Found this via Ezra Klein, whose admonishment to watch all the way to the end for the Pixar-worthy octopus feat is worth heeding:

Mark Sample spots a review of a David Foster Wallace collection authored by a Don Delillo character. McSweeney’s? Nope. It was published in the book review section of the academic journal Modernism/Modernity.

Update: M/M editor Lawrence Rainey and former managing editor Nicole Devarenne ‘fess up [kinda] in an open letter to Mark.

One of my favorite “pop music meets pop culture” writers is Tom Ewing, who writes the “Poptimist” column for Pitchfork. Ewing’s posts have a way of generally filtering into the cultural conversation without him necessarily getting a lot of direct credit – for example, he beat Paul Constant to the punch back in May by writing an essay on Twitter in 140-character paragraphs.

Ewing’s newest column smartly juxtaposes the decline of the relevance of the Top 40 (particularly in the UK) with a certain strand of newspaper pessimism. I particularly like his definition of pop music as “a fragmented cross-section of popular culture squeezed into a tiny space, and the act of squeezing– when things were working– filled that space with energy and fizz.”

Well worth reading the whole thing – here’s a relevant sample:

Far more people worry about the decline of newspapers than the decline of the British pop charts, but their plight is comparable. Both packaged worlds of content into small things and let the different elements fight for attention. Both also enjoyed audiences who had to consume a whole to get at the parts they liked. Okay, a newspaper reader could skip over the sections they didn’t care about more easily than a radio listener could, but still a good headline might turn that half-second flicker of disinterest into attention. And in that half-second chance lived serendipity and argument.

For serendipity to happen you have to be able to give people what they don’t want– or don’t think they want– as well as what they do.

Maybe that’s a utopian conception of the newspaper as well as the Top 40 — but it seems like all we do is trade in utopian conceptions. Let’s kick this one around for a while.

This is the last day that Hilzoy will be blogging at Obsidian Wings and Washington Monthly. I don’t think everyone yet realizes what we as her readers are losing. As I wrote to Matt after we heard the news, “she wasn’t the most famous political blogger; she was just the best.”

A philosopher by training, she was compelled to blog in 2002 by what she saw as the craziness of the country then – not just the bad policies of the government, but brutal invective against anyone who doubted or wanted to debate them. Now, it’s calmer. As she wrote in her farewell post:

There are lots of people I disagree with, and lots of things I really care about, and even some people who seem to me to have misplaced their sanity, but the country as a whole does not seem to me to be crazy any more. Also, it has been nearly five years since I started. And so it seems to me that it’s time for me to turn back into a pumpkin and twelve white mice.

One of the things that’s sad for me, though, is that while Hilzoy was particularly fierce, patient, and logical in her approach to Big Issues In Politics, she was also attentive to things that typically draw much less attention. For example, her post on the unseriousness of Sarah Palin’s resignation pivots from smart but general things (government is serious business, a lame-duck governor can actually usually do more to affect policy than one who needs to secure re-election) to a very specific policy issue, with data to back it up:

As of 2007 (the most recent data I could find), Alaska was the fourth worst of 45 states reporting when it came to keeping kids from being abused in their foster homes — the homes they’re given to keep them safe from abuse and neglect. Alaska’s child protective services were the fifth worst in the nation at keeping kids from undergoing repeat abuse, the third worst in response time, and the sixth worst in terms of the time from an initial report of child abuse to receipt of services…

Foster care is one of those issues that liberals and conservatives ought to agree on. Kids are not responsible for being abused or neglected. They can’t just take care of themselves. And someone like Sarah Palin, who is forever talking about fighting for our children, might be expected to work at this. If she was looking for a way to spend her time other than taking junkets at taxpayer expense, it might have occurred to her to fix Alaska’s foster care system so that it really took care of Alaska’s kids.

If I had to put a label on Hilzoy’s best virtue as a blogger, it was this insistence on moral seriousness. Some of this was rooted in a basic respect for due diligence in policy decisions – see her blistering comments on the origins of the enhanced interrogation program. After all, she was a professional philosopher, who took reasoning and evidence seriously. One of my favorite posts of hers in this vein was her takedown of EO Wilson’s Atlantic Monthly article on biology and morality. She just knew her stuff cold.

