interviews Jenkins and tells us that he will be speaking at another MIT conference this Saturday called Beyond Broadcast, subtitled From Participatory Technology to Participatory Democracy. Sounds like my bag, anyway.
Thanks to ThoughtCast for including Brainiac among the favorite links.
One sorta helpful resource, for those of us -- including Peter Canellos -- who can't call to mind many US politicians on the national stage born from the mid-1950s through the mid-'60s is the website The Political Graveyard. Oddly enough, they haven't updated Obama's profile since 2004; and at that time, they didn't seem to know his date of birth. So although he's in the database, he doesn't show up on the 1961 page. (Mary Bono does, though.) So, like I said, it's sorta helpful. Let me know if there's a better resource out there.
As I mentioned in last Sunday's Word column, it was Jon Stewart's report on the Lisa Nowak incident -- with its multiple uses of diapers in a context that sounded singular -- that got me wondering about the status of the word. I e-mailed lexicographer Ben Zimmer for help untangling the singular/plural possibilities of diapers, and boy, did he answer the call.
Zimmer's oldest example (so far) of singular diapers dates from a 1915 infant-care book, which uses "dry diapers" to mean "a dry diaper": "Directly before the nursing or feeding time it [the baby] should be put in dry diapers and properly powdered."
And "pair of diapers" appears by 1930: "We wish that when the New Year is welcomed into Wisconsin that they'll give the poor little tyke something besides a pair of diapers."
James Michael Curley, Harold Ickes, and the comic strips "L'il Abner" and "Moon Mullins" also supply important evidence. Who'd have thought there was so much to discover in diapers?
Speaking of Obama's youth, Chris and I have been talking, off Brainiac, about whether Obama is too young to run for POTUS and win, or, more to the point, too young to serve. Bill Clinton was actually younger than Obama will be by election day when he took office. And John F. Kennedy was younger still in 1961.
But the issue with Obama, as I see it, is his inexperience. Nicholas Lemann wrote that George W. Bush has what might be the thinnest resume of any president in history, including those who served long before politician was a career choice. But foreign policy is even more of a hornet's nest than when GWB appeared, and I wonder if voters will entrust the path of a nation at war to a fortysomething.
That said, look at a list of 2008 presidential candidates ranked by age, oldest to youngest. Perhaps this is my youth showing, but I would say, even striving for objectivity, that the only serious candidate in the first half is McCain. Everyone else is young enough to have missed World War II entirely. The Un-Greatest Generation Strikes Back.
As I think about comics/comical actors born into Generation Obama, I find myself dividing up even that thinly sliced demographic cohort into smaller groups. (PS: I realize that I'm not strictly sticking to a particular set of years in these various posts. Like I said, generational diviniation is more of an art than a science.) Over-generalizing doesn't begin to describe what I'm about to say, but I'll bite the bullet. We've got to respond to Canellos's challenge!
Comics born between 1952-59: Jerry Seinfeld, Dan Aykroyd, John Goodman, Roseanne Barr, Matt Groening, Rick Moranis, Howard Stern, Sandra Bernhard, Dana Carvey, Whoopi Goldberg, Gilbert Gottfried, Kelsey Grammer, Fran Drescher, Denis Leary, Jon Lovitz, Ray Romano, Drew Carey, Bernie Mac, Tom Arnold, Tracey Ullman, and Weird Al Yankovic. It strikes me that theirs is an angry, edgy, sarcastic, often nihilistic humor. These comics are satirists who believe that progressive social change is necessary, but -- unlike their kookier, cuddlier boomer comic elders (Cheech Marin, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Ted Danson, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Jay Leno) -- they don't believe their satire can contribute to that change; they don't seem comfortable, finally, with being comedians. Among the many things preventing progressive change, they seem to believe, is humor itself, which is perhaps why many of them favor the deadpan, even stoneface style: Weird Al and Aykroyd and Romano and Seinfeld are prime examples, as are Kelsey Grammer and Bebe Neuwirth, who of course played an absolutely stone-faced duo on "Cheers."
Ellen Degeneres is the odd woman out -- she seems much more like a cuddly boomer. Hard to imagine these others with a daytime talk show.
Comics born between 1960-64, on the other hand, practice slacker comedy. This is the comedy of those who -- schooled in the scorn of "Saturday Night Live" and Howard Stern, really don’t believe that progressive social change is possible. Theirs is the free-floating, all-consuming, air-quote irony that Generation X was accused of; in fact, these 1960-64s are the original and true Generation X. (Douglas Coupland, author of the novel of that title which branded everyone born after 1965, was born in 1961; Coupland lifted it from the punk band fronted by Billy Idol, born in 1955.) The comedy of Steve Carell, Mike Myers, Jim Carrey, Conan O'Brien, Eddie Murphy, Amy Sedaris, Damon Wayans, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Mike Judge, Craig Kilborn, Greg Kinnear, Lisa Kudrow, Norm MacDonald, Hank Azaria, John Leguizamo, Rob Schneider, Yeardley Smith, and David Spade is perfectly suited to the Bush era, a time when progressives have been marginalized, rendered politically impotent, branded as traitorous. It's simultaneously vulgar and aestheticist, politicized and apathetic. Unlike the previous group, these comics don't seem like resentful children or younger siblings; they seem like the prematurely sophisticated only children of broken homes. They're sophisticated savages, latchkey kids raised by TV. They really do have love to give, to paraphrase a line from "Magnolia," a movie studded with Generation Obama actors, but they just don't know where to put it.
Jon Stewart, David Cross, and Janeane Garofalo (all from the latter group) are a different story. I think... But anyway, I went way, way out on a limb here. Still, I'm going to put this theory out there. Email me with constructive criticism, friends.
Some Brainaic readers want to know why I've compared Barack Obama to Hollywood celebs. Jim M. writes:
So you're really good at naming people who where born in the early '60s. What does this have to do with politics and how can you compare Obama to the likes of Sean Penn and Emilio Estevez. I don't think they went to Columbia/Harvard Law or spent years working in poor neighborhoods.
Julie M. (no relation) writes:
As someone born in that era I've long argued that the label "baby boomer" did not apply to myself and my peers.... We came of age in a very different atmosphere, one that was more cynical and self-absorbed. What I think is unfortunate is that among the many figures you cite as examples of this post-boomer generation, all of them are actors. Other than Obama, you fail to mention anyone involved in politics, academia or literature.
First, I should say that this business of naming and defining generations is a pseudo-science at best, more of a parlor game than a sociological project. That said, on with the show. As you'll recall, in my post I was picking up on Peter Canellos's acute observation that if we understood Obama's generational touchstones better, we might understand better what kind of president he'd be. One way to understand Bill Clinton's politics is to view him as a product of the Sixties, suggests Canellos; George W. Bush's politics, inversely, can be thought of as part of the neoconservative reaction against the Sixties.
The Sixties, as we know them, are part history, part generational attitudes and worldview, and in no small part pop culture. (Chris Shea points out the importance of that Fleetwood Mac song to Clinton's campaign.) I was obviously focusing on the pop culture, partly for comic effect. But Canellos, who I'm pretty sure is part of Obama's generation, says it's hard to know what to say about those Americans born between, let's say, 1954 and 1965:
Just what these touchstones comprise in political values and impulses is still undefined, partly because so few politicians born after the first years of the baby boom have been on the national stage. Political dialogue has so often contrasted the quiet commitment of the World War II generation with the self-referential baby boomers that a voter could easily assume that no other perspective exists besides Greatest Generation stoicism and Me Generation bravado.
This suggests that Generation Obama is a new Silent Generation -- you know, the generation between the Greatest Generation and the boomers who've never had one of their number in the White House. We don't know anything about them; they've toiled in obscurity. Chris Shea suggests that musicians born in those years are "anti-boomers" -- a negative definition, but still something. I'm born too late to be in Generation Obama, so let's hear from you readers born in the late '50s and early '60s. What's it like to be you?
I had a psychology professor in college who taught a hugely popular lecture. On day one, he gave the lie to the widely expressed claim -- delivered while looking down the nose -- that psych is the study of the intuitively obvious. In one example after another, he shot down the class's vote in answer to a given question by explaining a study that demonstrated the opposite. It was impressive.
Add this study to the list: according to new research, it seems that women are drawn to men who are attractive (duh) and men who have high status professionally and financially (duh), but not to men who have both in spades. The researchers' suggestion is that the guy who has it all is viewed by women as "likely to pursue a mating strategy rather than parenting strategy."
