Always rushing on to the next thing, pushing yourself to create, create, is not always the best thing. Consuming media's the worst option. The middle road: sit still, let be, have a thought and follow it. Never know where it leads.

People keep saying the same wrong junk about Warhol's Brillo boxes!

Louis Menand, otherwise a hero of mine, in a piece for the magazine a month ago, quotes a classic (?) line from critic Arthur Danto:

"Why is something that looks exactly like a Brillo box a work of art, but a Brillo box is not?" ("The Artworld")

And Menand seems to take the bait: "Pop showed that in the end the only difference between an art work, such as grocery carton, and a real thing, such as a grocery carton, is that the first is received as art and the second is not." I think this is decidedly off the mark.

Warhol's Brillo boxes don't look exactly like a Brillo box. They look like an artist's depiction of a Brillo box. They're not cardboard, for one thing, they're painted wood, or some other more solid material. Their texture is like that of painted drywall. They feel like paintings, albeit very physical ones.

They are idealizations, even if the box design is unchanged. The commercial design of the original boxes was already an idealization: it is minimal modernism exemplified. To my contemporary eye, too, they are refreshingly free of fine print—ingredients, safety disclaimers, barcodes. They've been cleansed of the stink of the world, offering only those touchingly exuberant (and lightly poetic) self-advertisements: "25 GIANT SIZE PKGS. / SHINES ALUMINUM FAST."

Like any other time a painter re-imagines something, that something is made fresher, and it is a gift we receive, to be able to sense this thing anew.

Two deceptive phrases in Menand's remark stand out: "look like" and "the real thing." As noted, Warhol's Brillo boxes do not "look like" Brillo boxes—they look different. Well, okay, they "look like," but they certainly don't "look exactly like" them, as Danto was saying. And if they look distinct to the naked eye, there is no question of them being "fake." Warhol's and the commercial Brillo boxes are both real objects. Warhol's objects just happen to be artistic views upon the other.

I am tempted to argue that Duchamp's "Fountain" was the only time in the history of art when a completely ready-made object was presented, and accepted, as art—and even then, Duchamp made a playful signature and turned the thing sideways. There is always this critical alteration, which makes a thing art.

It is thus a mistake, the justice said, to applaud the regulation of corporate speech as “some sort of beatific action.”

Justice Thomas said the First Amendment’s protections applied regardless of how people chose to assemble to participate in the political process.

“If 10 of you got together and decided to speak, just as a group, you’d say you have First Amendment rights to speak and the First Amendment right of association,” he said. “If you all then formed a partnership to speak, you’d say we still have that First Amendment right to speak and of association.”

“But what if you put yourself in a corporate form?” Justice Thomas asked, suggesting that the answer must be the same.

"Justice Thomas Defends Campaign Finance Ruling" The New York Times, 3 Feb, 2010.

But corporations are self-aware, not just assemblies of people! They live in perpetuity and their agents can be held responsible for not properly feeding the beast with profit. Surely that changes the dynamic somewhat?

The very inspiring thread of Tyler Cowen's Create Your Own Economy is muddied by a surprising presentation of autism as primarily a set of intellectual gifts. To hear Cowen sing, you'd think autism was strictly an attribute of heroes—heroes who are sadly abused by the prejudice of mainstream neurotypicals. He argues that we should all emulate autistics by memorizing and ordering information—and that we are already doing so, through social networks and personal technology. He takes umbrage at the notion of autism as a "disorder" and calls those who see it that way bigots. He spends chapter after chapter extolling the virtue and importance of autistics' legendary "ordering" abilities, and the relevance of information-ordering to a modern information economy.

I was perplexed—isn't there some downside to autism? Other sources say so. Wikipedia, citing medical journals, describes it as a developmental disorder, and gives figures showing that autistic adults have a very poor success rate (circa 12%) at living independently from day to day.

Cowen paints far too rosy a picture of autism, it seems. And while he does good to call out its strengths, and rail against prejudice, I'm not sure his book contributes to a good understanding of the condition.

Autistic people, like any others, have the right to be treated with dignity and with all the respect they earn. Cowen is right to point out that, as "autism" becomes a commonplace label for a broad class of people, it becomes easier to write them off: to give them less credit than they deserve, and deprive them of dignity.

But if autism is a cognitive inability to participate in the communication protocols that allow us all to coordinate as a society, then it is a disorder.

And, doesn't Cowen elevate the importance of "information ordering" too far? Studying and organizing information can be useful; but I've seen plenty of such obsessions that are, truly, useless—or at least not paying off. The people who memorize train timetables or baseball stats seem to me to be wasting their time. Lots of people know facts but interpret them too rigidly: they can't apply fuzzier knowledge—established associations and probable linkages—or flex what is known into a fuller understanding. Information should be carried by paper and hard drives, not by human memories. Our minds should be left free to perceive, to compute, and to enjoy.

Here's an alternative heroism: the real heroes of today are those with a holistic, integrative and flexible picture of our information-dense world. These are the torch-bearers of the liberal arts 2.0, the intellectual politics of Barack Obama.

I left my job in aughty-two with one fresh thing in mind: that life, existence, was more than just having a job and eking fun in the off-hours.

I started devoting myself to the difference between "work" and "my work." Work was an obligation, it was time in service. "My work" meant laboring on the things I was curious about.

And I was surprised, in the first months out, that life could be more than just "my work," too. It could be dawdling in the spring-moist bushes of the arboretum, idling at the cafe watching the regulars high-fiving the staff, bussing down to an art gallery and contemplating destruction. And none of it in the service of creative work, either. Just living.

Reading a letter from your father in the public library, a letter about history, and trying to write a letter back.

Keeping the space safe while the children got ready to leave school.

We were children then. Everyone I knew was free. There was no urgency to time. We got up to do the next thing as soon as we felt like it. We lived cheap, made our own dinner, kept up old clothes—we kept our lifestyle going.

To think that life was more than one's creative work, and that it was really, firstly, about noticing, enjoying, feeling and doing the right thing. That it could be about raising children, being a good friend a good neighbor. Absorbing the changes in the world, too, and being a good neighbor in each new world, each new month's world.

John Oliver and Jon Stewart on corporations as people. Comedy gold! Well, comedy silver flecked with gold. Not bad value.

A typically devastating yarn by T. C. Boyle graced the New Yorker's pages last week.

Why is it that I think it's not worth reading online, and that I could never have such a deep engagement with a story, if it were on my computer monitor instead of a page? I think it's because with a computer I'm never alone; the computer is a perpetual partner, and to die in a story I must be alone with it.

An a quote from Jonathon Littel's novel The Kindly Ones:

Now my thoughts shifted: in place of his frail neck other powerful necks appeared, of men I had been with or even just looked at, and I considered these necks with a woman's eyes, suddenly understanding with a terrifying clarity that men control nothing, dominate nothing, that they are just children and even ots, put there for the pleasure of women, an insatiable pleasure all the more sovereign that the men think they are in charge, think they dominate women, whereas in reality women absorb them, wreck their dominion and dissolve their control, . . .

Ahem:

Using handlebar-mounted RFID or GPS technology, for example, commuters could detect other riders on the routes, helping them to assemble into pelotons or "bike buses." These groups could in turn emit signals that trip traffic lights in their favor, resulting in a "green wave" of bicycle momentum

—"The 9th Annual Year in Ideas," New York Times

And so.

Here:

In "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America," Daniel Boorstin distinguishes between heroes, whose higher example can "fill us with purpose," and celebrities—each his own fleeting "human pseudo-event"—who "are nothing but ourselves seen in a magnifying mirror." But what about the ambitions or hopes of celebrities themselves? What is it that they really want? Sarah Palin's uncertain future raises this question.

—Sam Tanenhaus, "North Star." The New Yorker, Dec 7, 2009

Sorry to pull the second-to-last paragraph, but it was the best. :-þ

Create Your Own Economy gets dramatically more compelling in Chapter 3, where Cowen hunkers down into an economic argument that cultural bits have gotten smaller now that the delivery and attendance costs are lower, and that as a result we're consuming a wider range of smaller bits of culture, and are happier because of it—because we can fit more pieces of culture into the puzzle of our lives.

Rather than just tout modern pop culture above classical masterpieces, the way lots of commentators have done, Cowen credits those masterpieces with great beauty and power, but argues that most of the time, we're not willing to take the extra trouble to consume them.

Most interesting of all is his idea that, instead of giving us shorter attention spans, these modern culture-bites (TV shows, blog posts, tweets) can give us a longer attention span: they reward us for staying with a source over time: tuning in for every episode of a show, or checking back to a blog week after week.

My view: in the face of all this, there is still some under-appreciated value in big culture, that is, really deeply-worked masterpieces. It's always been hard to consume those, and we've always needed to ask ourselves to watch a four-hour Hamlet rather than a bundle of eight TV shows, or rather six TV shows and two snack breaks.

When I was doing my PhD, I became aware of how much trouble I had focusing on a single problem for hours at a time—much more trouble than I had had as a teenager—and this frustrated me. I kept wondering if it was because of bad habits, like watching TV, that I'd let myself into, or if it was just age dulling my mind.

Cowen's argument would be that, if we have trouble focusing on a four-hour Hamlet, it's just because we're aware of other, cheaper culture that we can get to. But does this mean we'll be less well-prepared as a society to tackle really big problems?

After reading Chapter 1 of Tyler Cowen's Create Your Own Economy, I don't believe it at all.

He argues that we of the information age are, like the autistics among us, obsessively order-seeking. For an example he touts the iPod, which, he says, gives us the ability to order our music collections.

It seems to me just the opposite. Back when we had LPs, we kept them in order: alphabetically, or by genre, or color, or something else. Everyone had their own system, but systems they had. For some it was casual, just a way to find the needed vinyl, but other folks obsessed, loving and memorizing their orderings. Contrariwise, isn't the special quality of digital music libraries (which Cowen calls "the iPod") just the fact that they don't require ordering? Computers do search so well that we can just free-associate: we don't have to impose any structure.

The other examples are just as mystifying: Google, FaceBook, Google Earth, Delicious, and Flickr, to remember the most salient. All these services allow me to search and zoom in directly to the item I want, just by using some loose words associated with it. They dispense with my old ordering practices.

One kind of order we see every day is the chronological order. I'm a big fan of this order. But Cowen makes something extra of it when he glosses that "Your 'news feed,' now on the main Facebook personal page, orders what your friends are up to." This surely misses the point: Yes, the news items are in the order of their happening, but that's only because recent stuff is most important. That's a feature of human life that has nothing to do with an autistic passion for order. The autistic kindergartner Cowen cites, who is fascinated with railway schedules, is indulging a different urge than us Googlers.

One of Cowen's themes is that autism isn't a disability, that it's a condition whose strengths are actually valuable in an information-centric world. That may be, but not because of modern gadgets like digital music and Google.

The new film Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (from David Foster Wallace's book) can maybe best be described as a scarifying experience. Not redemptive, or cathartic, certainly, but more of a bracing shove. (Everything I say here may go for the book, which as a philistine and a dilettante I haven't read. Also, SPOILERS AHEAD, so don't read on without seeing the film or reading the book.)

It's a realization of the central character's own project, as we discover it to be: a meditation on how the feminist movement affected men.

The first monologues show ordinary pick-up artists, from the cads who baldly treat women as conquests and have no pretense of sensitivity, to the smooth operators who use sensitivity as their bait. DFW has a good ear for the pick-up tricks and the layers of deception built into them. It's amazing how they escalate: each hideous man uses the supposed callousness of the last as his foil, building himself a persona of deeper appreciation—either of women in general, or of the bullshit others use in their own pick-ups.

All the way through the film, I was fighting with it, trying to find my own monologue, my own very reasonable, honest sensitivity. But in the end nothing can be said, not any sensitive declaration or any unmasking of the "truth" we're so often hearing, that men think with their dicks. (If this were true, wouldn't we have a lot more dick-aches for Excedrin to treat?)

It left me with a feeling that feminism truly did strengthen women, weakening men in the process. And maybe this is a good thing. Maybe we're all more likely as a result to end up with someone who's really good for us, or at least less likely to end up with someone who makes us feel bad.

(According to the stats—and I believe the stats—feminism hasn't helped all women, all the time, but maybe at least it helps women like Sarah in the film, in her romantic bargaining power.)

At the end of the film our one sympathetic character makes a tremendous speech, where we find out how bad he's been—he's had an affair. He admits his own misbehavior and the hideous reasons that led to it, apparently laying himself quite bare. This is the moment of catharsis we've been waiting for. We want our man to save the day, if only because he's our man. But Sarah neither forgives, nor condemns. Her stony smile shows she simply doesn't need him anymore—since the affair has revealed his inconstant heart—and that is what finally hurts him.

Here's a good book: Portrait of a Marriage, by Nigel Nicolson.

Nicolson tells the story of his mother, Vita Sackville-West, and his father Harold, who had a very unusual marriage during the first (most romantic) half of the 20th century. Nigel seems to hold the same view as my own mother, who once told me, mischievously, "I don't think there's any secret that somebody's gotta take to the grave."

There were certain disturbances in the force during Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson's 50-year marriage, but ultimately it was seen to be a marriage of deep love and a stable one. They had three or four productive careers between them, raised two happy children (with productive careers of their own), and died more or less by each others' sides. As a great believer in love in the long arc, I found it an inspiring tale, and a ripping good yarn.

I credit it with a very vivid beginning in medias res, for a biography. Also, for us egalitarian Americans (I count myself one), the book makes an intimate view into the British upper class in the 20s and 30s—a world sufficiently strange as to lift this biography almost to magical-realist status.

Fear of spoilage prevents me from saying more, but let me tempt one trice you further, Unknown, by noting that there is a surprise midnight airplane flight undertaken by two unlikely, ersatz friends to salvage a delicate situation (they fail, then it comes through anyway, etc.). If that doesn't sell you, nothing will. Benedictions, Unknown.

In a dear post to my heart, Jonathan Hoefler notes that

Young typophiles today have more outlets for their enthusiasm (you are here)

Now then. The future beckons.

No, rather, it is I who beckon it. The future is glorious and sweet but the present involves working for pay and rattling cages for a job. I beckon you, future. Come here.

Now then. After all, I do intend to be a computer scientist. Squirrely remarks in other directions are to be discounted. I learned up on creating programming languages and creating programming languages is what I want to do.

But first, a few million dollars.

Well, first, a few dollars.

Then we'll see.

Oh, I forgot to tell you guys! I finished my edumication. I wrote down everything I learned, fixed up the margins and the linespacing (what a plague!) and handed it in. Then I spent the summer peregrinating, collaring people to tell them about it. And finally I made that long pilgrimage back to Edinburgh, Scotland, and then I stood up and defended myself for a few hours, and then they slapped me on the back and taught me the secret handshake of scientists.

It was such a big milestone I couldn't even write about it. It's an unaccountable validation: no one can ever again tell me I am not a computer scientist!

What a relief. Now that that's out of the way, I don't even have to act like a computer scientist! I can do anything I want. Hot-air balloonist, lathe operator, type designer! Tee-riffic. Can't wait to start goofing around again.

In spite of its American Pie-like trailer, Adventureland is actually a sweet, sad, funny little movie.

