Slate today carries a rather tendentious piece about Mitt Romney, subtitled "How Mitt Romney's corporate success explains his campaign -- and his flip-flops." The emphasis is definitely on the flip-flops -- on abortion, taxes, and other social issues -- which were recently exposed and criticized on TV multipletimes. (Watch for a Globe columnist in the MSNBC clip.)
The essence of the Slate near-hit job is that Romney is like a CEO who switches companies and declares each the best. He flip-flops because that's the way to the top, in other words. Principles be damned. This calls to mind, in some ways, David Greenberg's more positive Ideas piece that drew a parallel between Romney and Calvin Coolidge, an ex-Mass. governor:
"The chief business of America is business," runs Coolidge's best known aphorism -- and to be sure, his appreciation of 20th-century novelties included, foremost, a respect for the fruits of capitalism.
In contrast to the Slate writer, Greenberg sees Coolidge as a strong model for Romney, rather than a predecessor to flip-flopping. How voters perceive Romney's change of heart over abortion and gay marriage will be key to his campaign. Greenberg's comparison suggests possible optimism for the Romney camp:
It was a strength, not a weakness, that within his own party Coolidge occupied no clear niche. "He is not easy to classify as either a conservative or a progressive -- the two major lines of political division," noted Bascom Slemp. His personality, not his party or even his platform, commended him to voters. "I have not met anybody who is going to vote for the Republican Party," Barton said in 1924. "They are going to vote 'for Coolidge' or against him."
Ten years ago, Tom Hodgkinson (whom I have interviewed for Ideas and elsewhere) and Matthew De Abaitua, the editors of The Idler, a British journal, published "The Idler's Companion: An Anthology of Lazy Literature," an anthology of great idler lit. It didn't really make it to these shores; I see that Amazon has only five copies, available from used booksellers.
I can't find my copy! But Hodgkinson's "How to Be Idle" was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic. (Though it raised hackles at Fast Company.) Amazon's "Citation" features lists all 151 citations in this latter volume; they include such idler lit classics (I'm including fiction and nonfiction) as "The Compleat Angler," by Izaak Walton; "The Right To Be Lazy," by Paul Lafargue; "The Soul of Man," by Oscar Wilde; "In Praise of Idleness: And other essays" by Bertrand Russell; "Confessions of an English Opium Eater" by Thomas De Quincey; "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain; and "Down and Out in Paris and London" by George Orwell.
More incoming mail on idler and slacker lit calls for another post. A repeated nominee is Ivan Goncharev's "Oblomov," a 19th century Russian tale of sloth. According to the book's Wikipedia entry, Oblomov, the title character, "famously fails to leave his bed for the first 150 pages of the novel."
As explained in the novel, which was a very successful satire of Russian upper-rung society, "The house of Oblomov was one which had once been wealthy and distinguished, but which, of late years, had undergone impoverishment and diminution...."
From the first bit of the book: "Therefore he did as he had decided; and when the tea had been consumed he raised himself upon his elbow and arrived within an ace of getting out of bed. In fact, glancing at his slippers, he even began to extend a foot in their direction, but presently withdrew it." Within an ace!
For a delicious parody of "Oblomov," read this essay by Gary Shteyngart, author of "The Russian Debutante's Handbook" -- a slacker novel by most measures. Very funny stuff.
Steve Bailey reports in the Globe that Mayor Menino will introduce a proposal today that would reduce Boston's property taxes by imposing a meals tax and a tax on telecom companies -- if, that is, the Legislature gives the city the power to do so. (Governor Deval Patrick recently announced a plan that would give all Massachusetts municipalities greater power over their tax structures.)
Last week, Harvard law professors David Barron and Gerald Frug, writing in Ideas, made the case for why giving Boston this power specifically, and greater powers in general, is essential if Boston is going to compete for citizens and corporations in the future.