When I think "baby boom," pop musically speaking, I think of '60's-era rock and soul, depending on the demographics, and strong nostalgia today for same. (I heard Bob Edwards the other weekend interviewing David Crosby, ecstatically quizzing him about the California folk scene 40 years ago -- a classic instance.) You could throw into the mix '70s classic rock: Think of Clinton and his theme song "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." In contrast, these musicians, in their various subgenres, strike me as anti-boomers:
Bob Mould, Husker Du (1960), Paul Westerberg, the Replacements (1959), Morrissey, the Smiths (1959), Michael Stipe, R.E.M. (1960), James Hetfield, Metallica (1963), Tom Araya, Slayer (1961), Chuck D. and Professor Griff, Public Enemy (both 1960).
Eric F., a Brainiac reader born in 1961, writes to remind us not to forget those athletes who also might have served as touchstones for those born within five years of Barack Obama. He writes:
Here's a Hall of fame-type sampling, with a Boston slant, from the "Obama era." Basketball: Larry Bird [1956], Magic Johnson [1959], Patrick Ewing [1962], Michael Jordan [1963]. Baseball: Roger Clemens [1962]. Football: John Elway [1960]; Lawrence Taylor and Patriots' own Andre Tippett [both 1959]. And Bruins Hall-of-Famer Ray Bourque: [1960]. Not sure if it signifies some cluster representing the "golden age of sports", or just a coincidence, but it sure seemed like it to me at the time.
Thanks, Eric. Does anyone want to go deeper and offer a hypothesis about what qualities of character, say, or athletic intelligence, or joi de vivre these athletes may have shared? Can we derive any insights into Generation O from this list? Keep those emails coming, readers!
Barack Obama's bid to capture the Democratic presidential nomination has been hyped in the media as a story about race. But in a perceptive National Perspective column today, Peter Canellos, the Globe's Washington bureau chief, pointed out that "much of what's striking about Obama's campaign ... can be better read in generational, rather than racial, terms."
Canellos points out that although Obama, who was born in 1961, is "technically a baby boomer, one of the last of the breed," his "cultural guideposts" are markedly different from the boomers'. I agree with the latter comment, but I'd take Canellos's argument to the next level: Barack Obama is not a baby boomer at all.
The "baby boom" label was applied to all Americans born between 1946 and 1962, because these dates bracket a period of unusually high birthrates. But a generation is not simply an age bracket: History, attitudes, behavior, and self-identification are also a factor. And when you think about Americans born in the 5 or 6 years following, say, 1959, it's impossible to lump them in with the boomers. (NB: I was born in the late '60s, so I'm not talking about my own generation. I'm defending the generational integrity of my immediate elders.)
Canellos writes: "Obama, for all his uniqueness, has shared with everyone his age a certain set of touchstones, and a certain view of society. Just what those touchstones comprise in political values and impulses is still undefined...." Brainiac readers, let's take a first step toward such a definition by recalling certain aspects of the pop culture of Obama's formative years.
Consider, for example, the Brat Pack, who appeared together in one teen-oriented film -- "Class," "Sixteen Candles," "The Breakfast Club," "St. Elmo's Fire," "Pretty in Pink" -- after another in the mid-'80s. Emilio Estevez (1962), Rob Lowe (1964), Andrew McCarthy (1962), Demi Moore (1962), Judd Nelson (1959), and Ally Sheedy (1962) are the same age as Obama! He was formed in the same generational crucible as they were. Their touchstones are his touchstones.
The Brat Pack generation (it's been more charitably called the Repo Man generation, or Generation Jones) gave us other iconic teens, too: There's Sean Penn (1960), a star of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High," which co-starred Jennifer Jason Leigh (1962), Phoebe Cates (1963), and Forest Whitaker (1961); Penn was also in "Taps," which co-starred Timothy Hutton (1960) and introduced Tom Cruise (1962). Cruise went on to star in "Risky Business" with Rebecca DeMornay (1962). Another teen icon from Obama's generation is Matt Dillon (1964), star of "Little Darlings," which co-starred Tatum O’Neal (1963) and Kristy McNichol (1962), not to mention the movie versions of S.E. Hinton novels like "Tex," co-starring Estevez (op. cit.); "The Outsiders," co-starring Lowe, Estevez, and Cruise (all op. cit.); and "Rumble Fish," co-starring Nicolas Cage (1964) and Laurence Fishburne (1961). Let's not forget Johnny Depp (1963), who got his start on "21 Jump Street," or Keanu Reeves (1964), who started in "River's Edge."
I could go on and on. A second string of Brat Packers appeared in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," "Young Guns," "Footloose," etc. Kevin Bacon (1958), Matthew Broderick (1962), Lou Diamond Phillips (1962), Jennifer Grey (1960), Elizabeth McGovern (1961), James Spader (1960), Ralph Macchio (1961), and Eric Stoltz (1961) are also Obama's contemporaries. So are: Scott Baio and Erin Moran (1961) of "Joanie Loves Chachi," Michael J. Fox (1961) of "Family Ties," Willie Aames (1960) of "Eight is Enough," Valerie Bertinelli (1960) of "One Day at a Time," even Gabrielle Carteris (1961) and Ian Ziering (1964) from "Beverly Hills 90210."
Yes, you heard me right: "The Breakfast Club," "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," "21 Jump Street," "Footloose." Tremble, baby boomers! A generation weaned on "Joanie Loves Chachi" may soon make it into the White House. After getting your kicks in the '60s and '70s, you helped form this generation's touchstones and view of society by shoving such movies and TV shows down its collective throat. Tremble, I say!
Readers, email me with feedback, other well-known Americans born within 5 years of Obama, etc.
As they've done with several of the other great newspaper strip cartoonists of the past -- Charles Schulz, Hank Ketcham, E.C. Segar, George Herriman, Hal Foster, Harold Gray -- Fantagraphics will next publish a comprehensive series comprising Walt Kelly's "Pogo" strip. The first in their planned series of 12 volumes ("Pogo" ran from 1949 to 1973) will appear in October. The announcement just went out.
Although I already owned stacks of old "Peanuts" and "Dennis the Menace" collections (stolen from my father's shelves), I've been thrilled by the recent Fantagraphics series of collected Schulz and Ketcham strips. The books are hardcover, the reproduction is gorgeous, and most importantly -- they're complete. According to Fantagraphics, the consecutive run of "Pogo" has never before been systematically collected into book form.
Coincidentally, I just this week received in the mail a CD I'd purchased online: "Songs of the Pogo." The 1956 album, whose lyrics were written by Kelly, was released as a CD in 2004, but I didn't hear about it till it was mentioned on Boing Boing last week. Seems that emusic.com made it available as a free download. I still sent away for the CD.
According to news reports of the last few days, a group of scientists and astronauts are warning that there is a chance that Earth will be struck by a large asteroid on April 13 [naturally], 2036 -- a mere twenty-nine years away.
What kind of chance are we talking about? Well, maybe 1 in 45,000, says the group. But they still think the UN needs to take action as soon as possible.
A spokesman for the group says it's "important to start the search for asteroids now, to allow enough time to effectively deal with them." And what do these astro-guys propose we do? Not entirely clear, but theoretically we could use a weapon on the asteroid's surface or pull the asteroid off course with the force of another object's gravity. "Another suggestion," says ABC News, "is to crash a spacecraft into an asteroid in the hopes of changing its direction." A multibillion-dollar spacecraft sacrificed "in the hopes" of a good outcome.
On the face of it, there's nothing absurd about this call for evasive action, and especially for more study into other flying threats. But it is almost charmingly naive to think the UN is going to devote itself, for many billions of dollars, to preventing a 1-in-45,000 event when it can't seem to halt certain climate change and definite genocidal killing in Darfur.
When persistent Catholic foes caused Amanda Marcotte, John Edwards's "blogmaster," to resign from his campaign (after I had discussed her hiring), I wrote critically about her tell-all that appeared in Salon, and reported the indignant response of a reader wholly opposed to Marcotte's attacker(s).
Another reader has come forward to second in a more general way the views of the first reader -- that the incursion of strictly religious forces into politics is leading us down a foolish and dangerous road, no matter what principles they may think they are defending. This second reader points to a post on the lefty political blog Talking Points Memo about a memo distributed and signed by a Georgia State Representative, Ben Bridges, that tars evolution not only as an incorrect theory but as the product of pernicious Jewish teachings. Double penalty.
Bridges denies any involvement with the memo, though the author says Bridges signed off. In any case, the politician says he doesn't find it such a problem:
Asked if he agreed with the Kaballah evolution conspiracy theory and the earth's lack of motion, he told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, "I agree with it more than I would the Big Bang Theory or the Darwin Theory. I am convinced that rather than risk teaching a lie why teach anything?"
I don't think we can blame Marcotte's fall on people with views quite like these, but thanks for the reader tip.
Since the response at TNR.com (and on Brainiac), to the call for a new American book review has so far been universally positive, let me quibble with it -- not with the idea itself, but with the way it's framed. (Who could object to a new TLS-style review of books?)
