Today is my one-year anniversary of writing for Snarkmarket.

I should say — my anniversary of writing as an author, because I was the unofficial commenter-in-chief long before that. Snarkmarket was the first blog I read; it inspired me to start my own, which (being even nerdier than Matt and Robin) I bestowed with the German pun Short Schrift; and I think it also helped me to realize that the problems I’d been thinking about in philosophy and literature and politics and elsewhere revolved around problems in media — and for me, specifically, media that had something to do with writing.

It’s been really cool, to use the parlance of our times. When I describe Snarkmarket to people who’ve never read it (especially if they’ve never read a blog), I say that the three of us – a journalist, an academic, and a media producer (does anyone know exactly what to call Robin?) write about how these three fields and everything they touch (which is everything) change — with all of us writing about everything, under the assumption that one important change is the redefinition of intellectual/professional boundaries.

Now, I like the indefinite tense on “change,” because Snarkmarket has always been tense-agnostic; we all write about the past, present, and future. If I skew towards the past, Robin towards the future, and Matt towards the present — I’m not completely sure that we do, but that’s what you might predict — it all somehow becomes quite coherent.

I think the root of that coherence may be that Matt, Robin, and I are all in love with writing, in all of its forms.

I deliberately give “writing” a very broad meaning, both materially and conceptually — which is nevertheless a very literal meaning. It’s not an accident that in my entry for “photography” in the New Liberal arts, I define it even more literally as “the writing/recording of light.” It bothers me when otherwise intelligent people implicitly limit writing to either handwriting or print, the writing that fills up books or fills out our signature. It’s not true. Writing — and reading — are everywhere, in almost every medium. It’s not even worth listing them all. We’re saturated in literacy.

The assumption that usually goes along with this reductive view of writing — setting aside ritual genuflections before the ghost of Gutenberg and his machine — is that reading and writing are essentially ahistorical, almost natural, assumed parts of the educated order, at least for moderns like us, while other technologies are unnatural interruptions of this order. Or, that once key technologies are discovered/invented – e.g., script, the alphabet, the codex, or print – their history stops, and they proceed along, virtually unchanged, until the present.

I once heard Marilyn Frye, a philosophy professor at Michigan State, describe this as the point-to-point view of history. In 1865, Lincoln abolished slavery; in 1920, the 19th Amendment guaranteed women the franchise — and after each event, nothing else happened, at least to women or black people in the United States. Ditto, Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in 1439, after which, nothing else happened, writing no longer has a history.

For instance — and I don’t want to unfairly pick on something tossed off during an interview, but here we are — Brian Joseph Davis, interviewing Michael Turner for The Globe and Mail, flatly asserts that the book “is stalled out, in terms of technology, at 1500 AD, and sociologically at around 1930.” See Jason Kottke’s post, “Books have stalled,” where he quite rightly asks what these dates might mean.

On the technology side, Davis is just flatly wrong. I’d invite him to operate an incunabula letterpress — set the type, prepare the pages, swab the ink, and crank the mechanical lever page by page — and then visit a contemporary industrial press before he felt tempted to say something so silly again. (If he’s only talking about the codex form of the book, and not the means of production, then he actually needs to run back over a millennium — and even then, the size and shape and composition of books has steadily changed over those 500+ years too.)

We also don’t print on parchment anymore. Gutenberg did print a bunch of bibles in paper, but it was cloth paper — the fancy stuff we print our resumés on now — not the kind of paper we use today. Davis should read a few 19th-century histories and manuals of papermaking — they’re free on Google Books — just to realize what a technological triumph it was to create usable paper out of wood-pulp. You can’t just smash up some trees — it’s a chemical process that’s as complicated as creating and developing photographic film, a breakthrough that happened around the same time (the two are actually related.) Turning that into an industrial production that could make enough paper to print books and newspapers and everything else in the nineteenth century was another breakthrough.

This is what the industrial revolution did for us, folks. It wasn’t all child labor and car parts. It changed the way we made and consumed culture.

For the last 500 years, ours has been a culture of paper. But the East had paper for centuries before, and what we call paper completely changed a little more than a century ago. It’s convenient if you want to either attack or defend book culture to paint it as unchanged by the passage of time, but it just isn’t so.

Add in all of the cataloguing and distribution technology developed in the twentieth century, shifts in marketing, the rise of chain retail and online booksellers – the kind of stuff that Ted Striphas writes about in The Late Age of Print — and it’s clear that there wasn’t just one revolution (Gutenberg’s) that made the past and another (digital media) that’s making the present and future. We are dealing with a long, intersecting history of multiple media, each of which are heterogeneous, that is ongoing.

Anyways, that is the past, and the present. I hope you will stay with us for the future. So far, I’ve loved this show. I can’t wait to see what next.

Unintentional Simultaneous Coda (from Matthew Battles, writing about something quite different):

Of course there is intention and purpose in the system, Smail allows, but it’s personal, limited in space and time, not a case of grand, scheming ideological structure.

