Wordwright

The old and the new

2011-08-26T10:06:00.003-04:00

Greetings. If you're visiting here for the first time, please feel free to look around. I have nearly 8 (!) years of blogging archived here, but as of August 2011, I'm no longer updating this site.

You can find my current personal blog at gavinjcraig.com (which includes links to my other writing), and I also write frequently for The Idler.

Or, of course, I'm on Twitter at @craiggav

If you need a good place to get started, check out my "Best of Wordwright" post from July 2010, or my list of publications at gavinjcraig.com.

Happy reading!

Z is for zed

2011-04-30T19:21:00.002-04:00

The name is the thing.

Thou whoreson zed! Thou unnecessary letter!

It is an unnecessary letter, that anomalous hard consonant end. Like Ned and Ted for Edward—superfluous, silly. No wonder Z was on its way out. If you don’t use it, just lop off the end. But sometimes even the unnecessary survives in archives and on maps. Sometimes a good paring is all that you need to thrive. Sometimes you just have to change the name.

The name is everything. Speak for five minutes and I can tell you your hometown and what your parents did for a living. Speak for ten and I can tell you your future. Speak your name and I can do both at once.

The name’s the thing. If I call it driftwood, you will not sit on it. If I call it a chair you will not break it up to burn. It’s a chopper, baby. If you cannot name it properly, we’ll never get anywhere.

Zed’s dead, baby. Long live Z.

Y is for yawn

2011-04-29T08:52:00.002-04:00

You yawn
as a sign of yielding.

Giving way
is still a way to give.
Movement is creation, and
a yawn is a nod
to the physicality
of language,
difference in space
as well as time,

but it is also a way to say not yet.

Yes,
we are not
quite
at the end
just yet.

Yes,

not yet.

Yes.

X is for xeating

2011-04-28T13:18:00.002-04:00

X is for cheating. It is the letter of abbreviation and shorthand.
X is a signature and a saint, manifestation and incarnation, a use of the body to prove the existence of spirit.
X is impossible, a remainder, redundant.
X would be the first to go.
X is a shortcut, a marker, a way around the crosswalk.
X is a line, a single dimension.
X is the cross and double cross, convergence and divergence.
X is never the same thing twice.
X is not equal to Y.
X is the proof of the primacy of sequence, as it may be both added to and subtracted from depending on the placement of I.
X is the nothing that is, and thus is not the empty set.
X is the necessity of a new zero.
X is the transcendental signified, and thus X is cheating. QED.

W is for writing

2011-04-27T09:04:00.001-04:00

(A version of this piece was originally posted on March 13, 2008)

The writing that I have to write is of a kind. One of those kinds is a writing to be read, a writing that disappears into meaning and conveyance, that carries a load and when the load has been carried it is the load which is meaning which is remembered and the writing disappears. Another of those kinds is a writing which is for writing and for words and is not for conveying. This is a writing which is for reading but is not for being read. The writing which I have to write is mostly of the second kind. Writing which is for reading does work, but it is of a different kind than the first kind of writing. This writing also disappears but its disappearing is of a different kind than the first kind of writing. Writing that does not disappear is made to disappear. Writing which disappears is made, which is to say that writing which disappears is made to disappear, but the writing which is not made to disappear disappears as well. The disappearing is of a different kind because the making is of a different kind. This is a history of not being read.

V is for Victoria

2011-04-26T08:37:00.002-04:00

There can be no arc of development between the times I lived abroad. I was not a small Channeltown boy who moved to the city and came home only once. I was a visitor, a tourist, even as I ate handmade sandwiches from a local vendor and drank English beer. Only a tourist can really love a place, because only a tourist can see a place as it really is instead of how it was or how it was meant to be. My affair with England was perfect: passionate and brief, and I long to return largely because there is little opportunity to do so. I was someone else in England, which is to say that I was truly myself. I was a true cosmopolitan, unaware almost to the end that Victoria Station did not serve the whole of the island, but only the area southeast of the city. I traveled to London to see all of England, and learned my lesson so well that when I returned I hardly left Bloomsbury. The British Museum is the world entire. I will never go back again.

U is for un

2011-04-25T09:18:00.000-04:00

Un, in English, is a prefix of negation. Un, en français, is the indefinite masculine article. There is no direct English equivalent for un. A single indefinite article encompasses both the masculine and feminine forms, since English, as a language, is ungendered. Like un, un is not unique within the language—a single word for a single function—but unlike un, the choice of prefix is determinative and not determined. Un cannot be une, but the word itself chooses the article. The distinction between in and un, however, is one of connotation. Undistinguished is not the same as indistinguishable. The underlying truth is that negation is far more than a simple absence. It is complex, and infinitely variable.

T is for Tom

2011-04-24T10:17:00.002-04:00

I can tell you about Tom. Like most of the people I know, he is a writer. Like most of the people I know, he doesn’t write much. He wrote a story once about a girl he knew in high school. He gave this story a romantic ending, not so much in that he and the girl ended up together, but in that the story ended with Tom crossing the continent to follow his art. This, of course, didn’t really happen. Tom is the sort of guy who says “know your bartender” and means “know your dealer.” He doesn’t drink very much, and he doesn’t know any bartenders. Tom lies to his parents about his religion, even though only one of them would really care. The only way to keep a secret is to not tell anybody. Tom’s favorite color is red. He works in Chicago writing dust jacket blurbs for a small press. He finds this difficult because he objects on principle to adjectives. Tom has a friend he has tried to write about, but every time he tries it sounds like he is in love with him. All those adjectives. Tom and I go a long way back. We live in different cities now. Tom and I write to each other a lot, but it isn’t the same. He hasn’t met my wife. Tom’s friend has red hair, and he and I go way back too.

S is for silence

2011-04-23T08:17:00.002-04:00

Can an argument be made for silence as an aesthetic virtue? To be successful, such an argument would have to be sincere. Irony may disarm, but a contingent, ironic virtue would be troublesome. The argument should not be that some art is to be silenced, but that silence itself may be productive, expressive, and beautiful. Similarly, silence as an aesthetic tool can be useful only if self-imposed: a method and not a qualitative distinction—a provocation and not a response. Unfortunately, this last position is untenable. Silence is always a response to the inadequacy of speaking and can only be meaningful in the context of that speech.

R is for respiration

2011-04-22T09:46:00.003-04:00

Respiration and spirit share a common root. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding in history, language, and religion. The truth is not so much that spirit and breath are similar or somehow linked in nature, but rather that the reference is the linguistic remnant of a logical fallacy in which the cognitive tendency toward reification resulted in the attribution of substance to a property.

Bodies breathe, but in the heavens there is only air.

There can, however, be insight even in misapprehension. Respiration is evidence not of soul, Geist, but the deep physical and material connection between all living things. I breathe the breath of your lungs, and the mine-ness of my breath is a contingent matter of relation and proximity. Our spirits mingle, and each breath is a repetition. In and out. Again and again. Between every breath there is a little death. A rehearsal, if you will, and a resurrection.

Q is for quandary

2011-04-21T09:30:00.000-04:00

A quandary is the place where a river, flowing downstream, meets an obstacle and is divided into two parallel courses, never to be joined again. While the term is generally attributed to Archimedes, there has been, historically, a great deal of controversy in its usage. Most commonly, the term is used only to apply to rivers which never rejoin and continue independently to the sea, but a certain school, informed by Heraclitus, insists that any river, once divided, is a new river and, thus, all points of division in all rivers are properly described as quandaries. The non-Heracliteans argue that such a position stands wholly against cartography and navigation, for every river contains such a multitude of islands, diversions, and bits of debris that if each of these creates a new river at each occurrence that the proliferation of names required for these apparently independent bodies of water would be beyond human catalog and comprehensibility. Whatever the merits of their position, it must be acknowledged that the non-Heracliteans have provided the most useful observation that the sum of the force exerted by the water flowing in the two rivers resulting from a quandary is less than the total force exerted by the single river before the quandary. While most often applied to industry and agriculture, this law of quandary, abstracted and homologized, has also informed the stratagem known vulgarly as “divide and conquer.”

P is for Patriarchal Poetry

2011-04-20T10:23:00.000-04:00

(This piece was originally published in Red Cedar Review)

I got up in the middle of reading Patriarchal Poetry. In the middle of reading patriarchal poetry I got up to use my hands to fold clothes my hands to fold to fold clothes to clothes to fold to fold to clothes to fold my hands to fold clothes to use my hands to fold to use to fold to use my hands to clothes.

I do not think that Stein would mind.

I use the word I too much in my poetry.

There is sound in Patriarchal Poetry sound and rhythm in repetition in the way that we use sound to make words we use sound to make words mean different things the sound in patriarchal poetry makes words mean different things we use sound in patriarchal poetry in Patriarchal poetry we use sound we use sound to make words mean different things in patriarchal poetry.

I do not think that Stein would mind, but we use sound in Patriarchal Poetry to make words mean different things.

I use the word I too much in my poetry in my poetry I too much is I is he in my poetry I is he is he is I is he in my poetry is he he said in my poetry is patriarchal poetry my poetry is patriarchal poetry I mind I too much in my poetry.

It is natural to mind in my poetry.

I got up to mind in my poetry I got up in the middle of reading patriarchal poetry I got up in the middle he said I do not think that Stein would mind getting up in the middle of patriarchal poetry.

I folded clothes he said. I got up in the middle of my poetry he said to fold clothes. I thought about sound and rhythm and to rearrange. I fold clothes he said not as a political statement it is a political statement it is a sound it is a political sound it is political a sound a sound to fold clothes.

Even when I fold clothes his poetry is my poetry is my patriarchal poetry.

When I was a child I would repeat words in my head until they broke down into sounds. At first glimpse two has a meaning but repeated it is a shape and a sound. Two. Even when broken down it can be said quickly and has meaning again. Thought and meaning are not always compatible.

Even when broken down two can be said again quickly even when broken down it can be said even when broken down it can be Patriarchal even when broken when down when broken even it can be said it can be broken be quickly even when broken down patriarchal poetry can be said quickly and has meaning again even when broken down Patriarchal Poetry can be said again quickly even when broken patriarchal poetry can be said again.

I do not think that Stein would mind he said.

Have it as she said she said.

O is for originality

2011-04-19T09:11:00.002-04:00

Originality, like nature, is an illusion. Novelty—an unfamiliar or unrecognized combination—while often mistaken for originality, is simply a result of mathematical permutation in time, which allows the repetition of individual results to be far enough separated so as to provide the semblance of the new. In fact, the elements are the same. It is the contemporary communication explosion which has revealed the undeniable limitation of the set from which all cultural, social, and political combinations are drawn. We breathe, and each breath is a repetition. Within experience, difference exists only as an accident of space. Geography alone separates my footsteps from those taken on the moon. It would, however, be a logical fallacy to conclude from this argument that similarity is somehow more essential than difference. Each is a comparative quality, imposed by cognition. The object itself is unaffected.

N is for nothing

2011-04-18T09:00:00.000-04:00

nothing

M is for midpoint

2011-04-17T11:20:00.000-04:00

M is for midpoint, which in the modern English alphabet is not occupied by a single letter but rests between m and n. Unless, of course, w is counted as a true double letter (“vv,” as it was originally typeset), in which case n marks the exact midpoint. Alternatively, one could eliminate j as the historical straggler, which would also shift the midpoint to n. Otherwise, in lieu of any change or revision, the midpoint of this project, the place of exact balance, lies not in this entry, but in the white space after the period at its end.

L is for logos

2011-04-14T09:11:00.001-04:00

1. In the beginning was speech, through speech could man approach god, and speech was a god. The world, when created, was spoken and then named. We know this because it was written down.

2. The word has two natures, spoken, and written; atemporal, and historical; ideal and formal. There is a reason why scholars and academics resort to langue and parole to discuss this dual nature. In English, language and speech have trouble drawing the same distinction. We have only mots.

3. There are, of course, no mots in English.

4. Language is a hidden thing. Every letter is purloined, artificial. Nowhere is this more apparent than in English, where every letter is stretched and twisted, and correspondence between sign and sound is largely accidental. Identical combinations of letters, pronounced differently, mean different things.

5. The word logos, in Greek, does not mean “word.”

K is for Kafka

2011-04-13T14:51:00.003-04:00

It is difficult to think of Kafka as a model for emulation. Even Walter Benjamin, who adored him, said that “to do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure.” Kafka’s most famous work, The Trial, is an incomplete, unsequenced draft, which Kafka was unable to destroy as he intended. In this way, Kafka is not Kafka alone, but must be seen through the filter of his literary executor, Max Brod. Is it even asked these days whether Kafka’s papers should have been burned? Is there still any room for guilt and uncertainty? Or does the author, like Josef K., disappear into the system that preserves and dissects his corpus? While I may mourn the loss of such an inquiry, I cannot dispute the verdict. Flame touches the page every time Kafka is read. That is enough.

J is for Jonah

2011-04-12T10:08:00.001-04:00

My name is Jonah, and I’d like to set the record straight. I was a paying traveler to Tarshish when we were becalmed. In their superstition, the sailors cast lots, and when that failed to draw a breeze, they cast lots for the crew, and then the passengers. When I belittled their ignorance, they turned against me. “Tell us,” they said, “for whose cause this evil is upon us; what is thine occupation? And whence comest thou? What is thy country? And of what people art thou?” Offended by their presumption and familiarity, I spoke with disdain. “I am an Hebrew; and I fear the LORD, the God of heaven, which hath made the sea and the dry land.” Having heard that I was a Jew, they raised their hands and cast me from the ship.

The part about the fish is true.

