Multimedia Blog

Tao Lin is one of those people I want to hate, but don't really, which I suppose is another way of saying 'people I envy.' There's a line somewhere with Stephen Fry one side of it; he's on the other. Anyway I like the graph idea, I'm going to incorporate it into my super-narcissistic Manifesto For My Life project, to be done in Wales next weekend (starting to love the American use of super- as an intensifier for any adjective).

"Mr Jefferson, You Are Insolent!"

The pleasures of historical research: coming accross antique and forgotten cultural artefacts that speak of an earlier time. Such as the 1976 Emmy award-winning PBS miniseries, The Adams Chronicles. Best bit of this trailer is at around 47 seconds; I quite like 1'20 as well.

Non-Lyrical Pop Music

[I've been listening to albums from the Rough Trade Top 100. Thanks Chris Maughan for the pointer.]

Is there a difference between lyric and instrumental pop music? What is it that words add to music, and do they take something away as well?

By pop music I mean everything that isn't 'classical' music; by non-lyrical I mean that there is no layer of meaning provided by words. I want to include bands like Sigur Ros, which sing in languages that very few of us understand (they're an extreme example in that they sometimes use a made-up language. They know what they're doing.) There seems to be a lot of this on the Rough Trade 100. Darkstar, Gold Panda, Emeralds, Voice of the Seven Thunders. I don't know, maybe that's not many, but they're all from the top twenty.

In a lot of music, the lyrics aren't actually about the meanings of the words. They just add a different kind of texture. So maybe there isn't so much difference between bands that sing and ones that don't. But in pop music singing seems to have been so dominant (from both work-song and choir-song roots, I guess) that not using it means something in itself. If only that we recognise the meaninglessness of the words themselves.

What kind of meaning does a song, a piece of music, express? By omitting lyrics, is there something less fixed, something less open to argument? Because we have always disputed what words mean in pop songs, or even what words actually are being sung. Are non-lyrical pop songs an escape from that arena of dispute? Are they less analytical; does that make them somehow more cowardly? There are two sides to the recognition that meaning is difficult to pin down. In this way, non-lyrical pop music is a genre of postmodern relativism.

But perhaps they are really more than that. Perhaps they are not really hiding from the problems of verbal communication, but experimenting in a way of solving them. They are brave, existential essays (tries, attempts, shots) in imagination, empathy, connection, and emotion beyond words.

Meaning and Explanation

The kinds of meaning we find in representations of the past are related to the kinds of explanation we find satisfying or plausible. Is meaning the same thing as explanation? Not quite, I think. Meaning can be tragic or triumphant, optimistic or ironic. Explanation (or causation) is more neutral, mechanistic. That distinction may be false though; they do seem inseparable. But which way does the logic run? Do we find certain kinds of explanation plausible, and therefore derive certain kinds of meaning; or do we look for certain kinds of meaning, and therefore find certain explanations satisfying?

In biography or biopic (and perhaps in film more generally, since it is more likely to focus on specific characters), both meaning and explanation are located on a personal level, more than they usually are in academic written history. That doesn't mean films can't represent 'historical forces.' Sometimes the lives of individuals seem to be tossed around by the waves of an unseen storm. It is precisely in this situation that we might find meaninglessness, or a type of meaning that is nihilist or existential. We find other kinds of meaning where we can see individual agency, especially in personal relationships (where agency at least appears to be effective).

Reading biography, or watching biopics, encourages us to locate meaning in personal relationships, those near enough to actually be visible in our lives. History on a wider scale, in contrast, emphasises the relationships that are invisible and distant. When we focus on one of these, are we avoiding the responsibilities the other entails?

Are You Smarter Than...

People think that humans are the smartest of animals, and most people do not think about other animals as being smart, or at least think that they are not as smart as humans. Knowing that other animals are as smart as us means we can appreciate them more, which could also help us to help them. (via Marginal Revolution)

If George Orwell was writing "Politics and the English Language" again today, he'd use this as an example. It's from a scientific paper written by a class of primary school children, published in an academic journal. Yes it it a bit of a publicity stunt; it's not actually about the writing, the point is that these kids and their teacher did an experiment that really did advance science. But this is one thing I take from it: I would rather write like these eight-year-olds than like most academics.

History on Page and Screen

1) Meaning is often (always?) generated through metaphor. In traditional or academic written history, the kinds of metaphors that are most prominent are those that describe large systems. The idea of historical 'forces' is the quintessential example; more generally, the metaphors link physical to social systems (geological, for example: societies can have 'layers,' or be 'fractured.') The written word allows for or encourages this more abstract mode of thought; what Robin Hanson would call far mode.