First is Jeffrey Herf's failure to ask whether scholars and publishers -- and not just book reviews -- contribute to the problems he identifies. Herf argues that it's a crime that roughly 9,300 of the 10,000 books published by university presses each year get ignored. (He leaves out many publications, including the Atlantic and the Boston Review, in arriving at that figure.) But shouldn't he at least make a nod toward the contention that humanities and some social-science departments have turned into factories producing books of often-negligible value? How many of those 9,300 books should even have been published, let alone reviewed?
And the "manifesto" on book reviewing posted by Eric Rauchway strikes me as schoolmarmish rather than funny, as Josh describes it. "Write a book before you review one"? TNR's main fiction critic, James Wood, just to give one of countless examples, established his pre-eminence long before he wrote his lone novel. And is an associate professor of whatever really automatically better-qualified to review a work of history, law, or philosophy than the Philadelphia Inquirer's Carlin Romano, who is, at least for now, pre-book? (It goes without saying I'm all for reviews by professors, too.)
"Avoid quips"? You've got to be kidding. (Or did I just break the rules?) A quip, should you need reminding, is a "sharp or sarcastic remark" or a "clever or witty saying." Does Rauchway read TNR's book reviews?
Finally, there are the unembarrassed paeans to the New Republic, by these TNR contributors (Herf even refers to TNR's Leon Wieseltier as "our greatest editor," sounding all too much like the much-mocked Sean Penn at the 2005 Oscars, defending Jude Law), and the bashing of the Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books. Here rivalry is recast as cultural critique. TNR's back-of-the-book is great -- but if you think it has fewer hobbyhorses than NYRB, talk to John Updike, Judith Butler, Cornel West, or admirers of the late Edward Said.
The real crime isn't the quirks of highbrow publications other than TNR, but the cutting back on book-review pages by mainstream newspapers and magazines. But, yes, of course: More reviews, in more publications.
An article in Sunday's Times is in one sense simply a report on a competitive market wherein competitors are fighting to provide what customers want. It's about the sperm donation industry, in which women now "want proof of perfection before buying a dream donor's sperm." Personality tests, voice audio files, SAT scores, not only baby and adult pictures but teenage ones (eek) -- you name it. "Intelligent, tall, and interested in music" no longer cuts it.
There is something uncomfortable about this, since it represents an attempt, clearly, to control nature, to see to it that you get a designer baby for your money. But the underlying assumption is that biology to a great degree governs human development. The article implies that one prolific donor would not be in business, so to speak, if buyers knew he was living in an RV, eking out a living from odd jobs (including sperm donation). As if genetics made him do it.
I think this is highly ironic, because somehow one suspects that the women who use the services of sperm banks voted for John Kerry in the last election. Under normal circumstances, they'd agree with the following statement: "The Bell Curve is racist pseudo-science proven wrong by experts." But these same women become True Believers in The Bell Curve and eugenics when it comes to selecting genes for their own children.
That comparison is not quite well thought-out, but the writer is in the close neighborhood of a good point.
As I was investigating the uses of stomach, the verb, for yesterday's Word column, I remembered being taught that I should distinguish between stomach, the digestive organ, and belly, the abdomen. At the time I thought the issue was scientific accuracy, but there was more to the story, it turns out: A belly reclamation project was under way through much of the 20th century, as usagists labored to restore the word to respectability.
Here's a sampling of the campaign literature, starting with H.L. Mencken in "The American Language" (1921):
The Englishman, on the whole, is more plain-spoken than the American, and such terms as bitch, mare and on foal do not commonly daunt him, largely, perhaps, because of his greater familiarity with country life. . . . But an Englishman hesitates to mention his stomach in the presence of ladies, though he discourses freely about his liver. To avoid the necessity he employs such euphemisms as Little Mary.
H.W. Fowler, Modern English Usage (1926):
Belly is a good word now almost done to death by genteelism. It lingers in proverbs & phrases, but even they are being amended into up-to-date delicacy, & the road to the heart lies less often through the b[elly] than through the stomach or the tummy.
Bergen and Cornelia Evans, A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957):
Belly is a good, sensible, established, time-honored word for that part of the human body which extends from the breastbone to the pelvis and contains the abdominal viscera. . . .
Stomach describes a particular organ, a sac-like enlargement of the alimentary canal. . . .
Tummy is simply disgusting when used by anyone over the age of four.
Victorian American manners made the word belly, like leg, cock, bull, and many others taboo in most mixed company. Abdomen, stomach, midriff, and the cute tummy and jocular breadbasket were used as euphemisms instead. Today belly is Standard (although conservatives may prefer abdomen) in a range of literal and figurative meanings, the most central of which are the literal “the front lower part of the human body,” “the stomach,” “the abdominal cavity,” and “the underside of an animal’s body.” As a name for the womb, belly is partly archaic, partly Conversational: Where do babies come from? From Mommy’s belly.
Bill Bryson, "Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States" (1994):
On an early [TV] talk show when the English comedian Beatrice Lillie jokingly remarked of belly dances that she "had no stomach for that kind of thing," it caused a small scandal.
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (1994):
The committee for the defense of belly as applied to people seems to have been formed by Fowler 1926. . . . Although none of our 19th-century sources mention the word, there seems to have been a notion around that it was not polite. Krapp 1927 notes that belly was not then used in polite conversation or writing with reference to human beings. This newspaper article refers to the question:
"[It's time] to scrap the Victorian version of belly and explain that since the gay nineties it has not been necessary to confuse belly with stomach or abdomen in order to show your good breeding." (Bronx Home News, 1937)
Over at Open University, a blog published by The New Republic, historian Jeffrey Herf has issued a call for a new weekly review of books focused on informing a non-specialist but sophisticated public about developments in the world of American scholarship. Something closer, he says, to England's Times Literary Supplement than to the New York Review of Books (too political; too many fiction reviews) or any of this country's weekly newspaper book sections.
Herf's fellow OU bloggers agree, and offer advice. David A. Bell says: You should publish it online. Richard Stern says: You should also survey foreign publications. Linda Hershman says: You should include more reviews of books by women, and reviews by women. Steven Pinker says: You should be more fair to the cognitive and biological sciences. Eric Rauchway, finally, takes the opportunity to post a funny reviewer's manifesto:
1. Write a book before you review one. You'll learn lots of useful things about the performance you're assessing.
2. Write about the book you're reading, not the book you would have written, the author, the political position you impute to the author, or the book, on a similar subject, that you are now writing.
3. Eschew predicate adjectives, especially "persuasive" and "convincing" and their opposites. The least persuasive sentence in any book review is, "The argument is unpersuasive." What you mean is, the argument does not account for facts (a), (b), and (c). Saying so specifically will add a mote of value to civilization.
4. Avoid quips: to criticize the author, quote the author saying disagreeable or foolish things.
TNR subscribers can join in the discussion via the COMMENTS function.
Hopefully we all understand by now that this Mooninite business was a viral marketing campaign that eschewed traditional ads in favor of enlisting the participation of wised-up youth. Members of the target audience were supposed to notice these LED throwies, recognize the Mooninite character (or at least recognize it as a silly cartoon figure of some kind), steal the signs, blog about them, take photos and post them to Flickr, and so forth. Which is exactly what some of them did.
There's a far more sophisticated version of this sort of viral marketing campaign going on even as a write this. A few days ago, Nine Inch Nails fans figured out that highlighted letters on one of NIN's tour t-shirts were a message leading to the website Iamtryingtobelieve.com. Since then fans have been led to discover other websites, audio recordings including a leaked album track from the forthcoming NIN album "Year Zero," working telephone numbers, and more, all carefully prepared in advance. These websites, recordings, phone numbers, and so forth embroil one in an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) whose storyline is the same as the one in "Year Zero": America is a dystopia, and violent resistance is on the move.
Back in August 2005, I wrote an item for Ideas about Jane McGonigal, then working as a designer and "puppetmaster" for 42 Entertainment, an Emeryville, Calif.-based outfit that creates elaborate ARGs for marketing purposes. McGonigal was branching out into political protest, using the same online social networking tools she'd manipulated for 42 Entertainment in order to get Americans in every state to reshelve copies of Orwell's "1984." Tomorrow McGonigal, now a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, will be the first respondent in the Wired Science blog's "Ask a Scientist" feature. Got any questions for her about this Mooninite stuff, or viral marketing, or wired political activism? You can post questions here.