The new film (500) Days of Summer declares its theme as the rejection of "The One" in romance. It's the story of young Tom, who thinks Summer is The One for him; they have a cute few months together, but then they're on and off for a year. Summer is glib and won't commit, although we never see what drives her reservations. These facts are pressed by the voiceover to show that Tom's vision of The One is an unsustainable fiction and that Summer's fly-by-night indulgences are the true path.

Narration aside, the story I saw was different. A boy, Tom, falls for a girl, Summer, who simply doesn't fall back in turn. Instead she toys with him and he grows increasingly and understandably frustrated. Why don't they click? We don't know. Does Summer do right by keeping him at half an arm's length? Seems not, to me.

The voiceover draws a further lesson from Tom's events: that "coincidences" determine love more than "fate." And to show this, the film conjures a woman who appears just when Tom is open to a new relationship. But something ineffable (or at least, ineffed) happens between them; they both prick up their ears in this meeting. Surely this mystery is what we wanted explained through the fantasy of "The One": the mystery of that instantaneous reaction—love at first blink, if you will. Here, the coincidence is only that they meet at all—not the source of what we assume to be their special connection.

A more thorough debunking of "The One"—a romance more dedicated to coincidences, that is—would show how love builds inexplicably through unforeseen events, but events which somehow bind the two together: a certain broken kite, the memory of hidden crustaceans revealed in tide pools, a spontaneous word which becomes a regular game. The strange laughter that emerges from long winter nights.

Because unexpected, these event can't support one's personal prophecy of The One. But they are the wings on which fondness is born. And the cement of an intimate existence.

They's makin my favorite chilluns book into a movie!

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

Looks like it departs from canon quite a bit—but keeps the plot?

I like the cartoony touches—like seeing the guys' skeletons when they get electro-cuted. Didja notice cartoons got less cartoony while they were trying to prove how realistic their computers could get?

HOT COCOA. That is all.

This week's New Yorker has Anthony Lane putting the latest Harry Potter against In the Loop and getting "a perplexing report on the corroded state of the British imagination." He says, "The choice appears to be between a soaring escape into fantasy, ... and a descent into the rat-run of moral contamination," before lamenting "So much denial and self-hatred, for a small country ... What hope is there for the return of the steady, tolerant gaze?"

The Brits I know are in no apparent state of denial nor self-hatred. In fact, so far from it: they are content, actualized, and happy. They seem so much less caught up with their self-images than many Americans I know; instead they live in their skins and get on with things. Unlike the stereotypes, they try new things, they are friendly, they make individual statements (both fashion and otherwise). But they're not obsessively driven, as is the American way, to set themselves off from the others, to be seen as unique and original. My favorite example is this: in Edinburgh we all lived—across the city—in nearly identical stone-built flats. We got interested in the small incidental variation from site to site, instead of installing pink flamingos and wearing baggy pants.

Do my British friends have a "steady, tolerant gaze"? Not in the Lawrence of Arabia sense, not that I saw. Then, I don't know my British friends as moral leaders. But perhaps they are closer to the sense of irony exemplified by In the Loop than to the escapist (?) fantasy of Harry Potter. It often seemed, in Edinburgh, there were things that everyone knew, and needn't be said, and these then were the basis of sly—but not cruel—jokes.

Anthony Lane knows something of Britain and something of films. Has he slightly over-egged the custard this time? Does he hang out with different folk than I do? Or must I admit that my muse, Criticism, has failed, that it cannot reliably take the pulse of a people?

Writing to you has become immensely more difficult, Unknown. I don't know what the story is, lost the tonic note whose sounding pleases you so.

But I am not giving up. I have much energy and I'm ready to work. Give me a room of my own and I'll round back toward the native hue.

For sure, Werner Herzog would win any staring contest.

"When Freire died, Boal said 'I am very sad. I have lost my last father. Now all I have are brothers and sisters'." Augusto Boal has passed away.

Last year I went on a Coetzee binge—J.M., that is. He became my favorite writer in no time.

I started with Youth after riffling it on someone's shelf. It is an excellent introduction. Coetzee's most distinctive trait is on evidence: his utterly low-key delivery, whereby he builds item on item, developing a world, our world, in deadpan limpidity.

Our sympathy toward his clearly autobiographical hero, described in the 3rd person, is undiminished by the deadpan tone, and nor does the writing lose any power or personal detail from this. The hero has a threadbare diet "Rousseau would approve of, or Plato," consisting of "marrowbones and beans and celery." There is texture in this; and the couple of sentences that communicate this spell tomes about his background, and his dreams. The prose itself is not without savor. It has a pleasing rhythm, one without thunder but just some rhythm of storytelling—concise, sharp storytelling.

The story of Youth is, to my reckoning, the ultimate one: young, intelligent boy alone survives at the bone, dreams of glory in work and in love. Strives hard for the one, is useless in the other. This hero enjoys his math and the puzzles of computer programming (all this set in the late 1960s), but is strangled by the routine of the suburban office life. As a narrator Coetzee is not so tasteless as to suggest technical details, which keeps his work up in the universal.

Waiting for the Barbarians is so far the strongest Coetzee I've read, the one that changed me the most. It is abstract in its setting, placed at the edge of some empire in some unknown historical moment (the men ride horses, is about all that dates it) where go some "barbarians" of undefined race. It is easy to project the story to Coetzee's colonial South Africa, or the American West, or just about any other place on Earth, at any time, since there is always an empire and a class of barbarians. Waiting is all about that kind of meeting point.

Coetzee is a roughly moral artist. All his stories are hard confrontations with moral extremes, like horror movies without the gore that dehumanizes the monster. Routinely, his heroes take us to the moral edge; doing things without apology that convention tells us not to do.

The other characters, the antagonists, are also challenging, in haunting ways. They are frequently sympathetic despite their turpitude: Coetzee insists on bringing us to the brink with them, with seeing their needs, their thought process. I will never forget the colonel in Waiting for the Barbarians who says "But surely that is what war is: compelling someone to do something they do not wish to do." And so blithely, confidently, he says it. It is hard to disagree with him.

Disgrace is a prize-winner, but it was less effective for me. To be sure, it brought me to the brink again, but this time I didn't quite appreciate the hero's perspective on the central horror, and less so the daughter's alien calm. This story seemed more embedded in present-day South Africa, and I suspect I'm missing some context. Or was I just getting desensitized?

My latest selection was Foe, a retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story, and the story of the story, from the perspective of a woman supposed to have been with Crusoe, who brought the story to England and told it to a Mr. Foe, a fly-by-night writer who steals the tale. This one seemed to be wearing its politics too brazenly, such that I could see too far ahead. It ends with a fizzle, returning briefly to the story of the island, a nice roundelay that didn't seem to reveal anything new. I'd like to have read it with Robinson Crusoe in one hand, to see where it matches up: perhaps there's more going on than I detected. But even if Foe isn't dramatic or challenging, it is a well-functioning machine: it does what it says on the tin.

I'm captivated by Coetzee and is one of the readers for whom I'd read any book he's written. Lucky, then, there are so many more to go.

Do I really need to sit on this bench, drawing this church? Could be another bench, another time, another church. So many missed opportunities this way.

Frost/Nixon is a testament to performance—political and journalistic performance.

The actors do alright—Frank Langella is amazing—but the drama is all about readiness for the event. Performing on the spot is a difficult, remarkable, and important thing that humans do—some of them—and it deserves its day.

In India, everyone wants to sell me something; and the curious thing is: if I decline the offer, they'll act as though I haven't heard them, becoming louder and repeating themselves, while if I ignore them they'll act as if I resolutely declined, quickly walking away.

Coffee and closers do not seem to correlate here.

Infomercial 2, by John Ashbery in today's New York Times

California considers requiring more space for chickens.

As previouly noted, Edinburgh has a castle and a lot of old stuff: most of the city proper was built in a few quick waves of building, and the urban fabric drops off quite quickly—there is little sprawl—at least on the inland sides. Nearly anywhere in town, the same stone walls stretch from street to street, walls of gray granite (though my three-year eye has become tuned to the varied hues, the pinks and reds and blacker grays, that one can see across town).

This oldness pleases me: these edifices represent the solid, tolerable, and sometimes contented lives of the workers and bourgeoisie of another century, at a time when urban life and culture, the capitalist system, and the information economy, were all just being worked out—not to mention the modern tension between productivity and play. Scattered around its monolithic, zero-green tenement blocks, Edinburgh generously sets out public space for pure fun. The Edinburgh Meadows, a "town green" of sorts, is a trivially simple and yet utterly beautiful and useful lens of green stretching across the center of town; it is triangulated by tree-lined paths which make distinct perceptual spaces. Citizens of the city, high and low, have used it for centuries for their ball games (hurling, footer, and golf) and picnics and languid strolls in tolerable weather. The public golf course at one edge speaks a lost vision of the game: not the secluded country clubs and backroom deals of racially-exclusive businessmen but rather hordes of drunks smashing a wee ball with sticks (like spitting cherry-pits into the trash can: an unexclusive sport).

People are tempered. Longcoats and woolly jumpers prevail—not gear to be causing trouble in. Tracksuited lads might "chib" a passerby sometimes, but by and large the peace is kept. I feel calm, watching students, academics, young bankers and coders walk to work in such decent attire, such conventional textiles, no Triple F.A.T. Goose to be found. And still the people love their rock and their roll, their oonts-oonts dance tracks, and their reggae too. The Jazz Bar on Chambers Street has a good act or more almost every night of the week.

Oh right.

So I've been in Scotland for a while now—long enough to settle in—and some folks might be looking for to hear, you know, what it's like over there/up there. Well: Eht's alreet!

Despite impressive efforts, I just can't go and bung a massive tribute to Edinburgh in a post. Content yourselves with a few minor encomia, to be delivered over time.

Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.

—Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.

—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Whatever temptation he succumbed to in 1956, in 2008 he refuses the temptation to make an exemplary lesson out of what happened. He does not cast himself as a victim, or as a reformed villain or a misunderstood hero, three narratives that are quite popular in these days of compulsive self-discovery. Now in his 80’s Van Doren still hasn’t discovered himself (do any of us?), still hasn’t been able to plumb the depths of his motivations for actions that remain unfathomable, even to him, especially to him. The best thing about the essay is its refusal to claim self-knowledge while still desiring it.

—Stanley Fish, "None of the Answers." New York Times, August 10, 2008.

Some good light is shed on the tide of Chinese nationalism—a topic this column mulled over in April—by Evan Osnos's 28 July New Yorker article, "Angry Youth." It follows Tang Jie, a Chinese man in his 20s who studies Western philosophy at the graduate level, and who made an Internet-popular nationalistic video documentary. There are some quotable details: the fact that young Chinese commonly circumvent the national firewall, for example ("Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed. We are always eager to get other information from different channels."). And Osnos reports that many young Chinese are familiar with the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989; one compares it with the Kent State shootings of 1970. Further he says that "many Chinese have concluded that the movement was misguided and naive," though I would have like more background on this.

We at "Letters to an Unknown Audience" recommend the article for anyone interested in nationalism, or China, or youth, politics and media.

One of the best things about writing is that it's private: I can sit with my thoughts without having to respond to people who say, "Aren't you Charles Van Doren?"

—Charles Van Doren, "All the Answers," The New Yorker, 28 July 2008

Superheroes are utterly ridiculous. That's all I could think of when a stiff-necked, obscenely-built Batman pops onto the screen in The Dark Knight. What sort of dull pre-adolescent fantasy are we all communally participating in here, and thereby sanctioning, no less? Do we somehow, as a society, feel it's okay to pine for a cape that would allow you to fly, or to dream you could knock out a maniacal killer who wields a gun with just a couple of sturdy, unflinching punches? The sub-orgiastic surges of energy periodically afforded by these movies are too far over the top, and often too cloudy, to capture me in visceral identification. And the bad guys are too magical to have any menace—Heath Ledger's Joker is a spooky and psychological character, to be sure, but his ability to be anywhere at any time, with an army of goons having presently constructed, say, a gargantuan ziggurat of dollar bills (just in time to be torched by your man), or to turn up at a cocktail party with nothing but a Ginsu knife kit, hold everyone in terrified thrall, then slip away (off screen) before the impressively-equipped team of Batman and the Gotham City PD can seem to spot him, leaves me lacking the real sense of doom that would make this kind of story kick.

I want to see a movie about a young cockbite web-dev in Tukwila, WA, with a black Teflon outfit and a firecracker, and his trusty butler who spends his time browsing eBay and listening to police scanners, the two of them facing a tireless, waif-like speed addict with a 4-minute-mile and an air rifle who lives down the street. That would be good cinema.

All this aside, The Dark Knight is not a bad piece of action movie.

That after sex your thoughts might turn to something else. The softness of the rain. The energy of six year-olds. Fears. Insects' limbs. The remarkable tension and comfort of our friendships: so-and-so's way of laughing, someone's small courage. Kinds of grapes and a dog's eagerness.

Not to leave the moment, rushing onward, but to lie on it, without sinking down and away from all the other things.

Remark this way—outward—and we'll be bonded together from then.

Sam Neill is the only actor in The Tudors (first season) who matters. But, Oh, he matters.

(P.S. Why, when they're having sex, do they work so hard?)

(P.P.S. There: I admitted it; I've been watching The Tudors. I'll be grovelling for my cred, next post.)

Which Rome character are you?

Me: Lucius Vorenus.

It's also a good chance for meditation and mental discipline. Over the years I've learned a lot of tidbits from teachers about how to approach the Mental Game of Yoga. One of the best was Geoffrey, who at different times gave me these useful slogans:

• 1. Don't blow past it.

  Sometimes it's easy to push your limb past a tight spot into a more comfortable one that looks "more stretched." But the value of the training is in that tight feeling. And sometimes it's possible to go "past" that place, into a pose that actually uses different muscles—hence, the ones that I felt, which were crying in pain, become relaxed. In each pose, I need to find the place where I, personally, can work usefully, without being too comfortable. This goes hand in hand with that motto that yoga teachers are constantly beating us with, "Don't try to look cool. Nobody cares." It's true! Nobody cares. Yoga seems to have a different culture than the martial arts, where there is an unacknowledged premium placed on looking tough.

• Don't do the pose with your face.

  We novices have a pernicious tendency, in yoga, to screw up our faces in pain. Somehow, our bodies seem to think that squinting and grimacing and and tensing our neck muscles will allow us to get an extra inch of stretch, or to endure it longer. It doesn't help, of course! Part of yoga's training is to help us relax our minds, even in difficult circumstances—a skill that I reckon will come in useful if I ever have to run a marathon, or escape from prison, or face a Bond villain's evil contraptions.

  There are several things built into yoga practice that aim to take us out of our bee-swarming heads—to relax our minds—and be more conscious of our bodies: there's the injunction to breath constantly and smoothly, there's the constant dropping of the head and neck in poses where seemingly every other muscle in the body is fully engaged, and there's this lovely slogan: Don't do the pose with your face.

In the wake of the protests surrounding the Olympic torch procession, I marveled at the cause of the counter-protesters: the ones marching with Chinese flags. I can well understand the impetus for the Free Tibet (or "pro-Tibet") movement, and I can well understand an attitude of apathy or even disagreement with the importance of that movement. But I can't quite fathom the drives of the Chinese nationals, living abroad, who marched actively against the Free Tibeters, in what has recently been described as a pro-China movement. Does this movement argue that the people of Tibet have no right of self-determination? It seems a strange rallying cry to me. But then, as this NY Times article seems to say, the activists on the Chinese side want to counter what they see as slander against China as a whole, rather than specifically repudiating the idea of a Free Tibet. I haven't seen any particular anti-Free Tibet response, other than to point at a longer (and somewhat hazy) history that places Tibet as a traditional part of China.

