Ben and Alice

Football and Pynchon: deeper than oddity ought to drive

2010-02-08T22:24:00.006-05:00

"I like football for the graphic interfaces!" I remarked to Ben's brother, Alex, last night. He replied that Ben has said the same thing: "You guys should start a blog or something." I was thinking about this article from The New York Times about how military intelligence officers are looking to John Madden's telestrator technology as a way to mediate information gathered by drones in Afghanistan:

They are even testing some of the splashier techniques used by broadcasters, like the telestrator that John Madden popularized for scrawling football plays. It could be used to warn troops about a threatening vehicle or to circle a compound that a drone should attack.

“Imagine you are tuning in to a football game without all the graphics,” said Lucius Stone, an executive at Harris Broadcast Communications, a provider of commercial technology that is working with the military. “You don’t know what the score is. You don’t know what the down is. It’s just raw video. And that’s how the guys in the military have been using it.”
...
So Cmdr. Joseph A. Smith, a Navy officer assigned to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which sets standards for video intelligence, said he and other officials had climbed into broadcast trucks outside football stadiums to learn how the networks tagged and retrieved highlight film.

“There are these three guys who sit in the back of an ESPN or Fox Sports van, and every time Tom Brady comes on the screen, they tap a button so that Tom Brady is marked,” Commander Smith said, referring to the New England Patriots quarterback. Then, to call up the highlights later, he said, “they just type in: ‘Tom Brady, touchdown pass.’ ”

Having been the "videographer" and "statistician" for the high school girls basketball team (read: the totally thankless job of being the manager because I am clumsy), I'm always interested in this subject of how one mediates visual perspective into information. I spent a lot of time watching live basketball through a camera lens, and most of the basketball I watch now is mediated through a television camera lens. I like watching games from the aerial perspective to see how plays work, and I was stunned by how cool the XFL camera angle looked last night when Tracy Porter intercepted Peyton Manning. I got interested in football when I was in college, when one of my friends had two big-screen televisions in his suite--one for playing Madden NFL, one for the ladies (which seemed to have Four Weddings and a Funeral on a loop). When I learned that football players were using Madden to study plays, I found my entry into the sport--if you can turn it into a question about how people process information, then I'm hooked! From this month's Wired:

It’s one thing to suggest that videogames may be making us smarter. It’s another thing altogether to say they might be making us better athletes. But when you add it up, the evidence starts to look pretty overwhelming. At the Pop Warner Super Bowl in 2006, the winning team had 30 offensive plays, which it had learned through Madden. (”I programmed our offense into Madden to help me memorize our plays,” one 11-year-old told Sports Illustrated. “It was easier than homework.”) Dezmon Briscoe, an all-conference wide receiver for the University of Kansas, credited Madden 2009 with teaching him how to read when defenses “roll their coverages” — move their defensive backs to disguise their strategy. Chuck Kyle, a high school coach who has won 10 state championships in football-mad Ohio, has programmed his team USA playbook into Madden and uses it to teach players their assignments. So have coaches at Colorado State, Penn State, and the University of Missouri, among other schools. An offensive lineman for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers used the videogame as a preparation tool for an entire season, scouting his opponents digitally. While even-more-sophisticated software is available for virtual sports training, coaches and players at all levels of football say that Madden’s off-the-shelf simulation is good enough.

Marshall Faulk, former superstar running back for the St. Louis Rams (he appeared on the cover of Madden 2003), says that when he entered the NFL in 1994, “probably 10, 15, 20 percent” of the players were gamers. “Now? Anywhere from 50 percent on up,” he says. “Because Madden is sort of a mainstay in football, a lot of the kids playing in the NFL now grew up on it. It makes you a better football player.” Faulk may be understating the title’s popularity in the league: When I asked Stokley how many NFL players are Madden players, his estimate was even higher: “Everybody.”

Side note on interfacing information in text: Wired's commitment to adding hyperlinks and YouTube as supplements to the articles really pays off in a way that the Times is trying to do but can do more of.

A Times reader recommends James Paul Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy for more on this phenomenon.

The Kotaku video game blog notes that Madden can simulate games with remarkable results, as in this year's prediction of a Saints victory:

Stevenson was proud that the Madden Sim delivered a game-changing special teams play that, while it did not happen in the real Super Bowl, mimicked the effect of New Orleans' shocking onsides-kick recovery to open the second half. In the Madden Sim, Reggie Bush returned a punt 46 yards to put the Saints on top 28-24. While the Colts briefly regained the lead in that sim, "it is cool that our game also predicted a pivotal turning point on special teams."
...
Whatever the case, with this kind of accuracy after seven years, the Madden Sim has emerged as a counterpart to the Madden Curse for reliably predictive if statistically unproven performance.

And yet the Pynchonian in me reflects on that article about Madden-interfaced drones and wants to read these predictions and mediations in a sinister way. From Gravity's Rainbow:

The rockets are distributing about London just as Poisson's equation in the textbooks predicts. As the data keep coming in, Roger looks more and more like a prophet. Psi Section people stare after him in the hallways. It's not precognition, he wants to make an announcement in the cafeteria or something ... have I ever pretended to be anything I'm not? all I'm doing is plugging numbers into a well-known equation, you can look it up and do it yourself.

His little bureau is dominated now by a glimmering map, a window into another landscape than winter Sussex, written names and spidering streets, an ink ghost of London, ruled off into 576 squares, a quarter square kilometer each. Rocket strikes are represented by red circles. The Poisson equation will tell, for a number of total hits arbitrarily chosen, how many squares will get none, how many one, two, three, and so on.

Absorptive reading is historically specific?

2010-02-07T15:18:00.004-05:00

I cheered for Richard Brody's wonderful Front Row post about reading, in response to George Packer's concerns about being unable to read Kierkegaard as absorptively as he used to:

But I’d bet that George is a better, if more laborious, reader of Kierkegaard now than he was in his college days, because he brings to his reading a greater variety of experience-—and judicious participation in the Internet flux is a crucial, inescapable part of what counts as experience in our times.

Brody's response is so thoughtful for its gentle recasting of the situation, a nice turn away from the Luddite/Biltonite charges that Packer has dismissed. The final turn to Kierkegaard as media critic is lovely.

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle grid

2010-02-07T14:09:00.003-05:00

A stranger's unconscious habits become intolerable in a confined space. I think I may be a loud tea sipper, or I may sip tea at a completely reasonable volume. But inside the library stacks--where it's first of all forbidden for me to be sipping tea in the first place because it is a Safe Space for books--my tea-sipping must sound atrocious and gauche to my studious neighbors. Yesterday I thought of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Whisper Sticks, which temporarily make a whisperer hear all sounds at that inaudible, annoying volume. That fantasy led me to the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle Wikipedia page, which has a totally amazing grid of her cures, organized by book, chapter title, main character, bad behavior, cure employed, and other children introduced. I put down my tea to pore over the grid and recall my favorite Betsy MacDonald stories. The "other children" column is an adorably precise set of extra information. She had the best names for children: Calliope Ragbag, Paraphernalia Grotto, Pergola Wingsproggle, Jasper and Myrtle Quitrick, Melody and Harvard Foxglove, Cormorant Broomrack, Trent and Tansy Popsickle, Sylvia and Janey Quadrangle, Prunella and Quinton Peasley, Nicholas Semicolon.

