Submitted For Your Perusal

“Today everyone is a blogger, but where are the readers? A New Yorker cartoon reverses the usual picture of a literary festival with book lovers lined up to get the author’s autograph. The cartoon shows a table and a queue, but authors line up to see ‘The Reader,’ who sits behind the table. On the Internet, articles, blog posts, and comments on blog posts pour forth, but who can keep up with them? And while everything is preserved (or ‘archived’), has anyone ever looked at last year’s blogs? Rapidly produced, they are just as rapidly forgotten.” —Russell Jacoby, “Big Brains, Small Impact”

1. “Ode to an Onion Ring, and Other Fast Food in the Slower Lane”

“Why then should I have an intrinsic preference for fast-food restaurants whose franchises number in the hundreds or thousands rather than the tens of thousands? It might be because their smaller sizes make them more amenable to culinary innovation — a burger served with an onion ring on the patty; a menu that offers three different kinds of fries, or chicken and tacos at the same time.

“Or maybe it’s because these restaurants strike the right balance between familiarity and the possibility of unpredictability.”

2. “Edison …Wasn’t He the Guy Who Invented Everything?”

“The reality is that the ‘Aha’ moments of industrial creation are preceded by critical moments far less heralded. Behind and beside every big-name inventor are typically lots of others whom history forgot, or never knew. And it’s unusual that an innovation is created in a vacuum (including the vacuum, which itself claims several progenitors).”

3. “Sisters in Idiosyncrasy”

“Much the way Hollywood people have shuttled between Los Angeles and Manhattan for decades, or academics commute on the Acela between Morningside Heights and Cambridge, Mass., there is a young, earnest population that is beating a path between artsy, gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and their counterparts in the Bay Area, especially East Oakland and the area south of Market Street in San Francisco, or SoMa.”

4. “Why Blog? Reason No. 92: Book Deal”

“And then on March 20 Random House announces that it has purchased the rights to a book by the blog’s founder, Christian Lander, an Internet copy writer. The price, according to a source familiar with the deal but not authorized to discuss the total, was about $300,000, a sum that many in the publishing and blogging communities believe is an astronomical amount for a book spawned from a blog, written by a previously unpublished author.”

5. “Gatekeepers to the Art World”

“In the money-frenzied, celebrity-stoked sprawl that has become the New York gallery world over the last five years, the pittance-paying job of front desk assistant (a k a receptionist, gallerina, gallery girl) has become hungrily sought as an entree into the commercial, rather than creative, side of the business. From this modest, occasionally humiliating rung, women can indeed ascend. They have become dealers, curators and, increasingly, art consiglieri — advisers to corporate and private collectors.”

6. “The Bold and the Bad and the Bumpy Nights”

“But on the occasion of her centennial, it’s worth remembering Davis as she was in her prime, in the 1930s and ’40s, when she commanded the screen with something subtler and more mysterious than the fierce, simple will that carried her through the mostly grim jobs of work that followed. (Though the will was there from the start, and her formidable technique never wholly deserted her.) In her heyday, as the reigning female star at Warner Brothers, she was as electrifying as Marlon Brando in the ’50s: volatile, sexy, challenging, fearlessly inventive. She looked moviegoers straight in the eye and dared them to look away.”

7. “Alleys for Cool Cats”

“In the tradition of a city whose literary legacy includes both the Beats and Sam Spade, those out-of-the-way addresses also include hipster bars and Zagat-rated speakeasies like Bix, an alley-front favorite whose Jazz Age ethos includes tuxedo jackets and torch songs.

“Indeed, unlike many cities that have built over or ignored their old service streets, San Francisco has embraced them, with tourist-friendly spots like Belden Lane downtown, which is home to a row of restaurants specializing in everything from Spanish food (B44) to vodka (Voda).”

8. “Sexual Advances”

“Roach belongs to a particular strain of science writer; she’s interested less in scientific subjects than in the ways scientists study their subjects — less, in this case, in sex per se than in the laboratory dissection of sex. She delights in medical euphemism and scholarly jargon; you can hear her titter as she rolls out terms like ‘vaginal photoplethysmograph probe,’ ‘nocturnal penile tumescence monitoring’ and ‘vaginocavernosus reflex.’”

9. “Who’s a Good Boy?”

” Sutherland … says that the most important lesson she learned from studying animal trainers was that whether you’re training a hyena to pirouette or a husband to stop speeding, the best results come when you reward behaviors you like and ignore ones you don’t.”

10. “Frankly, My Dear …”

“This breathtakingly trashy biography does not skimp on sordid anecdotes.”

11. “It’s Not You, It’s Your Books”

“Let’s face it — this may be a gender issue. Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. ‘It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,’ said Beverly West, an author of Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives. Jessa Crispin, a blogger at the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. ‘Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,’ she said, but ‘now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.’”