But, an English friend of mine stung me, explaining that many Britons have been incensed that people around the world would try to tell the UK what to do with Northern Ireland—namely, to give it sovereignty or let it join the ROI. Many Northern Irish people are, of course, quite happy to be part of the UK—while others point to a history of English oppression on the island.

We Americans, I realized, are especially predisposed towards any group that wants to separate from a big parent or neighbor. But when the Southern States sought to break away for self-determination, in 1861, bringing them back by force was (and is) thought to be a great moral imperative. The issues in Tibet are surely more subtle than I'd thought.

(Any comments pointing to more thorough arguments against the Free Tibet cause would be appreciated.)

UPDATE: A recent New Yorker article, "Angry Youth" by Evan Osnos, addresses just this topic: the spirit of nationalism amongst young Chinese at home and abroad today.

I’m a vegetarian, and Yes, it’s for ethical reasons, but No, it’s not because I think animals are adorable and don’t deserve to die. Animals do deserve to die. We all deserve to die. Chickens and humans, and bacteria and lichen and elephants, are all part of a glorious ecosystem that circulates organic material around and around, each thing eating its time in the sun and passing on. It’s called life, and it’s not wrong.

What is wrong, in my view, is industrial meat production. The chain that leads from the birthing of a cow in a breeding center, to its growth on fattening grains (which themselves are intensively farmed), to its glory days in a CAFO absorbing hormones and grazing the shit of other cows, to its arrival at the abattoir and then its grinding and processing, is a peculiar invention of man and particularly the modern capitalist supply chain which perfectly dissociates consumers from the origins of their products. My vegetarianism is a protest, a demonstration, against these methods.

It’s not a matter of the animal not having a chance to defend itself, as people sometimes say. Chickens, pigs and cows are at a distinct disadvantage against human hunters and husbanders anyway, as is the gazelle when faced with a lion. The gazelle has its own adaptations—its speed, for example—but at least nine times out of ten it’s the lion that eats the gazelle and not the other way around. In a wild ecosystem, predators sometimes starve, and prey populations go up and down—they evade better or worse—so there’s a natural balance. But in terms of the eating, we know who’s eating who. A man who eats from a cow herd, if that herd lives in some sustainable balance with the man, is no less ethical than the lion that eats the gazelle.

I don’t object to the use of tools or technology in hunting or raising food animals. Let us have our human advantages—our tools, our planning intellect—fine! But when we start to use the animal as simply a factor, leveragable to maximize production, we’re doing something wrong. If we lose the larger ecological cycle that animals participate in, we start taking unexpected costs. We see these costs in many places: There are the occasional health scares, like mad cow disease, that are nurtured by the animals’ unnatural diets. Hormones given to the animals might affect human health in unexpected ways. There is the land-use problem, that getting human energy from animals requires ten times as much land as getting it from plants. It’s not the technology as such that causes a problem: it’s the assumption a tool that increases yields on your farm—a hormone, say—won’t have unsustainable costs somewhere else. It’s the policy of focusing on results, rather than the cycle that produces them.

Even if animals deserve to die—to become someone’s lunch—we should still respect their life, I feel. As living things, they deserve not to be managed strictly as food items. They deserve to eat a diet that their digestion is adapted for, rather than one that fattens them up. (If they are meat-eaters, they deserve to eat other living things, rather than the ground bones of other industrially-farmed animals, which is commonly used as feed.) They deserve to roam, to graze—to follow their behaviors. The industrial system puts the animals in an extremely tight cycle of birth, feeding, waste removal, and slaughter, which is not a life.

Not all agriculture is as intensive as industrial meat production. Older ways of farming were more holistic, allowing the animal a fairly natural life before cultivating it—that is to say, slaughtering and butchering it for the table—and some farms strive to operate this way today. (One such farm, Polyface Farms, in Virginia, is astutely profiled by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma.)

Above all, I want to know the chain, to know what I'm eating. Forget about facing the animal with a sharp flintrock on an open plain: If you can stare your food chain in the eye, then you can eat from it. If you insist on averting your eyes, you're doing something wrong.

Essay writing for me begins, and nearly ends, with Annie Dillard. That’s personal: she happens to be the writer whose essays I read when I started reading essays, and they ended up moving me.

She writes mostly about nature, observing it through the humble lens of the enthusiastic non-expert. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek seems like the story of a year in the wilds, though she’s only describing the adventures of a few backyard species in suburban Virginia. Her attention to detail and her authorial grace turn these limited horizons into a land of discovery. It shows there’s life nearly everywhere, that appreciating it is a choice you can make: an attitude, a strategy, for living on Earth.

Her essay, “Aim For the Chopping Block,” still haunts me with its images of an unnamed Washington State island, and its metaphor, relating wood-chopping and writing—but more broadly any sort of exhausting endeavor—transmutes personal experience into useful knowledge.

I was reflecting on this in the wake of Paul Graham’s latest essay, “You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss.” His writing has been moving at times; but consistently, he has taken an authoritative, condescending tone. He has often made up for it by offering to programming a dignity and glory that it rarely receives. But more and more he slips from a cocky-but-compelling voice into one that’s simply smug.

This essay starts with a dis on a crowd of coders he finds that don’t meet his approval in some unspecified way. “They are not founders,” he ends up concluding. He uses lions in the wild as a metaphor, but rather than painting a prose picture of those lions for us, he only says they “seem about ten times more alive.” In this way, and others, he stretches his personal experience, using it as a bullying-stick to put weight behind him without building an argument.

He also dwells on a claim of the form, “All the anthropology I’ve read says X.” I has hoping the footnote at the end of that paragraph would provided a citation, but alas, it’s only a clarification. He goes on: “Tribes of hunter-gatherers have more freedom. The leaders have a little more power than other members of the tribe, but they don't generally tell them what to do and when the way a boss can.” Quite frankly, I’m not convinced he’s done the relevant anthropological research; I suspect he doesn’t have a deep understanding of the social dynamics of “hunter-gatherers” in general, even if one allows that hunter-gathers’ various lifestyles could be generalized so easily.

I have a bias against big companies myself, for different reasons, mostly to do with my personal habits and wants, or political feelings about their power. I don’t agree with Graham’s argument against them.

He says that humans weren’t “meant” to work in large groups, and that the freedom of the individual is inversely proportional to the size of the organization. I don’t think either of these claims are quite right. One reason people make large organizations is to increase organizational efficiency. In principle, large companies should have groups that can share work and move in a coordinated way, without letting inter-firm competition block this coordination. It doesn’t always work that way, but it can. There can be a large team spirit, with whole groups building infrastructure for lots of other groups. And, Graham doesn’t pin down his ‘freedom’ or account for the fact that it might trade off against other virtues. What about the freedom to move to a different team within a big company? What about the chance to be highly productive by meshing with lots of other competent people, which might require sacrificing some personal freedom to muck about with code? Of course, the situation can be much worse, but Graham is wrong to conclude that individual freedom is always inversely related to organization size.

Some big organizations work better than others. I found this to be true when I worked at Amazon in the early 2000s: there were loads of sharp people there who were trying to make the development process better and who were eager to fix problems when they found them. I learned a tremendous amount at that time: about aspects of programming, debugging, and software architecture, about running an enormous website that has critical demands on uptime and performance. It honed my software practice. And when I stopped learning, I left and did other things. In fact, Amazon at that time was keen to retain some of the qualities that Graham calls for: from Bezos downward, there was a drive to reward individual initiative and empower individuals, which Graham says large organizations can’t do. Because it was done well, and because there was a tremendous enthusiasm about the company and about the web at that time, it worked.

I also think it’s false, what Graham says, that large organizations are strictly tree-structured. The official org chart is a tree, yes, but the actual structure is much different. People grow a much more organic set of relationships, and this can be interesting, dynamic and lively. My official boss was someone who checked up on me weekly to see that I was working, and he could stand up for me when something went awry, but I normally worked more closely with, and took orders from, people in another branch of the organization.

Paul Graham’s charms as an essayist should be taken with a grain of salt; he has a fairly broad personal experience, but he makes more of it than is necessarily warranted. He makes specious claims: ones that sound right but aren’t carefully backed up. Paul Graham was my guru for about a month in 2003, but no longer. The next time I want to read a strong and compelling essay, I’ll go back to the likes of Annie Dillard.

"The Rose Town project will be derived from the Caribbean vernacular," he said. "This means embracing local traditions of cooking and dining out of doors, relying on cooling breezes to ventilate the house, and using courtyards to create secure spaces which interact with the street."

That's Prince Charles, getting all new-urbanist with a development in a ghetto in Kingston, Jamaica. Full story at the Guardian.

Looking back at journals from two or three years back moves me to rapture. I can't believe I went through these things—and in this sequence! How did I survive? Often I look back on a time as idyllic, yet I wrote at the time like things were miserable. This means, for sure, that when things seem bad, they're more fun than they seem. You remember the good things, and the learning experiences; you forget about the stresses. Old Hemingway says, trying to be deep for once, "I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better."

2005 was a big year for me. Some amazing things came into my life. And through calendar trickery, nothing left my life until early 2006. Then everything came apart and left hiss and steam.

In March 2005 I went to Santa Cruz to play Ultimate Frisbee with my college team, and all the old rivalries were gone and I played well and the weather was good and you could see the ocean from the fields and we had a great time playing. A few days later I put in a grad-school application to a long-shot school called Edinburgh on the other side of the world. Next I had a shallow relationship and got accepted to Edinburgh. At the end of May I recorded a vivid, prescient dream of a woman I loved in friendship, loved in a distant, delayed, and hopeful way, and later that year she delighted and sustained me and I had the chance to love her properly, to show her what she meant to me and how we could spend our lives together in blissful contentment. But I bollixed that, or she did or somebody did. That's why in February, 2006, something really good left my life and left an emptiness that has yet to be replaced.

I worried about so many things that were good things nonetheless. I'm so grateful to myself for keeping a record, for sending signals to the future me, so that I can later, somewhat, understand.

Mom writes: "Did you know you were born on the 10th anniversary of the Tet Offensive?" I did not!

Here's to acknowledging progress in life, and to getting out of bad situations. (clink)

Says Wikipedia, with further timeliness, "On Tết, Vietnamese visit their families and temples, forgetting about the troubles of the past year and hoping for a better upcoming year."

This is from Hemingway, A Moveable Feast:

"I know. It's been terribly hard and I've been tight and mean about money."

"No," she said, "But—"

I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.

Ah, the sweetness of classical music: the relief. It doesn't know me, it's not telling my whole life, with its song. It doesn't eat me alive like good folk.

OK, I'm'a re-blog this. It's David Foster Wallace's intro to the Best American Essays 2007 [thanks Sippey]. It's a bit rambly, but a nice perspective on the importance of essays, and editorship, in a world where we all seem to be very ignorant. A summary quote:

The alternative is ... continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.

A much more engaging film about three Americans abroad is Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn. This is the story of pilot Dieter Dengler, who is shot down over Laos in the early days of the Vietnam war. Unlike Wes Anderson's heroes, the guys in Rescue Dawn care about something—getting home. And since this is so apparently impossible and so desperately wanted, they've evolved a psychological web to deal with their condition, which we watch develop over two dynamic hours.
In other words, Herzog is interested in what it is to need and to try for something.

Check out the encounter between Dengler and the North Vietnamese officer who, in a nice, tropical, breezy, wooden room, with no weapons at hand, asks Dengler to sign a confession and denounce the US government. There is an encounter here: the two men size each other up, they make decisions about each other, about what to do. How much better this than Anderson's matchups between the hijinxing brothers and the numb, otherly Indians.

Besides the human dynamics, what I like about Herzog is he's not afraid to highlight the mechanism of the story. In Fitzcarraldo, he takes the boat over the mountain. Here, he shows us the inside of the handcuffs, the space underneath the jailhouse, the prisoners' technique for tracking their captors, and "stack it up for me," the game of remembering home. Much moviemaking takes movie magic as its support—fair enough, if it tells a good story. But Herzog's films are so often compelling because he insists on showing us how the thing works: the gizmos for hoisting that boat over the hill, or (my favorite) the handcuffs, in this film. There's a pleasure in this, like appreciating your buddy's jalopy fixit job, or the fine tooling on an analog watch: the marvel of a clever thing accomplished. I don't mean the filmmaking workmanship, but something else: in this case, Dengler's feats, both skillful and charismatic, not to mention fundamentally willful and hopeful—to escape and survive in the jungle.

Unknown,

Is this accurate? Do tell.

For your contemplation:

Is it possible that meat is now openl enjoying a renaissance—that it's finally cool to be a carnivore? If so, it has been a long time coming. Meat-eaters, having already ceded the moral ground to vegetarians (no one has ever really come up with a persuasive rejoinder to the claim that a warm-blooded, pain-feeling creature's life shouldn't be taken for your supper), have more recently had to accept that their diet is probably the source of much of the world's heard disease and much of its obesity. That diet is also sustained by an industry that is just flat-out evil: the factory farms, the egregious economies of waste in fast food, the ghastly genetic manipulations of chickens and turkeys, the pigs raised in no-room-to-move confinement, the reckless use of antibiotics and growth hormones (as well as the frightful possible consequences—early breasting in children, difficult-to-defeat superbugs), the contamination of fields and rivers by noxious excrement runoffs from feedlots the size of small nations, the tricks and shortcuts adopted by supermarkets (cheap animals fattened on cheap grain, butchered by high-pressure hose, and packaged at their bloated maximum weight). And yet, at a time when things could not seem worse, there is a generation of people ... who are thinking hard and philosophically about their food and are prepared to declare: Enough! I'm a meat-eater and proud of it!

—Bill Buford, "Red, White and Bleu." The New Yorker, December 3, 2007

Ian Curtis was a 23 when he died—so young! This is perspective; so much could change after 23. Life's much more worth taking the chance than not.

Sanderson has devised a systematic way of recording and representing an ecosystem. He calls it the Muir web ... In the Muir web, each species of plant or animal, and each characteristic of habitat, has a full set of needs and associations, which, taken together, form a tangle of connection and dependency. . . . He then plugs them all into his customized modelling software, which places them on the map . . . The software mimics that of social-networking sites. His son, who is six years old, once asked him to explain it, and he said, "This program writes programs that tell the mapping program to make the maps that predict where all the species were."

Eighty per cent of the work is building the data sets. The glory part is turning that data into 3-D pictures.

—"The Mannahatta Project," Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker, October 1, 2007 (full article not "yet" available online).

Universally, when computer science brushes up against a magazine subject, the journalist misses its role in the story. This very engaging story by Nick Paumgarten in the October 1, 2007 New Yorker, about an effort to create a model of Manhattan island when it was first touched by European, commits the error surprisingly.

