Thought Ambience

Montessori Madness

2012-01-31T14:52:00.003-05:00

Laura Shaw wonders why nobody talks about Montessori when discussing school reform. Money quote:

Why is Montessori so effective? We know there is an indisputable link between movement and cognition, with the former actually enhancing the latter. We know that people of all ages need to feel a sense of control over their lives and that lack of control leads to depression and learned helplessness, which inhibits learning. We know from a huge body of research that extrinsic rewards and punishments don't work and can actually adversely affect intrinsic motivation. Research tells us all of these things, yet students at conventional schools are still confined to their desks, with rigidly scheduled days, receiving grades for every aspect of their learning and behavior. Is it any wonder that the public school district needs therapists?

To expand on this a bit, my kids have been in a Montessori day care/school for a year now and I'm not only amazed at how they both thrive in that environment but also at how much more self reliant my 2 year old is than my older son was at that age. They both love the school, and I love the emphasis on self-determination and the combination of learning (Hunter's actually already doing fractions at age 5!) and life skills (they prepare food, clean windows, and learn how to take off and put on their own shoes). It's been such a pleasant experience, in fact, that I wish I had the funds to continue them in Montessori schools into the future - Hunter's moving into Kindergarten this fall and i'm wondering how he'll take to the transition.

Burning Painings

2012-01-24T15:28:00.001-05:00

As some of you probably know, I've recently given up painting. There are many reasons for this, but the main one was that I was getting frustrated with my talent level, and in order to get any better I was going to need to put in some significant practice that I just don't have. So I've put my painting on hold until I find more leisure time, which probably won't be until my kids get older and more independent.

Anyways, I was cleaning up my art room the other night and decided to get rid of some of my failed paintings. And what better way to do so but through fire?

I got a kick out of the fact that the middle face burned away first. Must have put more of the flammable paint on that one!

This'll Put You in Your Place

2012-01-23T15:27:00.002-05:00

The Dish pointed me to astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who tries to explaining the problem of dark matter to a young boy:

[E]verything we've ever seen in the universe has gravity--Earth, the moon. And you can tell how much gravity something has by how fast something moves around it. ... Add it all up. We've done this. Add it all up and say that should give me this much gravity. But when you look at how fast things are moving, you get six times as much gravity as the stuff that we know about is generating. It was originally called the missing matter problem. Where is the matter that's making this gravity that we see? Because everything we do count up doesn't get us where we need. We now call this the dark matter problem.
But really we have no idea what's causing it. We so don't know what's causing it that we shouldn't even call it dark matter because that implies we have some understanding that it's matter. We don't know what it is. I could call it Fred. Eighty five percent all the gravity in the universe comes from something about which we know nothing. ...
[Add that to dark energy and] it is ninety six percent of the universe. Everything we know and love--electrons, protons, neutrons, light, black holes, planets, stars, everything we know and understand--occupies four percent of the universe. Dark matter and dark energy is everything else.

The size of the universe really is stunning. It's the most humbling thing I can imagine. Sometimes I ponder the size of things in order to help me fall asleep - it's so hard to keep track of, it's like counting sheep.

5 Packaged Foods You Shouldn't Buy

2012-01-23T15:18:00.001-05:00

Grist tells us that there are five packaged foods we should never buy: soup, soup stock, canned beans, hummus and cereal. Noble ideas, but tough to implement in practice. For instance, I love Cheerios, and there's no way that I'm going to be making my own Cheerios. Now, I suspect that this point was made for those people that eat "sugar cereals" and not those with whole grains - the article specifically mentions sugared wheat cereals. On the other hand, I already make my own granola and combine the Cheerios with the granola, so i'm basically already meeting the Gristers halfway.

The other points are intriguing and I may take them up on this challenge. In fact, I bought a bag of beans this weekend rather than canned beans so we'll see how this works - so far, I've been forgetting to soak the beans so there hasn't been any chili on my table for the last few days. It all comes down to planning and priorities, which can be tough to do for two working parents with two children.

What do you think? Any processed foods that you make a point to avoid?

Legos and Gender

2012-01-23T15:11:00.000-05:00

boingboing, one of my favorite websites, is obsessed with Legos. Recently, they posted an article about Legos' new effort to attract more girls by creating a "more feminine" line of Legos.

The first link in that article details not only the amazing amount of time, effort, and money that Lego is spending on"feminizing" it's toys, but also the insidious, creepy nature ofmodern advertising. I mean, as this NYTimes article states, there are quiteobviously some ingrained gender differences in kids. I saw this first hand with my boys who, despite my not caring less about vehicles, both became sterotypically obsessed with cars and construction machinery. On the flip side, they both also like to walk around wearing mommy's shoes, and one of Hunter'sfavorite toys is a hot pink "princess" phone he insisted we buy him. My point is that while there are differences between boys and girls, each kid is also uniqueand as such is open to anything.

Initiatives like Legos' are merelytrying to take advantage of - and thus reinforce - early gender differences justso they can make a buck. Sure, given the way our society reinforces gender roles, a girl might initially be more attracted to a pastel beautysalon than a Garbage Truck, but doesn't this just reinforce the stereotype? As the article puts it: "How can they develop skills for such collaborations from toys that increasingly emphasize, reinforce, or even create, gender differences?" Who says that a girl might not have been drawn towards a Garbage Truck but just in pink? I mean, just look at the popularity of Pink and Powder Blue NFL jerseys and baseball hats (like the Red Sox "pink hat brigade"). Given the power that Legos hold over many young ones, it would have been nice if they tried to point to a new way. It's hard enough when society already pushes boys towards Legos and car/military vehicles and girls to "American Girl". (And do we honestly really need more toys teaching small girls to wearminiskirts? Or am I just getting old?)

Good questions, but there's not much I can do about it on a large scale. My thinking is that I subvert the dominant paradigm by letting my kids play with whatever theydamned well please. So Hunter occasional walks around the house in my wife's red pumps while Trey talks on aprincess phone. They're still all boy, but at least their not being limited by any societalguidelines.

Unless they try to wear Patriots gear, of course. A dad's got todraw the line somewhere.

What I Hate I Love

2012-01-21T21:45:00.001-05:00

“I hate and love.
Ignorant fish, who even
wants the fly while writhing.”

Frank Bidart, "Catullus: Odi et amo” from The Sacrifice

The Nexus of Choice and Persuasion

2012-01-20T16:19:00.001-05:00

“Every time a message seems to grab us, and we think, "I just might try it," we are at the nexus of choice and persuasion that is advertising.”

- Andrew Hacker

Seriousness in Fiction

2012-01-19T14:39:00.000-05:00

"When we speak of "seriousness" in fiction ultimately we are talking abut an attitude toward death–how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn't so immediate. Everybody knows this, but the subject is hardly ever brought up with younger writers, possibly because given to anyone at the appropriate age, such advice is widely felt to be effort wasted."

- Thomas Pynchon, from his introduction to Slow Learner

Online Protest Day

2012-01-18T11:03:00.000-05:00

"Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good. The word has ceased to have meaning."
- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, page 548

While I would never deny my three or four readers my website by going dark in protest, you should pay attention to the horrible bills working their way through the US Congress: PIPA and SOPA. As Barry Ritholz eloquently puts it:

It would greatly damage the linking structure of the internet, allowing companies to close down websites on flimsiest of premises. It would criminalize even pointing to any site that itself points to a site where there is a Copyright violation.
Over the years, the copyright cartel — this includes Disney and other major content companies — have bought themselves a Congress. They prevented works that were scheduled to enter the public domain, as envisioned in the US Constitution, from doing so.
SOPA is the latest attempt to censor the public’s access to independent information and manipulate copyright laws. The new law works to their own benefit and the public’s detriment.

Don't passively accept Pynchon's warnings about the dominance of technology, because IMO the battle is not yet over. Work to keep information free by killing off this poorly written legislation by signing the petition and contacting your representatives today.

Update: For a more detailed look at why the bills are so bad, check out Mashable's reporting on SOPA.

Revenge of the Tab Dump

2012-01-17T21:12:00.000-05:00

As always, interesting articles that I indended to write about, but never found the time.

1. I spend most of my professional life working in PowerPoint. Slide:ology helped me to learn how to design better slides. It could help you too.

2. Justin E.H. Smith argues the, to me, obvious point that marriage is work:

One might suppose rather that love and work—or at least a distinctly modern, capitalist conception of work—are two sides of the same coin: both emerge together at the same moment in history, and both carry with them the ungrounded belief that each of us has our destiny in our own hands, that our happiness is entirely a consequence of our life choices, and our misery a surefire sign that we are doing something wrong. In this connection the contemporary use of "passion" serves as a revealing misnomer. For how many can recall that, originally… to undergo a passion was to suffer an affliction over which one had no control? … in the modern world, in both work and love… we are expected to treat the things that happen to us, that cannot but happen to us, as a result of the way our society is structured, as if they were the result of our own sundry projects of self-creation.

He’s a bit too cynical and determinist for my tastes, but there’s some truth in there: many, many people do not hold their destiny in their hands, for one reason or another.

3. I’d Rather Be Writing ponders a good question for all writers.

I was talking with my wife’s uncle last week about writing strategies for fiction, and whether it’s better to outline everything ahead of time, or figure it out as you go. The former is apparently called a “plotter” method and the latter a “pantser” method (called pantser because you fly by the seat of your pants).
He said there’s no right way, but if you’re planning to figure it out as you go, it’s still a good idea to write your last chapter ahead of time. This way you know generally where you want to end up. If you don’t know how your novel is going to end, he said, you often wander around and eventually end your novel in fanciful/unbelievable way. Further, pantsers often lose motivation because they don’t know the point or meaning of their story.

He goes on to connect this to his life as a Technical Writer. I always enjoy his posts; he’s a thoughtful writer who has some great insights in the details of technical communication.