I is for index

2011-04-11T10:55:00.001-04:00

An index is my finger pointing. As knowledge and referability begin to exceed the limits of short-term (and long-term) memory, we need to create new ways to organize and access information. The index is the first step in this direction. By creating a list of places in which a particular idea or thing is discussed, we designate points of entry into a text, and implicitly, may begin to draw conclusions. If the index states that E. M. Forster (homosexuality) is mentioned on pages 37, 41, and 285, then one may consider page 79 as not taking part in such a discussion. If the posthumous novel Maurice is not listed, then it does not exist at all. As citation becomes itself essential as content, the index becomes a movement toward the Index, just as every object is only a pale, imperfect reflection of its ideal Form. The Index, long awaited, can only come as the ability to compile and cross-reference transcends the limitations of the individual text, which is unavoidably isolated and peculiar, beset by typographical errors. We seek to escape these limited bodies. The Index is the end result of all science and art, the sum total of all human knowledge. Compiled in real-time, the Index, which requires the unceasing labor of all those who live, is the logical and glorious result of the combined labor of all those who have ever lived. Through the Index we resurrect the dead. Through the Index we live forever.

H is for hero

2011-04-10T10:19:00.001-04:00

He liked his fiction like he liked his eggs—
Hard boiled. He liked a hero. With Swiss cheese.
Happiness is a noun
which can only be found
in stories where no one is happy.
Homer is my hero
Both of us are bald.
Hyperbole. Hyperbola.
Archaeologists have a wealth of Paleolithic axe heads.
I am not aware of a Paleolithic hammer.
The head is hafted to the helve.
For Hero I swam the Hellespont.
One night she blew out the flame.
I love a woman with a sense of humor.

G is for glass

2011-04-08T16:19:00.003-04:00

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. We put the tree in the powder-closet, and draw a curtain when the candles are lighted, and with the looking-glass behind it looks quite pretty. A glass is of any height, it is higher, it is simpler and if it were placed there would not be any doubt. Just as if some one was kissing the window all over outside. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.

F is for father

2011-04-07T10:02:00.003-04:00

I will not write about my father, my physical, biological, material father. The affections and resentments I describe have nothing to do with the person whose name appears on my birth certificate. Ink is insufficient: too thin a fluid. My stains are indelible. My father on paper is like the God of the Bible—reduced, constrained, a lie. He has not done what he has been said to do. His qualities do not describe him. He remembers, and the traits I ascribe to him are my own.

E is for exile

2011-04-05T17:14:00.003-04:00

The idea of exile implicitly assumes that a condition of belonging exists. If one has never belonged, then one cannot be alienated. One can only be.

D is for deus

2011-04-04T11:44:00.001-04:00

The idea and name of God are inseparable. It is no accident that every religion contains echoes of nearly every other religion. Resurrection is reincarnation. Akhenaten worshipped the sun alone. The Elohim of Genesis is plural, and is translated as both God and gods. The Tetragrammaton is unpronounceable. Horus is Ra. The literal translation of Baal is Lord. The word “trinity” does not appear in the Bible. The Jesus of medieval art wears a solar disc. A god that you cannot touch is no god at all. We have quantified infinity. We have calculated the age of the sun. He ignores us entirely.

C is for centripetal

2011-04-03T13:21:00.001-04:00

Centripetal force, as opposed to its counterpart, centrifugal force, as best I can recall is defined as the center-seeking force in a rotating system. I was never able to make any sense of this, as the man in the locally-filmed science show spun milk in a bowl to demonstrate how it would flee from the center, making a ring, a torus, a three-dimensional body with a single hole. The man would try to explain that centripetal force in this system was represented by the sides of the bowl, but I could never understand how that was an internal force and not an external, imposed constraint. It was the centrifuge that I could understand, the impulse to flee, even as I was told that centrifugal force was an illusion. It didn’t exist. There was nothing pushing the milk from the center of the bowl. It was much later that I learned about inertia and the attraction of the void. Nothing is a force of its own.

B is for bookbinding

2011-04-01T08:43:00.001-04:00

The advent of the art of bookbinding was a consequence of the creation of the codex. The scroll, while seemingly free and unbound, is an imposition of sequence—each page made inextricable from the page before and the page to follow. The codex, which may have been informed by the practice of folding scrolls for easier transportation, is in fact an innovation of kind. A single edge of each leaf is bound, leaving the other free. This freedom, alone, can prove destructive, and damaging even to the book itself, which suffers from being read. Thus binding became a process of containment and not simply sequence.

A is for archive

2011-03-31T10:07:00.001-04:00

Archive—n. A collection, especially of ephemeral, partial, unfinished manuscripts, performances or other texts intended primarily for long-term storage or preservation. This stands in contrast to a library or collection, one of which is intended to be read, and the other to be seen. An archive is not an archive if there is no question of accessibility. It is one of the bodies, buried.

An archive is the unity of form and content, a text without an author, an unconscious collaboration between everyone who has ever filed, collated, paginated, annotated, re-categorized, or deleted.

An archive is a necropolis.

An archive is an assertion, not that a particular set of texts somehow provide context to each other or together contain informative value, but that the grouping itself is both informative and sufficient. It is the authority of that which is unavailable to the eye.

An archive, when opened, is no longer an archive.

Another fantasy political speech

2011-01-10T13:06:00.005-05:00

I'm just sick over the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona over the weekend, which left six people dead, including a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl.

I don't have that much of depth to say about the whole thing. The shooter, Jared L. Loughner, seems to be a genuinely disturbed individual, whatever consolation that may be, who cannot really be categorized as "left" or "right."

However, it's more than a little unsettling how much violent political rhetoric has been flying around in general over the past few years, and in Gabrielle Giffords' district (among others) in particular. This included a poster produced by Sarah Palin's PAC with a gun's crosshairs over Giffords' district, and Giffords' opponent using as a campaign photo a picture of himself in military fatigues holding a combat rifle, and a campaign event in which attendees were invited to fire "a fully automatic M-16" to "get on target" to remove Giffords from office.

I don't think it's reasonable to blame either Palin or Jesse Kelly for the actions of a single unhinged individual. However, I'd really love to see Palin or someone stand up and say something like the following:

"In addition to the condolences I've already expressed to Representative Giffords, her family, and the families of all those who were injured and killed this past weekend in Arizona, I believe that these tragic events demand that each of us do something more than express sympathy. This is a chance for all of us to take a minute and look at ourselves, and the culture that surrounds the way we elect and evaluate the people who represent us in our government.

"While there's no evidence that the shooter had any connections to any political group, in light of what happened I deeply regret that my Political Action Committee created a poster with an image that could easily be interpreted as placing a gun sight on Representative Giffords' district.

"This act of terrorism—and let's be clear that this was an act of terrorism— hasn't changed my core beliefs, and I remain committed to the many freedoms we cherish in the US, including legal and responsible gun ownership and freedom of speech. But it's time for us all to take a moment to reaffirm that in the big picture, we're all on the same side. Without ignoring our differences, we're all Americans, motivated by our love for our country and what we believe is best for it.

"In recognition of this fact, from today forward I and all campaigns associated with me are making a commitment to refrain from violent imagery or rhetoric aimed at any individual.

"We will never stop fighting for the things we believe in, and to convince those who disagree with us. But it's time to reaffirm what patriots on both sides of the aisle have always known: Our tools are words and ballots, not threats and violence.

"We will continue our struggle to be worthy of the political system we have inherited, and to do honor to the ideals enshrined within our Constitution. We will continue to debate when we disagree, and vigorously, with a commitment that those who serve our nation should do so without fear of violence."

That's my dream, anyway, and while there's no real danger of Mrs. Palin ever earning my vote, she would earn my respect.

Know your battles

2010-11-05T10:57:00.002-04:00

Let me start off, like a good academic, with a caveat. I read the political cartoonist Chuck Asay pretty regularly, and while this in no way implies that I agree with the man on a regular basis, it means that I find him interesting, entertaining, and at least occasionally thought-provoking.

But, today. . .

Setting aside the "Obama and colleges are dirty Marxists" overtones, there's a huge, lazy error in this comic.

Colleges and universities already exist in the free market. They do compete for students, and they're well aware that the cost of tuition is a big part of that competition. (Ask anyone who works in an admission office.) Tuition is, however, far from the only consideration, and it's well-established that students and parents are eager to pay a premium for prestige, in large part because the labor market, on the whole, pays a premium for graduates with degrees from those colleges, even though there's little or no evidence that the quality of education is any better—meaning that paying this premium is an economically rational decision. God bless free markets!

Do you know what are the two biggest factors behind increasing tuition at public universities? 1. The increasing cost of health care, and 2. state-level divestment from higher education. That's right! When the state stops subsidizing its universities, you pay market price for your education!

Thus:

A. Colleges are already free-market entities. There is no way that "free-marketizing" them will lower tuition because the only way to make them more beholden to market forces than they already are would be to eliminate state subsidies from public universities. Which would raise tuition.

B. The single fastest, most effective way to lower tuition would be to take the cost of employee health care out of education. Maybe through something like national single-payer health care. (Or by making all instructors "part-time" adjuncts, which many schools are well on their way to doing. Good for costs. Not so great for quality of education. But then we've already established that quality of education doesn't matter if you have a prestigious school's name on your degree.)

Complaining about rising tuition is fair. Blaming the rise on Marxism is idiotic. In this case, talking about federal involvement in student loans is a non sequitur.

I'm never in favor of book burnings

2010-09-09T10:53:00.000-04:00

A few thoughts which probably don't qualify as full-fledged opinions:

That crazy pastor in Florida has every right to burn whatever book he wants, just as I have every right to criticize him for it and publicly ask him to not do it.
Just as Park51 has a right to build a community center wherever they want, as long as it meets local zoning ordinances.
The difference being that Park51 is not, in fact, an attempt to thumb anyone's nose at anyone.
It's sad that the 300+ million people in the US will be judged internationally based on the actions of a 50-member church.
Except that, clearly, this 50-member church is expressing an opinion condoned by a lot more than just 50 people.
Free speech is hard. Tolerance is even harder.
Also, don't expect a lot of thanks from someone because you tolerate them. Tolerance is the bare minimum for civil society. Tolerance is the least you can do to not impede justice.
Working toward justice is an entirely different thing, and something we need to get better at.

Three final reasons to vote "yes" on renewing the CADL millage

2010-08-02T18:23:00.000-04:00

(Originally published at www.supportcadl.org)

1. Library usage is up, not down. In fact, it's way up. And CADL is not asking for one penny of increased funding. Not one penny Seriously.

2. If the millage passes, it doesn't increase your current property taxes by one penny, and the 13 CADL branches and bookmobile continue to operate. If the millage fails, the library closes, and your property taxes won't even decrease enough for you to notice. (Less than 3.5%. Seriously.)

3. Michigan needs to hold on to young, college-educated people, especially families. You've heard about "cool cities"? Yeah, I didn't really buy that either. My family and I don't live in a loft, and we don't want to. We don't want a new nightclub, or a cool place to shop downtown. We want a library. We want story hours. We want a safe place to bring our kids where they can have fun and learn and we can find information on how to kill the dandelions in my lawn or cook a good dinner faster. If you want to keep college graduates in state, fund the library. Seriously.

The library is worth supporting

2010-07-11T19:13:00.000-04:00

(An edited version of this letter was run in the June 30 edition of Lansing City Pulse)

In 2005, my wife and I moved back to the Lansing area after an unsuccessful year looking for work in Detroit and the east coast. We knew the area well from our time at Michigan State University, but we were coming back without much of a support system. Our closest family was in Detroit (my father lives in Chicago, and my wife’s parents in New Jersey), and nearly all of our friends had moved out of the area (and the state) after graduation. Our daughter was a little more than a year old at the time, and we were expecting our second.

We were living on a single income, and needed entertainment and educational resources for a stay-at-home-mother to use, as well as a place for the family to get out of the house and meet other families. We found all of this in the Capital Area District Library’s Foster branch, which had a great collection of kids’ books and music, and a weekly story hour. It was nothing less than a lifesaver.

Our children are older now, and my wife and I are both working full-time, but the library is still a big part of our lives. Our daughters check out more chapter books than picture books these days (Cynthia Rylant is a particular favorite), but Sesame Street CDs are still popular, and audiobooks still keep us all happy, healthy, and sane on the long drives to visit grandparents in Chicago, New Jersey, and Tennessee.

On Tuesday, August 3, voters will be asked to renew the millage that supports the Capital Area District Library. Even with increased operation costs and record levels of library use, CADL has not requested additional funds, but only a renewal of the millage which expired on December 31, 2009. This millage covers nearly 90% of CADL’s operation and maintenance costs, and without this funding, the 13 CADL branches will close on Jan. 3, 2011.

The Capital Area District Library is an essential community resource, and one of the best values in the area. In 2009 alone more than 1.5 million visitors checked out 2.7 million items (and logged more than 284,000 hours on the internet using CADL computers). My own family conservatively estimates that we get $148 of use for every dollar of our property taxes that goes to support the library.

Perhaps even more importantly, my daughters get excited when it’s time to go to the library. They love to return books on the conveyor belt in the downtown branch, and the toy trains can’t compete anymore with shelves and shelves of books they haven’t read yet. They meet up with friends by accident or at special events. They sit and read, and read, and read. (Okay, the younger one looks at the pictures and makes up her own story, but it’s a good start.)

This summer, they each got their own library cards, and they treat them as the most valuable things in their purses (which they are).

Please vote to renew CADL’s millage on August 3. The library is a treasure. Let’s keep it around.