To me, the glorious bit of the above project is that bit where someone has written a program that writes programs that guide the mapping software. This requires understanding the space of possible ecosystems, precisely enough to render it in code—which you might think is a respectable human and intellectual achievement. It calls on ecologists' knowledge, but also computer scientists' knowledge: what constitutes a representation (of an ecosystem), what parameters are needed to admit the necessary freedom, what parameters are unnecssary, and how to make such a model concise and precise.

Eric Sanderson, profiled in this article, is an ecologist working with the Wildlife Conservation Society; he has a vision of exploring Manhattan in 1609; some programmer somewhere has helped him realize this vision. I long for such a programmer to garner the same respect as the ecologist he works for.

Here's a manifesto, then.

I am interested in the "computational turn" in the history of our civilization—namely, the idea that we can explore a much wider range of imaginative objects (ecosystem models, say, or texts, or games) by creating a process that generates them. In centuries past, we were much more limited: for example, you could draw up one historical map of a place by manually placing roads and creeks in accordance with evidence. But now, we can codify our knowledge of what constitutes such a map, and then the computer becomes a toy for exploring all the possibilities. Computers are powerful not because they have an amazing amount of memory or speed, but simply because they allow us to work at a higher level, the level of defining the process by which imaginary 1609 Manhattans can be generated—rather than the lower level of making a particular guess about it.

Let some magazine reporter come along and do a piece on that.

And there were only three things left that would rouse him, make him live. One was to drink or smoke hashish, the other was to be soothed by Birkin, and the third was women. And there was no one for the moment to drink with. Nor was there a woman. And he knew Birkin was out. So there was nothing to do but to bear the stress of his own emptiness.

When he saw Birkin his face lit up in a sudden, wonderful smile.

"By God, Rupert," he said, "I'd just come to the conclusion that nothing in the world mattereed except somebody to take the edge off one's being alone: the right somebody."

—Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence

‘Atlas Shrugged’ is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.

“Rand believed that there is right and wrong,” he [James M. Kilts] said, “that excellence should be your goal.”

This reminds me that I highly recommend the film A Sense of Life for shedding some perspective on Rand's life and work.

Errol Morris has a blog. In case you don't remember: he made the wonderful Fast, Cheap and Out of Control and other documentaries.

[Warning: spoilers ahead!] It is unfortunate that Miranda July's story "This Person" breaks, on the last page, the genderlessness of its protagonist. It is a very sweet story, a brief, universal fantasy: everyone in your life is reunited in love for you—all of the tensions and dislikes transformed now, in delicate fashion, into love, and you begin a new life in this nurturing community.

Like some kind of experimental fiction, the piece avoids (at first) using any gendered pronouns, letting "this person" be a universal individual, any one of us. This person is not lacking particular characteristics, and yet this person admits any reader's own imagination into the situation. For my part, it was easy for me to imagine the character as myself, and also as several other people I know; it was uplifting to think of each us in turn being celebrated in the way of this story, and exciting letting my mind flip, as with an optical illusion, between these possibilities.

Had July kept this conceit throughout the piece, it would have transcended any individual complaint, transcended this to express instead a broad human lament,, to be a grand work of art. But then, on the last page, there occurs a "her" and a reference to "this person's breasts," which breasts are apparently quite female. In this moment, the optical illusion collapses into a much smaller figure—now we see that she doesn't actually embrace us all: it is instead her own self-pity on display.

Jeanette Winterson, in Written on the Body, manages to sustain a very precise, richly characterized protagonist who is nonetheless completely un-gendered. It's impressive, as a feat of writing, but it's more than that: it's an admirably humanistic act of imagination that draws any and every person into that big human tent, where we ultimately share very similar feelings.

I find it particularly worth noting because July does, at times, write of a situation that's not apparently her own. In other stories, like "The Sister," "Birthmark," "How to Tell Stories to Children," and "The Boy from Lam Kien" (to name a few), she seems to describe people rather different from herself. Throughout the whole collection, "The Boy from Lam Kien" is one of my favorites, because it imagines a spirit so radically separate: an insistent, uncontrollable little child.

I raise my glass to those artists who can describe, in excruciating detail, a human malady whether great or small; but to bring it across to the reader, it has to be other than a whine in a moment of pain. It has to be generous, and compassionate, and that's what July often achieves, though not, I think, in "This Person."

One reviewer on allconsuming.com wrote off No One Belongs Here More Than You, saying that most of the characters "are emotionally stunted." Why that in itself would be a flaw deserves examination, but I wanted to note that the point is essentially false anyway.

July's character's are not stunted—in fact they have huge emotional lives. Instead, they seem inactive, or they don't realize their emotional impulses: they dream of things, but don't do. Take the narrator of "The Shared Patio," who lives a whole romance in one short dream, while her paramour is having a seizure. Or "The Man on the Stairs," a fantasia extrapolated from a few isolated moments of noise in a quiet house.

No, these characters are emotionally large, but they don't seem to have the knack of acting on their feelings—that's the pathos. Their are exceptions, too, as with "The Sister" and "How to Tell Stories to Children," and this contrast makes the emotional paralysis a clear theme for the book. It's also reflected in Me And You and Everyone We Know, where July's protagonist seems to be living emotionally in a larger room than the one where she acts—although there, she does take action, by making artworks, and I'm enchanted by the man in that film who lights his hand on fire to mark a change.

Let's all remember, friends, to act, to take action.

Shostakovich takes me outside myself.

I was very moved, once, by an exhibition of Sebastio Salgado photographs entitled Migrants. That means people moving, but to Salgado it also means people moving overland, long distances, with poor accomodations, and generally against their will. It's made up mostly of large black and white prints. Walking in to the exhibit was off-putting at first: Why do we need to see this? This stuff goes in the newspaper—I don't want to chase down bad news on a weekend. But the photos themselves were compelling. By the time I walked out, I had a strong, clear sense that most people on the planet have only what they wear on their backs, and an incredible number of them are at any time moving overland, long distances, with poor accomodations, and generally against their will.

I had plenty of time to meditate on this as I was walking across Edinburgh today with two large backpacks on my back, migrating my stuff (more than I could carry on my back) from one flat to another. I've got it good: I have a warm, dry place to go at the end of the day. But hauling my stuff around like this gives me a feeling of solidarity, a sense that the human condition is rough and lonely: that it is, essentially, just spells of calm punctuated by frequent upheavals involving discomfort, toil, and a pit of lonely wonder. With all this slogging around, do we end up, on average, above zero in our general happiness? Or are we constantly in debt, always placeless, always owing something to the world that housed us for a little while, yet never fully settling in there, never living easily. I suspect the answer to this question is the same for us in posh Anglo-America as it is for Salgado's forced migrants, those people crossing a border from Bosnia in a big wagon with 20 relatives (and perhaps some enemies).

The strange fact which comes to me each time I see photos like this, or read stories of people hard-up in the third world, doing more on the daily to live a tough life than I do to live my posh one, is the same strange fact that one sees in studying the animal kingdom: life keeps going. It never asks, is this life above zero or below it? It never makes such an economic calculation. Life, simply, keeps going. Any doubt, any dour calculation to that effect which I might make, that is just posh Anglo-American fantasy.

I just discovered this terrific letter to the editor from the August 28, 2006 New Yorker:

Stacy Schiff stresses error rates in her comparison between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica ("Know It All," July 31st). The compelling nature of Wikipedia, however, is due not to its scholarly perfection but to its process. Wikipedia may or may not triumph, if the competition involves building an infallible compilation of earthly knowledge. But it is truly revolutionary that the best, rather than the worst, input from each contributor can be more or less effectively harnessed. The performance of human organizations is often limited by the lowest common denominator: the dimmest mind always seems to be in charge. Building a system that plucks strengths from each individual is quite remarkable. Instead of quibbling over whether Britannica's shelf space is going to be usurped, we ought to consider how our institutions might be improved through a more wiki-like model of participation.

Michael Murray / Oakland, Calif.

Isn't that great, Unknown? I am looking forward to the future, if the future takes more of the strengths from each individual. What do you think?

Tim Bray says:

In the keynote, I griped about the all-male audience. I’m sorry, I’m not going to shut up about this: it is irritating, disturbing, and unacceptable that probably less than 100 of the 1600 attendees were women. It’s probably pretty lame of me to say “unacceptable” when I have exactly zero good ideas about how to fix it. I talked to a random selection of attendees; two women said “thank you for saying that” and a bunch of men said “yeah, it sucks, what can be done?”

Geeks, you know, they’re admittedly obsessive about computers, but once you get past that they’re on average a pretty eclectic, amusing, and warm-hearted bunch. And in recent years I haven’t met a single one who wasn’t upset about the missing gender. If a booming female Voice From On High spoke out, saying, “Do this and we’ll rejoin your profession”, well I bet a lot of us would do whatever it was. But failing that, in the meantime the problem isn’t getting better.

The people who study such things tell us that there is a long chain of influences, from Kindergarten to the first day on the job, that discourage women from working in computing. Like the chain of intermediaries who drive up the price of a latte and drive down the wage of coffee-bean growers, no one step along the chain is the Decisive Step, yet from end to end, something goes wrong.

It's a fact of our culture—our broader culture, not just the profession's—that there is some kind of mismatch between "womanhood" and "computing" (as well as other technical professions).

These professions would be healthier and happier if they were more equitably populated with women; and in principle, it seems wrong there should be a field to which women seem to have almost no "access." But I also wonder whether, in an ideal world, a world free of gender pressures toward or away from a field, women would choose this kind of work. Programming, for example, certainly has its pleasures: the challenges, the elegance of a good solution, the need for creativity and the satisfaction of a working system; on the other hand, it tends to be solitary work, and it can call for a lot of pedantic knowledge—and to some kinds of feminists, these are patriarchal traits, not "women's ways of knowing."

It is likely that the commonly accepted stereotype of women's thinking as emotional, intuitive, and personalized has contributed to the devaluation of women's minds and contributions, partiularly in Western technologically oriented cultures, which value rationalism and objectivity. It is generally assumed that intuitive knowledge is more primitive, therefore less valuable, than so-called objective modes of knowing. . . .

Feminists are beginning to articulate the values of the female world and to
reshape the disciplines to include the woman's voice, while continuing to press
for the right of women to participate as equals in the male world.

—Women's Ways of Knowing, Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, Tarule

I'm interested to know more about how that perspective relates to the idea that women should participate more in computing professions.

After making my recent post, "Arrival: Gizmos and Love," I thought a lot about reworking it. I decided against it: part of the reason for blogging is spontaneity, to write and post at a series of different moments, not to wait and publish posthumously a fully-formed life.

After the link got posted on a bunch of popular sites, I wondered again if I shouldn't edit the post. A wider-than-usual group of strangers was reading it, and would be less inclined to forgiveness than my habitual readers. I decided that this moment of exposure was not the time to update the post: I would have to be consistent toward these new readers, not to regret my words under the spotlight. Instead, I would simply have to engage the conversation, which is, after all, what I am always hoping to spark.

The post is somewhat mysogynistic, as a way of making a point. The two figures in the picture represent people in our society (real people who I've seen) who could be faulted for playing traditional gender roles, and they might be living emptier lives than they have their opportunity might allow—that's my own reading: tou can make another—and mine is pushing the facts pretty far, but it's a reading I want to make and one that I think the picture supports. Because the picture is, to me, partly about gender identity (I double-check: the man is slightly liberated, wearing a necklace; but the woman wears her uniform to a T—or to a tank-top; and the boy's toy is the center of the picture—paging Doctor Freud), I imputed some gender-essentialist characteristics to the characters. I worried about this: people would take it seriously, would understand that I think women want X and men want Y, unchangeably. I wanted to rewrite this, find a cleverer way of saying it, of getting at the gender dynamics (essential and performed); but it was too late, and I wasn't sharp enough anyway. Aside from the (minor) issue of what people think I believe, I was concerned about adding something to the historical record (as much as obscure blogs can be considered a historical record) that might lead someone to the wrong conclusions: that is, to bolster someone else's misogyny. But as it stands, with all the commentary, I feel that my own views have been clarified and lots of other people got their say, so the post doesn't stand as a monument to chauvinism—I hope not, anyway.

In the end I updated the post slightly, for personal reasons. I reordered the last couple of sentences, because I felt that in the first version they implied something incorrect about my personal life: that I've had lots of relationships involving girls cooking, ball games on TV, and gossip. In fact, all the girls I've dated have been much too sharp to indulge in gossip, I don't follow sports, and more often than not, I've done the cooking.

Of all the reactions, I was most pleased by Jason Kottke's, because he cut right to the heart of what I was trying to say, and overlooked the overstated sexism; he quoted the line, "a boy with a toy, and a girl with patience." That's the only thing I wanted to say, really.

I intend to write carefully, considering the consequences of my statements, but I also hope to write quickly, without taking forever to hone my message. That's the challenge; I'm posting today just to reaffirm those two imperatives.

Some weeks ago, I saw again in print the phrase "post-9/11 world." It was an article on current television shows, about what people want to see—specifically, what people want to see in a "post-9/11 world."

I'm beginning to wonder, are we still living in a post-9/11 world? Isn't it time yet to move on?

Certainly, September 11th was unprecedented and it's right that it should change us. But at some point, its influence should become part of history, rather than dominate life in the present.

In fact, I think we have moved on, for the most part: we've internalized the change that September 11th represents. Isn't it time we started thinking about the future again? Started thinking about what kind of world we want to make? And not just asking how to respond to terrorism and how to protect freedom? Essentially, asking what will make us happy? And working to create that?

Please consider the cover of the April 30, 2007, New Yorker, by Harry Bliss.

The drawing shows a young couple standing before a large abstract expressionist painting, apparently in a gallery; they are pleasantly dressed. Hipsters, we might call them, but they're not hipper-than-thou: the boy wears a necklace and jeans, while the girl has a black tank-top and a red skirt.

The boy has just taken a digital photo of the painting, or part of it, and is showing her the results on its little screen. She stands slightly apart, her head inclined toward the camera, her hands clasped behind her holding the gallery map. While he is planted solidly on the ground, possessing his gadget with both hands, she is ever-so-slightly distanced from it. It is clearly his gadget, his photography habit, and his capture (of the painting that stands before them).

This drawing means several things to me.

On the one hand, it might represent an arrival. The boy and the girl are about my own age; they have my style; they have an interest in art—all fine things which I approve of. And the camera: it's an instance of the digital technology, whose arrival I spent my youth waiting for (never could I understand why anyone used those baroque, circular timepieces, when digital watches told the time directly!). This couple is not of the frock-and-shawl generation that decorated New Yorker covers past: no, these are the youngsters, probably with a bit of hip-hop as well as indie rock on their iPods, and no Gershwin at all. They might be product designers, or marketers. The boy might be a coder. Possibly, this picture is a picture of our arrival on the scene: an announcement that we, the jeans-wearing creative class, we who know innately the superiority of the digital approach, we are the cultural vanguard, we are at center stage for the hopes and dreams of bourgeois America.

I want to read the picture that way, and partly I do—partly I find some hope in it. But it seems more profoundly a criticism, rather than a triumphant arrival.

