Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
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August 31, 2007
Interested in the Larry Craig (R-Idaho, arrested in airport men's room) story but not getting enough info from your local paper? Craig says he did no wrong, but GOP senators want him to resign. Romney dumped Craig... but says he shouldn't resign. Barney Frank says Craig is a hypocrite on gay rights... but shouldn't resign. It's confusing! Is he guilty of soliciting sex in a men's room, or not?
Eric Reynolds of Fantagraphics has posted a helpful entry at their FLOG blog. It includes links to the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport police interrogation tape, a "Dragnet"-style reenactment of what allegedly happened in the bathroom, and more.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 06:51 AM
August 30, 2007
Amazingly enough, it's a live issue in the social sciences whether students' grades correlate with the hours they spend studying. The problem has to do with isolating the variable: Maybe smarter students study more -- and their intelligence, not their studiousness, makes the difference.
A startling headline in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week announced a breakthrough: "Your Parents Are Correct, Scholars Report: Studying Pays Off."[$]
The authors of a forthcoming paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research -- Todd R. Stinebrickner, an associate professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario, and his father, Ralph Stinebrickner, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Berea College -- made use of a so-called natural experiment: The random distribution of video-game consoles among Berea College freshmen.
Their reasoning went like this: Freshmen whose roommates have an XBox are likely to study less than freshmen deprived of that diversion. And freshmen whose roommates have an XBox ought to be, on average, just as intelligent and ambitious as their non-XBox-enjoying peers.
According to the Chronicle's David Glenn, the XBox's (or Wii's) presence was devastating. Students with a video-game-console-owning roomie
study 40 minutes less per day, on average, than first-year students whose roommates did not bring consoles.
And that reduction in study time has a sizable effect on grades: First-year students whose roommates brought video-game consoles earned grades that were 0.241 lower, on a 4-point scale, than did otherwise-equivalent students whose roommates did not have consoles.
Glenn quotes another scholar who suggests that perhaps video-game-console owners have other bad attributes that confound the data: They could also play loud music that makes studying in the room difficult, for example. But the Stinebrickners say there's no evidence for that. Less time, they say, simply equals worse grades.
But what about hand-eye coordination?
Posted by Christopher Shea at 05:21 PM
August 30, 2007
I've just returned from a week in Montana, where I happily passed a week on my brother-in-law's farm, within petting distance of dwarf goats and monstrous pigs, reading two new books by Luc Sante, author of "Low Life," "Evidence," and "The Factory of Facts."
The first, Sante's translation of "Novels in Three Lines" (New York Review Books Classics), by the French anarchist and aesthete (art critic, journal editor) Félix Fénéon, was revelatory.
I already knew something about Fénéon, because of my research on Oscar Wilde, who subscribed to French anarchist journals. I've read up on the Trial of the Thirty -- 30 leading
anarchist journalists and critics were hauled into the courtroom in Paris after the anarchist Émile Henry threw a bomb at the Cafe Terminus in the Saint-Lazare station in 1894. Fénéon, who was accused not only of advocating anarchism, but of being in possession of the types of detonators the anarchists used to set off their bombs (according to Sante's introduction, they really were Henry's detonators), yet he managed to be witty in the dock, and was exonerated. Example:
JUDGE: "It has been established that you surrounded yourself with Cohen and Ortiz."
FÉNÉON (smiling): "One can hardly be surrounded by two persons; you need at least three."
(I'll bet these snappy responses influenced Wilde's witticisms when he was put on trial for sodomy not long after that. Alas, for Wilde and literature, he was not exonerated.)
Anyway, in Sante's translation, Fénéon's three-line news items/novellas -- published in the Paris daily newspaper Le Matin, in 1906 -- have much to teach us. Especially those of us who toil in daily journalism. Fénéon's politics were anarchistic (policemen, soldiers, elected officials, and non-striking workers come off badly in these items), but more interestingly, so were his sensibilities: He was neither conservative nor liberal, neither a populist nor a mandarin. Fénéon was an aesthete in the most exemplary sense of the term: someone determined to discover everyday life's inherent artistry, and so to transform our blunted, violent 20th-century experience into something gorgeous, terrible, memorable, charming.
Some of Fénéon's entries remind us that comedy is a man in trouble:
His head injury was not serious, believed Kremer, of Pont-a-Mousson, who continued working for a few hours, then dropped dead.
Scratching himself with a revolver with an overly sensitive trigger, M. Édouard B. removed the tip of his nose in the Vivienne precinct house.
Having just sniffed a pinch of snuff, A. Chevrel sneezed and, falling from the hay wagon he was bringing back from Pervencheres, Orne, died.
Others remind us that Edward Gorey and other contemporary practitioners of blague (deadpan black humor) had nothing on the turn-of-the-century French:
Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three times at his wife. Since he missed every shot, he decided to aim at his mother-in-law, and connected.
