Posts by Tim

What can I say about Jacques Derrida’s book Paper Machine, besides “I adore this book, and wish everyone would read it”?

It’s the great French-Algerian philosopher’s most important look at the transformation of the written word through electronic and computing technologies. It’s also one of his most important looks back at his own career; he revisits and updates a thousand and one of his earlier ideas and positions from the point of view of transformations in writing technology. “It seems as if I’ve never had any other subject, but paper, paper, paper,” he half-jokes – knowing that philosophical deconstruction was/is as much a function of a technological epoch on the wane as it was a social/intellectual breakthrough.

“Paper” for Derrida isn’t just the paper of books, but also identity papers (the French term for undocumented immigrants is “sans-papiers,” i.e., without papers), newspapers, and printer paper – “Papier-Machine” means “typing paper, printer paper, machine paper,” even as it comes to mean (and I’m here I’m extrapolating) the whole structural edifice of a world built on networks made of paper. William Carlos Williams said that “a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words”; you could also say that a poem (or a book) is a machine made of paper.

This retrospective aspect makes Paper Machine a great introduction to Derrida and his writing, even as it introduces new wrinkles. The man who famously titled a chapter in Of Grammatology “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing” has to stop and rethink “what does this mean?” in a world where “the end of the book” (that is, the printed book) is a real possibility. It’s fun to watch.

Also fun, and given the positions in the book, inevitable — the book has been scanned and OCRed, and is now available at AAAARG.org, aka the best website for philosophy/theory PDFs ever. So, please — give it a whirl.

It’s been fascinating to me to watch the circulation of this clip of Louie CK on Conan O’Brien, loosely titled “Everything Is Amazing And No One Is Happy.” The appearance is about eight months old (if anyone can track down an exact date, please let me know) over a year old, but I still regularly get links, embeds, forwards of it. What’s more, each highlights a different aspect — for some people, the clip is about the importance of thankfulness; for others, it marks generational change; it’s a good riff about the magic of new tech; and for still others, it’s a great attack on spoiled jerks.

Something about this resonates with people. It hit a sweet spot, and it’s on its way to becoming a modern classic.

Kottke links to a really good article about the technology behind men’s razors. Me, I’m linking to this old article from The Onion, “Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades.”

You’re taking the “safety” part of “safety razor” too literally, grandma. Cut the strings and soar. Let’s hit it. Let’s roll. This is our chance to make razor history. Let’s dream big. All you have to do is say that five blades can happen, and it will happen. If you aren’t on board, then fuck you. And if you’re on the board, then fuck you and your father. Hey, if I’m the only one who’ll take risks, I’m sure as hell happy to hog all the glory when the five-blade razor becomes the shaving tool for the U.S. of “this is how we shave now” A…

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we should just ride in Bic’s wake and make pens. Ha! Not on your fucking life! The day I shadow a penny-ante outfit like Bic is the day I leave the razor game for good, and that won’t happen until the day I die!

A lot of straightforward but not-always-obvious wisdom in this 37signals post, “Don’t just try to steal a share of the existing market, create a new one“:

Nintendo goes after people who aren’t using other video game systems. While Xbox 360 and Sony one-up each other trying to reach experienced, demanding gamers, Nintendo goes after newbies. The Wii’s controller makes video games so simple that a three year-old can play it. And the company is thriving because of it…

Nearly half of all undergraduate students in the US now attend community college. Why? They are more affordable, have more lenient admission standards, offer online degrees, and focus on market-driven degrees aimed at nurses, firefighters, law enforcement officers, and EMTs. All that means they are able to enroll students who otherwise might never wind up in a classroom.

You could take this lesson to politics, too – especially local politics, or anywhere you’re trying to outflank an entrenched establishment. Don’t go to the usual power brokers, making the same speech in all of the same places. Put together a coalition of people who don’t usually bump up against each other. And especially, make sure you get all of the people who haven’t been successfully targeted by a political campaign before. Don’t fight the same battles if you can redraw the map.

Come to think of it, I guess that’s how Obama did it. Smart guy.

Someone recently reminded me of an old poem I wrote in college, about memories, childhood, art, and baseball. If you’ll forgive my indulgence, I want to post some of it. [You can read the rest (including lots of other juvenilia) here.]

Mexicantown

On summer Sundays we took communion
at Holy Redeemer. When church broke
we ran down Vernor Hwy to Clark Park,

Past the bodegas we just called stores
if we didn’t know them by name.
Miguel lived on Christiancy,
which was faster; I liked Vernor

Where we could see Rosa skipping
double-dutch, and where old Manuel
gave us baseball cards and taffee,
and warned me about las mujeres.