Looking at the two characters' postures, I see a rift. Rather than a couple in love with each other, with art, and with technological possibility, I see a boy with a toy, and a girl with patience. He is much more engaged with the devise device; she curves demurely away. Digital cameras are the most dubious of "tools," as you'll see in a moment. Whereas a film camera is (of course!) a vessel for capturing light, for making pictures, digital cameras are rather more like handheld video games. They are full of settings and switches, a field for endless play—and not only this, they can also be upgraded. The memory card and the lens can be forever interchanged, providing opportunities to experiment, to buy, and to peruse catalogs and hobbyist magazines—all with the veneer of a respectable, even artistic, hobby (unlike riding a motorcycle, which raises eyebrows). It is a boy's dream, a Game Boy, dressed in grownup's clothes.

Women, of course, are wiser than this. Women know there's no satisfaction in relationship with a device. Nothing handheld holds much interest for them. Women are whole-body people. All that play amounts to nothing: not skill, not insight, not love. Just diversion. Yet women (so sad! so tragic!) have this need for a man, this need to be protected and supported. In the pursuit of that domesticity, one needs to put up with the obsessions of the other. The woman looks on, a little bored, a little disappointed that the man is so obsessed, but unable to say anything, unable to spark a passion in him, not a passion for art, nor for experience, nor for herself. She knows that the device is distracting, that its little screen or the prints that will be made later are no substitute for the present moment. But then, she wants to be loved, to be cared for, she wants stability. In that connection, having a little patience with the boy's habitual diversion is a small price to pay.

This picture is a picture of my whole life, in 8 1/2 x 11.

Later that night, they will watch a little TV; she will make him dinner; he will watch a ball game while she gossips with her friends. They will share nothing of their souls, they will not connect. But peace will be kept.

If you care about torture—and I know I do—then here's a good book for you: Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee. Set in an imaginary frontier town, just at the edge of the reach of the Empire, and just at the edge of the reach of the barbarians, our protagonist does just what we all do: postpone boredom, seek companionship, and weigh difficult moral choices, not to say act on them.

The writing is extremely lucid and easy to read (I read the whole thing on one long plane trip—uncommon for me), and the protagonist is immanently sympathetic, just as much a monster as any of us. He faces, more directly, the same moral questions that you or I (my Unknown) face each day: about how to see Others, how to deflect or apply violence, and how to quench desire and keep right-relations.

Torture pervades the novel, and the position where our hero finds himself leads us to consider the ethics of standing by while torture is perpetrated: the problem of having some modest power, and leaving it unutilised. It is a question I find very pertinent today, as my own government, financed by my labors, applies torture to men, both innocent and guilty, in Guantanamo Bay.

But like a fool, instead of giving her a good time I oppressed her with gloom. Truly, the world ought to belong to the singers and dancers! Futile bitterness, idle melancholy, empty regrets! I blow out the lamp, sit with my chin on my fist staring towards the fire, listening to my stomach rumble.

I have finished Howards End. Other than to say it's quite good, I am unable to make a general appraisal, so instead I'll give quotes, somewhat randomly selected.

'I've often thought about it, Helen. It's one of the most interesting things in the world. The truth is that there is a great outer life that you and I have never touched—a life in which telegrams and anger count. Personal relations, that we think supreme, are not supreme there. ... This outer life, though obviously horrid, often seems the real one—there's grit in it. It does breed character. Do personal relations lead to sloppiness in the end?'

Elsewhere:

'You men shouldn't be so chivalrous,' said Margaret thoughtfully.

'Why not?'

She knew why not, but said that she did not know.

I spent the last week in the American desert, contemplating. One big thing I learned:

In your home, keep less of who you have been, and make space for who you're going to be.

Three things I learned about myself this week:

• I really like running up and down sand dunes,
• I really like climbing up and down small rocks,
• I'm no fun when I devote myself to things I can't justify.

The good quotes seem to come in bunches:

So does my grocer stigmatize me when I complain of the quality of his sultanas, and he answers in one breath that they are the best sultanas, and how can I expect the best sultanas at that price? It is a flaw inherent in the business mind, and Margaret may do well to be tender to it, considering all that the business mind has done for England.

A younger woman might have resented his masterly ways, but Margaret had too firm a grip of life to make a fuss. She was, in her own way, as masterly. If he was a fortress she was a mountain peak, whom all might tread, but whom the snows made nightly virginal. . . . And if insight were sufficient, if the inner life were the whole of life, their happiness had been assured.

Both from the same two-page spread of Howards End by E. M. Forster, that master.

I started reading The New Yorker in January, 2001. I was young, just out of college, and ready to hear about the grown-up world. "The news" didn't appeal to me much, but I wanted to catch up with other grown-ups, a part which I was now going to start to play myself.

In those days, there was still an economic boom going on, which meant that people were doing stuff. People were trying out ideas—lots of them mindless, some of them clever, many interesting. The world was active and interesting; I read the news with an eye toward the weird experiments of entrepreneurs, artists and hackers who were avidly reshaping life in the world. The magazine picked up this kind of story from time to time, amidst its mustier matter (profiles of 18th-century despots and little-known WWI-era poets). I dug it. Each week I couldn't wait to tear it open and look for the next item, the next step in the evolution of mankind, as seen through the Talk of the Town.

Not long after that, the news changed. Suddenly there were zero new projects going on: instead, the news was all about the one big project, and the question of whether it was right or wrong, how long it would last, and so on. Then the news was all about the deceptions that got this project started, and the moral failures contained within it. Part of the big project involved treating people inhumanely; part of it was denying that. For hundreds of weeks, this was the only project on anyone's radar.

But in the past couple of months, other projects have occassionally sprouted through the pavement cracks. The New Yorker's Feb 5 issue has an article about a project to scan every book and put it online. The New York Times' lead headline a couple of weeks ago was about the microchip companies shifting to low-power chips. There are hints that the news will begin to report on forward progress again.

Of course, the big project rages on. It still harbors those same moral whorls; it needs to be talked about. But I'm glad the news can at least sometimes remind us that some amongst us are using their energies productively, to move civilization forward—not everyone fights inwardly, wearing down humanity.

This is our curse:

Judith loved and hated her husband, on alternate days, sometimes even in the same instant. She hated his wisdom and his collection of shells; she loved the father of her children, and the man who was under the covers in the morning.

from "A Tranquil Star," by Primo Levi

As a theoretical computer scientist, most of what I do is invisible. I can visualize it, but the work is still essentially invisible: you can't see it. The scratches on paper that I use to communicate with other theorists are just reminders, hints. When I sit on the bus, and I'm doing the work, the other bus patrons can't see the moves I'm making—they can't see that I'm doing it at all; and neither can my friends or family. They know I do something, which must be important to someone, but since they can't see it, they don't know what it feels like; they can't put any weight on the work I do.

To them I suppose it's something like being a "compliance officer." Surely those people do something, somewhere, to keep the world ticking, but I've never had any idea what.

Hereunder is a statement of what I do, and why, so that you (O my Unknown) can imagine it for yourself and judge it's value. I want to know what you think about it, so fire back, please.

My field is programming languages, which means that I want to design the tools that programmers use. In some sense, then, you can already see what I do: at least, you can see what the application programmers do (they make your email program and your web browser go) and you can imagine that I somehow support them. And on a concrete level, I guess all I want to do is to support the people who are making those apps, so that there are more good apps in the world. If you've ever used a great software app, then you know how good that can feel. And if you've ever tried writing a great app in a crummy language, then you have a sense of what I can do for the world.

But that doesn't quite convey the nature of my work—the end goal, sure, but not the nature. To explain the nature of it, I want to tell you about an idea I've just recently learned to name: the idea of a "compact understanding."

Here's how it goes.

Even if you know nothing about computers, you can probably imagine that they're somewhat complex. Trying to write a good application with a small team of people is something like trying to manage all the trains in New York, making sure that everyone can get where they want to go in a reasonable amount of time. If anything goes wrong in the New York subway system, and if (unrealism warning) you were trying to keep a high level of service, you'd have to adjust a load of other things to compensate; that's complex.

An email program, for example, needs to do cryptography, networking protocols, user interface management, search & indexing, and a lot more. And beyond all that, different computers and different operating systems can behave differently, and worst of all, any small piece can disastrously affect any other. Thinking about an application like that, I always marvel that it's possible that anyone can understand it at all—how anyone can hold it all in the mind and control it.

The answer is actually surprisingly simple: abstraction. We write pieces of code whose internal details are not important to understanding their external behavior, which is designed to be more simply understood. Quite often, these pieces are modeled on some real-world metaphor: we speak of "objects," "packages," "actors," "factories" and so on. Examples might be "MessageListingPane" and "EmailFetchingAgent." The point is that programmers give themselves a layer of intuitive "objects" which are quite easy to understand, even though (in principle, with poor design) any object could affect any other in surprising, catastrophic ways.

Better yet, a single "object" can often unify a number of different things which vary mechanically in some of their details. Because computers are good at banging out boilerplate examples of a general scheme, it's often quite easy to unify things in this way. Programmers do it all the time.

So, creating these abstractions gives you a more compact understanding of a given program: you need to pay attention to fewer issues because you've used the machine's mechanical power to take away some of the tedium. The rub is that fewer things take your attention. That makes it easier to manage the complexity of a large program.

This kind of thing works even if you can already understand the whole program. It's still worthwhile to abstract (or "refactor") it when you can, because fewer things will take your attention, thus leaving more of your time free for conquering new problems. Imagine if you could take a newspaper and remove all the annoying ads: you'd be able to glance through that newspaper much quicker because fewer things would be vying for your attention. Now imagine that you could take that newspaper and unify all the articles that talk about politics into one article: you'd see that they all share some common facts and principles, and vary only in certain details. You'd have a very compact understanding of the day's news! The sentence "Guerilla warfare broke out in Trieste, Vladivostok and Chicago" is much better than three sentences that say that, though in different ways, about those three places independently.

Of course, you can't really do this with newspapers, since newspaper articles have characteristics like "point of view," "style," "local color," and so on. But if all you cared about was some kind of raw information content (and assuming that natural language has raw information content), you could do this with a newspaper. And computer programs, for the most part, don't have these subjective variables to stand in the way of abstraction.

With programs, too, you can do the operation on many levels. So continuing the newspaper metaphor, you could "compress" the invidual words, choosing a core set of neceessary words—this way you don't have to worry about fidgety variations between, phrases like "no less than" and "at least." Beyond that, you could compress the sentence mechanics, reducing those to a minimal set, and you could compress the dynamics of the article and the concepts of the domain—politics, for example, could make use of a core set of concepts that might not be useful for art or business. At the end of the day, you'd have a very small "language" for writing newspapers: a small set of words that you need to know, a small set of grammatical principles, and so on.

So ultimately, the effort to produce "compact understandings" of a domain is a matter of picking out the essential concepts, so that people don't have to worry about needless variations between similar-but-different concepts. This allows you to read and think about the domain much more quickly and with fewer issues calling for your attention.

I am told, by a philosopher friend, that much of modern philosophy (or at least the philosophy of science) is a matter of analyzing the literature of some area and picking out the essential concepts and critiquing those—boiling down the field to its essence and working just with that. In that way, the philosophy of science has a lot in common with programming-languages research.

On the other hand, you really don't want to boil down the concepts further than necessary. In the newspaper metaphor, you mustn't lose so many words that you can no longer adequately describe the domain. In PL research, this is called "expressiveness," and the goal is to create a minimal language which is still sufficiently expressive. That's where the tension lies, and why it's not easy. Einstein famously said that "Everything should be as simple as possible and no simpler"; that's precisely the goal of compact understanding.

This all becomes quite exciting when you think about all the layers of abstraction, and thus the power of compact understandings, that operate in our modern world. Here's a good example: the Coq theorem prover advertises a very simple core logical language. That logical language is easy to look at, understand, and trust: it only takes a couple of pages to write the whole thing out, and it's made of elegant concepts. Built on top of that core is a rich and expressive language for expressing logical statements and proving them. But you don't have to understand this rich language to trust the theorems that come out, since they're all written in that core language. Now, the Coq prover can be used to prove statements about a program, such as that it doesn't crash, or it produces the right answer or whatever. In fact, Coq could be used to prove that a compiler is correct, which gives the programmer more confidence that his code will be run in the way he thinks it will, even on different machines.

Next, the programmer might use "libraries," which give a simple view into a complex piece of functionality, like cryptography or searching & indexing. These might be proven correct, or their usage might be proven correct. Such libraries constitute an additional layer of abstraction on top of the prover and the compiler. All of this compactness of understanding allows programmers to move quickly, to meet their (users') needs, and still be confident that the program meets certain criteria.

These programs, in turn, will become desktop applications that present information workers with a clear and simple view of the data they work with—whether that be Google search results, or a large Word document, or currency exchange rates. Yet more examples appear, even above the world of programming: a historical stock price chart is an example, or any of Edward Tufte's carefully designed "visual displays of information"—all these things help us achieve more compact understandings.

This is essentially the food chain I work in. I work way down near the bottom level, making languages that are eaten by programmers that are eaten by information workers that are eaten by. . . . But I'm building infrastructure that underlies, in a nice way, all of the information economy. That's what I do, and why I do it.

Brillat-Savarin draws a sharp distinction between the pleasures of eating—"the actual and direct sensation of a need being satisfied," a sensation we share with the animals—and the uniquely human "pleasures of the table." These consist of "considered sensations born of the various circumstances of fact, things, and persons accompanying the meal"—and comprise for him one of the brightest fruits of civilization. Every meal we share at a table recapitulates this evolution in semisilence to the lofting of conversational balloons. The pleasures of the table begin with eating (and specifically with eating meat, in Brillat-Savarin's view, since it was the need to cook and apportion meat that first brought us together to eat), but they can end up anywhere human talk cares to go.

—The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan

Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children sucked me in, against my protestations. It's a thick novel about upwardly-mobile, well-endowed New Yorkers, most of them aged 30 (the new 21!). I had expected a hackneyed satire of the cell-phone-wielding members of the cosmopolitan upper-middle-class, something on the order of The O.C. It turns out to be more thoughtful, and truer to what I know, and more pleasurable, too, being tastefully sexy, and appealingly peopled.

The characters are each emblematic of broader things, but I'm repeatedly impressed how carefully they're drawn: impressed at the countervailing qualities that might have undermined their symbolic roles, but which instead add to their humanity. Messud knows her characters very well: to the gesture, to the motive force, to the limits. I was inclined to think she was one of them, one of us, that this was veiled autobiography, until she gave herself away with a few isolated Britishisms ("midges" and "he went through with his wine," e.g.).

It's a novel about people who want much from life, who want to have engaging and useful careers, happy love lives, and to fulfill (in moderation, perhaps) their simple desires. They want to touch the culture, to write their own messages on the face of it, and they happen to sit on a platform that makes this possible. Most of them are highly educated in the approved institutions, while some are autodidacts, but all of them are well connected among New York literati (glitterati, according to the reviews). It is a novel about people for whom happiness is eminently possible, though not without a struggle.

A running theme is the tension between, on the one hand, an "older" version of liberal idealism (one of consistent, well-worn ideals and similar myopias), and on the other a "newer," shiftier, more playful strain, which wants to dismantle and replace the older one. At stake is the question of who gets to describe the culture, and whose point of view will win the day. The seesaw is delicately balanced, and 100 pages from the end, I'm not sure how it's going to unravel. This conflict within the drama is mirrored at the level of storytelling: Messud continually presents the same event from the point of view of several different characters, and every one of them seems entirely reasonable, though they're tautly opposed. The effect is one of mounting anxiety over how all this could be resolved: who is the greater deceiver, who's fooling himself the most?