What’s in this for me? Well, it’s a handy and inspiring way to think about the rise of writing in general, and of specific letterforms, as memes facing selection pressures that change with dips and explosions in media, genres, and social and cultural forms. So there’s a retrospective use, helping to understand the existence of stuff like serifs and dotted i’s thrive while eths and thorns and a host of scribal abbreviations die out. And prospectively, it help enrich my sense of the future of reading and writing—mostly by reminding me that it will be decided by no business plan or venture capitalist, but by all of us getting in there, using and breaking the new tools, and making new things and experiences with them.

Absolutely. Now all we have to do is get there.

In honor of Tim Carmody and Snarkmarket, which have their 30th and 6th birthdays today, respectively, here’s a DIY music/movie mashup courtesy of two others also born on November 3rd.

First, press play on this aria by Vincenzo Bellini (b. 11/3/1801), from his opera Norma:

While you’re enjoying that, pull the volume on this second clip down to mute. (The video comes from Snow White, whose chief illustrator was Gustaf Tenggren, b. 11/3/1896.) When Norma hits the 1:18 mark, press play:

Happy birthday to Tim, Snarkmarket, and all the other producers of beautiful things born on November 3.

Jerome Groopman writes in The New Yorker about Maja Matarić and the quest to create robots that can help people through therapy. Assistive robots are nothing new; Japan’s aging population has been using this technology for years. But Groopman focuses on the social and emotional components of these advancements, and on efforts to enable robots to understand people:

Glancing at the robot, Mary lifted a magazine from the top of the pile and guided it into a rack on top of the shelf. As soon as the magazine was in place, the robot emitted a beep. During the next few minutes, Mary moved each magazine, one by one, to the rack. Gradually, she increased her pace, and the beeps from the robot came faster. Mary began to laugh.

She turned and looked squarely at the robot. With a sly smile, she moved her weak arm toward the remaining magazines on the desk and mimed putting one into the rack. She then stuck her tongue out at the machine.

Matarić said, “She is cheating. She is totally thrilled, because she thinks she cheated the robot.” The robot, though, was on to the game. A reflective white band that Mary wore on her leg allowed the robot to follow her movements. A thin motion sensor attached to her sleeve transmitted Mary’s gestures to the robot, so that it knew almost instantly whether she was raising her arm and in what motion. A sensor in the rack signalled the robot when a magazine was properly placed, and the robot communicated with Mary only when she performed the task correctly.

Although the task lasted about an hour, the novelty of the interaction did not seem to wane. In a debriefing after the study, Mary said, “When I’m at home, my husband is useless. He just says, ‘Do it.’ I much prefer the robot to my husband.”

The article takes an interesting turn when Groopman considers the ethics of this technology:

Thirty years ago, [MIT professor Sherry] Turkle began studying the impact of sophisticated technologies, including virtual-reality computer games and robots, on emotional development in children and social relationships among adults. “I am not a Luddite,” Turkle said. “But there is no upside to being socialized by a robot.” Based on her observation of groups of different ages, Turkle has found that “children and the elderly start to relate to the object as a person. They begin to love it, and nurture it, and feel they have to attend to the robot’s inner state.” With this attachment and projection of their emotions, Turkle says, people begin to seek reciprocity, wanting the robot to care for them. “We were wired through evolution to feel that when something looks us in the eye, then someone is at home in it.”

Robots, Turkle argues, risk distorting the meaning of relationships, the bonds of love, and the types of emotional accommodation required to form authentic human attachments.

In a chat about the article, Groopman ties the matter to the expanding use of remote-controlled drones in warfare.

Apocalyptic visions involving robots tend to focus on what they’ll do to us. It’s interesting that the first real anxieties about this relationship concern what we do with them. Will we become too emotionally invested? Will we become too distant from the ethical reality of taking human lives?

And I wonder, do Sherry Turkle’s concerns extend to things like pets and the Sims?

David Leonhardt writing in the NYT:

If you wanted to help the economy and you had $14 billion to bestow on any group of people, which group would you choose:

a) Teenagers and young adults, who have an 18 percent unemployment rate.

b) All the middle-age long-term jobless who, for various reasons, are not eligible for unemployment benefits.

c) The taxpayers of the future (by using the $14 billion to pay down the deficit).

d) The group that has survived the Great Recession probably better than any other, with stronger income growth, fewer job cuts and little loss of health insurance.

The Obama administration has chosen option d — people in their 60s and beyond.

Oy. So, to prove that 1) nobody wants to hack Medicare to the bone or 2) institute death panels, or that 3) Obama isn’t a double-secret Muslim, we’ve gotta sweeten the deal for seniors by putting a $250 cherry on top?

This rankles folks because seniors collecting Social Security actually got a huge cost-of-living increase this past year (5.8%) — even the flat benefit increase this year will actually amount to a net increase due to deflation of the dollar.

U of M economist Joel Slemrod has the money quote: “If the long-term issue is entitlement reform, the fact that the political system cannot say no to $250 checks to elderly people is a bad sign.”

Also, look at that number on top — 18% unemployment for teens and young adults! Eight-Teen Percent — and that doesn’t include people living at home, recent grads seeking shelter in grad schools or in volunteer positions. Almost one out of five young people – cheap, easily insurable young people – can’t find work! It’s like everyone under 30 is living in a super-Michigan. Add our catastrophic student loan and consumer debt, and our parents’ suddenly uncertain economic futures, and we’re also living in an ultra-California.