I read all the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books in the house where I learned to read, so I have an imaginary neighborhood for these characters based on the Rosedale district in Austin, Texas. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's upside-down house was next door to mine; Evelyn Rover, of Whisper Sticks fame, lived in my house. In this imaginary neighborhood (also home to Betsy, Tacy, and Tib--Betsy lived in my house while Tacy lived diagonal and Tib lived at the end of the street), all the houses had two storeys because they seemed terribly exotic, only to be replaced a few years later in my aspirational neighborhood by Anastasia Krupnik's turret.

Romanticizing the mundane

2010-01-16T17:01:00.006-05:00

I'm lost as a teacher if I don't have a blackboard to chart each session's work. I use it to collect, record, notice patterns and/or discrepancies, classify, and then report on and extend student responses to our activities; I'd say that 2/3 of my aha! moments in the class come from us pointing to the work on the board and making a connection between what the students and I have written in chalk. A couple of downsides: I'm covered in chalk dust by the end of the class, and some other people (including some students) say that it takes up class time to write so much. In the future, I'd like to see how a smartboard could work for me and the students, but I'm OK for now with using that time to write in chalk.

I don't defend this practice in terms of nostalgia; it's just how I learn and teach best. I think it's useful to reformat knowledge in order to see new connections--from notes to grid when I'm making connections in a project (in the classroom or my own projects), from notes to diagram for other types of connections, from computer screen to printout when I'm proof-reading, from one genre of writing to another if I'm trying out an argument or an idea that could crystallize differently...

I'm struck by Anne Trubek's diagnosis of the decline narrative in her essay about the history of handwriting: it's spot-on for historicizing how we came to associate handwriting with character, intelligence, and, earlier on, even religious difference. I like her move of reading the nostalgic tendency in the calls to revive handwriting:

It took the printing press to create a notion of handwriting as a sign of self. For monks, whose illuminated manuscripts we now venerate as beautiful works of art (as they most certainly are), script was not self-expressive but formulaic, and rightly so. When the printing press was invented, the monks were worried about this new capricious technology, which was too liable to foibles and the idiosyncratic mark of the man helming the press. A hand-copied manuscript was for them then the authoritative, exact, regularized text. In his treatise, "In Praise of Copying," the 15th-century monk Trithemius argued that "printed books will never be the equivalent of handwritten codices, especially since printed books are often deficient in spelling and appearance."

Handwriting slowly became a form of self-expression when it ceased to be the primary mode of written communication. When a new writing technology develops, we tend to romanticize the older one. The supplanted technology is vaunted as more authentic because it is no longer ubiquitous or official. Thus for monks, print was capricious and script reliable. So too today: Conventional wisdom holds that computers are devoid of emotion and personality, and handwriting is the province of intimacy, originality and authenticity.

This transition, and the associations we make with old and new technologies, played out while millions of Americans were being Palmerized in school, and the Palmer Method is inextricably linked to a new writing technology that was starting to compete with handwriting: the typewriter.

I'm less sure about the notion of typing as "cognitive automaticity, the ability to think as fast as possible, freed as much as can be from the strictures of whichever technology we must use to record our thoughts." Technodeterminist me wants to push harder on that idea, to consider that the technology we use enables different kinds of thinking rather than just records it to greater or lesser degrees. That is, my thinking is tied to how I'm doing it, and in what form. My composition classes tend to bear this out: students do different work when they reformulate exercises into new genres, diagrams, grids, sentence structures, etc. And it so happens that the computer is very useful for facilitating and storing all of these experiments--more so than the chalky blackboard, which is useful for other types of work.

Nostalgia for the Soviet police

2010-01-13T20:04:00.005-05:00

The NY Times reports on a lifelong Russian dissident, Lyudmila M. Alexeyeva, who is still at it at 82 years old. Her specialty, in Soviet times and post-Soviet times, has been playful disruption of the police state:

On her way into K.G.B. headquarters, Ms. Alexeyeva would stop to buy a ham sandwich, an éclair and an orange. These were delicacies in the 1970s, even for the investigator, who was headed for a lunch of gray cutlets. Halfway through, Ms. Alexeyeva would unwrap her lunch and lay it out on the table.

“They reacted very nervously when they started to smell ham,” she said with a sweet smile. “Then I would start eating the orange, and the aroma would start dissipating through the room.” The effect was reliably hypnotic.

“That’s how I amused myself,” she said. “It was a way to play on his nerves.”

The most disturbing part of the story is her observation that the Putin regime exercises authority even more arbitrarily than did the Soviet Union of her youth:

New fears have replaced the old ones, though. Ms. Alexeyeva has received death threats, and last year she buried two friends who were killed. Legal risks are unpredictable, too. While Soviet dissidents could strategize to protect themselves -- knowing, for example, that prosecutors needed at least two witnesses -- their tricks are of no use in a post-Soviet justice system, where cases can be wholly fabricated, she said.

“Now they do what they want,” she said. “There were rules then. They were idiotic rules, but there were rules, and if you knew them you could defend yourself.”

this reminds me of the Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara and his wife Yukiko Sugihara, who during World War II wrote thousands of visas to desperate Jews in clear violation of orders -- all of which were then honored by the meticulously bureaucratic Japanese government.

The dissident movement in Russia is small, but it's alive with organizations like "The Other Russia".

Haphazardly informed institution

2010-01-12T11:50:00.005-05:00

One of my favorite former Spectator columnists, Charles Homans, has a great article in the Columbia Journalism Review about weather reporters who deny climate change, as they draw faulty connections from one field (meteorology) to another (climatology):

But the disagreement, then as now, also came down to the weathercasters themselves, and what they knew—-or believed they knew. Meteorology has a deceptively close relationship with climatology: both disciplines study the same general subject, the behavior of the atmosphere, but they ask very different questions about it. Meteorologists live in the short term, the day-to-day forecast. It’s an incredibly hard thing to predict accurately, even with the best models and data; tiny discrepancies matter enormously, and can pile up quickly into giant errors. Given this level of uncertainty in their own work, meteorologist looking at long-range climate questions are predisposed to see a system doomed to terminal unpredictability. But in fact, the basic question of whether rising greenhouse gas emissions will lead to climate change hinges on mostly simple, and predictable, matters of physics. The short-term variations that throw the weathercasters’ forecasts out of whack barely register at all.

From here, he turns to the problem of scientific expertise and science literacy as it's broadcast in local news.