It needs to be noted that the milieu is distinctly that of privileged people. The characters are rich, or talented, or both, besides being well-connected. The novel mainly avoids any sense that this high society is not the norm, that this way of life is supported by the other 99% of the planet. But there are chinks in the armor: one of the most interesting moments occurs right near the midpoint, when briefly and unexpectedly the housekeeper gets her say, re-describing the principal characters in a whole new set of terms, and bringing a new depth to the characters who otherwise were seen only from within their families and professional networks.

The Emperor's Children could be irritating, or boring, to people who don't find the moral dilemmas of the creative class vitally important. But if you find that sector of society interesting, or if you find yourself in it, you might see this as an engaging little epic for our times.

A good NY Times editorial on Critical Mass:

Considering that more than 200 cyclists have died in traffic in New York over the last decade, including two hit by motorists on a bike path recently, the department should have better priorities. The police should pay more attention to the real problems — everyday cyclists who ignore red lights and one-way street signs, and motorists who crowd and cut off bikers.

A very temperate Fall here in Edinburgh. Each morning the smell of hops brewing seeps up from the ground; it's a smell I associate, for some reason, with Cheerios left lying in milk. Do Cheerios have hops in them?

Yesterday I went with my flatmate to the Thermos Museum; later we saw a small girl with a green face and a pink bear clinging to her chest run from a shop. We stopped at the goldfish pond of the big museum. It was a fresh day full of visions.

Actually the Thermos Museum wasn't there, so we went to the art gallery that we found there instead. One small room had a load of quick drawings by a Stuart _____. These were slightly rough-lined portraits of people, with slightly inflated heads, and with snippets of things they'd said, written in a barely-legible cursive and a barely-legible rendition of a Scottish accent. One wall was all people in pubs, saying things. "I'm sixty-one years old," said a burly man with a short beard in one drawing, "and ah'm built like brick shithoose. Ah've got a kerd says ah'm a black-belt in karate... I've got to carry it cause with my skills I could kill someone." Another man, middle-aged with glasses, was overwhelmed by the portaitist himself: "Oh, God, don't that look just like me? Wait till I show it to the missus. Oh, God, Oh, God."

Today I had enough coffee (light poured out of me) and walked through a park (busy with young footballers) and along the canal (ducks, swans).

This clement, yet crisp, weather, and the orange blush of the trees, bring me to an umfamiliar feeling of well-being. I do remember this: moments of unmixed bliss, the sense of happiness and play that comes of being in grass with friends nearby. Of knowing that things are sweet, we have our whole lives to live, there will be many more Autumn Sundays, and none any worse than this.

When I hear that voice in my head that says, "Look, you're happy right now! Notice this! Come back to it!" I answer it with, "Yes, so; but only because of our privilege." This habit is either morally very wise or psychologically disastrous.

Sofia Coppola said of her heroines that they're all trapped, but that Marie Antoinette is the one who's taking some advantage of it, the only one who's actually enjoying her life. It's a good portrait of that: a character embracing the material pleasures of her life. So a film like Marie Antoinette (and, for that matter, Coppola's previous two films), stirs this unease in me: somehow the pleasures on offer are only material, only fleeting, only unearned ones. The characters seem to be struggling against purposelessness, but they seem to exult in indulgence and stimulation.

When Antoinette and her (anonymous) friends stay up all night to watch the sunrise, she gushes, "Isn't that the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?" Nothing else flies between the characters at that moment—an opportunity for vulnerability, for connection, for cataclysm, or any other alteration, is squandered. Likewise, the long scene of drunken karaoke and strange Tokyo house-parties, from Lost in Translation, provokes a feeling of merely adequate stimulation—and none of the sense of transformation (however small) that one might expect from such an ex-static moment. The characters seem to get just enough endorphins from this stuff so as to enjoy their lives.

So it could be with me and you and everyone we know, perhaps. I don't let myself. I believe deeply that the lesson of Marie Antoinette (the lesson omitted from Marie Antoinette) is the critical one: You can indulge, and enjoy, for now, it is true; but sooner or later an angry mob will come round smashing your chandeliers and disconnecting your body at the neck. And whether they do or not, the pleasures of cakes, bouffants, and Manolo Blahnik shoes are fleeting. The pleasures of engagment with others and of commitment to change, those will outlive any guillotine.

One thing you can say about Sofia Coppola: she was there, she was. Her sense of the past is exquisitely refined. Not for 18th century France (heavens, no!), but for the party scene of California in the 1980s. The music, the energy, the wanting—she's got it down, and for that I say, party on.

On the "organized American Snack Tyranny":
"Do you know what should be fun when your kid plays soccer? Playing soccer."
—"Will Play for Food," NY Times Op-Ed, Harlan Coben.

The 'reason' for sleep is still somewhat of a mystery. However, ... at least part of the picture is that it is a time when short-term memories gathered during the waking period are consolidated into longer-term memory.

Rodney A. Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us

This is how I feel about spending time with people—after being with people for long enough (hours), I start to feel uneasy, unless I get a chance to sit by myself and to start to congeal the thoughts that arose while I was in company.

The economic logic of gathering so many animals together to feed them cheap corn in CAFOs is hard to argue with; it has made meat, which used to be a special occasion in most American homes, so cheap and abundant that many of us now eat it three times a day. Not so compelling is the biological logic behind this cheap meat. Already in their short history CAFOs have produced more than their share of environmental and health problems: polluted water and air, toxic wastes, novel and deadly pathogens.

Raising animals on old-fashioned mixed farms... used to make simple biological sense: You can feed them the waste products of your crops, and you can feed their waste products to your crops. In fact, when animals live on farms the very idea of waste ceases to exists; what you have instead is a closed ecological loop—what in retrospect you might call a solution.

—Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma

My barber wanted to know where I was from, again? The US, of course. "Awful mess at the moment, ay?" he says.

"What, do you mean with this 'plot' and all?"

"Oh, ay. Can you imagine, if they'd blown up ten planes crossing the Atlantic? It's just terrible, I think, it's just terrible. And what gets me is"—he stops cutting, and looks at me in the mirror—"these guys were British citizens behavin this way." He pauses. "Raised in the same society as you and I. D'you ken what I mean?"

I kenned what he meant, but I didn't want to nod and reassure him. I let him go on.

"I mean, can you imagine. (beat) And you can't take nothing on the planes anymore."

"Seems they might have overreacted with that; they've thrown the airports into chaos."

"Oh, ay, but it's better than getting blown up halfway to Chicago, a'n't it?"

"Yeah, it is that."

"You know what I think." He stops cutting again, lays his arm on my shoulder. "Because these people, they don't respect society. They're not like ordinary criminals, murderers an' that. You know what I think. I think they need a world body that can take these people and just shoot them. Because if they don't—if they're willing to kill themselves, if their lives aren't worth nothin to them, then we should just get rid of them, do you ken what I mean?"

Now I really wasn't sure I kenned what he meant.

"Because it's not enough for any one government, d'you ken what I mean? It's not enough for any one government to do it, we need a world body, that can take these people and just shoot 'em. Because society canna deal with them, ay?"

"Hm."

"Because society canna deal with them, and they don't believe in society. How can you deal with it, really?"

I considered this perspective for a moment.

"I can imagine a lot of people objecting to that idea, of a world government that can shoot people based on whatever evidence."

"But it's the only way, isn't it? How can you deal with this problem, these people aren't part of society?"

"Well, the nice thing about having separate countries is that at least no one has too much power. There's always someplace else you can go, if your own government is too wild."

"Oh, ay, ay."

The silent hair-cutting that followed told me I had either said quite the wrong thing or else exactly the right thing, I wasn't sure.

"I think it's just terrible, just terrible, what's going on in the world today."

"Yeah."

"It's just terrible, just terrible."

What is it that barbers want? They always chat, and usually not about petty things. Do they want me to agree? To argue back with some spine? Tell jokes? Honestly, I wish they'd put a sock in it and just got on with the barbering.

Suppose you're forced to live in a flat with nothing but Teflon pans (a vision of hell, surely, but a daily reality for me). Suppose further that every one of those Teflon pans is already scratched (we're entering the second level of Hell now), but some are scratched just once while others appear to be thoroughly scoured.

What's the best policy to minimize destructive effects on your health?

Is it: Use the less-scratched ones which have less of their badness exposed?

Or use the more-scratched ones since they have less Teflon on them??

Dear Master Arora:
Your discussion of atomic forces shows that you have read entirely too much beyond your understanding. What we are talking about is real and at hand: Nature. Learn by trying to understand simple things in terms of other ideas—always honestly and directly. What keeps the clouds up, why can't I see stars in the daytime, why do colors appear on oily water, what makes the lines on the surface of water being poured from a pitcher, why does a hanging lamp swing back and forth—and all the innumerable little things you see all around you. Then when you have learned to explain simpler things, so you have learned what an explanation really is, you can then go on to more subtle questions.

Do not read so much, look about you and think of what you see there.

...

Sincerely yours,
Richard P. Feynman

-->

Mr. Tord Pramberg
Stockholm, Sweden

Dear Sir:
The fact that I beat a drum has nothing to do with the fact that I do theoretical physics. Theoretical physics is a human endeavor, one of the higher developments of human beings—and this perpetual desire to prove that people who do it are human by showing that they do other things that a few other humans do (like playing bongo drums) is insulting to me.

I am human enough to tell you to go to hell.

Sincerely,
Richard P. Feynman

The new Seattle library is incredible: a masterpiece of public stewardship, from the superb space to the excellent information design, daylighting, color interaction, metaphors, choice of typeface, and all-around impressive facilities. The stacks are built in an ever-so-gradual spiral of gently sloping floors, with nice big numbers on the floor to tell you where you are in the Dewey decimal system. A translucent sheet of plastic covers the ends of the shelves, which softens the forceful ubiquitous shapes that abut the ends of library shelves everywhere, allowing you to see the books first, instead of the shelves first. Day-glow elements lighten the space, whose color is mostly, of course, gray (in keeping with the sky). The blocky foam-rubber chillin'-seats, in warm earth-tones, are comfortable, solid, and enveloping, and probably cheap, too.

The designers of this building obviously understand the pleasures of space. There are lots of vertiginous views and nifty outlooks. When you get to the top of the spiral, there's a balcony and you can look down through the canted steel-and-glass mesh walls to the city streets below. A small sign near one corner says, "highest viewpoint," as if it were an alpine outlook. Which, in a way, it is. Besides the overhead view of streetborne passersby, you can ogle Seattle skyscrapers all around and, through them, the Olympic mountain range on the other side of the Sound.

The building's only weakness, in the opinion of this author, is as a sculpture in the city. It's shifting angularity is a bit displeasing to me: it seems like something off balance, and somewhat neurotic. Still, the overall effect is not too strong, and at street level, it fits well enough into the surrounding cityscape. The building has a lightness, both in color and in weight, and its steel mesh actually echoes an older brick building down the street, a Seattle landmark (I'm not sure what it is), providing a modicum of context-sensitivity.

When the library was under construction, I was a frequent critic, based on the displays that were showcased at the temporary library. But the execution turned out to be impeccable, and the imagination, grand. I was quite impressed when the Capitol Hill library was rebuilt a few years ago: it turned out to be an open two-level room, with lots of light, and a little walkway running around the edges of the higher level. It was modest in size but expansive in feeling.

Now I learn there is a comprehensive plan to overhall the whole library system, one branch at a time. The Seattle libraries have always been principally hangouts for the bored and out-of-work, and the old branches were principally dull, neglected, gray boxes; these new buildings ennoble those out-of-work wayfarers and provide truly useful services to the community. It looks like the Art Museum is getting an overhaul, too. I'm now quite jealous of you Seattle citizens and your civic services.

Halfway through Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Lawrence Weschler's portrait of the artist Robert Irwin, there's an extended digression into the dynamics of betting on horse races. Irwin made his living by betting the horses, all the while taking his artwork—initially a matter of paint and canvas—further and further away from the tropes of pictorial art (or, for that matter, the tropes of "art"), removing first the presence of any distinct marks on the canvas, then the square frame of the canvas, then the "art object" itself (this progression can be well understood through reading the book and trying some of his works; one of them is on display at the SFMOMA).

But while peeling away the layers of his consciousness, Irwin was also spending time at the race track. He says an interesting thing about horse racing:

I never wanted to be a writer. It's important to know this about yourself. Some people, after all, do want to be a writer. It's a charming way of life.

Culturally, "writer" is the paradigm case of the artist: popular and intellectual, free and wise. A writer is meant to be in touch with the currents of human lives; a writer's knowledge of people is broad and he understands many individual quirks and dreams: he is a humanist and a gentleman. He is witty and clever. Stories are said to be the fabric of our cultural heritage, the stuff, literally, that dreams are made of.

Everyone would like to be a writer: everyone wants to ennoble his personal history with the glaze of a printed narrative, an archived tome. Each of us wants to quit his job and go—to ply the trade of words, to work the material of memories and characters into a strong image, a general yet specific portrait of the human condition—something that changes, and strengthens, the lives of adoring readers.

Meanwhile, the alarm rings, children go wild, systems fail, the bread burns in the oven, minds go soft. In fact, for many of us, it may be the noblest thing to say, "I don't want to be a writer."

See also.

The 'average' erected statue [on Easter Island] was 13 feet tall and weighed about 10 tons. The tallest ever erected successfully, known as Paro, was 32 feet tall but was slender and weighed 'only' about 75 tons, and was thus exceeded in weight by the 87-ton ... statue ... that taxed Claudio Cristino in his efforts to reerect it with a crane. ... Rano Raraku quarry contains even bigger unfinished statues, including one 70 feet long and weighing about 270 tons. Knowing what we do about Easter Island technology, it seems impossible that the islanders could ever have transported and erected it, and we have to wonder what megalomania possessed its carvers.

—Jared Diamond, Collapse.

If not for you!
Winter wouldn't have no spring.
Couldn't hear the robins sing,
I just wouldn't have a clue!
Anyway, it wouldn't ring true.
If not for you!
If not for you.

—Robert Zimmerman, "If Not For You"

I left my flatmate watching television in the common room tonight, went to my room and read old poems collected by someone else. My friend JD used to say, repeating Harold Bloom I think, that reading is "the experience of the authentic self." He seemed to be using the phrase, as if it agreed with his long life of reading alone. He was a resolute soldier of listening and reading. He had a wife. He drove a car made before 1980. I never met his wife, but she loomed there outside our conversations: he'd speak of her sometimes, and of their relationship. How curious, isn't it? How is it possible to be alone and not in one lifetime?

Dude, accepting ads and repudiating culture jamming are not the same thing at all, no, no.

Why accept ads on your blog, your website? Because they are a relatively small nuisance to put up with to get free access to something--to avoid the mess of getting out your credit card and to avoid the jillions of little charges that would add up if you had to pay for every old thing on the web.

Why hate Adbusters? Because it's a brand and a behemoth and it's lost track of its mission, lost its honestly, trundling on, throwing ossified barbs at anything that moves in order to justify its own stated goals.

