Recent efforts by Tony Judt, Christopher Hitchens, Atul Gawande, following on slightly older ones by Joan Didion and Phillip Roth, make me wonder whether we’ve achieved a new breakthrough in our ability to write about death — perhaps especially protracted death, death within the context of medical treatment, in a secular context, which as Gawande reminds us, is comparatively new and certainly much more common.

I just learned that Chris Meadows, smart writer and one of the most prolific bloggers at e-book site Teleread, was (until very recently) unemployed for sixteen months:

I’ve recently taken on a new full-time job, after sixteen months of life on unemployment, and in the rush of having money again have been considering a number of possible purchases—including an iPhone 4. But some articles I’ve been reading lately have started me thinking about whether I really even need one.

This resonates with me, because I’ve been unemployed and in need of a new laptop since the end of the summer; I cut my cable off and started writing and tweeting like crazy. And it’s no secret that my last big surge in Internet writing happened when I was stuck in the hospital.

What if what’s seemed like a sudden flurry of interest in and great writing about technological devices, much of it coming from no-or-low-revenue producing sites, has been driven by the economic crisis — a torrent of talented writers, information workers, and tech enthusiasts who not only couldn’t find full-time work (freeing up their time and attention to write), but who in most cases couldn’t even afford to buy the devices they were writing about, leaving them nothing to do but sublimate that desire into distanced obsession, and fantasies of unrealized alternatives?

There’s something so moving and human about that to me. Here’s my fictitious (loosely autobiographical) internal monologue:

If only Apple would make a smaller version of the iPad, that made Facetime calls and supported ePub. I have so many good ideas, if only someone will listen to me, and give them a chance. I guess we can’t afford a sitter to go to the movies — I’ll just see what people are saying about the new Blackberry phone. I know where LOST went wrong. Just one more, and everything will be perfect.

It’s the dark side of Clay Shirky’s cognitive surplus, where technology and education haven’t just created a new pool of leisure time, but a pool of high-skill knowledge workers devastated by structural unemployment, with nothing to do but create and imagine and argue, struggling to hold on to the lives they imagined for themselves, or used to lead.

Update: Definitely check out the link Saheli posted in the comments to Richard Morgan’s “Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How to Make Vitamin Soup.” I’d read it earlier in the week and almost definitely (and unconsciously) had it in the back of my head writing this post. Also see the now-quasi-classic Tina Brown essay “The Gig Economy.” I say “quasi” only because I don’t really know if it’s widely seen as a classic, but Rex built a company based partly on the idea, so, whatever.

Finally, for kicks, read The Gervais Principle and “Lost” and the High Narrative Price of WTF, two smart pieces of pop culture criticism that also try to make sense of how this decade’s economic crisis has already been represented for us.

Freelancers, amateur tech/culture bloggers, unpaid interns, adjunct lecturers, Demand Media — it’s all a part of it. A grand mashup of “Stuff White People Like” and When Work Disappears.

This column/essay/interview with avant-short-story-writer/French-masterwork-translator Lydia Davis, written by Emily Stokes for the Financial Times, just made me smile from start to finish. I’m really looking forward to her take on Madame Bovary. (Which would be the third French novel to complete the trilogy of cultural touchstones + undeniable awesomeness? I’m thinking maybe Stendhal’s The Red and the Black.)

I met Davis briefly at an event she did at Penn just after publishing her terrific translation of Proust’s Swann’s Way. It was a joint event at the Kelly Writers House with Edith Grossman, who was just about to publish her also-excellent translation of Don Quixote. (Note – I’ve read Proust in French, but not Cervantes in Spanish, so I can’t vouch for fidelity, just joie de lire.)

I felt badly for them, because the place was virtually empty. I don’t remember if it was on an odd night or the advertising got confused, but there were maybe a dozen people in the room. I wasn’t going to miss it, because I was working up this whole theory about the relationship between Proust, Don Quixote, and slapstick comedy that ended up becoming the coda to my dissertation. (Basically, read Bergson’s On Laughter, Walter Benjamin’s long essay on Proust, watch a whole lot of Buster Keaton, then think really hard about photography, and it will all make sense.) I was taking a seminar on Proust that semester, and only my professor and I showed up (and she hadn’t known about it until I told her). It was strange.