The best of Wordwright

2010-07-06T14:41:00.001-04:00

Wordwright has been around for more than five years now, and it seemed an opportune time to collect some of the keepers. Thus here, in reverse chronological order, are 16 posts that hold up well, offer interesting markers, or are simply the first places I would point someone digging through my archive.

Hopefully it's a fun and interesting grab bag. Thanks for reading, and I hope to have even better in the future.

Thursday, April 15, 2010: There are only three meaningful places to cut federal spending

Monday, November 16, 2009: Theses on journalism: an experiment in format

Thursday, January 22, 2009: First poem (A reading of Elizabeth Alexander’s poem written for the Obama inauguration)

Tuesday, January 06, 2009: Identification and participation (Thoughts on the community function of newspapers)

Monday, August 25, 2008: Ones and zeroes (DVD as the digital novel)

Thursday, August 21, 2008: Trying to get published: minefield or quicksand?

Friday, August 08, 2008: Kwame Kilpatrick: the cliffs notes (This may need an update, but the thought of writing one is more than a little depressing)

Tuesday, July 15, 2008: What makes the Bat?

Friday, July 11, 2008: I'm not wrong, just not as insightful as I'd often like to be (Obama vs. Clinton)

Wednesday, April 23, 2008: Nearly everyone talking about this is an idiot (Yale art student Aliza Shvarts)

Monday, April 07, 2008: i is for improvisation

Monday, March 12, 2007: My old friend (On Jack Kerouac’s 85th birthday)

Wednesday, December 07, 2005: Promo CD problems

Monday, November 07, 2005: Ain't fake politics fun? (On The West Wing’s live debate episode)

Tuesday, October 11, 2005: The story of O. (Where I claim, well ahead of the pack, my belief that James Frey’s memoir was a fraud.)

Saturday, October 02, 2004: Musing on Hitchens (and Miller, apparently)

Notable omissions: nothing on the aftermath of the 2009 elections in Iran made the cut (there are some good links archived there, but my own writing on the topic just wasn't substantial enough), nor did any posts on copyright law (too dry), nor my recent writing for the now-defunct Ditching Otis (too recent).

Confessions and Extra Lives

2010-06-17T21:44:00.004-04:00

(This piece was originally posted at Ditching Otis.)

I have a confession to make. I’m not an unbiased reader of Tom Bissell. I have a not-entirely rational investment in writers from my alma mater, and Bissell’s background comes tantalizingly close to neglecting to fail entirely to overlap with my own. He graduated from Michigan State a year or two before I started attending. He worked on the campus literary magazine that wasn’t the one I worked for. He has longstanding acquaintances with the older MSU writers whose books I obsessively collect, catalog, and for the most part do not read. I had lunch with him once when he visited campus and he was friendly and interesting without leaving the impression that he was working harder than he should to like you or make you like him. He signed my copy of his collection of stories (which I had actually read) and included his email address.

I have a second confession to make. Tom Bissell is the reason that I write about video games. While trawling the interwebs I stumbled across a piece Bissell had written about the game Dead Souls which spiraled out to consider the role difficulty plays in video games. Bissell used Dead Souls as a way to talk about the complaint that recent generations of video games, with in-depth tutorials, frequent save points, and repetitive game play minimized in favor of cinematic cutscenes, lack the level of challenge found in the earliest console games, which demanded split-second reflexes and/or hours of repetitive “grinding” in order to raise characters to a level sufficient to defeat the monsters guarding the next area to be explored. I knew that Bissell was going to be a game writer worth following when it became clear that he was not entirely nostalgic for the days of difficulty über alles.

I have a third confession to make. Tom Bissell is the reason that this column is titled “Diary of a Casual Gamer.” Bissell includes his Playstion Network and Xbox Live usernames in the author bio of his new book, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, and when he accepted my friend request (don’t read too much into that gesture—one doesn’t make such information so broadly available if one is disinclined to accept such requests), it was brutally clear just how much homework I had to do to even be able to really even participate in the conversation. I have trophies (markers of progress) from six PS3 games (one of which I don’t even own). Bissell has trophies from 18, and it’s pretty clear from his writing that Bissell’s PS3 receives substantially less use than his Xbox 360, a console he has purchased no fewer than four times in three different countries. (Seriously. Page 160.)

I have a fourth (and hopefully final) confession to make. Bissell discusses a wide variety of games in Extra Lives. I have played almost none of them. Happily, this in no way adversely impacted my enjoyment of the book.

Bissell’s book is subtitled Why Video Games Matter, but more than a philosophical or aesthetic treatise, Extra Lives is an embodiment of the pleasures of close observation and careful description. I chuckled in moments of recognition—Bissell’s initial reaction to the overwhelming number of buttons on the original Playstation controller “(seventeen!)”—and allowed myself to follow Bissell through the twists and turns of games I’ve never played (and probably will never play). I’m pretty sure that Bissell has an opinion on the relative merits of the Xbox 360 vs. the PS3, and it’s somewhat striking that he claims to own a GameCube and not a Wii, but Bissell wisely avoids such debates, and casts an ironic eye on the possibility of a final qualitative distinction. At the end of the chapter "The Unbearable Lightness of Games," Bissell writes:

I once raved about Left 4 Dead in a video-game emporium within earshot of the manager, a man I had previously heard angrily defend the proposition that lightsaber wounds are not necessarily cauterized. . . . “Left 4 Dead?” he asked me. “You liked it?” I admitted that I did. Very, very much. And him? “I liked it,” he said grudgingly. “I just wish it had more story.” . . . I then realized I was contrasting my aesthetic sensibility to that of some teenagers about a game that concerns itself with shooting as many zombies as possible. It is moments like this that can make it so dispiritingly difficult to care about video games.

Coming at the end of a chapter in which Bissell has shown how the cooperative features and brilliant interactive design of Left 4 Dead actually creates narrative moments by forcing players into situations where their choices really seem to matter and create tangible (if entirely contingent) outcomes, the manager’s criticism is especially damning. Left 4 Dead, according to Bissell, creates experiences—I abandoned my group, because they were all dying and it seemed better for me to survive, but through shame and peer pressure, I was coerced back into the game and was able to save my teammates—but he is forced to concede that experience is not always the same as story. Given the way that open-ended gameplay is at odds with the sort of authorially-determined story that we’re familiar with from novels and film, Bissell is rightly and fascinatingly conflicted over whether making video games “matter” means arguing that they offer narrative possibilities equal to (if different than) those offered by film and literature, or casting an entire outmoded idea of narrative aside in favor of an entirely new set of possibilities.

Extra Lives doesn’t answer this question (and it probably wouldn’t be anywhere near as fun to read if it thought it necessary to do so). One of the underrated (or at least under-discussed) pleasures of video games is to watch a better gamer than oneself in action. (In this way, video games might be considered in analogy to sports as much as other forms of narrative.) This is one of the pleasures of reading Extra Lives as well.

The coach and the professor

2010-06-17T08:38:00.000-04:00

Mitch Albom on MSU criticism of media coverage of Tom Izzo's flirtation with the Cleveland Cavaliers:

Tuesday night's gathering bordered on choosing a pope. A school president gushing over keeping -- not hiring, simply keeping -- a sports coach makes you ponder if she'd do the same over a beloved English professor who touches more than 15 kids a year?

Albom, like me, has a great deal of both respect and affection for Izzo, but I'm deeply grateful for the nod to the skewed priorities of the University, the state, and the nation at large.

I love MSU basketball, but it is just basketball.

Read the full column here.

A modest proposal

2010-06-04T12:33:00.011-04:00

(This piece was originally posted at Ditching Otis.)

There has been a small outcry in the sports world over the past few days after a blown call by umpire Jim Joyce cost Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga a perfect game on the very last out. Replays shown by broadcasters clearly and immediately showed that first baseman Miguel Cabrera’s throw beat Jason Donald to the bag. Joyce reviewed footage after the game and admitted as much to Galarraga in a tearful apology. Calls to institute instant replay into the game of baseball have been insistent and widespread. This was an objective error, fans and commentators say, with concrete consequences that could have been corrected immediately. In fact, if he so chose, the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, Bud Selig could still reverse Joyce’s error, erase the subsequent batter groundout to third, and award Galarraga a perfect game. Fortunately, Selig has rightly declined to do so.

Galarraga’s game is irrevocably tainted by Joyce’s error. If placed in the record books it would be entered with an asterisk. It, at this point, cannot be perfect. Joyce’s error cannot be corrected, and is an essential expression of the inherent failure of asking a subjective umpire to make an objective determination. If we can electronically time bobsled runs to the hundredth of a second, we can objectively determine who got to the bag first. Baseball fails as a game because of its reliance on umpires, and we should get rid of them.

Major League Baseball relies on umpires because baseball, in its current form, is a deeply subjective game. There is perhaps no better expression of this than the strike zone, upon which every pitch, every play of the game is entirely dependent, and which exists as an imaginary box in the head of the home plate umpire. Major League Baseball defines the strike zone as “that area over home plate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the knee cap.” The home plate umpire bears sole responsibility for determining and enforcing this magical imaginary set of boundaries, and is accountable to no review of his determination. Even more ludicrous is that this set of boundaries, upon which the entire game hinges, is different for every single player. A taller player will have a larger strike zone than a shorter player, which was famously exploited by the Cleveland Browns when they sent a 3’7” Eddie Gaedel to the plate on August 19, 1951. Gaedel, whose strike zone was less than a foot tall, walked on four pitches. In a more respectable and more objective game like basketball or football, this would be equivalent to lowering the basket for shorter players, or adjusting the length of the field depending on each player’s 40-yard split time. In addition to variations based on differences in physical size, the batter himself can alter the strike zone by changing his stance at the plate, since the official rules state that “The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batter's stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.” Thus, a player who stands at full height at the plate, like Craig Counsell will have a larger strike zone than a player like Ricky Henderson, who crouched at the plate.

Left, Craig Counsell; right, Ricky Henderson.

Baseball’s current reliance on human judgment is a relic of its antiquated, rustic origins. While precision electronics may not have been available in 19th century Cooperstown, we have them now, and it’s time to fix baseball. Basic touch sensors can be used to determine whether a runner or a fielder has made contact with a base, and motion-sensitive devices in both the ball and the mitt can exactly determine when a fielder has possession. Playing fields should be standardized, with the distance and height of the outfield fences dictated in the rulebook. Fenway’s green monster need not be torn down, but it would need to have a line set above which any ball which strikes the wall would be ruled a home run. Alternatively, left field walls identical to the green monster could be built in every stadium. Objectivity demands not that the field be symmetrical, only that like a basketball court, a football field, or baseball’s own infield diamond, its dimensions be identical in every park.

The crowning glory of this plan, however, will be the strike zone. Dictated by the rulebook as a precise and specific polygon suspended above home plate, identical for every player, we can embed laser proximity sensors around and in the plate itself. We will not rely upon the umpire to judge that a pitch hit the inside corner. We will know. There will be no arguments over a called third strike. There will be no inconsistency. There will be no variation based on player size, stance, or umpire’s whim. Every pitcher and every batter will have the same target. With the right eyewear, we can even make it visible, if we wish. Imagine every player and spectator wearing glasses in which the lenses are polarized screens, making the laser-determined strike zone clear to all, and perhaps even programmed to illuminate the ball if and when it passes through this no-longer-subjective space. The umpires can even remain on the field if we wish, nearly invisible headsets informing them of what has just happened, allowing them to give voice to an objective, correct result. There would be no more perfect performances marred by subjective error. There would be only perfection.

Diary of a Casual Gamer #1: Getting Lost

2010-05-25T15:28:00.002-04:00

(This was originally posted at Ditching Otis)

Playing Red Dead Redemption and Final Fantasy XIII at the same time is more than a little jarring. Not, of course, because of the wildly divergent settings. Even a casual gamer can accept the transition from the early 20th century American west to a futuristic dystopia without so much as blinking. For me, at least, the deeply unfamiliar experience is playing not one but two current-generation console games so close to their release date. I am, after all, the epitome of the casual gamer. Always late to the party, mashing buttons, dependent on the strategy guide, with the slimmed-down version of the console under my television, and a disproportionate number of games with garishly colorful “greatest hits” cases sitting on my shelf. (The ugliness of the “greatest hits/players choice/whatever” packaging is intentional, a penalty inflicted upon those of us cheap, lazy, or patient enough to not buy a game until the price drops.)

All the same, due to a happy set of unusual circumstances this past holiday season, I’ve found myself with both a Playstation 3 and a Nintendo Wii, which has allowed me the fantasy of engaging in some serious gaming. In March, I purchased Final Fantasy XIII (Final Fantasy X and X-2 were my favorites out of the rather limited number of games I played on the PS2), and let it sit almost entirely untouched until the beginning of May. (I was finishing a graduate thesis, and my wife made it perfectly clear that if I valued my marriage that the thesis was going to have to come first.)

Now, after several hours of game play, I’m on Chapter 7, which depending on how you’re counting, is either about halfway through the game’s 13 chapters, or barely started. (The strategy guide—yes, I bought the strategy guide—describes chapter 10 as being about halfway through the game’s story.) There are substantial portions of the game’s battle system that I don’t even have access to yet.

This can make it feel at times like you’re only playing part of the game in the early stages, which is quite literally true but is also a sensible way to deal with one of the most substantial challenges in the current generation of console games: the learning curve. As games become more immersive and give players more control over characters and environment, the number of skills a player has to master in order to progress in a game has exploded. (Just imagine Super Mario Brothers, with the only inputs being a direction pad and two buttons, where the game opens with the character simply waiting for the player to make him run, a threat in the form of a Goomba already bearing down. I don’t really want to get nostalgic—I never actually completed Super Mario Brothers—but we’ve come light years from the first generation of consoles.)