Again and again Mme. Couderc, of Saint-Ouen, was prevented from hanging herself from her window bolt. Exasperated, she fled across the fields.
Jostled by the convulsive piety of a pilgrim at Lourdes, Monsignor Turinaz injured himself on face and thigh with his monstrance.
The closest we come to this sort of thing today is FARK, I guess, or (here in Boston), Boston.com's list of Most E-Mailed Articles. Too bad. However, there is some good news: One hears that Sante is planning to translate more writings by the French anarchists. Can't wait!
***
Sante's other new book is "Kill All Your Darlings" (Yeti/Verse Chorus), the first collection of his freelance writing -- from the New York Review of Books, the Village Voice, and elsewhere.
The essay "My Lost City," about Sante's experience of New York in the pre-yuppie 1960s and '70s, is the best thing I've ever read in NYRB. Except, perhaps, for "The Invention of the Blues," in which Sante rejects sentimental notions about the blues (e.g., the blues arose spontaneously, from oppressed African Americans, as a reaction to their oppression) and argues brilliantly that, instead, "it was a deliberate decision arrived at by a particular artist through a process of experimentation, using materials at hand from a variety of sources." I wish that one came with a CD.
Sante's critiques of French and Belgian artists, from Hugo (a proto-Surrealist, we discover) to Hergé, not to mention other protean cultural producers, notably Bob Dylan, Terry Southern, and Robert Mapplethorpe, are erudite and (much more difficult to pull off) original. But I was particularly pleased to discover personal essays on: Sante's experiences working an injection-mold machine after school; the glorious days before we decided that cigarettes were evil; and the prehistory of hip. Sante even dons an archaeologist's helmet and uncovers the origins of the terms "dope" and "funk." What else could you ask for?
Actually, I do have a request: M. Sante, please expand on your point that "the deaths of blues musicians are particularly subject to dubious or imaginative retelling." Perhaps this phenomenon has something in common with the biographies of ancient Greek poets and philosophers, whose death stories may have been intended to sum up their worldviews. I'd certainly enjoy reading your analysis of Blind Lemon Jefferson's weltanschauung.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:16 PM
August 29, 2007
Speaking of Skrullicism, yesterday was Jack Kirby's birthday. Check out this amazing tribute, posted to Chris's Invincible Super-Blog:
Via The Valve.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 08:37 AM
August 28, 2007
A hit piece in the Atlantic [$] by the former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully on his boss, the highly lauded former head speechwriter Michael Gerson, has focused attention on certain behind-the-scenes aspects of Presidential phrasecraft: A team of writers labors in a room for weeks, batting phrases around and exchanging drafts. But after the President gives his address, the press credits the chief speechwriter alone, ignoring how many monkeys banged on those keyboards. Scully argues that Gerson assiduously encouraged that oversimplification.
(I'd love to hear the reaction of the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, who has been effusive about Gerson in recent years, giving him full credit for speeches he may not have written.)
Given this brouhaha, it's timely that Peter Robinson, a speechwriter for President Reagan, has just offered an account of the writing of Reagan's famous "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" speech, in Berlin, in June 1987.
In Prologue, the magazine of the U.S. National Archives, Robinson depicts himself as a bumbler who slowly felt his way toward a great line. Before drafting the speech, he'd been warned by every imaginable diplomat and national-security expert not to write anything that might provoke Gorbachev. (After all, he was a reformer.) But having heard from West Germans at a dinner party how much they loathed the guard towers and barbed wire dividing their city, he decided to hit the topic of the wall hard.
His first efforts were hardly stirring, in this version of the tale: "In one draft I wrote, 'Herr Gorbachev, bring down this wall,'" he writes. ("Bring," he adds, was "the only verb that came to mind.") The second try was "Herr Gorbachev, take down this wall."
The head speechwriter pronounced this "no good" so Robinson went back to his desk. Asked to review a draft, and what he'd like to tell the East Germans who could hear his speech on the radio, Reagan himself singled out "that passage about tearing down the wall. That wall has to come down. That's what I'd like to say to them."
From there, Robinson says, he actually took a few steps backward, at one point putting Reagan's big line in German: "Herr Gorbachev, machen Sie dieses Tor auf." (One suspects this wouldn't have made Bartlett's.) In the end, Robinson contends, the line "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" -- which State and the NSC protested until minutes before Reagan delivered it-- had many authors, including, not least, Reagan himself, who proved to have an ear for the strong verb.
Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate, 1987
Posted by Christopher Shea at 03:15 PM
August 27, 2007
Not long ago, I described my efforts to track down a copy of "Dragon Island," which Christopher Hitchens says was his favorite book when he was a boy.
Well, I'm pleased to report that I've managed to lay my hands on a copy of the book. Here's the cover:
And here's one of the book's illustrations:
"Dragon Island" looks terrific. I'll be reading it to my own boys this week.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 05:15 PM
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