Most people who know me well know that I have two brothers, one older, and one younger. We’re all oversized, bigbrained, bighearted, redheaded guys with Irish names (Sean Patrick, Timothy Brendan, and Kevin Daniel). Sean’s a high school math teacher and football coach; Kevin is a counselor/advisor at a liberal arts college. Sean’s two years older, and Kevin’s a year and a half younger. They are honestly more like each other than I am like either of them, but since I’m in the middle, I was probably equally close to both of them. Kevin and I shared a room together until I was 16; Sean and I went to college and lived together for three years.

This is a long way to go to say that whenever I read about Rahm Emanuel and his brothers, I smile and smile and smile.

Brian Howe pens a lovely (and loving) review of Bill Callahan’s Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle:

Image via Wikipedia

Like the birds he loves so well, Callahan’s albums find him alighting momentarily on precarious perches and naming what he sees. By the time we hear the music, he seems to have flown on again. His vantage from Eagle is one of textured ambivalence; his images split and shimmer like double-exposures, immediately releasing an obvious meaning quickly followed by a subtler one that equivocates the first… Twenty years in, and Bill Callahan appears to be tearing up everything he’s believed and starting from scratch, armed with the terrifying wisdom of knowing that one knows nothing, and searching for meaning regardless. He’s resigned but heroically presses on. The void looms, but the music keeps it barely at bay.

I don’t think I’ve been this dominated by an album since Andrew Bird’s The Mysterious Production of Eggs.

Virginia Heffernan looks deep into the Twitterverse and doesn’t like everything she finds: 

The “ambient awareness” that Twitter promotes — the feeling of incessant online contact — is still intact. But the emotional force of all this contact may have changed in the context of the economic collapse. Where once it was “hypnotic” and “mesmerizing” (words often used to describe Twitter) to read about a friend’s fever or a cousin’s job complaints, today the same kind of posts, and from broader and broader audiences, seem… threatening. Encroaching. Suffocating. Twitter may now be like a jampacked, polluted city where the ambient awareness we all have of one another’s bodies might seem picturesque to sociologists (who coined “ambient awareness” to describe this sense of physical proximity) but has become stifling to those in the middle of it.

I only subscribe to a handful of Twitter feeds — about twenty, almost all people I’ve met and known for years — and I protect my updates, partly to ward off feeling this way. However, I still can’t escape whiners like me:

In the old days, Facebook updaters and Twitterers mostly posted about banal stuff, like sandwiches. But that was September. It’s spring now. Look at Twistori, a new site that sorts and organizes Twitter posts that use emotionally laden words like “wish” or “hate” or “love,” thereby building an image of the collective Twitter psyche. The vibe of Twitter seems to have changed: a surprising number of people now seem to tweet about how much they want to be free from encumbrances like Twitter.

“I wish I didn’t have obligations,” someone posted not long ago. “I wish I had somewhere to go,” wrote an other. “I wish things were different.” “I wish I grew up in the ’60s.” “I wish I didn’t feel the need to write pointless things here.” “I wish I could get out of this hellhole.”

Exactly. Obviously, people use Twitter to do different things. A professor of mine has, I think, perfected it as an art of academic self-promotion — linking not just to new posts but old articles, interviews, projects, etc. But one thing that scares me about the way that I use it is that I often find myself being brutally honest about my feelings — like I’m in therapy with Wonder Woman’s lasso wrapped around my brain. 

For every detached quip like “tcarmody thinks Proust would have been a great blogger. Joyce? Not so much,” there’s a strain of sentimentality (“tcarmody is watching my son play catch with my sister, who taught me how to play catch when I was a little boy”), self-pity (“tcarmody is recovering from surgery and apparently is pissing off everyone in his life. If you’re going to be useless, don’t be cranky too”), petty complaints (“tcarmody will not give up cream in his coffee. Will. Not.”), and full-blown existential dread: “tcarmody is trying and failing to call in friendships and favors. Help. I need help”; “tcarmody is deeply uncomfortable and entirely alone.” 

Heffernan pulls back from this conclusion and settles for a vexed explanation based on long-felt class anxieties. I think something else is at work. Maybe it isn’t a new epoch in the history of being, but it is SOMETHING. This isn’t just ordinary moaning. Is it?