Exile in Guyville

2010-01-06T11:07:00.006-05:00

RE: Katie Roiphe's infograph-tastic essay on sex scenes in Philip Roth, John Updike, Norman Mailer vs. Benjamin Kunkel, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, etc.:

Didn't Liz Phair already write this essay in 1993, when it was called Exile in Guyville? ("you might be shy and introspective / that's not part of my objective")

Let this also record my ambivalence about Liz Phair: is she the Katie Roiphe of the Lilith Fair set? The contrarianism has always seemed cynical, as though the self-conscious irony left even less room to maneuver than before; what was called honesty collapsed all interpretation into a bleak flatness.

There is only one narcotic

2009-12-30T21:34:00.001-05:00

The NY Times reports that some teenagers are canceling their Facebook accounts or voluntarily restricting their usage because it is taking over their lives and keeping them from school, family, and real-world contact with friends. The first psychologist they quote, Kimberly Young, says “It’s like any other addiction. It’s hard to wean yourself.”

I mean to take this sort of addiction seriously, although the Times has a history of sensationalizing youth trends that they don't really understand or have much evidence for. Note that Kimberly Young is introduced as the director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery in Bradford, Pa.; I'm going to go out on limb and guess that this academic-sounding institution is not exactly doing brisk business, and that its director is welcoming of publicity. When the Times states that she "said she had spoken with dozens of teenagers trying to break the Facebook habit", note how many steps far removed this is from actually treating even a single teenager who sought her out.

With that said, I think this problem, and the broader problem of addiction to the mesmerizing World Wide Web, is real. And I think it points to a problem with our education about addiction, which paints drugs as a supremely harmful force unlike any other. Drugs do contain a unique ability to screw up the body and mind, and disorient their users to the point of crashing their cars and unleashing violence. But their greater danger is addiction, and the damage of addiction is hard to explain well -- which is why we fall back on cautionary tales about doing PCP once and jumping through a second story window.

Here's my try: the damage of addiction, irrespective of the narcotic, is that it replaces real life. Potheads, including some friends of mine, generally believe that marijuana is not an addictive drug. But if you check out from the real world every day, you are missing out on real life.

Of course, there is no consensus on what real life consists of. If watching four hours of TV makes you a couch potato, doesn't reading a novel do the same thing? Most people consider reading novels a worthwhile use of time, but of course it depends on the novel; I'd advise putting down the Danielle Steele and smoking a joint instead.

Irene Adler museum

2009-12-24T22:28:00.004-05:00

Sherlockians insist that the sleuth was real and Arthur Conan Doyle was merely his chronicler, making for some great "lost papers"/ Sherlock Holmes pastiches. I was delighted by Ruth Rendell's invention, in The Keys to the Street, of an Irene Adler museum in which "the woman" for Holmes is treated as a real Edwardian figure:

"When she was in here or in the corset room, Mary often thought Irene Adler's incursions into male attire--as when she whispers 'good evening' to Holmes in Baker Street--entirely understandable. The crab in whalebone could have known comfort only in bed at night, never by day in the S-shaped whalebone stays, the buckled and webbed bodices, the crustaceous layers, and those furbelowed cartwheel hats. Other pictures on the walls showed Edwardian women attempting to mount stairs, board trams, and manage their hats on windy days.
...
"They sold more copies of the Sherlock Holmes story 'A Scandal in Bohemia' (Irene as crab in whalebone on the front cover and in jacket and breeches on the back) than all the catalogs and brochures put together. A favorite place was the facsimile of Irene's drawing room, as it must have been at Briony Lodge, with the secret panel by the fireplace where the compromising photograph was kept hidden, open for all to see the secret spring. Gustav Klimt had not painted her, for he was real and she was fiction, but the mock-Klimt portrait of Irene in sequins and pearls posed against a gold-leaf screen, framed in narrow gilded wood, went back to hang on the walls of many a Midwest condo. Business was too brisk at lunchtime for Mary to leave the museum. It even looked at one point during the afternoon as if admission would have to be restricted for half an hour. But the crowd dwindled as five approached, by which time the shop had run out of calendars and Knossos scarves and Stacey was on the phone to the sales rep."

The Klimt pastiche, especially the part about "for he was real and she was fiction" in the midst of that straight-faced detail, kills me!

"Good music to listen to whilst locked in the boot"

2009-12-23T01:02:00.001-05:00

It made perfect sense that Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon officiated Lily van der Woodsen's wedding on Gossip Girl this spring: of course they knew each other from the early '90s grunge scene, had stayed connected through Marc Jacobs, had daughters the same age...

Earlier this year, I read Noise, an anthology of short stories inspired by Sonic Youth songs, and I wondered at first why they weren't all written by Mary Gaitskill. Her short stories could come with Sonic Youth soundtracks in my wildest dreams, and if Janet Malcolm was the best chronicler of Gossip Girl I could have imagined last year, then Mary Gaitskill may be the solution to the show's current malaise--or at least to the boredom of Blair and Chuck. Gaitskill's 2005 novel Veronica could be some alternate (fictional) universe for Lily van der Woodsen had she lived on the Lower East Side with Kim Gordon in the 1980s. Let's see how this triangle of Gordon, Gaitskill, and Gossip Girl could work out, using William Deresiewicz's assessment of Gaitskill's early career and review of her new collection, Don't Cry, from the Nation:

A second collection, Because They Wanted To, appeared in 1997. Taken together, Gaitskill's first three books established a tightly coherent vision expressed through a narrow but powerful array of themes and techniques. For Gaitskill, [Ayn] Rand and [Ronald] Reagan are only extreme expressions of a universal condition, and the social world itself is a Hobbesian jungle of the hideous, the merciless and the weak. Its paradigm and training ground is childhood, which Gaitskill returns to throughout these three books as if it were a wound she can't stop licking:

The assigned classroom was filled with murderously aggressive boys and rigid girls with animal eyes who threw spitballs, punched each other, snarled, whispered, and stared one another down. And shadowing all these gestures and movements were declarations of dominance, of territory, the swift, blind play of power and weakness.

Given such conditions, the only viable strategy is to bury your feelings as deeply as possible. In Two Girls, the most despised of the classroom outcasts is nicknamed "'Emotional,' the worst insult imaginable": "Every answer seemed to come out of some horrible complex individuality reeking with humanity, the clarity and trust in her soft voice made them squirm with discomfort."

The result is at once self-enclosure and self-alienation. Gaitskill's characters are young women and men set adrift between adolescence and adulthood, members-in-training of the so-called creative class, like so many of us are or once were. They hole up in cruddy apartments, work demeaning jobs and nurse vague creative aspirations while making the desultory round of bars, clubs and parties in the demimonde of urban hipsterdom. But Gaitskill gives her characters a larger than ordinary allotment of psychic distress. It doesn't matter if childhood trauma figures explicitly in their stories; with their stunted or fragile or provisional selves, their baffled craving for comfort, they are all still damaged children. Their predicament creates a suffocating compound of psychological pressure and emotional desiccation, along with a lurking sense of threat that originates not in the outside world but in the hidden places of the psyche, in the violence that unacknowledged desires are capable of calling down. Gaitskill's characters have a blind spot where their personalities are supposed to be, and it's staring at the back of their heads. They can't feel what they feel or want what they want. They aren't struggling, like their peers, to decide what to be; they're trying to figure out who they are.