But I think it was also rooted in her deep empathy for people who were abused, powerless, without recourse technical arguments as a means to solve their problems. She was also unafraid to interject her own experiences into the discussion. See her rebuttal to David Brooks’s complaint when a politician had grabbed his leg, which Brooks read as a signal that the code of dignity governing interactions had slipped away.

News flash: This has been happening to people forever, at least if you count women as people. Back when George Washington was writing out his “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation”, which Brooks cites as an example of the Dignity Code, Thomas Jefferson was hitting on Sally Hemings. A professor whose class I was enrolled in once grabbed my breasts at a party. Every woman I know has stories like this. Maybe being groped in a public setting is a novel experience for straight guys; not being a straight guy, I wouldn’t know. But if it is, that isn’t because no one ever groped anyone in a public setting before.

What can I say: nobody knows if hilzoy’s retirement will be like Jay-Z’s. I doubt it will be like Brett Favre’s, because she’s too deliberate to mess around with a decision like this. I do hope that we’ll be seeing her writing on politics and morality in some popular forum – because she is the real thing. And we need that.

After I followed Robin’s link to the photos of the Apollo 11 astronauts, I wondered, “why don’t we have ticker tape parades any more?” Of course, it’s because lower Manhattan isn’t swimming in ticker tape. We’ve got the words (a change in a stock price is still called an uptick or downtick) but the telegraph-and-paper-strip-printing machines are long gone.

On Metafilter, someone asked: “How long will it take to remove the word ‘videotape’ from the collective vocabulary?”

I caught myself yesterday asking somebody if his performance was videotaped. Of course, there is no tape involved in this process any more. Why was that the first phrase that sprang to mind even though “recorded” or “digitally recorded” are the technically accurate terms? How long does it take for language to catch up with technological obsolescence?

The short answer is that it doesn’t. Virtually nothing in language goes away, so long as it’s rooted sufficiently deep – it just restructures itself. Tape is a great example of this. The ticker tape era closed; the magnetic tape era opened. Tape itself went nowhere. Even the meaning of the noun – a thin, flat strip of material – didn’t change. The verb did; “tape” no longer meant “to shower with paper” – that would be “TP” – it means (or meant) to record or to stick. It doesn’t matter what the tape is made from, either. Tape used to just mean “ribbon,” especially a cloth ribbon used to tie clothing or parcels – but that sense is now mostly displaced by tape made of paper, cellophane, and metal.

The great thing about tape is that it shuns whatever qualifiers you want to put on it, and it’s still perfectly clear what it means. Tape is equally adhesive tape, audio tape, video tape, paper tape, surgical tape, the tape at the end of a race. And it always means both the physical strip of tape itself, its container, and its contents, as well as the act of putting the tape into use.

Are there other words that carry the same grammatical structures regardless of their contents? It’s almost like speakers intuitively assume, “well, if ‘tape’ is going to mean a ribbon AND to tie that ribbon, then it HAS to mean the sticky tape AND the act of sticking it, the magnetic tape AND the act of recording to it,” etc. We’re effortlessly swapping contexts all the time.

Claude L

Writing up the new Oxford Historical Thesaurus, Jason Kottke laments the lack of an advertised online version: “what a boon it would be for period novelists to able to press the ‘write like they did in 1856’ button.”

So, being a total dork, and already in love with the not-even-shipping OHT, I tweet:

I want a “write like they did in 1856” button!

and then:

Actually, not a “write like ANYBODY in 1856” button. I want a “write like Flaubert” button. (Quiz: what writer in 1856 would you choose?)

This is harder than it sounds. 1856 might have seen just about the greatest confluence of writers ever. Do you want to write like Flaubert, Baudelaire, or Hugo? Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? Melville or Whitman or Dickinson? The Rosettis, the Brownings, or George Eliot? In nonfiction, you could write like Darwin, Marx, Carlyle, Mill, Schopenhauer, Lincoln, or Emerson.

