“There’s another kind of activity that we call ‘People just standing there, alone.’ Life swirls about them, and they let it all pass by. They just ... stand there.”
From The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, by William H. Whyte.
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Thinking about the various clustercusses in the world, and reading William James, I came across this optimistic notion:
Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forevermore the ponderous equator to its lines, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.
It’s a quote from Emerson, delivered in a lecture on the divine in the mid-19th century. You gotta wonder if he’d reconsider his position if he saw the world today.
(Also known as those pickled vegetables from the taco truck.) ... Mara made some this weekend, and I’ve basically been living on it for the last three days. The recipe originated in The Essential Cuisines of Mexico, but we found a previously adapted version at Simply Recipes. ¡Horale! ¡Vamos a do this!
Ingredients
1 lb jalapeño (and serrano if you wish) chile peppers
1/3 cup olive oil
2 – 3 medium white or yellow onions, thickly sliced
2 – 3 medium carrots, peeled and thickly sliced
Florets from half a small cauliflower (optional)
1 head garlic, cloves separated but not peeled
4 cups apple cider vinegar
2 Tbsp Kosher salt or sea salt
2 bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
4 sprigs of fresh marjoram or 1/4 teaspoon dried
4 sprigs of fresh thyme or 1/4 teaspoon dried
1 Tbsp sugar
Method
- Wash the chiles, leaving the stems intact. Cut a cross in the tip end of each chile so that the vinegar will be able to penetrate the chile.
- Heat oil in a large, deep skillet. Add the chiles, onions, carrots, cauliflower if using, and garlic. Fry over medium heat for about 10 minutes, turning them over occasionally.
- Add the vinegar, salt, herbs, and sugar and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer for 5 minutes for serranos or 10 minutes for jalapeños. Make sure the chiles are entirely cooked through before canning.
- Pack 4 pint-sized sterilized jars with the chiles and vegetables. Top with the vinegar and seal. Process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.
Once opened, can keep for one to two months in the refrigerator.
I’ve love infographics, and I’ve gone on and on about collaboration and the Beatles before, so when I heard that someone had created an infographic displaying the degree to which Beatles collaborated on songs — well, “interested” would be hugely understating my emotions at the time. (Thanks, Dan, for the tip).
Author: “The Beatles: Authorship & Collaboration” is a nicely composed graphic, clearly breaking down the contributors to each song, Beatle and non-Beatle. The songs are laid out chronologically, and the overall effect clearly reveals that the Beatles collaborated less as they progressed in their careers. (If anything is true of the Beatles, it’s that they grew apart over time). The chart’s data is drawn from Beatlesongs, which quantifies the degree to which each Beatle contributed to the writing of a song, using a scale of 0 – 100%.
I can’t quibble with the desire to understand and visualize the degree to which each Beatle shaped each song, but I find the quantification bit a little — well — falsely precise. It makes for a nice infographic, but a mere skim through The Official Abbey Road Studio Session Notes, 1962 – 1970 makes it clear that there was quite a lot of collaboration among the four Beatles — not to mention the various “fifth Beatles,” the “Black Beatle,” and their producer, George Martin. Perhaps there’s a difference between “collaboration” and “authorship?”
In the example to the right, “Octopus’s Garden,” is said to be 100% Ringo? Yes, Ringo does receive sole credit for “authorship,” but it is widely known that George had a significant role in shaping it. In fact, George works out the song on a piano in the Let It Be movie. How to represent this softer sort of collaboration? Good question. Shapes? Sizes? Colors? Dimensions? Whatever it is, it should fairly communicate the organic nature of creative collaboration. And dispense with the too-neat round numbers.
Amidst the many changes around and within journalism, the journalist — as an actor in creating the news — is becoming more recognizable, identifiable, and individual. For instance, I’m “friends” with New York Times reporter Nicholas Kristof. (Okay, it’s on Facebook, but still).
Kristof himself is a media decathlete: In addition to being a NY Times columnist, he has a blog on nytimes.com, updates his Facebook status daily, posts tidbits of news to Twitter — and all of this relates and refers to his “official” journalist work as a journalist for the Times. He also engages with his readers in comments, carrying on conversations about his posts. These different “touch points” — a term that I hate, but which seems appropriate here — allow him to test assumptions, get quick feedback, and share information that may not fit into the framework of an official column. They also gives readers ways to get more engaged with topics they care about, providing a variety of avenues for participation. Finally, they give readers more insight into the reporters themselves — their interests, their informal voices, their senses of humor.
Is insight good? Is “participation” good?
I don’t know. This humanization of news sources isn’t totally new, either. There have always been celebrity journalists like Kristof, and their greater exposure ensures the accrual of an identity more extensive than a mere by-line.
The difference is that this also happening at much more granular levels. My friend Leslie is a reporter for the Modesto Bee. She uses Twitter to post meta-news (@BeeReporter), and created a Facebook page (ReporterAlbrecht) to foster a community around her beat. At the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World, the sports reporters record podcasts, comment on articles, and maintain blogs.
