Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
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July 31, 2007
Brainiac readers are already familiar with the essays and criticism of Scott McLemee, who writes the Intellectual Affairs column for Inside Higher Ed, and who blogs at Quick Study, Crooked Timber, and Cliopatria. But what does he look like, you ask? If he were a "Simpsons" cartoon character, he claims, he'd look like this:
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And if McLemee were a "South Park" character? He says he'd look like this:
Aren't you glad you asked? Now if we could just find out what he'd look like if he were a "Krazy Kat" character, we'd be in business.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:59 PM
July 30, 2007
Ed Champion, whose blog Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant was prominently mentioned in an Ideas essay about literary blogging and America's literary culture yesterday, has the following to say about the Swedish director, who died today at 89.
Bergman was as literary a filmmaker as you could get -- the likes of which we won't see again for some time. It is as if Ibsen or Strindberg has died. And his absence leaves a staggering void that not even twenty filmmakers could fill.
The publicity photo, above, from Bergman's "Persona," was a favorite at the offices of Hermenaut, a journal I used to publish. Once, we even hired two young women who were near-identical twins to recreate this shot for a Hermenaut publicity photo.
We weren't mocking Bergman, though, despite the fact that his brand of anguished existentialism -- on display in "The Seventh Seal," "Wild Strawberries," and "The Virgin Spring," for example -- went out of fashion around the time the Beatles recorded "Sgt. Pepper." In the spirit of Woody Allen, whose movies often pay tribute to Bergman's talent and vision while simultaneously signaling an ironic distance from Bergman's concerns, our "Persona" gag was the kind of mixed message that we soulful, engagé postmodernists are forced -- like it or not -- to send.
Farväl, Ingmar!
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 01:10 PM
July 27, 2007
When vocalists reach for that high note, they often have a facial expression to match -- and players of musical instruments do something very similar, especially when they play "singing" melodic lines. See: B.B. King.
How precise is the connection between the sight and the sound? Very, according to an forthcoming article in the September issue of Psychological Science. In an experiment conducted at the University of Toronto, 17 students whose musical training ranged from nada to substantial watched soundless video recordings of three singers trying to hit pitch intervals of various sizes: thirds, fifths, octaves, and so on.
The performers weren't told the purpose of the experiment, so they were un-self-conscious about their faces were doing (or as un-self-conscious as you can be while singing in a lab). But, to a surprising extent, the students who watched the videos could accurately gauge the size of the interval from the singers' expressions alone. (To take account of the lack of musical training, participants simply rated the size of the interval on a scale of one to seven.)
The authors, psychologists William Forde Thompson and Frank A. Russo, don't try to sort out to what extent the singers' expressions amount to actorly efforts to "signal" the interval to a crowd, serve as memory aids for the performers themselves, or are simply the involuntary result of physical effort. They just note the striking correlation.
Since Thompson and Russo do mention the King of the Blues, they probably should have added that with guitarists it's got to be either option one or two. Trust me: It just isn't that hard to bend a string.
Next up in the Toronto lab?
Posted by Christopher Shea at 03:31 PM
July 27, 2007
The Ideas section's new editor, Gareth Cook, threw a party in Harvard Square last night for outgoing editor Wen Stephenson, who will run Tom Ashbrook's show, "On Point," on NPR, based at WBUR here in Boston.
Casablanca was packed with Ideas editors past and present: Since launching in September 2002, Alex Star, Jenny Schuessler, and Wen have served as editors, while Jenny, Wen, and John Swansburg have served as deputy editors. (I served briefly as Wen's interim deputy.) Alex is now at the New York Times Magazine, Jenny is at the NYT Book Review, and John is at Slate. Me? I'm at home, here in West Roxbury. But we were all in the same room, for the first time ever, last night.
Gareth's incoming deputy, Steve Heuser, was also on the scene -- along with Ideas designers Greg Klee and Mike Swartz, photo editor Susan Vermazen, and staff writer Drake Bennett.
L to R: Gareth, Wen, Alex, Jenny, Steve
Globe, Books, and Boston.com editors Marty Baron, Jim Concannon, and David Beard were there too, along with Globe staff writers Wesley Morris and Yvonne Abraham, and of course several hungry/thirsty freelancers, including Ideas columnists James Parker, Harvey Blume, and yours truly.
Apologies to those whose names I haven't mentioned -- I'm a little foggy this morning. A good time was had by all! See below:
L to R: Wesley, Drake, John, Greg
We'll miss you, Wen, but we look forward to the new, improved "On Point." And Gareth, I hope it wasn't just the spirit of the moment that made you promise to throw several Ideas parties every year...
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:53 AM
July 24, 2007
I recently mentioned a few books -- some new, some old -- that I've been reading while vacationing in the Berkshires. Here are a few more new books that I'm excited about reading this month.
* "Lost Between the Edges" (Semiotext/e Native Agents, distrib. MIT). Described by the publisher as "a new classic of symbolic warfare waged in the street and the mind," this novel by Toronto-based author and artist Eldon Garnet concerns the efforts of X, a "renegade academic and punk intellectual," to put a Holocaust denier out of business, permanently. I enjoyed Garnet's 1995 novel "Reading Brooke Shields: The Garden of Failure" (also from Semiotext/e), and I've long admired Chris Kraus's Native Agents imprint, so this ought to be a good read.