4. AGNI interviews Johnathan Lethem about sampling and creation. I love how Lethem thinks. Some samples:

On using quotations in his work: “Girl in Landscape is relatively free of cultural reference. The voice is in the third person omniscient and stays relatively close to a thirteen year old girl who’s not a voracious reader or music listener, who lives in the future, and on this other planet. Yet I know there was at least one moment when some descriptive passage of the desert landscape under the sky slipped into a tiny bit of a Joni Mitchell lyric. It was irresistible, it was like a throb in the voice that just felt right, and there’s no reason in the world why I wanted to resist that. There might have been five words of quotation, but direct quotation, and I just let it be. But that’s notable because it’s so exceptional inside that project."
On Dylan and his sources: “This whole question of quotation and theft in Dylan tends to be looked at in arguments in favor for or against his unique genius, as though he himself were introducing the very problem that undermines his own claim. In a way it’s giving him too much credit to call him an original thief. He’s a typical thief. So can we now please just leave that question behind? When an ideology exists, no one is free of it. He’s spent a lot of time defending himself or obfuscating about sources because he has absorbed the same frameworks that people are using to judge the work."

Ultimately, if art is working then it’s done something and you only need to become interested in sources if they interest you. Nothing more needs to be said. When art succeeds it’s its own law, it’s its own reason for being.”I know that the few “original” things that I write almost always spin off of something else that I’ve read, either consciously or subconsciously, and certain phrases that I use have been used in that way before. If this should be called “sampling” so be it – I believe that the modern world is better off for it.

5. The world's smallest known vertebrate. I miss having frogs in the house.

6. Gotta say, a movie called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace sounds fascinating: Adam Curtis, the director, describes it as "...This is a story about the rise of the machines/and how they made us believe/we could create a stable world/that would last forever."

7. In her essay collection In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, Margaret Atwood splits hairs and describes her Science Fiction - The Handsmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood - as "speculative fiction" rather than scifi.

8. One of my favorite albums is the Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society, and probably the most rocking tune off this understated album is the majestic "Big Sky." Adam Fieled overthinks the songs implications.

Romney's Bane

2012-01-13T11:29:00.002-05:00

I didn't realize exactly the kind of business Bain Capital, Mitt Romney's company, conducted. Here's some details from the New York Post:

Romney's private equity firm, Bain Capital, bought companies and often increased short-term earnings so those businesses could then borrow enormous amounts of money. That borrowed money was used to pay Bain dividends. Then those businesses needed to maintain that high level of earnings to pay their debts...
Bain in 1988 put $5 million down to buy Stage Stores, and in the mid-'90s took it public, collecting $100 million from stock offerings. Stage filed for bankruptcy in 2000.
Bain in 1992 bought American Pad & Paper (AMPAD), investing $5 million, and collected $100 million from dividends. The business filed for bankruptcy in 2000.
Bain in 1993 invested $60 million when buying GS Industries, and received $65 million from dividends. GS filed for bankruptcy in 2001.
Bain in 1997 invested $46 million when buying Details, and made $93 million from stock offerings. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2003.
Romney's Bain invested 22 percent of the money it raised from 1987-95 in these five businesses, making a $578 million profit.

This is exactly the kind of shenanigans that give Wall Street a bad name. I don't see any job creation in this - I just see the conscious looting and destruction of companies for the sole purpose of building shareholder wealth.

Hat Tip: The Daily Dish

First Lines of "The Night Circus"

2012-01-13T10:08:00.001-05:00

"The man billed as Prospero the Enchanter receives a fair amount of correspondence is the theater office, but this is the first time envelope addressed to him that contains a suicide note, and it is also the first to arrive carefully pinned to the coat of a five-year-old girl."

- Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

What's Not For Dinner?

2012-01-12T22:09:00.002-05:00

Mark Bittman in the New York Times provides a staggering statistic: “Americans eat more meat than any other population in the world; about one-sixth of the total, though we’re less than one-twentieth of the population.”

I wasn't aware of this, but over the last year I've been doing my part to reduce this figure. For a number of reasons, I've been cutting back on the animal flesh, including:

Reading Michael Pollian’s In Defense of Food. This book taught me not only just how bad too much meat is for you but also how resource intensive it is to produce meat. For example, The Telegraph points to a study that concluded that “Producing 2.2lb of beef generates as much greenhouse gas as driving a car non-stop for three hours." Damn. And don't get me started on the U.S.'s damaging addiction to corn subsidies.
Acid reflux. Eating less meat results in less intense reflux, an unexpected but very welcome side effect.
CSA meat. For a year or so, I was getting all my meat from a CSA which taught me just how much better locally-produced, organic meat tastes than the mass-produced stuff you buy in the supermarket. Seriously, if you haven't tried a good steak from a local farm, you don't know what you're missing.

It's not that I dislike meat: quite the contrary. I just don't eat as much of it any more. And it turns out that i'm not alone. In the same article, Bittman writes that

The Values Institute at DGWB Advertising and Communications just named the rise of “flexitarianism” — an eating style that reduces the amount of meat without “going vegetarian” — as one of its top five consumer health trends for 2012. In an Allrecipes.com survey of 1,400 members, more than one-third of home cooks said they ate less meat in 2011 than in 2010. Back in June, a survey found that 50 percent of American adults said they were aware of the Meatless Monday campaign, with 27 percent of those aware reporting that they were actively reducing their meat consumption.

Nice to be on the cutting edge of a trend for a change!

Quote of the Day

2012-01-12T16:55:00.004-05:00

You cannot run away from a weakness. You must sometimes fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?

- Robert Louis Stephenson

Where Art Thou, Organic Bourbon?

2012-01-11T15:08:00.000-05:00

Grist points out that not only is organic burbon whiskey hard to find, there’s a reason for that:

Bourbon gives us an interesting window into GMO grain, because the spirit must by definition be made with at least 51 percent corn. Consider the fact that 85 percent of the corn grown in the U.S. is now genetically engineered, and you can guess why organic bourbon won't be appearing in a liquor store near you any time soon.

Supply and demand. The only consistent demand for bourbon without GMO corn are the overseas markets. Domestically, the consumer apparently doesn't care (to be honest with you, I look for this stuff and whiskey just slipped through the cracks). In addition, the GMO corn is cheaper, mainly due (I suspect) to government subsidies, making the end product more inexpensive as well.

The end result? Most of the suppliers of non-GMO corn are fading away. And those that are holding on may not be around for much longer; as Jim Rutledge, the 45-year veteran distiller at Four Roses, says, “due to cross-pollination, even the farmers not using GMO corn will end up with it eventually.”

Murakami's 1Q84

2012-01-10T22:17:00.004-05:00

“…pure solitude and tranquility. That was the best thing themoon could give a person.” – 1Q84, p 528.

It's been a while since I’ve finished 1Q84. I've sat down anumber of times to write my reactions, and I’m finding it difficult to do.Partly because the book was such a monster - at 925 pages, it took me almost afull month to read - and because my dislike of the ending colored the rest ofthe book. I wanted to be careful.

Murakami’s 1Q84 starts with a bang, or more specifically, asong and a vivid description of Aomame - a sharp dressed woman - escaping from a freeway parking jam byclimbing down a multiple story fire-escape ladder – a tale that would havemade a good short story in and of itself. It gets even better when we find outthat Aomame is an assassin – one trained at a unique, untraceable form ofkilling at that! – and we’re off to the races. The novel alternates chapters between Aomame and Tengo, another of Murakami’s passive males, who gets pulledinto a ghostwriting scheme. The two stories leisurely percolate along, bothvery entertaining in their own right; both of the characters are well fleshedout, and they both find themselves in bizarre circumstances that, like the best of Murakami's novels, could go in any direction. My only quibble is that I found Aomame to bethe most masculine female character I’ve seen in a major novel - even hersexual escapades – and there are many of them, surprisingly - read like what amale would imagine (fantasize?) a female wanting. I didn't find her believable as a woman, but despite this, Aomame’stoughness and mystery made her my favorite character in the book, at leastuntil part three.

And that’s the rub. Part three of 1Q84 was not good. The first two sections were sprawling,obscure, with dead-end subplots and thousands of hints of something deeper beneathit all – and it was fascinating! Little by little we learn that Tengo’sghostwriting story might not be fiction after all, but instead describe a mysterious race of “littlepeople” that permeate and control the world - and, oh yea, it might not be our world after all, but an alternate reality of some kind, one with two moons in the sky and enough subtle changes to throw everything askew. In short, it's a rivetingtale, and one beautifully written in Murakami’s singular prose. But like a poorlypaced runner, Murakami runs out of gas in part three. While it may be unfair tojudge the three sections as a complete whole – apparently he had finished andpublished parts one and two and only later decided to put out another 300 pages - I don’t understand what he was hoping to accomplish with his ending. Part three rides an unsatisfying middle road: it didn't resolveany of the important plots that kept me riveted (who exactly are the little people anyways? Whatare they trying to accomplish?) or it spelled out situations in too much detail (I personally didn’t need to see Aomame and Tengo get together).This problem is exasperated by two major flaws in part three – Murakami’s continual repeating of themes and phrases to the point of annoyance (mainly around Aomame’s taking care of “thelittle one”) and introducing the point-of-view of the repugnant Ushikawa whosepurpose here I don’t comprehend. Thefailure of part three, while not ruining the book, definitely left a bad tastein my mouth. It didn't tell me anything that parts one and two hadn’t alreadytold me, nor did it present any new “wow” moments.

In the end, though, a flawed Murakami book is still betterthan 99% of the books out there. I still remember the feeling of anticipation Iheld onto all day long as I waited to get back to the book at night. 1Q84 holds a place of honor on my bookshelf, because I'll definitelybe reading this book again – only this time, I’ll stop after section two.

Cross Posted at Reading, Running and Red Sox

The Indelible Mark of Reality

2012-01-10T15:26:00.002-05:00

"There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterwards, you can remove all trace of reality. There’s no danger then... because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark."
- Pablo Picasso

I would add that unless you have a highly trained eye, most observers are looking for the reality behind the abstraction. While part of the beauty of abstract art are the different interpretations that different people bring to the table (art as audience participation!), without a solid grounding in something to grasp onto, folks will just make up their own reality for the piece. And perhaps that's what the artist wants! But I like my abstraction with just enough foundation in ...something... to make the mystery elusive but yet within grasp.

Insomnia Mind

2012-01-09T21:37:00.001-05:00

"She tried to will herself to sleep but realized she was listening intently, listening to the room. She lay in a kind of timeless drift, a mindwork spiral, carried on half-formed thoughts. She passed into a false sleep and then was listening again. She opened her eyes. The clock read four-thirty."
- Don Delillo, from "The Ivory Acrobat"

It's a feeling with which I'm intimately familiar. Never associated it with Delillo-style paranoia before, but it makes perfect sense.