Take out "cruddy apartments" and you have a very interesting direction for the show! XO, XO.

Really, this post was supposed to be about Noise and the stories inspired by Sonic Youth, but I'm still puzzling over the new Gaitskill collection, and it's telling that her contribution to the anthology, "Wish Fulfillment," is an allegory that doesn't sound much like the piercing specificity of her previous work. The descriptions in those stories were often painful to read, and Deresiewicz, in noting that changed descriptive tone in Veronica (quoted above), is setting up his concerns about the way that description doesn't work as well in the allegories of Don't Cry. But "Wish Fulfillment" comes from a deeply personal place, Gaitskill explains in the introductory paragraph to the story in Noise, as she basically describes being saved by a Sonic Youth song.

Question #1: Do Sonic Youth songs inspire listeners to commit allegory?
How does noise rock relate to allegory--why do they go together, or do they? My first thought on reading the anthology was that I would have written a story inspired by "Disconnection Notice" from Murray Street--an allegory if there ever was one:

Did you get your disconnection notice?
Mine came in the mail today
They seem to think I'm disconnected
Don't think I know what to read or write or say
Glossaries injected daily
Words and numbers spell out the price to pay
It simply states "you're disconnected baby"
See how easily it all slips away

This is no direction
Prepare for the city
Angels turn on heaven's light

But I don't think I would have stayed in allegorical mode for my short story. I listened to that song a lot one winter, and it's one of those New York songs I think about a lot when I've been pacing around for several miles in the cold. So, no details yet for this as-yet-unwritten short story.

Question #2: Or is it the weird details of the band's songs, matched or exacerbated by the noise, that inspires some good writing?
I was most struck by the jarring details of the stories, as when Catherine O'Flynn writes in the introduction to her short story, "I think it's good music to listen to whilst locked in the boot of a car." Emily Carter Roiphe has a good story called "Little Trouble Girl," about living on the Lower East Side while the band was practicing and performing in Tompkins Square Park--agree or disagree with her assessment of the band, her details are well-noted:

No time to consider that art-noise-rock-screech soundcheck might be the one bit of indifference that would send a depressed, chemically dependent college drop-out over the edge, especially when she looked at Kim Gordon, all ice-cool and swan-like aloofness, while the college drop-out scraped the dirty sweat off her forehead with a matchbook.

Question #3: Does being inspired by a weird band make an author's writing style more like itself, or does it swerve it around to negations?
Shelley Jackson writes about Goo, and it seems very much in keeping with the rest of her work from The Melancholy of Anatomy, about bodily fluids and secretions. Katherine Dunn's story has some of the same freakishness as Geek Love. But Jess Walter seems to respond to the band's noisy negations when he writes, "this is not that kind of story" in the form of a note to a professor about a creative writing assignment. Jackson and Walter are two varieties of responses to the Noise project: either use it to reflect your style through the band, or use the band's avant-garde sensibility to try something new, or, more specifically, to have your story's characters try something new, as in the famous story from this volume that takes "Bull in Heather" to new directions that the author said he hadn't tried before.

There are two other books in the series: stories inspired by the Fall and by the Smiths. I think those would be two very different types of inspiration, and I'd be really interested to see what kind of variation there is among the Smiths stories.

Question #4: Or is the avant-garde weirdly cyclical in its inspirations?
My very favorite piece in the book is Tom McCarthy's introductory paragraph to his story about "Kool Thing"--I have no idea whether it's reliable, I'm even more interested if it's not:

I remember, in 1992, listening to Kim Gordon's voice monologuing over 'Kool Thing.' She was talking about a white girl lying on a bed with a dagger in her hand, staring at a black panther in a tree; and she said it had something to do with Patty Hearst. I didn't know who Patty Hearst was then. Years later, when I visited the Joyce Museum in the guntower where he spent the night that Ulysses emerged from, there was a life-sized black panther in the bedroom: Joyce's roommate, like his hero Stephen's, had a nightmare with one in it and, picking a gun up in his half-sleep from the night-table beside his bed, fired it over Joyce's head. Beneath the bedroom was a storeroom for gunpowder; in past centuries the guardians of the tower had to be careful not to generate any sparks. Maybe all avant-gardes begin with gunpowder and a dream of a black panther.

Subversive activity

2009-12-21T15:03:00.001-05:00

A nice post about the NYPL Candide show from More Intelligent Life.

"'Candide, or Optimism' is a work of fiction, but it is not a novel," begins "Candide at 250: Scandal and Success", an exhibition at the main New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. In the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery, the show examines the ways Voltaire's text has been warped, reimagined, staged, filmed, redrawn and otherwise revised over the course of 250 years. "Candide", we learn, is nothing if not a supple source.

Don't mess with the Marvelettes (no, no, no, no)

2009-12-16T18:01:00.001-05:00

How do you tell a story about the Marvelettes? They were the first Motown group with a #1 hit ("Please Mr. Postman"), who were then pushed aside in favor of the more professionally minded Supremes. Like many girl groups in the period, including the Supremes, their lineup changed to fit the professional needs of their managers, but this feature became distorted as the group later became a Larry Marshak product of multiple "Marvelettes" revivals (or impostors) to be performed in nightclubs as a brand rather than a group. They were the first Motown girl group but are not members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They are releasing a three-CD box set, complete with a booklet of an oral history of the treated-as-though-they-were-interchangeable members, at a time when box sets aren't what they used to be (if they ever were).

This is a geeky coincidence, but two of their biggest hits are about modes of communication that have changed significantly since the 1960s. "Please Mr. Postman" and "Beechwood 4-5789" are transcendent pop songs, though, despite e-mail and cell phones.

I'm struck by how all of those features of anonymity, obsolescence, and indeterminacy make it hard to write a story about them. Evidence: Christopher Petkanas's T magazine essay about the Marvelettes' box set, Forever. The essay, called "Lost in the Mail," has a coy, fakeout intro--"you may be interested in this subject, even though maybe no one else is," he seems to say--and that leads to a series of sentences which tell the story of the Marvelettes through predominantly negative constructions:

Depending on your sympathy for the bugle-beaded tragedies of what have become broadly known as Dreamgirls, the Marvelettes are either a big sigh or a windfall. It’s hard to believe, but many people have had all they can take hearing about talented young black women having their lives shredded by greedy record labels in the 1960s. The same people find spending an evening with the Beatles video game more sustaining than putting the Marvelettes’ new three-CD set “Forever” on the changer and snuggling down with Marc Taylor’s tell-all “The Original Marvelettes: Motown’s Mystery Girl Group.” I guess there’s no accounting for how people spend their Tuesday nights.

