WARNING: MEDICAL

On Nov 13th, Jason Kottke asked

Why doesn’t anyone talk about bacterial marketing? Or hookworm infestational media?

I wrote

@jkottke viruses make a better metaphor; they need a host’s cellular architecture to replicate their own DNA. Also AIDS put viruses on map.

Just a couple of days later, I became very, very sick.

It turned out I had an infected abscess, around a hematoma in my lower back. I’d been trying since October – and if you remember, I was seeing a lot of doctors in October – to get a physician to take this swelling seriously, to say something other than “Wow, would you look at that?” or “Let’s just wait a few weeks to see if it goes down on its own.” Now it had almost killed me. It’s like my accident had finally found a way to get at my insides.

On Thursday, I was admitted to the hospital (again), to get the infection cleared up. This ultimately required not just dose after dose of antibiotics, but also surgery. Actually, two surgeries so far, and a third tomorrow. It’s not closed yet, for I’ve got a little vacuum pump sucking my incision dry. But no more little hunchback. And no more fevers or explosive bouts of illness. And a good chance I’ll be discharged in time for Thanksgiving.

I’ve had it with hospitals. After this year, I hope I don’t see the inside of one for another ten. I think I’m due a break.

Anyways, I wanted to explain my long Snark-absence. This is my first night with the computer, which also feels pretty good.

Because something has been growing inside me besides just bacteria. (Eww. Where’s this going?)

AN IDEA. I have an idea!

It comes from Joanne McNeil’s name for her Twitter list of wordly nerds who like to think about books and new media: “bookfuturism.”

More to the point — bookfuturists.

I love it because the first word modifies the second as much as the other way around. A futurist (in the original sense) wants to burn down libraries. A bookfuturist wants to put video games in them. (And he wants one of those video games to be Lego Hamlet.)

A bookfuturist, in other words, isn’t someone who purely embraces the new and consigns the old to the rubbish heap. She’s always looking for things that blend her appreciation of the two. (The bookfuturist might be really into steampunk.)

The bookfuturist is deeply different from the two people he might otherwise easily be mistaken for – the technofuturist and the bookservative. Technofuturists and bookservatives HATE each other. Bookfuturists have some affection for each of them, even if they both also drive him nuts.

What do I mean by “technofuturists” and “bookservatives”? Well, I can show you.

Bookservatives talk like this:

Accompanying this plague [of bookstore closings] is a feel-good propaganda campaign that enjoys the collusion of the major media outlets, including such true hi-tech believers as the NY Times and NPR—print and broadcast venues that are themselves cheerily being rendered obsolete by the hi-tech rampage—and that in subtle ways positions the destruction of book culture like so: “books” in and of themselves are nothing, only another technology, like the Walkman or the laptop. What is sacred are the texts and those are being transferred to the Internet where they will attain a new kind of high-tech-assured immortality. Like dead souls leaving their earthly bodies the books are, in effect, going to a better place: the Kindle, the e-book, the web; hi-tech’s version of Paradise…

The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now Der Book. Hi-tech propogandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that society would simply be better-off altogether if we euthanized it even as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries in our pockets, downloaded on the Uber-Kindle.

Further, we are told that to assign to books a particular value above and beyond their clearly inferior utility as a medium for language is to mark oneself as an irrelevant social throwback. And then, goes the narrative, think of the extraordinary sleekness, efficiency and amplitude of a Kindle, where thousands of texts lie at your fingertips. Which teen or twenty something in their right mind is going to opt for paper over electronic texts? No one of course. That’s just the way of evolution, goes the narrative. Publishers and readers, writers and agents, are well-advised to get with this truth or perish. As to the bookstore, it is like the synagogue under Hitler: the house of a doomed religion. And the paper book is its Torah and gravestone: a thing to burn, or use to pave the road to internet heaven…

The advent of electronic media to first position in the modern chain of Being—a place once occupied by God—and later, after the Enlightenment, by humans—is no mere 9/11 upon our cultural assumptions. It is a catastrophe of holocaustal proportions. And its endgame is the disappearance of not just books but of all things human.

Technofuturists can get nearly as apoplectic, but they’re winning most of the fights these days, so most of them sound like this:

I am utterly perplexed by intelligent and innovative thinkers who believe a connected world is a negative one. How can we lambast new technology, transition and innovation? It’s completely beyond my comprehension.