In a recent study for the Boston Foundation, Barron and Frug compared the legal powers of Boston to six other successful American cities -- Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, New York, San Francisco, and Seattle -- and found that Boston had far less power than its competitors. As they wrote in Ideas:
...the restrictions range from the absurd (the state decides the city towing fee) to the surprising (the state Legislature might have to approve a plan to move City Hall) to the serious (the state lets the city create business improvement districts but on terms that, as a practical matter, ensure they won't be established). No other city is as comprehensively restricted as Boston, and some, like Chicago, enjoy freedom on an entirely different scale.
These differences matter. Current economic forces reward cities with the ability to respond creatively and flexibly to fast-changing conditions. Urban centers that can't pursue cutting-edge economic development strategies, or respond boldly to the special challenges urban success may bring, risk slipping slowly but surely behind their competitors. Boston's ability to compete in an increasingly globalized market for urban economic development is directly connected to the state's willingness to loosen the reigns of power.
It seems the Governor and the Mayor tend to agree, as least with regard to taxes. Legislature's move.
A recent thread on The Valve has directed my attention back to a post of a year ago on the same blog by John Holbo, who also contributes to Crooked Timber and is "pretty much Editor-in-Chief" of The Valve -- for which, kudos.
The post advocates the creation of an electronic academic press, which would still have the responsibility of vetting manuscripts, arranging for peer review, and editing, but would have virtually no production costs. More to the point, the "press" would embrace the reality that academic publishing is not about profit but about elevating the stature and attention afforded to deserving scholars (who hope to then get raises, Holbo grants).
In that spirit, the works published in this way would be offered up for a generous, Lawrence Lessig-type interpretation of "fair use" -- that is, they will be usable free for long quotation, amounting to near-reproduction, and possibly even markup and modification:
the goal should not be electronic publishing, per se, but embodiment of what academic publishing culture should be like, given the potential of electronic publishing. The answer: a generous gift culture. We need an electronic press that embodies that.
The question of media "objectivity" as it relates to coverage of global warming won't go away. This week Al Gore argued once again that scientifically illiterate, on-the-one-hand, on-the-other coverage of the subject had contributed greatly to the United States' failure to face up to the crisis. (Check out this section of a recent AP story about a Gore speech-- the link may be temporary -- for a classic example of what Gore means by bogus evenhandedness.)
Does the Chronicle of Higher Education* agree with Gore on this point? Its front-of-the-book section, called Short Subjects, observes that the conservative American Enterprise Institute has offered $10,000 for articles pointing out flaws in the new IPCC report, then goes on to say:
We at Short Subjects applaud the institute for refusing to jump on the global-warming bandwagon, and we eagerly await a reward for papers that discredit the spherical-earth theories that have been circulating for the past millennium or so.
In the meantime, we are staging a contest of our own for the silliest arguments against the findings of the IPCC's climate-change report. Send your ideas to short.subjects@chronicle.com and include your name and telephone number. Please be concise. We'll publish the most entertaining responses. The winner gets a lovely parasol. Top runners-up will receive tubes of sunscreen.
Some nominations have come in for idler novels, and a few slacker ones, too.
Idler novel: Sam Lipsyte's "Home Land," which had trouble getting published but has achieved a certain cult status, among publishing types anyway.
Slacker novel: Melissa F. nominates Benjamin Kunkel's "Indecision," in which a young soul-searcher gets Pfired from a pharma company, does drugs in a blissful lovefest on the eve of 9/11, and "finds himself" under strange circumstances in Latin America. Given the acquisition of a socially conscious sense of purpose, goes into the slacker category.
Probably slacker: Jay D. hesitantly points to the narrative about Chip in Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections," in which the protagonist is unemployed, fouls up relationships, steals salmon steak from SoHo's Dean & DeLuca, and at some point ends up involved in a successful dot-com in East Europe. Or does that crash and burn?
Idler, with a darker tinge: Jay D. also gives a nod to Robert Stone's "Dog Soldiers," in which a half-assed journalist smuggles heroin, from which things only go downhill -- quelle surprise.
Slacker novel, best answer yet: "Remembrance of Things Past," which Joshua K. says is "by you know who."