12. “Show Stopper”

“I’m not technically a tight lacer. It’s a fetish, in which you wear extremely tight corsets all the time. I don’t sleep in my corsets, and I’m not obsessed with obtaining the world’s smallest waist. My waist is around 18 inches.”

13. “The Case for Fitting In”

“Lab-based research supposedly furnished slam-dunk evidence that, as the social psychologist Solomon Asch put it, ‘the social process is polluted’ by ‘the dominance of conformity.’ That research, though, was rooted in its time and place: The United States in the aftermath of World War II, when psychologists and sociologists focused on the conformity that made millions give in to totalitarian regimes.

“Lately, however, some researchers have been dissenting from the textbook version. Where an earlier generation saw only a contemptible urge to go along, revisionists see normal people balancing their self-respect against their equally valuable respect for other people, and for human relationships.”

14. “Students of Virginity”

“The Ivy League’s abstinence clubs began emerging several years ago about the same time as student sex blogs, sex columns and, at Harvard and Yale, student sex magazines. Those involved, however, say that the most important catalyst was university-sponsored safe-sex education, which they saw as institutional encouragement of promiscuity.”

In my previous post, I shared with you a recent statement by David Mamet. Mamet’s name has been bandied about the blogosphere of late because of a piece he wrote called “Why I Am No Longer a “Brain-Dead Liberal,’” which appeared in the Village Voice a few weeks ago and created a mild stir. The piece itself is worth reading – if only for the hilarious bit about the World’s Perfect Theatrical Review – as is Counterpunch’s point-by-point response. But for my money, all of the talk about Mamet’s politics isn’t as interesting as the new movie he has coming out: Redbelt, which looks to me like Karate Kid-for-adults. (That, by the way, is a compliment.) As of this writing, there are two trailers online; each gives a different impression of the movie, and each, I think, is worth watching.

“Y’know, I grew up in a different generation. I grew up after World War II, and boys did different things in those days. You went camping. You went hunting. You boxed. And the image of a writer, to someone starting off in those days, was not some schmuck who went to graduate school. It was Jack London, Nelson Algren, Ernest Hemingway. Especially coming from Chicago – a writer was a knock-around guy. Someone who got a job as a reporter or drove a cab. I think the reason there are a lot of novels about How Mean My Mother Was to Me and all that shit is because writer may have learned something called ‘technique,’ but they’ve neglected to have a life. What the fuck are they gonna write about?” —David Mamet, GQ, April 2008

“I try to remind myself that during the last two decades men with PhDs in the humanities and social sciences, many of them working for the Pentagon, have been responsible for killing more people in any given week than the Mafia has managed since its inception.” —Neil Postman, Conscientious Objections

“One might argue that the most sophisticated cultural theorists in America are neither critics nor scholars, but rather artists-writers Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Rudolfo Anaya, and Maxine Hong Kingston or musicians Laurie Anderson, Prince, David Byrne, and Tracy Chapman. Their work revolves around the multiple perspectives, surprising juxtapositions, subversions of language, and self-reflexivities explored within cultural theory. It comes from and speaks to contemporary cultural crises about subjectivity and nationality. Issues that critics discuss abstractly and idealistically seem to flow effortlessly and relentlessly from the texts of popular literature and popular culture.” —George Lipsitz, “Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies” (1990)

“There are few American artists, or even artists period, whose work is as psychologically haunting as Hopper’s. In paintings such as Automat (1927) or Nighthawks (1942) one see quite clearly the results of American individualism: an isolation and pervasive melancholy that lurks underneath the surface bombast. Americans, I remember thinking, must be the loneliest people on earth; they just don’t know it. Certainly, no one managed to capture the soullessness of a life devoted to power and ‘success’ as well as Hopper did; and if, on an unconscious level, life in the United States was this bleak in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, what would his paintings look like, I wondered, if he were alive today?” —Morris Berman, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

“We had a meeting and when a meeting was over, we said thank you to the meeting makers for having made the meeting. Very rarely did we say anything negative or derogatory about meetings. We all knew there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly all the meetings and in fact one meeting out of every three or four was nearly perfectly without gain or purpose but many meetings revealed that one thing that was necessary and so we attended them and afterward we thanked each other.” —Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

1. “At Cineplexes, Sports, Opera, Maybe a Movie”

“From nickelodeons to drive-ins to multiplexes, American movie theaters have always evolved with the times. But the latest evolution, set off by stagnating attendance and advances in digital technology, marks the first time that movie theaters have reinvented themselves without motion pictures as the centerpiece.”

2. “Even at Megastores, Hagglers Find No Price Is Set in Stone”

“Michael Roskell, 33, a technology project manager from Jersey City, N.J., said he and a friend from high school periodically visit electronics stores. While Mr. Roskell expresses interest in buying an item, his friend acts as though he is dissatisfied with the price and threatens to leave. ‘We play good cop, bad cop,’ Mr. Roskell said.