* "The Poetics of DNA" (Minnesota), by Judith Roof. According to Roof, a professor of film studies and English at Michigan State, formerly discredited Western ideologies about identity, gender, and difference have made a comeback in recent years thanks in no small part to wrong-headed analogies, metaphors, and other "figurations" of DNA. Roof blames not only science writers, however, but scientists: After all, she points out, "selling the project of mapping the entire human genome is easier... if we conceive of the ultimate product as the book of life, a tidy tome with affinities to a cookbook, a manual, and the Bible, rather than the molecular topography of of incipient protein production." Peddlers of pseudoscience, beware!
* "Voices of a People's History of the United States" (Seven Stories), edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck still haven't made a movie of Zinn's "A People's History of the United States," like they said they would, but now we have "Voices," a CD of 16 readings selected from that book. If you liked Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn in "Lord of the Rings," you'll love him as Bartolome de Las Casas, providing a 1542 eyewitness account of how Columbus devastated the Indies. Also included: John Sayles as Mark Twain commenting on the Moro Massacre in 1906, plus Lili Taylor, Sandra Oh, the divine Marisa Tomei, and others.
* "The Fun Never Stops" (Fantagraphics), by Drew Friedman. Friedman needs no introduction -- although he's the darling of alt.culture magazines and journals like Raw, Weirdo, and BLAB!, his comics and illustrations have appeared in mainstream publications like SPY, Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, and The New York Observer for years now. Those of us who can't get enough Friedman are in luck: Here's an anthology of his work since 1991. It includes the amazing strip from Raw about Buddy Rich, in which Rich nearly kills a stranger who suggests that Gene Krupa is the world's greatest drummer; the New Yorker comic "Cooking with Genius," in which Beckett waits for 3-minute eggs to boil and Einstein's 5-alarm chili erupts in a mushroom cloud; and even Friedman's "Toxic High" drawings for Topps. Thanks, Fantagraphics; I'll be poring over every panel for weeks.
* "Critical Americans" (North Carolina). Leslie Butler, an assistant professor of history at Dartmouth, celebrates the ambitious liberalism of the late 19th century, when the Cambridge, Mass. circle of George William Curtis, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton articulated political ideals and cultural standards that seem impossibly utopian at our own particular moment. Down with American racism, materialism, and jingoism? Up with educative citizenship and a temperate, deliberative foreign policy? Please tell me that our next president will share these sentiments.
* "The Act You've Known For All These Years" (Canongate), by Clinton Heylin. Heylin is the author of far too many books -- over a dozen biographies and histories of the Velvet Underground, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan (a few times), Sandy Denny, the Sex Pistols, Public Image Ltd., and Joy Division. But of course all the research the British author has done must make it easy for him to knock off a book like this one: a biography of a single album, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," which as we know, was released 40 years ago this summer. "Sgt. Pepper's" was inspired by Beatles friends and rivals like Dylan, the Beach Boys, and Pink Floyd. "It was precisely the fact that 'Pepper' was a clever collage of all the most up-to-date innovations of others," writes Heylin, "that made it sparkle so brightly." Which innovations were appropriated for which Beatles songs? Now you'll know.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 08:33 PM
July 24, 2007
In his column yesterday, the Globe's Alex Beam asked: "Who can ignore the loopy website BoycottLiberalism.com, which anathematizes goods, services, and people of whom the right-wing webmaster disapproves?"
Beam goes on to say:
I first learned about this website from Brainiac, the Globe's intello-blog, which reported that BoycottLiberalism was calling for a girlcott of Watertown's own Eliza Dushku, she of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Bring It On" fame. According to Joshua Glenn, BL.com added her to the Do Not Patronize list because Dushku attended a benefit concert for John Kerry. Senator Kerry, of course, figures in BL.com's "Liberal Hall of Shame," in between Robert Kennedy Jr. and New York Times columnist/scold Paul Krugman.
The intello-blog thanks you, Alex.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:53 PM
July 23, 2007
I don't ordinarily read every essay in each issue of the journals to which I subscribe, but when you're on vacation you do things like that. So it was with pleasure that I devoured issue 26 of the Brooklyn-based journal Cabinet, over the weekend. The theme of the issue is "Magic," and it includes excellent essays on, among other things: "Deceptionists at War," "The beguiling stagecraft of American politics," "Black Herman's African American Magical Synthesis," "Secular magic and the modern cultural imagination," "A brief history of magic's most famous illusion," and "Indian magic's new superstar."
Cabinet's timing is perfect. I've also been reading "The Occult Mind: Magic in Theory and Practice," a fascinating new book from Cornell University Press that examines ley lines, the Tarot, the Corpus Hermeticum, writing and ritual in magic practice, and early attempts to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. The author, Christopher Lehrich, a visiting assistant professor in Religion and Writing at BU, argues that magic is, in fact, a mode of theory that is "intrinsically subversive of normative conceptions of reason and truth" -- that is to say, magic is deconstructionist avant la lettre. I particularly appreciate Lehrich's successful attempt to write a work of interdisciplinary scholarship in an engaging fashion; books by tenure-track academics are normally all but unreadable.
Lehrich's book kicks off with a chapter on the Hermetic corpus -- a collection of Neoplatonic dialogues (conversations between Hermes Trismegistus, supposedly an Egyptian priest roughly contemporary with Moses, and various interlocutors) composed in Alexandria during the first centuries of the Common Era. These writings were highly influential during the Renaissance, among thinkers who believed that they contained clues to knowledge (about the revelatory character of nature, for example) that had been lost to humankind at some distant point in the past. So this is an opportune moment to recommend another new book I've been reading: "The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus" (Cornell), by Florian Ebelling, a lecturer at the University of Heidelberg. Ebelling strips away the mumbo-jumbo surrounding the figure of Hermes Trismegistus amd the writings attributed to him, and offers an overview of the current scholarly understanding of Hermeticism. Not always easy to follow, but very useful, indeed.