Football Hindsight

2012-01-08T13:38:00.001-05:00

So Jabari Greer had two playoff interceptions for the Saints last night. Why can't the Bills get players like tha... Oh. Wait. Never mind. I forgot that the Bills have become a farm team for the rest of the league.

This is Your Mind on Books

2012-01-07T14:06:00.001-05:00

Nicholas Carr notes how our brains function when reading:

In our day-to-day lives, we are always trying to manipulate or otherwise act on our surroundings, whether it’s by turning a car’s steering wheel or frying an egg or clicking on a link at a website. But when we open a book, our expectations and our attitudes change drastically. Because we understand that "we cannot or will not change the work of art by our actions," we are relieved of our desire to exert an influence over objects and people and hence are able to "disengage our [cognitive] systems for initiating actions." ... It is only when we leave behind the incessant busyness of our lives in society that we open ourselves to literature’s transformative emotional power.

This explains that wonderful feeling of losing yourself in a book: you just don't feel the need to control things. Relinquishing that power can be a sweet freedom.

Distrust that Particular Flavor

2012-01-06T09:39:00.000-05:00

I'm excited to pick up Distrust That Particular Flavor, William Gibson's debut essay collection. You can read more about it at Boing Boing.

While I can't say that Gibson's my favorite author, he's a writer that I love to read: he's always very interesting, and the erudition on display in his interviews and essays are intimidating in his breath of knowledge and analysis. For example, take this from this Art of Fiction interview from the Paris Review:

I think the popular perception that we’re a lot like the Victorians is in large part correct. One way is that we’re all constantly in a state of ongoing technoshock, without really being aware of it—it’s just become where we live. The Victorians were the first people to experience that, and I think it made them crazy in new ways. We’re still riding that wave of craziness. We’ve gotten so used to emergent technologies that we get anxious if we haven’t had one in a while.
But if you read the accounts of people who rode steam trains for the first time, for instance, they went a little crazy. They’d traveled fifteen miles an hour, and when they were writing the accounts afterward they struggled to describe that unthinkable speed and what this linear velocity does to a perspective as you’re looking forward. There was even a Victorian medical complaint called “railway spine.”
Emergent technologies were irreversibly altering their landscape. Bleak House is a quintessential Victorian text, but it is also probably the best steampunk landscape that will ever be. Dickens really nailed it, especially in those proto-Ballardian passages in which everything in nature has been damaged by heavy industry. But there were relatively few voices like Dickens then. Most people thought the progress of industry was all very exciting. Only a few were saying, Hang on, we think the birds are dying.

Actually wants to make me pick up Dickens!

Making Money from Money, not Work

2012-01-05T15:16:00.000-05:00

Brian Beutler at TPM explains why Romney is so reticent to provide his tax returns to the public: he suspects that it will not only let people know just how stinking rich he is (hint: he's probably in the 1%), but also drive home that money fund managers make a lot of investment profit that is not taxed at the normal tax rates:

In private equity, fund managers are typically compensated with both a fee (two percent of assets) and substantial share (20 percent) of the fund’s profits. Those profits are called “carried interest” and they’re classified as long-term capital gains, which are taxed at 15 percent — much lower than wage income, on which the top marginal rate is 35 percent. But unlike the fund’s main investors, the manager typically doesn’t put up more than a nominal share of the fund’s actual capital. In other words, this so-called “carried interest loophole” allows private equity fund managers to treat the money they make in exchange for their labor as if it was a return on an investment — even though they haven’t made such an investment at all.

This kind of information is not really common knowledge. To me, these types of rules are so byzantine, and so unused by regular folks, that exposing them is a good thing, even if it might not be politically expedient to Mitt Romney.

Review: Jean-Christophe Valtat’s Aurorarama

2012-01-04T21:43:00.000-05:00

Jean-Christophe Valtat’s Aurorarama is a beautifully-writtennovel that combines steampunk, revolutionary and authoritarianismpolitics, druggy subcultures, and anthropology together in an extremelyentertaining brew. It takes place sometime in the not-so-distant past in theArctic city of New Venice, a metropolis filled with wondrous Victorian-era inventions,including machinery that sustains life so close to the North Pole. The storyfocuses on two heroes: Brentford is the greenhouse administrator in charge ofgrowing the city’s food. He’s part of the city’s nobility but dreams ofreviving the city from its corrupt government by democratically integrating NewVenice with the surrounding native cultures. He makes up half of an odd couple withGabriel, a dissolute dandy musician who staggers through the book under theinfluence of a wide variety of drugs (a commonplace New Venetian pastime forcombating the boredom of the short winter days). They both struggle in theirown ways – high and low – against the authoritarianism creeping through thecity, and one of the more fascinating aspects of the book is how convincinglyValtat depicts the creeping reach of the government, the dread of those subjectto it, and the diverse and subtle ways that different subcultures combat it.

Aurorarama feels like a steampunk novel, but Valtat rarelyallows the conventions of that genre to become stilted, partly as a result of hisinventive wordplay drawn from English, his native French, the Nordic languages,and the Intuit, the latter from which he references wondrously bizarre arcticmythologies (the Kiggertarpok, or the Intuit “polar kangaroo,” plays a majorrole.) His Pynchon-lite sentences snake around their meaning, never afraid totake a digression into a fascinating detail or fun description before workingits way back to the main point. The effect is relentlessly inventive, as whenhe writes: “Snow redesigned the streets with hints of another architecture,even more magnificent, more fanciful than it already was, all spires andpinnacles on pale palaces of pearl and opal. All that new Venice should havebeen reappeared through its partial disappearance. It was as if the city weredreaming about itself and crystallizing both that dream and the etherealunreality of it.”

Despite all of its strengths, the book’s tone oscillateswildly as the action leaves New Venice to wander around the arctic wastes. Forinstance, a well-scripted horror scene featuring a group of undead explorersdubbed the “Phantom Patrol” awkwardly gives way to a utopian society living ina giant emerald embedded in the arctic permafrost. These tone changes taketheir toll on the main story, although the refreshingly revolutionary ending picksup the pace again, despite what I thought were sub-plots that were tied up a littletoo neatly (it read like a pale imitation of one of Neil Stephenson’s apocalyptic endings (The Diamond Age being the best example)).

But don’t let these quibbles disparage a novel that’s a hellof a ride. Valtat’s a great storyteller, and his bizarre and wonderful world has continued to linger in mymind in the weeks since I’ve read it.

Cross Posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox

First Lines of The Angel Esmeralda

2012-01-04T09:09:00.001-05:00

"It was an hour's drive, much of it a climb through smoky rain. I kept my window open several inches, hoping to catch a fragrance, some savor of aromatic shrubs."

- Don Delillo, from "Creation," the first story in the The Angel Esmeralda

In Honor of Yesterday's Quick Snowstorm

2012-01-03T16:46:00.002-05:00

green leaves or fallen leaves
become one--
in the fallen snow

- Chiyo-ni

For the Winter

2012-01-02T22:19:00.001-05:00

The blizzard seemed to be dying down, and it was now possible to enjoy the sight of the buildings and embankments and bridges smothered in the diamond-dusted whiteness. There's always something soothing in the snow, thought Gabriel, a promise of happiness and absolution, of a new start on a clean sheet. Snow redesigned the streets with hints of another architecture, even more magnificent, more fanciful than it already was, all spires and pinnacles on pale palaces of pearl and opal. All that new Venice should have been reappeared through its partial disappearance. It was as if the city were dreaming about itself and crystallizing both that dream and the ethereal unreality of it. He wallowed in the impression, badly needing it right now, knowing it would not last...
- Jean-Christophe Valtat, p. 201 of Aurorarama

Moscow in Timelapse

2012-01-02T21:24:00.001-05:00

Москва'2011(Moscow/Russia) from zweizwei |motion timelapse| on Vimeo.

I love old Russian architecture. Would love to see St. Basil's Cathedral in person some day.

The Painful Truth?

2011-12-29T22:28:00.000-05:00

Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from."

- Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, page 441

Obama's Faults Lead to Ron Paul?

2011-12-29T22:26:00.003-05:00

I'm not as much of an Obama fan as I used to be. And after reading The Big Picture's rant about all of the repugnant things that Obama has either done or has allowed to continue under his watch (hint: he's no friend of civil liberties or holding Wall Street accountable for their maleficence), it's hard not to be disgusted by how far the reality of the man differs from the hopey-changey image that he so expertly built in 2008. I say this in full knowledge that I'll be voting for him next year since he's far and away better than any of the options that the Republicans are attempting to throw in the ring. However, I agree with the post in that he needs to start being held accountable for some of his poor decisions. Which is why this idea is so intriguing:

So register as a Republican for one-year only to ensure that Ron Paul gets the GOP nomination.
Even if you’ve never done so before and never will again (we all know how bad the mainstream Republican party has been!), register one time as a Republican to vote for Paul in the primaries.
Why?
If Paul gets the nomination, then he will debate President Obama in the election itself. Then 3 of the issues that are important to all of us – ending the stupid wars, restoring freedom on the Internet and in the real world, and reining in the out-of-control Fed – will finally be discussed.
Whether or not you want President Obama to be re-elected, we all want him to be forced to answer tough questions about endless war, the ongoing drift towards a police state, and the unaccountable Fed.
Helping Ron Paul get the GOP nomination is the way to do so.
Click here for state-by-state instructions.
Note: While many progressives and liberals like Ron Paul, this essay does not focus on actually trying to elect him, only to force a real debate of the issues so that President Obama has to address them.

I'm having a hard-time buying the argument completely - voting is a serious responsibility, and i'd have a hard time knowing that I put someone whose views I disagree with so close to a leadership position - but I have to admit, the idea has merit. Despite his faults, Ron Paul does come from outside the military-industrial complex, and for that reason alone sounds better than 99% of the politicians out there. He brings issues up for discussion that otherwise would never be discussed, and for that reason alone i'm glad he's running.