It is not our fear of information overload that stalls our egos, it’s the fear that we might be missing something. Seeing the spread of social applications online over the past few years I can definitively point to one clear post-internet generational divide.

The new generation, born connected, does not feel the need to consume all the information available at their fingertips. They consume what they want and then affect or change it, they add to it or negate it, they share it and then swiftly move along the path. They rely on their community, their swarm, to filter and share information and in turn they do the same; it’s a communism of content. True ideology at it’s best…

Frank Schirrmacher asks the question “what is important, what is not important, what is important to know?” The answer is clear and for the first time in our existence the internet and technology will allow it: importance is individualism. What is important to me is not important to you, and vice-a-versa. And individualism is the epitome of free will. Free will is not a prediction engine, it’s not an algorithm on Google or Amazon, it’s the ability to share your thoughts and your stories with whomever wants to consume them, and in turn for you to consume theirs. What is import is our ability to discuss and present our views and listen to thoughts of others…

As someone born on the cusp of the digital transition, I can see both sides of the argument but I can definitively assure you that tomorrow is much better than yesterday. I am always on, always connected, always augmenting every single moment of my analog life and yet I am still capable of thinking or contemplating any number of existential questions. My brain works a little differently and the next generation’s brains will work a little differently still. We shouldn’t assume this is a bad thing. I for one hold a tremendous amount of excitement and optimism about how we will create and consume in the future. It’s just the natural evolution of storytelling and information.

I mean = it’s not THAT either, is it?

And yet = there are clear outlets — clear markets — for both of these sentiments and styles. They both LIKE arguing against the other. A more sophisticated point-of-view — which is also not just that of the distinterested critic, or the market watcher, or the tech insider — where is the space for that, really? Where is the community?

There are a lot of us – Joanne’s list is a decent place to start – mostly writing on blogs, on Twitter, trying to figure this out.

Stay tuned, Snarkkinder. I’ve got something cooking on this. Let’s keep thinking about this together.

Is this song on heavy rotation anywhere outside the Twin Cities (Har Mar’s home region)? ‘Cause if not, it should be.

Can’t believe Britney turned this down.

Our own indispensable @SaheliDatta points to Slate’s takedown of the proliferating book-trailer genre. The column is skeptical of book trailers, but I tend to find them charming. I remember loving the idea when I first ran across it, and now we’ve got several exemplars of the form, like the Little Prince Pop-Up Book trailer:

I like the way book trailers attempt to light up your expectation for a printed page by teasing you with an entirely different sort of temptation. A good book trailer is like good food photography. I don’t think of the primary seduction of a meal as being visual, but a well-done food photo evokes everything non-visual about a meal – taste, scent, texture. Similarly, I don’t typically think of the primary seduction of a book as being its atmosphere or aesthetic, but this is what a good book trailer (or animated book cover) evokes – the environment the book will create around you as you read it.

Obligatory Miranda July link. Obligatory Miranda July book trailer:

Talk about reverse publishing. One of the world’s most beautiful Web apps has been turned into a book. And it looks fantastic:

I also love that they make it easy to embed pages, even if it’s just a simple linked jpg. (How fantastic would it have been if they’d let you embed an interactive widget from the book exploration interface they created on their site, though?)

Preordered. (Via @andrewhaeg.)

Kenny Goldsmith writes that

with the rise of the web, writ­ing has met its pho­tog­ra­phy

but really, writing “met its photography” 500 years ago; it was called print. Virtually everything that photography did to painting – to the entire field of visual culture – print did to writing. After print, writing was reproducible, mechanized, lost/regained its aura, chirographic/manuscript writing was displaced as a storage and reproduction technology*, etc….

(*partially at first, more completely after the emergence of the typewriter, but of course manuscript never goes away, as any trip to a doctor’s office will show you)

So it would in fact be fairer to say not that “writing met its photography” with any technology, but rather that in photography, painting met its print.