I personally love the new avenues of participation, but I wonder what the effect of all this will be. News has become more of conversation. Reporters are extending their identity into the public sphere, becoming distinct as individuals. Does this increase the value, authority, credibility, reach, or depth of the subsequent journalism?
Last night I read the New Yorker profile of Matthew and Michael Dickman, poets from Portland, Oregon who happen to be identical twins. (Here’s the abstract). In their work, they have very different voices, but there’s a strange sort of twin telepathy that seems to exist within it. They also edit each other’s work, providing insight and feedback to each other about works in progress.
During one editing session, one of the Dickmans recalls an interview with former American poet laureate Mark Strand in which Strand cautions against relying on “clusters of words” that pop into your head ... This sounded to me like a good rule of thumb for writing. (It also added fuel to the fire of my dislike of Twitter and Twitter-like tools that encourage people to offer half-cocked, cliche-ridden mini-opinions about everything.) I plundered the Internet in search of the interview.
Turns out that he was referring to a 2003 piece in Post Road Magazine. It was conducted by writer Michael O’Keefe. The relevant bit is the last passage from Strand, but the context is helpful:
Mark Strand: Nobody wants to arrive because that’s the end. One wants to have openings constantly before him so there are places to go.
Michael O’Keefe: Do you believe that sometimes words can get in the way when you write?
MS: Words do get in the way when you have heard them used in a particular manner before. When you write all you’ve got are words but they both get in the way and serve as a salvation.
MO: Do you avoid using any kind of combinations of words that you could remember easily?
MS: Yeah, I mistrust them because it means that they existed in that way before. The idea is to use a modifier-noun combination that may never have been used before. Otherwise you may be just quoting others or quoting yourself. The excitement comes when you have done something that was unthinkable before.
Amen, brother. Mistrust ease. Seek the unthinkable.
In my digging, I also found some excellent Strand resources, including a nice interview in a 1975 issue of Ploughshares and a very helpful page at the Library of Congress that eventually led to my discovery of the above interview.
Last night, Lynne told a story about a friend who, upon seeing movie star James Franco in the New York subway, experienced a feeling of ecstatic clarity, of time slowing down. I don’t recall if Mihály Csíkszentmihályi covers celebrity sightings in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, but this sounds like a state of flow to me. Wikipedia sums up the flow concept as “a mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.”
Bill DeRouchey recently mentioned the ingredients that, for him, trigger a state of flow: “Brian Eno [ed: I’m guessing his music here, rather than, say, seeing him on the subway], Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack, isolation, old rocksteady/ska and (yes) the LOTR trilogy.” There was an ensuing #flowstate discussion on Twitter.
David Halberstam’s book about the late 70’s Portland Trailblazers, The Breaks of the Game, contains a nice description of former Blazer Bill Walton’s pre-game ritual:
[Walton] loved the day of a game, particularly an important game. It was a time which belonged completely to him, a time pure in its purpose. On the day itself, he did not analyze the game, he had done that the night before, thought about the team and the player he was going against in the most clinical way possible. The night before was the analytical time. The day of the game was different, it was an emotional time. He always took a nap on the day of a game, waking up two and a half hours before the game ... This was the time in which he felt the rhythm and tempo of the game, almost like feeling a dance of his own. He played his own music, from the Grateful Dead ... and the music helped, it flowed through him and he thought about the tempo he wanted to set and how he could move. He would sit in his home or his hotel room in those hours and actually see the game and feel the movement of it. Sometimes he did it with such accuracy that a few hours later when he was on the court and the same players made the same moves, it was easy for him because he had already seen it all, had made that move or blocked that shot. He loved that time, he had it all to himself, he was absorbed in his feel for basketball.
An ingredient to Walton’s secret sauce: The Grateful Dead. In the same jam family, I would say, as Bill’s Phillip Glass go-to, Koyaanisqatsi.
All of which of course made me think of my own flowstate triggers. The more I think about it, though, my most reliable trigger is running, but a glass of water and the Baseball Encyclopedia also can do the trick. Music is not as essential to me; sometimes silence is better, sometimes I need some Animal Collective. For Reverend Green is pretty reliable.
President–elect Obama:
Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends — hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism — these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.
This is the price and the promise of citizenship.
...
So let us mark this day with remembrance, of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people:
“Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive...that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].”
America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
Read the whole dang thing. It’s just as impressive in text as it was in voice.
Incoming White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel recently discussed the next administration’s approach to the financial crisis, telling the Wall Street Journal, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Linking politics, crisis and opportunity, Emanuel’s sentiments evoked either Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom or Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, depending on your level of paranoia/distrust of the federal government.