It's a series of weird moves: negations are built into so many of the sentences that he seems to be undermining the very act of writing about the group. Or, and I'm only half-kidding here, it's as though the backup vocals of "Don't Mess with Bill"--"no, no, no, no"--were the structural formation of the essay. Consider how many negative moves there are:

INDETERMINATE MEMBERS OF THE GROUP:

You know the Marvelettes’ songs even if you don’t know their names (and you probably don’t)

ALTERNATE HISTORY IS FACTUAL HISTORY:

The Supreme One doesn’t like it known that she once looked up to scruffy little Gladys Horton, the Marvelettes’ early lead singer, who worked in recent years at her son’s hair salon in California, but you can’t rewrite history just to please Miss Ross. It’s weird to imagine a world in which the Supremes got transistor radios from Motown for Christmas and the Marvelettes got diamond rings.

ASSUMPTION FOLLOWED BY ITS NEGATION:

It’s easy to say that when the competition heated up with all those sharp-elbowed Vandellas and Velvelettes jockeying for position, it was their cruder wigs and gowns that held the Marvelettes back. But this was not the case.

THE STORY IS LIKE A GOTHIC NOVEL, COMPLETE WITH TRAGIC MISTAKEN IDENTITY TO PARALLEL THE INDETERMINATE, SOMETIMES ANONYMOUS, ALWAYS INTERCHANGEABLE MEMBERS OF THE GROUP:

As chronicled by Taylor, the Marvelettes’ real story is so much richer and crazier than anything you could make up. (The same goes for the Supremes, but don’t get me started.) The saga has it all: Drugs! (Wanda Rogers), Mental Collapse!! (Wyanetta Cowart), Murder!!! (the estranged husband of Rogers’s sister Adoria mistook another sister for Adoria, shooting and killing the sister at their mother’s house).

UNRELIABLE NARRATORS:

If I didn’t know I was reading about the Marvelettes, I’d swear it was Martha Reeves explaining why she didn’t become Stevie Wonder.

COMPETING NARRATIVES:

Refreshingly, not every Marvelette supports the overlooked narrative. ...So whom do you believe? It doesn’t matter. Both Anderson-Schaffner’s and Horton’s versions are at the bull’s-eye of the Marvelettes matrix.

BRANDING CREATES A SCIENCE FICTION EVENT OF IMPOSTORS, MULTIPLE MARVELETTE WORLDS:

Larry Marshak, a concert promoter, holds the Marvelettes trademark. Widely reviled in the business, Marshak specializes in multiple editions of the same faux oldies act, so “the Marvelettes” can be appearing in Boston and Washington, D.C. — on the same night.

NEGATION, REJECTION WAS THEIR DESTINY:

In 1964 Holland-Dozier-Holland wrote “Where Did Our Love Go.” That the Marvelettes were allowed to reject it tells you how much Motown prized the group in that period.

I initially found all these fakeouts, negations, and twisted sentences difficult to read, but that line about the "Marvelettes matrix" made me reconsider this excess of ambivalence about the group. I started to think that the ambivalence is an artifact of how one writes an oral history of a group with interchangeable members, where the biographical oddities transcend what oral histories of musical groups usually include, where the story's partial trajectory is already overly familiar from Dreamgirls (which played on Beyonce's interchangeable members of Destiny's Child, as well as Jennifer Hudson's transcending the American Idol brand), where the later history of the group involves having to go to court to have access to their identity, where the canonization of the group's songs (about letters and rotary dial phones) is being preserved on an older form of musical technology. This is some kind of limit case of the oral history genre, and the stacked-up negations start to look like an interesting comment on how the "Marvelettes matrix" is more like a vortex of indeterminacy?

Youk's uncle

2009-12-10T00:02:00.004-05:00

Cincinnati-style chili, courtesy of Kevin Youkilis's uncle Edward: (thanks to Katy for the heads-up)

Cincinnati-style chili has little in common with the Texas variety except for the ardor of its fans. The core concoction consists of ground beef in a thin, tomato-based sauce that is tangy rather than spicy. (Chocolate is rumored to be a secret ingredient.) In the basic presentation, the chili is poured over slightly overcooked spaghetti and topped with shredded Cheddar cheese; this is known as a “three-way.” ... The authentic shredded cheese, which is a fluorescent yellow, travels poorly, so Edward’s must grate its own.

Ah, but the Texas variety is close to my heart for many reasons, not least of which is its suitability for Frito Pie, best poured straight out of can into the bag of chips itself, with cheddar melted on top.

La Chamade / That Mad Ache

2009-12-09T12:56:00.000-05:00

I was reading spines on a bookstore shelf the other day and saw this title: Sagan / That Mad Ache. The single syllables, the use of the less likely "that" as an article: I had spent so much time with Douglas Hofstadter's iterative translations of Clément Marot's "A une Damoyselle malade" in Le Ton Beau de Marot that I wondered if there were a connection. I looked closer at the name running up the opposite side of the spine: Douglas Hofstadter. He has translated Françoise Sagan's novel La Chamade under the title That Mad Ache, and appended notes on his translation work as an essay called "Translator, Trader" on the flip side of the book.

It's a delightfully designed book, in Baskerville font as usual, including Hoftstadter's now-customary discussion of why he loves that typeface so much and how he uses it almost as a constraint-based writing technique to plan out line breaks and page breaks. (Ben and I were at a party a few weeks ago when Hofstadter came up in conversation very late in the evening, and after some geeky bonding someone decided that someone else needed to know about Baskerville font and the best way to do that would be to type out on a computer, "this is Baskerville, you jerk..." or something like that, probably more adjectives or expletives. Later, our Hofstadter mark remarked that he had never been at a party and discussed Douglas Hofstadter before--obviously he'd never been at a party with Ben or me before.)

Hofstadter's essays and books about translation are fascinating because his obsession with syntax and how sentences work comes from his work in cognitive science--a source that makes for some odd, delightful digressions and thought experiments. I love to read his explanations of how lateral thinking produces unlikely and wonderful connections in his many fields of expertise and interest. Here he's discussing the 1966 English translation of La Chamade by Robert Westhoff, which left the title in French, probably to appeal to readers of Sagan's previous success, Bonjour tristesse:

I'm not saying it was a bad decision to leave the title of La Chamade in French, but it isn't what I myself would have chosen. In fact, as you know, I took another pathway. One day, I was just looking at the word chamade and, as often happens when my mind is idling, I started juggling the letters around a little bit, and what popped out but 'mad ache'. This felt a bit eerie. After all, the whole story is about the mad ache in the hearts of several different people, all of whom are desperately searching for love or think they have found it. Something about this felt right to me, and at the moment it occurred to me that this would be a delicious way to translate Sagan's title 'La Chamade.' It took a bit more thought about whether to say 'A Mad Ache' or 'The Mad Ache' or 'That Mad Ache' or even just plain 'Mad Ache,' but in the end I settled on 'That Made Ache.'

