Japanese foreign minister Taro Asa is at it again. In the language skills department, he's up there with Daisuke Matsuzaka's (ex-)translator. Asa has a little history of bobbling the ball in public, Reuters reports:
He offended South Korea with remarks in 2003 that were interpreted in Seoul as trying to justify some of Japan's actions during its 1910-1945 colonization of the Korean peninsula.
He also drew criticism in 2001 when, as economics minister, he said he hoped to make Japan the kind of country where "rich Jews" would want to live.
This time, Asa said in a speech that when it comes to Middle East diplomacy,
"Japan is doing what Americans can't do"....
"Japanese are trusted. If [you have] blue eyes and blond hair, it's probably no good," he said.
"Luckily, we Japanese have yellow faces."
CNN gives the Reuters story a memorable headline: "Japan diplomat: Blonds 'no good' in Mideast talks"
Over at Shutdownday.org, some 55,000 people, as of this writing, have taken the pledge to turn their computer off at midnight and leave it off for 24 hours. About 9,000 damned souls have confessed that they cannot stay off the computer for a single Saturday.
Michael Wood has an excellent piece in the London Review of Books on the superb and wrenching German film "The Lives of Others," the surprise winner last month of the Oscar for best foreign film, over "Pan's Labyrinth." For local readers, the movie is still playing in Boston, theaters and showtimes here.
The film takes place in Berlin in the years just before the Wall came down in 1989, with an epilogue that comes after. There are in a sense two main characters, one a playwright/writer who begins as a model citizen in the eyes of the state but becomes a dissident, the other the man who spies on him for the Stasi. The interplay between them, though they never meet, is intimate, and morally complex. As is, crucially, the relationship between the writer and his wife, a prominent actress.
Wood deftly captures the mood and force of "The Lives of Others," and closes with a paragraph that deserves to be quoted in full. However, I must say that there are spoilers ahead. Stop reading now if, like George Costanza, you "like to go in fresh."
There are two ways of reading the story of the good person [the spy, Gerd Wiesler]. One is rather sentimental, and the film leans into it towards the end: it's the story of the prodigal monster, the tormentor who discovers a little humanity in himself after all, and over whom in heaven there is more rejoicing than over the thousands of people who were not monsters to start with. In this version Wiesler is a hero, and the attraction of the [Ulrich] Muhe's low-key presentation of the character contributes to this effect. The other reading provides no hero, and scarcely even a good person except in the bleakest, most diminished of perspectives. But it is, I think, more compelling than the first reading, and it is what the actual title of the film picks up. Wiesler does not find virtue or moral salvation; he finds, through the sheer patience and persistence of his spying, through the long, narrow act of abnegation that is his life, a form of humanity he can approach only vicariously, a world where the pleasures of 'being friendly', in Brecht's phrase, do still exist against all the odds, and are not a mere mask or lure for corruption.
It's worth checking out a nifty article in the Washington Post today about a D.C. dump-truck driver -- for the firm Junk in the Trunk (!) -- who collects trash in his spare time, too. Christopher Goodwin is interested in rubbish of all sizes, notable examples of which he displays on his blog, but he is best-known, it seems, for his Trashballs, gumball-size spheres with rubbish inside. They're actually sold from gumball machines, a quarter per. Goodwin is a "proud dropout" from art school who chooses to drive a truck for work because "Office work corrodes my soul."
Trash- and Goodwin-enthusiasts should know about two things: 1) The book "Rubbish!: The Archeology of Garbage," whose premise is that "what people have owned -- and thrown away -- can speak more eloquently, informatively, and truthfully about the lives they lead than they themselves ever may." 2) Found Magazine, which I highly, highly recommend. The mag displays montages of found items sent in by readers -- love letters left at Kinko's, Mash notes from middle school, mix tapes, Polaroids, etc. I've been looking for a great find for them for years, but so far nothing up to snuff. The Web site shows a "Find of the Day."