Now, I love that Goldsmith tees up Peter Bürger on this score, because I would like to do the same. This is Goldsmith quoting Bürger:

In 1974, Peter Bürger was still able to make the claim that “[B]ecause the advent of pho­tog­ra­phy makes pos­si­ble the pre­cise mechan­i­cal repro­duc­tion of real­ity, the mimetic func­tion of the fine arts with­ers. But the lim­its of this explana­tory model become clear when one calls to mind that it can­not be trans­ferred to lit­er­a­ture. For in lit­er­a­ture, there is no tech­ni­cal inno­va­tion that could have pro­duced an effect com­pa­ra­ble to that of pho­tog­ra­phy in the fine arts.” Now there is.

Absolutely. But — again — two things. First, and this may be obvious, but print DID produce an effect on literature and literary production comparable to that of photography in the fine arts. The relevant books here are Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, and hundreds if not thousands of others. I hope this doesn’t need to be shown.

But neither Bürger nor Goldsmith are really interested (alas!) in the late Renaissance. They’re primarily interested in the emergence of the avant-garde in the twentieth. Photography spun off Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Abstract Expressonism, Pop Art — where did avant-garde writing come from? Obviously writers were reacting to photography and film, too, but it didn’t affect them (so the argument goes) in the direct way it did visual artists. So whence the avant-garde? For Bürger and Goldsmith both, there is no explanation – for Goldsmith, this means (in part) that the real avant-garde, the final clearing away of all the traditionalist residue in literature, can finally begin.

I want to offer an alternate solution by pointing to the following: the newspaper, wood-pulp paper, the fast/continuous press, the telegraph, the typewriter, carbon paper, half-tone photographic reproductions, lithography and offset printing, the mimeograph, the file cabinet.

For Bürger and Goldsmith, having traversed this history, all of these writing technologies seem totally natural. But they are not. This was an honest-to-goodness information revolution, which — we ought not to be surprised by this — coincides with both the industrial revolution and the broader media revolution that includes photography and cinema. (I’m not proposing anything radically new here either – see Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Bernhard Siegert’s Relays, Avital Ronell’s The Telephone, and especially Harold Innis’s Empire and Communications, Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse,” among many others.)

The important point is that the Dada cut-up, Pound’s and Eliot’s use of fragments/quotations, Joyce’s and Apollinaire’s riffing with typography, Mallarmé’s reimagining of the book, and Kerouac’s continuous scroll don’t come out of nowhere. Nor are they somehow just rehashings of the Gutenberg moment, no matter what Hugh Kenner says in The Stoic Comedians — not least because he argues against himself in The Mechanic Muse.

We can have a new avant-garde without pretending that the old one happened for no reason, or that it never happened at all.

(I’m not nearly done yet! Part 3 is coming! I’ll actually talk about “content distribution”! Dematerialization! Video games! Waaahhh!)

A while back, the conceptual writer Kenny Goldsmith wrote something really high-concept:

with the rise of the web, writing has met its photography

I actually can’t find the original 2007 blog post where Kenny wrote this – the link above takes you to . But luckily, he reformulated it in July in a comment on Ron Silliman’s blog:

As I’ve said before on the Poetry Foundation, with the rise of the web, writing has met its photography. By that I mean, writing has encountered a situation similar to what happened to painting upon the invention of photography, a technology so much better at doing what the art form had been trying to do, that in order to survive, the field had to alter its course radically. If photography was striving for sharp focus, painting was forced to go soft, hence Impressionism. Faced with an unprecedented amount of digital available text, writing needs to redefine itself in order to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance.

When we look at our text-based world today, we see the perfect environment in which writing can thrive. Similarly, if we look at what happened when painting met photography, we’ll find that it was the perfect analog to analog correspondence, for nowhere lurking beneath the surface of either painting, photography or film was a speck of language. Instead, it was indexical — image to image — thus setting the stage for an imagistic revolution. Today, digital media has set the stage for a literary revolution. In 1974, Peter Bürger was still able to make the claim that “[B]ecause the advent of photography makes possible the precise mechanical reproduction of reality, the mimetic function of the fine arts withers. But the limits of this explanatory model become clear when one calls to mind that it cannot be transferred to literature. For in literature, there is no technical innovation that could have produced an effect comparable to that of photography in the fine arts.” Now there is.

Ninety percent of me is so sympathetic to everything that Goldsmith says here. And it sounds familiar, right? Digital tech has revolutionized reading, spun off all sorts of new writing process, and poses the potential to continue to revolutionize writing. I agree with all of this.