A reader responds to my post about Amanda Marcotte and the successful campaign against her by the head of a large Catholic organization. The reader is a lapsed Catholic, so we'll have to take him with a grain of salt:
I'm afraid you'll have to specify just which "principle" Marcotte's foes are fighting for, unless it is the suppression of opinion. Catholicism is itself an opinion, of course, not a genetically determined condition. Being anti-Catholic in the nineteenth century was bigotry because it was tantamount to being anti-Irish, but today such is no longer the case. Anti-Catholicism now is in fact a form of anti-bigotry -- the same could be said of most forms of opposition to religion.
I'm not going to get in to the broader claims here, interesting as they are, but I will say about Marcotte that what I was trying to say was that I have more respect for criticisms of her based on her views on abortion, which is fair game for someone who has after all become a public and political figure, than for attacks on her use of vulgarities on a personal blog. She seems to think neither is fair, which is an odd position to take to someone devoted to speaking out and even picking fights -- for what is a political campaign but an invitation to debate?
In last Sunday's Word column, I mentioned the question of punctuating the title Ms. If it's not really an abbreviation, readers asked, why does it have a period?
No reason, was my answer, except to make it harmonize with Mrs. and Mr. -- and that answer still stands. But Ben Zimmer has sent along some Ms. information from decades before the earliest OED citations.
"Your reader who complains that 'Ms is not an abbreviation for anything and therefore does not need a period' might be interested to know that this has been a point of contention for quite a long time," he writes. "I discovered what is currently the earliest known cite, a 1901 article in the Humeston (Iowa) New Era commenting on the Springfield (Mass.) Republican's suggestion of Ms.":
As a word to be used in place of
"Miss" or "Mrs.," when the addresser is ignorant of the state of the
person addressed, the Springfield Republican suggests a word of which
"Ms." is the abbreviation, with a pronunciation something like "Mizz." But the Republican does not tell what the new word is or how it is to be
spelled.
"Because the Springfield paper spelled the word with a period, the Humeston paper confusedly assumed it must be an abbreviation for a longer word," notes Zimmer. (And the Springfield newspaper's original citation has not yet been excavated from its hiding place. Maybe we'll learn one day that Ms., like scofflaw, debuted in Massachusetts.)
For more on Ms., see Zimmer's post at the American Dialect Society's Linguist List.
A couple of days ago, Globe editor and music writer James Reed -- whose musical taste has not disappointed me yet -- reviewed "A Date with John Waters," an album of songs that the trash filmmaker believes would be the perfect soundtrack to any romantic outing. Among other tracks, Reed approves heartily of Elton Motello's "Jet Boy Jet Girl," which he describes as "a frank paean to gay sex that shares a melody with Plastic Bertrand's new-wave classic 'Ca Plane Pour Moi.'"
Now, I like that Plastic Bertrand song a lot, and I used to own an Elton Motello record -- I sent away for a grab bag of avant vinyl from an ad in the back of Rolling Stone, back in 1983 or so, and Motello's weird "Pop Art" was one of them. But I couldn't remember what "Jet Boy Jet Girl" was all about. I was going to call James and ask him to sing it to me, when I noticed that over at Salon today, you can download the song.
Oh yeah! Now I remember. True, (kinky) gay sex is a theme of the song, but the main reason that Waters likes it is probably because it's a Weird Al Yankovic-like tribute to/mockery of New Wave music. It's funny stuff...
The week of Feb. 5, I wrote here twice about Amanda Marcotte, a iberal blogger formerly of pandagon.net hired by the John Edwards campaign as "blogmaster." The first post noted her hiring and saw it as potentially another step on the moon for blogger-kind. The second charted the beginning of her fall from grace, as a concerted campaign brought about her decision to resign.
Now Marcotte has written her tell-all of sorts on Salon. It's a valuable piece for its explanation of what really happened, but I must say Marcotte doesn't quite succeed in keeping my sympathy.
First she says her conservative enemies ought to have been able to distinguish between her personal blog posts and those on the campaign site. But come on, all opinions become fair game when you take on a public role. Moreover, in what amounts to the climax of her piece, she writes this:
Donohue and the long list of culture warriors on the league's board of advisors are dedicated to stomping out those very rights McEwan and I were defending. It's unlikely they took issue with just the coarse, comedic vernacular that we used to defend those rights.
But that is only an endorsement of her foes, in my view. They are fighting for a principle, not just railing against a potty mouth.
From a poster on Metafilter, a valuable find. If we are stuck on the notion that Iran is a country of oppression so great that life there is unending suffering, we miss out on what's going on. What we have is a volatile but complex and rich nation that Americans probably fail to understand even at the highest levels.
Josh: Your Bertrand Russell post sends me back. I actually had occasion to work a bit with William Drenttel in my previous capacity as an editor at the sadly now-defunct Legal Affairs magazine. Winterhouse, the studio Bill runs with Jessica Helfand, designed the magazine's first issues back in 2002.
One of my favorite ideas Bill had was enlisting the services of a French children's book illustrator (if memory serves) for the cover story of the magazine's fourth issue. The story was about a guy who had submitted a patent application for a series of chimeras: creatures that would be made by combining human and animal embryos. The ones that I recall are the humouse (man + mouse) and the humanzee (man + chimp).
The artist, whose name I'll have to look up at home tonight, created wonderful images of these as yet still imaginary creatures, rendering them as hovering between being scary and being scared of themselves. He depicted the humanzee regarding his reflection in a silver spoon. The humouse, who would end up on the cover, held his massive, mostly-mouse head in a very human hand.
Last January, when Legal Affairs stopped publishing, I put in a request for the poster-sized blow-up of the fourth issue that had graced the walls of the magazine's New Haven offices. The folks there were kind enough to oblige, and I'm happy to say that the humouse now presides over the den of my apartment, startling visitors and only occasionally giving me nightmares.
UPDATE: Bill Drenttel emails with the name of the artist -- Etienne Delessert.
The Washington Post has a funny account of the day after the Westminster Dog Show for this year's winner, James, an English Springer Spaniel. More revealing of human than animal behavior. Read this bit -- then watch the video:
The day-after ritual includes lunch at Sardi's, the Manhattan landmark where the walls are covered with celebrity caricatures. And the highlight there is the ceremonial serving of the champion's meal. This arrives on a pewter plate and is set in front of the dog, who is sitting on a chair at a fully set table, white linens and all.
Surrounded by photographers, James snarfed down all the meat and promptly looked around as if to say, "You got any more of that?" This brought awwws and chuckles from the dozens of dog enthusiasts around the table. But one photographer didn't get the shot she wanted and loudly demanded that James get seconds, and step on it.
"We need more! We need more!" she yelled.
A few feet away, James's owner and self-described mom, Teresa Patton, frowned... this is the first time one of her animals won the Big One. And she wasn't going to watch her prize possession overeat his way to a tummyache.
"That's too much," she said, not very loudly. "You're going to make him sick."
With that, Patton grabbed the meat off the second plate that was headed James's way. James looked disappointed and the photographer fumed. For a good 10 minutes, there was a stalemate: photographer vs. owner, with James and his empty plate stuck in the middle.
"She brought the meat back to the kitchen," said Allen Patton, Teresa's husband, who is a teacher at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale. "And she's not bringing it back."
It takes a certain kind of determination to win at Westminster, and a different kind to face off with a New York photographer desperate for a money shot. The Pattons, it seems, have both.
I posted yesterday about Little Joe, the gorilla who escaped in 2003 from the Franklin Park Zoo.
Little Joe was finally returned to his "exhibit space" this week, and I asked readers to comment on the newly fortified architecture of the gorilla exhibit -- while keeping in mind T.W. Adorno's comment that the contemporary, open-style zoo exhibit (with its moat too wide to leap) is more sinister and depressing, if you think about it, than the old-fashioned zoo cage with iron bars.
Here are abridged versions of a few of the responses I've received:
When I grew up near Boston in the 1960s, there was a fire in the lion house at the Franklin Park Zoo. The word on the street was that the lions set it themselves in an attempt to get a bigger living space. As long as we can still refer to what should be a habitat as a cage, we have a big problem. Little Joe has my best wishes for many happy escapes in the future. -- John C
I can really only stand for the large open-space zoos that afford a large roaming space for the captive animals (North Carolina Zoological Park is a fine example). The time of small "boutique" or city zoos is a thing of the past, in my opinion. -- Tim N
Although I agree with Adorno that moats and trenches in zoo exhibits keep the boundaries of their cages invisible, I'm not sure this environment can be said to "inflame the [animals'] longing for open spaces." Since he's anthropomorphising, I'll take the same approach and point out that most of us, whether on a beach staring off into the horizon, in a cubicle with a view of the vasty parking lot, or on our couch with the virtual horizon beamed at us through the tube, are quite content to remain there. -- Susan
My dad is the assistant director of the Sedgwick County Zoo (http://scz.org) here in Wichita, a zoo that has sort of defined modern zoos by starting in the late 1960s, when people were first starting to get the idea that bars [EXPLETIVE DELETED].... The SCZ's chimpanzee exhibits were the first in the world to get Jane Goodall's seal of approval.... Some people don't like the idea of an animal in captivity on general principle, and there's not much you can say to them. Most zoos nowadays, though, make managing the survival of a species their main goal, knowing that their natural habitats are being robbed faster than you can say, "Can someone give me $3 million to make this animal feel at home?" ... I can't make any forceful comments on Little Joe's exhibit itself -- the Globe story is short on certain details that would be critical for making a real assessment -- but it seems OK.... I doubt I'd be going out on a limb in saying that it looks like Little Joe will be pretty happy. -- Mike M
Thanks for writing, everyone. And thanks to Boing Boing for linking to this post yesterday.