The forthcoming publication of a Library of America edition of four Philip K. Dick novels of the 1960s ("The Man in the High Castle," "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and "Ubik"), introduced by Jonathan Lethem (who in 1984 dropped out of college in order to become the Philip K. Dick Society's first recruit), will undoubtedly, hopefully, raise a few hackles.
I mean: Henry Adams, Louisa May Alcott, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, Edith Wharton... and the author of "The Zap Gun"? I say "hopefully" just because I hope there are people out there who still take literary standards seriously. But, of course, as Ideas and Brainiac readers may already know, I think Dick is one of the greatest novelists of the 2d half of the 20th century.
Anyway, the folks at the Valve are arguing about the Library of America/Philip K. Dick question this week. Scott Eric Kaufman doesn't touch the question of whether Dick is a talented writer or not, but wonders whether the 2d half of the 20th century was really a time of creeping paranoia, or if it was just Dick's paranoia that will make it seem so to future readers of the Library of America volume. If a novelist is like a seismograph (and that's a big if), is Dick a trustworthy instrument? David Moles says yes: "You don't have to argue for the literal truth of Dick's work to call it a potent metaphor for its time, whether it really is or not." Others disagree. What do you think, readers?
I nominate this discussion for talkfest of the week.
PPS: Here's James Parker writing about Dick, for Ideas: "Substance."
UPDATE: Thanks, RealFake blog, for the following comment on this post:
Good linkery in the Brainiac post about the new Philip K. Dick edition of the "Library of America" series. Brainiac once again strikes that balance between pomposity and pop that is dear to my heart.
Josh, great post on Crichton and Gore (and nice line, Al). Were you aware of the back story involving Crichton and Michael Crowley, whose TNR post you linked to? It's quite amazing. Let's just say the phrase "small penis rule" -- a legal term of art-- is involved.
And Evan, there was actually breaking news this week, unbelievably enough, on the trolleys-and-moral-philosophy front. In the laboratory, psychologists determined that if you damage a certain part of your brain -- or, I should say, if a part of your brain is already damaged; don't try this at home -- you are much more willing (than a subject without the injury) to push someone onto the tracks, in front of a train, in order to save innocent people further down those tracks. In other words, with this specific injury, the utilitarian part of your brain works just fine (you count the deaths you cause against the deaths saved), but the empathy part (I don't want to kill someone myself!), which causes most people to balk at the "push" part of the equation, is affected. Josh Greene, the psychologist whose work Singer discusses in the Guardian, is quoted as saying the new finding affirms some of his own work.
A cheeseburger at McDonald's is 99 cents. A double cheeseburger is...100 cents. I can't figure out how this is economically advantageous for McDonald's, and nor are any of my friend's explanations proving persuasive.
He gives you the friends' theories, too. And he's right about them. The comments section below the post, however, gives us, if not a definitive explanation, at least a few gems of burgernomic wisdom. 1):
I think this is the breakdown for each transaction:
Ha, but uh, where's the profit? Oh, never mind. 2) "In order to be more 'health conscious', [single-burger buyers] becomes less sensitive to the fact they're getting hosed." 3) Because the drinks and fries are where the money's at, "The dollar menu items are the pawns of the operation. There's no such thing as half a pawn." 4) "What I want to know is how Little Debbie stuff is so cheap. Actually, I probably don't want to know. They're probably made out of the workers, or something..." And 5):
maybe there is a kickback from astra-zeneca on each big mac sold...as it will be leading to another lifetime consumer of the little purple pill. yum. a big mac, an order of fries and some fluff for dessert with a prilosec on top.
Back in February 2005, Chris Mooney wrote an excellent essay for Ideas about Michael Crichton's novel "State of Fear." The protagonist of that fiction, if you recall, was an MIT professor of geoenvironmental engineering who argued that global warming was not caused by humans; and the novel was heavily footnoted with actual scientific citations supposedly backing up the denialist professor's claims. Well, Mooney called up some of the scientists footnoted in the book, and they told him that Crichton was twisting their words and distorting their findings.