PS: The following essays from the current issue of Cabinet are also well worth reading:
* The Barber Trial: an account -- by Thomas Keenan & Eyal Weizman -- of the 2006 French trial Sivan vs. Finkielkraut, in which the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut was sued for libel by the French-Israeli filmmaker Eyal Sivan, because Finkielkraut called Sivan's documentary "Route 181" (about the 1947-48 expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians from the territory that would become the state of Israel) an example of "Jewish anti-Semitism" and an incitement to violence against Israelis.
* Sivan vs. Finkielkraut, a translation of the trial transcript.
* Joshua Foer's history of "aquatic ambulism," or water-walking, from Jesus and Saint Peter to the 2006 London gallery exhibit "Bridge."
* "The Real Thing," in which yours truly draws the reader's attention to curious parallels between the argument made in Van Wyck Brooks's 1915 book "America's Coming-of-Age" and the discovery-invention of the 1915 curved Coke bottle.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:10 PM
July 23, 2007
I'm still in the Berkshires, dialing up to the Internet, so until next week you won't hear very much from me. But here's a good story...
Retrofuturists, steampunks, and other friends of mine would like nothing better than to commute to work via personal blimp. We imagine that it would look something like the machine in this 1900 image:
According to a story in today's Globe by the talented Boston.com multimedia producer Thushan Amarasiriwardena, an Amherst-based outfit is designing a friendly-looking blimp for flight enthusiasts who want to fly as quietly as possible.
Perhaps the future is now? Here's a photo of the personal blimp, taken by Amarasiriwardena:
And Amarasiriwardena also shot a video of the blimp. Phew! These multimedia producers work hard, don't they?
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:29 PM
July 23, 2007
I've been thinking a lot about the local-food movement, and specifically food miles, since publishing a piece on the "new food journalism" in the Columbia Journalism Review.
Here are a few points to toss into the interesting debate that Drake's lead Ideas piece is inspiring:
1. In "Omnivore's Dilemma," Michael Pollan exempts chocolate and coffee from his ban on non-local foods, on the grounds that there is a centuries-long tradition of consuming truly unique foodstuffs from faraway lands. But how is Pollan's eating chocolate in Berkeley -- at any time -- any different from Bostonians' eating lettuce in January?
2. What are people in Reno, Nevada, supposed to eat? (Is it a coincidence that many of the leading local-foods advocates live in Northern California, a comically perfect place to grow food?)
3. Given that we live in an economy in which virtually everything in our homes has been designed and built hundreds or thousands of miles from where we live, where's the sense in singling out food for this particular kind of analysis?
On the last point, this might be one area in which it makes sense to think like an economist (or at least like Columbia's Jagdish* Bhagwati, whom I interviewed on the subject): If we were to raise taxes on gasoline (or petroleum, or carbon), that would discourage environmentally wasteful shipping throughout the economy. There would be no need to calculate how far the butterbean on your plate traveled to reach you, or the RAM card in your computer. (No one would possibly calculate all the "food miles" and "consumer-product miles" in their lives anyway, Bhagwati says; each person would need a full-time staff of analysts for the task. Even then, it would probably be impossible.)
On the other hand, a lot of local food just tastes better -- reason enough to eat more of it.
Should only Floridians eat these?
*Spelling fixed.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 09:29 AM
July 20, 2007
James Fallows has a fascinating, if also fascinatingly uncritical article [subscribers only] in the latest Atlantic about the outsourcing of American manufacturing to China and the working conditions of Chinese workers.
The arrangement, he concludes, is working for everyone -- Chinese leaders, Chinese workers, American businessmen, American consumers-slash-workers.
To be sure, the timing of the piece is a bit awkward, given the barrage of front-page news lately about shoddy, adulterated, and deadly Chinese products, as well as rampant corruption in Chinese industry.
Sure, Fallows writes, workers may work 12-hour shifts six or seven days a week -- but they get free meals. And workers in industrializing 19th-century England had it rough, too. And, since the official Chinese workweek is 40 hours, the workers get a lot of overtime play, Fallows notes. No doubt that 40-hour standard is rigorously enforced by China's pro-labor-movement bureaucrats. Fallows doesn't explain how, but I'm sure it's so.
The line that leapt off the page for me, though, was this one, which comes amid a blandly neutral-to-positive description of working conditions at these factories: "'The people here work hard,' an American manager in a U.S.-owned plant told me. 'There's none of this 'I have to go pick up the kids' nonsense you get in the States.'"
The line passes without comment or explanation (where are the kids? with Grandma, back on the farm? in communal day-care centers?), although an editor was alert enough to run the quote in large red type on the next page.
How did the editors let that screw-American-families comment, from an American outsourcer, through in such an oh-by-the-way fashion -- in a piece designed to defend outsourcing? My wife unfairly suggests the answer is that the Atlantic is "written and edited by men, for men -- and Caitlin Flanagan." The editors simply didn't realize that this disparaging quote about American working parents -- or American labor laws; same difference -- raises important issues.
Fallows himself appears to have no clue how the line would sound to American ears; everywhere else in the piece he portrays the foreign businessmen on the make in China as scrappy heroes and truth-tellers, contrasting them with Ivory Tower and desk-bound whiners and fretters in the United States.
