My favorite post that I wrote for Kottke.org might be “Digging in the crates (or Why my generation is into history),” which used a Ta-Nehisi Coates riff on hip-hop’s omnivorous hunger for obscure/great old music as a kind of vernacular historical barometer.

But of course, crate-digging isn’t just a hip-hop thing; it’s also always been a huge part of indie rock culture. This is why every time I hear M.I.A. growl The Modern Lovers’ “Road runner, road runner” over hip-hop & Bollywood beats at the start of “Bamboo Banga,” or James Murphy shout “Gil! Scott! Heron!” at the climax of “Losing My Edge,” I feel like Sasha Frere-Jones had his head up his ass.

Then I think about Bob Dylan stealing old Woody Guthrie records from his friend’s houses in Minneapolis, and I think maybe my generation just isn’t so different:

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The problem with giving a book called Writing Tools as a gift is that its recipient assumes you think she’s a bad writer.

I do not think you’re a bad writer.

Over the years, I’ve purchased and given away probably ten copies of Writing Tools. It’s, by far, the best book on writing I’ve ever read—smarter, richer and more useful than even (GET READY FOR IT) The Elements of Style. Its author, Roy Peter Clark, teaches at the Poynter Institute, where both Matt and I used to work (and learn), and so I heard many of its lessons in person. But they come across so clearly and crisply in the book that it is almost—almost—a substitute for Roy himself.

A few things worth noting:

• This is a practical book. It’s not theory or fusty prescription. It’s a box of chewy ideas you can digest and put to use instantly.
• The ideas are so chewy, in fact, that many of them easily make the leap to other domains. The ladder of abstraction, for instance, isn’t only useful in writing; it’s a great way to build a presentation. (And as you’ll see if you click that link, the L.O.A., like many of the tools, isn’t Roy’s invention. He’s as much a curator as a coach in this book.)
• The tools apply across the board: from newspaper writing to fiction writing to blogging. Jeez probably even tweeting.
• Finally, the book is simply a great object. If you buy it, I implore you: buy the hardcover. The materials that Little, Brown chose for this thing are just perfect. It feels good in the hands; it feels like something you could use for years.

I bring it up now because Roy’s new book, The Glamour of Grammar, is out and newly reviewed in the NYT. There’s a Paper Cuts blog post as well, which I like even better because it brings Roy’s voice into the mix. I haven’t read the new book yet—but the old one is sitting here, right next to my keyboard, within arm’s reach.

P.S. I’m really only setting Writing Tools up against Strunk & White for effect, and to clearly communicate its insta-classic character. The truth, of course, is that the books are entirely complementary.

It’s nice today, on the anniversary of the March on Washington, while our friends at Longshot are in LA putting together issue #1, to find something small but inspiring that connects those dots:

Bayard Rustin’s first rule of management was to make lists of every conceivable task. If somebody thinks that something can possibly go wrong, come up with a specific solution, and put it on the list. Organizing anything — a massive march, a union picket, a training program, a newspaper — succeeds or fails because of details.

All day long, Rustin and his team crossed off completed tasks and added new tasks to the three- and four-page lists:

Briefing of Marshals
Sy does press release on cars to Negro press
Telephone for top command
Find out when office tent goes up
Wire Mahalia Jackson
Call Joe Rauh on insurance and inspection
Clarify with Washington police Rockwell’s intentions
Small national office at the Statler

I’m fascinated with Bayard Rustin, have been for years — about a year ago I finally picked up his Collected Writings, Time on Two Crosses. At the end of his life, Rustin became a forceful advocate for gay rights, and a lot of his writing from this period connects the two movements. But in everything I’ve read about Rustin, I’d never heard this story:

At the end of every workday, Rustin convened a staff meeting. Everyone was invited — and expected — to attend, from the heavies like Tom Kahn and Cleveland Robinson down to lowly interns like Peter Orris and Elliott Linzer.

Rustin let everyone else talk. Staffers reported on how many people had written requesting brochures and buttons. They reported on how many buses had been booked for Akron and Albany and New York. They raised questions about security arrangements or coordination with Walter Fauntroy’s operation in Washington.

As others talked, Rustin doodled. As he scribbled notes and crossed out completed tasks, he drew squares and triangles that looked like mazes. Peter Orris, a brainy high school student, was convinced that the doodles helped Rustin think through the relationships between the many-layered tasks. He got Rustin to autograph one of his doodles.

