Little Women syndrome

Of course there's a Sex and the City promotional campaign by a vodka company that features designer mixed drinks themed to each character, so if you're a Charlotte you can have this obnoxiously sweet mixed drink, and if you're a Carrie you can have that obnoxiously sweet mixed drink. If you're a Miranda you can have this slightly less sweet mixed drink. I knew plenty of people in college who identified with one of the four characters on the show; I once insisted to one my students who asked that everyone at Barnard identified most with Miranda, even though both of us knew that was a lie. I didn't watch the show until after college and find it irredeemably sad unless I'm watching it with other people... other Mirandas, I guess. She's the only one I find sympathetic. And actually I enjoy the show sometimes.

I had my own 19th-century version of the which-character-are-you game: Little Women Syndrome, in which every time I'm in a group of four women, I cast us into the roles of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. The affliction struck me when I was fourteen and saw the amazing Gillian Armstrong film with my three cousins, and the four of us fit pretty well into the four characters. I'm always Jo. There can be more than one of each character present.

My college roommate, who remains one of my closest friends, was a Beth. In a good way. She got really mad when she found out--or as mad as a Beth can get--and retaliated by coming up with The Robber Bride game, in which she cast us into the roles of the wronged women of Margaret Atwood's novel. She got to be the shy, brilliant war historian Tony and made me Roz, the blowzy businesswoman. We knew a Zenia and a Charis, too. I was kind of bitter about it until I realized that Roz and I had more in common than I thought. There's a funny scene in the novel where Roz hears Tony use the phrase "crossing the Rubicon" and imagines a lipstick line based on names for rivers:

Then it comes to Roz in a flash of light--what a great lipstick name! A great series of names, names of rivers that have been crossed, crossed fatefully; a mix of the forbidden, and of courage, of daring, a dash of karma. Rubicon, a bright holly-berry. Jordan, a rich grape-tinged red. Delaware, a cerise with a hint of blue--though perhaps the word itself is too prissy. Saint Lawrence--a fire-and-ice hot pink--no, no, out of the question, saints won't do. Ganges, a blazing orange. Zambezi, a succulent maroon. Volga, that eerie purple that was the only shade of lipstick those poor deprived Russian women could lay their hands on for decades,--but Roz can see a future for it now, it will become avant-retro, a collector's item, like the statues of Stalin.

Roz carries on with the conversation, but in her head she's furiously planning. She can see the shots of the models, how she wants them to be seductive, naturally, but challenging too, a sort of meet-your-destiny stare. What was it Napoleon crossed? Only the Alps, no memorable rivers, worse luck. Maybe a few snippets from historical paintings in the background, someone waving a gusty, shredded flag, on a hill--it's always a hill, never for instance a swamp--with smoke and flames boiling around. Yes! It's right! This will go like hotcakes! And there's one final shade needed, to complete the palette: a sultry, brown, with a smouldering, roiling undernote. What's the right river for that?

Styx. It couldn't be anything else.

I have two eyeliners, black and brown, and am tearfully inept when it comes to any other makeup--which ruins the eyeliner--but I do love to look at the names of the lipsticks at Duane Reade. I found a whole lip gloss line based around islands (Bali, Curacao, Madeira) one day, and dances (cha cha, foxtrot, salsa) another time. Then I found out something even more important: lip gloss is vile.

I love how Atwood kicks up the 1980s feminist critique of the L'Oreal intersection of consumerism and imperialism to the satire of imagining a campaign based on full-fledged military battles: We are trafficking in exoticism; the colonial past is the present in the names of all the reds such as Indochine Red and Caribbean Pink. What's the relationship between quashing Third World revolutions and the militaristic language of skincare "regimes" and eliminating "free radicals"? OMG this stuff is amazing and I used believe all of it. If you gave Tyra Banks The Robber Bride, she'd do Rubicon-Delaware-Styx as an ANTM photo shoot in a second.

The architecture of Santiago Calatrava

A few weeks ago I visited Chicago for the first time, and loved its variety of architecture and the ease of viewing the city from its branching river. (You can take an excellent boat tour with an architecture historian.)