It’s that ten percent of me — that part that thinks about the nineteenth century more than I really ought to, which is also the part that takes analogies way too seriously — that can’t let it go. Not for the claims, but for the analogy used to make them —

web: writing :: photography: painting

— which I love for its rhetoric, its purity, its lightning flash, but can’t accept as an historical analysis.

I think the analogy can be fixed by changing one word. Instead of “writing,” say “publishing.” Even though I know Kenny means “writing,” that he, like me, is really concerned first and foremost with writing and less with other kinds of media, I want to say that he really means “with the rise of the web, publishing has met its photography.” Let me explain why.

First, painting is fundamentally different from photography in ways that writing is not different from the web. As Kenny points out, the web IS writing – an unprecedented amount of text. The web is not only writing, but writing belongs to the web in a way that painting does not and could not belong to photography. For Goldsmith to keep “writing” and “the web” distinct, he’d have to define “writing” in traditionalist literary terms he wouldn’t want to accept, or “the web” in terms that likewise make it quite foreign to text, and he can’t do that either.

It’s important to remember that photography didn’t only pose a crisis for painting, but for all of visual art. That’s where Goldsmith’s conceptual predecessor Marcel Duchamp comes in with his ready-mades. Photography also transformed theater, journalism, bookmaking, advertising… There’s no reason to single out painting.

Likewise, writing isn’t the only kind of cultural production that’s been upended by the web. Television, movies, still photographs, telecommunication — everything that fits under the increasingly wide banner of “content delivery” is affected by the web according to much of the same logic that the web has been affecting writing.

In short, “the web” is not a medium – at least not in the same sense that photography is. It is a content delivery system, that not only represents and reproduces content but also stores and delivers it. For most people, this change in content delivery has offered remarkable change, but has not posed a crisis of the same sort felt by painters and sculptors and playwrights in the wake of photography. It’s not writers who face a crisis, but publishers.

So, then:

web:publishing* :: photography:visual culture**

*in the 20th/21st century
**in the 19th/20th century

Maybe that isn’t quite the lightning bolt as Goldsmith’s original formulation, but I think it’s closer to the truth.

(See more in Part 2)

A couple of months ago, I started typing up a long post bashing David Goldhill’s Atlantic Monthly cover story on health care that everybody was lauding (especially David Brooks). The article had appeared in the midst of August, when health care reform was on the ropes, and it seemed like just another antagonist helping to push the process to defeat. But by September, when I was drafting the post, the prospects for reform had brightened dramatically. It was revived! With a public option! In the Senate, even! So I put my post away.

Another article, in the New Yorker this time, is getting my dander up again. (OK, it’s a blog post, but for any other publication it would have been an article.)

These articles perpetuate the belief rampant in journalism that systemic change happens in sweeping gestures. And very, very occasionally, it does. But over the past 90 years, almost every sweeping change proposed to overhaul the health care system has gone down to crushing defeat. The real changes have been step by step, bit by bit. Even Medicare when enacted was a mere condolence for the death of the comprehensive insurance system Truman had envisioned 20 years before.

But the worst thing about these articles is that they’re not content to just paint a grander vision than is practical or possible. They also spit at the seeds of change reformers have fought hard to embed within the legislation that’s proceeding.

At the heart of both Cassidy and Goldhill’s arguments is a familiar contention and one I agree with – that one of the biggest problems with the US health care system is the way it distorts costs by shuffling most payments for health care through a gruesome patchwork of employers and private insurers. Goldhill would reboot the current system in favor of a more libertarian solution, establishing affordable options for catastrophic coverage and handing out vouchers for individuals to purchase more routine care. Cassidy suggests he’d like a more progressive solution, perhaps straight-up single-payer insurance.

If their arguments stopped there, I’d appreciate them. Either of these proposals could be part of a good conversation about what health reform might look like in an ideal world. And I think it’s tremendously important that folks continue to paint these alternative visions of what health care can become.

What I find most maddening about these articles, though, is the pose of the lonely iconoclast. The way the authors pretend their ideas are so novel and transgressive that no one’s pointed them out until now. The way they ignore the past 90 years of attempts at health care reform. And worst, worst of all – the way they off-handedly dismiss the real reforms that try to incorporate those ideas into actual legislation as pragmatically as politics allows.

Both men frame their arguments as though they’re the hard-headed realists pointing out the truths no one else will acknowledge. But both are ignoring (or dismissing) reality themselves, not even really engaging with politics as it exists in the real world.