And still no health care yet! No universal pre-K. No increase in benefits or reduction of troop levels for military families. No end to don’t ask, don’t tell. Even though we voted for Obama!

Speaking of Michigan and California, check out this article about the rising costs and declining quality of public universities (even the flagships):

In this particularly hard year, in which university endowments have been hammered along with state coffers, federal stimulus money has helped most avoid worst-case scenarios. The 10-campus University of California system, for example, has received $716 million in stimulus funds to offset its $1 billion gap. But that money is a temporary fix. A quip circulating among college presidents: The stimulus isn’t a bridge; it’s a short pier.

This fall, flagships still had to cut costs and raise tuition, most by 6.5 percent or more. And virtually all of the nation’s top public universities are likely to push through large increases in coming years.

“The students are at a point of rebellion, because they’re paying more and getting less,” says Jane V. Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability…

I wrote a speculative essay for the Chronicle a few months back speculating about the collapse (and partial privatization) of the University of California system and the University of Michigan sometime between now and 2029. I didn’t realize just how close I was:

The transformation of the University of Michigan’s finances began with Harold T. Shapiro. In the mid-1970s, Mr. Shapiro, then a professor of economics and public policy at the university, studied Michigan’s economy and predicted that the state would lose tax income compared with the rest of the country in coming decades. He was right.

While the state trimmed a third of its support for the university in the 1980s, Mr. Shapiro, as the university’s president, worked to build a more secure budget base. Michigan increased private fund-raising and developed a tuition structure that took advantage of a growing number of out-of-state students, who now pay $36,163 a year in tuition and fees — about the same as Princeton…

Still, Mr. Duderstadt says, the university fulfills its public mandate by helping to drive the state’s economy and continuing to educate Michigan’s top students. While lawmakers still grumble about the large number of students from other states, the university, he says, didn’t have alternatives. Earlier this year, state lawmakers studied the idea of taking privatization to the next level, by eliminating annual state funding. The university remains public, for now.

So how could the Obama administration stimulate the economy by helping out younger people, who are actually deeply suffering, rather than by transferring it from the young (including the unborn) to the old?

• Student-loan forgiveness and rate reductions
• Checks for parents of young children
• Making all college tuition paid tax-deductible
• Weighting tuition as a credit rather than a straight deduction, making it a better benefit for low-income workers and young people paying/borrowing their own way
• (ahem) passing health care reform, creating a solid public health care option, and letting us into the health-care exchanges, so we can take our health care from state to state and job to job while we look for career work

I’m sure people who are better public-policy heads than I am can come up with better ideas.

While we’re on the topic of California, public policy, and robbing the future to pay off folks in the present who don’t deserve it, I’d be remiss if I didn’t link to this dynamite LATimes essay by Rebecca Solniton how California squanders its inherent material and economic abundance:

My friend Derek Hitchcock, a biologist working to restore the Yuba River, likes to say that California is still a place of abundance. He recently showed me a Pacific Institute report and other documents to bolster his point. They show that about 80% of the state’s water goes to agriculture, not to people, and half of that goes to four crops — cotton, rice, alfalfa and pasturage (irrigated grazing land) — that produce less than 1% of the state’s wealth. Forty percent of the state’s water. Less than 1% of its income. Meanwhile, we Californians are told the drought means that ordinary households should cut back — and probably most should — but the lion’s share of water never went to us in the first place, and we should know it…

Examine the way that we changed corporate income tax policy in the crisis years of 2008-2009 to give a small number of corporations tens of millions of dollars a year in tax breaks — $33.1 million apiece, on average, for nine corporations; $23.5 million to six others, according to the California Budget Project. There’s money there, ripe for the picking, and powerful forces to prevent that from ever happening — or maybe weak forces, because it’s our Republican legislative minority that prevents us from ever achieving the supermajority to raise taxes (and our weak Democratic majority that goes along with crazy tax cuts amid a crisis).

Turning California into a Third World nation where the environment is neglected, a lot of people are genuinely desperate and a lot of the young have a hard time getting an education or just can’t get one doesn’t benefit anyone.

Hear, hear. In fact, this seems like one of those situations where we could use some change we can believe in.

(Although, you should note: today is the last day that I can be a sincere advocate for folks under 30. After tomorrow, screw you guys.)

(h/t Alexis Madrigal)

Umm…. yeah, I just wrote this.

Tuesday is my 30th birthday. I’d like to buy a Nook e-reader. I’d been setting money aside for it — okay, I’d been setting it aside for a Kindle — but I’ve recently been in a bad accident that’s forced me to take the semester off of work. So, I’ve asked family and friends if they’d be willing to pitch in to collectively buy the Nook as a birthday present. I figure if we can get 13 friends to pitch in 20 dollars each, we’re home. My buddy Kelly Bennett suggested setting up a Paypal donation button for this purpose, so that’s exactly what I did.

I don’t have a slick video pitch like Robin’s for his book, nor do I have anything to offer you — except more blog posts about reading machines. Really, since I wrote this and this, B&N should just send me an offical review copy. However, it seems to be an iron law that nobody sends you anything for free until you are at least thirty years old. So I shall call on friends instead.