An amusing footnote to this is that my friend Daniel Kiechle ..., on hearing about my proposed title, started searching for English anagrams involving all nine letters in 'La Chamade', and he came up with 'A Calm Head', which though a nice phrase, is pretty nearly the diametric opposite of the meaning of the original title. What a curious coincidence! Needless to say, I didn't go for Daniel's anagram, ingenious though it was.

What should one think about such a brazenly redone title as 'That Mad Ache'? Is it reasonable? In particular, what does the playful game of anagrams have to do with this novel or with Françoise Sagan's style? Admittedly, nothing at all. But even so, I think there is something charming about tipping one's hat to one's author by making the translated title through nothing more than a rearrangement of the very same 'raw materials' that constituted the original title. But then I'm biased.

Elsewhere in "Translator, Trader," (which plays on the traduttore/traditore, translator/traitor pun) Hofstadter calls attention to a translation choice he made in describing a bat's flight. Sagan describes how "des chauves-souris rôdaient autour des lampes sur la terrasse." Hofstadter looks to his dictionary and finds for rôder: roam, wander, loiter, lurk, prowl. I would very much like to see a bat perform any of these actions, but I like his final choice: "some bats were swooping around the lights on the terrace." And, really, it's not so much the particular choice that's interesting to me here but rather Hofstadter's way of explaining how he made the choice and what it shows about dictionaries, translators' prerogatives, translators' constraints.

When I've taught Hofstadter in the past, I've used his work as a model for students to consider how they can:

*write about considering and playing with an intellectual puzzle in an engaging way

*write about specialized expertise, knowledge, and procedures in an engaging way

*assess knowledge as something that's produced, reconsidered, and revised rather than just judged

*use their expertise in one field to learn something new about another field by making moves that translate skills and reveal new possibilities (e.g. the anagram above)

*play with constraints to generate new or different approaches to a problem

*play with form to generate new or different approaches to a problem

The chapter in Le Ton Beau de Marot in which he translates John Searle's Chinese box thought experiment into a Perec-style Oulipo lipogram is one of these totally rewarding moments: I learned something about new about constraint-based writing and AI (without the E).

Master-narrative dirigibles

2009-12-07T20:35:00.001-05:00

I hadn't loved Lorrie Moore's new novel A Gate at the Stairs the same way that I loved her Anagrams, but I was blown away by David Wallace-Wells' review of the book in The Nation. His review made me rethink the function of some of the things I didn't like as much about the novel--namely, I thought the jokes about academia, punk rock, and foodies were about 15 years out of date and the plot twists came out of nowhere--and it also made me think about the contemporary social novel in a way I hadn't considered before. This paragraph doesn't really contain spoilers, but the review itself talks about major plot twists and explains their function brilliantly:

One of these sensational twists might be forgivable in a novel as engaging as this one; two of them would be inexcusable for a writer like Moore, who has always demonstrated such dexterity and narrative control; three of them, however, must be willful, and as the histrionics accumulate in the second half of the novel, A Gate at the Stairs begins to appear more and more a 9/11 farce, mocking the very enterprise of fashioning a coherent and conventional novel from those terrible events and the chaotic years that followed. Moore seems to be mocking, too, the novelistic impulses of our hyperbolic public life, in which private histories are reconfigured into broad narratives dictated by distant events. She offers instead a Gothic melodrama for our particular age of anxiety, a new model novel wrapped in its own cautionary tale. In presenting her readers with both a poignant domestic story and a series of contrived and grandiose narrative flourishes, intrusions that seem more to obscure than to illuminate the lives of her characters, Moore appears to be suggesting that social novels need not be master-narrative dirigibles like those favored by Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen, among others. They can be assembled instead, like much social history, from the ground up, piecemeal, from minor and private testimony. They can be as local and ragged as a patchwork quilt. The history might even be better that way.

(As a sidenote, I did like one of the epigrams at the beginning of the novel, from the Hayden Planetarium: "All seats provide equal viewing of the universe." It reminds me of when I was in fifth grade Drug Abuse Resistance Education class, and the police officer was admonishing one of my classmates for forgetting his DARE binder. "I left it at The Center of the Universe," the boy said. This excuse totally infuriated the police officer, but the boy kept repeating it as though it made perfect sense. Finally, the teacher explained that The Center of the Universe is an [unintentionally grim] concrete sculpture on the University of New Mexico campus, popular less for providing cosmological epiphanies and more for skateboarding and being the victim of crimes, as it's just four concrete passageways that intersect and make for lots of dark corners for lurking. This feels like a Lorrie Moore anecdote to me...)

Mad Men meets Bewitched

2009-11-30T21:04:00.005-05:00

The "tying up loose ends" column genre is by definition hit-and-miss, but I laughed at these two Mad Men queries from Stuart Elliot's advertising column in the NY Times today:

¶With the third season of “Mad Men” concluding as the characters advanced to December 1963, how long will it be before they meet other familiar Madison Avenue figures of the period like Darrin Stephens and Larry Tate of the McMann & Tate agency on “Bewitched”?

¶And if the fourth season of “Mad Men” proceeds as far as the New York City blackout of 1965, will Robert Morse, who plays the executive Bertram Cooper, run into the younger version of himself filming the movie “Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?” about the blackout?

(This reminds me of my favorite episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, when it's revealed that Indy's high school girlfriend is none other than Nancy Drew. Sort of--the redhead is Nancy Stratemeyer, daughter of Edward of Stratemeyer Syndicate fame. At the beginning of the episode, Indy helps Edward with a plot twist for the latest Tom Swift novel and then he and Nancy use their knowledge of how plot twists and character deceptions work in those books to solve a mystery that's generically very similar to a Syndicate story!)

When does a raven appear at two writing desks?

2009-11-27T13:13:00.005-05:00

Great column from Matt Gaffney on Slate about eerily similar crossword theme answers. Gaffney's style is so engaging that I'm sure even non-cruciverbalists will enjoy it. Both the author and Mike Shenk made an Edgar Allan Poe-themed crossword with RAVEN embedded in the theme answers:

Why did Shenk and I both place CONTRAVENE on top and COBRA VENOM on the bottom? Imagine a cheese tasting, in which you start off with the mildest cheese and build your way up to the show-stopping sharpest. The principle is the same here: People tend to solve crosswords from the top to the bottom, so we both chose to lead off with the dullish CONTRAVENE (a semi-boring word that semi-boringly embeds the keyword completely inside) and finish with the awesome COBRA VENOM (snakes are very cool creatures, plus the keyword is divided in an unexpected way).

He asks Merl Reagle to make a crossword with the same theme, to see if the theme answers and the grid could look different. Reagle's extra theme answers are very funny.

Georgian cabdriver

2009-11-23T12:20:00.003-05:00

Ben and I were in a cab on Saturday night and he noticed that the driver's name on his placard was Georgian. He mustered up some Georgian and asked the driver where he was from (Tbilisi), and then they switched to English to talk about the country, where to get good Georgian food in New York, and so on. The cabdriver told us that his father was one of the most famous artists in Georgia...