Apparently the big story in Chicago architecture now is Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire, which will be North America's tallest building at 150 floors -- almost all of them residential.

The design follows most closely Calatrava's "Turning Torso" tower in Malmo, Sweden, so-called because he based it on his abstract sculptures of twisting male torsos. (Read the always-excellent architecture critic Paul Goldberger's piece on the building.)

The sculpture:



The tower:



The lower section of the Chicago Spire will resemble the Turning Torso very closely:



...while the top, originally designed with a separate, thin spire...



...will instead come to a twisting point reminiscent of fractals or occurrences of Fibonacci sequence in natural forms like pine cones:



The tower also, unmistakably and unfortunately (fortunately?) resembles a giant dildo, and 10,000+ Google results think so too:



He's also at work on another apartment building based on another of his sculptures of a torso:



Note the sculpture's clear suggestion of genetalia at the bottom, which was omitted from the tower's design:



This building will be in lower Manhattan, and I bet it'll become iconic -- I hope more so than the disappointingly dull Freedom Tower.

Let's keep going.

In the early 1990s Calatrava designed the "City of Arts and Sciences" in Valencia, Spain. (I've written before that Valencia is one of my favorite places on earth, not least of all because its dry riverbed has been turned into a miles-long park filled with soccer fields, Calatrava's museums, and a playground where kids climb all over a giant, tied-down Lemuel Gulliver.)

Calatrava's eye-shaped building houses the Planetarium for the Museum of Science. This iconic building is called L'Hemisfèric (if that sounds more French than Spanish to you, remember that this the official local language is Valenciano, aka Catalan):




Looking up from the nearby walkway, L'Umbracle (which, like the english umbrella, means something like "provider of shade"), a tree-lined promenade which nicely covers and hides the parking lot beneath it.



As I discovered when I stumbled onto them while chain-smoking my way through Valencia, this building and its environs make for magical strolling. It's hard to get a sense of how nicely the complex nestles in the city's riverbed from all the side view photos. This aerial view from Google Maps gives you some sense of the project's large size, yet perfect fit within the riverbed (the light blue parts are reflecting pools):



Close up, the buildings have design details that surprise me, because they shift at times from the sort of clean utopian industrial look that Calatrava has been making so popular to other, very different forms. For instance, this photo of Calatrava's main museum building reminds me strongly of Gaudi, whose effort to create a Catalunyan style I imagine Calatrava meant to pay homage to:



But not all Calatrava work fits its environment so well. A very recent His Milwaukee Art Museum design is, in my opinion, just the sort of design that looks light and new in renderings but heavy and overwrought and cumbersome in reality, like much of the 1970s architecture scattered around Cambridge, Mass, my hometown.



Inside the building, though, the architecture creates some magical spaces:



I'm also not so hot for the overall look of hisTenerife Opera House in the Canary Islands:



I appreciate the echoing of Jorn Utzon's Sydney Opera House, but that overhanging leaf (or helmet plume, or Darth Vader chamber hatch) feels forced to me. (Then again, maybe I should shut up until I have the chance to see these in person.)

Whether or not the outside works, again, there is undeniable beauty inside. Here is a shot of the auditorium:



The curtain that is folded above the stage is a semi-solid wall; it borrows on his design eight years earlier of loading doors at the Ernsting Warehouse in Coesfeld, Germany. Here is one of those doors, in three stages of opening:





I appreciate about this, among much of Calatrava's work, that its brilliance is an accessible one that a child could understand, not one that requires justification with theory and verbiage. You can imagine, for example, a child's imagination lighting up at Calatrava's forthcoming (I believe) Woodall Rodgers Extension Bridge in Dallas:



Even when the structure's form is not so easily digestible, this playfulness is present. Below are shots of the Calatrava's Bodegas Ysios in Laguardia, Spain. This is a building about which I cannot pretend to form an opinion without seeing firsthand, which is exciting:




His Oriente Station in Lisbon is thematically similar to the City of Arts and Sciences:



Of his design tropes, I am least interested in the style he used for the Milwaukee Museum, but I think it succeeds in his design of three similar bridges near each other that pass over the Hoofdvaart river in the Netherlands (one is shown here):



He is also using a blend of this sort of spiny motif and the steel arches from the City of Arts and Sciences in his design for the new World Trade Center transportation hub entrance. Mockups make it seem it won't look as good as his signature ribbing at the BCE Place Galeria in Toronto:



If you're interested in seeing other contemporary designs of completed buildings, take a quick look at the excellent page of important new works in architecture put together by Triton College architecture prof Frank Heitzman.

