Tab Dump

As always, interesting articles and posts that i've read but haven't had the time to intelligently comment on.

• Yogasm? Really? For women only, alas.
• How to best deal with the inevitable fact that we're going to die someday? Denial! Or, more specifically Courageous Denial:
  "If all our character is a lie, created to keep us from recognizing the circumstances of our existence, then we can choose our own course.  We can choose to love, live, work, and play because those things matter to us.  We need not be bound to scorn, or to roll the Sisyphean rock at all.  We can altogether forget about the absurdity and live happy, well-adjusted lives.  And what’s more courageous than that?"
• Why it's important to log out of facebook, and clear your cookies, to avoid the social media monster tracking your movements elsewhere on the web.
• I, too, dig female voices with my indie rock. And Metric kicks it for me every time.
• The first step towards "reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories"
• Is love an Art? Yes, methinks.
• Amanda Alinehan points us to the Joy of Desire. Money quote:
• "If you’ve ever been in a power struggle with a 5 year old, you know the lengths that kids will go to in order to get what they want.  Children are much more closely connected with their desires than adults are, and have no shame in trying to fulfill them.
  What if you could connect with your desires that way?  To know what you wanted and to have no shame in wanting to fulfill it.  That would make you a powerful force in the world – for yourself and for others."
• An overview of the Transcendental Meditation resurgence, as led by the David Lynch Foundation. Yes, that David Lynch. Never tried it myself, but i'm intrigued.

Last but not least, we visit the tired "9/11 changed everything" department, where we find John Freeman pronouncing the death of the "'Systems Novel' - a novel [that] bulges and hums with a theory of how the world is run: the market economy and the economy of language - the twin broadcast networks of global power." He writes that these types of books from Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo and DFW "create what Fredric Jameson described as ''the spectacle of a world from which nature as such has been eliminated, a world saturated with messages and information, whose intricate commodity network may be seen as the very prototype of a system of signs.'' Freeman claims that "In one hour, Osama bin Laden proved that a spectacle could be more powerful than any narrative, especially in a world in which signs and symbols traveled much faster than words and stories."

It's an interesting claim, I guess, and might explain why there's been a dearth of "big novels" recently, but I do need to point out that DeLillo himself explicitly made this same point in Mao II where he claims that the novelist is being supplanted by the terrorist. To me, this type of hair splitting is meaningless: people will always continue to write in order to make sense of the world, terrorists or not. Whether or not people read them or not is another matter. People may for the moment be paying attention to the terrorist, but i'd be shocked if narrative didn't make a mainstream comeback in the future.

Earth from Orbit

The view from the International Space Station. A stunning video.

Wharton's Writing

TNC has been writing recently about how great Edith Wharton's prose is. Specifically, he's enamored with The Age of Innocence, which I read in college back before I knew anything about life. I should read it again at some point, but his writings were fresh in my head when I encountered a copy of her novel Twilight Sleep novel at the local library sale, inspiring me to toss down the 50 cents for the softcover.

While i'm only three chapters in, I  already wouldn't characterize it as a great book - the mere fact that it's about the upper-crust of NYC society in the Jazz Age means that it's basically antithetical to what I look for in a book - but my oh my has she presented some great turns of phrase so far. To wit:

"But she had had glimpses enough of the scene: of the audience of bright elderly women, with snowy hair, eurhythmic movements, and finely-wrinkled over-massaged faces on which a smile of glassy benevolence sat like their rimless prince-nez. They were all inexorably earnest, aimlessly kind and fathomlessly pure; and all rather too well-dressed, except the “prominent woman” of the occasion, who usually wore dowdy clothes, and had steel-rimmed spectacles and straggling wisps of hair. Whatever the question dealt with, these ladies always seemed to be the same, and always advocated with equal zeal Birth Control and unlimited maternity, free love or the return to the traditions of the American home; and neither they nor Mrs. Manford seemed aware that there was anything contradictory in these doctrines. All they knew was that they were determined to force certain persons to do things that those persons preferred not to do. Nona, glancing down the surried list, recalled a saying of her mother’s former husband, Arthur Wyant: 'your mother and her friends would like to teach the whole world how to say its prayers and brush its teeth.'" p. 11

"Poor Arthur—from the first he had been one of her failures. She had a little cemetery of them—a very small one—planted over with quick-growing things, so that you might have walked all through her life and not noticed there were any graves in it." p. 25

I'm not sure i'm going to make it all the way through this one, but I've sure enjoyed what I've read so far. What more do you want out of a book?

Cross-posted at Reading, Running and Red Sox.

A Separate Internet

The New Yorker reports on where Facebook is going:

The longtime goal of Facebook, and of founder Mark Zuckerberg... has been to build a separate Internet. ... In the minds of people who work at Facebook, there’s the cold, confusing, open Internet that is managed by Google and its algorithms. You go there and you never quite know what you’re going to get. And then there’s the Facebook sub-Internet, where everything is kinder and organized by your friends.
... if Facebook gets its way, it’ll be where you read your news, find new songs, and watch video. It will have eaten a big chunk of the rest of the Internet.

Personally, I don't have any interest in this. Other than catching up and sharing tidbits about my life with friends, I find myself becoming increasingly tired of Facebook, especially its hard to use mobile interface.

Watching "The Girl..." Movies

Over the last few weeks, I watched the Swedish versions of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire. Excellent, captivating movies! I found the lack of qualities that are present in most American blockbusters refreshing, mainly the absence of bombastic music in favor of subdued mood music with downtempo stylings, and the complete lack of violence glorification.

I recommend both movies highly, but must warn you: both of them are damned dark. One of the major themes of the trilogy of books and movies is that "everyone has secrets." This is certainly true enough, but in this world  "secrets" involve murder, violent rape, sex trafficking, theft, and other assorted evil and venial crimes. I'm not sure if this says something about Sweden, or the mindset of Stieg Larsson (the author, who was a newspaper reporter and thus probably saw his fair share of awful situations), but I was struck how few positive notes were struck throughout the movies. The few moments of positivity that shone through were hard fought and short living. Other then that caviat, these well constructed flicks are well worth your time.

The Milky Way from 15,000 Feet

The Milky Way by  Anton Jankovoy c. Caters

An incredible picture of the Milky Way, taken by Ukranian photographer Anton Jankovoy in Nepal. More of his pictures here. So see the larger version - the picture here really doesn't do it justice.

The Social Contract

The current political climate needs more truth speakers like Elizabeth Warren:

I hear all this, you know, “Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.”—No!
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.
You built a factory out there—good for you! But I want to be clear.
You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for.
You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.
You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.
You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.
Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea—God bless. Keep a big hunk of it.
But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.