Also, Davis (as you’ll gather from the piece) is a little quirky, introspective, more comfortable in the text than in conversation. Grossman was garrulous, which doesn’t quite actually mean what I want it to mean: aggressively but charmingly outsized, yet totally at home with herself. Davis cares about the squeak of the pepper grinder; Grossman would care about the ravioli. I am Davis, but pretend to be Grossman. Harold Bloom wrote the introduction to Grossman’s translation, and there’s a little bit of Harold Bloom in Edith Grossman. She spoke to this intimate room like Jim Harrison eats food.

After the talk, Davis and Grossman both sold their books, in hardcover, for $20 each. Now, the Quixote, if I remember correctly, normally retailed at $40, Proust at $30. Also, Swann’s Way was already out in stores; Don Quixote hadn’t actually been officially made available yet. Plus, I had exactly $20 cash in my wallet. So, being a good economic rationalist, I bought Grossman’s book, which she signed and we talked about Don Quixote. It was great. Davis, meanwhile, floated on the edge of conversation, with a glass of wine I think, barely touched, watching everything, waiting for her host at the Writers House to take her out to dinner and then to a hotel.

I got to talk with her for a little while just before, during the Q-&-A, about Proust and comedy; she was insightful, and funny, in very much a Samuel Beckett way. And it’s a Beckett take on Proust she’s got, which is pretty much my take too, which is probably why I liked her translation so much once I finally got the chance to read it, which didn’t happen until Christmas 2007. I read most of it out loud to my son, who was about four months old then. In retrospect, it’s probably why he gets such a kick out of kissing his mom and me goodnight. But jeez — I really wish I’d had more cash that night.

This is a long way around of reading the essay at hand, where Davis parts with two different stories that I think taken together manage to say everything I want to say about reading and the encounter with media. The first is from an actual short story of Davis’s, at the end of this paragraph; I’ll keep the whole series to preserve the rhythm.

As Lorin Stein – previously Davis’s editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, now editor of the Paris Review – once noted, Davis’s narrators are “precise about feeling muddled”, occasionally so precise they can seem a little “unhinged”. In one story, for instance, a speaker writes a scientific report of 27 get-well letters sent by a class of fourth graders. In another, a woman struggles to find the correct tense with which to speak about a dying man. In another – which pops into my head as we sit down to eat (there is a Davis story for most occasions) – the narrator describes how, on reading a line of poetry while eating a carrot, she finds that she has not really read the poetry – or hasn’t really “consumed it, because I was already eating the carrot. The carrot was a line too.”

The second is from an anecdote, related by Stokes:

As we walk to the car, she tells me about a recent project, based on dreams and dream-like experiences, inspired in part, she says, by French surrealist Michel Leiris, whose work she has translated. A thunderstorm is brewing outside and Davis drives me to the train station. As we draw up outside it starts to pour but Davis hops out of the car to stand under an awning for a moment so she can show me two pictures from her wallet. The first is her home – a large redbrick schoolhouse covered in ivy with large windows. The second is a photograph of two cows – standing in the snow like black cut-outs on white paper, staring flatly at the camera. Something about the picture is irresistibly funny.

She sent the photo, she tells me, to her friend Rae Armantrout, a poet, who called her afterwards. “She asked me why I had sent her a picture of two pigs strung up on a spit,” says Davis – and then turns the picture upside down.

I can see what she means; the line of horizon does resemble a wire, and the cows do look a bit like pigs. “It was just one of those confusions,” she says, shrugging.

Then she bids me farewell, and drives away.

I realized today that the entire Andrew Breitbart/Shirley Sherrod/Obama administration scandal, and arguably the entire Tea Party/conservative/media pundit civil-liberties and “reverse racism grievance industry” can be explained in this sketch about the heavy metal band Wicked Sceptor from the Mr Show with Bob and David episode “Show Me Your Weenis!”:

“Guys, you gotta see this tape. It’s a black official being TOTALLY racist in front of the NAACP!” A guy gets a tape from some random college student the Underground Young Republican Tape Railroad, dubbed so often it’s practically worthless, that doesn’t really show what it’s supposed to. But the guy — and I don’t know if this recipient is Andrew Breitbart, or if Breitbart’s the guy from the Underground Tape Railroad and cable news is the recipient — says “No shit?”, watches it anyway, and decides to cynically pass it off as what it’s claimed to be.

After all — you’ve already paid for the tape, what are you going to do, not show it to your friends? Even if it isn’t what it says it is, you can get some entertainment out of debating whether or not the tape really shows what it says it does. The elephants [get it?] aren’t really fucking, but who cares? You can have a “conversation on race,” one that’s exactly as serious and informed as the conversation college kids have sitting on a couch watching a viral video together.