Over at Design Observer, one of my favorite blogs, William Drenttel posted recently about "The Good Citizen's Alphabet," a political and philosophical ABC book (abecedarium?), published in 1953. Written by Bertrand Russell and illustrated by Franciszka Themerson: Think Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary" for kiddies.
Over half a century later, the book still feels outrageous. Yesterday, one Design Observer visitor was actually outraged, and commented:
It's ironic that Bertrand Russell, in his clamour for Socialism, chose to sarcastically describe liberty on the L page as "The right to obey the police," when Socialist regimes have threatened and beaten so many into that very obedience. Time has erased all sarcasm from that spread.
I want a copy! Thankfully, Drenttel has made a slideshow version of the book. Take a peek.
In television news -- that is, news about television -- apparently Fox News is trying a new show on for size, a fake news program called "The Half-Hour News Hour" (get it?) clearly intended to counter the Daily Show. Not a bad idea in principle, but if the pilot or test episode is any indication, oy, the execution!
Actually, maybe this is a bad idea. First, this kind of copycat counterprogramming rarely succeeds. Say what you will about the Rush Limbaugh Show -- in a sense it's better than Air America. Second, what would the Daily Show be without Jon Stewart's talent? If you reverse the political leaning, it might look something like this.
As a Crooked Timber post by sociologist Kieran Healy rather haughtily points out, a parody of the U.S. government's ready.gov site, advocating readiness for national and manmade disasters, has been around about four years, and 3 Quarks Daily gets to it only today.
But who cares? It's a lot of fun. The primary target is the site's pictograms depicting citizens in dire straits either of various origins doing the right thing or the wrong thing. The pictograms are patently ridiculous and hard to decipher. Hence some very funny alternate interpretations. "If you spot terrorism, blow your anti-terrorism whistle. If you are Vin Diesel, yell really loud."
In a New York Sun article today, linguist John McWhorter uses the history of love -- the word, not the phenomenon -- to illustrate the way today's "mistakes" may morph into "simply tomorrow's version of the language."
Love was [used] as a noun, but quickly started being used as a verb as well. That is, when you say, "I love you" to someone, you are using a word that began as a noun just as fax, interface, and green-light did.
And long before that, the word's spelling and pronunciation had been evolving. Leubh is the root of love and believe, but
people started "mispronouncing" leubh just as you-know-who pronounces nuclear as nucular. But the planet keeps spinning and we have no sense that the "proper" pronunciation of belief is "beleubh." It was the same with the transformation of leubh into love. Every time we say love or belief, we are, technically, mispronouncing leubh!
Here's another Fred Astaire dance from "Royal Wedding" that might as well be the gold standard of grace. Single folks, even a coat rack can be your Valentine. And you can dally with a bowling pin to make the coat rack jealous.
Lo and behold, gov'nor, a piece in the (London) Times Literary Supplement that can be described as neat-o. It's a review of "Allen's English Phrases" and it discusses the current, as-we-speak development of the English language -- this is definitely happening, of course -- and the ways that development is being documented.
New Web sites like UrbanDictionary, PseudoDictionary, and Doubletongued are not only defining words and phrases at the instant they appear; they're also publishing entries in advance, out of a fun kind of neologistic hope. Hence idioms like these, presumably real and conjured:
One can read about irritations such as “carriage cruisers” (“A person who is unable to simply stand in one position on a train and decides . . . to move down the length of the train using the internal doors”) [now illegal in New York--Ed.] and the “Yoko factor” (“A term used to refer to something that splits up a group of friends”). UrbanDictionary is useful; it can be inventive (“slurk” – “a mixture of lurk and sneak”) and funny (“I beg to differ” – “I want to sleep with you”); but, as with so much of Web 2.0, there is more chaff than wheat.
But what wheat! The Yoko factor! That joins my internal dictionary instantly, whether or not anyone else is already saying it.
A trusted source passes along this tidbit about Mooninite LED throwy installer/TBS fall-guy Peter Berdovsky...
[Last night I was attending the] Akron/Family show at the Middle East, and midway through the show (it was sold out, and in the upstairs part, so the room was packed), I glance to my left and guess who was standing next to me? The mooninite guy with the dreadlocks -- Peter Berdovsky.
The room was all abuzz because he was there -- I heard several people mention it as they walked by -- and a few people approached him, seemingly with positive things to say. Also, he was carrying around a neon green, fuzzy stuffed animal, and he had a whole entourage of friends. Clearly, he didn't mind the attention from the crowd. I guess they're embracing their celeb status now?
What was it Oscar Wilde said about negative publicity being better than no publicity at all?
A poster on Metafilter really got me enjoying life this morning, as I nurse a viral throat infection in a sleet storm, with a three-link post (click each link) of dance photographs. The first link show pictures of dancers in midair, calling to mind the astonishing Fred Astaire dance scene in "Royal Wedding" where he appears to climb the walls and ceiling mid-dance.
Another link shows dancers through a Kaleidoscope; another shows dancers jumping through things, be it powder or air; a third posted by a commenter shows an image series of the kind pioneered as a precursor to motion pictures in the 19th century by Eadweard Muybridge with his "Horse in Motion" work: they show a dancer at closely successive moments so that the motion is captured in a sense all at once.
That headline's just a glib reference to the title of an old Baudrillard pamphlet; I don't really want you to forget Waters. But his "Slow Reading" essay in CHE that I blogged about the other day has raised some hackles over at the Valve.
Bill Benzon writes:
Just what is the connection between reading among pre-schoolers and the readings that literature professors extract from literary texts? ... I understand that [Waters is] skeptical about current critical practice -- so am I -- and that he wants children to read -- so do I. I don't understand the connection he's making between these two.
Here's my take on the matter: If the connection between two parts of a published essay are unclear, blame the editor! It's certainly possible that Waters's argument could be less flimsy in places. But isn't that what editors get paid the big bucks for? Catching problems like that?
So far, though, the Valve-ers seem to want to lay the blame on Waters. Check out the debate -- pretty entertaining so far.
Patrick Smith, a Somerville-based commercial pilot, world traveler, and talented writer about whom we've written in the Globe a few times, mounts a defense of his repeated use of the un-PC term "stewardess" in his latest "Ask the Pilot" column for Salon.
Jan Freeman: Since it's too icy and rainy to go out today, want to weigh in on this topic?
Harvard University has selected its first female president. What do you think?
Kent Livermore, Hammock Maker: "This only proves that to get the same opportunities as men, women have to work twice as hard and have twice as many fathers on the board of trustees."
Remember Little Joe, the 300-pound gorilla who in September 2003 escaped from the Franklin Park Zoo? In a testosterone frenzy, Little Joe leaped over a 12-foot-high, 12-foot-deep moat, crawled up a gorilla-proof wall, past an electrified wire, over a glass barrier, and through two sets of doors out of the gorilla pavilion. He attacked two people, scaled a fence and ambled off the zoo grounds for nearly two hours. Now, having been hidden away from the public for over three years while his "exhibit space" was fortified, Little Joe is back.
My kids will be glad to see the western lowland gorilla again... but what interests me is the redesign of his cage. See, when Little Joe escaped, then-Ideas editor Alex Star urged me to write something, anything, about it. (It was the Mooninite attack of that period.) We published a short item on Oct. 5, 2003, titled "Our gorillas, ourselves." Here it is:
LITTLE JOE MAY NOT have made it much farther than a Seaver Street bus stop, but news of the 300-pound adolescent gorilla's dramatic escape from the Franklin Park Zoo last Sunday was front-page news around the world.