Sometimes, like a herald from the past, Rustin suddenly interrupted the chatter with an old spiritual, his voice sweet and high pitched:

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
A long ways from home,
A true believer
Sometimes I feel like I’m almos’ gone
Way up in the heab’nly lan’
True believer

Sometimes he sang alone. But he also called out songs everyone knew. Always the teacher, he told them where the song came from, what it meant. He talked to them, for example, about the syncopation in “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel” and the call-and-response patterns in “Swing Low.” He sang the old spirituals with new words targeting Bull Connor, George Wallace, Ross Barnett, and Jim Clark, the most notorious symbols of segregation in the South.

As Harlem slept, the music of slaves and sharecroppers, sit-inners and picketers, gospel choirs and a capella college ensembles, filled the muggy night air.

Listen to this speech.

Listen to it!

I heard King’s “I Have a Dream” on the radio this afternoon. Despite the grandeur of the visuals of the March on Washington, and the power of the text, I think that radio is the best way to experience it. I am amazed, as a writer, teacher, poet, and speaker, at the range of King’s elocutionary instrument.

He doesn’t just use every sonorous rhetorical tool in the book. He makes words rhyme which shouldn’t. He finds transitory consonants and bends them to fit his alliterative schemes. He has the most versatile spondaic foot I’ve ever heard, so much so it could pass for iambic. (Try to find a genuinely unstressed syllable — or unstressed thought — in the way King says “We Will Not Be Satisfied.”)

And he matches and varies his pitch to highlight his parallelisms of matter and mind, in his voice and in the air; a small, thickly built man, speaking from the roots of the trees, from the center of the earth, knowing that the extension of his own gravity stretches like a column from the molten core to the orbit of the moon. He is a single still point with the granted power to bend straight the crooked lines of history.

Originally published January 19, 2009

I embedded one of these videos and linked to the other in my Gadget Lab article on the near-future of wristwatches, but I thought it’d be worth juxtaposing ’em here too.

Two quick notes: in case it’s not obvious, “Anémic” is “Cinéma” backwards. And as you can see, Duchamp was never one to limit himself to just vertical OR horizontal reading. (Watch the whole thing.)

Hey, so I’m going to make something for Longshot Magazine tonight, and I would like to call upon your collective brainpower for just a moment to help get me started.

The theme is COMEBACK; it’s articulated powerfully and persuasively on Longshot’s site. I participated last time, and it was a blast, so I’m doing it again. But rather than write a traditional piece (with, you know… words) I want to do some sort of data visualization. I’ll find some data, filter and process it, then make it pretty with Processing.

But I have no idea what subject or data I’m going to explore. And I’m at work right now and can’t really think about it very hard until after 6 p.m. or so. So I thought I’d throw the question out to the assembled might of the Snarkmatrix.

When you think COMEBACK and read Longshot’s pitch, what springs to mind?

What might be a good question or hypothesis to start with?

What’s a data set that people might not traditionally consider a data set?

This might require some constellational thinking.

Update: okay, I figured something out. Woo!

In the long list of books I’ll never write, there’s one that’s about a theory of risk. The theory is that there’s a threshold of risk aversion beyond which our attempts to extinguish risk actually exacerbate it. It would be filled with the case studies you might expect – things like the overuse of antibiotics and how a financial insurance product short-circuited the economy. But the opening anecdote would be about roads. And I’d basically copy and paste it from from this December ’04 Wired story:

Riding in [avant-garde traffic engineer Hans Monderman’s] green Saab, we glide into Drachten, a 17th-century village that has grown into a bustling town of more than 40,000. We pass by the performing arts center, and suddenly, there it is: the Intersection. [Monderman’s baby. – M] It’s the confluence of two busy two-lane roads that handle 20,000 cars a day, plus thousands of bicyclists and pedestrians. Several years ago, Monderman ripped out all the traditional instruments used by traffic engineers to influence driver behavior – traffic lights, road markings, and some pedestrian crossings – and in their place created a roundabout, or traffic circle. The circle is remarkable for what it doesn’t contain: signs or signals telling drivers how fast to go, who has the right-of-way, or how to behave. There are no lane markers or curbs separating street and sidewalk, so it’s unclear exactly where the car zone ends and the pedestrian zone begins. To an approaching driver, the intersection is utterly ambiguous – and that’s the point.