Meanwhile, the guys in charge watch a little bit of the tape and freak out. Every blogger in the country is downloading this! Tour’s cancelled, career’s over.

Okay, now the metaphor shifts. Now the band, Wicked Sceptor, are actually the Bush-era conservatives who have suddenly turned around to see racism, erosion of civil liberties, economic disaster, failing wars, a man-made ecological disaster on the gulf coast, a bottomless budget deficit, and the spectre (scepter) of a totalitarian regime everywhere they look.

They’re watching two videotapes, one of the years when conservatives were in power, and all of those things were happening, and another of the lunatic, demagogue fringe that’s gradually defining the institutional and ideological center of the Republican party, engaging in all manner of incompetence, parodic levels of racism, making jokes about eating ribs and witch doctors and anchor babies and the NAACP and Obama secretly wanting black people to stay poor and stupid and they’re saying, what’s the big deal? It’s just a party tape.

Then we say to the conservatives, “guys, I’m gonna take your tape out, and I want you to do me a favor and watch this OTHER tape of the Democrats being racists and fascists and acting hateful.” Meanwhile, we’re actually taking the same tape, putting it behind our backs, and putting it in the VCR.

And when they see it, they’re horrified. Outraged. Disgusted. They can’t believe what they’re seeing.

And we scream, “That’s you!!” And they laugh and dance around and sing, “alll-rii-iight!”

Then someone tries to be reasonable. Tries to break it down and explain the complexities and the nuances of the situation, and how we’re all, all of us, implicated in the horrible history of our country, its racism and wars and intolerance and political dysfunction and neglect of the sick and the poor and its energy addictions and terrible media culture and general short-sighted willingness, even eagerness, to murder the future to pay the interest on the present.

And they say, “Racist!”

Meanwhile, Shirley Sherrod says, fuck it. I’ll go to Fire Island.

Ta-Nehisi sums it up:

It’s always a marvel to me to watch this guy [Colbert] go in on somebody. As much as I love Stewart, Colbert is act is for the ages. He is channeling all of our simmering left-wing anger and refracting it through the mask. From a black perspective, it is very familiar–but I need to re-read Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray to tell you specifically why.

A few years back, he sliced up D’Nesh Dsouza so bad, that I don’t think he knew he was bleeding until a week later. And now, here he is according Laura Ingraham all the respect that she so richly deserves. That this woman can satirize Michelle Obama for eating ribs all day, and when wonder why anyone would think she was racist is vexing. I actually regret that–the anger, I mean. Frustration with these people, so often, feels useless. And then you see it turned into something like this, and you understand that rage has its purposes.

And:

We had a few years, post-9/11. where it seemed like this sort of language disappeared–at least as it related to black people. Now we’re back to situation where the most publicized political movement of our time believes, that charges of racism have destroyed “whole cities,” that the NAACP is as bad as the Klan and is perpetrating “racial terror,” that white people should have the right to say nigger, that the amendment that granted African-Americans citizenship should be repealed, and that “white America” needs to “see black people condemning the NAACP.”

It’s worth remembering that this is the Tea Party’s reply to charges of racist elements in their ranks. It feels like something out of 1986.

See also here, here, and here.

And then you have to read the final thought.

This week, I finished reading a wonderful book – God Says No, by James Hannaham. The protagonist, Gary Gray, has this endearingly earnest, not-too-bright, surprisingly perceptive and doomed sense about him that really made me want to root for him throughout. Gary’s an overweight black guy attending a Christian college in Central Florida; he gets his girlfriend pregnant just as he realizes he has to question his sexuality. These two events catalyze a series of fairly significant catastrophes in Gary’s life, and through each one, I wanted Gary to succeed, to attain what he wanted.

Spoiler ahead. Read more…

Last week, a bunch of digital humanists got together at the Center for History and New Media to make a new tech tool that the broader academic AND nonacademic communities could use for their work. The catch: they had to conceive, design, and ship the thing in JUST one week. And as anyone who’s spent any time hanging out with university people, the pace is usually pretty glacial compared to the commercial world, even/especially for tech.

They called it “One Week | One Tool,” with a great subhead in the deck: “A Digital Humanities Barn-Raising.” You can see the sweet team that put it together here. And CHNM has a great track record with these kinds of projects: Zotero and Omeka alone are free, open-source world-class products that have made life in the research and curatorial feeds way easier.