And I can't help but include this design of a Volkswagon prototype, the "Viseo", by Marc Kirsch, which he says was inspired by Calatrava's designs:


Frankly, if a few ripples frozen in aluminum are all it takes to make something an homage to Calatrava, make mine the much-maligned BMW Z4:

Mysterious manuscrpts, vol. 3: Riverside relics

My Barnard classmate, Lily Koppel, published a book this spring called The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life through the Pages of a Lost Journal. I've only met Lily once, at the English majors reception at graduation, but I was surprised to find out in the preface to this book that, for our first apartments after college, we both rented rooms from eccentric older women on Riverside Drive. She lived at Riverside and 82nd in a fabulous old building famed for its literary occupants. Her elderly roommate greeted her with Brie, crackers, and grapes, which she served with silver Victorian grape scissors. I had no idea such things ever existed until I read the book yesterday--now I can't think of any kitchen utensil I want more in the entire world. And don't need. One day, she walked out of the marble lobby of the building to find that the building was throwing out several old steamer trunks which had been left in storage for many years. She opened the trunks to find old flapper dresses, men's hats, delicate antique purses, and other amazing items. She retrieved an old diary from the trunks and began to investigate the life of its author, a young woman who had recorded all the important details of her life as a teenager and young adult in 1930s New York. The Red Leather Diary is part detective story of how Koppel tracked down the author, Florence Wolfson, but it is mostly a retelling of the entries in the diary with details added in to make a biography of Florence's early life.

I'm kind of jealous. The only things ever harvested from the trash at my apartment building on Riverside and 137th were the wine bottles and other large glass containers that my elderly landlady collected, cleaned, and filled with boiling water every single day. She stockpiled them in the living room. She killed mice by pouring boiling water on them. She collected clown dolls. She had a crush on Howard Hughes (they had the same birthday and a shared obsession with cleaning, not that pouring water and bleach on every surface every day is a good method...) and Muammar al-Qaddafi ("he's a very handsome man").

Oh, those 82nd Street Victorian grape scissors. It's not impossible that Alba had such a thing amid the clutter of old bottles and clowns. Koppel has a nice eye not only for saving wonderful relics from the trash, but also for writing about them. I was especially taken with the description of the "tangerine boucle coat with a flared skirt and single Bakelite button. 'Bergdorf Goodman on the Plaza' read the label sewn into its iridescent lining." She sends the coat to the cleaners and wears it out to 21st-century society events she attends as a gossip writer for the New York Times. She notes wryly that she and the diary's author are not so far apart in wearing the same items to the same sorts of parties seventy years apart.

Nevertheless, Koppel's ability to pick out these evocative small details isn't always matched with a consistently sure narrative mode and tone. Florence's diary is a catalog of a young woman's social calendar and emotional "firsts"--crushes, obsessions, disappointments, desires--told in wonderfully dashed out sentence fragments. Koppel quotes from the diary extensively, but she surrounds them with narrative descriptions of those events. Sometimes these scenes feel more like summaries of events than compelling stories about them, as though the diary were expanded but not selectively edited. The result is that the narration is like a video on fast-forward of all the events of a particular season, but then it's occasionally paused at a particular moment, and sometimes it seems like the pauses are chosen less for the necessity of illuminating a telling moment and more because that's where she has the most information.