Gotcha! Right? Alas, as NYU media and culture professor Stephen Duncombe argues in his fine new book "Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy," debunking the other guy's false claims just isn't good enough. "Truth and power belong to those who tell the better story," he writes.
As The New Republic reports on The Plank, its political blog, yesterday Al Gore told a pretty good story before Congress -- and simultaneously got in a jab at Crichton. Hoping to spur action on legislation to fight climate change, Gore told a House panel:
The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says, "You have to intervene here," you don't say, "Well, I read a science fiction novel that says this isn't important."
"Hmm," gloats The Plank's Michael Crowley. "I wonder what that might have been a reference to."
A very interesting letter, from reader J.H.M., regarding my post yesterday about new investigations into the evolutionary and biological roots of human morality:
From your post [the quote is from Sharon Street, as quoted in the NYT, as quoted in my post--ed.]: "You can identify some value we hold, and tell an evolutionary story about why we hold it, but there is always that radically different question of whether we ought to hold it[.]"
I shy away from the diction, but if by using the word 'value,' we mean moral values such as the 'trolley' examples illustrate, I would say that every such proclivity has an evolutionary 'story' behind it. This is not to say that these cannot be modified by experience or the will to do so, but besides accepting a Skinneresque view on acquired traits, or a belief in an intrinsic moral force, there is no other way to explain these values in a way where systemic analysis would be helpful or even meaningful. I wouldn't argue that we necessarily understand what these stories might be, but they must exist, our ignorance notwithstanding.
At any rate, back to the quote. If we say that we 'ought' not hold a value, which I say was developed evolutionarily, i.e., was selected for based on the trait's providing a survival advantage, then we should be very careful when we cavalierly propose to consciously stop holding a value without a reasonable explanation as to why this survival advantage is no longer valid.
J.H.M. has more of a right-brain orientation than I do, though I admire his logic and think he poses a challenge to Peter Singer (much more so than to me). I think that moral philosophy, in addition to evolutionary biology, is "helpful [and] even meaningful." Its aim as I see it is, through "systematic analysis," to synthesize our moral intuitions with reason so that the whole system coheres to the extent that it can -- to "explain" our moral intuitions, then, albeit in a slightly different sense than is likely to satisfy J.H.M. Between intuition and reason, which must come further to meet in the middle is indeed an open question, but such a project is not defeated by evolutionary explanations.
He describes the Peter Singer article well, and rightly points out another thought experiment Peter Singer has encouraged:
Suppose that as you were walking to work today, you passed a child drowning in a shallow pond. Should you wade in and save her, even at the cost of ruining your suit? Of course. But for much less than the cost of a suit, you really could save a child who is now dying. The only difference between the cases is that the second child is far away, probably in sub-Saharan Africa. We think very badly of the person who walks past the drowning child to save his suit; but we don't think badly of the person who buys a suit instead of giving the money to UNICEF. What could make the moral difference? Surely not just distance. Singer argues that nothing makes such a difference.
Tough pill to swallow, huh? Sam clearly took some of the same classes I did, and has probably read Peter Unger's forceful and disturbing book "Living High and Letting Die." (I always get him confused with Peter Singer.)
Ultimately, all this leads to 1) a debate about the validity of emotion or intuition in morality, as against reason, and 2) a conflict between deontology (in essence, morality is a system of "don't" rules) and consequentialism (morality is the bringing about of the best outcomes). But I'll spare you more, and link to a fantastic little ditty that Sam has brought to my attention. It's a bunch of in jokes, but it's a scream. How did I miss this?
Speaking of ethics and its attendant and never-ending debates, The Valve takes note of a Peter Singer article in the Guardian about new research using old thought experiments to investigate the neural basis of moral decision-making. Two thought experiments:
1) You are standing by a railroad track when you notice that a trolley, with no one aboard, is heading for a group of five people. They will all be killed if it continues on its current track. The only thing you can do to prevent these five deaths is to throw a switch that will divert the trolley on to a side track, where it will kill only one person.