Many games succeed or fail based on how well they teach you the necessary skills in the early stages without feeling like the only purpose of the early stages is to teach you the skills you will need in order to really play the game. This is no small trick, and a number of reviewers have argued that Final Fantasy XIII doesn’t quite pull it off. As a player, for all the aspects of the game I have yet to master (or even encounter), I feel like I’m making progress, but I have little choice but to do so. The only thing the game asks me to do is to run forward and fight the monsters that stand between my character and the somewhat arbitrary geographic goal the game has set for me.

Red Dead Redemption, in a lot of ways, is something else entirely. In the few hours I’ve played the game so far, I’ve spent a great deal of time entirely lost. (I’m nowhere near as far along as Chris Hooley, in fact, I’m a bit embarrassed to say that I can’t find the poker game.) The world, as many have written, is huge, and I’ve already had my horse stolen out from under me in the middle of nowhere, leaving my character to jog to the next town. A number of reviews have talked about lassoing bad guys and dragging them in for a bounty, but I’m not even sure whether or not I have a rope yet.

More than anything else, I’m not good yet at the sort of things the game asks me to do. My own inclination is to play as more of a “good guy” than a “bad guy” character, and the game gives you ample opportunities to help people out. Just walking or riding around, I’ve stumbled upon a miner being robbed, a man being hung by a gang, and a drunk assaulting a prostitute. In exactly one of those three situations have I been able to keep the victim from being murdered. Once when I was shooting coyotes, I shot a man I hadn’t even seen sitting in the tall grass. (That was the one time I actually stopped playing and went back to an earlier save point.) I’m apparently, just not very good at helping people.

And for all that, I’m having a hard time figuring out which game I like more. I have a long and very fond history with the Final Fantasy franchise. I love the settings, the stories, and the varying levels of weirdness they present to the American gamer. I have, on the other hand, never played a Grand Theft Auto game. (And, as others have observed, whatever its setting, Red Dead Redemption is essentially and structurally a Grand Theft Auto game.) The richness and depth of the narrative of the Final Fantasy series is one of the primary reasons that I take video games seriously (my graduate degree was in literature), and I don’t really expect Red Dead Redemption to be able to compete on that front. I expect to spend a lot more time in Red Dead Redemption wandering around and doing things that, in terms of the overall story, amount to nothing at all. But to my own surprise, I’m finding that I like being lost.

There are things we can agree on, even across the spectrum

2010-04-16T19:53:00.003-04:00

Andrew Sullivan echoes my point in yesterday's post (of course, I'm really echoing him and other reasonable people all along the political spectrum):

When they [Tea Partiers] propose cuts in Medicare, means-testing Social Security, a raising of the retirement age and a cut in defense spending, I'll take them seriously and wish them well.

Until then, I'll treat them with the condescending contempt they have thus far deserved.

In the sense that I support a single-payer healthcare system, I'm actually in favor of an expansion of Medicare, but if we're going to talk about balancing the budget, popular scapegoats like earmarks, farm subsidies, or food stamps aren't going to get us there. They're not even going to get us started. Let's have a real political discussion about what we want government to do (and realize that we're never all going to agree, and that elections are a valid way of helping to settle—and unsettle, and re-settle—those questions), and agree that whatever it is that government does, we have to be willing to pay for it.

And let's extend that principle to our states and communities. No more demanding that everything get cut as long as it only affects someone else. Fund the schools. Fund the police (and emergency services). Fund the library and the bus. Each of these things is worth paying for.

There are only three meaningful places to cut federal spending

2010-04-15T11:28:00.001-04:00

Last Friday, I tweeted a link to an Economist poll in which 92% of Americans said that it was important to balance the federal budget within the next few years, and 62% said that the budget should be balanced with spending cuts alone instead of raising taxes (5%) or some combination of tax increases and spending cuts (24%). The notable part of this poll was that when participants were asked what, exactly should be cut, the average response seemed to be "not much, except for foreign aid" (which accounts for less than 1% of federal spending).

As a follow-up, I'd link to point to an article in the NYT today reporting the results of a poll and follow-up interviews with people who identify themselves with the Tea Party movement:

When talking about the Tea Party movement, the largest number of respondents said that the movement’s goal should be reducing the size of government, more than cutting the budget deficit or lowering taxes.

And nearly three-quarters of those who favor smaller government said they would prefer it even if it meant spending on domestic programs would be cut.

But in follow-up interviews, Tea Party supporters said they did not want to cut Medicare or Social Security — the biggest domestic programs, suggesting instead a focus on “waste.”

Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits.

Others could not explain the contradiction.

“That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” asked Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif. “I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.” She added, “I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.”

In order to make inroads into the federal budget, the only places where substantial cuts could make an impact are in Defense, Social Security, and Medicare/Medicaid, which together make up more than 59% of total spending. Of those three, only Defense is "discretionary," meaning that cuts could be made without requiring the passage of substantial new legislation.

I'm not against spending cuts. What I'm against is demanding that government shrink without a clear idea of where cuts should be made, and what the real impact of those cuts would be, especially when percentage of the federal budget (or percentage of the total deficit) is compared to impact on actual people's lives.

I think that the budget should (on the whole) be balanced. (Temporary but substantial deficits in times of recession would be the primary exception to this rule.) And I think that eliminating waste is a good thing. But when you're being told that government waste is the source of the problem, you're being lied to. The problem is the irresponsible tax cuts of the past 10 years, combined with fighting two wars on a different continent.

Many government programs help people, and they do so with a surprising level of efficiency. They help you. And that's worth paying for.

Lansing Lit Mags, and me.

2010-04-06T17:46:00.000-04:00

I've already posted a link to a slides-only video version of my Lansing Lit Mags presentation at Ignite Lansing 3.0. This afternoon, LCC TV posted video of both the slides and me. I think I have a nerdy sort of charm.

What would I do differently if I were to do it again? I think, especially given the spirit of the event, I'd focus a bit more on the opportunities for small periodical publication offered through the internet, and talk about how Oats led into Robin Sloan's current work. It's a tough compromise to make, since I already had to cut so much. I barely had time to name drop Pablo Neruda and Margaret Atwood (I didn't get to mention the interview with Allen Ginsberg in issue #17, or Tom Bissell's first published story in volume 30 #2, etc., etc.).

And these are tough compromises, because there are a lot of cool things that people have done, and one of the big things I wanted to do was to show off some of the good ideas so that people could see the variety of forms that lit mags have taken and not come away with the idea that the lovely, glossy, rather staid versions that are out there right now are the only options. The costs of entry are nearly non-existent.

One story I didn't tell had to do with the transition of The Offbeat from a self-published 'zine to publication with the MSU Press. Before the final decision was made, Tim Carmody and I talked between ourselves about publishing a final compilation issue showing off the work that The Offbeat had printed over the previous three years and centering on an essay which would argue that if we had done it, with minimal support (basically free web space and an email address) from MSU, that anyone could and should do it. Rather than asking a new staff to pick up our publication, we would have created a gap and asked someone else to fill it with their own publication and their own ideas. I'm proud of The Offbeat, and happy that it has carried on. Because of Offbeat/1, I have an editor credit in the Library of Congress.

Still, part of me wonders what might have popped up had The Offbeat not hung around.

Summer reading

2010-03-26T10:04:00.005-04:00

I'm currently buried neck-deep in reading for my MA thesis on Gertrude Stein, but I'm starting to get really excited about being free to read anything I want this summer, and at the top of my list is fellow MSU and East Lansing lit mag alum Tom Bissell's upcoming book on video games Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.

Beyond being a fan of Bissell in general, I've had a few tastes of his game writing in The New Yorker and The Guardian, as well as his writing at crispygamer.com. As someone who recently dragged myself through the original Final Fantasy, just to be able to say that I'd beaten it, I particularly enjoyed his piece on game difficulty and the downright sadistic although not entirely unenjoyable design of Demon Souls.

Final Fantasy XIII is sitting on my shelf, waiting for the thesis to be done, and I hope to use it and Mr. Bissell's book as a way to start talking about some of my own thoughts on games, narrative, and the way that I stopped reading sci-fi novels after playing Final Fantasy X. (Don't worry, a grad class, believe it or not, got me started again.)

So the point of all this is, if anyone wants to send me an advance copy, I promise to write a review. :-)

Lansing Lit Mags

2010-03-13T19:29:00.007-05:00

I have some thoughts on the presentation after re-watching it, but for now, if you haven't seen it, my 3/5/10 Ignite Lansing presentation on Lansing Literary Magazines is available at YouTube here.

A little controversy is a good thing

2010-03-09T10:32:00.003-05:00

I gave a presentation on Lansing Literary Magazines at Ignite Lansing 3.0 on Friday night. I thought the presentation went well, and while I didn't bowl over the crowd (there were both more dynamic presenters and more socially engaging topics than mine), I kept up with the slides, presented some good information (no small job when trying to talk about 50+ years in 5 minutes), and even made the argument for people to get out and start their own lit mags a bit better than I expected I would. And there was only one moment of mostly-unintentional blue humor. [I'll link to video when it gets posted.]

Ignite got just a little bit of coverage in the local press, most notably a rather dismissive blog post from local columnist John Schneider. Schenider's post prompted some strong and thoughtful reactions, and he put up a semi/non-retraction this morning:

Some things I’ve learned in the past 24 hours:
- The presentations at “Ignite Lansing” are largely beside the point. The point of the gathering is the gathering.
- It’s not fair to judge the speakers because there are no standards beyond a willingness to stand up in front of a crowd and talk about something. Anything.
- The presentations aren't necessarily meant to introduce innovative thinking, provide a vision of the future, or move Lansing forward, although there’s no rule against those things.
- The fact that hundreds of people assembled to pay attention — to some extent — to those claiming their five minutes on the stage makes Lansing a better place.
- The Twitterati are good at mobilizing.

Beyond the fact that I'm a bit surprised that Schneider seems so surprised by the strength of the response—after all, participants in an event that posted a live Twitter feed of #ignitelansing tweets are pretty likely to read a blog post and have no problem commenting on it—I'm actually happy that the discussion is taking place, and I hope it gets people talking about the presentations themselves and not just that Schneider "missed the point," or that the presentations themselves are not the point of the event. I posted the following comment to Schneider's second blog post:

"As one of the speakers from Ignite, I'm not really comfortable if this discussion is leading towards the conclusion that "it's not fair to judge the speakers." (I don't think your summation of the feedback is off, John, I just think the feedback itself is a bit defensive after an initial seeming dismissal.)

"It is important to note that we (the presenters) were amateurs, but to say that it's not fair to judge us is to say that it's fine not to pay attention (which seemed to be one of the implications of the event.)

"The gathering was important, yes, and none of us were Steve Jobs announcing a new iPhone, but there needs to be a balance between the social aspect and the ideas and information that (in theory) the presenters are trying to share.

"It should always be a mixed bag, and it's okay if some are a bit dry, or inscrutable, or simply fall flat on their faces. But the good ones should start to be part of the bigger discussion.

"The last presentation of the night was a young architect taking about how to build a city that people will want to live in, instead of just a series of boxes or halfhearted, trendy derivatives. While I can make no argument for my own presentation other than that people voted for it, and so someone must have been interested, Francis Wilmore's presentation is one that deserved some coverage."

What we talk about when we talk about books

2010-02-09T21:21:00.003-05:00

(This is also posted at Bookfuturism)

I'm taking it for granted that I'm preaching to the choir here when I say that books are different things. Books are novels, nonfiction, collections of photos, hardcover, paperbacks, inexpensive newsprint, rare vellum, scrolls, pop-up books, random pages bound together, text running left to right, right to left, vertically, no text at all, usually but not always made of paper. I think one of the things that we value so much about books is their very malleability. Hell, digitize it, put a "e" in front of its name and read it on a Kindle and it's still a book.

That being said, I think that it's time that we really start broadening our minds and ask ourselves some hard questions about what we're talking about when we talk about books, and as we move into the future what exactly it is that books do and what exactly we want them to do.

Books, for example, are not synonymous with any particular form of technology. The book, for example, is much older than those things we're used to seeing in bookstores and libraries, which are codices. The infamously destroyed Library of Alexandria? Nothing but scrolls. The end of the codex, if it ever happens, is not the end of the book. The single best example of this is the encyclopedia, which (in printed form) is dead, dead, dead, and exactly no one misses it. Whether Encarta or Wikipedia, there's a better way to collect large volumes of general reference information than unwieldy, expensive, and immediately obsolete printed volumes. On the other hand, e-readers may be getting better and better, but printed, bound volumes seem to still be the most accessible and cost-effective format for long-form fictional and nonfiction narrative, and so while novels may not carry the same high-culture impact that they did 60 years ago, they still sell (reasonably) well.

Books do not compete with newspapers, the internet, movies, or video games. These all do different things (or, perhaps more interestingly, they do the same things in different ways). Saving the book does not mean saving the novel any more than saving poetry meant saving the oral epic. Rather than bemoaning the death of the printed word, let's ask ourselves what print does that memorization and performance didn't do, and remind ourselves that memorization and performance still exist in the theatre, on slam stages, streetcorner lyrical battles, and lecture halls. The end of print (if print disappears) is not the end of the book.

Books are also not synonymous with authorship. The mystique of the author is the younger sibling (or grandchild) of the book. Homer has to be invented because when the Iliad was written no one cared who had written it. Discerning the future of the book is not a business plan for tomorrow's novelists (as much as I might like it to be), although since remuneration for writers will affect what books are written and not written, it will always be a subject of interest.

All books are written, although they are not written in the same way. All books are interactive, although they are not interactive in the same ways. Let's talk about what makes a book a book (and what makes it sometimes a newspaper, or a magazine, a film, or a video game), and what it is that we want the book to be.