And now, I have to go pick up the kid.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 05:15 PM
July 20, 2007
Reader D.D. contributes this:
In the piece "Leave those kids alone" ... you point out that parents in traditional societies don't spend time playing with their children. This may be true, but children in traditional societies grow up surrounded by other children to play with. I grew up in a Midwestern small town, and we roamed around all day in the summer -- and all afternoon on school days -- playing with other kids. I see the same thing where I work, in a semi-rural section of a large urban county. In a traditional setting, the seven-year-olds teach the four-year-olds, and the twelve-year-olds rule the roost. The kids who are bored and understimulated are those who do not have cousins in the house or other children on the block -- or whose parents aren't comfortable letting them run off with the other children, letting them participate in their normal socialization. We were only required to tell my mother whether or not we expected to be back at lunchtime, otherwise it was liberty hall between breakfast and supper. She knew where we were (or thought she did).
I love the last parenthetical.
I grew up in a semi-rural suburb in which parents basically turned kids loose (after toddler age) to play as they saw fit. Where I live now, I find it hard to imagine giving my son (now 3) that degree of freedom when his time comes. I suspect many people feel a similar shift (because of the dangers of cities, real as well as perceived, and the increasing pedestrian- and bike-unfriendliness of many suburbs). Maybe that partly explains the turn inward -- to the house, and to intra-family play.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 02:45 PM
July 19, 2007
The mighty Arts and Letters Daily has already linked to this essay, by the Washington Post fiction critic Ron Charles, about the ambivalent effects of the Harry Potter phenomenon -- so recommending it here may be redundant.
Still, it's hilarious as well as smart, so do check it out.
The gist is that the blockbuster-book phenomenon may not be good for literature. Here's one musty but startling fact Charles drops into his essay: "According to a study by Alan Sorensen at Stanford University, 'In 1994, over 70 percent of total fiction sales were accounted for by a mere five authors.[emphasis added]' There's not much reason to think that things have changed."
At the end of the piece, Charles (disclosure: he's a friend) says his favorite book this year was "The Law of Dreams," by Peter Behrens, a historical novel centered on a boy who -- unlike his parents -- survived the Irish Potato Famine. When Charles filed the piece for the Post, it had sold 8,367 copies in the United States. At least one independent bookstore is now plugging Behrens' book as an alternative (or complement) to Rowling's latest monster, and its publisher reports a surge in sales.
Bigfoot
Long-tail underdog
*Title stolen from an off-hand line in Ron's piece.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 10:11 AM
July 18, 2007
Elena Kagan, dean of Harvard Law School, didn't make the cut for the Harvard presidency, but could there be a considerably higher post in her future? And what about a shift to the judicial branch (federal division) for Deval Patrick?
On SCOTUSblog, Tom Goldstein, who runs the Supreme Court practice at a major DC law firm, made some much-discussed predictions this month about just whom a prospective Democratic President might pick to replace retiring Justices, post-2008.
Sure, it's a parlor game -- with a doozy of a built-in assumption. Still, court-watchers across the blogosphere eagerly joined in. Goldstein's list for the first vacancy was lawyerly and insiderish: It included three judges from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (famous for its liberal bent) -- the Hon. Johnnie Rawlinson, the Hon. Sonia Sotomayor, and the Hon. Kim McLane Wardlaw -- plus the Chief Justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, Leah Ward Sears.
More interesting to New Englanders was Goldstein's second-tier roster -- those who might have a shot at filling a second or third opening: That's where the Harvard Law dean and the Massachusetts governor prominently appeared. (The others on the secondary list were Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, the Hon Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for DC and Ken Salazar, a U.S. Senator from Colorado).
"My ultimate predictions?" Goldstein wrote. "Kim Wardlaw (2009, for Souter), Deval Patrick (2010, for Stevens), and Elena Kagan (2011, for Ginsburg)." Goldstein believes that Souter pines for New Hampshire and will retire before his older colleagues, a view many other legal observers consider idiosyncratic.
After Goldstein's readers added their two cents, things got even more interesting, from a Bostonian perspective. In a follow-up post, in response to those comments, Goldstein bumped Kagan up to his first tier of candidates. A longtime star among liberals, Kagan, Goldstein observed, has won conservative accolades by brokering the hiring of conservatives at Harvard Law, which the right has long viewed as an impenetrable liberal fortress.
Could that be her ticket to the high court, when the next Justice steps down?
(Hat tip: Legal Times. [Subscribers only.])
Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:17 PM
July 18, 2007
The news -- reported by Publishers Weekly yesterday, among other places -- that the children's graphic novel "Tintin in the Congo" will be published in English, and in the US, this fall has sent a shockwave through the blogosphere.
First published in 1930-31 in the children's supplement to the Belgian newspaper Le Vingtieme Siecle, then updated and colorized in 1946, with additional changes in 1975, Herge's story about the intrepid boy reporter Tintin's adventures in the Belgian Congo is racist and colonialist -- there's no question about it. The black Africans are childlike, quick to worship Tintin, and helpless without his aid. But like Hugh Lofting's racist and colonialist "Doctor Dolittle" series, which first appeared in the 1920s, "Tintin in the Congo" is also exciting, funny, and charming. So what to do with a book like this?
Though it wasn't translated into English, "Tintin au Congo" was in print in the 1970s in England, where my father -- whose antiracist credentials are impeccable -- bought it for me. He used it as a teaching tool about racism, and I've done the same thing with my children. (The book was published by the indie press Last Gasp in 2002.) Now, thanks to Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, the book will be widely available in the US, in English.
According to Publishers Weekly, Borders stores in the US will stock "Tintin in the Congo" in an adult-oriented section of the store -- the graphic novels section -- because of material the retailer says "could be considered offensive by some of our customers." (This is mealy-mouthed: Anyone who does not consider the racist aspects of the book offensive is deluded! But I support Borders' decision to shelve the book outside of the children's section.) Little, Brown acknowledges that the book "may be considered somewhat controversial as it reflects the colonial attitudes of the time it was created." A belly band expressing this sentiment will be wrapped around US editions of the book; there will also be an explanatory preface in the new edition.