[Revised 5:49 p.m. to specify salmon steaks in "The Corrections" and to remove reference to a heroin problem for the main character in "Dog Soldiers." He might only deal the stuff.]
Vince Gallo's gorgeous (if onanistic) tour de force about a young man's cross-country quest for...?. I know, I know, everyone loves to hate the guy, but I think Gallo's bizarrely purposeful intensity -- paradoxically -- makes it sort of an idler manifesto, rather than just a road movie of some sort. And on a meta-level, as a filmmaker he seems to replace the "story arc" with a series of privately meaningful goals, which somehow says 'idler auteur' to me."
I'd like to add that Gallo was born in 1961; he strikes me as a quintessential member of the Jones/Obama/Repo Man generation.
Matthew D. suggests: "Withnail and I," truly a great movie about the pleasures of idling (though, at the end, one of the characters does get a job, I think); "Zardoz," in which Sean Connery stars as the last virile man in an effete and decadent future (kind of a warning to idlers); and "A Boy And His Dog," in which Don Johnson navigates a post-apocalyptic future. (Think of it as "Two-Lane Blacktop" plus telepathic dog.)
Still accepting nominations, but Friday is the cutoff point!
Very interesting piece in the San Francisco Chronicle last weekend about the city's Castro district:
...up and down the enclave that has been a symbol of gay culture for more than three decades, heterosexuals are moving in. They have come to enjoy some of the same amenities that have attracted the neighborhood's many gay and lesbian residents: charming houses, convenient public transportation, safe streets and nice weather.
I love the detail about the nice weather -- New Englanders complain about our unpredictable weather, but it's so San Francisco to talk about weather as varying from neighborhood to neighborhood. On a more serious note, according to the Chronicle the encroachment of heterosexuals on gay neighborhoods is a phenomenon happening "from Chicago to New York City to Toronto, where urban revitalization is bringing new residents at the same time some gays are settling in other parts of cities or the suburbs."
San Francisco is apparently spending $100,000 on a plan to preserve the area's gay identity. (A variety of initiatives are on the table, from creating more affordable housing in the neighborhood to finding a home for the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society's archives.) But the Castro has acheived symbolic status, and SF is a progressive city, and I wonder if other gay neighborhoods in other cities will be able to count on such support. I also wonder to what extent this phenomenon is in evidence here in Boston. Local Brainiac readers, any insight?
Mark Feeney, author of the Globe's obituary of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., checked in this morning with word that he had a few more thoughts on the historian to share:
There are many things to be said pro and con about Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who died of a heart attack last night in New York. You'd have to go back to Henry Adams to find a more graceful writer among American historians, and his "Age of Roosevelt" books solidified a template for our understanding of the New Deal that remains largely intact half a century later.
Of course, "The Age of Jackson" (1945), which won him the first of two Pulitzer Prizes, reads today like a brilliant backdating of the New Deal. Old Hickory, as portrayed by Schlesinger, seemed to have nothing to fear but fear itself. The same might be said of Schlesinger's portrayals of John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert -- except they come across as even more impressive than FDR. It's as if FDR, in the implicit Schlesingerian schema, is John the Baptist to . . . well, you get the idea. It's not for nothing that Garry Wills labeled Schlesinger a "Kennedy courtier." "A Thousand Days" (1965), his book about JFK, may have won Schlesinger a second Pulitzer, but it soon came to seem more like roseate apologia than objective history.
For better or worse, Schlesinger's association with the Kennedys will forever define his career. Now only Robert S. McNamara and Ted Sorensen remain from the higher echelons of Camelot. Yet Schlesinger belonged to another starry, if less prominent, group with roots in Cambridge: the scholars at Harvard in the 1930s and '40s who all but created the field now known as American studies.
Schlesinger was a generation younger than Perry Miller and F.O. Matthiessen and Samuel Eliot Morison, slightly younger than Daniel Aaron and Henry Nash Smith, and slightly older than Edmund S. Morgan and Leo Marx. But the intellectual influence of that group is hard to exaggerate, and far from the least among them was Schlesinger (a Harvard faculty brat, whose namesake father was a noted historian in his own right). Their senior member now is Aaron, who at 94 still goes into his Harvard office each weekday morning, and whose memoir, "The Americanist," the University of Michigan Press will publish this spring.