NB: This is here purely for folks who wanted to find a way to participate in my birthday present, but didn’t have a better way. Most readers of this blog have never met me, nor do they have any business buying me a birthday present. But, I figure – what the heck. Anything is worth a shot.

Told in a series of tweets (and two long blockquotes, with my emphases):

• @eoinpurcell: Most people will have read this piece by Tim O’Reilly on Safari but if you haven’t yet, you should. http://bit.ly/4wIa4e
  about 3 hours ago from bit.ly

Safari Books Online is an online book and video subscription service, launched in partnership with the Pearson Technology Group in 2001. It contains more than 10,000 technical and business books and videos from more than 40 publishers. It has more than 15 million users (including the number of concurrent seats available through libraries and universities); it is now the second largest reseller of O’Reilly books, exceeded only by Amazon.com, and its revenue dwarfs our sales of downloadable ebooks. It’s also the most affordable of our ebook offerings for those who are regular consumers of technical content. The average Safari Books Online subscriber uses at least seven books a month, and many use dozens (or even more), yet the monthly price (depending on the subscription plan) ranges from little more than the price of a single downloadable ebook to no greater than that of two or three.

Here’s the rub: most people thinking about ebooks are focused on creating an electronic recreation of print books, complete with downloadable files and devices that look and feel like books. This is a bit like pointing a camera at a stage play and concluding that was the essence of filmmaking!

At O’Reilly, we’ve tried to focus not on the form of the book but on the job that it does for our customers. It teaches, it informs, it entertains. How might electronic publishing help us to advance those aims? How might we create a more effective tool that would help our customers get their job done?

It was by asking ourselves those questions that we realized the advantages of an online library available by subscription. One of the best things about online technical books is the ability to search the full text of a book. How much better would it be to be able to search across thousands of books? Safari Books Online was our answer.

• @tcarmody: Good essay by Tim O’Reilly on Safari, e-publishing, subscriptions, etc. http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/safari-books-online-60-a-cloud.html via @eoinpurcell
  about 3 hours ago from Tweetie
• @tcarmody: That O’Reilly essay makes me think about other spheres where a subscription model for ebooks would be best. University presses, for example.
  about 2 hours ago from Tweetie
• @tcarmody: Uni presses already sell subscription access to journals for institutions and individuals. And some are already experimenting with books.
  about 2 hours ago from Tweetie
• @tcarmody: Subscriptions don’t work with new creative writing and popular nonfiction. Essentially: everything that’s doing WELL on the Kindle.
  about 2 hours ago from Tweetie
• @tcarmody: It might work well for backlist titles. I’d subscribe to Penguin Classics, or Oxford, etc.
  about 2 hours ago from Tweetie
• @tcarmody: I also think subscriptions won’t be optimal for “e-books 2.0,” the multimedia objects specifically created for digital reading.
  about 2 hours ago from Tweetie
• @tcarmody: Those books will be like illuminated manuscripts: highly individualized, rich aesthetic objects, more like apps than ebooks today.
  about 2 hours ago from Tweetie
• @tcarmody: There will still be serialized objects that fill that space, especially comics and magazines, but books won’t fit subscriptions right away.
  about 2 hours ago from Tweetie
• @tcarmody: More likely than subscriptions will be multivolume sets: the complete Shakespeare, or Harry Potter, or reference sets.
  about 2 hours ago from Tweetie

I banged this out on my iPhone this morning. But there’s one thing I wanted to comment on but didn’t. Here’s O’Reilly again:

What Job Do Your Books Do?

In order to understand how to succeed with ebooks, it helps to ask the right questions. As I mentioned earlier, the first question is this: what job does a book do? This is not the same for all publishers. If you publish bird identification guides, WhatBird.com shows how much more easily you can do your job online, and how you can do it even better on an iPhone. If you publish maps and atlases, Google Maps clearly does the same job, and does it better, than a print book.

Most publishers exploring the ebook market think of so called ludic reading, that feeling of getting lost in a good book. Jeff Bezos explicitly called this out as one of the goals of the Kindle.

“The key feature of a book is that it disappears.”

But this isn’t the only reason we read. Years ago, I heard Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christenson explain how different products do different jobs for different customers at different times. He gave an example of a Harvard study done of McDonalds’ milkshakes. Peak sales in the morning were to solitary commuters, whiling away a long commute. Peak sales in the afternoon were to soccer moms hurrying up a pack of kids who’d gotten a visit to McDonalds for a treat after practice. Two different jobs, perhaps two different products: In the morning, thick and slow is good; in the afternoon, a bit quicker to drink might make mom a bit happier.

I’ve applied this kind of thinking to our publishing strategy, both in print and online. Our books are used to learn about new technology, to search for task-relevant information, and to a much lesser extent, for entertainment As a result, you’ll see a clear bifurcation in our publishing program between books that are primarily used for reference, like the Cookbook series, versus those that are used for learning, like the Head First series, or those that are read for fun, like Make: magazine. And in online publishing, we built Safari Books Online for reference and just-in-time learning, and the O’Reilly School of Technology for structured online learning with live instructors.