Monderman and I stand in silence by the side of the road a few minutes, watching the stream of motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians make their way through the circle, a giant concrete mixing bowl of transport. Somehow it all works. The drivers slow to gauge the intentions of crossing bicyclists and walkers. Negotiations over right-of-way are made through fleeting eye contact. Remarkably, traffic moves smoothly around the circle with hardly a brake screeching, horn honking, or obscene gesture. “I love it!” Monderman says at last. “Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each other. You can’t expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design of the road.”

I wrote the text for “10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books,” but TheAtlantic.com’s science and technology editor/good friend of the Snark Alexis Madrigal edited it and added all the hyperlinks and images. The images are really wonderful, so I thought I would add some short annotations/captions/homework assignments for each one here.

1. Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory builds on the observation that what we call WW1 was the first major war fought where most of the soldiers did a lot of reading. The German empire sent the soldiers off with copies of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Soldier-poets like Wilfred Owen had inexpensive poetry anthologies like the first Oxford Book of English Verse. And the soldiers had lots of access to news, even printing their own newspapers (some official, some samizdat — those were the funny ones). Add the literacy revolution of the late-19th century, and lots of time spent sitting around and waiting for something to happen, and there was more reading in that war than any before it.
2. These industrial print machines just have a great aesthetic, don’t they? It looks like the machine Chaplin slides through in Modern Times. You could also say he’s becoming a ribbon of film flitting through the projector:
   

3. None of my “revolutions” are single moments. In fact, you could say that all of them are all still ongoing. But if you were talking about genuinely revolutionary moments in the history of reading, deciphering the Rosetta Stone would be a big one. And once you cut through the propaganda, even that wasn’t done by one guy on a single date.
4. If you wanted to, you could describe every revolution in the history of reading as a computing revolution. I love the “earliest true hardware” section of this Wikipedia article: “Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, mostly using one-to-one correspondence with our fingers.” As Matthew Battles would say, we’re all digital natives.
5. I don’t know how exactly Alexis dug up this picture of glasses designed for reading in bed, but I strongly suspect there isn’t yet an app for that.

Here is a link to Tim’s terrific new post over at The Atlantic, provided for your convenience. Like I said on Twitter:

@tcarmody I love that your magisterial media history post totally has a Demand Media headline. Nicely done.

I love the fact that Gutenberg’s press represents just one of ten revolutions here, and I love Tim’s characterization of it:

2. Outside of scholarly circles, the top candidate is usually the better-known Print Revolution, usually associated with Johannes Gutenberg, who helped introduce movable type to Europe. Now, as Andrew Pettegree’s new history The Book in the Renaissance shows, the early years of print were much messier than advertised: no one knew quite what to do with this technology, especially how to make money off of it.

“No one knew quite what to do with this technology.” I can’t tell you much I love that—how heartening I find it. It means we probably haven’t even figured out what the web is really good for yet.

But yo, Tim, I’ve got beef: where’s the paperback revolution in your list?

Why didn’t US dollar coins take off, or even take hold, in 1999-2000? Stan Collender, who led the award-winning marketing effort for the popular golden Sacagawea coins, breaks it down:

The reason had nothing to do with consumers refusing to use it: Instead, businesses refused to order the coins and so didn’t have any to give to consumers.

Their reasoning made a great deal of sense. Most large retailers pay to get bills and coins delivered to them by armored vehicle and, because they weigh more, coins are more expensive to deliver than bills. The average retailer didn’t want to spend anything additional for coins when there was a perfect substitute product — dollar bills — that it could get at a lower cost. That meant that, unless they received a Golden Dollar as payment from a customer, retailers had none to use as change. Like almost any other new product, consumers quickly tired of asking for the coins when the answer almost always was no…

There were other reasons. The most prominent was that the manufacturer of the paper for the dollar bills who wanted to keep selling it to the federal government, waged an aggressive anti-dollar coin campaign and trashed the effort every way imaginable. For example, the Mint had to cancel a promotional effort in Boston because the paper manufacturer, which was located in Massachusetts, protested to its senators and the senators demanded that the Mint cancel the effort.

I think everybody who’s breathed the air around economics gets the thesis that money is an economic product subject to supply and demand like any other. But to actually see it broken down as analysis of discrete things — a fiat currency backed by the full faith and credit of the US gov’t but whose weight and materials and cost and durability and shape all turn out to be crucial to its success or failure — man, it’s another thing altogether.

Via @dancohen.