“In February, he said, the friends got $20 off a pair of $250 speakers at 6th Avenue Electronics in the New York area. Earlier, he and the same friend negotiated to buy two 46-inch high-definition Sony televisions at P. C. Richard & Son, a New York-area electronics chain. List price: $4,300. Price after negotiation: $3,305.50.”

3. “Basketball Reigns in the Northwest”

“‘Washington State is a basketball hotbed, no question,’ said Jim Marsh, a former N.B.A. player and current Amateur Athletic Union coach. ‘Just look at the N.B.A. Just look at the college tournament. How many kids are from the 206?’”

4. “Fear of Not, Er, Flying”

“A friend just back from a bachelor party in Las Vegas told me that at the beginning of the weekend, the group of 10 revelers took a survey inspired by current events: four of them had paid for sex. By the end of the weekend, he said, the number had risen to six. Eliot Spitzer: role model.”

5. “A Sage for Our Time”

“Political incorrectness can have its place. Margaret Seltzer, the author of Love and Consequences, a memoir about growing up a gang member in South Central Los Angeles, was exposed earlier this month as a fraud.
Nobody gave her a grilling like [Larry] David would have if he had introduced himself at her book party. After chatting her up, and joking that she didn’t look like a gang member, he would probably lean in, grin on his face, and ask: ‘Really? You were a gang member?’ And never let it go.”

6. “Phenom Director Goes to War”

“Then when her brother returned home on leave, he brought reams of video made by soldiers, often with cameras mounted on guns or Humvees, shot mostly for posting online. Some were romantic homages to patriotism backed by Toby Keith songs, others pure gore, with bodies piling up and heads splitting open, set to rap and heavy metal.

“‘I have to admit I would get adrenalized watching,’ said Ms. Peirce. ‘We’ve never gotten this close to the soldier experience before. We’re literally seeing it, feeling, hearing it, and they’re cutting it, so they’re seeing their fantasy of themselves. I just knew a movie had to be born from that kind of representation.’”

7. “The Wisdom of the Ages, for Now Anyway”

“Mr. Tolle, 60, is the German-born spiritual speaker and author of The Power of Now. With a seemingly limitless pool of middle-class discontent to tap into — and a major push from Ms. Winfrey — he has become the most popular spiritual author in the nation.”

8. “Why Old Technologies Are Still Kicking”

“The mainframe stands as a telling case in the larger story of survivor technologies and markets. The demise of the old technology is confidently predicted, and indeed it may lose ground to the insurgent, as mainframes did to the personal computer. But the old technology or business often finds a sustainable, profitable life. Television, for example, was supposed to kill radio, and movies, for that matter. Cars, trucks and planes spelled the death of railways. A current death-knell forecast is that the Web will kill print media.

“What are the common traits of survivor technologies? First, it seems, there is a core technology requirement: there must be some enduring advantage in the old technology that is not entirely supplanted by the new. But beyond that, it is the business decisions that matter most: investing to retool the traditional technology, adopting a new business model and nurturing a support network of loyal customers, industry partners and skilled workers.”

9. “‘The Ten-Cent Plague,’ by David Hajdu: Penny Dreadfuls”

“The comics’ impact on American life is an inexhaustibly fascinating topic — which is probably why it has nearly been exhausted as a topic. Hajdu, the author of the well-received Positively 4th Street is but partly successful at making it fresh again.”

10. “God’s Workout”

“CrossFit has 450 chapters in 43 states (and several other countries). The network has a message for the merely healthy: ‘Your workout is our warm-up.’ Every day, its members consult CrossFit.com like a Book of Common Prayer, receiving instructions for their workout rites and periods of rest. Performing caveman feats like hauling, clambering, trudging, snatching, hurling and deadlifting, CrossFitters deliberately overwhelm and distress their bodies, executing near-impossible stunts with as much weight as they can bear. A Workout of the Day, or W.O.D., might include 50 kettlebell swings, 3 800-yard dashes in rapid succession and 10 pull-ups. Then repeat. No breaks. No weight machines. All you need is a body built for discipline and a mind that can justify so much apparent self-abuse.”

“I identify strongly with the transgendered. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I felt as if I were the wrong sex. If the current trend had been operative when I was in high school or college, I would certainly have been experimenting with male hormones. But I think that would have been a terrible mistake. Instead of modifying my body to conform to my male spirit, I put all my bottled-up energy into ambition and creativity. I worry that too many young lesbians believe that infusions of male hormones will remedy their sense of isolation and alienation. But perhaps those are psychological issues that demand psychological responses – new tracks of spiritual self-development and achievement. Many transgendered individuals do ‘pass’ in general society, but many others, after their surgical modifications, may be confining themselves forever to the margins, to the supportive burrow of a ghettoed world from which they fear to stray.” —Camille Paglia