This is hugely important, and totally sympathetic to everything that we’ve been writing about here for as long as I can remember, plus what Jason wrote recently, and too many other folks to count.

• We read more than just books;
• The book is more than just text;
• Books are read and used in a wide variety of contexts for an even wider variety of reasons;
• Just as books are produced and sold in a wide variety of sizes and formats and materials in many different kinds of stores according to many different sales models, we should not be surprised that e-books require a similar variety;
• The broader world of reading material in print presents even more variety, but books alone are deeply heterogeneous;
• In other words, books are more than just books!

We think that we know, that everyone agrees, what we mean when we think of a book, a reader, reading, a bookstore. But we don’t. Otherwise Jeff Bezos could never say, “The key feature of a book is that it disappears” – as if it were an intrinsic function of the technology, as if it could be solved through technological means alone.

Absorption/immersion in reading is only a key feature of a certain kind of book in a certain setting under very specific conditions of success or failure. This is an outcome you may want when you’re reading on a plane, at the beach, or maybe sleeping at night. And these are the primal scenes that the Kindle peddles as fantasies.

Other kinds of books do not and should not disappear. Their beauty, their shape, their resistance — in short, their physicality — matter. I’m thinking above all of children’s books, art books, magazines, comics, illustrated manuals, and yes, old-fashioned de luxe books, whether fine print or manuscript. You might get absorbed in the content of these books, in your experience of their content — but that is not because the book itself disappears. In fact, exactly the opposite.

Now, if you’re trying to sell digital books to avid readers of print books, you may have good reason to avoid playing up physicality. But we ought not, for that reason, ignore the fact that digital reading is a physical experience — visual, tactile, and increasingly, auditory. (True purists can tape a piece of paper on the back of their iPods for smelling and licking.) We can’t wish the physical away, even if we wanted to.

Now, O’Reilly quite rightly emphasizes the functional aspect of electronic books. But, precisely because of the business he’s in, he doesn’t emphasize the aesthetic aspects of such books. We’ve got to get over these oppositions — that only print books have a physical, formal aesthetics, that the text is nevertheless entirely separable from that, and that technology can only at best interfere with the text. We don’t think that about our computers, televisions, video game systems, or phones (at least anymore) — why would we think it about our reading machines?

I mean, if you really think that current e-books are “like pointing a camera at a stage play and concluding that was the essence of filmmaking,” then you’ve got to be at least a little concerned about the next aesthetic leap forward. (Creating a searchable online database isn’t exactly the equivalent of “the essence of filmmaking” either.)

This is why I’m so excited for the next-gen integrated media books, and the devices we’ll use to read them. I think we’re about to blow this whole thing wide open.

P.S.: The following is a self-disclosure to my good Snarkfriends; if interested, please see here.

Phillip Greenspun argues that technology is reducing the value of older people’s wisdom.

Let’s start by considering factual knowledge. An old person will know more than a young person, but can any person, young or old, know as much as Google and Wikipedia? Why would a young person ask an elder the answer to a fact question that can be solved authoritatively in 10 seconds with a Web search?

How about skills? Want help orienting a rooftop television aerial? Changing the vacuum tubes in your TV? Dialing up AOL? Using MS-DOS? Changing the ribbon on an IBM Selectric (height of 1961 technology)? Tuning up a car that lacks electronic engine controls? Doing your taxes without considering the Alternative Minimum Tax and the tens of thousands of pages of rules that have been added since our senior citizen was starting his career? Didn’t think so.

The same technological progress that enables our society to keep an ever-larger percentage of old folks’ bodies going has simultaneously reduced the value of the minds within those bodies.

Well, fine; if you previously treated your grandparents like the contents of the vintage encyclopedias on their shelves, then you’ve got some new options. But get this: you always could have just read those encyclopedias, too.

Probably no invention diminished the knowledge-retention-value of older people so much as writing. At the same time, writing provided a way for that knowledge to survive death, to reach not only children and grandchildren but great-great-grandchildren and strangers and people in far away places. Likewise, if older folks’ wisdom can be transferred to the internet, then it will actually add value to both their wisdom and the internet. Oh, wait — it already has!

More to the point, Greenspun’s human-hard-drive concept of valuable knowledge is pretty ossified. When I see my grandmother, I don’t ask her about the names of plants or when the best time is to plant certain flowers, even though I know that she (and not I) know this stuff cold. I don’t even (at least always) ask her to sew my split pants seat or loose jacket button, even though she’s the one in the family who’s got the sewing machine and knows how to use it.

Instead, I talk to her about the time when she picked me up from school, and took me to Taco Bell, and the hot meat melted the cheese on the tacos, something I had never seen before, and that we both marveled at. Or I ask her about the book she’s reading, what she thinks of it, her opinions about the characters and the writing. Or I ask her about things that happened before my lifetime, about the Depression, or how she felt when she and my grandfather moved into their house in Detroit — I have the picture of her, nineteen years old with the nineteen-inch waist, doing a cartwheel on the front lawn, but it’s not enough. I listen to her describe how the city was then, and sometimes wince at the sharpness she expresses in her distaste for the city now. She tells me about how difficult it is for her to read now, how she wishes she’d kept taking the shots in her eyes for her glaucoma and macular degeneration. She tells me about my grandfather, who has been gone for fifteen years, whom I knew not nearly as well.