Songs of the Year, Con't

2011-12-29T13:06:00.002-05:00

When compiling my Songs of 2011, I made two egregious omissions. My defense is that these were songs in heavy rotation that i took out before they were ruined. Time to revisit them!

The first is Austra's gorgeous "Lose It." While my prediction of it becoming a huge hit was flawed, the song's combination of electropop and operatic singing is an incredible combination: she simply sings like an earth angel. Her album Feel It Break was named the best of the year by New York Magazine. You can download a copy here.

The second is The National's "Bloodbuzz Ohio". Combine Matt Berninger's intense baratone with amazingly cryptic lyrics like "I still owe money to the money to the money I owe" or "I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees" and you have my earworm for April and May. Listen here.

Related Posts:
Songs of the Year

i alone

2011-12-29T12:52:00.001-05:00

Continuing the theme of Hunter's love of classic rock, he's become obsessed with Live's "I Alone" the last few weeks. He and Trey will ask "Can you play my favorite song?" and after I cue it up, lay down on the bed, loving the build up, until the loud guitars kick in.Then they jumping and screaming and play air guitar and go nuts in general.

It's a hell of a lot of fun to watch! And even though i'm slowly growing to loathe the song, I love seeing them getting into music so much. Added bonus: they're burning off a lot more energy. I just hope that they move on to another song soon!

My Friend, My Enemy

2011-12-28T16:39:00.000-05:00

"In a friend one should have one's best enemy. You should be closest to him with your heart when you resist him."

- Nietzsche

Fall Running Fragment

2011-12-27T14:36:00.000-05:00

I recently found a fragment I wrote about running during the fall that I was going to use as a springboard for a longer post, but now that that the window has passed, i'll simply present it here without any fluff. Enjoy!
---
Fall has arrived, and as the leaves pile up on the ground, the sounds of far-away trains and motorways travel farther through the skeletal trees, bringing otherworldly mechanical hoots and dull hisses that fight for prominence with my breath as I run down suburban roads. I say suburban, and there are certainly traditional suburbs on my running routes – too many houses on streets named for the trees that were cut down to make way for them. But one of the reasons that I love New England is the small scale of everything, and so my runs are punctuated with small portions of wilderness as nature fights her way through the structured settlements. Hence the scene as I run through southern Framingham, and as I transition from one suburb to another I find myself, if only for a quarter mile, on a country road, a small spit of pavement between two ponds, fall colors on the trees and also mirrored back to me on the still water, with only a few ripples coming from a shockingly white swan drifting about in the first light. Or jogging up a slow hill that divides a golf course, pale light floating down all around me through the early morning mist, not a car or person in sight.

Cross Posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox

For Those About to Fly

2011-12-27T13:28:00.001-05:00

Charles Mann tests the TSA's security theater and concludes that "To walk through an airport with Bruce Schneier ["one of America’s top security experts"] is to see how much change a trillion dollars can wreak. So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost."

Schneier's money quote: “The only useful airport security measures since 9/11, were locking and reinforcing the cockpit doors, so terrorists can’t break in, positive baggage matching”—ensuring that people can’t put luggage on planes, and then not board them —“and teaching the passengers to fight back. The rest is security theater.”

James Fallows has more. Much more.

First Lines of Aurorarama

2011-12-26T21:53:00.001-05:00

"In New Venice, every year around February 15th, when the sun goes up for the first time after four months of polar night, it is customary for the inhabitants to gather on the bridges and embankments and take off their mittens and hats to salute the benevolent star. By this, as the Intuit do, they manifest their respect and also their hope that they will be alive at the same time next year."

- Jean-Christophe Valtat, Aurorarama, a beautifully-written piece of steampunk that's so far combining political intrigue, druggy subcultures, and anthropology into an extremely entertaining brew.

Nip Watch 2011

2011-12-23T14:27:00.001-05:00

In what might be the last Nip Watch of 2011, I hauled in:
- 21 Nips, all vodka (either Absolute or Stoli)
- 5 beer cans
- 4 Plastic Bottles

Tis the season!

Protesting and the Police

2011-12-21T15:55:00.001-05:00

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
- J.F. Kennedy

I was thinking more about Occupy Wall Street this week, along the lines I detailed in this post - mainly how what was once a peaceful protest is in many instances degenerating into a struggle between the police and the movement. What sparked this line of thought was this article about "just how powerless citizens are when accosted by police officers—even when the cops themselves are clearly in the wrong." Long story short: Both a trial court and an appeals court convicted a black man who protested a policeman searching him even though he "was doing nothing wrong before the incident, [and that the courts recognized] it was illegal for the police to stop, detain, and search him." Even more disturbing, "The trial court, the appellate court, and the prosecution all concluded that these two cops broke the law, yet still, all three have deemed that the cops’ testimony is more credible than the testimony of Crossland, his cousin, and the other witnesses—none of whom was doing anything wrong before the confrontation."

It's important to keep this philosophy in mind when pondering ways to protest against the current conditions of, well, just about anything. In other words, if saying "Fuck this shit" sparks a severe beating for which there's no legal recourse, then i'm not surprised if citizens succumb to a bitter complacency or assume a posture of noncompliance. In America, where we are not only taught that our freedoms are special but endowed to us by our creator, this cognitive dissonance can really only last for so long. Combine this status with the increasingly powerful methods of control the state has at their disposal (see this post on The Soft-Kill Solution), and the quote at the top of this post becomes even more chilling.

The New Horror in Short Stories

2011-12-20T22:12:00.003-05:00

...I was beat. Arguing with the children, a trip to the dentist, then endless shopping for invisible things--toilet paper, glue, salt. Things no one ever knows are there until they're gone and are then needed desperately. An invisible day where you exhaust yourself running around, doing thankless errands that are necessary but meaningless: the housewife's oxymoron.

- Jonathan Carroll, "The Sadness of Detail", page 207 of Poe's Children.

Poe's Children is a compilation of what editor Peter Straub labels the "New Horror" - authors that strive to escape the ghettos of typical horror fiction in favor of "literature" (or at least genre mixing). Like all short story anthologies, not all of the stories are successful, even if they all are variations of a theme. So far, the ones that work for me are the ones that provoke a visceral reaction - either of horror, disgust, or wonder. To me, that's what horror as a genre is all about - lifting you out of he mundane world Carroll describes so aptly above. For example, Kelly Link's “Louise’s Ghost” is a story that's certainly interesting and has a fun conceit - the entire story is about two women both named Louise so it's difficult to tell who is doing or saying what for a while - but it didn't present any wow moments to me (unlike the other stories she presented in Stranger Things Happen). No, the strongest stories here either shock like Dan Chaon's “The Bees” (a truly disturbing tale of supernatural redemption) or present a situation to you in an entirely new way like Carroll's story or Elizabeth Hand's “Cleopatra Brimstone” (the best story i've read in 2001, hands down).

Still only halfway through the book, but so far it's half hits, half misses. A pretty good showing in my book. Hey, hitting .500 would win you the batting title and $250 million dollars, so Straub did something right!

Cross Posted at Reading, Running and Red Sox

Just Change Something

2011-12-20T11:30:00.002-05:00

“If you want to make enemies, try to change something.”
- Woodrow Wilson

What's the Deal with Christopher Hitchens?

2011-12-19T12:58:00.000-05:00

All of the blogs I follow regularly are very actively and eloquently eulogizing Christopher Hitchens. I personally don't know much about the guy, other than he was an atheist intellectual in a position to speak truth to power, something I will always applaud. Can someone fill me in on his best writings? I'm intrigued by the title of Letters to a Young Contrarian, but is there anything else I should check out?

It's Called an Open Mind

2011-12-19T12:51:00.001-05:00

Stubborn and ardent clinging to one’s opinion is the best proof of stupidity.

- Michel de Montaigne

Xmas Music

2011-12-18T14:10:00.001-05:00

The missus dropped me off early at the mall today so I could finish my Xmas shopping. The nice thing was that there were very few people there so I was able to do a quick in and out. The bad thing was that with so few people, I was able to hear more clearly the banal Christmas music that was being piped into every. single. store. Call me a Scrooge, but I think Christmas music is overplayed as it is, and I find it exhausting to be forced to listen to the same songs over and over. (Someone needs to write some new Christmas songs.Where's my drum n'bass Christmas album?) Having said that, Anthropologie actually did play some good music - beat heavy, and different arrangements of the "classic" songs made the music much less mind-numbing than normal.

POV French Skiing

2011-12-16T21:16:00.001-05:00

Time to get ready for winter!

Make Him Sorry!

2011-12-16T13:03:00.000-05:00

"Let us live so that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry,"

- Mark Twain

Why no Corporate Bankruptcy Stigma?

2011-12-15T21:44:00.000-05:00

James Surowieck , writing in the New Yorker, makes a good point about walking away from debts as a corporation and as a private person:

Paying your debts is, as a rule, a good thing. But the double standard here is obvious and offensive. Homeowners are getting lambasted for doing what companies do on a regular basis. Walking away from real-estate obligations in particular is common in the corporate world, and real-estate developers are notorious for abandoning properties that no longer make economic sense.

I had never really thought of this before, but Surowieck makes some really great points. He even offers a potential corporate/private solution to the dept issue:

They could have helped keep people in their homes by writing down mortgages (the equivalent of the restructuring that American Airlines’ debt holders will now be confronting). And there are plenty of useful ideas out there for how banks could do this without taxpayer subsidies and without rewarding the irresponsible. For instance, Eric Posner and Luigi Zingales, of the University of Chicago, suggest that, in exchange for writing down mortgages in hard-hit areas, lenders would take an ownership stake in a house, getting a percentage of the capital gain when it was eventually sold.

Songs of the Year

2011-12-15T15:06:00.001-05:00

It's that time of year when everyone writes their "best of" lists. I tend to find them annoying for many reasons: the arbitrary cut off date that tends to ignore things released earlier in the year, the notion that an entire year of a subject can be narrowed down to just a few items, etc. I could go on and on.

However, I do take the wintertime to reflect upon the recent past in order to determine what went well and what didn't. And since music is such a huge part of my life, I feel that I should share the songs that have changed my life for the better. So since I haven't been able to come up with a clever way of presenting them, i'm going to be lazy and present them as the best songs of the year.