The seams show when she has to integrate individual memories of events with contextualizing details. Florence's salon with New York literati sounds amazing: as a graduate student at Columbia, she hung out with Mark Van Doren, Delmore Schwartz, and various other writers, playwrights, and essayists. But the description of the evenings doesn't do a good job of moving between narration, description, and context:

As Florence bent to light the fire in the fireplace, she unpinned her long hair and let it cascade seductively onto her shoulders as her guests pondered Aristotle's Art of Poetry and the life of Sir Thomas Aquinas.
...
The twenty-one year-old poet Delmore Schwartz was the golden boy of the circle. Gesturing wildly in front of the fireplace, his dark blond hair damp with perspiration, Delmore preached the relevance of the classical philosophers to their own lives. Equally at home with baseball stats and the canon, he was the group's orator. Florence leaned against the mantel, mesmerized by his torrent of words. Looking around the room, sketching her friends in her mind, Florence wondered about each one's fate.

In paragraphs like these, the biographical conventions of telling about someone's life doesn't mix very well with a narration of imagining a particular scene (hence the cliched language of hair cascading and sketching her friends in her mind), which in turn doesn't mix well with biographical information about Delmore Schwartz.

This problem interests me more than it bothers me. These seams are where you see the writing problem of working in multiple forms of storytelling. The Red Leather Diary becomes an interesting example of an attempt to work in the self-conscious style of contemporary personal memoir (of Koppel's investigation and work at the New York Times) while at the same time deploying some of the conventions (often in cliched language) of traditional biographies which are less self-conscious about the author's relationship with source materials and explaining research methods. I kept thinking of Paul Collins' book The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine because he does a delightful job of moving between descriptions of historical events and contemporary discussions of why he's obsessed with the subject, the books he's reading to help him find out about side projects semi-related to the subject, the problems he runs into as he's working out the narration or the research. The book is a compelling set of digressions about the nature of historical research itself. Collins noted this problem of narrating source material on his blog:

This actually goes to the heart of the reductionism and the deterministic interpretation of source material -- this is the material I have, therefore this is what my subject must have been like -- that I fear in biographical writing. (And not least, I might add, in my own.) ... The longer I write biography, the more hesitant I become to use standard bio segues like "He was a broken man now." Broken to who?... To you? ... To him? Is he broken every minute of the day? The formulation is a specious one.

The other thing I wanted to do when I read The Red Leather Diary was to imagine what the stories would look like if they were cast as fiction by Francesca Lia Block. I've written before that I suffer from some combination of candy-stomachache and nostalgia when I read her books now (you can get a sense of this feeling with the Statistically Improbable Phrases from the books: witch baby, slinkster dog, niña bruja, lanky lizards, goat pants, tilty eyes, goat guys, toenail scissors, curly toes, fur pants, globe lamp, witch babies, witch child, genie lamp). I'm sure Block would love the details about the tangerine boucle coat, the pink flapper dress Koppel wears to a top-secret Matthew Barney Cremaster party, and the crumbling diary's sentence fragment lists of obsessions, purchases, and emotions. It's like a mixture of Weetzie Bat's fashion sense and Witch Baby's obsession with archives--set in New York, not LA, but Block switched coasts well in Missing Angel Juan.

I think Block actually addressed the candy-stomachache-nostalgia problem in her 2006 book Necklace of Kisses, in which Weetzie Bat takes stock of her life and wonders if all her passions have been worthwhile; the book is genuinely sad in many parts as she tries to do all the things that would have worked in previous books (go shopping, kiss a mermaid, eat umeboshi plums, kiss a drag queen...) only to find that they don't work anymore. One of the last chapters is a wonderful history of fashion, according to Weetzie Bat, about all the Vivienne Westwood and Pucci and Salvation Army and home-sewn clothes she's ever worn. I think Block is really in her element in lists of items like these, and she manages to imbue this particular list with a moving sense of belatedness, nostalgia, and forward-looking creativity.

I wonder what the Block treatment could do for Koppel's narration when the sense of belatedness sets in and she uses too many cliches of nostalgic writing:

A diary is about change. Florence's New York and mine couldn't be more night and day. Florence's metropolis was a vast theater, like one of the lost wonders of the world. It was alive with writers, painters, playwrights, and jazz. Ideas and art mattered. People rushed to the city because the mere thought of it burned a hole in their souls. My New York seemed out of tune, on its way to becoming a strip mall filled with Paris Hilton lookalikes.