Not all kinds of knowledge are generated at random, of equal factual value to everybody. Sometimes they’re embodied in experience, and specifically relevant only to the people who share them. As Zora Neale Hurston has Janie say in Their Eyes Were Watching God, “you’ve got to go there to know there.”

(Greenspun’s post via Lone Gunman.)

Today is Ezra Pound’s birthday. Born in Hailey, Idaho, raised in Wyncote, PA, son of an assayer at the Philadelphia Mint, Pound became, in turn: a fledgling scholar of Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and Provencal poetry — trying to gather a tradition of verse in the Middle Ages that he believed had eluded both medieval scholars and especially modern poets; then, after he was dismissed from his teaching post at a college in Indiana for the impropriety of having an unmarried woman sleep in his room, a wild-haired, sombrero-clad poet and critic who deliberately set out to shock the genteel chamber-room audiences who would come to hear he and W.B. Yeats declaim their verse; then, a champion of modern writing, shepherding T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, H.D., William Carlos Williams, T.E. Hulme, Robert McAlmon, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Frost, George Oppen, Richard Aldington, and dozens if not hundreds of experimental writers into print; then, a pacifist in opposition to the First World War, who watched his friends, including the impossibly talented sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska (who sculpted Pound’s head, and to whom Pound dedicated a book, titled Gaudier-Brzeska), die.

Pound’s great poem about his young adult life, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’s “Ode Pour L’election De Son Sepulchre,” also happens to be, I think, THE great poem about World War I. Bear with me, because I’m going to quote sections IV and V in full:

IV
These fought in any case,
And some believing,
pro domo, in any case…

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later…
some in fear, learning love of slaughter;

Died some, pro patria,
non “dulce” not “et decor”…
walked eye-deep in hell
believing old men’s lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;
usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.

V
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

Gaudier-Brzeska had died, along with so many, and Joyce had nearly starved, for a culture that Pound felt no longer deserved them.

Unfortunately, Pound’s growing obsession with “usury age-old and age-thick / and liars in public places” would eventually consume him. He moved to France, writing letters to The Dial about the new experimental writing there, along with photography, architecture, and filmmaking, and eventually to Italy. He wrote extended essays and even a book-length tract on economics, how banks and munitions sellers and the liars who ran newspapers conspired against both the general public and men of real intelligence.

This is why EP is perfect for Matthew Battles and co. at Hilobrow; I can’t think of anyone who was a greater cultural elitist than Pound who simultaneously championed both popular culture (some of his essays on film, especially, are revelatory) and especially the simple lives of ordinary people over and against the economic and political elites who sought to hoodwink and exploit them. Pound’s poetry is rife with this tension. He could almost be called anti-high, anti-low, and anti-middlebrow. I actually think Pound was so influential that this remains today the stance of most poet-intellectuals, especially those who think of themselves as avant-garde.

By the twenties, Pound was already in the middle of producing his long elder poem, The Cantos. Early on, The Cantos sought to serve a function similar to that of Eliot’s “The Waste Land” or Joyce’s Ulysses, reconciling modern life and the new, direct, fragmented writing with classical learning and traditions. Pound in particular was trying to resurrect the epic, but as if Milton had never existed, taking his cues directly from Dante. The poem that would eventually become Canto I (in early drafts, it bats third) is an English translation of part of Andreas Divus’s Latin version of Homer’s Odyssey, transformed into Anglo-Saxon alliterative incantations and trochaic rhythms:

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, so winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.

So far, we’re pretty close to the text, reanimating something of the spirit of Homer (which Pound felt Divus understood, but had been lost in previous English translations). The end, though, breaks the fourth wall:

Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus,
In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer.
And he sailed, by Sirens and thence outward and away
And unto Circe.
Venerandam,
In the Creatan’s phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite,
Cypri munimenta sortita est, mirthful, orichalchi, with golden
Girdles and breast bands, thou with dark eyelids
Bearing the golden bough of Argicida. So that:

In rapid succession, we get a bibliographic aside, a return to translation, untranslated Latin texts, a final evocative image, and a transition that terminates in medias res. The poet who could write perfect pastiches of a dozen polished literary forms decides instead to snap them off and show you their jagged edges.

This is the way Pound tried to rediscover the epic, the form that he characterized as “a poem including history.” Pound wanted to literally include history — facts and people and places, and above all WRITING. He dug through archive stacks in Italy to find original material on Sigismondo Malatesta, a relatively unknown 16th-century Italian nobleman/general who briefly became the hero of Pound’s poem, and incorporated them wholesale into his verse. He did the same with letters between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, materials that he thought showed the corruption of the American democratic project (through the secret machinations of usurious bankers and politicians, naturally) while it was still in its infancy. For an alternative to the “old bitch gone in the teeth,” he looked to Asia, above all to Confucius and Japanese poetry and drama. Wealthy nobleman with an austere, humanist philosophy, a solid record of artistic patronage, and a flair for theatricality — for Pound, these were the perfect models.