But give up on culture jamming? Accept ads in any form? Let organizations take over our landscape and hijack our senses? Let them gently coerce us, seduce us, steal that bit of our minds that wants to *want* things, and let them put their own interpretation on our desire? Let organizations define the public notion of comfort, sex, security, success--for their own commercial ends? Really? You'd hate on the culture jammers, those people who risk themselves to overwrite the posters, the adverts, the glossies and blipverts, who risk life and limb to re-subvert the overwhelming redefinition of contemporary life with a countervailing message?

Anil Dash, a recovering Adbuster-zealot? Kintta, please. Might as well call myself a Prince fan.

I finished reading The Master. It is not a gripping book, and it should not be attempted by anyone who is not an introvert. Even introverts should check their zest for adventure at the door before poring over this one.

It's a book about Henry James, a solitary American expat in Europe; a novel based on James' life, by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín (Toe-bean). His book The South nearly swore me off reading forever, it was such an undramatic and unredeeming, existential sort of tale. The whole way through, I was thinking, He's brewing for some nasty turns, he sure is. The turn never comes: everything is genial or calm or just riddled with ennui. The Master is like that, but it's punctuated by episodes that ring nicely in the mind (particularly a youthful holiday with Oliver Wendel Holmes and some charming women), and it ends with a surprising and encouraging lightness: a family turning pages, peace through the evening and a sense of thoughts stirring.

I was tempted to read the title as a repressed critique of the James' excessively-privileged position, but it never comes through: there's a passage that puts on stage his status as master to his servants, but apparently without a critical eye, and if anything, Tóibín seems gratified by the servants' demise and the master's restored peace. I'm tempted by the memory of what that's like: not to efface yourself, but to take your privilege with grace. But the fact remains: over a billion people live on less than a dollar a day—and that's purchasing power—and lots of them are serving folk like me.

Tóibín, in both these books, seems removed to a purely aesthetic realm of the inner life, its ups and downs, and he's a master with these matters:

He read on: 'If I were, by hook or by crook, to spend next winter with friends in Rome, should I see you at all?' And then, in one of the last letters he received from her: 'Think, my dear, of the pleasure we would have together in Rome. I am crazy at the mere thought. I would give anything to have a winter in Italy.' ... He put the letters aside and sat with his head in his hands. He did not help her or encourage her ...

He sat on a chair in his living room for most of the afternoon, letting his thoughts sink and glide and come to the surface again.

In him I feel the essential pull of regret of neglected love, against the necessity of being oneself and being honest. To that extent, I find a home here. But he offers no consolation, except for the pleasures of being a master, of having a big house in the English countryside and someone to cook your dinner for you. In that, I can do without.

I wanted to be a writer. I fancied myself the kind of shy, introspective and observant person who ought to become a writer. I imagined that becoming a writer meant that people would appreciate my inner life, and all my slights would be vindicated. I figured that I might have the diligence and the attention to detail that I'd need as a writer.

I wrote stories in high school and passed them around. In college I suffered through lectures and discussions that perplexed me, because I thought they'd galvanize me into a reader, into an appreciator. After college, I spent whole weekends slaving over a single page, trying to commit thoughts to word and to spin out characters and plots. I tried my hand at playwriting, trying to break soliloquys apart into dialogue, and reveal characters just with speech. I tweaked fonts and margins endlessly, and never had more than a few pages.

I knew it the whole time, but it was years and years before I accepted the fact: I was not going to be a writer. I would never write a novel or a play. My slavitude was barren, when other areas of life bore fruit much more easily. It was hard to accept—after all, if I never wrote, I'd be like a man who lived in a box, no one celebrating his perspective. The unexamined life is not worth living!

Photography should be the easiest of arts, shouldn't it? Carry a camera, point it at things—capture beauty. Or, in another flavor of photography: get hold of some props, pose your figures, apply makeup and clothes—express yourself in tableaux.

People often talk about art as self-expression, and count self-expression as something that all people should engage in for their well-being. This is true—that all people should engage in it! and that self-expression is like salt, lacking which one is not healthy.

Yet the critical thing, the needed thing, the meal, is to create—to bring something new into existence—and this is not self-expression by any means. One never creates anything by pushing out what is already there inside himself. To create is more to heed the possibility that something may appear before you; it is having the balls to hold your eyes on the thing and let it affect you; it is also to carry out the mundane work of manifesting that thing, which was principally in just your own eye, and reify it.

This manifesting can happen in painting just as well as in music, math, cooking, parenthood, sermons, criticism, love, room-cleaning, or indeed photography.

The important thing, the heart-warming thing, in to be a photographer is not to carry a camera; it is not to release the shutter. To be a photographer is to be willing to go to a place where something might occur. To face and accept the possibility that nothing might occur. And to serve the occurrence, when it happens, openly and courageously, by setting the aperture, opening the shutter, printing the film, cutting the prints, and laying them in sequence.

In the end, your self will be more or less expressed. You cannot remove your personal fingerprints from the work. And who you are is eminently important, but only because you are typically the only the only one who can have witnessed the event. To know myself, I should aim to know what medium I'm most at home with, so that the camera, or the word of counsel, or the concise equation, is ready when the event occurs.

To create is to put myself in a place where an event can occur to me. This takes courage, energy, and open eyes.

"When the bin is full, it needs emptying!!!"

This interesting sentence is posted in the kitchen of my flat, near the bin (Americans, read "trash can" for "bin"). There are so many interesting things about it, from the notion of the bin having needs to the multiple excalamation points. Since the sign seems like a sort of command directed at me, I can't help but try to divine the sign's own needs.

What is this sentence doing? It seems to equate two things which are necessarily equal. It's a truism, isn't it? No one would say that when the bin is full, it needs some more packing! Possibly "needs emptying" is just a euphemism for "is full." Is the sign in fact doing anything at all?

Under some consideration, one realizes that the sentence is in fact a reminder of something we already know. Though everyone would agree that what's needed by a full bin is emmptying, a newcomer might need to be told that his flatmates *care* about this fact and will be upset to see a full bin which has not been emptied. It signals the fact that no one person has been given responsibility over the bin--it's impersonality indicates that the need of emptying the bin is shared by all.

But, how often are newcomers coming new to the flat? Surely guests don't need to take responsibility for the bin. Isn't it a bit unseemly to let them see this prominent reminder? It's a bit like saying, "After you've enjoyed this lovely dinner, I'll have the burdensome task of wiping away the crumbs you've left, meticulously scrubbing the dishes, and hauling the sticky trash down to the dump." No, the sign can hardly be for newcomers or for guests.

What is it, then? Why is it there, and what difference does it make? With enough cultural context--that being the context of Western capitalist twenty-somethings sharing a flat--it finally becomes easy to read out the meaning. "When the bin is full, it needs emptying," is the exasparated cry of the neatnik who simply *can't believe* that he is always the one to take out a seemingly overfull trashcan. The neatnik is crying, of course, to the laissez-faire in his midst, who can't see anything wrong with dropping one more orange peel in the bin. If the neatnik caught the beatnik at that very moment, the latter would only cry--"It's not full! I'll take it out later."

What these signs never specify, to the chagrin of semanticists, is what level of junk should qualify as a "full bin." Shouldn't this, after all, be your first question when you notice that your fellow communitarians are not doing what seems should obviously be done. Whoever penned the above text was surely aware that he or she was reiterating something obvious--the author knew it was only a reminder. So why didn't this merry barrister stop to think what open questions might be the source of the confusion?

When people aren't behaving as you'd like, the reason is almost never that the others are stupid or flouting your needs; far more often than not, the source of conflict is a difference of interpretation.

The Wikipedia article on Marie Antoinette is surprisingly interesting. I was an ignoramus going in, but now I know that "Let them eat cake" was really "If they have no bread, let them eat cake," and that she didn't say it. Instead she said something less flip and a little bit more sensitive, about the bread shortage that was underway when she was coronated:

It is quite certain that in seeing the people who treat us so well despite their own misfortune, we are more obliged than ever to work hard for their happiness. . . . I shall never forget the day of the coronation.

Also learned the interesting fact that she and her husband couldn't figure out how to have sex for seven years after their wedding—until they were in their early twenties, that is.

During the Terror, the angry mob comes to her house:

In the early hours of the morning, the mob broke into the palace. The queen's guards were massacred. She and her ladies-in-waiting only narrowly escaped with their lives before the crowd burst in and ransacked her chambers. They made it to the centre of the palace; the king's bedchamber. . . . By this time, a large crowd had gathered in the palace's courtyard and were demanding that the queen come to the balcony. She appeared in her night-robe, accompanied by her two children. The crowd demanded that the two children be sent back inside. So the queen stood alone for almost ten minutes, whilst many in the crowd pointed muskets at her. She then bowed her head and returned inside. Some in the mob were so impressed by her bravery that they cried "Vive la Reine!" ("Long live the Queen!")

I won't give away the ending, but it's rather good—you should take 40 minutes or so to investigate it yourself.

As I'm slowly learning, the British phrase, "you have every right to..." translates to Americans' "you're welcome to..." It takes me a moment, each time I hear it, to remember that the speaker isn't accusing me of being a jerk.

In American English, you see, telling someone they have a certain right is a kind of sarcasm at least, and possibly a way to start a fight. The perturbed argumentator, for example, might simmer: "Well, you have a right to believe what you want, but..." A parent: "You have every right to scream and swear at me, but you're not going to that concert."

In the American view, I know what my rights are—it's a free world after all—so saying, "You have a right..." suggests that I've abandoned everything else—all other common sense, ties of friendship, and bounds of propriety. To an American ear.

At the bank, for example, I expected the Advice man would welcome me to submit an application, and if, as he says, it's unlikely that I'd get an account, I'd expect him to level with me: "Your welcome to try, but if you don't have a UK credit history, it's not likely." Welcoming me to try and simultaneously laying out the harsh facts—that's what friends do! Telling me my rights, that's what the cops do!

This puts me in mind of the fact that when Japan was opened up to the outside world, in the 1800s, they adopted (whether by enlightenment or coercion, I can't say) an American-modeled constitution, complete with its notion of "individual rights," a concept which had no native word in Japanese. The Japanese people found this a difficult idea to accomodate, as the scholars have it. A "right," it seemed, was some property an individual had no matter how assinine he might behave. What could quite justify such a principle? A man who killed scores of his countrymen in broad daylight had certain actions which he could still perform, and which others should not prevent him from doing?

So it seems to be, after the Enlightenment, and after the American Revolution and the ascendency of all things American, that there are certain properties which, in principle at least, no person can be rightly deprived of.

One is interested to note that in the original Meiji Constitution, "rights of subjects" were posited to the extent that law did not otherwise restrict them. These qualifications were dropped when the Constitution was re-written after WWII, when the American army was disbanding and replacing the Japanese one.

What consolation is there?

We drink wine!

But someone picked the grapes for that wine. What have you done for the man who picked them? What have you done for the woman who drove the machine that crushed the grapes? What have you done for those who dug the holes for the posts where the vineyards stand? What have you done for the one who drove all night to bring you your wine?

Bruce Wilcox designed a famous early Go program, and also designed a strategy called Instant Go, and generally terrorized the Go scene with his cocky personality. I first heard of him when my dear aunt gave me a copy of the program at about age thirteen.

Digging through boxes this week, I found this "interview," tucked in behind the floppy. This bit of text had a rather significant impact on my own character development. I used to read it over and over, wondering at the nature of the person behind it. It's easy to recognize a few characteristic features of a certain culture here; you know who you are.

For a few years there, Bruce Wilcox, along with Will Wright (the creator of SimCity) were my heroes. They were creating toys that were thoughtful and imaginative, things which didn't have any obvious commercial value, but which were popular just because they were creative and elegant.

I met Bruce Wilcox once, briefly, when his program was competing in a computer Go tournament in my home town. While the game played, dialog boxes kept popping up that said things like "Can't free already freed cons cell" and he kept swatting them away. "That's a flaw," he would say—never a "bug," always a "flaw." My coworkers may recognize that turn of phrase has crept into my own diction.

Part of "A Self-Interview 'Laser, Truth, Kids' by Bruce Wilcox, 5 Dan." from American Go Journal, volume 24 number 4 Autumn 1990.

When I really want to learn about someone, I ask one of my questions designed to reveal insights quickly. My parody of the classic "... in 250 or less" essay is "Summarize your life in three words or less." I learn a lot both from the answer, and how the person responds to being asked the question. For myself:
Laser - I see myself like a laser, capable of channeling immense energy into a tight single focus. Sometimes I use so much energy so quickly that my body can't keep up. I drink saturated solutions of sugar or eat a big meal and am still starving. Also, I'm technology-oriented. I look to the future, not the past.
Truth - I value truth and integrity. While I may not volunteer information, I don't lie. I figure I can manage the consequences of telling the truth, so be careful what you ask me. Also, I seek out TRUTH, fundamental information describing some area. AI's knowledge engineering entails this searching for TRUTH. I just naturally organize chaotic informatino into a unified whole. When I was asked to write a proposal, I didn't just write a proposal. I write a proposal generator so the company I worked for didn't have to write each proposal uniquely. I generalize specifics.
Kids - I have an incredible affinity with children. While in college I worked at a nursery. I have two kids (a boy 6, a girl 5) that I love immensely. Also, I an [sic] very playful, like a child. Being a programmer, I'm very literal-minded. I've been known to "drop in" on a secretary. That means falling flat onto the floor in front of her desk. My staff is devoted to me because I make business fun. I invent games in adult situations, and engage other adults in them. When my wife asked me to beat some eggs, I put the [sic] in a bowl and pounded them with my fist. They weren't the only things that cracked. Definitely a low sense of humor.

A couple of years ago, I gave myself the chance to make some big decisions about what to do with my life. This is a story about loving and caring and finding out what you want.

I was born in the age of masterpieces. It began long before I was born but ended before I was thirty years old. Even in my life the masterpieces were outweighed by the non-masterpieces.

Masterpieces were large creations that took months or years for one person to make. Masterpieces were usually physical objects composed of intricately balanced colors and shapes and each one had many components, each of which evoked a distinct psychological impression, but which all together transformed into a coordinated vision, a singular sense of life.

Some of the masterpieces I knew were Star Wars, Birth of a Nation, Kind of Blue, The Birth of Venus, The Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Sebastião Salgado's Migrations, The Iliad, The Oresteia, The Mahabharata, The Tale of Genji, David, The Shawshank Redemption, The Divine Comedy, The Cantos of Ezra Pound, The Wasteland, Ran by Akira Kurosawa, Anna Karenina, Moby Dick, Pather Panchali, Einstein on the Beach (by Robert Wilson, not by Counting Crows), The Art of the Fugue, Fallingwater, Midnight's Children, Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now, Time's Arrow, The House of the Spirits, Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Boy on Earth, Maus, Schindler's List, Meshes of an Afternoon, Bringing It All Back Home, Mezzanine.

Before I was born some people had great swaths of time on their hands and others had none. The former were driven by an egotism that held their perspectives to be unique, God-given, novel and necessary, and a desire to enlighten others by presenting these perspectives in meticulous detail. The latter were driven by a need for some vision larger than what their own lives afforded. By these forces, a creator and an audience would meet in a forum, and would be affected.

A masterpiece was something that astonished you, and you'd go away with stung eyes. Or you'd feel peaceful while watching it, and your bad feelings would drop away, like after a good run. After seeing a masterpiece, you'd think of it for days, and you'd contemplate its creator, and you'd admire that person. It was something with a precise name and if you heard anyone whisper that name in a cafe or in a Social Security line, you would drop your cup or give up your place in line to hear how they knew of it, and what they thought of it, and how they remembered it. You would pass hours with your friends recounting elements of your favorite masterpieces.