Not all of these songs were released this year, but were new to me in 2011. Presented in no particular order:

Nothing Like You - Frightened Rabbit. A slice of perfect rock from this Scottish band served as the soundtrack for March and April. Still resides in my racing mix.
Young Blood - The Naked and Famous. A candidate for my favorite song of all time because it makes me happy every time I hear it. Thanks to K for this one!
zitunE by Innerfuze (unreleased). A beautiful lullaby to his young son that you want to continue forever.
Glowing Mouth - Milagres. Love that falsetto. The lyrics ain't bad either.
Manners - Icona Pop. Composed of a bunch of elements that feel like they shouldn't work together, this song sticks with you. For a while. Seriously, if you don't find yourself singing "There is no one like me" in the shower, there's something wrong with you.
Derezzed - Daft Punk (Remixed by The Glitch Mob) The Tron: Legacy movie got me back into Daft Punk. SGTMT points out that you should "listen to it on your earphones whilst marching through a crowded public space, preferably an airport or large train station terminus. Seriously, stomping speedily through Victoria Station listening to Derezzed or The Grid will make you feel like the terminator, and we should all feel like the terminator once in a while."
Nightwatch - Acrylics. Not blown away the first time I heard this, it really snuck up on me. Now it's one of my favorites.
Everything by Ulrich Schnauss. Not only did 2011 present me with the magisty of Far Away Trains Passing By but the pandora station created from Schnauss' music is stunning and serves as my morning and evening soundtrack just about everyday. Some of the best electronic music you'll ever hear.

What have you been listening to this year?

UPDATE: Forgot two excellent songs, as detailed here.

From One Cage to Another

2011-12-14T21:44:00.001-05:00

"What did it mean for a person to be free? she would often ask herself. Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren't you just in another, larger one?"
- Murakami, 1Q84, page 184

Time for another Tab Dump!

2011-12-14T10:21:00.002-05:00

I'm laid up today, recovering from a minor surgerical operation, and you benefit because it's gives me the time to present you with another tab dump! As always, i'd love to write more about these items but just haven't been able to scrape together the time.

Like TNC, I'd love for the iPad to have a real competitor, if only so that the prices might drop enough so that I could afford one. Alas, Jakob Nielsen, one of the best usability experts out there (highly recommend subscribing to his newsletter!) "denounced the [amazon] Fire, saying it offered 'a disappointinglypoor' experience. For users whose fingers are not as slender astoothpicks, he warned, the screen could be particularly frustrating tomanipulate. "I feel the Fire is going to be a failure," Mr. Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, a Silicon Valley consulting firm, said in an interview. "I can't recommend buying it."
Not that I’d ever watch the show, but pulling adverts from the All-American Muslim "reality" show just because the conservative Florida Family Association says that the show is “...propaganda that riskily hides the Islamic agenda's clear and present danger to American liberties and traditional values” is just madness. Shame on Lowes for succumbing tothe bigots.
Never underestimate the power of money when it comes tostealing personal and public property for private profit when naturalresources are involved. Case in point: Pennsylvania. As Atrios says: “My firstthought when I heard about the natural gas discoveries in PA was,'uhoh, we're fucked.'”
Harvard physicist Lisa Randall talks about extra dimensions:“There could be more to the universe than the three dimensions we are familiarwith. They are hidden from us in some way, perhaps because they're tiny orwarped. But even if they're invisible, they could affect what we actuallyobserve in the universe. There are lots of things we cannot see with the nakedeye that turn out to be based in reality. ... our idea is there's an extra dimension that'sso warped, the masses would be big in one place and small in another. In otherwords, gravity could be weaker in one place and stronger in another. If so, itcould be a natural explanation both for why particles masses are what they are,and why gravity is so much weaker than the other elementary forces we observe.”
How animals see color. The most interesting are birds:
“Birds… possess rich color vision, in many cases better than our own. Most birds have four cone visual pigments, although this varies. In general, birds have an additional ultraviolet pigment in their cones and many more cones than we have. Furthermore the visual pigments that would be similar to ours span different wavelengths. Their visual experience is richer than our own in ways impossible to describe or understand. Not only do they see more colors, but the interpretation of colors would be different. Think of combining different colors of paint—if you combine more colors radiating from the same object, like a flower, you will see different colors. A hummingbird, then, would see a red flower as a different color because of the ultraviolet channel input.
You may ask what good are these extra color channels in birds? Ofcourse, it’s hard to know completely since we can’t even understand theperception of the color “ultraviolet,” but here is an example. When a mouse isbeing hunted by a hawk, it will often urinate out of fear and to make itself aslight as possible for escape. Mouse urine radiates ultraviolet and thatactually helps the hawk follow the mouse trail. Fresher urine radiates moreultraviolet light. The ultraviolet arrow will point to lunch for the hawk.”
Sounds Good to Me Too - one of the best music blogs out there - have started to post their best albums of the year.
Why we invented monsters. This article is one big slice of awesome, combining a treasure trove of bizarre myths ("In Aboriginal myth, there is a creature with the body of a human, the head of a snake, and the suckers of an octopus") with an analysis of the best monster of all - the dragon. In short, "anthropologist David E. Jones argues that the image of the dragon is composed of the salient body parts of three predator species that hunted and killed our tree-dwelling African primate ancestors for about sixty million years ... the leopard, the python, and the eagle. ... ancient primates evolved alarm calls to identify each of the three predators, with each call triggering the defensive response appropriate to the nature of the attack mode of the specific predator. ... [these creatures] were merged into a hybrid creature that had the salient predatory features of each: the face of a feline, the body of a snake, and the talons of a raptor. ...Because the image combined features from three dominant predators, it could quickly send the neural message very dangerous animal."

Bio-engineering at a Massive Scale

2011-12-14T09:49:00.000-05:00

The Dish points us towards a real-life SciFi proposal from Libya that would

"...reverse global warming by turning the Sahara into a massive wind andsolar farm." It would consist of “dozens of enormous greenhouse-like structuresup to 15km in diameter built across the Sahara and Arabian deserts. Each wouldsuck in air, that would be heated and then escape at high speed through largeventing towers.
This“conversion of daylight into steady winds” would power rings of wind turbinesthat would, with the help of a huge global network of electricity connectors,generate enough power to end the world’s reliance on traditional fossil fuels.”

Global engineering at this scale has always fascinated me, but then I’ve always been obsessed with anything that sparks my sense of wonder. Still, while I agreewith Andrew’s take that “some kind of massive bio-engineering like this will likely behumankind's ultimate way of grappling with the stress our mass consumerism isplacing on the planet,” I’m also confident that our leaders won’thave the willpower to even attempt something at a large enough scale to make adifference until it’s just way too late.

Irritating Things

2011-12-09T10:58:00.001-05:00

The passing year --
irritating things
are also flowing water.

- Chiyo-ni

Money Man Brown

2011-12-08T15:25:00.001-05:00

As someone who ran quite infamously as a man who drove a beat up truck (and IMO not much else), Scott Brown sure has quickly turned into quite the money man:

Next week, Brown backers are slated to hold at least two fundraisers to fill the coffers of Scott PAC and his campaign. On Dec. 7, his campaign is hosting a money bash at the National Theater, where the play “Jersey Boys” is currently running. And on Dec. 11, Scott PAC is holding a fundraiser at Fed Ex Field when the Washington Redskins take on the New England Patriots. ...
Even though Brown’s campaign had over $10.5 million in the bank as of Sept. 30, lobbyists are in overdrive to raise millions more because [Elizabeth] Warren’s campaign is off to a fast start and a new poll shows her with a slight edge over Brown.
Deep-pocketed GOP allies such as Crossroads GPS, the Karl Rove-founded group backed by secret donors, have sought to help Brown with negative TV spots against Warren.

Brown's been trying to paint himself as a moderate ever since he entered office, and to the extent that he hasn't been associated with the Tea Party, he's succeeded. However, he's had an unimpressive term to date and speaks the same depressingly Randian language as just about every other Republican out there.

Elizabeth Warren and her progressive policies are just about everything that I hope for in a candidate. I'm excited to vote for her. Here's hoping that enough of my Massachusetts brethren feel the same.

Related Posts:
The Social Contract

Attention Republicans

2011-12-08T10:19:00.001-05:00

Your shtick was predicted a while back:

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

- Isaac Asimov, from a column in the 1/21/1980 issue of Newsweek.

Where's the Future?

2011-12-08T09:43:00.001-05:00

"The strange thing about the future is that it never seems to arrive. Every day you wake up and it's still the present."

- Andrew Marantz, from "A Rising Tide," an article about Tuvalu in the December 2011 issue of Harpers.

Productive Resistance

2011-12-05T12:13:00.001-05:00

The power of an idea can be measured by the degree of resistance it attracts.
- David Yoho

Theoretical Physicists Adventures Beyond the Multiverse

2011-12-04T07:39:00.001-05:00

"Over the centuries science has weakened the hold of religion, not by disproving the existence of God but by invalidating arguments for God based on what we observe in the natural world. The multiverse idea offers an explanation of why we find ourselves in a universe so favorable to life that does not rely on the benevolence of a creator, and so if correct will leave even less support for religion."
- Stephen Weinberg

Alan Lightman's "The Accidental Universe" in the December issue of Harpers is a godsend for those of us who, like me, are fascinated in the theoretical musings about physics and space but don't have the time nor math skills to follow the major texts. He not only provides clear, concise definitions of the latest theories - string theory, dark energy, the multiverse concept - but he also draws them together in order to paint a picture of the current state of the field. I recommend you read the whole thing, but in short a lot of signs are pointing towards our universe, with it's scientifically improbable conditions that support carbon-based life, is merely a cosmic accident, just one of billions of universes- one that happened to have the right amont of energy needed to sustain life. It's the cosmological version of the room full of monkeys banging on typewriters until they produce a work of Shakespeare.

This is interesting enough in itself, but Lightman points out an irony in modern theoretical physics. Basically, scientists who have devoted their lives to "explaining all of the properties of the universe in a few fundamental principles and parameters"- in other words, those who want to scientifically define "laws of nature that govern the behavior of all matter and energy" - find themselves stymied by the multiverse theory. The theory answers a lot of difficult cosmological questions, but it can't be proven because there's no known way to see or otherwise prove the existence these other universes. Thus, "to explain what [scientists] see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove." Which sounds very much like religion.