...and as the ride came to end, he told us, "you can learn about him on my blog!"

The Broken Teaglass

2009-11-23T11:52:00.003-05:00

I read the most wonderful book this weekend: The Broken Teaglass, by Emily Arsenault. It seemed like it was written just for me: a mystery about two bored employees at a dictionary publisher who discover a trove of mysterious citation slips which don't seem to relate to the word they're supposed to be defining and perhaps point toward a decades-old murder. That is, they wonder if the citation slips were written just for them--or for some other lexicographer who may be wrapped up in the murder.

The mystery starts when there's a dispute about the correct plural form of editrix: is it editrixes or editrices? As lexicographers interested in variant spellings, they go to check the citation files of all uses tracked by the dictionary over the years. Editrixes and editrices both have citations, but the one for editrices doesn't seem to actually illustrate the word itself:

editrix
She warmed that water with her hatred. She sighed plaugues into that water. I didn't care. In this chill and inhuman place I was obedient and invisible to everything. I needed that tea to remember I was alive, warm-blooded. I always carried the tea slowly up the stairs and to my desk. I drank it with careful relish. No spilling on the citations. No slurping, no satisfied Aaaah! Such noises would echo through the cubicles and start an uncomfortable collective shifting of the editors and editrices in their seats. So I always sipped quietly.

Editrices is present in the citation, of course, but there's too much and not enough context in the file. It's more about tea and workplace boredom than editing. Then they keep finding more odd citations, marked each time as being from a book called The Broken Teaglass. But no such book seems to exist. When they find maven and it seems to refer to their own place of employment, the detectives start combing through the citations to find more citations to see how the mystery works:

maven
When the papers went crazy, I knew everything might very well explode. Still, I resigned myself to the stern presence of my fellow word mavens. There was at least an odd comfort in submitting to the long silence of the day. Reliable and insistent, it served as a kind of protector. I was reading a book about drug slang, underlining the word 'stash,' and you came into my desk. When you saw what I was reading, you said, Now you're talking. You said that junk slang was your favorite, and wanted to know if there was a chapter on junk. Then you asked if I'd finished that other book yet. No, I whispered, I was unraveling fast. Was it a trick question? What exactly had been in that article that I hadn't had time to read? Was there somtheing suspect near the corpse? Were you smiiling, Red, because of something you knew?

It's a delightful book, like Samuel Johnson and Jim Thompson joining The Westing Game.

Paul Krugman's thoughts on Brangelina, Bono's on the Berlin Wall

2009-11-15T18:17:00.004-05:00

The other day at lunch, my friend made me guess which New York Times columnist was quoted in Us Weekly on the state of Brangelina.

"Dowd would be too easy," I mused. "Frank Rich!"

Unable to name the obvious, correct one, I ran down the roster of columnists, pausing to guess what each one would have to say about the superstar marriage. I think it's completely within the realm of possibility for Gail Collins to have said something glib and offhand; my love for Paul Krugman extends to a delusional state, wherein he would be like me and devote a few minutes every week to "the tabs," as I like to call them and imagine he does, too.

I even named Bono, whom my friend refused to believe had a semi-regular spot. But there he is today, with a weird but not unenjoyable set of scenes tracing the history of "One" alongside the reunification of Germany. Yes, it's too much, too self-consciously cute in most places, but it's a great idea to trace how the song has been appropriated in ways that would have surprised THE SINGER 20 years ago:

An Irish band plays its song “One” in the city where it was written nearly 20 years earlier. The band is here for an MTV broadcast celebrating the anniversary of the wall’s falling. A helicopter shot glides like a ghost through the architecture of this most modern of cities: the avant-garde Chancellery, the glass dome at the top of the Reichstag, the refurbished Brandenburg Gate. Images of East and West Berlin dancing to the music are projected on the gate, turning this monument to peace into a graffiti wall of the same....

We close in on the band. We can feel its sense of occasion. This is nothing new. One suspects THE SINGER approaches a trip to the bathroom with the same degree of vainglory. (To wit, is he not writing about himself now in the third person? He is.) On stage, he is emotional in the way we’ve come to expect. In this case it’s because a song written to help stop his band from falling apart has somehow become an unsentimental ode to unity — in this instance a bittersweet song for a bittersweet history.

I love the idea of tracing how the song has transcended its initial context to mean something to everybody, largely by insisting on its transcendentality (not a word) in the first place. But key question: is it unsentimental, or is its extreme sentimentality the reason that it's been appropriated for use for multiple political and social contexts? Or, more to the point, what do you get by claiming it's unsentimental when every other generic feature of it (lyrics, Edge's guitar, multiple music videos for different causes) points the other direction?

I also deeply wanted Werner Herzog to show up in the scenes.

Local commercials: the genre perfected

2009-11-07T15:01:00.003-05:00

The guys at ilovelocalcommercials.com are creative geniuses. As a promotion for a company that helps small businesses, they travel the country filming commercials for local stores and such. It's hard to pick just one of their commercials, so here's the first one I saw:

These guys love them some local commercials... they even have a section on the site featuring commercials that inspired them, like the infamous ad for the Montgomery Flea Market:

The blend of enthusiasm and irony is awkward at times, but the commercials are suffused with love for the craft and for the entrepreneurial spirit. And they truly capture the character of the business owners and workers.

The approach the commercials take owes something to Dudley Moore's movie Crazy People, in which Moore cracks up and starts submitting ad copy like "Buy Volvos. They're boxy but they're good." (My favorite is "Jaguar. For men who'd like handjobs from beautiful women they hardly know.")

Learning is supposed to be hard (and The Ethicist is supposed to be not a douchebag)

2009-09-26T22:07:00.010-04:00

Randy Cohen's column "The Ethicist" is the worst part of the disappointing New York Times Magazine. He has a knack for missing the point and botching even routine advice, and he sees the need for his ethical interventions where no need exists; he is the "between you and I" of ethics. Today's column doesn't disappoint... in that it does. He ignores the nuances of the question, lays a guilt trip, dismisses the negative consequences of taking his advice, and doesn't do a whit of good for anyone.

The question is:

My listing on ratemyprofessors.com has a few positive ratings, but the majority are from students who gripe about the workload and the density of my lectures. May I suggest to my more-satisfied students that they post a rating on the Web site?

The question interests me because I helped create Columbia University's student-run professor review site, culpa.info. My roommate Ashran and I were responding in 2000 to a widespread feeling among Columbia undergraduates that Columbia valued research prestige over all else, certainly over actual learning. The college then had a notoriously bad -- some would say non-existent -- advisory system. I never once met my official adviser for my major; my wife Kate did meet her adviser, once, in the final weeks of her senior year, when any potential guidance was moot. When it came to exploring disciplines, picking majors, and finding good professors, it was every student for himself.