Now about half these people working on One Week | One Tool are in my Twitter feed, and they spend a lot of time talking to each other, so as this was unfolding, I read about this event non-stop. People wrote blog posts about it. Folks (especially those of us who were on the periphery) made puns and cracked jokes. It was an ongoing communal broadcast that you could follow on the #oneweek hashtag if you wanted the full dish. It was very, very similar to the excitement around the 48HrMag (now Longshot Magazine) project when it was first announced, albeit within a slightly smaller, maybe more homogeneous community.

But, importantly, with all that information circulating, nobody said anything about what the tool actually was. There were even enigmatic teaser tweets, like “Just used the new #oneweek tool for the first time; works great!” It wasn’t LeBron-taking-his-talents-to-South-Beach suspense, but at a certain point, more and more people were waiting to find out what the heck the thing was. They even launched a video stream to make the announcement. I don’t know if they tried to get ESPN to donate some time and sell commercials for charity, but who knows?

And sure enough, it became big news. Everybody who’d been following it live-tweeted the news once they’d gotten it. (Some people even begged their Tweeple to post it, since they couldn’t watch the video broadcast.) It got written up in ReadWriteWeb, the Chronicle of Higher Educaton, and the Atlantic, among other big-for-DH venues.

And they put together a great open-source tool: Anthologize, a WordPress plugin that helps you take online content like blog posts and collect, edit, design, and format them into a book — for either digital or print. Solid software, with obvious utility for lots of people, not just academics. (Although part of me quietly wonders if the CHNM’s last big project, “Hacking the Academy,” motivated the choice, since that explicitly was an effort to turn a whole bunch of scattered blog posts — again, all written and/or curated in one week — into a book.)

Now this is the part on Snarkmarket where, usually, I would try to explain what I think all of this means — for you, for us, for media, for journalism, for education, for the children. And this time, I’m deliriously happy, because I think we’ve already done it. I can just take two posts+comment threads from the Snarkmarket archive and blockquote the hell out of them. (And as everyone knows, me and blockquotes are totally BFFs.)

Here are some highlights from Robin’s still-uber-potent “The future of media? Bet on events“:

So far we’ve got this TED/Phoot Camp media-making work­shop spear-gun. Now, bolt on deadly addi­tions from Iron Chef and the Long Now Foundation’s debates. Now we’ve got a laser sword media prod­uct that is:

* Live. It’s an event that hap­pens at a spe­cific time and place in the real world. It’s some­thing you can buy a ticket for—or fol­low on Twitter.
* Gen­er­a­tive. Some­thing new gets cre­ated. The event doesn’t have to pro­duce a series of lumi­nous photo essays; the point is sim­ply that con­trib­u­tors aren’t oper­at­ing in play­back mode. They’re think­ing on their feet, col­lab­o­rat­ing on their feet, cre­at­ing on their feet. There’s risk involved! And that’s one of the most com­pelling rea­sons to fol­low along.
* Pub­lish­able. The result of all that gen­er­a­tion ought, ide­ally, to be some­thing you can pub­lish on the web, some­thing that peo­ple can hap­pily dis­cover two weeks or two years after the event is over.
* Per­for­ma­tive. The event has an audience—either live or online, and ide­ally both. The event’s struc­ture and prod­ucts are care­fully con­sid­ered and well-crafted. I love the Bar­Camp model; this is not a BarCamp.
* Ser­ial. It doesn’t just hap­pen once, and it doesn’t just hap­pen once a year. Ide­ally it hap­pens… what? Once a month? It’s a pat­tern: you focus sharply on the event, but then the media that you pro­duce flares out onto the web to grow your audi­ence and pull them in—to focus on the next event. Focus, flare.

I wrote this in the comments:

I like posi­tion­ing the generative-web-event as being some­where between a sem­i­nar, a TV show, and a magazine.

Like a sem­i­nar, or work­shop: it’s brainy, and col­lab­o­ra­tive, aimed at cre­at­ing knowl­edge, not just recit­ing it;

Like a TV show: it’s live! It’s hap­pen­ing now! Or, rather — it was hap­pen­ing then. We’re going to show you some­thing that’s going to gain and cap­ture your attention;

Like a mag­a­zine: you’re not cap­tur­ing a ran­dom viewer, who is just try­ing to tune in to what­ever catches their atten­tion at that moment. You’re con­nect­ing with sub­scribers, and try­ing to gain and hold their atten­tion. Too much of the web, of social media, is like flick­ing through the chan­nels, with too much of the bad aspects of that and not enough of the good.