In the 1930s, Pound’s paranoid method reached its summit. His politics were always contrary, and radical. After a brief flirtation with Lenin — which came to an end partly because of Stalin’s repression of poets and partly because EP felt that all Marxists fundamentally misunderstood the nature of money — Pound became a firm supporter of Mussolini and Italian fascism. Mussolini had his faults — but western democracy was a sham (WWI had proved that) and Mussolini liked and supported artists. Short of actually recreating the Italian renaissance or feudal China, Pound would take what he could get.

Pound’s fascism was simultaneously world-historical and deeply local. When he first came to Italy in the twenties, his innkeeper, who was a member of the Fascist party, intervened with the local bureaucrats who had denied Pound access to the Malatesta archives. These were men of action, who knew how to cut through red tape! Particularly for someone as obviously worthy as Pound himself! He met Mussolini and read some of his poetry aloud, in his famous faux-bardic sing-speech style (which was itself a pastiche of Yeats). “Very entertaining,” said Il Duce; Pound convinced himself that this was exactly the appropriate response.

As World War II approached, the Pounds grew nervous. They were classified as resident enemy aliens by the Italian government .Pound even sought asylum in the US or UK, but there was a problem. Pound’s wife, Dorothy Shakespear, was a British citizen, while he was not; what’s more, his lover and longtime companion, the violinist Olga Rudge, would not have been allowed to travel with the Pounds, nor would Pound’s and Rudge’s daughter Mary. (Dorothy had a son, Omar Pound, who was almost certainly not Ezra’s biological son, but that’s another story.) Nor would either country let Dorothy, Olga, or Mary travel without Ezra. Once again, bureaucracy had foiled him.

Pound then did something extraordinarily stupid. Instead of privately grumbling about the stupidity of his government, he took advantage of an invitation to broadcast his views on the radio. For the Italians, there was a clear propaganda value in having a prominent American writer denouncing the American invasion. For Pound, there was the illusion that he was taking real political action, and an audience in front of which he could perform. The broadcasts are a mess; Pound’s brain was always faster than his linguistic skills, and his Italian would slip, juxtaposed with long passages in English where he would perform in different dialects, as different characters — as if he were Orson Welles doing voices for a radio show. He would read poetry and rant about money and bankers and, increasingly, Jews. After the Americans had successfully invaded and captured Italy, Pound buried copies of his books in a neighbor’s yard. Then the American army arrested him for treason.

Pound was kept in a makeshift cell — really, a cage — along with various military prisoners, in Pisa, Italy. Some of them were captured officers in the Italian army, while others were American soldiers, mostly deserters. Pound, as an American traitor who had been collaborating with the Italian government, split the difference between the two. He was only able to keep with him a few possessions — a Chinese dictionary, and some notes he had been preparing for new Cantos.

But first, he had a different project. He felt his sanity slipping away. He had to understand what had happened to him — what had happened to everyone caught in the hairpin failure of European politics and culture. And he was legitimately afraid that at any time, he could be tried, convicted, and summarily hanged. He wanted to write down everything he knew, anything he could remember. Somehow he secured a pen; the first drafts of what would become The Pisan Cantos were written on toilet paper.

As he’d slipped into paranoia and prejudice, the Cantos themselves increasingly appeared to be a failed project. The Pisan Cantos redeems it. Instead of a failed epic about heroism, it becomes a heroic epic of failure — in particular, Pound’s failure. Freed from his archived arguments over the First Bank of the United States, Pound is able to reach deeper, into the archives of his memory, uncovering the piths and gists of Greek myths, Confucius, Ovid, and Dante — but also his physical memories of villages he had seen, women he had loved, stories Eliot told, songs Joyce would sing, jokes William Carlos Williams told him while they were still in college together at Penn. It’s a multi-vocal piece, almost a canon, where multiple threads overlap and intersect. Sometimes the strands are cued by simple graphic clues, indentation or stanza breaks, but more often left for the reader to disentangle (my quotes below lose some of this typographic subtlety — silly HTML). You read, and watch a man who is simultaneously at the height of his writerly virtuosity, and physically and mentally falling apart — and registering that he is doing so.

The most heartbreaking is Canto LXXXI. This is its conclusion.

What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity,
Paquin pull down!
The green casque has outdone your elegance.

“Master thyself, then others shall thee beare”
Pull down thy vanity
Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,
A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,
Half black half white
Nor knowst’ou wing from tail
Pull down thy vanity
How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.

But to have done instead of not doing
This is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
this is not vanity.
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered . . .

In order to avoid hanging or prison, Pound was committed to the St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in New Jersey. There he was visited by writers, both old friends and young aspirants. Despite the end to which he seemed to come, Pound’s relentless experimentation, his championing of other writers, and above all his writings made him a hero and model to poets of the younger generation. To one of these, a young Allen Ginsberg, Pound confessed: “My worst mistake was that stupid suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.” He’d largely exasperated and embarassed his modernist contemporaries, who were willing to speak for his freedom but otherwise wanted little to do with him. For other poets, less young or radical, especially those who were politically moderate to liberal but conservative in their writing, Pound confirmed both the political dangers and inherent aesthetic insanity of modernist writing. The Pisan Cantos, on publication, would win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1948 — a scandal, even for such an undeniable book. It was the last great literary work of Anglo-American high modernism; within a year, a Poundian poet named Charles Olson would begin using the word “postmodern” to name what was on its way, in poetry, the arts, and the broader culture.