In contrast, film encourages us to focus on concrete, visible objects, and actions occurring in real-time: in other words, the small stuff. It therefore favours different kinds of metaphor, namely synecdoche, where a part represents a whole. A shot of a plane in mid-air represents a journey. That's a temporal example, but I think there are spatial or conceptual examples too. The look a wife gives her husband across the table represents a whole marriage; the atmosphere in the king's chamber represents the progress of a war. It is the different kinds of metaphor natural to each form that structure the (differences between the) ways each can presents the past.

2) The different focuses (near/far, concrete/abstract) of filmic and written-academic history entail different ways of encoding meaning in the past. Our preference for one or the other type of representation shows what kind of meanings we value most, or what kind of explanations we find satisfying or plausible. Perhaps there is also a reverse effect: our (independent) preference for one medium leads to an understanding that favours a certain kind of meaning. This is no doubt part of a process of dynamic cultural construction.

It might be that this range of focuses and types of meaning is the whole point. Academic history can get at meanings that film or biography cannot. And vice versa. There's still the question of which meanings are most valuable, though (or why meaning is valuable at all). If we are not to judge this by what kinds of meanings most people choose to pursue, then what other measurement shall we use?

Decision Day About Twitter

Oh wait I said I would make a decision today about whether or not I should start tweeting. Hmm. The Con list I wrote is longer than the Pro list. That just goes to show how tricky is the concept of Pro and Con lists. I wonder if setting decision days like this is a good practice. Doesn't it just replace once arbitary time to make a decision (right now) with another (next week)? So it's procrastination. But is my unconscious figuring it out for that whole week? Prob not, my unconscious has better things to think about. Anyway let's just say yes. Saying yes is always better than saying no. Isn't it? I actually really like Yes Man. I know you'll think that's stupid.

Great Lakes Radicalism

What is the relation of geography and politics? I love David S. Brown's book, Beyond the Frontier, where he traces a 'midwestern' historical tradition with characteristics shaped both by opposition to the eastern orthodoxy and the special quality of the midwest, or the frontier, itself. You could say it's a Turnerian approach to historiography - and Turner is of course one of his key characters. He was a Madison, Wisconsin man, until he came to Harvard for the end of his career. (Carl Becker studied there under Turner; Charles Beard went to DePauw, a member of the Great Lakes Colleges Association.)

Madison was also where William Appleman Williams and some youthful proteges started the historians' New Left, and its journal Studies on the Left. Today, Madison continues a reputation for academic radicalism. Erik Olin Wright, who's recent book I have reviewed, is there for example. Then there's Michigan, where near Port Huron the SDS was formed. And over east a bit, Vermont, with its "democratic socialist" senator Bernie Sanders. So, my question is, is there something about this place that makes it a home for radicalism in a conservative country? If so, what? Is it the proximity of Canada? The frontier tradition? The Northwest Ordinance?! Seems like a pretty interesting place, anyway.

Beard Zeitgeist

I was going to write a proper post about one of my prospective pet projects, but then I came upon this article about beards in Smart Set. It's not actually a good article, just more or less a random collection of trivia with the word beard in (also it mentions that Al Gore "got heavy" when his political career was over. She doesn't mean "heavy" like "whoa, heavy, man...," she means fat. If you're going to mention that at all, why not just say fat?) But I liked these bits:

I have never known my husband without his beard, a fact that disturbed me in the early years of our relationship. What was he hiding: a weak chin, a saber scar, a slothful nature, a psychological need for a barrier between himself and the world? But as time passed, I no longer felt the need to ask these questions. I now know my husband, and the beard is part of who he is...

It is interesting to think of the many great men in history who had beards: Socrates, Christ, Lincoln, Freud, Lenin (the first two represented at least as having them)...

The Orthodox of the religion have traditionally worn beards... But in the Talmud, the Jewish commentary on the Bible, the subject undergoes clarification and, predictably, grows more murky.

Just Enough Supernatural Lift

From The New Yorker:

...there is something in the amplitude and dynamic of Mario’s jumps — just enough supernatural lift yet also just enough gravitational resistance — that makes the act of performing that jump, over and over, deeply satisfying. He also cited the archetypal quality of Mario’s task, that vague feeling of longing and disappointment which undergirds his desperate and recurring quest for the girl. “It’s a story of desire,” Brophy-Warren said.

Should I Start a Twitter Account?

[Actually I have a Twitter account already and I follow maybe thirty users. About half of them are political and the other half are cultural or something. The question is shall I do tweeting myself.]