What do you do, Batman? Most people say "Just do it."
2) This time, you are standing on a footbridge above the track. You cannot divert the trolley. You consider jumping off the bridge, in front of the trolley, thus sacrificing yourself to save the people in danger, but you realise you are too light to stop the trolley. Standing next to you is a very large stranger. The only way you can prevent the trolley from killing five people is by pushing this stranger off the bridge into the path of the trolley. He will be killed, but you will save the other five.
Most people say "No can do." The Valve writer doesn't appear to realize that these so-called trolley problems and others like them have a long history in philosophy. (I'm sufficiently geeky to find them really fun to talk about, if anyone wants to.)
He also makes a hash of Singer's article, whose subject is a new experiment using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) that "found that people asked to make a moral judgment about 'personal' violations, like pushing the stranger off the footbridge, showed increased activity in areas of the brain associated with emotions." More annoying evidence that will be used to say neural circuitry explains all. But Singer believes that this study should only "make us more sceptical about relying on our intuitions." We just get emotional sometimes when we're about to kill people. Nothing a philosopher can't fix.
The Internet has been all abuzz with talk of a mock advertisement circulating online that rips off Apple's famous "1984" commercial, adapting it to pose Hillary Clinton as Big Sister and Barack Obama as the renegade who can "Think Different." The Obama campaign said it had nothing to do with the ad. The creator has now come forward, and his ties to the Obama campaign, which so far appear pretty loose, will be the subject of a bunch of reporting in the days to come. Here's the video, for those catching up:
I wouldn't say it's brilliant exactly, but it does have a certain iconic force that might well be lasting. Of the comments I've seen online, my favorite, from MSNBC's The Red Tape Chronicles, a blog written by Bob Sullivan, captures the weird confluence of politics and the user-equals-producer Internet:
Enduring images from political campaigns are sometimes credited with changing the course of an election. Some political consultants believe each campaign produces such a video moment. But this time around, what if the image isn't produced by either campaign?
In the Science section of the New York Times yesterday, Nicholas Wade has what is to me a fascinating article. Wade writes that a growing body of evidence of acts among animals that are driven by a concern for others lends credence to the notion that these behaviors are the precursors of human morality. The best example comes right at the top:
Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.
Did everyone else know this?? The article says that "Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, proposed in his book 'Moral Minds' that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules," an echo of Noam Chomsky's famous theories and findings about language.
"Moral philosophers do not take very seriously the biologists' bid to annex their subject," Wade writes. Count me on their side. Maybe it's the fact that moral philosophy was my area of specialty as an undergraduate. Maybe it's just an aversion to the idea that we human beings are just playing out the script evolution has written, that moral reasoning and the soul could be explained away by science.
"You can identify some value we hold, and tell an evolutionary story about why we hold it, but there is always that radically different question of whether we ought to hold it," said Sharon Street, a moral philosopher at New York University.
Edging into Jan's territory a little bit, I wanted to point out a post on Language Log about the word "McJob." Apparently, as reported in the BBC, the UK branch of Mickey D's (sp?) is mounting a campaign to get a more favorable definition of the word into the "Oxford English Dictionary." (Who knew it was there?) Current definition:
An unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector.
The BBC says the term was popularized by Douglas Coupland's 1991 book "Generation X," though I can't say I've heard it lately. Language Log's Roger Shuy writes:
McDonald's believes this definition is out of date, inaccurate, and insulting, saying that it's time the dictionary changed it's [sic] definition, citing its own slogan as evidence:
McProspects - over half of our executive team started in our restaurants.
That's a questionable tack to take, I'd say. All the network nightly news shows seem to have a slogan about how they're the most watched, but I don't see them petitioning the OED to define them as number one. Also, a commenter on Language Log notes that 1) the McDonald's CEO has said that "more than 1,000 of the men and women who own and operate McDonald's restaurants today got their start by serving customers behind the counter," and 2) McDonald's has more than 30,000 restaurants and over 400,000 employees. The odds must be crazy.