What is it exactly that we're talking about when we talk about books?

If I were writing a political movie, this is how it would end

2010-01-06T11:50:00.006-05:00

Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Snyder is proposing to eliminate the Michigan Business Tax and replace it with a "6 percent flat corporate income tax." Snyder estimates that the flat tax "would raise an estimated $700 million, less than the $2.2 billion the Michigan Business Tax is estimated to generate for the 2009-10 fiscal year," and calls this additional shortfall in a state that already faces an annual problem of severe revenue shortfalls a "$1.5 billion tax cut on Michigan job creators."

It really frustrates me that Republicans seem to own the issue of fiscal reform, even when, as during the Bush years, that reform is deeply irresponsible and goes against their own dogma (as in running a huge deficit). I think there's a big opportunity for Democrats to try and turn that around, and the Michigan Business Tax is a great example of a potential way to do so.

I'd love to see a Democratic candidate stand up in a debate and say something like this:

"My opponent criticizes the Michigan Business Tax, and he's right. It's a bad tax. It hurts small businesses that are critical to Michigan's economy, especially when big businesses like Chrysler and GM—whose lobbyists created this tax and are the only businesses who benefit from it—continue to demonstrate that we cannot rely on them alone to drive economic recovery in this state. The Michigan Business Tax is even worse than the Single Business Tax it replaced, and that's unforgivable.

"Republicans like to criticize the Democratic Party as the party of tax-and-spend. They say that our state can't afford huge increases in spending in our economy, and that's exactly right. But it's become clear that Republicans seem to think that government can spend without taxing, that we can cut our way to prosperity, and the results of that policy have been clear and disastrous. When you campaign on eliminating taxes and nothing else, you end up eliminating taxes like the Single Business Tax and replacing them with worse ones like the Michigan Business Tax. If your campaign is based on eliminating taxes and nothing else, this is great because then your next campaign just argues that we should eliminate the Michigan Business Tax. This may be a great campaign, but you end up hurting people. You hurt the children whose schools lose funding, you hurt your neighbors who lose police and fire protection when state revenue sharing is eliminated, and what's worse is that you end up paying more for less. This is nothing short of a disaster, and it's the result of short-sighted and frankly stupid tax reform that ends up costing businesses and the rest of us more than we were paying in the first place.

So lets agree where we agree. Let's fix the tax system, because it's broken. But let's do it the right way, with a plan. [outline plan, very briefly.] This isn't about taxing just so that we can increase spending. No one gets a blank check. But let's do what the state needs to do, and let's make sure it's paid for. That's fiscal responsibility. That's fiscal conservativism. And that's my stand."

Cue a swelling inspirational soundtrack, and I might be able to sell a few tickets to moviegoers who flocked to Dave and The American President, but I'm not holding my breath to see it in real life anytime soon.

It's not a bug, it's a feature!

2009-12-02T15:49:00.002-05:00

Cute video from the Sun (UK), in the style of an Apple new product video.

I'm not sure how much I want to nitpick. I've spent a lot of time in this space arguing that print is a highly developed technology (and I know you read Tim Carmody at Snarkmarket who makes it a real argument and not just an assertion), but other than the humor, which is nice, there's a real misstep in this ad—which is to engage the iPhone on its own terms. 7 games? *yawn.* 3-D graphics? Not really. Never have to turn it on its side? That's all you have to give me?

So in short, chuckle, but don't think about it too hard.

(via Sullivan)

There are days when I miss my old job

2009-11-17T13:54:00.002-05:00

Photo taken at Schuler Books in Lansing

Theses on journalism: an experiment in format

2009-11-16T13:10:00.003-05:00

(I posted the following on Twitter earlier today.)

Fair warning: I don't really spend much time thinking about journalism.

However, prompted by an interesting albeit somewhat roundabout (my fault, not hers) discussion with @motheroflight, a few theses:

1. @motheroflight: "It's a bad idea to equate the decline of newsprint with the decline of journalism."

2. When newsprint circulation was higher, "the news" wasn't why most people bought a newspaper.

3. Regular purchase and consumption of a newspaper was a cultural impulse: a way to participate in a particular community.

4. This is actually in continuity with the internet and cable news's splintering of the "news" audience.

4a. Historically, most major urban areas had not one newspaper, but several, each with a distinct viewpoint/community.

5. In this way, the decline of the newspaper can be traced to the decline of classified advertising more than a decline in reporting.

5a. I think the history bears this out: decline in the newsroom follows and reinforces declines in circulation, it doesn't initiate them.

6. What we consider "objective," but more importantly, authoritative reporting is a result of national network newscasts, not newspapers.

6a. That is to say, the proliferation of 24-hour cable news was not an innovation as much as an unintentional echo of historical print.

7. The idea of the news as serving the public interest might also be traceable to FCC requirements for broadcast licenses.

7a. This one might be the most problematic, as I don't have research to back it up.

7b. Particularly because I'm not as interested in whether journalists consider themselves as serving the public interest

7c. so much as whether the idea of news reporting as serving the public interest had credence with the broader public.

8. Insofar as journalism is "in decline," what is really happening is that the idea of objective/authoritative news has collapsed.

8a. Part of this can be traced to an argument starting in earnest with Nixon that all reporting is biased.

8a1. Most left-wing media critics/theorists would actually say that Nixon was right, even if he used the argument speciously.

8b. Further stress was put on the idea of objectivity/authority in the postmortem examination of reporting leading up to the war in Iraq.

9. So what we have are three interrelated but not identical "declines."

9a. A decline in newsprint circulation, linked to a community function and caused by the migration of communities to other (free) outlets.

9b. A decline in reporting (newsroom employment) caused by circulation declines.

9c. A collapse of the idea of journalism (and especially newspapers) as custodians of the public interest.

Because steampunk is really all about the joy of being alive

2009-08-25T10:51:00.007-04:00

A steampunk take on the conclusion of the Original Series Star Trek episode, "The Menagerie"

I also rather enjoyed this strip, which is hotter than your mom.

A quick break

2009-08-19T09:49:00.006-04:00

I haven't abandoned CADS, and while I'm overdue for a post, I'm up-to-date on my reading, and will try to have something tonight.

In the meantime, however, I have another pressing issue on my mind. DC Comics lately has tried to drive sales with big identity mystery/reveals: who is Superwoman? Who will be the new Batman? I didn't care much about the former, and the latter turned out to be pretty much exactly who you would expect. (This is not a complaint. The last time there was a new Batman, it was a character that was introduced specifically to take over the role, and it sucked hard.)

A new Batgirl ongoing series goes on sale today, and the promotional material is trying to drive speculation about who exactly the new Batgirl will be. Casual fans may or may not know that Barbara Gordon hasn't been Batgirl since the late 80s, and a new character, Cassandra Cain, took over the role in 1999.

Without rehashing the whole sordid story, Cassandra Cain has been a bit of a hard-up character lately. Her own unlimited series ended in 2006, and she was turned into a villain as part of the "One Year Later" storyline. This move proved to be unpopular, and so Cassandra was revealed to have been under the influence of a mind-control drug. She floated around the second-tier "Batman and the Outsiders" title until that team collapsed during the "Batman: RIP" storyline, and Cassandra went to work organizing a new Outsiders team to help fill the gap left by Batman's apparent death. Oh yeah, she also had her own six-issue miniseries where she sought revenge for the mind control incident, learned a bit about herself, and finally was going to be adopted by Bruce Wayne (as Tim Drake, um, Tim Wayne, um, Robin had already been.)

What's the point, you ask? Exactly, I say. What's the point of all this if there's going to be a new Batgirl? What happened to Cassandra Cain? Is this just a Cassandra Cain Batgirl relaunch? (Which, I should say, would be well deserved) I'm going to be a bit peeved if I'm being sold a "who is Batgirl?" storyline if the answer turns out to be "the person who was already Batgirl before we started this storyline."

All the same, I'm going to be equally peeved if I don't find out exactly what Cassandra Cain is up to. Dick Grayson and Tim Drake make a big deal of the fact that they are adopted brothers, and there's a real bond between the two characters. It would be very un-Bat-Family for Cassandra to be adopted and for no one to know or care what she's up to.

However, I got to thinking this morning about the Battle for the Cowl storyline, and how while it really made sense for Dick Grayson to take over as Batman, part of me was hoping that Tim Drake would do it. It would be a bolder choice, as Tim is far younger than Bruce Wayne was when he first became Batman. (Tim is in his late teens, and Bruce is normally presented as being in his mid to late twenties on his first adventures as the Batman.)

In that spirit, I realized that there is a similar option for the new Batgirl, another character besides Cassandra who has been abused in every possible way, and largely overlooked even after her recent reintroduction: Stephanie Brown. It would be totally in character for Stephanie to take on the Batgirl mantle without asking permission, and I'd really like the character to come into her own as a full member of the Bat Family and become more than an ongoing well-intentioned troublemaker and comic relief.

So if DC had any guts, or ever did anything unexpected, Stephanie Brown should be the way they go. Based on the covers of the first few issues, however, I think it's going to be Cassandra (and I fear that it might just be a new character altogether.)

(Update, 11:38AM: Woot!)

The eternal present

2009-08-11T19:26:00.005-04:00

Observation #2 on time: when it starts moving in CADS, it moves fast. We've shifted from an eternal world in the first 50 pages, where no one dies and all history exists at once (as Tim observed), to the third generation gaining influence and beginning to die. It was striking to me, after reading again and again about the circumstances under which Colonel Aureliano Buendía faced the firing squad, to see him survive and his corrupt nephew Arcadio executed (in a figurative, narrative sense) in his place.

It's interesting to me as well the way that the transition between the mythic, deathless world, and the world of history is so seamless. It is never commented upon in itself, but is demonstrated only by the way that it affects the lives of the characters. It's not really fair, for example, to trace the beginning of history to the arrival of Don Apolinar Moscote, or the priest, Father Niancor. Even if the conservatives are read as the instigators of history, the exit from a mythic time, it is made clear that neither Mosciote nor Niancor are up to the task themselves, and when the revolution comes (my term, not García Marquez's), it passes Mosciote and Niancor by. The army takes authority, not Mosciote, and Niancor has his head "split open," becoming, paradoxically, something of a cause for the anti-religious liberals.

In fact, potency and inadequacy seem to be constantly at play on both sides of the conflict. Colonel Aureliano Buendía is something of a mythic figure himself (the son of a Titan, if you will), who cannot be killed by poison or bullet, and who fathers 18 children (17 Aurelianos and Aureliano José) by 18 different women, but he is also a figure of failure. He "organized thirty-two armed uprisings and lost them all." If Mosciote and Niancor are incapable of instigating history, Buendía is incapable of stopping it.

So we've talked about magical realism, and time, but what do we think García Marquez is trying to do or trying to say through the way that he makes time operate? Post-colonial conclusions seem apparent—that the local, marginalized village operates outside of what is considered time and history in a way that allows for the possibility of giants, and it is the outsider, the colonizer, the post-European, if you will, although perhaps Sir Walter Raleigh himself, who institutes time and history for his own gain—but somehow, I want García Marquez to be doing more than that, and I think he is. But what?

Also, what's up with all the incest? :-)

Reading 100 years of solitude nearly ruined all literature for me.

2009-08-07T13:00:00.001-04:00

The night I finished it, the summer of 2007, I lay on my stomach in bed and looked across the pillows at Jeremy and said, I don't think I'll ever read another novel again.

What shocked me, in the last 30 or so pages of the novel, was how perfectly and precisely plotted the whole book was. That what happens in those first few pages, first few chapters, sets into motion something cyclical and inescapable. Like "Love in the Time of Cholera" this novel is just as much about the inescapable realities we create for ourselves and others, and time, and its effects. Here, you'll find, there's a sense that time is more fluid. (In "Love", which I recommend, the construct is much more rigid.)

What I am reveling in, right now, is seeing it all set up so minutely and intently. It's all the stuff that hit me like a tsunami, the revelation, the oh-my-god-that's-what-this-is-all-about kind of thing.

Things I underlined and want to discuss, or return to: (all page numbers from my copy, an Avon books PB, which is probably a lot different than yours.)

"Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls (11)."

The episode where young Aureliano, age 3, tells his mother the pot of water will spill (23). This certainty in seeing the future, a sort of fatalism that doesn't change a thing, is compelling. It's as though, looking forward or back, nothing can be changed. It's almost what Daniel Faraday and Eloise Hawking tell Desmond Hume in LOST; you can't change it, and the more you try, the stranger things are that happen to keep time in order.

This sense of the unchangeable future, and the completely tangible and present "past," is echoed in JAB's sort of disinterest in his sons. When Ursula tells him of Aureliano's psychic fit, UAB dismisses it as a "natural phenomenon."

Somehow, that seems to be the point, here: none of this is fantastic, none of this is strange. It is just natural.

". . . to have searched for the sea without finding it [...] and to have found it all of a sudden without looking for it . . ." (12)

2009-08-05T16:38:00.004-04:00

Firstly, my experience with GGM is very limited and my experience with CADS is zero. This is surprising, considering my love for magical realist fiction (which began in grad school because of Professor A. Gilson). However, I have only ever read "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" probably once in high school and once again in college. Secondly, I enjoy books that come with a family tree on the inside.

What stood out to me in the first 40 or so pages were the concepts of discovery and knowledge (and how one acquires it). For JAB, sometimes the collection of knowledge was contingent on calculations and "directional instruments" (10). Sometimes, discovery only came when JAB's naiveté of the surrounding geography frustrated him to act. Sometimes, physical travel was hindered by JAB's lack of confidence, and therefore stifling his attainment of knowledge. Discovery would come from visitors. From the past. Perhaps knowledge isn't only extracted from how far you can see, how far you can walk. Knowledge will come even if you aren't looking for it. Even on an island. Even for a man of science. A practical man. Any kind of person.