Has all of this scientific work merely brought us back to the same spot? Do we need to accept some things on blind faith, be it theological or cosmological? It's still too early to tell - these theories are all relatively new and time will tell what new information will turn up. But it's another interesting twist that make pondering the universe so fascinating.

Why Big Companies Die

2011-12-02T16:33:00.001-05:00

I found truth in this article by Peggy Noonan. She makes two basic points. One is from Steve Jobs:

[Jobs] has a theory about “why decline happens” at great companies: “The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesman, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues.” So salesmen are put in charge, and product engineers and designers feel demoted: Their efforts are no longer at the white-hot center of the company’s daily life. They “turn off.”

Noonan adds "accountants and the money men" to Jobs' theory:

...[they] search the firm high and low to find new and ingenious ways to cut costs or even eliminate paying taxes. The activities of these people further dispirit the creators, the product engineers and designers, and also crimp the firm’s ability to add value to its customers. But because the accountants appear to be adding to the firm’s short-term profitability, as a class they are also celebrated and well-rewarded, even as their activities systematically kill the firm’s future.

When the people that do the work aren't valued, then the products suffer, and what is a company without it's products? It's why I think Agile Scrum is such an effective software development process; by pushing decisions down to the lowest possible level, you let people who are actually informed about the subjects (the "boots on the ground") make informed decisions rather than choosing directions based on executive summaries or spreadsheets. While you have to be careful to keep the focus on the customer (don't let the Inmates Run the Asylum), Jobs demonstrated that keeping a company's focus on adding customer value - another goal of Agile Scrum - is a path to continued success.

Freeda Stations!

2011-12-02T15:52:00.001-05:00

Alyssa Rosenberg reminds me of one of the most infuriating topics around: paying big bucks to cable companies for hundreds of stations that you never watch. Her money quote:

...younger consumers who have decided that cable isn’t worth the money at all and are declining to subscribe in the first place, so they won’t replace older ones who are exiting the subscriber universe. That should be a much scarier proposition for the cable industry, but it’s an intriguing one for networks.
I remain pretty convinced that even if it takes a very long time to unbundle cable, and even if a bunch of networks die in the process, a move towards a more flexible (if not entirely a la carte) multi-platform system is inevitable. The idea that choice is paying for precisely what you want, rather than getting an enormous number of things — some of which you want and some of which you’d gladly see die in a fire — for your money seems pretty well-entrenched in the music industry now, and has always been the case for books.

Who's surprised that young folks aren't buying the crap that cable is providing? If Nexflix carried sports, i'd say ciao to my cable box in a heartbeat. As it is, both Comcast and Verizon make me pay extra (~$45 a month) for their "Basic Plus" package in order to get NESN for the Sox games. Do I watch anything else on Basic Plus? No. So why the fuck am I paying for them? A la carte pricing is the way to go! Or some form of subscription based model; i'd pay for a X amount of hours of streaming content from a range of stations Nexflix/Pandora-style. I'd even pay-per view - at least that way I knew my money was supporting the creation of something that I enjoyed. In fact, I'd take just about anything but the awful pricing tiers that are available now. I know i'm not the only one, so when it someone comes up with a viable alternative, cable's going to crash quickly - mark my words.

Update:
A Dish reader makes some great points:

The first that "The LA Times has a story today noting how ESPN's programming costs have increased 50% in five years. Consumers are paying for [programming cost increases without a] way to discipline the market and reject the price increases without dropping their entire cable package."

He also points out that without these artificial limitations, "I think you'd see some cable and satellite companies do some creative things – Pick 10 channels from this bucket for $5 bucks. Pick 25 for $15. Buy 10 from this bundle at $10. – Buy this bundle of sports channels that includes the NFL Network instead of making me pay a dollar a month to watch the Scouting Combine in the summer."

Mental Health Break

2011-12-02T14:38:00.001-05:00

Texts from Bennett. Gotta like any kid that names their stuffed bunny "hustla da rabbit"

Wonder Why so Many People Feel Bad About Themselves?

2011-12-02T11:28:00.001-05:00

Because print media uses Photoshop (in the past, airbrushes) to make people look more glamorous than they really are. Check out these before and after pictures. If you click the buttons quickly, you can see boobs grow, butts shrink, and facial lines disappear before your very eyes!

Personally, I think age lines and big butts are endearing signs of personality, but then i'm not trying to sell magazines either. What I find annoying is how many people spend incredible amounts of time, energy, and money trying to live up to impossible (because faked) ideals.

An Expression of Quiet Trouble

2011-11-30T14:57:00.001-05:00

As If
By J. Allyn Rosser

How do you explain why elephants
appear to move their unwieldy hulks
with greater dignity than most humans do
in their finest moments,
as if they had evolved beyond wanting
anything but what they have?
Why does the field begin to ripple
before the wind arrives in whispers,
as if there were a communication,
as if the landscape were poorly dubbed,
and we weren't expected to notice?
What butterfly does not dart away from us
as if it could sense our latent cruelties,
and yet return to check and double-check?
Has the night not gotten recently darker,
as if to insinuate that we have squandered
the light that was there?
Have we made too much of our own?
And did you notice afterward the dawn
opening up with a tentative eagerness
as if there were something crucial to illumine,
as if we would wake up early just to see it?
I imagine you reading this now
with an expression of quiet trouble
itself troubled by currents of hope,
as if you imagined me here with you,
as if I might be able to see your expression,
and at least answer it with mine.

Hat tip: TNC

Syllabus Porn

2011-11-29T08:31:00.001-05:00

IMO, this Katie Rophie article (despite it's caveats) goes a bit too far into DFW idolation, but it's still worth reading for a look at how refreshing his approach to even mundane topics was. Money quote:

Wallace is bringing to the endeavor rigorous Salingerish standards of not lying, or not being phony, that would reproach other more ordinary people if these standards did not border on parody, and were not expressed in such a good natured and honorable way.
Most of us operate on what Wallace elsewhere calls the “default setting;” we make a calculation about what is the right expenditure of energy for a syllabus; we make a sensible adult decision about preserving analytic brio for other things, and don’t think too much about it; we use the conventions, the years of worn-out tradition, as a shortcut to speed up communication.

Rock Opera!

2011-11-27T07:37:00.001-05:00

I've never really understood the obsession with calling rock musicals "Rock Operas." Like many musical arguments, the whole premise seems like a silly exercise in nomenclature to me. However, I do agree with the premise of this article that the Who's greatest musical is not the more highly rated Tommy, it's instead the magical, grandiose Quadrophenia. The two instrumentals alone are the best composed and played rock music i've ever heard, while side three - "5:15", "Sea and Sand", "Drowned", and "Bell Boy" - contains all members of the Who firing on all cylinders for the last time on album. I couldn't recommend listening to the album in it's entirety more.

Random Clustering

2011-11-27T07:29:00.001-05:00

The Melbourne Urbanist reminds us that random distributions are not evenly spread out - instead, they cluster together in groups because, as David Pinker notes in his book The better angels of our nature: why violence has declined, "it would take a non-random process to space them out. The human mind has great difficulty appreciating this law of probability".

Making Monotony Interesting

2011-11-22T22:13:00.001-05:00

I've been listening to Phil Manley's "Life Coach" recently and the phrase that comes to mind is "making monotony interesting." I mean that in the best way! The song starts off with a simple drum loop that is quickly joined by a relatively static electronic bass riff that rides out the whole song. Eventually, a guitar plays an ethereal riff for about a minute before moving to the same riff as the bass except that the notes go up and down the scale note by note. It sounds very much like Rainbow Dome Musick-era Steve Hillage (before he discovered drum kits and formed System 7).

The song itself is nothing special, but the combination of the sounds really does something to me. Perhaps it's the echo of the guitar that bounces off of the back of the soundstage of the song. Or perhaps it has something to do with Terry Riley.

From what I understand, Terry Riley's In C was one of the first "minimalist" compositions in that it consisted of musical stasis that gradually transforms itself into something different, often so subtly that you don't even notice it until things have changed.I think of "In C" a lot, even if I find the actual recording I have to be unlistenable. The theory is sound, I just feel that it works better with electronic instruments than in a classical orchestral setting. For example, Pete Townshend was thinking of Terry Riley when he wrote the famous - and kick-ass! - keyboard riffs of Who's Next (going so far as to name "Baba o'Riley" after the composer). I also hear Terry Riley in the Orb, in particular the amazing "oxbow lakes" off of Orbus Terrarum where the static piano riff slowly changes into something else as the electronic madness takes over...

The last example that comes immediately to mind is múm's "Slow Bicycle" that rides essentially the same riff for a good nine minutes but is mesmerizing all the same. Oh, and The Days Of Mars by Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom!

I could go on and on but my main point of this rambling post is that montonous music can be interesting if the musician gives you the space to ride the groove - and you accept it. And that following musical influences into the past is really a hell of a lot of fun.

OWS and Police Brutality

2011-11-22T14:43:00.001-05:00

I've been enjoying the story of the Occupy Wall Street movement the last few months. I think that the movement is important if only because it draws more attention to the huge issue of income inequality of this country.

However, i've been watching the increasing conflict between the police and the movement with dismay, not only because it's obviously horrible for all of the people involved but also because it dilutes the economic message of the movement. As Josh Marshall puts it:

"...something seemed to have changed in the previous couple weeks — basically that the dominant imagery had become about confrontations with the police rather than the core economic messages which had been more dominant previously. In most cases it didn’t seem to be the fault of the OWS protesters. It was peaceful or mainly peaceful protests getting met by excessive police responses. But still, at the level of imagery and message, the end result can be the same. ...

The issue of police brutality and militarized or quasi-militarized policing is a legitimate and very important issue, entirely unto itself. But the the campus police at Davis or the NYPD for that matter aren’t what’s driving the rising inequality of American society."

I hope that this trend doesn't continue, because IMO American inequality is the premier problem facing our country today. If it's not addressed soon, expect the unrest and strife to continue - and if anything, escalate.