[Addition: Jan Freeman wrote about "McJobs" back on Nov. 16, 2003 for Ideas. But you'll have to pay for the article after searching boston.com.]
But here is something else that has the blogosphere buzzing today. Cartoonist Chris Ware, about whom everyone knows already, has produced his first cartoon, an animated version of one of the stories from the premiere episode of Showtime's upcoming "This American Life" show. Which is a spinoff of the public radio program, about which everyone knows already. The TV show debuts tomorrow evening.
The story, which sounds too good to be true, is about a bunch of 5th and 6th grade kids who all make pretend TV cameras out of cardboard boxes; they soon band into competing news operations. The teacher who tells the story says that the cameras were finally confiscated after he found one boy pummeling another boy on the playground, both circled by children aiming the fake cameras at the fight and reporting on it breathlessly.
painting by Laylah Ali
Ware, who is almost as good as Laylah Ali at depicting man's inhumanity to man via round-headed cartoon characters (see his cover for the recent Penguin edition of "Candide," for example), does a fine job here. I have to say, the video makes me want to watch the show, despite what Joanna Weiss said about "This American Life" in the Globe this past Sunday. Too bad I don't have cable.
How do you recruit an expert typographer (fontographer, alphabetician, whatever you want to call someone who knows everything about typefaces) in a tight job market? The London-based design firm Lunar BBDO asked itself the same question recently. Their answer? A series of recruitment ads whose copy was set entirely in "dingbats" (picture fonts) like Webdings, Wingdings, and Zapf Dingbats:
According to CreativePro, the website that reported the story, this is not the first time that a stunt like this has been happened:
Design rule breaker David Carson printed an entire interview with musician Brian Ferry in Zapf Dingbats in a 1994 issue of Ray Gun magazine. Although there has been speculation that the dingbat article was merely the result of an error in the production phase, Lewis Blackwell's '20th-Century Type' states that the use of unreadable icons was "Carson's reaction to the dull text."
Slate likes to zag where other publications zig -- but sometimes contrarianism can just tie you up in knots.
Follow the shifting impulses and arguments in this piece on the admissions processes at elite private pre-schools. First comes the pre-emptive strike against the conventional wisdom: "It's March, which means it's time for a spate of stories about the high comedy of preschool admissions ... In the press (and on the playground), the selective schools are the villains, and parents either the laughing stocks or the victims. The underlying assumption is that sorting small children comes down to judgments about their behavior that are wildly mercurial."
That sets up the contrarian take: Schools actually know what they are doing when they reject your youngster. Zounds (he says, as the father of a two-year-old). This striking claim is surely what sent this story shooting up the list of Slate's most-forwarded pieces.
But the caveats in the story, proliferating like bruises on a playground, undermine the thesis: In fact, the story says, kids do get arbitrarily rejected because they didn't share their shovel in the sandbox (not unheard of even among well-adjusted kids at this age); often, of course, the children of donors have pride of place in the process; some of the best pre-schools in the world view admissions screening as antithetical to the whole point of educating pre-schoolers; accomplished adults aren't necessarily sharers at age 2.
What's left in the end? Another amusing piece in, yes, "the press" on the high comedy of pre-school admissions.
In December Sven Birkerts wrote a piece about the challenges of reviewing a book that comes freighted with a huge advance, a lot of hype, and a cinder block heft. He discussed in particular Vikram Chandra's new epic novel "Sacred Games." The novel won an advance of $1 million and is over 900 pages. How does a critic stay clear-eyed, free of envy and marketplace cynicism, Birkerts wondered. How to read a lead weight while lying on your back? (Pillow on the stomach, under the book.)
There is a new interview with Chandra on the provocatively named Bookslut Web site, which is actually not at all lascivious. In the interview Chandra takes up the issue and gives, I think, a graceful answer:
[Interviewer:] There was a lot of press regarding the advance of one million dollars for the book. Now that it's published do you feel the pressure of that?