The island of Manhattan sinks a foot every thousand years. We are sinking now. Who will one day swim through the Washington Square Arch and around the silver Chrysler Building? What will they think as they circle the Empire State Building, that once fearful mass of steel and hard-edged stone weathered to blond? Our colossal spires are no longer seen as great lighthouses for the triumph of the human spirit but as dusty old stage sets, the backdrop of chain stores.

Maybe this is self-conscious excess, but it doesn't work for me--especially if it's self-conscious because that would be a cheap trick. I think Koppel corrects herself when she discusses all the amazing stories she reported for the New York Times about mysterious Manhattan literary societies, the zine library at Barnard, an antique typewriter store, and so on (many of which are right up Collins' alley). Clearly there are plenty of ways to exercise the mind in New York, so are there ways to write about nostalgia or belatedness that don't look so hoary? It's another mixed-genre problem, perhaps, of moving between biography of Florence and personal memoir. That's why I think a shot of Block would be interesting as an alternative style that would work well with (forgive me, one last time) those amazing silver Victorian grape scissors and that coat with an iridescent lining.

"Why I'm going to kill the president" *

I am Richard III of England, and the president killed my father. I was drunk and it seemed so easy to hit him with a stone. He vetoed the bill to establish the Second Bank of the United States. He attacked the South, ended slavery and gave the vote to blacks. He ignored my crucial campaign pamphlet and would not grant me an ambassadorship to Paris, and then God commanded me to kill him. I wanted to follow the lead of Gaetano Bresci, an anarchist who took matters into his own hands by killing King Umberto I of Italy. The ghost of William McKinley told me to do it, but I had nothing against the president--it was a warning to any president who seeks a third term. The president supernaturally caused my gall bladder adhesions, appendicitis and farting, so I vow to kill all kings, presidents, and capitalists. Killing him will draw world attention to the subjugation of Puerto Rico. His family bought their way into the presidency. He's a fascist, leftists don't want anything to do with me, and the Cubans and Russians won't take me back. He betrayed me by backing Israel in the Six-Day War--at least I think that's why. I want to do something bold and dramatic, a statement of my manhood for the world to see. I will be a hero for destroying the master conspirator against the poor. He doesn't understand the plight of the redwoods. He's continuing Nixon's war against the left, and killing him will spark the chaos we need. I am the Messiah. I was shot before anyone could learn what I planned to do at the White House with a lead pipe. I was hired to shoot blanks to create a distraction while Mexicans shot him. It is blasphemous to place 'In God We Trust' on currency. I will impress Jodie Foster like Travis Bickle did. Our president ordered us to kill him. I have emotional problems. My wife just died of cancer and I don't want to live. He restricted assault weapons, and also there's a dangerous alien mist at the White House connected by an umbilical cord to an alien in the Colorado mountains. I have never revealed my motives.

* In case there's any confusion, this is a restatement of why other people wanted to kill various presidents and presidential candidates. I wish the president a long, happy life.

The Phantom of Justice

Last week I had the kind of experience that can only happen in New York.

I was leaving a doctor's appointment in the fashion district at 6:30 in the evening and I was to meet my stepmother at 7:45 in Times Square to see the musical Gypsy, which we'd both wanted to see for some time. That left me much more than the twenty minutes it would take to walk uptown, so I was thinking of stopping into a bar wait out the downtime. Passing by Madison Square Garden on my way to one of its nearby sports bars, I saw twenty or so black men and women standing vigil for Sean Bell.

I won't get into the details of the Sean Bell case here. Let me just say that I'd been going through it in my mind and I couldn't see the difference between the reckless endangerment by Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq, the reckless endangerment by John White on Long Island (instead of calling the police, he brought a loaded gun out to confront a car full of boys who came to harass or beat up his son, and shot a boy when he swatted at the gun), and the reckless endangerment by police officers in Queens whose first response was to start shooting and who even, in the face of no return fire, reloaded and keep shooting dozens more bullets, putting one in a nearby living room, and one in a nearby monorail station. None of these people got up in the morning saying "why not shoot someone innocent today", and I hope I never have to face the wrenching momentum of a violent, life-or-death situation, but each was ready to use deadly force before employing a modicum of caution, and none granted their victims any benefit of the doubt before putting them in harm's way.