That Demon Life

2011-11-18T11:35:00.001-05:00

Did you ever wake up to find
A day that broke up your mind
Destroyed your ntion of circular time

It's just that demon life has got you in its sway

Ain't flinging tears out on the dusty ground
For all my friends out on the burial ground
Can't stand the feeling getting so brought down

It's just that demon life has got you in its sway

There must be ways to find out
Love is the way they say is really strutting out

Hey, hey, hey now
One day I woke up to find
RIght in the bed next to mine
Someone that broke me up with a corner of her smile

It's just that demon life has got you in its sway

- "Sway", off of Sticky Fingers by the The Rolling Stones. Quite possibly the best song they've ever recorded. You simply have to listen to Mick Taylor's guitar work on this one. Powerful each and every time I've listened to it.

So You Want to Be a Writer

2011-11-16T12:01:00.001-05:00

So You Want To Be A Writer by Charles Bukowski

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

- Quibble: I'd argue that even the most inspired writing benefits from some rework and wordsmithing. But the sentiment still stands, and who can argue with the great line "the libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep over your kind."

What is Music?

2011-11-15T15:43:00.001-05:00

Music is the shorthand of emotion.
- Leo Tolstoy

Where Do You Buy Your Stuff?

2011-11-15T15:18:00.001-05:00

Grist has been doing an expose on Wal-Mart recently, and today's installment examines the poor quality of the stuff we're buying these days. Long story short: Wal-Mart profits from selling sheer volumes of stuff, so they induce manufacturers to cut corners to lower costs. These lower costs mean people buy more, but they also mean that the quality is lessened, so that stuff wears out faster, meaning you have to buy more stuff. Buying all this stuff at Wal-Mart gives them more control over the market, making the whole thing a vicious circle:

Prices on general household goods have fallen by about one-third since the mid-1990s. Given how awash in stuff we were in those boom years, it's shocking just how much more we buy now. Since 1995, the number of toasters and other small electro-thermal appliances sold in the U.S. each year increased from 188 million to 279 million. The average household now buys a new TV every 2.5 years, up from every 3.4 years in the early 1990s. We buy more than 2 billion bath towels a year, up from 1.4 billion in 1994. And on and on.
While there are certainly factors beyond Walmart that have contributed to this ever-expanding avalanche of consumption, the company has been a major driver of the trend.Its growth and profitability rest on fueling an ever-faster churn of products, from factory to shelf to house to landfill.
In a paper [PDF] that came out last year, three business professors illustrate how inducing manufacturers to cut product quality enhances Walmart's competitive position. "Because lower quality products are usually cheaper to produce, it is often argued that discount retailers induce lower quality in order to drive down prices. Our model suggests, however, that the competitive and bargaining position effects provide incentives to induce lower quality regardless of changes in production costs," the authors write. In other words, getting manufacturers to make shoddier products doesn't just mean that Walmart can offer super-cheap wares; it also helps Walmart marginalize its competitors and gain more dominance over its suppliers.

It's one of the reasons I never shop there.

Everything is Sub-division

2011-11-15T07:05:00.001-05:00

“It goes back,” he might have begun, “to the second Day of Creation, when ‘G-d made the Firmament, from the waters which were under the Firmament,’—thus the first Boundary Line. All else after that, in all History, is but Sub-Division.”
— Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, p.360–61

The Perils of Face Time

2011-11-15T06:53:00.001-05:00

I recently upgraded my iPhone to version 4 (not the version with Suri) and have been loving the new experience. However, one feature that I haven't even been tempted to try is FaceTime. Hell, I don't even like talking on the phone, much less doing it via video.

The FaceTime thing always reminds me of a wonderful riff from Infinite Jest where DFW details the quick rise and demise of video phones. Money quote:

The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, and (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech.

The whole section needs to be read in its entirety - it's easily one of the best portions of that over-long, frustrating, fascinating book - but you can read a brief excerpt at kottke.org here.

Opting Out of Air Travel

2011-11-14T20:53:00.001-05:00

TNC, with his usual eloquence, explains one of the reasons why he's choosing not to fly these days:

Finally there is the fact that, as much as possible, I should avoid supporting airline travel in its current American iteration. As I said before I don't do this expecting any kind of policy change--but The God of Policy is not omnipotent. I expect an end to that sick feeling I get whenever I see passengers arbitrarily herded into full-body scans, or stranded on runways for hours, or yanked from their seats and stripped searched. There is still value in looking oneself in the mirror--whatever one might hope to see. Thoughtful resistance, in and of itself, is valuable.

That's so well put I would only add to it the monetary factor: air travel is certainly not as inexpensive or convenient as it used to be. Given these facts, who can fault anyone for choosing to drive, take the train, or forgo the trip altogether?

We Are the Robots

2011-11-14T12:28:00.001-05:00

My son Hunter has become obsessed with robots. If you've spent any time at all on this site, you know that that makes the SciFi nerd in me very happy. We've recently spent a few happy hours looking at the robot pictures in Stanislaw Lem's Cyberiad and talking about the different mecha in my old copy of Robotech Art 1. But in perhaps the happiest development i've discovered that I can head off tantrums by putting on Kraftwerk's The Man-Machine. Now we roll by marching around the house chanting "We are the Robots." It's a good life.

Not a story?

2011-11-07T23:11:00.001-05:00

"But this is not a story. We're talking about the real world."
Tamaru narrowed his eyes and looked hard at Aomame. Then, slowly opening his mouth, he said, "Who knows?"

- Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, p. 326

Morphing Starlings

2011-11-07T09:26:00.003-05:00

An incredible morphing collection of startling formations. Thanks to the Dish for pointing it out!

Sunday Time

2011-11-06T20:56:00.001-05:00

Time flows in strange ways on Sundays, and sights became mysteriously distorted.
- Haruki Murakami, 1Q84, page 153

Whether Announcing Despair or Affirmation

2011-11-05T21:39:00.001-04:00

Whether announcing despair or affirmation, American Realist art in the 20th century is a persistent effort to discover what position man occupies in a world he has brilliantly transformed but often seems unable to control.

- William Kloas

Six Months After

2011-11-04T14:27:00.002-04:00

Incredible photos of northeast Japan during, 3 and 6 Months after the terrible earthquake and tsunami.

Refreshing the Tree of Liberty

2011-11-03T12:39:00.001-04:00

“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which iswrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the factsthey misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions,it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. …And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are notwarned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit ofresistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right asto the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lostin a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed fromtime to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.It is its natural manure.”
- Thomas Jefferson

It's a powerful quote that speaks truth but has been used dangerously over the last few years. In the case of Greece and the decisions being made by the European Union without the explicit consent of the governed, I fear that that the people are about to take to arms and remind people about the inherit messiness of democracy.

Update: To clarify, i'm not advocating revolution. I just don't understand how the EU can continue to dictate terms to its member states - each ostensibly with their own sovereignty! - without going to the people for accountability. The collapse of the Greek Referendum today shows that it's not going to happen anytime soon, which, as Andrew Sullivan writes:

"...there are also profound long-term risks in pushing for the deeper European integration required of this crisis without popular, democratic consent. ... We're already seeing the paradox of accelerating the loss of sovereignty past the popular national will: you actually increase nationalism and division, rather than ameliorating them. In other words, the EU begins to defeat its own reason for existing."

Pictures of Halloween Past

2011-11-01T21:57:00.001-04:00

A wonderful collection of pictures from old Halloween nights. Beautiful in it's artlessness.

Halloween as Religion

2011-11-01T10:22:00.002-04:00

Starhawk reminds us of the pagan traditions of this most excellent holiday:

For Witches, for those who practice the renewal of the ancient, pre-Christian Goddess religions of Europe and the Middle East, Halloween is our most sacred holiday, our New Year. In Celtic Ireland, Wales and Scotland, Samhain, pronounced ‘sau-in’, was the time when the sheep and cattle were brought down from the summer fields, when the harvest was gathered in and the dark time of year began. The fruits of the harvest, the blessing of the year’s abundance, was shared with the ancestors in the form of offerings which have come down to us in modern times as the candy we give to children-who are the ancestors returning.
Harvest is a time of ending, but also a time of beginning, for the Goddess stands for the great regenerative powers of nature. Out of darkness, light will be born anew. Out of the time of cold and dormancy, new life will return. Death is part of a cycle that brings about rebirth.

In that sense, the witches celebration of Halloween is very Buddhist: not to become too saddened by death, for out of every ending arises yet another beginning, regardless of how difficult it is to see at the time.

And what a celebration it is! Easily my favorite time of year.

Who Controls Trick or Treat?

2011-10-31T13:23:00.003-04:00

I always just assumed that Trick or Treating was something that just happened, not something that was organized by someone. Well, according to the Boston Globe, many communities around Boston are cancelling or postponing Trick or Treating due to the damage wrought by this weekend's snowstorm (at least 500,000 houses were without power as of 9:00 this morning).

Something tells me the older kiddos will be outside regardless of what their local governments say. Regardless, i'm happy my town's festivities are not on the list - i'll be putting on my vampire makeup shortly after 5:00 PM!

The Mystic Withdraws into Danger

2011-10-30T15:46:00.001-04:00

"By withdrawing from the world, the mystic, far from escaping from temptation, opens himself to the encounter with evil in its purest form: as it arises from within."

- MacGregor, writing about Henry Darger

First Lines of 1Q84

2011-10-29T22:16:00.001-04:00

"The taxi's radio was tuned to a classical FM broadcast. Janáček's Sinconietta--probably not the ideal music to hear in a taxi caught in traffic. The middle-aged driver didn't seem to be listening very closely either. With his mouth clamped shut, he stared straight ahead at the endless line of cars stretching out on the elevated expressway, like a veteran fisherman standing in the bow of his boat, reading the ominous confluence of two currents. Aomame settled into the broad back seat, closed her eyes, and listened to the music."

- Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Loving what I've read so far!

First Lines of Negotiating with the Dead

2011-10-26T10:01:00.000-04:00

Writing, Writers, The Writing Life--if this last is not an oxymoron. Is this subject like the many-headed Hydra, which grows two other subtexts as soon as you demolish one? Or is it more like Jacob's nameless angel, which whom you must wrestle until he blesses you? Or is it like Proteus, who must be firmly grasped through all of his changes? Hard to get hold of, certainly. Where to start? At the end called Writing? Or the end called The Writer? With the gerund or the noun, the activity or the one performing it? And where exactly does one stop and the other begin?

- Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead

For more on this fascinating woman, you have to see her take on the hockey goalie.

Cross posted at Reading, Running and Red Sox.

Only the Best SciFi

2011-10-25T21:07:00.000-04:00

bestsfbooks.com: a site that compiles the most critically acclaimed SciFi out there.

Of the top ten, i'd love to read China Miéville's Kraken, although i've heard its humor is a bit obscure, and William Gibson's zero history, because there's always something interesting going on in a Gibson novel.

I haven't heard of any of the rest - i'm not as up on my SciFi as I used to be! - but judging buy the covers and titles, Tricia Sullivan's Lightborn, Nnedi Okorafor's Who Fears Death? and Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe all look good, although the latter has the possibility of being too postmodern for it's own good.

Writing Fiction in Four Easy Steps!

2011-10-25T16:36:00.000-04:00

Teresa at Making Light has a a simple four-item formula for turning story into fiction:

Move and keep moving.
Make it consequential.
Recycle your characters.
See if you already have one.

Details here. Like anything complicated, this simplifies the matter entirely, but could serve as a good jumping off point. Plus, as a commenter notes, it's usually a good idea to know what the rules are - or to at least think about them! - before deciding to break them.

Tough Phantoms

2011-10-25T09:24:00.001-04:00

"It is far harder to kill a phantom than reality."

- Virginia Wolff. Perspective and full quote here.

Related post: "I have done that"

Capitalism vs. Too Big to Fail

2011-10-24T20:55:00.000-04:00

I love Tim Carney's argument:

These banks' credit is rated higher than they would be in a free market, meaning they profit from the expectation of a bailout, if necessary. So banks profit largely through activities that do not create value or efficiencies. They profit through financial games that rest on government favors. Many Occupy Wall Street protestors demonize all profit. Conservatives defend profit-seeking as the engine that creates prosperity for all of society. But the big banks have rigged the game so that they profit without creating value. In fact, they profit from activities that weaken the economy by creating instability.

Hat Tip the Daily Dish.

The Language of Visual Symbols

2011-10-24T14:31:00.000-04:00

I've always been interested by good design, both in the real world (The Design of Everyday Things is an incredible book) and in the use of symbols to depict data, and so I read a NYTimes review of newly published design books called "The Design of Symbols" with great interest. Without this, I never would have known that one man laid the foundation for an innumerable amount of instantly recognizable graphic icons: Otto Neurath, who developed a “system of sign symbols, which became known as the International System of Typographic Picture Education (Isotype)". Money Quote:

Neurath may not be a household name, but he is a major figure in the world of visual statistics. [Each of his] primary concerns: community, democracy and globalism... contributed to a narrative that Neurath believed could be made more transparent by the application of his pictures. Man “receives his education in the most comfortable of means, partly during his periods of rest, through optical impressions,” he wrote. According to Vossoughian, he believed that “the dissemination of images or pictures could foster Bildung, that is, education and self-actualization.”
One of the best examples of how Isotype symbols were used to raise popular awareness is to be found in “Modern Man in the Making,” Neurath’s opus, published by Knopf in 1939; it beautifully demonstrates his means of presenting otherwise impenetrable data in bite-size, though not dumbed-down, nuggets, with layouts that are clean, crisp and easy on the eye. In his own book, Vossoughian makes clear that Neurath was the father of the current trend in information graphics, in print and on the Web, and that the prototypes he created are still as timely as ever.

This sounds incredible, and could be really useful to me in my everyday work as an Instructional Designer. Also, as I get older, I'm fascinated about the back stories of everyday items that people all take for granted. There's a huge amount of hidden history in just about everything. Here, the review notes that iconic symbols like the CBS "eye" and the IBM corporate logo achieve their power partly due to the foundation that Neurath laid. I'll have to read up more on this, and regret that I don't have the time to learn about all of these backstories!

First Lines of Idoru

2011-10-24T14:01:00.002-04:00

“After Slitscan, Laney heard about another job from Rydell, the night security man at the Chateau. Rydell was a big quiet Tennessean with a sad, shy grin, cheap sunglasses, and a walkie-talkie screwed permanently into one ear.
‘Paragon-Asia Dataflow,’ Rydell said, around four in the morning, the two of them seated in a pair of huge old armchairs. Concrete beams overhead had been hand-painted to vaguely resemble blond oak. The chairs, like the rest of the furniture in the Chateau lobby, were oversized to the extent that whoever sat in them seemed built to a smaller scale.”

- William Gibson, from Idoru

A Baby has No Subvert Life

2011-10-21T21:42:00.001-04:00

"A baby has no subvert life, and by comparison everyone else you know seems cloaked, muffled, and full of sad little tricks."

- Michael Cunningham, from A Home at the End of the World

Generation X is Sick of Your BS

2011-10-21T16:03:00.002-04:00

A wonderful rant from Mat Honan.

Owl Attack!

2011-10-21T14:29:00.003-04:00

I've always been very impressed with the visual appearance of owls ever since I was a 12 year old walking alone in the woods and witnessing - and being scared witless by! - an owl silently snatching a mouse 20 yards away from me. All I heard was the snapping of the mouse's neck. And this is what the poor mouse must have seen in the last minutes of its life.

And the owls are not what they seem.

Complementary Tastes

2011-10-21T13:10:00.000-04:00

For you cooks out there, a ginormous graphic depicting all of the complementary cooking flavors. I think i'm going to use this as wallpaper for my kitchen.

Who are We?

2011-10-21T11:24:00.002-04:00

“Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.”

- Italo Calvino, espousing the idea that we're all a mash-up of our experiences, a viewpoint that I do not disagree with.

Memory

2011-10-20T16:48:00.000-04:00

“Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased."

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Murakami's Boundaries

2011-10-19T14:39:00.002-04:00

I’ve often read that a good deal of Haruki Murakami’s writing is powerful because it evokes many unconscious trends of Japanese society. Without knowing much about Japan, it’s hard for me to speak to that, although it might explain away the strange underpinnings of his more abstract books. Personally, I find the subtle dark undertones of his writing to be mesmerizingly suggestive, but find that it's powerful because of this lack of specificity, not in spite of it. It's with this in mind that I ponder his obsession with boundaries. Boundaries between the real and the imaginary, boundaries between good and evil, boundaries between the certain and the uncertain.

His most famous boundary is the doorway that exists between the bottom of a dried up well and the mysterious hotel room in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, but it doesn’t take a lot of deep reading to find equivalencies in his other books. The most obvious one is spelled out in the title of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World in that most of the novel is about the journey between those two realities. I won’t bore you with more examples but pick up any one of his books and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

His 2007 novel After Dark is no exception. In fact, this short novel almost explicitly deals with the barriers between two states of being. These include:

The city before and after trains: “Between the time the last train leaves and the first train arrives, the place changes: it’s not the same as in daytime.” (p. 55)
Eri’s journey out of the “sleep coma” that she’s been in for the last few months
Takihashi’s speech about criminals vs. non-criminals: “[The criminals] live in a different world, they think different thoughts, and their actions are nothing like mine. Between the world they live in and the world I live in there’s this thick, high wall.” (p. 91)
One side of the mirror vs. another: Both Mari (p.63) and Shirakawa (p.127) occasionally have reflections that stay in the mirror after they have left the room – and Shirakawa’s reflection even does things that he does not!
Takahashi’s music: “You send the music deep enough into your heart so that it makes your body undergo a kind of a physical shift, and simultaneously the listener’s body also undergoes the same kind of physical shift. It's giving birth to that shared state.” (p. 88)
Night vs. Day “The new day is almost here, but the old one is still dragging its heavy skirts. Just as ocean water and river water struggle against each other at a river mouth, the old time and the new time clash and blend. Takahashi is unable to tell for sure which side – which world – contains his center of gravity.” (p. 173P

I could go on and on. The entire book is almost a meditation on complimentary opposites, ying and yang swimming both with and against each other. He even writes very evocatively of what it might take to truly be transported from one side to the other (a description of Eri’s journey through the TV screen that starts on page 102). All of these musings come to a head during this remarkable passage:

“What we see now is a gigantic metropolis waking up. Commuter trains of many colors move in all directions, transporting people from place to place. Each of those under transport is a human being with a different face and mind, and at the same time each is a nameless part of the collective entity. Each is simultaneously a self-contained whole and a mere part. Handling this dualism of theirs skillfully and advantageously, they perform their morning rituals with deftness and precision: brushing teeth, shaving, tying neckties, applying lipstick. They check the morning news on TV, exchange words with their families, eat, and defecate.

With daylight, the crows flock in, scavenging for food. Their oily black wings shine in the morning sun. Dualism is not as important an issue for the crows as for the human beings."

So what is it about Japanese society that fuels this obsession with boundaries? Again, I don’t feel qualified to speak: I’m on the far side of yet another boundary in that Murakami’s message is coming to me not only across cultures but also through the filter of a translator. It's a fascinating obsession, and I'm in awe not only that so much of his message gets through, but at how powerful it remains after repeated readings.

Cross-posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox.

Rock n' Roll Marriage

2011-10-18T22:37:00.003-04:00

Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon have split. Well, crap. A somewhat pretentious take in Grantland here.

I've always been amazed with musicians that could work so closely with people that they are close to. Bands like the Kinks, The Black Crowes and the Cowboy Junkies always seemed to feed of the intense connection between the siblings and the tension that arises from all of their history together. I certainly could never imagine embarking on any creative endeavor with anyone from my immediate family. But this pales in comparison to a marriage, where you don't have that bond of blood between you - just what you have in common (or not!) and this crazy little thing called love. In the few instances that I can think of, married musicians or lovers have flamed out quickly (while often leaving impressive results, like Richard and Linda Thompson's Shoot out the Lights). Thurston and Kim always seemed like they would survive that, having been married for 24 (!) years while working together in a relevant band, raising a child, and (from what I understand) serving as unofficial music patrons for Northampton. I'm sad to see that their relationship didn't survive.

Presented without Comment

2011-10-18T13:28:00.002-04:00

Decades Old Calvin and Hobbes Strip Succinctly Explains Occupy Wall Street Movement