The men would watch their sons
from the Clark Street stoops,
kept mothers inside while we stained
church clothes with grass and sweat.

A double to right field—I lost
my shoes rounding first base,
took off my socks and played barefoot.

After baseball, sliced oranges
and sweet raisins, reruns of Sanford and Son
or Chico and the Man. We hung sheets

Over doorways, ran fans to keep cool.
Miguel’s mother, my godmother,
stroked my hair until I fell asleep.

After summer, Dia De Muertos,
when we’d light candles and laugh at death.
We took the long walk from Holy Redeemer
to Holy Cross, the cemetery, praying

For Rosa’s father, Manuel’s wife,
Willie Hernandez (who wasn’t dead),
and Novia, Miguel’s sister who died
still a baby—who had clear blue eyes—

Our angelitos, our saints.
When I returned years later,
The milkweed still grew, and I drew

A self-portrait beneath the Ambassador Bridge.
The miracle of art is its rediscovery of the real,
That every day it breaks bread anew
With the mountains and hollows of our memory,

And memory always seems lacking.
We blessed ourselves and came away.
I held the bat tighter; it cracked in my hand.

I remember years ago, when I was dating a girl, getting into a conversation with her cantankerous grandfather about health care. He was a remarkable man – had been a principal in Detroit public high schools for years, and had seen a lot.

Anyways, to Mr Anderson, it was simple. All you had to do was take care of people when something really terrible happened to them. He would tell a story about watching someone fall down and crack his head open on the sidewalk. He and a few other strangers picked the man up and carried him to the hospital a block away. “Nobody asked or worried if he could pay,” he said. “They just saved his life and sent him home.”

That’s some people’s idea of health care — the nurses and doctors in the ER patching you up, so you don’t bleed to death in the street. This is usually because they’ve never gone for a prenatal visit or vaccinations, and they think routine screenings are a waste of time. They don’t ask their doctos about suspicious moles, or what they should be eating, or if they’ve started to have some trouble making it all the way to the bathroom.

This was me, too, not long ago. I once had to go to the emergency room for a terrible nosebleed that wouldn’t stop on its own. I later joked to friends, “I only go to see the doctor exactly when I’m bleeding from an important part of my body for more than a few hours.”

This kind of thinking comes particularly naturally to young men, where they’ve stupidly been told to hide their pain (emotion, too) and to valorize athletes and movie characters who play through pain. The only time you’re allowed to cry is when you’re watching the end of The Natural — not because the main character is slowly bleeding to death, but because he hit a home run anyways.

We’re dumbasses, really. But there are a lot of us.

Anyways, the resident young guy at the NYT op-ed page, Ross Douthat, floats an idea — universal catastrophic health care coverage — that could be kind of a good one, or a totally dumbass one, depending on how it breaks. I’m suspicious, however, that Douthat’s preferred implementation probably leans dumbass.

See, it’s all in the details. If “catastrophe” is defined as health care costs exceeding a defined percentage of one’s income in a calendar year, it plays one way. I’m actually kinda sympathetic to this, although I see problems.

If, however, it’s defined as coverage for really bad things that happen to you, as opposed to “routine” care, that’s actually really problematic. Because – and I think, as someone who’s recently had a catastrophic health care condition, I can say this – catastrophic care and routine care are completely interdependent.

Here’s how it works, in both directions.

Routine care prevents catastrophes from happening. Or, it catches them before they become hard and expensive to treat. I think this is relatively well-understood, so I’m not going to say as much about it.

Catastrophic care demands routine follow-ups. After you’re diagnosed with AIDS, or cancer, you need to meet with your doctor regularly and take steps to stave off infections. After you break your arm and leg, you need extensive physical therapy before you can work (or walk) again. After a C-section delivery, both mom and baby need regular check-ups. That’s most of what your health care is after something major — just people checking up on you, to make sure that whatever they did to put you back together again took, and that you’re not going to get swooped up by something else while you’re vulnerable.

That, and you take a lot of pills. Which usually counts as “routine care” even if your pills are keeping your skin from turning inside out.

I forgot to finish my almost-grandpa-in-law’s story. Later, he asked about the guy with the cracked skull that he’d brought to the hospital. About a week after he was released, he caught pneumonia and died. “After all that, he couldn’t take care of himself,” Mr Anderson sniffed, sad and disgusted, wise and blind, all the same time.

Now, go read Malcolm Gladwell’s “Million Dollar Murray,” and then tell me whether Douthat makes any sense, for anyone other than himself and guys like him.