[Chandra:] I was, I had a kind of happy life, as a midlist writer with a couple of books out. I mean you're just so happy about being published; I never expected anything much more than that. So, when the whole sort of excitement started over this one, it was baffling and exciting at the same time. I guess it's not really pressure, but I can see how having that sort of buzz can shape a backlash against it. I suppose what's unfortunate about that is that people getting caught up in that than actually looking at the book itself as a story.
The interviewer, Tony DuShane, mentions the size issue, too: "This 900-page epic is also heavy enough to use as a weapon against muggers on public transit."
If you have a Luddite streak and a yen for the simple life, it turns out you can build your very own replica of Henry Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond. It's going to turn out a little small, this replica, but still! A free model! The people behind it, Fiddlers Green, have put in a lot of work and seem both appealing and smart.
They have a sense of humor, too: "The nice folk at the Concord Museum yelled at me for taking photos of Henry's writing desk."
I've got a few more March books here that I'd like to share. I haven't read every word, but they look very good so far. I promise, I'm not praising every book that crosses my desk. These are the select handful of new titles that have made it through my rigorous filtering process. Check them out:
"Socrates in Love: Philosophy for a Passionate Heart" (Norton), by Christopher Phillips. Phillips is a very impressive figure, a world-travelling philosopher about whom I've written a few times before; he's started philosophy cafes -- grassroots discussion groups that approach philosophy as a tool for living -- in jails, hospitals, nursing homes, even in cafes. His books "Socrates Cafe" and "Six Questions of Socrates" demonstrate how ordinary people without any expert philosophical training could reason their way toward something like enlightenment, simply by asking better and better questions. Here, Phillips dispels notions that rational thought and passion don't mix as he communes about love (love of family, love of strangers, love between friends, selfless love, love of country, love of God, love of life, love of wisdom) with everyone you can imagine, from soldiers to homeless children to maximum-security prison inmates to Katrina refugees to South Africans celebrating the 10th anniversary of apartheid to Belfast residents on Easter Sunday. The book offers no answers; that's not the point. The idea is to get us thinking -- but be careful! Unlike listening to The Shins's "New Slang," thinking deeply really might change your life.
"Jamestown: A Novel" (Soft Skull), by Matthew Sharpe. In January, James Parker wrote, in an Ideas column on Cormac McCarthy's new novel "The Road" and the Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron's movie "Children Of Men," that these post-apocalyptic and dystopian narratives share a preoccupation: "The search for something to live by, a principle or perspective that will clarify present suffering." It's difficult to believe that the same might be true of Sharpe's non-earnest novel, set in a not-too-distant future that recapitulates, in a twisted way, America's colonial past. America is ravaged, the environment is exhausted, and the ruler of Manhattan sends colonists in one of those "Gauntlet"-style armored schoolbuses to Jamestown, Virginia, where they meet up with a Native American gal named Pocahontas and attempt to exploit her tribe. Hijinks ensue. So how can Sharpe's black humor (he's a very funny writer, in the best kind of nihilistic way) exist in the same book as such un-hilarious things as hope, optimism, redemption, joy? I hear they're in there, and I intend to find them; this novel looks right up my Damnation Alley.
"Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers" (Anchor), ed. Alane Salierno Mason, Dedi Felman, and Samantha Schnee. In 2003, I was excited to hear about the launch of Words Without Borders, a website dedicated to literature in translation. It's important for Americans to read international literature, but that's not a sufficient argument for actually doing so. The literature we read should also be engaging, enjoyable, charming, fascinating, troubling -- or why bother reading? I'm happy to report, after a few hours on a train, that the stories in this collection, translated from Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, Bengali, Persian, Arabic, Yoruba, Romanian, Bosnian, Italian, German, French, Norwegian, and Spanish, and individually introduced by Jonathan Safran Foer, Ha Jin, Wole Soyinka, Gunter Grass, Jose Saramago, and many other litterateurs, aren't merely worth reading, they're fun and exciting to read. Dress warmly: You're headed to the frontiers of new literature.
