Posts by Tim

All of these insights have their deep and shallow versions.

1. Practical knowledge is impossible without knowing what information to discard.
2. Vapor in the atmosphere makes light visible.
3. Every cuisine is the triumph of centuries of vernacular chemistry.
4. The idea of the future is a lens that brings spaces closer together.
5. All of our neighborhoods hold familiar secrets, depths we’ve never plumbed.
6. Consider your arguments and carefully circumscribe your conclusion. Then exceed those limits by at least twenty percent.
7. Aesthetically, we respond to nuanced humanity and inhuman purity, the shaving mirror and the telescope, the contingency of a moment and the point of view of the eternal universe. Everything else rings false.
8. An unheralded virtue: vigilance against an urge for thrift, misplaced.
9. Any task of memory or thought benefits from an association (even an artificial one) with vision.
10. Maps fool us into believing that cities exist in two dimensions, when they actually persist in (at least) four.
11. Food, Books, Weather, Conversation — excellence in these four things is an apologia for an unhappy memory or an indifferent universe.

Thanks, Robin.

Watching The Big Sleep in a hotel in Midtown Manhattan, and it is glorious. Lauren Bacall is as cool as blue flame, but it’s hard to beat watching Bogart with Dorothy Malone. Even bookstore clerks are wise! In a way this is a key to film noir — what passes as toughness is really a monumentous and universally held contempt for the slightest stupidity.

“I’ve got a Balinese dancing girl tattooed across my chest, and I’d better take her home.” It’s enough to make you want to write pastiches of pastiche, like the Coen Brothers squared.

I’m off to San Francisco tomorrow, to win the hearts of academicians large and small. Committee breakfasts, a job interview (!), and a paper on paternity, modernism, and tragedy. (Apollonian patriarchy, legal fictions, Hegel’s love child, and Ockham’s razor abound! It will be awesome.)

I will catch you all after New Year’s if not before. Keep your Kindles warm.

P.S.: Special props to Robin for hosting me in SF. When he returns, the city will be especially strong in the Snark.

Gavin at Wordwright wants the word back:

“Graphic novel” is not any more descriptive, and worse in that it implies fictional content to the detriment of memoir, travelogue, reportage, etc., which is where you find some of the most interesting work being currently done

In mine, I would be played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman. There’s a fair-to-middling physical resemblance, to be sure, but mostly, I just feel like he would do a really, really great job.

I’d also like it if he would say this about me:

The world is hard, and … being a human on this earth is a complicated, messy thing.

Matt can keep his Kindle — I’ll take one of these:

I seriously want to know more about the early history of astronomy. Less the sociology than the psychology of it – what was it that led humans to devote themselves to such long-term, precise observations? A belief in the power of distant gods? Boredom? The urge to find certainty somewhere, anywhere in the cosmos?

Via HNN/Ralph Luker.

Yum:

The most common mistakes made by home bakers, professionals say, have to do with the care and handling of one ingredient: butter. Creaming butter correctly, keeping butter doughs cold, and starting with fresh, good-tasting butter are vital details that professionals take for granted, and home bakers often miss.

Butter is basically an emulsion of water in fat, with some dairy solids that help hold them together. But food scientists, chefs and dairy professionals stress butter

I’m fascinated by Barack Obama’s conception of himself as a writer, and doubly fascinated by his partnership with younger-than-me speechwriter Jon Favreau. This Washington Post article by Eli Saslow (“Helping to Write History“) indulges both fascinations to the hilt. Enjoy.

Over at Brainiac, Christopher Shea writes about interlineal translation, where each line of text is followed by a native-language (and generally near word-for-word) translations. James Hamilton popularized the method in the early 19th century (interlineal translations are sometimes called “Hamiltonian”), but they’ve fallen out of favor as a method of language instruction in favor of immersion.

It’s really hard to find published interlineal translations, but the writer Ernest Blum says that immersion education has failed and that we ought to resuscitate Hamilton’s pedagogy (or something like it) using texts like the Loeb classics, which have opposing-face translations (a method that’s still much more common). The Loebs aren’t interlineal, but they’re the next best thing.

Wait a minute, though — we’re not stuck with the books we’ve got! We’ve got computers! As long as we’ve got the text, we should be able to represent these books any way we want — as pure foreign-language texts, straight translations, line-by-line, or page-by-page.

If we really want to try giving line-by-line translation a try, someone should design a super-slick front-end for something like the Perseus database that spits out beautiful interlinear translations just for students learning to translate. And make it easy to switch views; in fact, you could do different lessons using different methods.

In fact, I don’t understand why we don’t have crazy rich client applications like Rosetta Stone packed to the gills with classic texts in every language for people to learn to read great books in their original languages. You could add reference sources, digital footnotes, audio recordings (Ian McKellan reading the Odyssey, anyone?) — lots of stuff.

There are so many more things — just simple things, really — that we could be doing with digital texts. As the other great Homer would say, “I could do a lot of things if I had some money.”

Bottle Rocket is out on Criterion Blu-Ray. Dave Kehr writes a lovestruck review:

Stylistically,