Soft Skull Press will soon publish "Tintin and the Secret of Literature," a book-length analysis of the Tintin oeuvre by Tom McCarthy. On their blog yesterday, publisher Richard Nash offered an excerpt from the book looking at the right-wing origins of the strip.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 08:27 AM
July 17, 2007
Language bloggers, not surprisingly, have a couple of nits to pick with "grammar vandal" Kate McCulley, who goes around town adding commas and apostrophes to defective signs like a Reebok ad reading "Run easy Boston." A feature in Sunday's City Weekly explained:
The Reebok sign should have read "run easily," McCulley observed, and it should have had a comma after "easily," before "Boston."
(Grammar note: “Easy” is an adjective, which must never be used to describe a verb, such as “run”; that task calls for the adverb “easily.”)
"Run easily, Boston"?
Not so fast, said the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar:
While we appreciate the zeal, easy can be used as an adverb that means "with ease," and has been used this way since 1400. (We checked in the Oxford English Dictionary.)
Over at Language Log, Mark Liberman asks if we think Shakespeare's line should be edited to read "The course of true love never did run smoothly." Anyone who thinks "easy" is only an adjective, he says,
needs to take the general grammatical point up with William Shakespeare, Jack London, Francis Beaumont, Wilfred Owen, and many other worthies, as discussed in an earlier Language Log post: "Amid this vague uncertainty, who walks safe?"
Mr. Verb was stopped in his metaphorical tracks by something else entirely: McCulley's declaration "Without punctuation, we have nothing."
What's so striking about the use of "without X, we have nothing" is how it's traditionally been used: Check around a little and you get love, hope and dreams filling that X. . . . all matters with some metaphysical heft. I'm fairly sure you have never been so high that punctuation made that list.
Zeno, blogging at Halfway There, says McCulley's comma campaign warms his prescriptivist heart. Still, he agrees that her objection to easy is wrongheaded, and warns (too late?) that the entire grammar-vandal enterprise is hazardous:
No one can safely wave an admonitory finger and hold forth authoritatively on exactly what is right and what is wrong. That is a fool's errand. Anyone who tries too hard to fill the role of grammar police is certain to find him- or herself brought up on false arrest charges.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 04:46 PM
July 17, 2007
My column on parent-child play generated some good responses from readers:
Correspondent P.B., for example, offers one perspective on the upper-middle-class tendency to feel they need to get down on the playroom floor with Junior as often as possible:
A few months ago, I was sitting in the lobby of [a local music school], surrounded by a group of very upper middle class, seemingly accomplished, mothers. They were saying that they could never stay home, because they could not play with their children all day.
I entered the conversation, politely I hope, to say that I had been home with three children for 20 years, and had never played with them (this was a slight exaggeration, but mostly true).
I guess I see this new middle class emphasis on play as being mainly a result of two parents working: in other words, a combination of guilt and desire to be with the children in an intense way ("quality time") to make up for the togetherness lost during the workday. Parents who are home can be a lot more relaxed about all this ...
It seems as if no one trusts kids anymore. Boredom and doing nothing are the greatest teachers. I remember a term in Mothering Magazine in the 1980's: benign neglect. The idea was to be there to facilitate, but not direct. So, while your children play store, you might be the customer, if asked, but not supply the idea or the supplies. When my son built the Tobin Bridge with Legos, I read the paper. If he asked how to spell "Tobin" I would help (and only if he asked), or, if he asked how I liked it, I would tell him. But I never got on the floor, nor did I suggest the project in the first place.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 11:00 AM
July 13, 2007
The National Review is no fan of European welfare states, or of the American labor movement, and that's putting it mildly. Yet the East coast heat wave must be getting to the economist Kevin A. Hassett, a frequent contributor. In the mag's July 9 issue, he waxes positively envious [subscribers only] about European vacation policies -- not to mention the European ability to forget about their jobs when they aren't at them. At cocktail parties in the nations that conservatives were so recently deriding as "Old Europe," Hassett writes, "No one talks about work." (Hassett even has a few nice words to say about European "potables," the subject of boycotts not so long ago.)
Hassett presents the now-familiar chart showing just how stingy American vacation policies are: We get 13 or so vacation days annually, while the French are closing in on 40 -- a figure the Italians have already surpassed. Okay, they're Italians. But those hard-working Japanese? Surely they work harder than us? Nope: A full thirty vacation days a year.
Worse, Hassett writes, according to a recent survey by Expedia.com (not a red-check source, perhaps), Americans fail to take an average of three of the vacation days they are granted annually -- a phenomenon unheard of in other countries.
"Even though Americans have the fewest vacation days, they leave the most on the table," Hassett writes. He stops short of challenging corporate policies that limit American workers' time off -- what were you expecting? -- but implies that rock-ribbed conservatives and liberals alike can get behind the idea that you should take full advantage of the few vacation days that you have.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 05:45 PM
July 12, 2007
Every few years, journalists write that the study of Ayn Rand's philosophy is making a comeback at mainstream universities. (I'm guilty!) It's perpetually sort of true. But the fuller truth remains that while she has fierce adherents, often in campus libertarian groups or on the fringes of philosophy departments, most academics look down their noses at her. The novels, professors say, are ludicrously didactic and Rand's radical-free-market cheerleading morally noxious.