At the same time, I have my reservations. I can't say confidently that I would act differently than those police did. I hope I would, but what do I know about that level of violence, that place of tension and panic? And while that's not enough to absolve a private citizen who kills after being unnecessarily confrontative, it may be enough to absolve police. After all, we ask police to enter harm's way and to perform a duty that our society needs fundamentally, but which few of us are willing to do. If, having been asked by us to stand in our place, to be the ones who face bullets and must dispense justice, they prove not malicious but maybe irresponsible or negligent, how thoroughly can we blame them? My answer is: a little, not a lot.

That little bit, on the great scale of so brutal and ceaseless and haphazard a failure, is large enough for me to joined a protest. So I did, noticing that I was the only white person in it. We each held a sign with a different number between one and fifty, representing the number of bullets the police fired at Sean Bell and friends.

After ten minutes or so of this the organizers announced that we would be walking up Eighth Avenue. I didn't realize until we turned up Eighth that this meant not the sidewalk but the street itself. So we walked uptown, a very loose five abreast, occupying one lane of traffic during rush hour while people on the sidewalks stopped and stared, sometimes cheered (especially workers in the stores we passed), and occasionally joined us, and plain-clothes police officers shouted in alarm into their walkie-talkies. I didn't have work the next day so the thought crossed my mind that being arrested wouldn't be so bad, though I realized with alarm that it would mean I'd miss Gypsy. (It's Tony Awards season, when all the good tickets go to Tony voters, so finding tickets to the hottest show on Broadway is like finding a Knicks fan who still likes Isiah Thomas.)

But arrest was unlikely; I don't think the police were interested in exacerbating the city-wide tension by arresting black protesters, and besides, I didn't want the only white guy in the march to duck out as soon as things got serious. So, surprised to find myself in this situation, I marched up Eighth Avenue with the other protesters, blocking traffic, trying to stand between the passing buses and a woman with two small children who had stepped out from the crowd to join us.

Finally we reached the intersection of Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street, and the the organizers at the head turned as if we were going to walk West down 42nd Street. Suddenly I realized we were instead being formed into a big circle and -- good God -- we were blocking 42nd Street and Eighth, one of the busiest intersections in the city. This was something I had hardly thought possible, but there I was blocking traffic in front of Port Authority, listening to the maddest cabbies I've ever heard lean on a horn, and feeling relief that no public buses were trying to get through (civil disobedience in New York City always sucks the worst for people on the buses).

After standing and listening to the increasing chatter coming out of the police walkie-talkies for a several minutes, we finally picked up and resumed our march northward on Eighth Avenue, and I finally exhaled. After a few blocks we started to turn east, and what did I see but the very block I'd been heading for in the first place, the block where Gypsy was playing. This being prime Broadway real estate, the show right across from Gypsy is Phantom of the Opera, and in fact the organizers stopped right between Gypsy and Phantom, blocked one of the street's two lanes and called for all of us to face the theater showing Phantom of the Opera.

Several hundred European and American tourists and what seemed like a few dozen New Yorkers were already crowded on either side of the block, waiting for the shows to open, and with nothing else at all to do, all of them fixed their eyes on us and gaped. This, it would turn out, was precisely what the organizers had anticipated, and the lead organizer took the bullhorn and began a very unlikely prepared address -- not only an address to the tourists, but an address to the Phantom.

"Oh great Phantom of the Opera," he began, "you who call so many to travel far to visit our city, tonight you give us the gift of your famous entertainment."

At this point I glanced around, to see if anyone else felt this had been an extraordinary opening, but the mouths didn't seem to be gaping any differently than before.