This will sound strange to you, but when I was a boy, there was no direct way to interact with a masterpiece; there was no way to affect its contents or explore it on your own path. A masterpiece was something you humbled yourself to experience; it was something like a tunnel that you walked through, that you trusted not to collapse. It was not something that would return, changing but familiar, like The Simpsons (that near-masterpiece) or The Sopranos or the vaudeville. It was not like the ragas, or the oral stories of my great-grandparents, or the sitcoms of the latter 20th century, and it was not like the gamelan or the parade at Carnaval. It was always something rigid as a piece of forged steel.

With Apologies to Hollis Frampton

My little Prolog adventure shed some light on why the language has had even less popularity than such relative box-office duds as LISP and Ada.

I believe there are two opposing theories of history, and you have to make your choice. Either you believe that this kind of individual greatness does exist and can be nurtured and developed, that such great individuals can be part of a cooperative community while they continue to be their happy, flourishing, contributing selves—or else you believe that there is some mystical, cyclical, overriding, predetermined, cultural law—a historic determinism.

—Edwin Land

Pessimism yields bad results. If you prune away all action, you have no action to pull on the bootstraps. Do something, and do it well, and this can at least possibly lead to good things. Do it with a conscious mind and that's more likely to lead to better things for that mind than bad things. Soon optimism is not so irrational: there's no reason to think any course of action will be good, but there is reason to think pessimism will go nowhere. Optimimism is better than dead even.

Hello, terribleness. This is the beginning. It is a short, squat beginning, it will move on thwarted legs, but it's a beginning.

William Least Heat-Moon says, "Beware thoughts that come in the night." I say beware those that come in the morning.

I woke up in the middle of our lives. I want to take a journey not downward but to a worse inferno.

What drew me so to Jewish liturgical music in my dreams was the voice of group in it, a definite plural, a bunch of people all singing together for the comfort that's in it. That old Christian music: too univocal for me. And the meaning of the parable is: how could a man believe in a faith he just then believes to be arbitrary? Makes you a better person? Because you don't eat the peanuts? This is religion?

A priest this weekend said, "And we, as people of faith..." What is 'people of faith'? I thought it was those who would submit to the governance of an order that was not their own. I now understand "faith" as an irrational belief that things might be OK. There's no reason to think so. In Munro's story, it is the doctor, the smartest, the privilegest one, the most reasonable of all, whose "lack of hope" is "honest, and reasonable, and everlasting." Those of us who think about the goodness of the world, and don't take it on faith, find no secure reason for it—for the world to be better than dead even.

Yet I find there is this drama with myself. I read in a book yesterday where a monk said "I was afraid of what I really wanted." On entering the monastery he said that. So he turned to it, and entered. Work removes me, but contemplation reminds me: there is this self to be wrestled with, this self which wants (it flashes and yearns), and all but an ounce of the time, it is scared of its own damn self.

Thank you, my Unknown, for confronting me with what I want. Amongst friends it is not OK to be questioning. To have asked the question, you cannot say no. Once you have asked you are gone to the yes.

This is why I cried.

Jewish liturgical music woke me up the other weekend and I found myself wondering between the pillows if I should be Jewish. Eerily enough (quite enough!) the course of the week revealed that some people close to me were actively researching the possibility of conversion.

A friend of mine (a Jewish one) once described the Jewish law as containing rules that are more or less arbitrary but make you a "better person." The example? Not eating while the other person is not present. So if you're watching a football game with your chum and have a bowl of peanuts on the table, and he walks out to hit the head, you're not meant to go popping any peanuts while he's out. This is more or less the example he gave. Not precisely.

Well, I like the idea of not eating any peanuts while the other guy is out of the room, anyway.

Who is this Alice Munro, and how does she manage to suspend her devastating insights on such smooth and simple stories?

I just got around to her story, "Passion," in the March 22, 2004 NYer, which at first glance looked like it might be a fluffy confection, some treacly pastoral romance that I neither wanted nor needed. Thank peaches that I decided to dive in anyway—it made for far more than just a good train ride. Any bit that I would like to quote might clobber some of the surprise for you, my Unknown, so I'll try to hold back. It seems to me she has a sharper sense of what's true and awful about life and love than anyone else on Earth, with the possible exception of Jhumpa Lahiri.

... and in the middle of that she had come on a rock-bottom truth, a lack of hope that was genuine, reasonable, everlasting.

When I was in college I hung with a crowd who talked a lot about "place," and about the land, and about how the land affects our thoughts. One of the favorite metaphors was "bedrock." How do you find bedrock? We always wanted to know. One prerequisite seems clear at this moment: to give up the need for that fundamental truth to be something sweet.

The website for the Iraqi Linux Users Group at this moment is one of the most interesting texts I've come upon in a long time. There are lots of subtle aspects to what's going on there, it's worth browsing through a bit.

Also, it's great to see some good old hobbyists getting together and just sharing their excitement and their info. Reminds me of being 11 and hanging out, open-jawed, at the local Commodore users group meeting (CUGOR), discovering that enormous group of learned people who dug what I had until then dug in isolation. I have no idea how that feels when you've just had your homeland rid of an oppressive, bloody regime, and when same is in the process of being developed by foreign commercial interests.

B. T. W.: traceroute seems to place the server somewhere in London. Shouldn't some exploitative American corporation be opening up rack hotels over there by now?

(ILUG sounds like a name for an old-skool portable.

Zizek lacks a positive program of action, causing his work here to resonate with the moral ambiguousness that emerges out of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, an embrace of radical freedom that fails to develop a normative component to guide one's radically free choices.

—Daniel Worden, "Killing the Big Other," Postmodern Culture, January, 2004.

> The problem I have with it [Tim O'Reilly's "current stump speech"] is that it provides little normative direction...

—Matt Asay on the list fsb (at) crynwr.com

Good, thoughtful essays don't have to give normative direction. If you figure it out, _you_ might get rich.

—DW Henkel-Wallace, also on fsb (at) crynwr.com

Interesting customer review of the US Constitution at Amazon:

Lacks the explicit protections of, for example, the new Iraqi Constitution, which contains an explicit right to privacy (Art. 13(H)); states that: "All Iraqis are equal in their rights without regard to gender, sect, opinion, belief, nationality, religion, or origin, and they are equal before the law. Discrimination against an Iraqi citizen on the basis of his gender, nationality, religion, or origin is prohibited. Everyone has the right...

Does that really say, "Discrimination ... on the basis of his gender"? Yes, it does. Gender being as it is a construction, I suppose it's possible to discriminate amongst a group of men on the basis of their gender. But what about women? Don't they have a right to protection from gender-based discrimination too?

The US Capitol building was recently evacuated because it was thought that a plane was headed for it; the plane turned out to be carrying the governor of Texas (not a threat, of course).

Remember when that guy landed ["crashed"—Ed.] his plane on the White House lawn?

The early-nineties are like a Mary-Tyler-Moore-Show of innocence.

Dear Unknown:

My friend says, "It doesn't matter what you wear. Clothes are totally hollow. Just because you were a suit doesn't mean you're good at what you do. A spray-painted mohawk doesn't make you cool." My friend says it with some vituperation, which I lack the punctuation sufficient to render here. My friend wears all black: shirt, slacks, shoes and socks.

What do you think? The clothes don't make the man, I know. But does it matter what you wear?

Today on the train I left my black cotton sweater. I didn't particularly like it: it was heavy and not very warm. It was solid black but somewhat faded, and had a V-neck that had been filled in by the manufacturer; a last minute fix before the sweaters hit the production line, I reckon.

I forgot about it, without remorse. But then it's cold this time of year (where I am). What sort of warm outer layer should replace it? A sweater, a jacket, a windbreaker, a parka, a fleece, all possibilities. What shall I get?

Why not—I thought in my whimsy—get some rag that might, somehow or another, project some splintered hint of who I am? Why not, well, advertise myself a bit? Living in a city, I see countless people everyday who contrive to spark my imagination. This woman here with her light, loose, pressed pants that flap in the wind, and heavy furry collar, who walks with her nose high; what does she get engrossed in when alone? What does she find funny?

This tall chiseled man in the biking outfit, what driving force allows him to wear such tight spandex on the way to work?

This woman here, a neat, narrow skirt, totally wrinkled; what form of elegance does she have in mind, and why dress up if she doesn't mind the wrinkles?

This one, with her short quick steps, and what looks like a batik sari? Is she rooted in tradition, or making obeisance to it for her parents' sake? Her fierce steps, are they from determination or nervousness? Is she patient?

Here's a contemplative fellow, walking slowly, with lines of worry in his face, and looking up as if at the executioner's axe. But with a tight red T-shirt, bands of color at the sleeves, and some lost slogan across the chest. Is he witty and up-to-date? Or perpetually tired? How does he behave in the swift drop of a roller coaster?

What about these strip&eacut;d stockings here? A quiet pluckiness I see in them.

Each day I have these conversations with people who I never meet—or at least, they 'say' a bit to me. What am I saying to them? If I could speak back—ambiguously, of course, without precision—might some verbal conversation sprout between us? Late at night on an empty bus alone together?

Maybe I'll 'project' something, then. Do you know the mathematical meaning of 'project,' my Unknown? A transformation from a larger space into a smaller space, which thus loses information.

Intriguing post on education and its social value in Philip Greenspun's Weblog. He says, "Just back from a workshop at MIT on technology for community-building in America. The focus turned out to be poor communities. Apparently the middle class don't need community because they can enjoy their suburban comforts."

The mismatch of expectations is instructive. "Community-building" may well be a 'term of art' for nonprofits and activists: these specialists use it in a special way that they understand, so outsiders are left a beat behind. It can be very worrisome, the degree to which anti-poverty and anti-racist activists use such jargon, since their enterprise is not meant to be an elitist one, and yet they commonly alienate the middle- and upper-class people who they need to draw their resources from (they make it up on guilt, I suppose).

But let's read on:

"The non-profit world likes to think about affordable housing, leadership development, better health care, specialized training, etc. If everyone in a poor neighborhood were educated to the standard of the average Harvard graduate all of the other problems would be solved."

It's pretty to think so, but alas I believe this is a bit too sugary for my stomach to bear.

While walking across the dusty industrial heath today, I came across a plant that I thought was dill, because of it's tiny needles, even though it had thick stalks, something like bok choy or green onions. It turned out to be an anise, as I discovered when I rubbed the needles between my fingers, getting the scent on them, and smelled my fingers.

This is something I learned as a kid from my mother. Whenever we were walking over hill or dale, or through someone's fancy garden, she'd rub some showy herb between her fingers, smell it, and then exhort me, "Mmm, Ezra. Smell! It's so good."

But I was categorically, religiously opposed to these demonstrations. I was convinced there was some ploy afoot, some trick to make a fool of me, or somehow make me question the roots of my being, to force aside all my stubbornness toward bathing, eating greens, and generally not being the sourpussed brat that I was between the ages of 5 and 25. But, not knowing what she *was* up to, I'd always demand some justifiable reason for her wanting me to sniff this foreign plant: "Why?" I wouldn't risk losing face by just inhaling the bloody thing, not without getting some explanation. I had to know what sniffing plants was good for.

In this and a thousand other ways, my mom would invite me to something or instruct me against some other thing, and I'd demand "Why?" The king of all such struggles was the classic, "Clean your room!" For this I could see no decent reason at all, and yet my mother was adamant that it must be done. If it was so important, why couldn't she give me one lousy reason--simple or complex, subtle or stupendous? I was patient! I was ready to listen! I wanted to absorb the rationale for why any thinking being would waste time rearranging the piles of clothes in one's room, knowing full well they'd all be disrupted again in just days. I wanted my eyes to be opened, provided there was something to see, some legitimate explanation for it all.

It wasn't until a few months ago that I realized what was the fundamental deep difference between my mother and I that kept us at such a stalemate. Since you've already suffered me thus far, I hope you won't mind my diverting your attention with another story, prefigured by an epigraph of my poet friend J. D, from a private email:

By the way, expectation is the thing to release—good things come of that.

In the cool Northwest summer of last year, when I was working in a first grade classroom, the kids had a math problem to do each morning. It would be written on the whiteboard (!) when the kids came in and they'd have the first hour of the morning to work on it and turn in a piece of paper showing their solution. Something like this: "Farmer Brown has three stalks of corn. Each stalk has four ears on it. How many ears does Farmer Brown have?" On each table there were some little counters and the kids were encouraged to use those to find the total.

One morning I was working with one kid in particular, an earnest and agreeable kid with a great bowl haircut, the kind that was much in fashion when I myself was six. This morning, he was struggling with a problem that seemed to me about on the level with what this class was used to doing, but he wasn't finding the answer so I was trying to help him get a handle on it.

"How many are on each stalk?" "Three." "Well, there are three stalks, but is that the number of ears on the stalk?" "Oh, four." "OK, now if there are four on the first stalk and four on the second stalk, then how many are there on those first two?" "What do you mean?"

Somehow too big a leap had occurred in my thinking, so I shaved it down into smaller pieces. Without going into the details, I worked with him for maybe twenty minutes, trying different tacks; he always seemed very close, but kept coming to "What do you mean?" or "I don't understand." I didn't see any way to slice the problem any finer; by the end of it, I couldn't understand why he wasn't able to answer some questions that seemed to have a fairly straightforward answer.

At some point, the regular teacher, an amazing man named Darren, came over and watched for a bit, and then spoke. He had the boy draw a picture with the right number of ears on each stalk, put a counter on each one, and then count up the total number of counters. Simple! The kid turned in his paper and went off to play. Darren caught me and explained: "With someone like [name], he's more able to get it if you help him build it out, and then he can see the problem. You were trying to go at it in a conceptual way, which some of these kids will do, but [name] isn't ready for that. He'll understand it if he keeps building it with counters enough times." This simple bit of pedagogical strategy started a series of wheels spinning in my head and eight months later I'm still trying to either stop it from spinning, or get some momentum out of it.

A conceptual way. It hadn't occurred to me that there could be a non-conceptual way to approach addition. So I had to face that I myself have an unfailingly conceptual way of approaching every problem I encounter.

My mother, in the way she raised me, had a non-conceptual way of teaching me things. She figured that if I smelled enough herbs, I'd eventually appreciate why people stoop to smell them, or if I cleaned my room enough times, I'd understand the benefits of a clean room. I wanted to go the other way: If I could understand the Clean Room Theory, I'd have a solid basis for cleaning; otherwise my own theory was that it was fruitless. I was constantly frustrated at how many things grownups couldn't or wouldn't explain--what sort of world was this, where people blindly went through all the motions without having good reasons?

If I had it (childhood) to do over again, I'd do the same; I'd insist on reasons again, and try again to root out the silly things that grownups do out of mere convention. But still, if I could be a kid again, I'd like to take with me a willingness to try things without first having a reason. Now on my better days, I am willing, and if I wasn't, I'd still be eating strictly french fries and watching afternoon cartoons. If I could go back I'd fight less with my mom, because I'd dig where she was coming from. By having me smell those herbs, she was trying to get me to learn without expectation—and that is the thing to release. Good things come of that.