Wyatt Mason on outdoor springtime reading Leaves of Grass (the 1855 edition): “Not least of the pleasures of reading outside is one of the most prosaic: the light’s really good.”

Farhad Manjoo tries to figure out why nobody’s solved the riddle of streaming movies on the internet:

When I called people in the industry this week, I found that many in the movie business understand that online distribution is the future of media. But everything in Hollywood is governed by a byzantine set of contractual relationships between many different kinds of companies

Ozymandias on the history of tabbed browsing:

Observation:

Multi-screen viewing is seemingly anticipated by Burroughs’ cut-up technique. He suggested re-arranging words and images to evade rational analysis, allowing subliminal hints of the future to leak through… An impending world of exotica, glimpsed only peripherally.

I had never heard of this before:

It is clear from these opposed lists that more has changed than the move from control of objects to flexibility of storage and access. What is being stored and accessed is no longer a fixed body of objects with fixed identities and contents. Moreover, the user seeking the information is not a subject who desires a more complete and reliable model of the world, but a protean being ready to be opened up to ever new horizons. In short, the postmodern human being is not interested in collecting but is constituted by connecting.

The chart is from an apparently unpublished lecture by computer scientist extraordinaire Terry Winograd; the commentary is by Heidegger scholar extraordinaire Hubert Dreyfus.

H/T to Snarkmarket commenter John the Heideggerian.

Some people keep tabs open in their browser for days or weeks; I keep them open in my well-loved RSS reader NetNewsWire. (NNW doubles as a browser; I almost certainly do more READING of web content there than in Firefox.)

I like it — it keeps the old stuff next to the new stuff, and puts little pictures of what I want to read or re-read. I usually use MarsEdit to blog stuff, and MarsEdit is really well integrated with NetNewsWire, so it’s a good workflow to keep things open that I want to post to Snarkmarket eventually, or to make some other use of. (MarsEdit doesn’t play nice with Movable Type 3.2 [edit – but see below], which is why I occasionally have crazy characters in my posts for smart quotes, apostrophes, em-dashes, usw.)

Anyways, like any other workflow, this one gets backed up; I can’t think of exactly what I want to say, or (more often) other stuff gets in the way. But I think it’s still good to take some time to register the things I’m thinking about, because you might want to think about them too. Here’s what’s still in my inbox.

• if:book, “design and dasein: heidegger against the birkerts argument.” E-book readers and phenomenology? Content, thy name is Carmody. Disappointingly, author Dan Piepenbring hasn’t actually read a lot of Heidegger, so the argument is a little underdeveloped (check my comment down the thread). I really want to blog about this, but I also wanted effectively to remake the whole idea from scratch, and I don’t have the time right now to do that.
• CFP for Wordless Modernism at MSA 11. Academic CFP listservs come in RSS form now! This is so, so sweet. So is the CFP here: “If, as W.J.T. Mitchell has argued, the ‘linguistic turn’ of the early twentieth century took place alongside a concomitant ‘pictorial turn,’ how does this change the way we approach modernism
  

Speaking of the social life of documents — Clay Shirky shines a light I didn’t quite expect on the roman candle that was #amazonfail:

When trying to explain one

Always good to reread Brown and Duguid’s “The Social Life of Documents“:

In this way, document forms both old (like the newspaper) and relatively new (like the television program) have underwritten a sense of community among a disparate and dispersed group of people. As newspapers recede before broadcast and on-line communication, and as the multiplication of television channels disrupts schedulers’ control over what is seen when, the strong feeling of coordinated performance provided by these documents is changing. One possible result may be that the loss of simultaneous practice will reinforce the need and desire for common objects — the wish at least to see the same thing, if not at the same time. Here the Internet is a particularly powerful medium for providing access to the same thing for people more widely dispersed than ever before. Moreover, the reach of the Internet is increasing a sense of simultaneity as ideas emerging on one side of the world can almost instantaneously be picked up through the Internet and absorbed into the local context by communities on the other.

This essay makes for a nice introduction to a handful of the brainsexy literary/social theorists and historians I like to read: Bruno Latour, Roger Chartier, Michel de Certeau. (Hmm. All French. I guess Benedict Anderson and Joanne Yates are in there, too.)

It also has one of my favorite-ever qualifiers: “Art and eternity are beyond the scope of this essay.”