From the start, the other creators and I felt a tension between our desire to identify excellent teachers and the desire for so many fellow students to troll for easy grades. The latter type are legion, and their pressure on a site like cannot be ignored. There is a greater tendency to criticize a professor when you feel wronged than to praise one when you feel challenged and rewarded. Recipients of poor grades, moreover, will seldom mention their poor performance and have every motivation to shift blame from themselves, which gives the already over-represented negative reviews a false air of credibility.

You can see how a teacher with high academic standards and an eye on tenure might feel pressure to lessen her classes' rigor, lest the review site scuttlebutt threaten her career. Most operators of review sites dismiss such scenarios as outlandish or inevitable. They are at least not outlandish; consider the confession of Ben Marcus, a Columbia assistant professor of creative writing, in a Time op-ed in 2001, to dumbing down his courses:

After early struggles with students who resisted challenges and barked at any criticism, who refused to regard themselves as beginners or who were furious if I didn't regard their short stories as brilliant, I stumbled upon some dubious teaching techniques, reversed the criticisms of these chronically unhappy students and improved my student evaluations for the semester. My record would reflect a smart, attentive, encouraging teacher. But I would argue that I taught these students little. ...Submitting students to the rigors of learning seemed only to incur the wrath of many of them, which entered the record as my teacherly shortcoming.

I cannot speak for the current student managers of Culpa, but at least when my roommate Ashran and I created the current site, we took the problem seriously, and designed an editorial style that allowed for derision but demanded some critical engagement beyond bald professor-bashing. (Positive reviews need this guidance, too, perhaps more so given their writers' lack of a litany of complaints. "Professor X is great" is as useless as "Professor Y sucks", but fewer negative reviews will leave it at that.)

The quality of reviews has regressed to the mean as their number has grown (currently over 17,000), but many new reviews still reflect the pattern of the original hundred or so we wrote and collected in 2000. And our style guide -- a slapdash effort of mine that, surprisingly, still stands up -- has been adopted in full by another review site. The tide is against us, however, and the culture of entitlement is winning over the recognition that real learning is, well, hard. For a less delicate summation of this point, one that would be hilarious if it were not so frightening, check out Branford Marsalis's rant about trying to teach students today.

But I digress. Resume Cohen-bashing: Cohen responds, as you might expect, with advice deaf to the issues at hand:

It is no doubt irksome to read this roster of grousing when you are sure that many students benefit from your class, but that does not justify your skewing the results, which is what you propose... You’d do better simply to read the comments, use them as an opportunity to improve your teaching and then have a glass of wine. Or two.

Cohen's self-congratulatory, simplistic moralism reminds me here of a classic Fantastic Four panel, which has been captioned on the internet with "Reed Richards is an asshole... just, such an asshole."

He concludes, incredibly,

Even if those whiny evaluations affect course-enrollment numbers or even hiring and promotion, surely your colleagues realize that these sites do not provide a scientific survey of student views. In any case, as the CUNY prof put it, “Cooking the books on the rating does not seem the way to go.”

I do believe a whiny course review site is better than none. At a research university like Columbia, where teaching is often incidental and good teachers lose out to prolific researchers, students and teachers alike deserve a forum that celebrates teaching excellence -- even if the yardstick is immature and bratty. But that doesn't mean a teacher shouldn't stand up for himself; in fact, it helps the quality of a review site for teachers to encourage satisfied students to post reviews. Since the reviews are not a random sample in the first place, it is ridiculous to suggest such encouragement introduces bias, much less book-cooking.

In conclusion, professor whose name is withheld, DO encourage your supportive students to post reviews, and, more generally, always take the opposite of Cohen's advice.

Unintended anti-gay hilarity

2009-09-07T13:43:00.002-04:00

Charlie Kaiser takes down a WaPo puff piece about Brian Brown, of the National Organization for Marriage, a piece which did include this too-good-to-be-true gem:

NOM's campaigns have had missteps... Million for Marriage, the organization's push to rally online activists around the country, was similarly unfortunate: Apparently no one at NOM had realized that 2M4M, the hip-sounding tag they'd chosen for the initiative, is also the abbreviation favored by gay couples looking for a threesome. (emph. added)

Kaiser concludes with a link to one of Colbert's funniest moments, ever:

The only truly useful thing Mr. Brown has ever done was to produce an anti-marriage equality ad that was so inane and offensive, it inspired Stephen Colbert’s single finest piece of satire of 2009. Watch it here.

Kaiser points out that a piece like this screams out for a good editor. I agree--some passages are so unquestioningly cheerleading that it's downright confusing:

Brown is confident that if people hear his message, they will believe it. "People already believe it," he says, "but the issue is so deep-seated that they've never had to create an argument for it. Now we have to give people the language to do that. Create talking points. Help them see."

Oh sorry, I copied that wrong. See those last two sentences? Here's how they really read in the article (note the placement of the quotation marks):

Brown is confident that if people hear his message, they will believe it. "People already believe it," he says, "but the issue is so deep-seated that they've never had to create an argument for it. Now we have to give people the language to do that." Create talking points. Help them see.

Either author Monica Hesse is a call-and-response parishioner in Brown's church, or a couple of editors need to drink more Tab.

Kaiser quotes this confusing paragraph:

"The racial bigot comparison is the most troubling part of the argument," Brown says. It's horrible, offensive, deliberately incendiary. He thinks it is "irrational," a word he uses often.

I know Hesse means that second sentence to be of a piece with the third--a description of his views, not a statement of fact--but it reads somewhat like the latter. Is this some accepted new style? Hesse and her editors seem to think it is:

It is irrational when the opposition points to polls suggesting that most young people support gay marriage.
...
It is irrational when people believe that the legalization of same-sex marriage is an inevitability...
He takes nothing personally. He means nothing personal. He is never accusatory or belittling. His arguments are based on his understandings of history, not on messages from God that gays caused Hurricane Katrina. In short: The institution of marriage has always been between a man and a woman. Yes, there have been homosexual relationships. But no society that he knows of, in the history of the world, has ever condoned same-sex marriage.

There are several hundred million Europeans who might suggest counterexamples.

As Kaiser points out, even this guy's wife is a bit confused and embarrassed by his zealotry. I get the feeling it's time to start the anti-gay-crusader-revealed-to-be-gay countdown.

Isn't there like a war happening where people are dying?

2009-09-05T13:41:00.003-04:00

Yes, it’s fonts that we are talking about here, and as anyone who has seen the documentary “Helvetica” or fiddled with computer programs can tell you, there’s a big difference between Wingdings and Bauhaus.

Okay, maybe the article is describing Alice and me to a disturbing t.

Alice and Auster: drawing circles around the Times

2009-08-22T11:44:00.003-04:00

The NY Times has finally caught on the trend of walking (or jogging) in a path that would form an image from God's point of view. Why oh why must they omit mention of Paul Auster's City of Glass, which long ago originated the idea? None of the people mentioned in the article beat Alice to the punch -- before GPS was widely available, she followed Auster's characters' circuitous route through the Upper West Side, tracing a message no satellites could detect.