If you don’t mind a bit of wonkiness, read on. Read more…

Bob Stein at if:book, “Sea Change“:

There was a book sale outside the library at UCLA today. lots of wonderful paperbacks for 50 cents each. a year ago i would have bought a bag full. today zero. why? i do almost all my novel reading now on my iPhone which is always with me and which makes it easy to read at the gym, as opposed to print books which never lie flat.

This is funny. If I’d seen the same curbside sale of cheap paperbacks, I’d want to read them on my iPhone, too.

But I’d still buy a bag full, maybe two. Then I’d joint the books — cut the cover off and pull the pages apart, one by one — and run them through a two-sided scanner, OCR them, and save them as PDFs, HTML, etc., so I can make MOBI and EPUB and every other e-book format of them. Then I’d read them on my iPhone, my computer…

This is a two-step dance, folks.

I love this man — more than I loved Carl Sagan or Richard Feynman or Mr Wizard or the detectives on MathNet.

I’m glad my children get to have him.

David Brooks thinks cellphones are bad, bad, bad! not just for our brains, but for romantic love:

Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails. Potential partners generally met within the context of larger social institutions: neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and families. There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.

Over the past few decades, these social scripts became obsolete. They didn’t fit the post-feminist era. So the search was on for more enlightened courtship rules. You would expect a dynamic society to come up with appropriate scripts. But technology has made this extremely difficult. Etiquette is all about obstacles and restraint. But technology, especially cellphone and texting technology, dissolves obstacles. Suitors now contact each other in an instantaneous, frictionless sphere separated from larger social institutions and commitments.

People are thus thrown back on themselves. They are free agents in a competitive arena marked by ambiguous relationships. Social life comes to resemble economics, with people enmeshed in blizzards of supply and demand signals amidst a universe of potential partners.

You know, I actually really like David Brooks. I think Bobos In Paradise was a terrific book; I stick up for his place on the NYT Op-Ed masthead; his stuff on neuroscience has been really good; and I’m delighted whenever I see him on TV, on Jim Lehrer or Chris Matthews, because he seems to think and talk like a regular guy. Okay, a regular guy who went to the University of Chicago and never really left. But I never really left either, so I get that too.

But there’s a reason why he called it the “Happy Days” era: the past he’s describing isn’t really the past, but a 70s-era TV version of the past. Not even the past’s representation of itself! For that, you’d have to see On the Waterfront or read On the Road or Giovanni’s Room. It’s memory as ideology, created (whether consciously or unconsciously) to surreptitiously win arguments about the present, especially about social morés and generational change.

And the Happy Days era — the real one, which was reflected in the TV show like a funhouse mirror — was driven by technological and social change, too! Kids had access to cars, telephones, TV, records and the radio, and disposable cash. Cruising, malt shops, high school dances, drive-in movies, everything you see in American Graffiti — it might feel like part of the timeless social ritual now, but then, it was a revolution, a set of truly radical acts. Add the pill, civil rights, and a swelling in the ranks of college students, and you’ve got feminism, counter-culture, the sexual revolution. But in some ways, this was a postscript. The most important changes, the subterranean ones, had all happened already.

That’s me taking up Brooks for his treatment of the past. Ezra Klein – who has a much firmer grounding in the realities of the present than Brooks- also takes aim:

Columns like Brooks’s irk me because they demean not only my lived experiences, but those of everyone I know. To offer a slightly more modern rebuttal, Sunday was my one-year anniversary with my girlfriend. A bit more than a year ago, we first met, the sort of short encounter that could easily have slipped by without follow-up. A year and a week ago, she sent me a friend request on Facebook, which makes it easy to reach out after chance meetings. A year and five days ago, we were sending tentative jokes back-and-forth. A year and four days ago, I was steeling myself to step things up to instant messages. A year and three days ago, we were both watching the “Iron Chef” offal episode, and IMing offal puns back-and-forth, which led to our first date. A year ago today, I was anxiously waiting to leave the office for our second date.

It is not for David Brooks to tell me those IMs lack poetry, or romance. I treasure them. Electronic mediums may look limited to him, but that is only because he has never seen his life change within them. Texting, he says, is naturally corrosive to imagination. But the failure of imagination here is on Brooks’s part.