Some headline writers, recognizing that an ape on the loose is a potent symbol of the id unleashed, turned Little Joe's little adventure into an epic of sex and violence. "Juvenile King Kong Spreads Panic in Boston," screamed The Mirror of London. "Teen Was Helpless Against Raging Ape," panted The New York Daily News. But many pundits and animal researchers noted that at least six primates have escaped from American zoos in recent years, which may confirm what Zoo New England CEO John Linehan told the press on Monday: "It's not the gorilla's fault." So whose fault is it? Some 60 years ago, German philosopher and radical social critic T.W. Adorno, then living in America, pinned the blame on a social order that makes false promises of freedom to its human captives. He compared advanced societies to modern zoos that replace bars with trenches. In so doing, they "deny the animals' freedom only the more completely by keeping the boundaries invisible, the sight of which would inflame the longing for open spaces."
In this analysis, those of us who complacently munched potato chips while watching Little Joe's zoobreak on TV may have more in common with the Franklin Park Zoo's gorillas, who (one hears) spend their downtime resignedly watching "Teletubbies" and nibbling "primate browse," than we might like to believe.
So... what to make of Little Joe's new cage? Click on the link below to see a graphic of the "improvements." Then tell me what you think!
Great parody YouTube video making the rounds. It's basically a faithful recreation of an IT guy making a call on an office dweller to fix his machine, which has been down all day. It opens with the usual not-my-fault grumble from the Helpdesk about everyone needing to "learn the new system." Only the new system, the machine on the helpless guy's desk, is a book. He's making The Switch from the scroll.
It's a funny bit, most of all in its fidelity to the real-life situation. The "user" even offers the techie a glass of water, a classic move when you're feeling a little guilty about your incompetence. And of course the techie says no, because he'd rather just fix the damn thing and go home.
Lynne Truss's comic rage against apostrophe abuse helped sell a zillion copies of her punctuation manifesto, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves." But according to a report in the Independent on Sunday, Truss isn't laughing about the parodies her book has inspired.
In an outspoken attack on the wave of imitators who have spoofed the book's quirky title and cover design, Ms. Truss said she did not know how publishers of such imitations "live with themselves."
The parodies include "Eats, Shites & Leaves: Crap English and How to Use It," and "Doctor Whom," a "send-up about poor grammar acting as a catalyst for universal entropy."
Even the Vegetarian Society has clambered on to the bandwagon, with a booklet entitled "Eat Shoots and Leaves? More Interesting Cuisine from the Cordon Vert School."
Curiously, reporter James Morrison does not say where or when Truss made her comments; I would have expected an "outspoken attack" to produce longer or at least snappier quotes than anything printed here. But maybe there's more and better invective to come.
Henry Farrell, an assistant professor of political science writing at Crooked Timber, points out an element of the recent controversial foreign policy speech by Russian president Vladimir Putin that went relatively unnoticed. Putin ranted a little about the OSCE, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a "not very well funded international organization, which focuses on internal security questions in Europe and Eurasia, with particular attention to minority issues and to democracy and election monitoring," as Farrell puts it. Putin:
"They are trying to transform the OSCE into a vulgar instrument designed to promote the foreign policy interests of one or a group of countries. And this task is also being accomplished by the OSCE’s bureaucratic apparatus, which is absolutely not connected with the [member] state founders in any way."
What Farrell takes from this is that the OSCE is in a sense succeeding because it's irking leaders like Putin, who don't want to be prodded and monitored by any multinational entity. In a smaller way, the Carter Center, a nonprofit public policy center founded by Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, is having a similar effect on leaders like Hugo Chavez. They don't want the Carter folks around on election day. And that's a good sign.
David Abel reports in the Globe today that an administrative law judge has ruled that horticulturist and UMass Amherst professor Lyle Craker should be allowed to grow marijuana for research purposes.
Currently the only legal supply of marijuana for research purposes is grown at the University of Mississippi by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), a federal agency.
As Jessica Winter reported for Ideas last May in a piece called Weed Control, this limited supply -- and the quality of that supply -- has been a problem for both advocates and enemies of medical marijuana:
There is abundant anecdotal evidence and personal testimony to support myriad uses of cannabis to treat symptoms of cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis, and other ailments. As the FDA [has noted], however, scant clinical evidence exists to back these claims -- or, for that matter, to contradict them.
Paradoxically, the controls on official research of cannabis in America undermine both the medical-marijuana movement's efforts to prove the drug's benefits and the government's assertions of its dangers. Strangely enough, the case for pharmaceutical cannabis may, in the end, come down to good gardening -- and may depend on whether the government is willing to give up its monopoly on marijuana.
"I've spoken to patients who have used [NIDA marijuana], and they've said it's everything from worthless to other descriptions I should not use," Craker told Jessica last year. Looks like he might get his chance to grow some better stuff.
UPDATE: David sends along a link to the judge's decision.
William Arkin, a former military analyst with Human Rights Watch who is now a fellow at the Kennedy School's Carr Center for Human Rights, has now spent several days at the center of a blogosphere cyclone over some intemperate remarks he made about American troops. (See this posting on Boston.com for an example of the concern Arkin's comments have spawned.) While making the argument that soldiers' support for the war could not trump American citizens' opposition to it, he complained that some soldiers thought they should exercise a veto on questions of war and peace. He'd just seen a a TV-news report in which soldiers complained about the anti-war movement. That report, he wrote, "is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary -- oops sorry, volunteer -- force that thinks it is doing the dirty work."
Bill O'Reilly proclaimed all-out war against Arkin and anyone who pays him for commentary (namely the Washington Post, which publishes his blog, and NBC), saying Arkin, and by extension the mainstream media, "hate" the military. The Post's ombudsman now says the word "mercenary" should never gotten into the paper (and makes the incredibly bad argument that the Post shouldn't be blamed for what's on its Web site -- hey, different staffs!), the Post's media critic has spanked Arkin, and Arkin has apologized for using the term mercenary, though not for the thrust of his argument. See here (and on the left rail) for his follow-up posts. The Post has asked him to stop writing about the subject.
All of which reminded me of this post by Harvard's blogger-economist Greg Mankiw, from last fall. He relayed the following anecdote, from another Web source, about Milton Friedman's efforts to end the draft in the late 1960's and early '70s. Back then, it was the generals, including William Westmoreland, who said an all-volunteer army would be a "mercenary" one. Friedman sat on a commission reviewing the draft.
In his testimony before the commission, Mr. Westmoreland said he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. Mr. Friedman interrupted, "General, would you rather command an army of slaves?" Mr. Westmoreland replied, "I don't like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves." Mr. Friedman then retorted, "I don't like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries. If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general; we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher."
I got a kick out of one quote in the Language Log piece. It was from John Simon, a famous and infamously cranky critic with a career constituting several decades of laying waste to undeserving works of art--plays, music, movies, doesn't matter. (Is it me or is he incredibly insensitive toward anyone female with a few extra pounds?) He says: "As long as there exists an active minority that knows how to distinguish between disinterested and uninterested, it is not too late to fight for such discriminating usage." That's classic Simon pedantry, but, sigh, I agree. I'm trying to hold on to the word "whom," which in spoken language at least keeps threatening to disappear. But courage! Press on!
That's what the grammar wars are all about, as the LL writer says: "These days, being a grammar snob is like being a devoté of Phish or Douglas Sirk films -- if everybody were into this stuff, it wouldn't be half as much fun."
Mark Frauenfelder of the popular blog Boing Boing has given Boston's Mooninite attack plenty of coverage. (ABC News made an online video of his criticism of Boston police and officials for overreacting.) Yesterday, however, Frauenfelder was tickled by a different Boston disaster: Ann Biglan, a Cape Cod woman whose car was so filled with garbage that she crashed in West Yarmouth.
Biglan's car
It seems that a number of old coffee cups and other items fell onto Biglan's brake pedal and accelerator, and she lost control. Let this be a warning to us all.
Lest I sound like a shill for n+1, I should mention that I have also just received in the mail the latest issue (No. 24) of another of my favorite journals, Cabinet.
The theme of the issue is "shadows," and readers will discover an interview with Victor I. Stoichita, author of "A Short History of the Shadow," who explains, among other things, the symbolism of shadows in Renaissance painting; the four stages of shadow-understanding that Piaget claimed children go through; and the connection between the early modern craze for silhouette paintings and the belief that one's physiognomy reveals one's true character. Also in this issue: four specially commissioned artist projects about shadows; a history of the Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath's universal silhouettes (the ancestors of today's bathroom door and road warning symbols); an excerpt from a new book on the 18th-century "phantasmagoria," a horror version of the magic lantern show; the significance of Nixon's 5 o'clock shadow, and plenty more.
It reminds me of Susan Sontag's objections to most critical writing about art and literature, which she, too, believed was too "external" to the works themselves. What we need, Sontag famously wrote in "Against Criticism," is not more critical writing in the usual vein or veins but "an erotics of art."
It sounds as if Bauer is calling for an erotics of ... erotica.
Here's a blog that covers video games in large part, but takes good cracks at more general cultural crit. This post from last week about the ads from the Super Bowl is perceptive.