If any one work defined that Harvard cadre, it was Matthiessen's "American Renaissance" (1941), which among many other things celebrated the deeply democratic impulse in American culture. That impulse was something Schlesinger embraced in his life as well as work. His donnish bow ties and frequent appearances in the New York society pages gave him an aristo air. But he listed his number in the Manhattan White Pages. He answered his own phone and always had time for journalists' questions. That willingness to respond owed something to a fondness for seeing his name in print, yes, but even more it was indicative of a vision of scholarship that rejected any idea of an ivory tower and saw it as a vital part of the life of the republic. Think of it as a sort of civic equation: scholar + courtier = citizen.
I mentioned yesterday that a traffic counter chained to a pole in downtown Boston was detonated by the bomb squad. This story was not widely reported in the local press. (The Globe hasn't reported on it, as far as I can tell.) See the previous post for links to TV news coverage. And so far, no traffic-counting firm CEO has apologized or resigned.
The well-known security technologist Bruce Schneier (The Economist has called him a "security guru") said something depressing/amusing about the incident on his blog today:
It's not just the Mooninite blinkies. In 2004, the Boston police harrassed a protester by pretending he might be standing on a bomb. I'm beginning to think that something is seriously wrong with the police chain of command in Boston. Boston PD: Putting the "error" in "terror."
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Ouch! (Thanks, Boing Boing, for pointing out Schneier's comment.)
Why is Boston so detonation-happy? Last week, I spoke off the record to a person of my acquaintance who works in City Hall, and this person said: "Two words: Homeland Security." It's not the BPD, this person claimed; it's the Homeland Security types who've moved into City Hall who are exceedingly "nervous." In a comment posted to Schneier's blog, one of his readers is even less charitable:
The most plausible explanation is a pile of Federal anti-terrorism funding, sitting around in a municipal budget, waiting idly for something to do, and hoping for renewal with the new fiscal year. The people who write annual reports for the city need expenditure line items, and don't need to include any press clippings with the document they submit. The personnel and material costs of this "anti-terrorism" action will surely be itemized, and used to justify future anti-terror funding.
OK, Globe Spotlight Team! Time to mobilize. Let's investigate this funny business.
That Tennessee Center for Policy Research press release-cum-exposé on Al Gore's own carbon impact has generated a lot of blogging.
As most of the links in this post on the blog Alas indicate, what's emanating from the online armies is more heat than light. But the one from Gristmill was provocative. The writer wants to say that a) Gore offsets his carbon usage by buying offsets, a responsible and rare practice, and b) what he does is less relevant than what he says, because the latter concerns widely disseminated policy:
The primary message of the green movement is not that everyone should become monks. The primary message is that we need to change the system -- the laws and physical infrastructure that underpin our collective life. We need a new industrial revolution that makes eco-friendly living the default choice, the one that requires little thought, much less heroics.
...
These are the kinds of things Gore is out stumping for. If he helps achieve these changes, the good that results will outweigh his personal environmental footprint by many orders of magnitude. If he can't succeed in generating these kinds of changes, reducing his personal environmental footprint will amount to pissing in the wind.
This has the ring of rationalization. As I suggested, it amounts to a parent's "Do as I say, not as I do," and it also suggests that individuals' environmentally green acts are more or less for naught, which isn't quite the message the blogger is going for, I'm pretty sure.
Nevertheless, he's probably right in some sense. Recycling went through this argument in the '90s, and it was in fact much more important that places like Starbucks use "post-consumer content" in their cups than that I remember to recycle my bottles and cans.
I'm catching up with my reading, this week, and in the February issue of Harper's, I was blown away by "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism," Jonathan Lethem's terrific meditation on/manifesto about/enactment of: love and theft, contamination anxiety, the creative commons, the gift economy, the beauty of second use, and "usemonopoly."