And, isn't there a distinction among knowledge, discovery and learning? Learning means retaining, growing. Discovery means experiencing. Knowledge could be anything...fleeting, temporary, unnoticed...

I also liked the concept of how the past can be found as something physical--a path leading to memories so overwhelming that the men had to flee. Yes, objects serve as a reminder, a trigger for the past. But what about visiting--physically--the past. Often, I think of the past as purely a mental exercise--and this is part of what I love about magical realism--but I suppose it doesn't have to be only emotional or mental. It can be physical. You can physically go there and want to leave.

First impressions

2009-08-04T21:24:00.004-04:00

40 pages is just the first two chapters, so there's not that much for me to talk about yet—not because García Márquez isn't doing much. Indeed, quite the contrary. I'm just not sure where things are going yet.

So far, however, I love that ice is "the great invention of our time." Last fall I saw the Ridley Scott film Kingdom of Heaven, which includes a scene (historically accurate) in which Saladin offers a cup of crushed ice to the captured leader of the Christian army he has just destroyed, Guy de Lusignan. It's a striking scene of organizational and technological superiority, reinforcing the fact that the Christian army has been defeated after a foolish march through the desert in which they were cut off from their supply chains. But more than that, it's like magic when Saladin produces ice, as if it's the most natural thing in the world. That scene gives me just a hint of José Arcadio Buendía's awe. (As a whole the movie is okay. Hokey in places, but not terrible.)

I'm also not ready to go too far in-depth yet, but I'm enjoying how García Márquez's narration really tweaks the sense of time. The simple way of describing it is that by jumping back and forth as he does, giving parts of an old story, and then returning to it later, all interspersed with whatever functions as the narrative "present," gives the sense that everything in the book has already happened and it's coming into being as we watch (read). I think it'll be interesting to track how that functions as I continue to read.

So, fellow readers, what's your favorite scene from the first 40 pages?

Context, Then Content

2009-08-03T10:23:00.000-04:00

The only thing I can add to Gavin's account of our gift-giving above is that for years, it was a double-blind gift; we would give each other books that NEITHER of us had read before, and then proceed to NOT read them, together.

It was an aspirational thing; if there was a book that you wanted to read, you would buy it for your friend, in the hopes that he might read it for you, and then entice you to read it.

I think Gavin gave me CADS/OHYoS in 1999, but it may have been as late as 2001. In any event, I didn't read it until the summer of 2003, when I read it out loud to my then-girlfriend, now-wife. If you can find a spouse who WANTS you to read highly literary Latin American fiction to them out loud, marry them.

Since I'm coming from the POV of a re-reader, I'm going to hold off on plot/theme analysis in the first post and just focus on Garcia Marquez's sentences.

Especially in these early chapters, the story, the plot, the characters, the world, are really constructed from sentence to sentence, and sometimes from clause to clause. GGM's sentences are elastic, but never distended; none of those Proustian contortions or Faulknerian agrammaticality. It's usually just one or two clauses, the first giving the content, and the second delivering the payload. Seriously, check the rhythm - every sentence ends with a satisfying solid phrase, usually joined to a concrete image.

But there's always something hidden - a stray reference, an ellipsis, a digression, a temporal retread - either in mid-sentence or in the transition from one sentence to the next. One good example of this is the observation that José Arcadio was born in the mountains, on the way to Macondo, and his parents were relieved that he didn't have animal features. The narrator moves quickly to describe Aureliano's birth - and Aureliano is the son we're supposed to care about, kind of, maybe, since it's his firing squad that opens the book, so we move on, thinking "well, maybe there's a theory that a child born in the wilderness might look like an animal, or something" - and then in the next chapter, we find out that José Arcadio and Úrsula are cousins, and they've had another cousin who looked like a pig. Each clause provides an image, but it also seeds the backstory.

The rhythm of these sentences is hypnotic, almost enough to make you drowsy! It's only the vocabulary that keeps you on the edge of your seat. It's also pretty flexible - in fact, I teach my students to write expository prose using a similar construction style to what's adopted here.

I also don't know how much of the syntax is the translator's attempt to preserve Marquez's Spanish, whether the original text reads the same way, or if it's got a slightly different connotation in Spanish. In short, I don't know the Spanish text or Spanish well enough to say.

Let me also add that I love, absolutely love, José Arcadio Buendía. I feel like I AM him, or a version of him - his schemes, his energy, his fits of pique, his oscillation between apathy towards and intense devotion to his children. There's something almost Homer Simpson-esque about him - that oddly intelligent, "Father, give me legs!" Homer, who knows a surprising amount about Supreme Court Justices, whose half-assed overparenting is almost as bad as his half-assed underparenting, who still repeatedly falls down the same set of basement steps.

Getting started-Gavin

2009-07-28T18:28:00.002-04:00

For years and years, Tim and I have given each other books as gifts. Birthdays, mostly, as I recall but sometimes Christmas too. I know I always looked forward to getting a book from Tim, and it was just as important to pick out a good one. It was a really cool thing.

And for years and years, Tim never read any of the books I gave him, and I never read any of the books he gave me. It became something of a running joke.

And that's the extent of my history with One Hundred Years of Solitude. I hadn't read it when I bought it for Tim, and my memory is of picking up a copy for myself shortly before Oprah picked it for her book club. Or just after, when I could still get a copy without the big "O" sticker on the cover. I could be wrong though. I may be confusing my copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude with my copy of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

I'm also fully expecting Tim to say, "You chump. You didn't buy One Hundred Years of Solitude for me. I bought it for you. And you still haven't read it."

But that all changes now! Tentatively, I think would should plan to each read a little before August 3, since that will allow us to break the book into segments of about 100 pages per week for the rest of August. I'm going to set a page number for each week, based on my 1998 Harper Perennial Classics edition of the Gregory Rabassa translation. I propose as a ground rule that no one should comment on events beyond the assigned page numbers, since some of us are reading for the first time.

August 3: p. 40
August 10: p. 153
August 17: p. 239
August 24: p. 337
August 31: End! (p. 448)

All right fellow contributors—what's your history with this book? First-timer? Favorite novel of all time? When did you read it for the first time, or what are you expecting if this is your first time though?

On the whole, I'm expecting each of us to write our own posts on the book, and let conversation flow in the comments. If you want to talk about something in someone's post comment away! If you want to change the subject or have something else you want to say, go ahead and write a new post. And of course, if you're stumbling across this conversation, please do comment. We're all really smart people, and should be able to handle a little argument, but please keep the ground rules in mind. Finally, this is my blog, so I reserve the right to delete any uncivil comments.

One month of One Hunded Years of Solitude

2009-07-24T13:15:00.000-04:00

I'm very excited to announce for for the month of August Wordwright will become a group blog devoted to reading Gabriel García Márquez's One Hunded Years of Solitude.

I can confirm that Tim from Snarkmarket and my NLA collaborator Theresa will be participating in the discussion, and there are one or two others who may be posting as well. During the next week the plan is for each of us to introduce ourselves, talk very briefly about our history with the book (or, in my case, my lack of history with the book—I'll be reading it for the first time), and set some basic ground rules for the conversation. We'll start reading and talking in earnest on August 3.

We'd love if you came along for the ride, and comments, as always, are welcome. (At Tim's suggestion, we'll be using CADS, for Cien años de soledad to label posts.)

A quick note

2009-07-24T13:13:00.006-04:00

I've been really exited to see New Liberal Arts making a bit of a splash, and it has been amazing to see talk about my entry on "Brevity" pop up here and there.

In the spirit of brevity, I'll let the links speak for themselves:

Jon Hansen at notes from the east side

Claudine Ise at Bad at Sports

Lila King on Twitter

Jill Stephenson on Twitter

I'm especially pleased with the last two, since "Brevity" (no surprise) was largely inspired by Twitter, and in a nod to Twitter's 140-character limit, is exactly 140 words long.

Also, not specifically "Brevity"-related, but Janneke Adema at Open Reflections talked about NLA, and she recommends Nine Poems, so she's okay with me.

(Update, 7/26: Sugar Sublime quotes "Food.")

Brilliant

2009-07-22T22:09:00.002-04:00

It's up

2009-07-08T15:18:00.002-04:00

The New Liberal Arts is now available for free download as a PDF at Revelator Press and Snarkmarket.

Enjoy! (And send fan email. Always appreciated.)

What kind of a world do we live in?

2009-07-07T14:50:00.004-04:00

I've spent the last few months working in an ancillary role with the really awesome people at Snarkmarket to put together a book on the New Liberal Arts. It went on sale yesterday and, um, sold out before I had a chance to blog about it here on Wordwright.

Oops.

Kottke dug it. The Book Cover Archive loved the cover.

It's still pretty awesome, so you should check it out on Revelator when we get the PDF posted (today or tomorrow, I expect). If you would like a sample before then, Tim at Snarkmarket has posted links to segments of the books that are already online in one form or another.

God bless you, Mr. Trudeau

2009-06-30T11:29:00.004-04:00

Equal rights are not special rights

2009-06-29T16:07:00.003-04:00

Essential reading from Frank Rich on Obama and Stonewall.

It’s a press cliché that “gay supporters” are disappointed with Obama, but we should all be. Gay Americans aren’t just another political special interest group. They are Americans who are actively discriminated against by federal laws. If the president is to properly honor the memory of Stonewall, he should get up to speed on what happened there 40 years ago, when courageous kids who had nothing, not even a public acknowledgment of their existence, stood up to make history happen in the least likely of places.

It's useful to be reminded that gay men and women were considered something less than human 40 years ago, and that we've come a long way from the days when "homosexual sex was still illegal in every state but Illinois [and] it was a crime punishable by castration in seven states."

But Rich is also correct that full equality in the eyes of the law has to be the goal, and that we need to get there now.

“There’s a perception in Washington that you can throw little bits of partial equality to gay people and that gay people will be satisfied with that,” said Dustin Lance Black, the screenwriter who won an Oscar for “Milk,” last year’s movie about Harvey Milk, the pioneering gay civil rights politician of the 1970s. Such “crumbs,” Black added, cannot substitute for “full and equal rights in all matters of civil law in all 50 states

I, like many people, have a tendency to say that as an ally the politics are not my own, and that there's only so much I can do without co-opting someone else's autonomy and identity. But to settle into this mindset is to no longer be an ally.

This is not a question of one community against another.

This is a question of basic human rights.

This is not a question of tolerance.

This is a question of equality.

This is not a question of belief.

This is a question of justice.

I know too many good, well-meaning people who allow themselves to ignore the human consequences of legalized bigotry.

Justice and equality has to be for everyone. Now.

There is nothing that I could add

2009-06-22T09:39:00.003-04:00

A letter from Tehran in the New Yorker.

On who was marching on June 15:

A little farther on, I found myself once again near Reza and Hengameh. (I've changed their names.) Reza, who has a thick beard, and Hengameh, in a chador, have an old-fashioned "revolutionary" appearance. They do not look like the sort of people who would attend an unsanctioned rally against the regime. But there were plenty of marchers who looked like them—pious, middle-aged Iranians. This is the generation that took part in the 1979 revolution, and then, as in the case of Reza, fought in the long war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and, finally, grew tired of all the lies.

I have known Reza and Hengameh for a decade. I know that they are unfailingly loyal to the memory of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, but not to the current generation of leaders, who, with their love of power and their financial corruption, have, they believe, spoiled Iran. In addition, everything I have seen of Reza and Hengameh tells me that they are true democrats—for example, the relaxed way they have brought up their teen-age son, Mohsen. "We never obliged him to say his prayers or observe the Ramadan fast," Reza told me once, "and now he does both, of his own accord."

Iranians can draw on a rich culture of resistance to authority, going back to the country's first experiments with constitutional rule, a hundred years ago, and this, combined with their celebrated verbal dexterity, makes them naturals in the art of political verse. As we passed the Employment Ministry, the marchers improvised a chant: "Ministry of Employment, why so much unemployment?" We passed under a pedestrian bridge, from which dozens of people were watching the marchers. Then came another chant: "You won't win freedom of thought by standing on a bridge!" My favorite slogan was one that referred to Ahmadinejad’s notorious claim, caught on film and subsequently made public, that he had been crowned by a "celestial halo" while addressing the United Nations General Assembly, in 2005: "He saw the celestial halo, but he didn’t see our votes." Standing on a balcony overlooking Azadi Street, a man held a copy of the Koran above the heads of the marchers.

The leaders

2009-06-20T19:04:00.006-04:00

A supporter of defeated presidential candidate Mousavi is beaten by government security men as fellow supporters come to his aid during riots in Tehran, Iran, Sunday, June 14, 2009. (AP Photo)

As Saheli and Tim at Snarkmarket, and others have pointed out, one of the amazing (courageous, legitimizing, necessary) aspects of the civil activity in Iran is that from the beginning women have been at the forefront.

Roger Cohen in the NYT, from Tehran:

I also know that Iran’s women stand in the vanguard. For days now, I’ve seen them urging less courageous men on. I’ve seen them get beaten and return to the fray. “Why are you sitting there?” one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk on Saturday. “Get up! Get up!”

Another green-eyed woman, Mahin, aged 52, staggered into an alley clutching her face and in tears. Then, against the urging of those around her, she limped back into the crowd moving west toward Freedom Square. Cries of “Death to the dictator!” and “We want liberty!” accompanied her.