And Shamptonian asks:

Regard­less of the tools, meth­ods and processes involved, I keep wrestling with the exis­ten­tial ques­tion of “what is the ulti­mate pur­pose of this media?”

Are we gen­er­at­ing it:
1. For profit?
2. For atten­tion?
3. For edu­ca­tion?
4. For help­ing human­ity?
5. For the evo­lu­tion of civilization?

I have no answers 🙂 I think I’m just grow­ing weary of hav­ing to assign pur­pose to art, and the increas­ing belief that the forms of [artis­tic] media (poetry, lit­er­a­ture, paint­ing, pho­tog­ra­phy, video, etc.) are less mean­ing­ful, less mar­ketable, less ‘social’, if they do not have a broader intent.

Actually, that whole comment thread is one of my favorites ever: it features a goodly chunk of the all-time Snarkmatrix comment all-stars, and we talk about the awesomeness of the Snarkmarket ampersand, the non-value of farts in windowless rooms, and even spawned what’s still my favorite mass-culture media idea, “Lego Hamlet.” Read it, or read it again.

Now, Robin started out his events post thinking about events for profit, but clearly, as Anthologize proves, you can also get a lot of mileage for events that look to educate and help humanity AND — maybe most importantly — generate attention. Here’s Robin again:

A specter is haunt­ing the inter­net, and I think it’s even scarier than the chal­lenge of get­ting peo­ple to pay money. It’s the chal­lenge of get­ting them to pay atten­tion. I think it’s only going to get worse—which is to say, bet­ter, because we as inter­net users and blog read­ers and tweet slingers will have more cool, weird, inter­est­ing stuff to look at all the time, and it will just keep com­ing faster and get­ting cooler and frag­ments and—ack!

So what kinds of cultural objects historically have gotten people to pay attention? Well, I wrote about this last month:

The way our cul­ture works, depend­ing on what field you’re oper­at­ing in, cer­tain kinds of objects (or in some cases, events) gen­er­ate more cul­tural focus than oth­ers. Shirky gives an exam­ple from paint­ing: “Any­one can be a painter, but the ques­tion is then, ‘Have you ever had a show; have you ever had a solo show?’ Peo­ple are always look­ing for these high-cost sig­nals from other peo­ple that this is worth­while.” In music, maybe it used to be an album; in com­edy, it might be an hour-long album or TV spe­cial; I’m sure you can think of oth­ers in dif­fer­ent media. It’s a high-cost object that broad­casts its sig­nif­i­cance. It’s not a thing; it’s a work…

It’s no sur­prise, then, that he Big Dig­i­tal Shake-Up in the way cul­tural objects are pro­duced, con­sumed, sold, dis­sem­i­nated, re-disseminated, etc. is shift­ing our con­cepts of both author­ship and the work in many gen­res and media. What are the new sig­nif­i­cant objects in the fields that inter­est you? Pom­plam­oose makes music videos; Robin wrote a novella, but at least part of that “work” included the blog and com­mu­nity cre­ated by it; and Andrew Sul­li­van some­how man­ages to be the “author” of both the book The Con­ser­v­a­tive Soul and the blog The Daily Dish, even when it switches from Time to The Atlantic, even when some­one else is guest-writing it. And while it takes writ­ing a book to get on Fresh Air, to really get peo­ple on blogs talk­ing about your book, it helps to have a few blog posts, reviews, and inter­views about it, so there’s some­thing besides the Ama­zon page to link to.

I put forward a guess at the end of that post, which is a partial answer to that question. One new kind of media that’s starting to function as a work is a blog. Not, in most cases, a blog post — but a blog. If the New York Times decides, “hey, we’re going to start and host a blog all about parenting” — that blog becomes a Work. It produces ongoing cultural focus, and not just because it’s in the New York Times. Some posts get more attention than others, especially if they cross over into a long-form venue, but writing that blog, sticking with it, being its author, creates focus, readership, and a long accumulation of content. And I’m sure Lisa Belkin (who already wrote a book about parenting) will get another book out of it.