Now, I've read plenty of arguments in favor of relaxing copyright law. In fact, I've made the argument myself, writing for the website Feed back in 1999, shortly after Congress extended copyrights held by corporations from 75 to 95 years. (The Walt Disney Company, eager to ensure that their 1928 animated short "Steamboat Willie," starring the prototype for Mickey Mouse, would not pass into the public domain in 2003, orchestrated the extension.) But Lethem's argument in favor of relaxing copyright is particularly brilliant -- and besides, it comes not from one of the usual suspects, e.g., mashup artists and other musicians who rely on audio samples, but from a successful novelist.
'Steamboat Willie'
Lethem persuasively argues that hand-wringing over originality and appropriation in art is a canard, because: "literature has been in a plundered, fragmentary state for a long time" (at least since Shakespeare); "blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of 'open source' culture"; "without 'The Flintstones' -- more or less 'The Honeymooners' in cartoon loincloths -- 'The Simpsons' would cease to exist"; and so forth. He suggests that copyright is a "right" in no absolute sense, but rather a "government-granted monopoly on the use of creative results" -- hence a "usemonopoly." And speaking of Disney, Lethem accuses them of "source hypocrisy," because:
The Walt Disney Company has drawn an astonishing catalogue from the work of others: 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,' 'Fantasia,' 'Pinocchio,' 'Dumbo,' 'Bambi,' 'Song of the South,' 'Cinderella,' 'Alice in Wonderland,' 'Robin Hood,' 'Peter Pan,' 'Lady and the Tramp,' 'Mulan,' 'Sleeping Beauty,' 'The Sword in the Stone,' 'The Jungle Book,' and, alas, 'Treasure Planet'...
Lethem suggests that a shorthand term for "source hypocrisy" might be "Disnial."
Most entertainingly of all, at the end we learn that the bulk of the essay was cobbled together from multiple other writings on copyright and creative appropriation. After all, to quote a line that Lethem lifts from an interview with UVA social historian Eric Lott, author of "Love and Theft" (which documents the admiration/cultural appropriation in blackface minstrelsy; and whose title was lifted by Bob Dylan): "appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act, cutting across all forms and genres in the realm of cultural production." This is certainly true of long-form magazine essays, and Lethem masterfully lays bare the device. He even admits that the idea of a collage text is not an original one, pointing to Walter Benjamin's "Arcades Project," Eduardo Paolozzi's collage novel "Kex," and recent essays on/enactments of plagiarism by David Shields, David Edelstein, and others.
Phew! It's a real tour de force. Well worth reading. And while you're at it, check out this video of Neo-Mickey, a gorgeous cartoon designed and storyboarded by Matthew Cruickshank, and animated by Barry Baker. The video was posted earlier this week to Cruickshank's blog; I think it's a proof-of-concept cartoon for a proposed video game. You may or may not agree that Neo-Mickey is a good idea, or cool, or funny, or sufficiently Mickey-esque. But how can you disagree with the argument that living artists ought to have a chance to appropriate Mickey, just like the Disney Co. has appropriated beloved pop culture icons of the past?
Following Josh's posts about idler and slacker movies, I thought I'd add a note about a thoroughly enjoyable idler novel: Upamanyu Chatterjee's "English, August: An Indian Story." From the inspired jacket copy:
[Agastya Sen's] friends go to Yale and Harvard. August himself has just landed a prize government job.
The job takes him to Madna, "the hottest town in India," deep in the sticks. There he finds himself surrounded by incompetents and cranks, timewasters, bureaucrats, and crazies. What to do? Get stoned, shirk bureaucrats, collapse in the heat, stare at the ceiling.
Whether this is a slacker or an idler novel is open to debate, since Agastya is after all employed in a good job, and does undergo a kind of transformation. But it isn't the neat, pro-society transformation you might expect. Indeed, as Amit Chaudhuri has said, the novel is "at war with 'importance,' and is one of the few Indian English novels in the last two decades genuinely, and wonderfully, impelled by irreverence and aimlessness."
Any other nominees for Idler Art, Literary Division?
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.