But the Chronicle of Higher Education this month offers evidence [subscribers only] that cash from a group called the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship may finally be making a difference. (Would Rand complain that lucre, and not the force of her ideas, caused the shift in attitudes? Hard to say...) The Anthem Foundation was created in 2001 by a former Silicon Valley executive named John McCaskey: He and some friends found it shocking, given how much Rand's philosophy had shaped their own worldviews, that she was so rarely taught.
Since 2001, the group has given roughly $400,000 a year to colleges and universities to support studies of Rand and her philosophy, which she called Objectivism. (The BB&T Charitable Foundation, based in North Carolina, is another backer of things Randian in academia.)
Anthem's biggest grants have gone to Allan Gotthelf, a visiting professor of the history of science at the University of Pittsburgh ($435,000 in 2003), who studied with Rand in the '60s, and to Tara Smith, a philosopher at the University of Texas at Austin, and her graduate students ($300,000 in 2001). Some colleges, however -- even ones you might think of as cash-hungry -- are leery of the grants. In April, the Chronicle reports, the philosophers at Texas State University at San Marcos turned down the chance for a grant to support a long-term visiting professorship. They saw it as an attempt to buy legitimacy for the foundation's favorite philosopher and to shape interpretations of her work -- and therefore as a violation of academic principles.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:27 PM
July 12, 2007
Wave goodbye to "just deserts": In today's entry on his Oxford University Press blog, Ben Zimmer reports that the upstart "just desserts" -- the version that confuses dessert, the after-dinner treat, with desert, something you deserve -- is beating the standard idiom by 58 percent to 42 percent.
Zimmer used the Oxford English Corpus -- a database of "more than 1.5 billion words pulled from newspapers, blogs, magazines, scientific papers, journals, books, websites, transcripts," and other sources, according to the OUP -- to check on the condition of some beleaguered familiar phrases.
There is some good news for traditionalists. The standard sleight of hand, fazed by, and home in on are trouncing the challengers (slight of hand, phased by, hone in on) by 2 to 1 or better.
But vocal chords is neck and neck with the standard vocal cords, and strait-laced scores a pitiful 34 percent against straight-laced. "Poetic innovation or descent into linguistic anarchy?" asks Zimmer. The strait-laced will have one answer, I suppose; the rest will have desserts.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 03:49 PM
July 12, 2007
I am old enough to remember the days -- 30 years ago -- when one had to dodge traffic in Boston's Downtown Crossing. Before the Mass. Dept. of Education's Bureau of Equal Educational Opportunity moved to Quincy, my father's office was near the Common, and once in a while I'd spend the day there, and we'd have lunch in the area. This was in the mid-'70s, when the concept of the Ladder District would have struck Bostonians as pure science fiction. A Boston.com photo gallery supporting a Globe story today about the "revitalization" of the area takes me back.
Downtown Crossing goes pedestrian in 1979
A description of Downtown Crossing in today's Globe story -- "an unkempt, unsafe shopping district lined with discount stores, fast-food restaurants, and vacant storefronts" -- makes it sound like a terrible place. But when I was in high school, I spent quite a bit of time in that part of the city, working as a courier and also shopping for sneakers -- in the mid-'80s, if you followed hip hop fashion and absolutely had to have particular editions of Adidas and Nike kicks, you could not find a better selection anywhere else in Greater Boston. It was unkempt and unsafe, maybe, but I liked it.
Downtown Crossing didn't have a lot of high-end retail, in those days, but so what? It was a fine place for a teenager to buy records and books, nearly as good as Harvard Square. (PS: Can anyone remember the name of the used record store in Downtown Crossing whose owner proudly displayed a picture of herself singing in front of the Museum of Science's T-Rex model? Please remind me!) I've never set foot in Macy's or Filene's, so it still strikes me as odd that the shuttering of these institutions should be so alarming to Bostonians.
I know, I know. Well-heeled adults, and not urban teens, are the customers we'd all like to attract to Downtown Crossing. But permit me to offer a crazy alternate vision: Now that Harvard Square is all chain stores and high-end retail, let Downtown Crossing become the new Harvard Square. Provide rent breaks for independent retail stores. Make it easy for small restaurants, cafes, and pubs to open up -- give them permission to serve beer on the sidewalk, while we're at it. Try to attract some of Boston's thousands of undergrads and graduate students, not to mention its population of "cultural creatives," instead of worrying that Financial District workers won't lunch there.
Who's with me?
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:28 AM
July 11, 2007
Here's that photo of Brainiac drinking ketchup that I promised:
It was shot by Boston.com senior multimedia producer Scott LaPierre. Make of it what you will.
PS: There are now 1,200 photos of Boston's 2007 fireworks at the URL I provided last Friday.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:19 PM
July 11, 2007
Joe Keohane is sick and tired of the Boston Pops's 4th of July show on the Esplanade. In his latest column for Boston Magazine (written before the 2007 event), the former Weekly Dig editor airs a litany of complaints:
In 2004 we got David Lee Roth. Bad enough, but okay. The next year featured country rapper Cowboy Troy, doing a song called "Our America," which nimbly incorporated parts of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, and "The Star-Spangled Banner." The 2006 concert was the scariest yet, with Aerosmith's Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, hateful a cappella boy band Rockapella, the Vermont Air National Guard, American Idol loser Ayla Brown, a musical tribute to civil rights, and running commentary by one "Dr. Phil," which appeared to be some sort of eel.
Keohane's solution? "A [James] Levine-led Fourth of July Shostakovich spectacular." The BSO musical director's genius, Keohane argues,
is in challenging people to listen to unfamiliar things, and articulate what they like and what they don't like. He's not flashy or confrontational--he's thoughtful, and he programs the music in ways that help show the logical progression between the pieces, like his frequent retracing of how we got from tried-and-true Beethoven to scourge-of-blue-hairs Arnold Schoenberg.