UPDATE: Right after I wrote this entry, I sat down and read the 1st 100 pages of "Jamestown." Excellent, so far!
Last week Josh made the first go at a new Brainiac feature of uncertain frequency: books of interest to the Brainiac bloggers. Here's my initial stab.
I'm almost done reading Tom Bissell's new book, "The Father of All Things," and I wanted to tell all that it's extraordinary. (If you look at the critical praise on the Amazon page, you'll see that you don't have to trust me.) Bissell is in his early thirties, and this is his third book, after "Chasing the Sea," about Uzbekistan, and "God Lives in St. Petersburg," a collection of often wickedly funny short stories. (Read "The Ambassador's Son.") "The Father of All Things" is a memoir recounting a 2004 trip to Vietnam that Bissell took with his father, who was a Marine in the Vietnam War, where he saw combat and was seriously injured. The book is funny, very sharp, and most of all moving. My dad was a Marine, and Bissell's relationship with his father reminds me a lot of mine. But the book is about all men, because we're all sons. (Yes, Bissell is a friend.)
I'm just beginning an English novel called "Remainder," by Tom McCarthy, and I have that warming in the stomach that tells you "This is going to be good." If you've seen the Christopher Nolan film "Memento," you have some idea of the head-bending that McCarthy is up to. The narrator suffers massive memory loss as the result of an accident and receives a huge settlement. He uses the money to re-enact, with some hired help, things remembered or imagined. It's an ingenious ball of twine and I look forward to seeing it unravel.
In the academoblogosphere, or whatever it's called, this headline needs no context, no explanation, no justification.
Michael Bérubé? Crooked Timber? you ask. Well, I realize that Brainiac is not exactly in the academoblogosphere, but it's 10:30 pm as I write this, so I'm just going to link to more details.
I wanted to note that one of those paleolithic cell phones, much like the ones pictured in Josh's post below, appears prominently in the 1987 movie "Wall Street," starring Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen, pictured here in a still from the film. Douglas plays the wealthy, rapacious, and wonderfully named magnate Gorgon Gekko -- he's a lizard! -- and utters the famous line "Greed is good."
At one point Gekko is seen strolling a magnificent beach in linen pants, if memory serves, and holding a cell phone, probably worth only a little less than $3,995, that is roughly the size of a hardcover book. Seriously, it's amazing. It makes you think of one of these field phones from World War II. "We've got a man down here. Send in a medic."
Parenthetically, cell phones should no longer be called cell phones because they are now digital and don't use cellular technology, but try telling that to the whole country. Besides, if you say "Call me on my mobile" you sound like a wanna-be Brit.
Speaking of cell phones, there's a very interesting/amusing story on the development of the mobile phone in the winter issue of Invention and Technology magazine. Motorola introduced the world's first handheld portable cell phone in 1973.
Motorola's first commercial cell phone cost $3,995
What's so interesting is that nobody -- including Motorola -- thought the cell phone would be of much use to anyone. Because it was so big. Motorola's real motivation in prototyping the cell phone, it turns out, was to get the FCC to allot more spectrum for car phones, which they saw as a lucrative market for their equipment-making business. But this is a fascinating R&D story -- nobody thought they could pull it off. Well worth a read. And the photos are funny, too.
Back when the Mooninites attacked Boston in January, Josh Glenn, in a Brainiac post widely noted on the Internet, identified a blogger and some other folks who knew before Boston authorities sounded the alarm about the devices that they were the work of guerrilla marketers -- the blogger had even figured out which ones -- publicizing a TBS cartoon . He wrote the following:
I once interviewed a homeland security consultant who claimed that ordinary citizens armed with wi-fi laptops, smart cellphones, and the like would be far more effective at responding to terrorist attacks than any governmental organization. Tonight I have seen the proof of that argument.
That argument had also been given credence on July 7, 2005, the day of the London bombings. By that afternoon, through the work of many hands doing not so light work, an impressively detailed account had taken shape in the Wikipedia entry created that day about the incident.