But the other new, emergent work, which might be more radical, is the generative web event. 48HrMag, One Week | One Tool, Robin’s novellas, and maybe even the New Liberal Arts (especially if we put together another edition) are all ancestral species of this new thing — the children of TED and Phoot Camp and Long Now and Iron Chef, and the parents of whatever’s going to come next.

David B Hart on “the metaphysical meaning of baseball“:

I know there are those who will accuse me of exaggeration when I say this, but, until baseball appeared, humans were a sad and benighted lot, lost in the labyrinth of matter, dimly and achingly aware of something incandescently beautiful and unattainable, something infinitely desirable shining up above in the empyrean of the ideas; but, throughout most of the history of the race, no culture was able to produce more than a shadowy sketch of whatever glorious mystery prompted those nameless longings.

Note that this isn’t just a sportswriter losing himself in lofty/weepy rhetoric or a satirist engaging in arch irony. Hart’s a serious writer on religion, and First Things (where this essay appears) is all about phrases like “sub specie aeternitatis.*” So they mean every word.

This essay did remind me, briefly, of Stephen Jay Gould’s confession of faith in his essay on the relationship between art and science, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria”:

I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have enormous respect for religion, and the subject has always fascinated me, beyond almost all others (with a few exceptions, like evolution, paleontology, and baseball).

Substitute mathematics and poetry for evolution and paleontology and I am right there**. In fact, for me, at least in childhood, Catholicism and baseball are inseparable, beautiful, impractical dreams.

* This is a phrase of Spinoza’s (I don’t know if he invented it, but he used it a lot) that means “from the point of view of eternity.”
** Okay, I really like film and basketball, too.

H/t: Gavin Craig

My life was insane in August 2006. I moved twice and generally tried to piece my life and relationships together after a huge falling-out with my wife’s family, where we ended up moving out of a house they owned. For most of August, I sublet a bug-infested studio apartment without air conditioning or even working windows that had the questionable virtues of being on a bus line and across from a 7-11. I remember cleaning the kitchen, which had at one point harbored rats, top-to-bottom with industrial strength oven cleaner, which filled the house with toxic fumes but ate through the layers of grime and filth that had accrued over the years. Still, I stacked chairs in front of the kitchen and never used it once in the five weeks we were there.

As a consequence, I don’t really remember what the heck was going on Snarkmarket then; but that’s what archives are for! Here are a handful of posts that caught my fancy trolling through the stacks:

• “8.5″ X AWESOME,” images of paper art by Peter Callesen that I must have missed, because I posted some of the exact same material three-and-a-half years later: “I love paper so much I should marry it.”
• “Twelve Movies.” The ten-to-twelve information streams the brain uses to reconstitute the experienced universe: “Although we have the illu­sion of receiv­ing high-resolution images from our eyes, what the optic nerve actu­ally sends to the brain is just out­lines and clues about points of inter­est in our visual field. We then essen­tially hal­lu­ci­nate the world from cor­ti­cal mem­o­ries that inter­pret a series of extremely low-resolution movies that arrive in par­al­lel chan­nels.”
• “A (Really Expensive) Room of One’s Own.” On the impossibility of writing a novel in San Francisco — written by Robin, of course. I really enjoyed his summary of Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire in the comments: “As people live longer and longer (we are talking serious life extension here — decades more than we’re used to now), the magic of compound interest associates wealth more and more strictly with age. So we shift from an all-ages plutocracy to a gerontocracy — and it sucks to be in your 20s even more than it does now.”

This last point reminds me of this Economist article on “the unemployment netroots” — basically, young, highly-skilled, politically-active folks who have the incentives and abilities to get organized in a way that the long-term unemployed (for various reasons) have never been able to do.

Highly-engaged older people have long made it a point to be politically active as members of a semi-solid bloc; maybe young people, who’ve been disproportionately hurt by the Great Recession (I wrote a half-joking post about this called “The Coming Age Wars“) could pull it off. After all, in all of human history, the greatest revolutionary force has always been the idle, disaffected young.

My favorite Bertrand Russell book is Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, not least for the perspective shift he pulls off just in the title. He elaborates on it like this (I’ll paraphrase): This isn’t philosophy of mathematics, where we’ll sit around and ask deep, open-ended, metaphysical questions about whether or not numbers really exist, or if they’re just in our heads. It’s mathematical philosophy, where we’re going to try to think about philosophy (including the philosophy of logic and mathematics) like mathematicians would, using mathematicians’ tools.