In a Brahmin stronghold like Symphony Hall, which Keohane suggests can be seen as a microcosm of Boston, "a place unmatched in its inability to ever handle change rationally," getting people this engaged in new and unfamiliar music is nothing short of miraculous. And just the sort of thing we need on the Esplanade next July 4th. I'm all for it.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:07 PM
July 9, 2007
I'm in the Berkshires for three weeks -- connecting to the Internet via dialup, which means you might not hear too much from me till I get back. And it's going to be difficult to upload images, or even do online research. So today, I will content myself with singing the praises of a few novels that I read over the weekend.
* "Lucky Jim" (1954), by Kingsley Amis. I didn't mean to read "Lucky Jim," since I've already read it half a dozen times. But the latest Penguin edition was on the bedside table here at the house I'm renting. I laughed out loud, like I do every time, at the description of the bus ride near the end; and at the hangover scene, when Jim discovers that he's accidentally burned the blankets and rug in his boss's guest room. First and still the best of the great British campus novels...
* "Cassandra at the Wedding" (1962), by Dorothy Baker. I have a shelf full of New York Review Books that I've treated as fetish objects -- they're so attractive, and NYRB does such a great job rediscovering lost classics, that I just enjoy looking at them. But this summer I decided to actually read a few, and I started with "Cassandra at the Wedding." Brilliant prose. I think it's one of the best books about the perils of growing up in an intellectual household since "Franny and Zooey," which was published just a few months earlier -- must have been a hot topic in the early '60s.
* "This Perfect Day" (1970), by Ira Levin. I'd never heard of this book till recently, when I was researching dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels for an Ideas essay about fictional climatic catastrophes. I've always thought of Levin as a Stephen King-style author -- not untalented, but not worth wasting your time on, either. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that "This Perfect Day" is a fully realized, entertainingly written example of dystopian lit. Certainly better than "Logan's Run" (1967), from which Levin may have borrowed the theme of strict age limits as antidote to population explosion.
* "The Bushwhacked Piano" (1971), by Thomas McGuane. Globe columnist Sam Allis made me buy a copy of this, when I ran into him at Pazzo Books in Roslindale, several months ago. McGuane is a terrific stylist, he insisted. He's right! The plot of "Piano" is negligible, but there isn't a cliched phrase in the book, and every few paragraphs you discover a sentence that's nothing short of miraculous. Thanks, Sam!
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:36 AM
July 8, 2007
Commenting on today's substitute-Safire column, a lament about the short supply of grammatically acceptable single men, the irrepressible Mr. Verb sees an entrepreneurial opportunity:
Subject: Enhance your 6r@mm@r!
Isn't it time you did something about your problem? Finally the genuine stuff -- without money tricks! Want harder grammar? Want to make your sentences up to three clauses longer? . . .
"I love how rapidly your product worked on my boyfriend, he can't stop talking about how excited he is having such a big new vocabulary and firm command of syntax!"
And yes, of course there's more, much more!
Posted by Jan Freeman at 06:34 PM
July 6, 2007
Steven Walker, co-founder of the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs, writes in to emphasize that his group doesn't take a stand on some of the more provocative claims made by the UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, who believes there is an implicit and broad constitutional right to "medical self-defense" (the subject of my column last Sunday).
Walker writes: "You correctly noted that we do not claim a right to sell or purchase organs. Although less explicit in your article, we also do not enter the stem cell debate, nor do we take any position on abortion. Neither disease, nor the lethal denials of our regulatory system, discriminates based on politics or positions on hot button issues. Our constituents span the universe of political thought."
Volokh told me that if he were the Abigail Alliance's lawyer, he would play down those other claims -- casting the case narrowly, to appeal to as many judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals as possible. As an academic, however, he said it was his "duty" to probe the implications of the right-to-drugs argument -- to see how far embracing it would carry one. I imagine he also wanted a juicier law-review article.
Alan J. Weisbard, a professor of bioethics and medical history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, writes on his blog The Wise Bard that he can imagine the current Supreme Court mostly endorsing Volokh's argument, which makes him a bit queasy:
[Medical m]arijuana aside, I can imagine this argument appealing to members of the current Court majority. Rich and poor alike have the right to purchase (or sell) organs, just as they do to sleep under bridges.
I have my reservations, which increasingly feels like a kiss of death.
I think he means that whatever his own preferences are, you can count on the Supreme Court to go the other way.
Meanwhile, this Washington Post story today shows just how heated the fight over experimental drugs can be. In this case the battle is over Provenge, which may (or may not) extend the life of men with prostate cancer and which has so far been blocked by the FDA. Frank Burroughs of the Abigail Alliance is quoted.
According to the Post, some doctors skeptical of Provenge actually fear bodily harm when presenting their data at conferences -- whether at the hands of drug-company goons or irate patient-activists is left somewhat unclear. If the former, it's shades of "The Fugitive."
A kidney model
Posted by Christopher Shea at 03:59 PM
July 6, 2007
Having read the recent Brainiac item on France's jogging president, Belgium-born writer and critic Luc Sante offered his own analysis. As always, he is right on the money:
The French care obsessively about semiotics. The actions undertaken by public figures are immediately subject to parsing by observers of every station, so nothing is innocent about a politician's gestures. And Sarkozy has been going out of his way to goad the electorate by proclaiming "I am an American president" at every turn. I wish I'd saved the link I got a few months back to
somebody's analysis of his official portrait. They showed his
predecessors: De Gaulle and Pompidou posed in the library of the
Elysee Palace, Mitterand and Giscard posed before the tricolor. Alone,
Sarkozy posed with a flag in the Elysee library. Then they showed you
the official portraits of the last five or six American presidents,
every one of them posed with a flag in front of bookshelves. Sarkozy also had his hair spotlit so that he looked bizarrely blond, and you could swear he was wearing some kind of padded butt extension. The effect was bananas, and not French. The jogging thing is similar: he's not getting healthful exercise -- he's saying "I am Bill Clinton."