The Times made some fuss over the ads as reflections of the wartime American mentality. The blogger isn't buying it, and he's not bad at illustrating why. The ads that were supposed to be all about anxiety seem pretty campy and unthreatening. The post also points out, to its credit, that brain-scan studies did confirm in some cases that viewers were feeling anxiety or fear watching some of the ads, like this one. Beats me why, though.
Back in November, I mentioned in a Brainiac post that I'd written an essay titled "The Argonaut Folly" for the forthcoming issue of the journal n+1. Despite Chris Shea's cajoling, I coyly refused to reveal what the title meant. Well, the new n+1 is finally in the mailboxes of subscribers, and will soon be in bookstores everywhere, so the secret is out.
Josh submits 'Argonaut' essay to sleeping n+1 editor
My essay is a galloping history of a particular fantasy, more common than you might imagine, that gripped many of my favorite writers, thinkers, and artists -- from Nathaniel Hawthorne to the Beatles. It's a fantasy about not just working, but living in close company with one's most talented peers. Nietzsche wanted to do so; so did D.H. Lawrence and Andre Breton. I call it the Argonaut Folly because the Argonauts were the original band of talented individuals who together were able to accomplish great things, but whose very superiority (in my reading) rendered them misfits and losers among ordinary mortals.
Oh yeah, there are other fine essays in the new n+1, too. So far, I've enjoyed Gemma Sieff's gloomy report on post-apartheid South Africa; Imraan Coovadia's short story about a Pakistani nuclear engineer's surprisingly sentimental business trip to Pyongyang; and a terrific essay -- penned by Nancy Bauer, a feminist philosopher at Tufts -- which insists that "no philosophical analysis of pornographic objectification will enlighten us unless it proceeds not from the outside, from the external standpoint of academic moralism, but from the inside, from a description of pornography's powers to arouse." On deck: Keith Gessen's analysis of "Torture and the Known Unknowns" and Mark Greif's treatise on "Anaesthetic Ideology."
Other posts about n+1 and "The Argonaut Folly": 1 | 2 |
I received from interesting comments from an acquaintance who writes about science regarding this article from today's New York Times. The article is strange fare for the front page, where it appeared, since it takes as its subject a single doctoral student at the University of Rhode Island. But it's pretty thought-provoking.
This student is a Young Earth Creationist, which means he thinks God created the Earth roughly (or exactly?) as described in the Bible, and did so no more than 10,000 years ago. Meanwhile he's a paleontologist who researches creatures that vanished in the Cretaceous Era, which ended about 65 million years ago. The guy does some rhetorical gymnastics when pressed, which is exactly what is required of him, I think:
"I am separating the different paradigms.”
He likened his situation to that of a socialist studying economics in a department with a supply-side bent.
But would that econ student write a dissertation that argued--nay, took as a baseline assumption--that supply side is right on the money? If so, we'd call him hypocritical, wouldn't we? The science writer says: "I don't know how he can live with the split: doing the science that says one thing but somehow believing another. My word for people like that is 'phony.'"
The Sports Economist points to a story in the L.A. Times announcing that the Dodgers are trying out an ingenious ticket pricing scheme this year. The right field pavilion in Dodger Stadium will henceforth be the "all you can eat" section: For $35, you get a seat and unlimited concessions.
Given the outlandish cost of ballpark fare, this may sound like a pretty good deal. The LAT notes that the average fan spends $12.30 on food and drink per game, which actually sounds low to me, but then again I have an unfortunate soft spot for peanuts and Cracker Jack.
There are a couple catches, however. The obvious one is that your all-you-can-eat ticket does not include beer, which hasn't been sold in the pavilion for quite some time (a piece of Chavez Ravine trivia I learned the hard way during a Dodgers-Orioles interleague snoozer a few years ago).
The less obvious drawback to the all-you-can-eat plan is that the Dodger Dog is, in my opinion, the worst hot dog in baseball, and I say that having had dogs in more than 20 MLB parks (including all four of Milwaukee's Racing Sausages). So unless you really like cotton candy, I'd get some $10 upper deck seats (up this year from $6, alas) and spend the difference on food, drink, and a foam finger.
In the past decade, books about language have been making a play for the Valentine's Day market, and why not? They're the no-calorie, no-wilt, low-priced alternative to you-know-what. Should your sweetheart be receptive to this sort of thing, there are several flavors to choose from.
Just out is Erin McKean's "That's Amore: The Language of Love for Lovers of Language." McKean, a lexicographer and author of "Totally Weird and Wonderful Words," takes her search for language tidbits international this time around. A taste:
Rouler un patin: Finally a great mystery revealed: this phrase is how the French say "to French-kiss"! Literally translated, Je lui ai roulé un patin means "I rolled a skate to him."
Evan Morris, otherwise known as The Word Detective, sticks with English in 2004's "Making Whoopee: Words of Love for Lovers of Words," a collection of etymologies:
When bimbo, which is a shortened form of bambino, Italian for "child" or "baby," first appeared in English around 1919, it originally meant a young person of either gender and, in fact, was most often applied to men. When a gangster spoke of a bimbo in the 1920s, chances were that he was referring to the sort of dim-witted street-corner thug we might today call a wise-guy wanna-be.
Mark Morton, in "The Lover's Tongue: A Merry Romp Through the Language of Love and Sex" (2003), also covers English etymologies, though in more (and racier) detail:
The word hot, too, has been featured in amorous idioms since at least the early 14th century. Shakespeare, for example, uses the word hot as a synonym for lusty. In "Henry IV Part 1," Hal refers to a "hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta," and in "Othello" Iago implies that Desdemona and her supposed lover are "hot as monkeys."
I've just read a wonderful piece by Jenny Diski, a novelist with a blog, in the London Review of Books. Already we are in the territory that sets the LRB apart from the New York Review of Books; I am not aware of any blogger asked to write a piece in the latter. Also hip, in such an intellectual journal, is the subject of the article: the online virtual world called Second Life.
Diski seems intrigued enough by Second Life to want to join in the fun and see what makes it tick with a more attractive rhythm than real life (RL, as it is called in SL). But she casts a rather bemused eye in the end -- or really in the beginning:
So is the place stuffed full of extraordinary experimental poetry, song, fiction, art and architecture?
Second Life is a reiteration. It's a virtual world of buying and selling, profit and consumption, material decoration and political apathy.
And:
I was taken with the notion of becoming a great painter, but I couldn't see how Second Life would make me great at what I'm no good at in real life. If I wanted to think of myself as a great painter in spite of what I made on canvas or screen, I could just as well be delusional in the here and now.
On one (central) point, I must disagree with Diski, who seems to buy into an old image of the Internet as home of the pale geek:
The problem turned out to be (as it must) that Second Life is organised and inhabited by beings from the real world who have by definition very little experience of being anywhere or any way else.
The fact is that we are all now only too accustomed to what Sherry Turkle called, in the title of a book, "Life on the Screen." We sometimes prefer it that way, which may be the real problem.
The Washington Post's Style section takes note of one of my favorite buzzwords: granular (rendered more absurd when transformed into "granularity"). Sample usage, by hypothetical Pentagon briefer: "I'm just giving you the summary. The document itself is much more granular" -- i.e., goes into more detail.
Usually I snicker when I hear it; sometimes I get mad, in which case, in the future, I will remember this essay, from Language Log, on the ridiculousness -- even the camp quality -- of getting angry over word-usage issues.
They date back to 1914, and in fact nearly all of them were made before 1960, so think again if you thought your childhood burned through the entire genre. What City Rags deserves congratulations for is that he has found online video for 49 out of the 50 cartoons. Some of the links are now inoperative because the lawyers have gone after YouTube, but there is still enough to keep you occupied and steeped in nostalgia for some time.
Point-counterpoint exchanges on many Web sites tend to get awfully windy and digressive. This debate between Brad DeLong, the Berkeley economist and blogger, and Arnold Kling, of the Cato Institute, on the pros and cons of the New Deal, is more like a brisk tennis match.
(DeLong stresses the pros. Kling says something resembling the New Deal was inevitable -- or economically desparate Americans might have turned to extremism -- but says 1. its effects were smaller than often asserted and 2. over the long term FDR's programs deformed Americans' view of the role of government.)
The Harvard Crimson says Harvard's new president will be Drew Gilpin Faust; the Globe, a bit more cautiously, suggests the same thing.
But the Crimson might want to rethink the lede of its story:
Drew Gilpin Faust, a Civil War scholar, will tackle a "reconstruction" of her own as the new president of Harvard -- bringing the University back together after the tumultuous tenure of Lawrence H. Summers.