Pros

All the things I want to put as Facebook status updates and sometimes cannot justify, or feel guilty about because they are not really about my status, I can put here.

It could produce an online image of myself that is more succinct or accesible than this blog, and not walled in like Facebook. For marketing purposes.

People would be more likely to follow it than this blog or become my friends on Facebook.

It would be another way of writing and so help me improve my writing, especially flexibility of format. (It was hard to write that sentence without using the words platform, develop, or expression.)

I would be able to always follow my urge to link things, with no obligation whatsoever to add comment.


Cons

It would be joining an already heavy-laden bandwaggon.

The online image of myself that it produces could become embarassing or wildly misleading, no doubt like my Facebook page and this blog.

It would take time away from other things like showering and getting out of the door on time.

It would maybe encourage a continuing process of me taking on projected characteristics of people I read online, or somehow trying to become like them in the most superficial ways or even more.

I would have to decide whether something should be a Facebook status update or a Tweet.

I would be able to link things without really thinking about them or deciding which parts I like or why. It is like having the white space between the lines without the lines themselves.

[Decision day: Tuesday 21 December]

What is a Character?

This afternoon Failed Novelists were in my living room discussing what is characterisation. My biggest problem as a writer, said James, is creating characters. Specifically, he wanted in his story to express a character through the narrator, and by seeing through that person's eyes rather than self-analysis or self-description. Because analysis and description (either the "self-" variety, or of others) is the obvious way to make characters. It is also a bit like telling and not showing. That is I think why James wanted to avoid it.

He asked us to suggest books where particularly vivid characters are built up through the eyes of the narrator. I said, well this is kind of the point of all books, at least in first person. But it's something that happens over a novel length, it gains in intensity with time (how strange); so there is not a trick to doing it in a short story. Unless, as somebody pointed out, you make your character extreme in some way: a religious fundamentalist, maybe, someone who sees the world in an obviously abnormal way. I didn't think of this at the time but you could perhaps count the narrator of A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time in this group.

But I don't think I would call that character 'particularly vivid.' And now I am thinking that 'vivid' is the wrong word, that is the source of the trouble. Because what we should think of is ourselves (that is the essence of first person narrative anyway, right?). Do we have vivid characters? I take that word to mean clear-cut or well-defined, bright, easy to pick out. I don't think I am like this. Far more likely maybe that other people see me like this - people who know me less well?

I am vague. I am the narrator of my own life, and my character is expressed in the way I interact with the world (including inside my head). It is also of course formed by those interactons present and past. So in fiction I think we are going the wrong way if we are trying to build 'a vivid character.' We might do so only by making a cardboard cut-out: it's in your face but it can't speak to you. Real people are alive in their own worlds, and that is what makes up their characters. When you write, don't try to build characters: build worlds.

When I Am Slightly Drunk I Can't Help Obnoxiously Correcting Americans' Pronunciation

[This seemed so touching on first read, then very little... almost nothing.]

I have started to like this website very much. I think I have linked to it here before. But I thought: let me collect the pieces on it that I really like, and maybe that will help to see why I like it. It seems hard to understand without being more aware than I am of some sort of youthful literary subculture or social network (I mean an actual network, not a web programming thing). I feel excluded a little bit. I feel anxiety of influence. But everyone is allowed to like lists.

1) Getting Used To America: this is maybe the first thing I read from this website. It is the first thing from it that is catalogued in my Instapaper archive. What attracted me to this article (which is more conventional than most things on this website) was this bit,

Americans happily blurt out the most private details of their addictions or surgeries or family dramas within minutes  to total strangers — the sort of emotional revelations that, in many other places, are held private for years, or decades, and shared only with intimates.

I think this is probably not true. I want to experience it, and believe it. Does the one who is so open long for secrets, in the same way as the one with secrets longs to be opened?

2) Taking My Younger Sister to a Belle and Sebastian Concert: "None of my sister’s friends knew who Belle and Sebastian were. And it became apparent that Olivia didn’t actually like Belle and Sebastian that much — but she knew I did. Among all those things my sister was better at than me included being a thoughtful, unselfish sibling. In truth, I hadn’t taken her to the concert so much as she had taken me."

3) Lies I Have Told: I think this is the definitive Thought Catalog piece for me. It has a sense of personality. It makes me a little bit sad to think that that personality is constructed; why? I nearly wrote "sad a little bit," because that's how the author of this piece would have written it. The lie "I don't really know what I'm looking for right now" and the truth she writes, I find, I don't know.

Quiet, but not boring. Laughs easily. Doesn’t take me or him or life in general seriously, yet has a capacity to earnestly experience emotions, and is aware of this paradox. Average sex drive. Gives compliments. Dark hair is good. Would probably not like it that I have written all of these things down about what I want him to be like, but would also understand and later make fun of me for doing it. 