"But I ask you, before you begin your amazing show, please give your theatergoers a moment to learn about a grave injustice, about a young man who was shot and killed by the police on his wedding day. Yes, on his wedding day. All you who have a great treat in store for you tonight at this great Phantom of the Opera, when you go home to your loved ones, and tell them about this wonderful Phantom of the Opera, tell them also that before the show began, you had a moment of conscious, a moment when you said, 'I learned that a man was killed, and I learned that that man could have been me. And I want to know, who was this man, Sean Bell?' Because it isn't about race. This young man, Sean Bell, could have been any of us -- white or black, rich or poor. So look up his story on the internet. Read about Sean Bell. Now enjoy this amazing Phantom of the Opera show, but don't forget that an innocent young man is dead and that when there's no justice there's no peace. Thank you."

He put down the bullhorn and I suddenly realized that after the protest broke up, I would be stepping right into line behind the people who had been staring at me for fifteen minutes. And after we formed a quick prayer circle and were instructed to disperse, that's exactly what I did. With many eyes on me, I took my place outside the entrance of Gypsy, nodded to staring people standing on either side of me, and waited for my stepmother to arrive with the tickets. I had walked precisely the route I would have walked anyways, and I had found a very unexpected way to make it last just long enough.

Larissa Kelly, my Jeopardy love

I have a crush on Larissa Kelly of El Cerrito, CA, who has been tearing things up on Jeopardy for the last three days. I know this because Jeopardy on the treadmill is the only thing that gets me to go to the gym.

Her first day, she finished Double Jeopardy with so much money that if she had bet it all on final Jeopardy and answered correctly, she would have set the all-time record for single-episode winnings. Well, she answered correctly, but she wagered conservatively, which is no surprise because she is entirely phlegmatic and unperturbable. But with this calm comes intrigue: she hardly ever cracks a smile, and never rewards Alex Trebek's flattery in the slightest.

Today's game was incredibly close; she entered Double Jeopardy behind, was in third place for part of it, and only pulled into a slight lead with the last few questions, and the final Jeopardy question was especially hard. And even then, when she won, she only let herself smile for an instant before pulling herself together.

Larissa is a PhD candidate studying 19th century Latin American history and archaeology. Her focus, she explained in the meet-the-contestants opener yesterday, is not about sites like Teotihuacan and Chichen Itza directly, but rather about the social constructs that Mexican archaeology rests on, and the project of building narratives of archaeology that serve purposes of nationalism, revolution, or imperialism. To put her explanation in context, I watched an episode last week where a contestant's introductory story was that once she and her sister had to run across four lanes of traffic at a toll stop to pee.

In a wonderful moment, she singlehandedly polished off an entire category on opera yesterday, and the audience broke out in extended applause. She appreciated this with a smile whose brevity would make a hummingbird feel sluggish.

I also appreciate Larissa's exposing some of the workings of the game. From what I know of Jeopardy, much of winning is in your buzzer timing, since many of the questions could be answered correctly by two or all of the contestants. The buzzers are not activated until Alex finishes reading the question, and every press that comes too early disables your buzzer for some small amount of time. Usually, contestants keep their buzzers to low behind the podium for television viewers to see, but Larissa pulls hers up and waves it dramatically as she presses it, and you can see her wince when someone beats her to the punch.

Here are Larissa's first three Final Jeopardy questions. Video of the first two are available online at the time of this writing; for the third, see finaljeopardy.tumblr.com.

May 20th:
Category: Children's Authors
"In 1896 he said his mother had lost her childhood at 8; he "knew a time would come when I also must give up the games."

May 21st:
Category: World History
"One of history's largest refugee migrations, about 15 million people, took place 1947-1951 between these 2 countries."

May 22nd:
Category: Early 20th Century Plays
"In the preface to this play, the author writes 'The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.'"

I got only the first one, and that was practically a freebie, judging by Trebek's ususual, offhand prediction that Larisa would surely get it right. Larisa, needless to say, is three for three.

Pitcher-lifting skills

KEEPING MY PROMISE THAT ALL VARITEK-RELATED ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS SHALL BE IN CAPS LOCK.
NICE ARTICLE ABOUT HIS CATCHING A RECORD FOUR NO-HITTERS.
KATY AND I WERE ESPECIALLY DELIGHTED BY THE PHOTO CAPTION.