All that said, I’m sticking with Flaubert. That’s the year he finished and serialized Madame Bovary. (The next year, he went on trial for obscenity, and won, on the grounds that he wasn’t a pornographer, but a genius. This changed everything for modern literature.)

Gustave’s my guy. Who’s yours?

P.S.: On the Oxford University Press page for the historical thesaurus, it includes a link for an online version – it’s almost certainly going to be subscriber-only, and the link ends up with placeholder info for now. But it will happen.

Unboxing. The public documentation of possession. There’s an essay waiting to be written about what it means—about consumption, sharing, voyeurism, recognition of personhood in the face of mass production, blah blah blah—but I will not be the one to write it.

Instead, I will simply report: It is totally awesome to see people unboxing something you made!

Here’s Jon Hansen’s snap, which has the distinction of being the first one posted.

Here’s Kiyoshi Martinez—looking, as a twitter-pal pointed out, sort of like a 17th-century Dutch oil painting. The dark glimmer!

And here’s Snarkmarket favorite Howard Weaver, who displays New Liberal Arts in context. Look at all those books!

Here it is on another bookshelf—”attention economics” contributor Andrew Fitzgerald’s, in fact. Wow. Good company there.

Two different blog entries about health care ended up in my RSS reader at the same time. They argue for diametrically opposite positions based on what appear to be identical principles.

One is by Conor Friedersdorf, who’s filling in for Andrew Sullivan. It’s essentially a follow-up to his earlier post about requiring Congress to read the laws they pass, which I commented on here.

The worst thing about “comprehensive reform” efforts are that they shut the average citizen out of the legislative process by making bills so complicated that it is nearly impossible for the average citizen to properly evaluate whether on balance it is a wise or unwise measure. Who can predict all the effects of a 3,000 page bill spanning all manner of issues? Often times not even the legislature itself. Certainly not the press, which often focuses on bits of the legislation that won’t actually have the most impact, sometimes because legislators themselves are deliberately obscuring what’s actually at stake.

It’s a conservative lesson: we should make “small, piecemeal improvements to public policy, rather than the kind of sweeping efforts that flatter vanities but fail citizens.”

And here Ezra Klein presents an argument from a reader named Lensch, who compares the current reform bill being considered to the old Ptolemaic epicycles in astronomy:

We want a “uniquely American solution.” So we have weak plans, strong plans, coops, exchanges, individual coverage, community ratings, etc., etc., etc. I still haven’t seen we are going to handle the problem of people with pre-existing conditions. If we cover them, people will take out minimal insurance until they get sick and then switch. We need some more epicycles.

If Copernicus were alive today, I am sure he would say, “If you simply give everyone Medicare, you wouldn’t need all this complication, and I’ll bet it would be cheaper, too.”

The practically radical answer turns out to be intellectually conservative; it’s a back-of-the-envelope solution.

I don’t think one answer trumps or refutes the other. I think there’s another meaning of “simple” here, which both arguments ignore. The health care proposal floated in the House, is intellectually complex not only because it’s designed to please different legislators and constituencies, but because it’s designed to have a minimal impact on most people, particularly those who already have some kind of health care. If by a stroke of law, we switched everyone from private insurance to Medicare tomorrow, it would be chaos. That’s why you get epicycles – because it turns out that asking the earth to move in this case might actually make it change its orbit.

And really, the same thing could be said about the plan to make Congress read their bills out loud and then take a day to deliberate about them. It would actually introduce a great number of brand-new complications into the legislative process, not just for them, but for us, particularly if we actually cared enough to pay attention. You mean, my politicians actually want me to pay attention to what they do and weigh in on complex issues and hold them accountable? Wouldn’t it be easier just to complain that they’re all crooks who don’t represent my interests?