 4) Updike for Beginners and How To Drink a Martini: these are by the same author. The male version of the persona from above? The Thought Catalog persona. There are some things about the person I don't want to be. I will try to write about that later. I think these stories are somewhere in between the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Truman Capote, but in the now. But how many American realist short story writers have I read? Not many.

5) Why Germans Hang Their Socks to Dry: I Made a Facebook status update out of this.

Children of Violence

I can now add Doris Lessing to Iris Murdoch and (less so) A. S. Byatt among women authors with whose work I am somewhat familiar [edit: I forgot Jane Austen. Still, I'm a bit surprised by how short this list is]. She is less similar to those two than they are to each other. I first read Memoirs of a Survivor, then The Fifth Child, both of which share what I want to call a whimsical bleakness. Her five book series Children of Violence does not have quite the same effect; it couldn't be sustained over such length. But the series, written from 1952 to 1969, does show (especially in the last book) a gradual blurring of lines of reality. Her signature, developed in the last book The Four-Gated City and appearing strongly in Memoirs, is a fantastical, or magical, conception of the inner life.

The first two books in Children of Violence read a bit like F. Scott Fitzgerald; they are set in a backwater colony (Rhodesia it would appear) between the wars, and their world, living its pale imitation of the roaring twenties, has the same intense mix of superficiality and inner desperation. The second two books switch focus from a milieu of dance-parties and "sundowners" (a kind of cocktail?) to a hilariously observed proto-Communist cell and the politics of the committee meeting and the public lecture. Of course, what we learn is that the two worlds are not so dissimilar. They are about escape from a world ruled by someone else; they are each in their way, utopian.

What made the fifth book, which is far longer than those before it, worthwhile was a moment near the end. This book is in large part about the different kinds of madness people feel. It has both love (and lust) and politics and power, and these things are linked by the pathologies of inner human lives. What we realise as Martha (the heroine of all the books) teeters on the edge of mental breakdown is that in fact she has always been there, always teetering, always so close to just drifting off or falling down broken.

This is a story of "Children," drift and development, the slow construction of a personality (recounted with pained self-awareness), which is then in this last book - maybe - broken down again, eroded, deconstructed. There is an appendix describing a global apocalypse occuring after the main action of the book, and this acts as a sort of counterpoint. It demonstrates how much more poignant is life lived always on the edge of individual catastrophe.

Robert Bolaño's Advice on Short Story Writing

Sorry but I have to quote this at length, via This Recording:

1. Never approach short stories one at a time. If one approaches short stories one at a time, one can quite honestly be writing the same short story until the day one dies.

2. It is best to write short stories three or five at a time. If one has the energy, write them nine or fifteen at a time.

3. Be careful: the temptation to write short stories two at a time is just as dangerous as attempting to write them one at a time, and, what’s more, it’s essentially like the interplay of lovers’ mirrors, creating a double image that produces melancholy.

4. One must read Horacio Quiroga, Felisberto Hernández, and Jorge Luis Borges. One must read Juan Rulfo and Augusto Monterroso. Any short-story writer who has some appreciation for these authors will never read Camilo José Cela or Francisco Umbral yet will, indeed, read Julio Cortázar and Adolfo Bioy Casares, but in no way Cela or Umbral.

5. I’ll repeat this once more in case it’s still not clear: don’t consider Cela or Umbral, whatsoever.

6. A short-story writer should be brave. It’s a sad fact to acknowledge, but that’s the way it is.

7. Short-story writers customarily brag about having read Petrus Borel. In fact, many short-story writers are notorious for trying to imitate Borel’s writing. What a huge mistake! Instead, they should imitate the way Borel dresses. But the truth is that they hardly know anything about him—or Théophile Gautier or Gérard de Nerval!

8. Let’s come to an agreement: read Petrus Borel, dress like Petrus Borel, but also read Jules Renard and Marcel Schwob. Above all, read Schwob, then move on to Alfonso Reyes and from there go to Borges.

9. The honest truth is that with Edgar Allan Poe, we would all have more than enough good material to read.

10. Give thought to point number 9. Think and reflect on it. You still have time. Think about number 9. To the extent possible, do so on bended knees.

11. One should also read a few other highly recommended books and authors— e.g., Peri hypsous, by the notable Pseudo-Longinus; the sonnets of the unfortunate and brave Philip Sidney, whose biography Lord Brooke wrote; The Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters; Suicidios ejemplares, by Enrique Vila-Matas; and Mientras ellas duermen by Javier Marías.