Tyranny of the discrete

1. Anne Applebaum reviewed Nicholson Baker's new book Human Smoke for the New Republic last week. She takes issue with Baker's narrative method of writing short disconnected accounts of various people associated with the path to world war during the late 1930s. In Baker's book, these accounts are no more than a few hundred words long; his method is to let them aggregate into an implicit argument against World War II as a "good war." I'm not in a historian's position to assess Baker's argument about good wars or bad wars--other than to say that I don't think implicit (contrarian) arguments made by aggregation are the best way to write history. Applebaum doesn't think so either. One way of beginning such a critique would be to notice that Human Smoke looks similar Baker's other works. They proceed by minute repetitions of a narrative tic to create fractals of obsessiveness. By testing a perhaps untestable claim on so much primary source data, Baker gets an artifact of a repeated procedure with no good way to check the assumptions or what the repetition of the procedure is actually generating. That might be the way I'd look at the book.

Instead, Applebaum makes, I think, a bad move in connecting Baker to some larger zeitgeist of worrying about the decline of context and the rise of small chunks of unrelated data. She underscores her argument by mimicking Baker's box-car structure of discrete items which should, in Applebaum's mind, aggregate to show the folly of such a post-Gawker, post-Wikipedia arrangement of and attitude toward facts. Applebaum writes of Baker's short accounts:

Presumably, these items were selected because Baker finds them important, or perhaps because, like a Gawker post, they are meant to "turn conventional wisdom on its head." But ripped from their respective contexts, each item has the same weight as the next. There is no hierarchy, no sense that one enigmatic anecdote might be more important than the next equally enigmatic anecdote, or that one source might be more reliable than the next.

The entire last half of the article extends this argument to semi-ridiculous comparisons:

Yet the dull truth is that we arrived at the topic of Nicholson Baker not because we were talking about the war, but because we were talking about the contemporary cult of the non-expert, or rather the anti-expert: the bloggers who assume that the "mainstream media" is always wrong, the Wikipedia readers who think that a compilation of random anecdotes is always preferable to a learned study, and of course the college students who nowadays prefer to get their news in emails from friends because it is too bothersome to read a newspaper. And the even duller truth is that Human Smoke belongs to this cult, and not to the more exotic outer reaches of the historiography of World War II. One cannot properly understand Baker's book by comparing it to, say, Martin Gilbert's Auschwitz and the Allies or to the latest work on the fire-bombing of Dresden. To understand Human Smoke properly, one needs to read Gawker, Wikipedia, and above all The Da Vinci Code. The latter comparison might sound odd, but the resemblance is actually quite striking. Like Baker, the author of The Da Vinci Code is not a historian. And also like Baker, Dan Brown is a man apparently obsessed by his belief in the existence of a widespread historical conspiracy. (For those lucky enough to be unfamiliar with it, Brown's theory goes like this: the church hierarchy, along with the world's religious historians, art historians, and church historians, have been hiding the fact of Jesus's wedding to Mary Magdalene, as well as his subsequent children, from the public for centuries, using a massive cover-up perpetuated by Opus Dei, and so on, and on, and on.)

2. I first read about George W.S. Trow in his Gawker obituary, which noted that his most work, an extended essay published in the New Yorker in 1980 called "Within the Context of No Context," was their raison d'etre, in a weird way: "Trow's major thesis, that mass media and a cultural obsession with celebrity were ruining society as we know it," the editors at Gawker wrote, "is borne out pretty much each day on this website and every other." Trow's essay is an aggregation of discrete comments about television, print, and decline-decline-decline. ( The New Yorker has an excerpt available online which gives an idea of how the structure works.) The style was nothing weird for the New Yorker in those days; that Trow's work from 1980 about the decline of history looks so similar to what Applebaum is criticizing is one clue that decline narratives have the generic tendency to look to newer forms of technology as a reason for the decline. Trow names his reason for decline:

The work of television is to establish false contexts and to chornicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and chronicle it.

I became obsessed with Trow's essay because I think