Here’s an example of how this works. There’s a famous proof of the existence of God by St Anselm, called the Ontological Argument. Let’s say God is just our idea of the most perfect thing possible. Everything that could be good, God is: he’s all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good. Well, then this most perfect thing possible would have to exist, because something that exists is better than something that doesn’t — so an idea of a God who doesn’t exist wouldn’t really be completely perfect, would it?

Kant had already said that this proof was baloney, because “existence” wasn’t a predicate like goodness or knowledge. But Russell and analytic philosophy took it one step further. In math and formal logic, existence isn’t a predicate — it’s a quantifier. Like in the sentence, “For every natural number, there is a larger natural number.” We’re not making deep existence claims here, just singling out an element in a system.

So if we can come up with a model that’s foundationally and structurally sound, and works, let’s use it. What looked like an impossible problem wasn’t a problem after all; we’d just gotten twisted up in the way we talked about it.

So philosophy of mathematics => mathematical philosophy. Change of grammar => change of perspective.

You can imagine all kinds of variations on this. For instance:

• science of politics
• politics of science
• scientific politics

This gets you three totally different approaches.

Sometimes, we get lots of ambiguity because we can’t pull this reversal off. For instance, “digital history” means both the history of digital technology (usually done using recognizably traditional historical methods) AND using digital tools to do historical research.

What else could we switch around so we could see things differently?

Images of Russia, during World War II and today:

At Geekosystem, Robert Quigley writes:

Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov is a master of a technique called, alternatively, perspective-matching photography or the fancier computational rephotography, which consists of precisely matching the points-of-view of vintage and modern photographs and exploring what happens where they merge. Since last year, Larenkov has been assembling a series of such photos on World War II…

Some Photoshop whizzes have criticized Larenkov’s work on the grounds that the mergers are too jarring in their contrasts and could be executed with greater smoothness on his part, but, in the absence of an explanation of his work, I think that’s kind of the point: It clearly takes a great deal of patience and technical aptitude to create these photos, and the harshness of imposing war and its devastation on pristine modern European cities works better when it’s not too slick.

Browsing through Larenko’s gallery, the work is pretty uneven, but in a way that’s actually revealing. Some of them just put photos of groups of people from WWII against contemporary backgrounds, or vice versa. It looks sort of like one of those kitschy sepia-tinted photos of your family dressed in old-timey clothes you might get at a theme park. Overwhelmingly, the best images, like those above, blend outdated or obliterated buildings and vehicles into the existing cityscape. It’s the materiel, not the men, who matter.

Partly, this is because vintage photos of destroyed cities are just so compelling. This is an underappreciated contribution of Matthew Brady and the other photographers of the American Civil War. They kicked off a new kind of photorealist aesthetic focusing on machines and the worlds destroyed by them. All those strange geometries and fragmented buildings then funnel into the first waves of photographic abstraction. Here are some pictures of Charleston and Fort Sumter (after the allies retook the fort, bombarding it with heavy guns):

Like me, Ta-Nehisi Coates is fascinated by the way that the Civil War is a war driven by and brought to bear on “stuff” (human beings in the form of slaves and soldiers being just the most visible, contested, and precious kind of stuff) He quotes the historian Daniel Walker Howe:

While the growing of cotton came to dominate economic life in the Lower South, the manufacture of cotton textiles was fueling the industrial revolution on both sides of the Atlantic… During the immediate postwar years of 1816 to 1820, cotton constituted 39 percent of U.S. exports; twenty years later the proportion had increased to 59 percent, and the value of the cotton sold overseas in 1836 exceed $71 million. By giving the United States its leading export staple, the workers in the cotton fields enabled the country not only to buy manufactured goods from Europe but also to pay interest on its foreign debt and continue to import more capital to invest in transportation and industry. Much of Atlantic civilization in the nineteenth century was built on the back of the enslaved field hand.

Neil deGrasse Tyson likes to point out how it’s a mathematical certainty that the air we breathe and the water we drink passed through the lungs and kidneys (respectively) of everyone who ever lived. Likewise, in these Civil War photos, both the destroyed Southern buildings (one of them a US army fort) and the Northern cannons that destroyed them result from the profits of American slavery. Americans like to think about victories in World War II without thinking about the cities and people destroyed in Russia and dozens of other countries (including Japan, Italy, and Germany) that stand behind that war — in no small part because we don’t have to live with them, to walk down those streets, to feel those ghosts. But we’re haunted all the same.