12. Read these books and also read Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver, for one of the two of them is the best writer of the twentieth century.

The Mad Economist's Children

Bryan Caplan via Marginal Revolution:

...normal people can expect to be like their kids. But that's not saying much, because normal people can expect to be like any random person they meet! The story's very different for weirdos. By definition, weirdos never have much in common with random strangers. With a zero parent-child correlation, weirdos will feel equally alienated from their children. As the parent-child correlation rises, however, weirdos' incompatibility with strangers stays the same, but their expected compatibility with their children gets stronger and stronger.

Now let's look at these facts like a mad economist. There are two ways to surround yourself with people like you. One is to meet them; the other is to make them. If you're average, meeting people like yourself is easy; people like you are everywhere. If you're weird, though, meeting people like yourself is hard; people like you are few and far between. But fortunately, as the parent-child correlation rises, weirdos' odds of making people like themselves get better and better.

Caplan concludes the analysis by pointing out that as weirdness rises so does incentive to have children. He could have also said that, entailed in that, weirdos have more incentive to find and keep a long-term mate. Does this help explain non-standard mating patterns in weird people?

Only Pretending

1) The listener: why did you pretend to be asleep? If you had shown that you were awake, if you had spoken, done something, what would be different? Would the whisperer still have left?

2) The whisperer: were your words for the sleeper, or for yourself? Did you think you could be heard, that whispering would have an effect on the sleeper? Did you know that the sleeper was not really asleep, was really the listener?

3) If so, why did you accept the fiction of sleeping, why did you whisper as if to a sleeping person? Did you wait, hope for a response? If you spoke, whispered, knowing that the listener was not asleep, then you were both pretending. If you were both pretending, then in what sense was what you spoke, whispered, true?

Education for Empire

[This is a draft proposal for the RAI's annual graduate conference, Building an American Empire, 1783-1861]

Education for Empire: visions of order and reason in the 1780s

The decade following the 1781 victory at Yorktown was characterised by instability - political, social, and cultural - in the void left by British imperial rule. Institutional reforms culminating in the constitution of 1787 were championed by leaders and thinkers who wished to restore order and hierarchy, to build in America an empire that would both reflect (or perfect) and rival that of Britain. The movement for constitutional reform was thus part of a wider intellectual and cultural persuasion, which gave an important place to ideas and proposals for the future education of Americans.

This paper will look at the works of Noah Webster and Benjamin Rush, two leading Federalist thinkers, who devoted much of their attention to the cause of education. Webster's Grammatical Institute (1783), his Sketches of American Policy (1785), and Rush's Plan for Establishment of Public Schools (1786) form key texts for the Federalist educational vision, which can be compared with Thomas Jefferson's contemporaneous proposals for a public school system.

These ideas should be situated both in their contemporary social and political context, and also in the broad tradition of philosophy of education. The ideas of John Locke, in his widely printed Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), are especially important. For the promoters of America's Enlightenment empire, reason and order were the foundations of glorious ambitions. But building an empire was as much about moulding a people as it was about conquering territory. Federalists' attitudes to education help us reimagine their conception of the new nation's future.

One In Ten

"I am the one in ten, a number on a list.
I am the one in ten, even though I don't exist.
Nobody knows it, but I'm always there,
a statistical reminder of a world that doesn't care."
- "One In Ten," UB40

"a total of 90 percent of women, almost all of them, will have one partner or more during their lives, and some many, many more." - Diane Johnson in the NYRB

Is it only me? Is this not a painful statistic? Doesn't it imply that one in ten U.S. women will never have a partner in their lives? One in ten! So casually dismissed in the phrase 'almost all of them,' surely a misunderstanding? I would like to just dismiss this as the vicissitudes of stupid stats; it must be that. It must be something to do with mortality rates, voluntary celibacy (nuns!), emigration, lying to survey-takers, and so on. But now I can't stop thinking, how many? How many people go through their entire lives without that kind of love?

Update: later in the article she writes, "Gottlieb’s underlying assumption is that every girl wants to get married; and the statistic that 90 percent of American women do get married at some point—a higher percentage than in any other country—supports this." So by partner she meant husband (or wife)? I guess that makes me feel better.

Update II: A different perspective, from the Christian mag Relevant: "But I know couples in loving relationships who remain lonely. Why? After all, they've found a perfect mate who has taken great strides toward fulfilling their need for intimacy. But that's a heavy load for one person to bear, despite the stories Cameron Crowe tells. Lonely single people become lonely married people. If your goal in marriage is to satisfy your need to belong, your next stop may be heartbreak."