Sarkozy "footing" (jogging) in a NYPD t-shirt
As for the question posed by the left-wing newspaper Liberation, "Is jogging right-wing," I tried to steer clear of that too-easy binary formulation. As I pointed out parenthetically, just because Nerval and Baudelaire were horrified by the effect of economic liberalization on foot traffic doesn't mean they were leftists. Sante had a few enlightening things to say on this topic, as well:
Consider also that "jogging" is one of those words that is en anglais dans le texte, and I'm not sure the Academie has even bothered to formulate an alternative. You go to provincial towns and see banners proclaiming "Le grand jogging" and know the event was designed by and for people who spend their time watching American TV shows. It's neither a leftist thing nor (in French terms) a rightist thing, but "liberal" -- which there refers to someone for whom amassing personal wealth takes precedence over any ideal. Even the right wing -- still preoccupied with blood and soil -- spits on that.
Thanks very much, M. Sante. And have a good weekend, everybody.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:09 AM
July 6, 2007
Missed all the excitement on the 4th? Well, Brainiac ran a Flickr search for you -- just click here for nearly 1,000 photos of Boston's fireworks.
Here are a couple of samples:
Photo by Flickr member DJ Durutti
Photo by Flickr member Marboston
Photo by Flickr member Technicolorcavalry
Brainiac was hoping to include a shot of Brainiac drinking a bottle of ketchup on the 4th of July. But Brainiac's favorite Flickr member did not come through with the goods.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:48 AM
July 5, 2007
The mannequin-like handsomeness of Mitt Romney -- indeed of his whole family -- has been much-commented on this campaign season. It's sort of an X-factor in the run-up to next year's election: How much does the classic firm-jawed, "Presidential" look matter, anyhow?
Reading Garry Wills's classic "Nixon Agonistes" for the first time, I learned that the handsomeness of Romney's father, Gov. George Romney of Michigan, was a factor in the 1968 Republican primary (in which the elder Romney was a contender). Or so it seemed to Wills ... and, in Wills's version, to Richard Nixon:
It is unfair to judge Nixon as the least pretty of the candidates. But, as he talked ... it seemed that the face doesmatter, because it affects the man behind it. Perhaps a Rockefeller, or Romney, or Reagan, or Percy, or Lindsay does not live entirely on the surface; still, each one could do so if he wanted -- it is a very pleasant surface. And if none of them lives entirely there, it pays each to do a good deal of commuting to that pleasant locale. It would not pay Nixon at all. He must be aware that people vote for him despite his appearance; he speaks, always, across a barrier.
Nixon, Wills proposes, ended up viewing his untraditional looks as a positive trait, something that filtered out frivolousness. "While he is being tested as a candidate," Wills writes of Nixon, "he feels he is a test of others' seriousness."
So if Romney, the younger, is the Romney of 2008, who is our Nixon, in this superficial (yet important!) sense?
From the Mitt Romney Web site. Or to follow its lead, "Web site."
Posted by Christopher Shea at 09:38 PM
July 5, 2007
French thinkers and writers love to stroll -- to ambulate, that is to say, in a manner that is purposeful but not rushed, neither speeded up nor slowed down. An unfortunate side effect of the liberalization of the economic sphere in the early 19th century, of course, was the spirit-of-capitalism-powered acceleration of foot traffic in Paris. The hurried pace of modern city life so disgusted self-invented aristocrats like Nerval and the teenage Baudelaire that they practiced flanerie -- conspicuous dawdling, ostentatious loitering. When Nerval led a lobster on a pale blue leash through the gardens of the Palais-Royal, it wasn't because he was on the brink of madness, as legend has it; it was a form of anticapitalist (though not necessarily left-wing) street theater, an insult to all the hustlers and bustlers. And when Baudelaire fled to Belgium, near the end of his life, to escape his creditors, he complained bitterly that "strolling, so cherished by peoples endowed with imagination, is impossible in Brussels."
So you can imagine how French intellectuals and critics feel about jogging. In his philosophical travelogue "America," published in English translation in 1988, Baudrillard was caustic:
You stop a horse that is bolting. You do not stop a jogger who is jogging. Foaming at the mouth, his mind riveted on the inner countdown to the moment when he will achieve a higher plane of consciousness, he is not to be stopped. If you stopped him to ask the time, he would bite your head off.... Decidedly, joggers are the true Latter Day Saints and the protagonists of an easy-does-it Apocalypse. Nothing evokes the end of the world more than a man running straight ahead on a beach, swathed in the sounds of his Walkman, cocooned in the solitary sacrifice of his energy.... Do not stop him. He will either hit you or simply carry on dancing around in front of you like a man possessed.
The latest victim of French stroll-mindedness is that country's recently elected president, Nicolas Sarkozy, an economic liberalizer who not only bashes the welfare state like a good American go-getter but ambulates like one, too. That is to say: he jogs.
An hour after he took office in May, "Speedy Sarko" and his prime minister were driven off for a jog in the Bois de Boulogne. Sarko returned to work an hour later, running up the steps of the Elysee presidential palace. In shorts. Soon after that, Sarkozy went on holiday, where his first order of business was |