I’ll admit that I’ve only skimmed Friedman, but Klein’s book is a provocative interpretation of social crisis and the ways in which corporations benefit (and people are exploited) in the wake of a disaster. She holds Friedman accountable for the rise of “disaster capitalism,” and she identifies his philosophies as the origin of numerous crises precipitated by governments around the world in the past fifty years:
This is how the shock doctrine works: the original disaster — the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown, the war, the tsunami, the hurricane — puts the entire population into a state of collective shock ... Like the terrorized prisoner who gives up the names of his comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often gives up things that they would otherwise fiercely protect.
Anyway, what’s especially interesting about Emanuel’s invocation is that (I suspect) at least some of the new administration’s policies will reverse the deregulation that Friedman recommended and that his acolytes implemented. Also, like Friedman, Emanuel is from Chicago. Ironic? Deeply.
I love reading, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how technology is affecting the way that we read now and in the future. I keep thinking about something Sven Birkerts said in a 1998 interview with Harpers: “If you touch all parts of the globe, you can’t do that and then turn around and look at your wife in the same way.” [PDF] Of course, one could be turn around and look at one’s wife in a more informed, more educated way, but that’s not the way he sees it. I share this anxiety: I love reading the New York Times on my phone, but I can’t help but sense that something will be lost if all printed matter moves in this direction.
This is the top shelf on one of our book cases. It’s comforting to have the books sitting there; they’re like a version of myself, sitting on a shelf, disassembled and re-arrangeable.In August 1995, Harpers Magazine conducted a round table discussion with Wired’s Kevin Kelly, author Sven Birkerts, the Well’s John Perry Barlow, and Mark Slouka. The results were condensed in the magazine [PDF], and the conversation outlines the two ideologies that continue to converse today: Those who believe that the paper incarnation of the book is an irreplaceable arena for the delivery of its content, and those who don’t. Birkerts discusses the former in his 1995 book, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.
In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts sent a shot across the bow in a paper called “Reading at Risk,” [PDF]. The researchers surveyed 17,000 people, and they concluded that the future of literary reading is bleak: “Literary reading in America is not only declining rapidly among all groups, but the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young.”
Still, the total number of books sold continues to rise, so is the future really that bleak? The NEA thinks so. It released a follow-on to Reading at Risk called “To Read or Not To Read.” This study focuses on young readers, and links the decline in reading to “civic, social and economic” risks.
Last spring, Nicholas Carr discussed Google’s effect on literary reading in the Atlantic, provocatively titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid.” [I discussed this in a blog post at the Cooper Journal called “Dumb is the new smart”]. In it, he interviews a blogger who confesses the following:
“I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
The article also sparked a discussion on brittanica.com, collected in a forum called “Your Brain Online.” It’s got a lot of interesting stuff from folks like Kevin Kelly, Danny Hillis and Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, who thinks that the “unprecedented abundance” of the web will function to break the vise-grip of the “literary world” on culture:
It’s not just because of the web — no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting. This observation is no less sacrilegious for being true. The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it, but that process started long before the internet became mainstream ... The threat isn’t that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to the idea of reading War and Peace.
Ursula Le Guin disputes the notion that people have ever read War and Peace. (Well, maybe.)
Self-satisfaction with the inability to remain conscious when faced with printed matter seems questionable. But I also want to question the assumption — whether gloomy or faintly gloating — that books are on the way out. I think they’re here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?
The title of her recent Harper’s essay pretty well sums up her position: “Notes on the alleged decline of reading.” It roars through the various aspects of the state of reading and publishing, quickly turning into a ringing indictment of corporate publishers:
The social quality of literature is still visible in the popularity of bestsellers. Publishers get away with making boring, baloney-mill novels into bestsellers via mere P.R. because people need bestsellers. It is not a literary need. It is a social need. We want books everybody is reading (and nobody finishes) so we can talk about them.
On that social note
I was just looking at my beat-up copy of “The Dharma Bums,” and I felt a sort Chris Matthews-esque tingle. I bought it during high school at Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kansas, and it sparked my fascination with the West Coast, years before I ever traveled here. Would I ever read it again? Probably not. In fact, just now, I could barely read even a couple of pages without feeling like Kerouac was on auto-pilot. But I like the idea that my bookshelf is a kind of externalization of myself, a collection of important influences and expressions. The future of my books appears to be not so different than the present: A combination of talismans, objects of beauty, and points of reference.
On the subject of reference, in (wait for it) a Harper’s essay called ““A Defense of the Book,” William Gass talks about the pleasures of not having the world at your fingertips:
I have rarely paged through one of my dictionaries (a decent household will have a dozen) without my eye lighting, along the way, on words more beautiful than a found fall leaf, on definitions odder than any uncle, on grotesques like gonadotropin-releasing hormone or, barely, above it — what? — gombeen — which turns out to be Irish for usury.
And holy crap, there’s a whole lot more Gass at Tunneling. Articles, links, thoughts. I love the Internet.