Conceptual writer Kenny Goldsmith introduces a new issue of Poetry devoted to probably the most divisive no-va-nt-guar-d writing in generations:

Our immersive digital environment demands new responses from writers. What does it mean to be a poet in the Internet age? These two movements, Flarf and Conceptual Writing, each formed over the past five years, are direct investigations to that end. And as different as they are, they have surprisingly come up with a set of similar solutions. Identity, for one, is up for grabs. Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else’s? And if your identity is not your own, then sincerity must be tossed out as well. Materiality, too, comes to the fore: the quantity of words seems to have more bearing on a poem than what they mean. Disposability, fluidity, and recycling: there’s a sense that these words aren’t meant for forever. Today they’re glued to a page but tomorrow they could re-emerge as a Facebook meme. Fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, these strategies propose an expanded field for twenty-first-century poetry. This new writing is not bound exclusively between pages of a book; it continually morphs from printed page to web page, from gallery space to science lab, from social spaces of poetry readings to social spaces of blogs. It is a poetics of flux, celebrating instability and uncertainty.

Read more…

I think, for folks interested in what’s happening with digital books, at this point it’s foundational to read Anthony Grafton’s 2007 New Yorker essay on book digitization. Grafton is a historian of Renaissance humanism and early print culture; he writes with a great deal of sympathy even as he criticizes a lot of the ramshackle moves that have been made in getting print books up on the web.

It’s a weird thing – I think I can say that age of digital humanism we’re in shows the same enthusiasm as the Renaissance in getting old texts into circulation and generating new information, but much less care than the early humanists in making sure that the information is complete, accurate, or discriminating. And it seems as though this is what traditionalists and futurists argue about, endlessly.

This at least, is the tension in Peter Green’s TLS review of Grafton’s new book, Worlds Made By Words, which contains an expanded version of that New Yorker essay, plus plenty of tasty goodness about Renaissance humanists like Leon Battista Alberti, or Justius Lipsius, a Flemish philologist who “offered to recite the text of Tacitus with a knife held to his throat, to be plunged in if he made a mistake.” Green’s review is titled “Google Books or Great Books,” and it offers a nice peek into what Grafton’s all about. Here’s a slice of the good:

An editor at Cambridge University Press, reputedly the world’s oldest publisher, cheerfully admitted to Grafton that, conservatively, “95 percent of all scholarly enquiries start at Google”. Which, as Grafton says, “makes sense: Google, the nerdiest of corporations, has roots in the world of books”, to the point where (if you throw in Amazon and one or two others) “the Web has become a vast and vivid online bookstore”… Today all would-be members of the Republic of Letters, all hopeful explorers of past history, have, in a literal sense, the world at their fingertips. As Grafton says, “it is more than transformative to sit in your office at a small liberal arts or community college and call up, as you already can, thousands of books in dozens of languages, the nearest material copy of which is hundreds of miles away”.

And the bad:

Scanning by optical character recognition, ironically, commits some of the same errors as those made by careless medieval scribes, including long “s” read as “f” (German scholarship sometimes appears as Wiffenschaft), and the confusion of u and n. Thus, key in the meaningless qnalitas for qualitas (a key term in medieval philosophy) and you get over 600 hits for qualitas which you would miss if you only keyed in the correct word. Much of the old German spiky Gothic black-letter material (Fraktur) comes out in “plain text” as gobbledegook.

Which Grafton synthesizes in a really lovely way, as follows:

Yes, the young scholar is told, take every advantage of the new electronic Aladdin’s cave. But – and here Grafton shows a rare moment of deeply felt emotion – these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate rather than eliminate the unique books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. For now, and for the foreseeable future, if you want to piece together the richest possible mosaic of documents and texts and images, you will have to do it in those crowded public rooms where sunlight gleams on varnished tables, as it has for more than a century, and knowledge is still embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable manuscripts and books.

Here’s a thought. One term that I think we can use to bring the digital enthusiasts and the traditional scholars – besides humanism, which I still think is a super-powerful idea – is standards. One thing web and software people are actually surprisingly good at, considering the libertarian ethos that drives a lot of the best work, is at establishing standards of mutual interoperability.

What if scholarly bodies like the Modern Languages Association, American Library Association, American Historical Association, etc., worked together with the tech guys to establish standards for digital scholarly texts in their fields? Work to verify the scans, establish the bibliographies (it would really help to know, for example, if a full-preview book in Google Books is actually from a pirated or faulty edition), and verify the results? Hashtags for scanned books!

I think that could be beautiful.