Let's see. If you've read a book on Reconstruction written since 1985 or so, that analogy might suggest to you that the new regime will make some noble attempts at achieving justice, after Summers's foul depredations, but will ultimately be driven back by the forces of reaction, leaving progress at Harvard stalled, or worse, for a century.
If your knowledge of Reconstruction derives, however, from a high-school U.S. history class any time up to about 1990, you might think the Crimson is insinuating that Faust will employ shifty-eyed traitors and collaborators -- carpetbaggers from lesser universities like Bryn Mawr or Penn, her almae matres -- to stab honorable Harvardians like Harvey Mansfield in the back. But the forces of righteousness will, after a brief, humiliating spell, redeem fair Harvard -- and female scientists will, once again, be hired and tenured at the rate nature intended.
Either way, Reconstruction is a more potent metaphor than the editors may have grasped.
A new short film apparently sanctioned (or even produced?) by the Irish Film Board is making the rounds online. It depicts a day at the pitch 'n' putt (a golf course of only short holes) with local heroes Joyce and Beckett.
Joyce unleashes a stream of sometimes nonsensical naughty talk, and gives lip to the shop girl who gives out tees, scorecards, and chocolate bars: "No, not a Milky Way, you arse, a Topic. All fecund in its nuttiness."
Beckett looks impassively at the golf ball in his hands waits for an unnamed third player, as only he can do, further enraging the nattily dressed Beckett. "Well I don't f______ care where he is, I'm teeing off. Into the f_____ sapphire of the day...." It's good stuff.
[Update: REVISED Feb. 12. As two readers have pointed out, Joyce actually seems to say "fecund in its nuttiness," not "thickened in its nuttiness," as my post originally said.]
On Tuesday I wrote here about John Edwards' hiring of a "blogmaster" for his 2008 presidential campaign. The blogmaster was Amanda Marcotte, of pandagon.net. I saw it as another step in the trend of co-opting bloggers to serve not only as public relations hired hands but also as a kind of alternative to media coverage. When you're out on the trail, you will always have major media with you if you're a major candidate like Edwards. But you can't control what they say. Enter the blogger, who writes diaries that look like journalism but don't have the same odor.
It turns out that on the very day I wrote about Marcotte, she and another Edwards blogger, Melissa McEwan, came under fire from the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which demanded they be fired for messages they wrote before working on the campaign. (The New York Times today described the old posts as "long cybertrails of incendiary comments on sex, religion and politics.")
Edwards reviewed the old blog posts, some of which were disparaging about powerful Catholics, and took his time responding. Then he decided to keep them on staff. Another instance, perhaps, of the blog genre bumping against the professional and political world's expectations. (That's how Wonkette makes her daily bread.)
In my column on the soon-to-be late, lamented, Darth Vaderesque Stealth fighter this week, I said the plane was retired partly to deal with budget pressures. Since President Bush has just proposed a military budget that some analysts are comparing to the massive ones of the late Cold War, that claim needs a bit of context.
Basically, the Air Force says it's being asked to do too much -- from deploying spy satellites to maintaining the fleet of older planes to designing new ones to rescuing people during Katrina -- given its budget. ($128.8 billion last year.) Air Force spokespeople stress that the service is the only truly global one -- wherever the conflict is, Baghdad or the Taiwan Straits, we'll need planes. Without an additional $20 billion more a year, for the next several years, the Air Force will be forced to fly dangerously old aircraft. (The Government Accountability Office, for its part, mostly blames poor planning on the part of the Air Force.)
All of which is to say: The Air Force generals probably aren't happy with the military budget released Monday. The Air Force got about $8 billion more for 2008, but inflation will chip away at some of that. And the Air Force's proportion of the budget actually dropped relative to the Army's and Marine Corps. Some observers say this may rekindle the old inter-service rivalries.
The F-117 "Stealth" fighter
Today, the Globe's Bryan Bender points out that some military goodies not related to the current war were slipped into the President's Iraq-war budget -- including some pricey planes. Still, the Air Force probably feels disrespected.
At Sign and Sight (tagline: "Let's talk European"), quite a storm has been documented since late January over Ian Buruma and his book "Murder in Amsterdam," about the killing of the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh.
French philosopher Pascal Bruckner kicked it off, writing in an article originally written for a German magazine. I find his critique more heat than light, but it raised an interesting point -- that Buruma's book (and the sympathetic review of it in the NYRB by Timothy Garton Ash) treated all sides of the Van Gogh story with respect and an attempt at understanding but gave something like short shrift to the Somali member of Parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who in their eyes has all but renounced Islam, thereby perhaps throwing out the baby with the bathwater. (TGA seems to have been especially critical of this, despite paying her other compliments: "[Her book] 'The Caged Virgin' is subtitled, in its American edition, 'An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam.' It would be more accurate to call it a manifesto for the emancipation of women from Islam.")
Bruckner writes, with some throat clearing:
It is time to extend our solidarity to all the rebels of the Islamic world, non-believers, atheist libertines, dissenters, sentinels of liberty, as we supported Eastern European dissidents in former times.
Buruma gets in a few licks here: "Mr Bruckner is an important French intellectual, so I'm sure he doesn't have to be told this, just as I don't need to be lectured by him on the perils of cultural relativism."
Sea Launch has been a fairly low-profile government project since its debut in 1999. Developed by a consortium of companies from four nations --the US (Boeing), Russia, Ukraine, and Norway -- it supplies a technique for launching rockets into geosynchronous orbit. The payloads on these rockets are generally satellites for use by "such customers as EchoStar, DirecTV, XM Satellite Radio, and PanAmSat," so naturally the Feds aren't wasting their money on this, or not much anyway.
Nevertheless, it is discouraging to see abject failure. Now presumably Boeing will need to charge more for their planes, and we'll end up paying for that.
Speaking of the Kennedys, I have just met Rory Kennedy, youngest daughter of RFK (she was born after her father's death). She has a new film, "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib," which was at Sundance and will be on HBO first on Feb. 22 and thereafter for about a month.
The film is a powerful piece of journalism that begins with a psychological inquiry into the American military police who perpetrated the torture and photographed it at the notorious prison, and becomes a more investigative work about where responsibility for the abuses ultimately lies.
Errol Morris has a film in production on the same subject, which is slated for a 2008 release. See them both.
The Times takes up the issue of Romney's religion on A1 today. The piece concerns itself largely with how Romney's faith will affect his chances of winning his party's nomination.
(In an Ideas piece in late December, Drake Bennett looked at where the Church of Latter Day Saints stands on various issues -- and found that "Romney's stances on key issues dear to the religious right may actually make him more conservative than his own church.")
The Times also reports that Romney is "giving strong consideration to a public address about his faith and political views, modeled after the one John F. Kennedy gave in 1960 in the face of a wave of concern about his being a Roman Catholic."
The Kennedy Library has the text of that speech, and the audio too. It's well worth a read or listen. Here's a taste:
If I should lose on the real issues, I shall return to my seat in the Senate, satisfied that I had tried my best and was fairly judged. But if this election is decided on the basis that 40 million Americans lost their chance of being President on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser, in the eyes of Catholics and non-Catholics around the world, in the eyes of history, and in the eyes of our own people.
Adam Reilly, like many other Maldenites, was displeased with my crack about the inhabitants of Paris on the Mystic, and emailed last week to say so. But this week, the Boston Phoenix's media critic gives Brainiac top honors for our coverage of what he calls Mooninite-gate. It's a fine article excoriating the Herald, WBZ-TV, WGBH's Emily Rooney, and the Globe's Jeff Jacoby for what Reilly sees as their abject failures in our time of crisis. Here's an excerpt:
BEST PERFORMANCE BY A FORMERLY OBSCURE MAJOR-MEDIA OUTLET: At about 3:30 pm Wednesday, a story written by two Globe reporters and posted at Boston.com still termed the Mooninites "suspicious objects" -- or, alternatively, "electronic circuit boards with LED lights attached." Over at the Globe's Brainiac blog, however, Joshua Glenn was calling the "suspicious objects" Mooninites, identifying them as part of a guerilla ad campaign, and crediting the local bloggers who figured things out first. Then, on Thursday, Brainiac attributed the over-the-top behavior of local law enforcement to embarrassment; suggested, provocatively, that Bostonians have a kind of terror-envy of New York; critiqued the media's awkward descriptions of the objects, and provided the technically correct phrase ("LED throwy"). Plus, he tied what happened in Boston to the inexorable metastasis of non-traditional advertising. Kudos.
Despite a few (richly deserved) left-handed compliments, I'm tickled. I should point out, though, that it was Evan and John, not me, who posted about non-traditional advertising. Also, if you read Reilly's essay to the end, you'll see that what he likes most of all is when I take a break from bashing Malden to bash my own hometown of Boston.