Andrew Sullivan:

I wrote a couple weeks back that something is happening in Iran. But it is not the only place where something is happening. The rejection of al Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan; the ground-up election of Obama in America; and now the rising up of Iranians for freedom and civility with their neighbors: these are the green shoots of recovery from 9/11 and its wake. Empowered by new information technology, chastened by the apocalyptic conflicts of the last few years, determined to shift course away from civilizational warfare, the people of many countries are grasping for a new order and a new peace. It will not be easy; and it will not be short. But it is the only path worth taking.

And these Iranians are now leading the rest of us.

Right now, Iran is the center of the world. Right now, the women of Iran are the most important people in the world. May we be worthy of their example. May they not suffer unduly for their courage.

Tell everyone you know. Start now.

I am blogging though tears

2009-06-20T16:05:00.004-04:00

The Iranian government has begun in earnest to use violence to suppress citizen gatherings and protests.

While I cannot call for U.S. intervention, and I cannot be in the streets of Tehran myself, I can call for everyone who sees this to voice their outrage.

Know what is happening. The NYT is updating in real time here. Andrew Sullivan has been one of the best voices on the web for days. Remember and remind everyone that the protests were peaceful.

Demand that the will of the people be heard. Tell everyone you know. Start now.

When I'm asked what Twitter does, this will be my new answer

2009-06-19T11:22:00.007-04:00

John Cole (via Sullivan. Also this and this, and from another angle, this)

Politics vs. the political

2009-06-17T21:16:00.005-04:00

I'm really dissatisfied with having labeled my last few posts on the mass protests in Iran with the category "politics." I think that a label like "the political" would be much more in the spirit of what is going on.

At the same time, I'm not willing to create a new category. The contrast between the mass protests in Iran and even the historic election of 2008 is, I think useful. So, in the short term, when you see the label "politics," read "the political." May it remind us that politics is about so much more than gossipy coverage of the candidates.

Politics is about people, and the real impact that ideas and policies have on them. And, as Iran is showing us, the real impact that people have on ideas and policies.

I don't know how to say anything other than wow

2009-06-17T20:59:00.005-04:00

From Robin at Snarkmarket:

If you haven’t read Unconquerable World by Jonathan Schell, now’s the time. It’s about, among other things, the world-shaking changes that have been wrought by nonviolence in the 20th century.

I don’t read too many books more than once; I’ve read this one three times. Schell is not — I need to emphasize this — not a pacifist, and he’s not naive. But even so, he looks at the evidence and concludes: There exists in the world an unstoppable force. And it looks something like this:

More images from Iran

2009-06-15T16:18:00.007-04:00

Boston.com's The Big Picture has a great photo essay on the past few days in Iran. (Thanks @robinsloan)

I'm not ready to build a narrative yet, but I'm going to pick out the one image I want to stay with:

A backer of Mir Hossein Mousavi helps evacuate an injured riot-police officer during riots in Tehran on June 13, 2009. (OLIVIER LABAN-MATTEI/AFP/Getty Images)

This is beyond words. A demonstrator is protecting a man sent to attack him. There are photos of the wounded and dead, but there are more pictures like this as well.

When you no longer need to kill your enemy, then the revolution becomes possible

This is the most important thing going on in the world right now

2009-06-15T11:23:00.008-04:00

Massive protests in Iran over election results.

Excellent coverage by Andrew Sullivan including Iranian Twitterers.

Live updates on NYT's The Lede.

BBC coverage of the protests

538.com runs the numbers

At 11:27 AM, CNN's "Live Developing Story" is "Will housing market rebound soon? Economists share views." I will never, never watch CNN again.

Collette should have been so much more awesome

2009-06-09T11:38:00.005-04:00

The Mad Typist on OpenSalon bemoans the lack of female leads in Pixar films. Even better, she puts together a sharp, spot-on discussion of the major female characters in the 9 Pixar films released to date.

The only point I would disagree with is Collette from Ratatouille, and even then only slightly. Collette is a strong female character, and clearly was included as such. Early in the film, she's actually in the position of teaching the "genius" chef how to work in a professional kitchen.

The Mad Typist is correct that Collette ends up being relegated to a strange secondary role, but a big part of that is the film's narrative confusion over whether Remy or Alfredo is the primary character. It's hard to argue though, that in the end, Collette is sous chef to a rat, and seems happy in her subservient role.

So's it's a character with potential, but ultimately, the film isn't sure what to do with her. I'd give Ratatouille a B- to the Mad Typist's C.

Do your job, media! Do your job!

2009-06-04T18:32:00.001-04:00

I know you all have cable, and have already seen this, but it's so essential that you won't mind watching it again.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Dick (Uncut)

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Economic Crisis

Twitter is for listeners

2009-06-04T07:15:00.004-04:00

The NYT's Economix blog has an interesting post citing a Harvard Buisiness School study on the gender dynamics of user trends on Twitter.

Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women. Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other.

These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks. On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women — men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know.

The study Economix cites includes two other interesting facts:

Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one.

and

[T]he top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.

Both of these two facts stand in marked contrast to the typical image of Twitter as the outlet for the self-obsessed, arguing that most Twitter users are more interested in what other users have to say than in broadcasting themselves.

Of course, there are other possibilities, not the least among which are that many Twitter users create accounts in order to give themselves the impression of proximity to Twitter's many celebrity users, and that high-volume business Twitter users skew the data in a way that they do not on Facebook.

Those wishing to do empirical verification of their own, and who wish to include an example of the self-obsessed Twitterer in their sample can follow me at http://twitter.com/craiggav.

Why I love Detroit

2009-06-01T14:45:00.003-04:00

(In the basic style of CNN's story of the same name.)

Gavin

Lived in Detroit: Technically never. Lived in Ferndale for a year, Oak Park for two years, and then Ferndale for ten years.

Favorite spot: Watching the July 4 fireworks from across the river in Windsor, Ontario.

I have always been outside Detroit, an inner-ring suburban kid. Even when I go back now, I visit friends in Hamtramck. I wasn't around for the city's industrial past, or the riots, or the exodus. I'm not there now. I did, however, go to ball games at Tiger Stadium. I watched the demolition of the Hudson's building. I had Kirk Gibson on the front page of the Free Press hanging on my wall in 1984. I eat Paczki on the day before Ash Wednesday. I remember the "Michigan Music is World Class" movement in the 90s. It was a load of crap. The White Stripes released their first album in 1999. I was in East Lansing by then.

Why I love Detroit: I don't. I don't know how to love a city, and I don't know many people who live there anymore. But I'm still shaped by it—by not having been there then and by not being there now. I'm fascinated by its open spaces and by the possibility of building a new not-city in the middle of the suburbs. I can see the community working to get a foothold so that they can do more than support each other. I can imagine a statement, a movement that start to inform other post-urban areas. I cannot imagine moving back there with my children.

The zeitgeist

2009-04-28T09:47:00.002-04:00

It looks like the Snarkmarket guys aren't the only ones thinking about new liberal arts. (Which is no surprise, really.)

Mark Taylor writes in the NYT about the need for a new University. (Although it sounds to me at times that he's often just looking for a new organizational structure—there's not much that talks about changing the way scholars teach, or desired outcomes, particularly for undergraduates.)

Taylor asks us to:

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Or perhaps, a fourth year organized around questions of food?

The Chronicle of Higher Education also presents evidence that "Digital Humanities" scholars are more likely to collaborate on publications than "traditional" scholars.

The New Liberal Arts are already out there. Our task is to organize, name, and continue to work.

Real reporting still matters (of course)

2009-04-20T15:34:00.003-04:00

The Detroit Free Press just won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Kwame Kilpatrick text-message/perjury scandal.

Kudos, Freep. Please continue to matter.

Best. Easter Card. Ever.

2009-04-11T20:44:00.002-04:00

I don't think it actually had anything to do with Easter, but it made my day.

Thanks, Theresa. :-)

Brevity, sweet brevity

2009-04-09T13:21:00.004-04:00

A. O. Scott asks us to reconsider the downtrodden, undervalued short story:

Reading through their collected stories, you wonder if novels are even necessary. The imperial ambitions of a certain kind of swaggering, self-important American novel — to comprehend the totality of modern life, to limn the social, existential, sexual and political strivings of its citizens — start to seem misguided and buffoonish. More of life is glimpsed, and glimpsed more clearly, through Barthelme’s fragments, Cheever’s finely ground lenses or the pinhole camera of O’Connor’s crystalline prose.

What's more, Scott observes, I think correctly, that new formats demand the writers be able to work in a reduced form.

The new, post-print literary media are certainly amenable to brevity. The blog post and the tweet may be ephemeral rather than lapidary, but the culture in which they thrive is fed by a craving for more narrative and a demand for pith. And just as the iPod has killed the album, so the Kindle might, in time, spur a revival of the short story. If you can buy a single song for a dollar, why wouldn’t you spend that much on a handy, compact package of character, incident and linguistic invention? Why wouldn’t you collect dozens, or hundreds, into a personal anthology, a playlist of humor, pathos, mystery and surprise?

The real insight is that these are both/and positions, and not either/or. Books, as the best way to consume extended narrative, will survive, although when given the choice, many people may consume their narrative in bits. This is an opportunity, particularly for young writers, to shape new forms and craft new aesthetics. There are new tools. Let new fictions rise to meet them. It is time for a new avant-garde. May it shock us all.

It's all about timing

2009-03-30T22:44:00.002-04:00

Today was the first day of the Detroit newspapers' reduced publication schedule. The NYT:

Maybe once a year, a city has a news day as heavy as the one that just hit Detroit: The White House forced out the chairman of General Motors, word leaked that the administration wanted Chrysler to hitch its fortunes to Fiat, and Michigan State University’s men’s basketball team reached the Final Four, which will be held in Detroit.

All of this news would have landed on hundreds of thousands of Motor City doorsteps and driveways on Monday morning, in the form of The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News.

Would have, that is, except that Monday — of all days — was the long-planned first day of the newspapers’ new strategy for surviving the economic crisis by ending home delivery on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Instead, on those days, they are directing readers to their Web sites and offering a truncated print version at stores, newsstands and street boxes.

I'm actually a big proponent of local papers. It's more and not less important to be informed at the local level in order to be an engaged citizen. It's far too easy to just vote in the national elections.

However, local reporting needs to find a new model that creates and engages actual information gathering and sharing. Three or four days a week isn't it. If a 24-hour news cycle is too long, how does a 48-to-72-hour news cycle make more sense?

It's like an analog podcast

2009-03-03T16:31:00.005-05:00

In a neat show of common interest between "old" and "new" media, Michigan Public Radio did a piece on the New Liberal Arts project. (Full disclosure: I was interviewed for the piece and show up at the one-minute mark.)

Interesting observation to come out of the story: while professors are notoriously liberal, students are actually rather conservative (in much more than the political sense):

Carolyn Racine is in [University of Michigan creative writing professor Emily] Zinnemann's class and a fan of Facebook. But that doesn't mean she wants her entire creative writing class or poetry class to happen via Facebook or Twitter or whatever is the next big online tool.

"I think," says Racine, that "students now shouldn't be completely into current processes like Facebook and forget about Shakespeare and the formalities. I think that's dangerous to forget about formalities."

When asked why, Racine hesitates and says, "Uh. I don't know. I'm still figuring it out as a student."

Resistance to the new in academia doesn't primarily come from administrators or parents; it comes from students. And rightly so, since they're the guinea pigs in all educational experiments.

He doesn't really have any idea how science works

2009-03-02T10:57:00.004-05:00

Tax-cut fundamentalist Grover Norquist on the siren song of the new:

Norquist puts the "fresh ideas" people into two groups: Those who want to move the party to the left and those who want attention. "The only way to get attention is to come up with something completely new, which in life, usually means something completely stupid. There's a reason why scientists and inventors are known as crazy people: Because most of them are, and then every thousandth guy invents something really good. But most of the time they're lunatics. The guys who say, 'That won't work' "—he breaks into a whisper—"they're almost always right."

(Via Slate)

The snark and the chap

2009-02-02T10:31:00.003-05:00

Call for Contributors

Snarkmarket.com and Revelator are proud to announce a new collaboration: The New Liberal Arts, to be published as both an electronic and printed (that's right, printed!) chapbook, and we're looking for contributors.

The time is ripe to expand and invigorate our notion of the liberal arts. Is design a liberal art now? How about photography? Food? Personal branding?

We don’t want to generate a canonical list, but rather a laundry list. We want pitches for new liberal arts that are smart, provocative, insightful, surprising, and/or funny.

Together, they’ll read a little like the course catalog for some amazing new school. (The College of Snarks and Letters? Our endowment is untouched by the financial crisis!)

So now we’d like to ask for your help.

Visit The New Liberal Arts at Snarkmarket.com to get involved, and don't delay. We're looking to have a rough list of contributors by Monday, February 9.

An alternate praise song

2009-01-29T20:29:00.001-05:00

Maira Kalman's take on the inauguration. Which is, perhaps, closer to my particular odd sensibilities.

A final word on Updike

2009-01-28T13:18:00.001-05:00

Thomas Mallon:

Perhaps the keenest compliment one can pay him as a man is to say that his life will make for a lousy biography: Just about no scandal; precious little feuding; almost no phony contretemps and posturing. He was deeply interested in sex and God, but more than anything he was interested in working—steadily and prodigiously.

(Via Sullivan, whose post also includes links to online archives of Updike's writing.)

John Updike: 1932-2009

2009-01-27T13:34:00.007-05:00

AP announcement that John Updike has died of lung cancer.

Update, 2:55pm:

The extended AP obit

Salon's King Kaufman on Updike's baseball writing

Update, 4:21pm:

NYT obit

Lev Grossman in Time

The end of history

2009-01-26T10:52:00.003-05:00

The British library addresses the too-often-overlooked issue of digital archiving.