Pound himself lived until November 1, 1972 — just two days after his 87th birthday. For long stretches, he would not speak, only write. He even returned to Italy, to live with his daughter Mary, who had married Prince Boris de Rachewiltz. Mary’s mother Olga Rudge, the love of Pound’s life, lived with them, too, caring for Ezra and working as his secretary. She died in 1996, 100 years old. Mary, still living, helped secure Pound’s papers, which are now at the Beinecke Library at Yale University; she remains very much the keeper of the Pound legacy. Which is enormous — there’s a reason why former dean of modernist scholars Hugh Kenner titled his best book The Pound Era.

Happy birthday, Ezra. For all of your faults, which were real and deep, you gathered a live tradition from the air, and returned it to us. And that is not vanity.

Noted layabout Jason Kottke writes about one of the unexpected virtues of the iPhone; it’s easy to use with one hand.

People carry things. Coffee, shopping bags, books, bags, babies, small dogs, hot dogs, water bottles, coats, etc. It’s nice to be able to not put all that crap down just to quickly Google for the closest public restroom (aka Starbucks)…

My wife spends about five hours a day breastfeeding our daughter and has only one hand available for non-feeding activities. That hand is frequently occupied by her iPhone; it helps her keep abreast (hey’o!) of current events, stay connected with pals through Twitter & email, track feeding/sleeping/diaper changing times, keep notes (she plans meals and grocery “shops” at 3am), and alert her layabout husband via SMS to come and get the damned baby already.

I think it’s fairly easy to dial and answer any cell phone with one hand. It’s the fact that you can almost perfectly use smartphone functions with a single hand that set the iPhone apart. I used to have a Blackberry Bold — it bit the dust around the same time my arm did — and while I really liked a lot of things about the hardware, you really couldn’t use it well with one hand. In particular, the virtues of fast thumb-typing on a mechanical QWERTY keyboard seem a lot smaller when that particular grip is impossible for you to pull off.

Now I’ve got an iPhone, and the ability to use the thing one-handed is one of several features that makes it the perfect phone for me. (Let me also say, after my venture into Blackberry land — if you primarily use a Mac, it’s silly to have another smartphone. If you’re on Windows, do what you feel.)

Jason mentions my recently broken arm in his post, along with a tweet I wrote: “They should have an ad — ‘If you’ve got a broken arm, this is the perfect phone for you!'” Jason also points out that many folks have disabilities more permanent than mine which make it hard for them to use both arms/hands; this observation really touches me, since I have a relative with a congenital upper limb difference whose left hand is prosthetic. Also, several of my good friends from rehab have had spinal injuries that greatly limit the full use of their limbs.

Generally, I would say that while I was actually pretty conscious of accessibility issues before my injury, I have a completely different understanding of it now, as I’m navigating the world in a wheelchair, trying to both capture and manage the attention of random passers-by, totally aware of just how much function I have, and that (unlike my friends) I’ll be hanging up the wheelchair in just a few weeks. (Rehabbing the arm will take a while longer.) Your cheerfulness about the situation varies almost directly with your autonomy — and the iPhone is GREAT at making you feel autonomous. Innovation in interface design isn’t just about creating a cooler experience. It’s about giving more and more people a shot at that experience to begin with.

Last week, Ta-Nehisi Coates posted a video of R&B singer Jerry Butler, who was also called “The Iceman.” “He is, bar none, my favorite singer ever,” TNC wrote. And: “My Moms loved Jerry Butler. Hearing him softly murder this classic [“Your Precious Love”] reminds me of sitting in the passenger seat of her silver Volkswagen Rabbit.”

I don’t have any comparable childhood associations with TNC’s writing. But gosh — there are few people writing today who can just absolutely gut you the way he can. I think “Iceman” should be Ta-Nehisi’s new nickname.

See it:

Incredible journalism is like incredible baby-making–it starts with passion. The guy combing through the city budgets because it’s his job, isn’t the same as the guy combing through them because it keeps him up at night, because he thinks about it when he shouldn’t be. Institutions support that passion–but they don’t create it. When my old Howard buddy was killed by the cops, it was all I could think about, and it was all I wanted to write about. And I did it almost for free, because it helped me sleep at night. I was burning to get it down. I deeply suspect that the bloggers you love, and the reporters you love, are similarly on fire inside.

I don’t have a strict allegiance to “journalism,” as much as I have one to the written word. Perhaps there’s no difference. But my point is that to the extent blogging makes it possible for more people who are “on fire” to employ the written word, than it’s good for the written word. It’s true that it creates a situation in which anyone, for $15 a month, can say their piece. But I have more faith in the market of ideas, than in a brain-trust of editors, to separate the wheat from the chafe.

Moreover, while there are an incredible number of bloggers out there, with no institutional support, who suck. There are a truly shocking number of writers, who have all the institutional support in the world, and not only suck, but bring nothing save cynicism, incuriousity, and cold poisoned hearts. And the institutions enable them. To the extent that blogging exposes these frauds, I am all in.