It’s weird to read what seem like round after round of articles talking up the importance of the potato in shaping modernity (mostly by way of jacking up population numbers). To me, at least, this is old news.

Ten years ago, Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher had a cracking book chapter in Practicing New Historicism called “The Potato in the Materialist Imagination.” It mostly looks at debates in the late 18th and early 19th centuries about potato farming (including such luminaries as Gladstone, William Cobbett, Arthur Young, and of course Thomas Malthus). It was definitely clear then that potatoes allowed you to support a vast population of tenant farmers for fractions of what it cost before, when most peasants ate bread.

The other concern was that compared to bread, the potato was antisocial — there was no structured division of labor, no fusion of foods from different subagricultures (i.e. wheat and eggs). You could just dig them out of the ground and boil them — the first MRE (besides cheese). Greenblatt and Gallagher also focus on how the fears of overpopulation were driven by the production of the potato itself — critics imagined dumb, zombie-like potato people rising up directly from the ground. Unstoppable. Like a tidal wave. “The potato is the root of misery BECAUSE it is the root of plenty.”

It’s worth noting in the context of our current anxieties about food monocultures how, for much of human history, the vast majority of human beings were sustained by a single food item. Bread, potatoes — the assumption was that you would eat one kind of food, which would supply your whole nourishment. This, of course, is what made crop failures and famines so deadly. Potatoes, since they grew underground, were thought to be immune from the usual agents of famine – an invincible wonderfood.

This wasn’t just a problem in England and Ireland. Between Malthus and Greenblatt/Gallagher comes the great sociologist Max Weber. Weber’s first substantial work, written not long before The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, was the lecture “The Nation-State and Economic Policy,” where Weber criticized the wealthy Prussian landowners for systematically replacing the local peasants with immigrant Polish workers. The Polish workers were cheaper largely because they were willing to raise and live on potatoes alone, where the established tenants would not. Potatoes then became the means to establish new relationships of domination in the absence of the traditional set of mutual obligations that governed peasants and landowners in the feudal period.

Weber’s work on the Polish farmers is important because it shows (I think) that he realized that modernity was not only about his legendary middle-class Protestants, so anxious to prove that they are among the elect that they work long after they’ve satisfied their basic needs, but also about these exploited, bare-subsistence workers. Both in their own way exploded social traditions. But while one group came to dominate economic, political, and intellectual life, the other slowly grew, the invisible material substrate, working to feed all of those diligent bourgeois toiling in their vocations.

“Does the Brain Like E-Books?” sounds and reads too much like a Snarkmarket original to be ignored. I like this bit from my friend and almost-colleague (if I had locked down that UCSB job) Alan Liu:

Initially, any new information medium seems to degrade reading because it disturbs the balance between focal and peripheral attention. This was true as early as the invention of writing, which Plato complained hollowed out focal memory. Similarly, William Wordsworth’s sister complained that he wasted his mind in the newspapers of the day. It takes time and adaptation before a balance can be restored, not just in the “mentality” of the reader, as historians of the book like to say, but in the social systems that complete the reading environment.

Right now, networked digital media do a poor job of balancing focal and peripheral attention. We swing between two kinds of bad reading. We suffer tunnel vision, as when reading a single page, paragraph, or even “keyword in context” without an organized sense of the whole. Or we suffer marginal distraction, as when feeds or blogrolls in the margin (”sidebar”) of a blog let the whole blogosphere in.

And I adore this closer look at the cognitive implications of reading, as relayed by Jonah Lehrer:

I think one of the most interesting findings regarding literacy and the human cortex is the fact that there are actually two distinct pathways activated by the sight of letters. (The brain is stuffed full of redundancies.) As the lab of Stanislas Dehaene has found, when people are reading “routinized, familiar passages” a part of the brain known as the visual word form area (VWFA, or the ventral pathway) is activated. This pathway processes letters and words in parallel, allowing us to read quickly and effortlessly. It’s the pathway that literate readers almost always rely upon.

But Dehaene and colleagues have also found a second reading pathway in the brain, which is activated when we’re reading prose that is “unfamiliar”. (The scientists trigger this effect in a variety of ways, such as rotating the letters, or using a hard to read font, or filling the prose with obscure words.) As expected, when the words were more degraded or unusual, subjects took longer to comprehend them. By studying this process in an fMRI machine, Dehaene could see why: reading text that was highly degraded or presented in an unusual fashion meant that we relied on a completely different neural route, known as the dorsal reading pathway. Although scientists had previously assumed that the dorsal route ceased to be active once we learned how to read, Deheane’s research demonstrates that even literate adults still rely, in some situations, on the same patterns of brain activity as a first-grader, carefully sounding out the syllables.