Historians have become increasingly concerned that while the Domesday Book, written on sheepskin in 1086, is still easily accessible, the software for many decade-old computer files - including thousands of government records - already renders them unreadable.

There is already one stark warning from history. The BBC's Doomsday Project of 1986, intended to record the state of the nation for posterity, was recorded on two 12inch videodisks. By 2000 it was obsolete, and was rescued only thanks to a specialist team working with a sole surviving laser disk player.

More Silliman

2009-01-23T09:51:00.002-05:00

The man himself on poetry at the inauguration.

Favorite moments: Silliman cites the close of Joseph Lowry's benediction as an instance of poetry (I agree), and goes on to observe that

[a]t the one inaugural party we attended later in the day – really more of a “Get outa town, George Bush” affair – I found that the suburban progressives of Chester County had not recognized the Johnson quote [early in Lowry's benediction] and were divided on Lowery’s later contribution, depending on whether or not they thought that humor was appropriate for an inauguration. (It was my favorite moment of the whole inauguration, if that tells you anything.)

and

One of my sons, tho, who has heard quite a bit more poetry than most of my suburban friends, was more interested in Alexander’s stilted delivery which paused. After. Every. Word. He wanted to know if Alexander had had a stroke. I had to explain to him that there is a kind of poetry in which writers do read. Like. That. It’s intended, I added, to underscore the thoughtfulness and urgency of the poem. “Shouldn’t the text do that?” he asked. I didn’t have an answer for that, at least beyond my Cheshire-like grin.

Other voices, other blogs

2009-01-22T22:57:00.002-05:00

Via Silliman's Blog, Edward Byrne's sensitive but "disappointed" take on the inaugural poem, a snarkier take, and an alternative offering.

Yes, but did you like the poem, or the fact that there was a poem?

2009-01-22T09:26:00.010-05:00

Randy Malamud, from Georgia State University, has a more positive take on Alexander's poem and reading, although by "reading" I mean the fact that a poem was read at the inauguration as opposed to Alexander's delivery.

I find it interesting that Malamud spends a good amount of time on the same images I do, and he makes a good observation on the nature of the work described in the present participle section:

There are lots of lines and devices that I find inspired: "A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin." I like the way Alexander here parallels the incredibly difficult challenge Obama confronts today and the smaller challenges we all faced every time we took a test. It's as if she's saying: Just as we have all done that, so he (and we) can do this, too.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

In those lines, Alexander delicately conveys how profoundly broken American society has become, what a mess President George W. Bush has left his successor, but she chooses the quiet metaphor over the caustic political accusation, making this poem more unifying (as befits a "praise song") than partisan.

Perhaps even better, Malamud appears to have access to Alexander's actual line breaks for the whole poem, which he includes.

PRAISE SONG FOR THE DAY

A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration
By Elizabeth Alexander

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other's
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what's on the other side.

I know there's something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Copyright © 2009 by Elizabeth Alexander. All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minn. A chapbook edition of "Praise Song for the Day" will be published on February 6.

(Via the Chronicle, subscription required)

Update, 10:33pm: Thanks to Randy Malamud for information on Alexander's use of italics in lines 15 and 34-36 of the printed version of the poem.

The first poem

2009-01-20T22:19:00.007-05:00

I have watched it again. I have read it again. It's an odd little poem, and I wish that I meant that as the complement it should be.

First, I agree with the masses and disagree with Salon. Elizabeth Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day” wasn’t great, but the delivery was terrible. I was willing to entertain the idea that Alexander was trying to estrange the language, and do something with poetic meter in the delivery, but she’s not. The reading is actually deeply conventional, even if that convention is “open mic night.” The fact that the delivery was less than perfect is actually, on its own, not that much of a criticism. Many poets are not performers. Many poems work better on the page than in person. (And the opposite is often true as well. I had a discussion over beers recently as to the merits of slam poetry, which I defended, even if when I was an editor I didn’t find much to put on the page.)

The NYT describes their text of the poem as coming from a transcript service, so my inclination is to treat it as a record of the verbal poem and not the author’s specific text. It’s a strange transcript, though. There are no less than five semicolons, and while my experience with Alexander’s writing is less than extensive, I have yet to find a poem where Alexander uses a semicolon more than once in a single poem.

I have a less-than-stellar reading. I have a tentative text. I am left with only the words.

There seems to be a broad sense that “Take out your pencils. Begin.” is the best moment in the poem, and I would tend to agree. I initially wanted to put a colon between “pencils” and “begin,” even though I figured that a period was probably intended. I actually want to put a line break there now. "Begin" is powerful enough to stand on its own, and is the best single-word summation of the spirit of the inauguration.

The "pencils" line follows a section written in the present participle:

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

This is followed by a move to the present simple:

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky;

The present participle is an active tense, and this sense of activity was a good fit for the inauguration, the gesture of which was the movement from potential to realization—“(yes,) we can [do]” to “we are doing.” The present simple tense is much more passive, and this is emphasized by the verbs themselves: “wait,” “considers.”

The clause following the first semicolon in the NYT transcription, however, is an imperative, a command, a call to action. It is a powerful follow-up to the continuing action of the present participle. It is organization, direction, and it would be better without the more passive present simple passages.

Someone
is stitching
up a hem, darning
a hole in a
uniform,
patching a tire,
repairing
the things in need of
repair.

Someone
is trying
to make music somewhere
with
a pair of wooden
spoons on an oil drum
with cello,
boom box,
harmonica,
voice.

A teacher says
take out your pencils
begin.

I want to be nitpicky with the rest of the poem, but the violence I’ve done at this point suggests that there’s really little else I can say responsibly without the poet’s actual line, in the absence of which I have inflicted my own. I’m not satisfied with the image of words as being “spiny or smooth.” The invocation of various credos—the golden rule, the physician’s primum non nocere—is shallowly done. There’s even a dangling preposition, and I was waiting for her to start talking about chickens when she mentioned “others who said, ‘I need to see what's on the other side.’” And what if the mightiest word is love? Don’t leave us hanging! Twist that cliché!

There is good news. I’m actually much more impressed with the poetry Alexander makes available on her official web site. And she even seems to address some of my most petty complaints:

Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

It's an impossible task to write a poem for an event like this, and if Alexander's attempt was less than perfect it in no way diminishes the interest and power of her other writing. I would love to see the poet's actual line in this work, and I would love to see whether she writes a second draft.

Can micro-blogging be blogging?

2009-01-20T16:22:00.003-05:00

I have been twittering the inauguration today.

I'm not going to do a full recap. High points:

Elizabeth Alexander's poem wasn't great, but had great moments—"Pick up your pencils: begin." (I'm sticking with my colon, even though I'm sure that "begin" is probably written as a single-word sentence.)

Including the word "non-believers" was a huge rhetorical moment, even though I apparently misheard it as "unbelievers."

Joseph Lowery's closing benediction was really good. And even Warren's invocation wasn't bad, even if it was from Warren.

Gene Robinson's invocation at the "We Are One" concert last night was even better. HBO didn't air it, but I don't have HBO anyway.

Aretha Franklin owes me money. I said it, it must be true.

Wow. Just wow. :-)

Consider it the anti-EPIC

2009-01-19T10:13:00.001-05:00

A short film on the book publishing process.

(Via Sullivan)

Why should everyone else have all the fun?

2009-01-15T10:55:00.003-05:00

Call for nominations: The Doorstop Prize for physically largest single-volume book.

Weight, as listed on Amazon.com will be used to determine winners.

Nominees sought in Fiction and Nonfiction. Both 2008 and all-time. Please specify title, author, publisher, and whether you have read at least 30% of the nominated book. ("Read" and "Non-read" books will be divided into separate categories.) Boxed sets will be considered multi-volume works. Single-author multiple title collections will considered, but may receive their own category.

The prize will be bragging rights, especially for the nominator of the winner in the "Read" categories.

Please make nominations by using the comments section.

Addendum, 11:51a.m.: Titles nominated must be currently in-print, as determined by "In Stock" or "Temporarily Out of Stock" status at Amazon.com. (Which is an implicit requirement anyway, since I can't make a judgment on a nominee if Amazon doesn't list a weight.) Sadly, out-of-print works are at this point excluded from consideration. (Perhaps we'll do a real "all-time" competition sometime in the future, when we'd have more time to do the research that would be necessary.)

Stranger than fiction

2009-01-13T16:33:00.002-05:00

Graphical representation of the official (and, weirdly, almost certainly true) narrative of the birth of Sarah Palin's fifth child.

(Via Sullivan, as you might have guessed.)

Would somebody tell me what kind of a world we live in?

2009-01-13T15:47:00.003-05:00

Even though deluxe two-disc versions were released in 2005 of the 1989-1997 Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher Batman films, none of those four films is currently available on DVD.

The 1966 Adam West/Burt Ward Batman, however, is available on both DVD and, as of this Friday, Blu-Ray.

What's up with that?

Yes, he did

2009-01-08T20:03:00.003-05:00

Andrew Sullivan:

When one contemplates what president Bush has bequeathed - from $2 trillion deficits as far as the eye can see to a war without end in the Middle East to an intelligence capacity poisoned by torture - the jaw still drops. Did he really do this much damage to America and the world? Yes, he did.

The challenge now, at least for a person like me, is to find a language sufficient to talk about it, and to describe the ways in which this was not and is not inevitable.

Identification and participation

2009-01-06T13:50:00.014-05:00

When I was starting college, the person who would become my favorite blogger wrote an email. I'm using the word "email" in this sentence not in the singular, but to describe a medium, like "magazine," "newspaper," or "blog." He wrote an email regularly and sent it to a selected list of acquaintances. He didn't really know any of us all that well at the time, but he was (and is) a good writer, with a mind that worked in interesting and unexpected ways, and the group of us was small enough that we could respond and start a reasonable conversation. Some of us participated more than others, and some of us just enjoyed getting something fun to read delivered to us every so often.

It both was and wasn't a nascent blog, and it was the first sign that this was going to be a person I was going to be able to talk into taking writing seriously as a thing in itself and not just something he did for fun in between the other things that he did. He's still one of the most interesting people I read, but there are a lot of things he writes about that I wouldn't be interested in coming from anyone else, and only a part of it is his skill as a thinker and writer. Part of it is that he and I have an ongoing conversation, so I've been built up as a reader. I know the context and the thought processes. Often (but not always) I know specifically what prompted his interest in a seemingly random subject.

In the sense that our conversations allow me to participate in his thinking and writing, his posts are written for me in a way that makes me feel almost like they've been addressed and delivered directly, like the old emails.

I realized this morning that I hadn't checked my RSS feed in a week, and what's more, I didn't really want to read most of what was waiting for me. Now the cranky generalist in me would try to conclude that most of the web is uninteresting and fails to direct itself usefully to specific audiences (in this case, me), but it seems terribly problematic to blame the web for my dissatisfaction with my own selections for my RSS feed.

The real lesson from all this may be that the sort of communication available through the web troubles the idea of identification as a member of a particular group or community without active participation. I have memories of having been fed an argument as a student that there was a certain civic responsibility involved in reading a newspaper. That argument, as I recall, went something like this: living in Lansing, I should be interested in the Lansing newspaper, and reading the local newspaper was itself a form of participation in the community. By reading the newspaper, I became an informed citizen and being an informed citizen was itself a way of interacting with the community. This was, in its own way a sort of social contract between the newspapers and its readers.

This argument was easier to make when the vast majority of a newspaper provided local coverage and was written in a way that seemed to speak to a particular community. I would argue that increasing reliance upon wire services invalidated that argument in the mind of many readers. While the use of cheap national wire services over expensive local reporters has been in large part necessitated by the rise of 24-hour televised national news in the early 80s, which allowed individuals to identify primarily as "participants" in national instead of local events, and the ability of the web to enable individuals to identify as more and more specific subgroups, the result has been disastrous for the newspaper industry.

But perhaps just as important was the decline in classified advertising, which not only cut revenues, but eliminated many readers' most direct interaction with both the newspaper and with the wider community facilitated by the newspaper. Readers used the newspaper to find a car, a job, or a place to live; to sell unwanted but valuable items; and both directly and indirectly to meet people. This may have been far more important to many readers than the news itself. The classifieds were the way in which the newspaper was for you. Identification through participation. In this way the old media may actually be not all that different than the new media. The civic responsibility/social contract argument was not only invalidated, it was largely fatuous to begin with. It failed to describe the way in which many readers interacted with their newspaper and used the newspaper to interact with their community.

I'm finding myself uninterested in a number of conversations because I'm not involved in the issues under discussion. This doesn't mean that the discussions are bad. It means that I need to find discussions of subjects that I engage more actively.

The second realization that I want to read more emails and fewer blog posts, but that's another problem that a blog post isn't going to solve.

What if you built a democracy and nobody came?

2009-01-05T14:15:00.003-05:00

According to a study by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales:

over 50% of all the edits [to Wikipedia] are done by just .7% of the users—524 people. And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits.

Of course, this could all be a non-issue, but how may people contributed to the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica? Was it more or less than 524? Or 1400? Is it essential to the value of Wikipedia to have a large number of active contributors? Or is it enough that potentially anyone could contribute to Wikipedia?

(Via Sullivan)

Somehow, it's better that way

2008-12-30T15:40:00.005-05:00

"Garfield Minus Garfield" posts Garfield strips with the title character removed "in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle."

It's so much better than the real thing.

(Update, 1/6/09: If you want proof, Gocomics.com posts both Garfield Minus Garfield and the original strips for comparison.)