Today David Carr notes that journalism professors and mainstream news outlets are beginning to get religion about power-to-the-people journalism, which has been dubbed "crowdsourcing." Among the examples Carr cites is Assignment Zero, a new experimental site established by NYU journalism prof Jay Rosen that plans to harness the wisdom of crowds for better reporting. These developments are worth following, and Brainiac will do so.
The internets are abuzz about the Hollywood adaptation of "The Watchmen," the paradigm-shifting graphic novel written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons, and serialized by DC in 1986-87.
Moore's graphic novels -- "From Hell," "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," "V for Vendetta" -- have been made into less-than-worthy movies in the past; but "The Watchmen," a still-amazing achievement sometimes called the "Citizen Kane" of comic books, has been in development for years now. Zack Snyder, who directed the Frank Miller graphic novel adaptation "300," is the latest director. Supposedly Warner Bros. has "Watchmen" on the front burner for a summer production, with a release date of late 2008, but they're not revealing details about the cast. Why?
Over at Underwired, a blog published by Wired magazine, Jake Swearingen worries that it's because the cast is laughable. Commenting on a disquieting rumor that Keanu Reeves has been cast as Doctor Manhattan, the godlike superhero at the center of "Watchmen," Swearingen says:
The actor who brought his craft to bear on characters such as Ted "Theodore" Logan and Johnny Utah will now portray a blue-skinned ubermensch who can control atoms, has stepped outside temporal linearity, and at the end of Watchmen leaves our world to go build his own. Say it with me: yeesh.
Swearingen goes on to suggest other actors to fill out the "worst. cast. ever." He includes Lindsay Lohan as Silk Spectre, Tim Allen as Nite Owl, and Patrick Swayze as Ozymandias. It's easy to criticize casting decisions, of course. Who would I like to see in "The Watchmen"? Here are six ideas.
The all-powerful, impassive, inhuman Doctor Manhattan: I can see why they might choose stone-faced Keanu for this part. But come on. I think Viggo Mortensen is the right answer.
The ugly, disturbed, yet sympathetic Rorschach: I'm sure that Leo is lobbying for this part, but he's just too pretty. So I vote for: Jim Carrey or Jackie Earle Haley
The macho-but-older, black-hearted, right-wing Comedian: Mel Gibson.
The overweight, conflicted, brainy Nite Owl: I kinda think Clooney, though I'd also like to see Philip Seymour Hoffman give it a whirl. Tim Robbins wouldn't be bad.
The physically perfect, brilliant, charismatic, beyond-good-and-evil Ozymandias: I know why Cruise and Law have expressed interest in this part, but Cruise, though an ubermensch of sorts in real life, is too short; and Law is too skinny and foppish. It's got to be Daniel Craig.
The sexy, chain-smoking, brunette Silk Spectre: I'm going to take the easy route on this one: Jessica Alba. Wait! How about another athletic and dark actress, one who isn't already a superheroine: Eliza Dushku?
Readers, let's hear from you.
UPDATE: Watch a video of Zack Snyder discussing his plans to adapt "Watchmen" for the screen. He says it will be set in 1985; it will be R-rated; Tom Cruise will most likely not be involved, though he was "very into it." He gets very tongue-tied when it comes to casting...
Allan M. Brandt, a professor of the history of science at Harvard, has just published a magisterial 600-page work called "The Cigarette Century." Sober stuff, right?
Bryan Burrough's in-from-left-field review, in the Washington Post, begins with some manic riffs on the "inanimate biography": You know, the genre that includes "Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World."
While I admire the scholarship that goes into these studies, they tend to leave me a bit flat. I mean, it's the rare cod that battled the Boers alongside Winston Churchill or ate fried eggs off Ava Gardner's chest. And while I love a heaping spoon of Morton's as much as the next guy, no matter how you shake it, salt will simply never own up to losing its virginity to the upstairs maid.