That’s right — Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés” actually pushes through to a different part of your brain — because it taps into new graphic possibilities, as well as semantic (and syntactic) ones. And that, my friends, is poetry — i.e. “language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”

Or it is, so long as we keep making it new:

The larger point is that most complaints about E-Books and Kindle apps boil down to a single problem: they don’t feel as “effortless” or “automatic” as old-fashioned books. But here’s the wonderful thing about the human brain: give it a little time and practice and it can make just about anything automatic. We excel at developing new habits. Before long, digital ink will feel just as easy as actual ink.

Or today’s graphic avant-garde will feel as easy as tomorrow’s MOR pleasures.

Think about a newspaper – so much potential for marginal distraction! All those graphic collisions of text upon itself, with pictures and advertisements and such, in tiny type and held in an unusual bodily orientation. Then they added color! In the nineteenth century, the newspaper was a sensory onslaught akin to watching the commercials surrounding Saturday morning cartoons. Now, it’s straightforward, orderly — even stately.

There’s a great, probably unintentional allegory of this transformation in Citizen Kane. It plays out as the fossilization of a marriage, and the crystallization of Kane’s political intentions – moving from anarchic gadfly to demagogic gubernatorial candidate – but it’s also about the normalization (and neutralization) of newspaper reading. It goes from marginal distraction to tunnel vision, and in just six moves.

Some goodies from the latest Frank Rich column:

As the economics commentator Jeff Madrick points out in The New York Review of Books, the American public is still owed “a clear account of the financial events of the last two years and of who, if anyone, is seriously to blame.” Without that, there will be neither the comprehensive policy framework nor the political will to change anything.

The only investigation in town is a bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission created by Congress in May. It is still hiring staff. Its 10 members are dispersed throughout the country, and, according to a spokeswoman, have contemplated only a half-dozen public sessions over the next year. Such a panel, led by the former California state treasurer Phil Angelides, seems highly unlikely to match Congress’s Depression-era Pecora commission. That investigation was driven by a prosecutor whose relentless fact-finding riveted the country and gave birth to the Securities and Exchange Commission, among other New Deal reforms. Last week, we learned that the current S.E.C. has hired a former Goldman hand as the chief operating officer of its enforcement unit.

I’m a little put off by Rich’s overall anti-Goldman, anti-Ivy, bordering-on-a-conspiracy-theory not-quite-populism in this column, but this idea is just right on. I mean, gawd — can you imagine an independent, prosecutor-led investigation into the financial crisis that was as dogged and intense and public as Ken Starr’s investigations of Bill Clinton? Complete with a book like the 9/11 Commission’s? We’ve got Patrick Fitzgerald investigating Blagojevich and… which B-team, exactly, on the global financial crisis?

Come on. Let’s get to the bottom of something. Preferably something real.

There are a lot of things I’m skeptical/pissed about re:the Google Books settlement (and Google Books in general). This, however, strikes me as exactly right:

Speaking at the Tools of Change conference in Frankfurt, Amanda Edmonds, Google’s director of strategic partnerships, said the programme would be rolled out by June. Edmonds said one of the strengths of Google’s offering was that once bought, the e-book would exist in a “cloud library”, which could be accessed from potentially any device, including laptops, “smart phones” or e-readers. “As long as you can get onto the library, you can access it,” Edmonds said. “All books will live in the same library, so it doesn’t matter where you buy it or where you read it.”

I’m assuming that Google will also use Gears or some other implementation to allow for local storage and offline reading. You’ve got the tools; it’s easy to use them.

I like a lot about this model for e-books in general, but it seems particularly well-suited for Google Books, which is a scanned backlist of books not originally written or designed for digital reading.

NEW e-books, on the other hand, might benefit from some hardware-specific formatting. You can imagine an interactive book that’s designed to be read on the iPhone, or maybe on a Nintendo handheld or something. Not hastily scanned text, but a piece of tailored multimedia.

The short lesson is that if e-book sellers are going to try to lock their content to a particular console, they had damn well better make sure that the design and readability of the book take full advantage of that console. AND that console had better create a hell of an experience reading books. Otherwise the versatility of the screen-agnostic, read-anywhere cloud model just guts whatever competitive value you might offer in throwing up text on a screen.

This is also a lesson to creators – if you don’t want to be a part of the Google Books party, but want to sell e-books, your best bet is to offer something Google Books won’t match: that is, a book that isn’t just scanned/copied text on a blank screen.