4.20.2008 New York Times Digest

1. “Struggling to Evade the E-Mail Tsunami”

“In his correspondence, Mencken adhered to the most basic of social principles: reciprocity. If someone wrote to him, he believed writing back was, in his words, ‘only decent politeness.’ He reasoned that if it were he who had initiated correspondence, he would expect the same courtesy. ‘If I write to a man on any proper business and he fails to answer me at once, I set him down as a boor and an ass.’”

2. “A Novelist With a Story Attached”

“Her editor at the time made two suggestions: Don’t take forever to write another, and for God’s sake, don’t write a novel. So much for that good advice. And to make things worse, her novel is about a 46-year-old Oxford-educated American, a writer, who is married to a glamorous Briton.”

3. “On the Internet, It’s All About ‘My’”

“The rise of sites with the ‘my’ prefix is an outgrowth of an increasingly customized world of technology, such as the iPod and TiVo…. But they illustrate how corporations are striving to show that they can be as intimately connected to their customers as in-vogue social networking sites. They’re not just impersonal businesses; they are your close, intimate friends.”

4. “Been Up, Been Down. Now? Super.”

“There were rehabs that did not work, followed by jails that did not impress, ending in hard time, twice, including a one-year stint in a state lockup where he had to fight to find a place to stand.

“A winking nod to that tumultuous history is baked into the banter in Iron Man. The movie opens with Mr. Downey’s mitt wrapped around a tumbler of whiskey, rumbling along in a Humvee, AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black’ blasting on the soundtrack and Mr. Downey acting all lusty and incorrigible. And when Gwyneth Paltrow’s character, the dewy-eyed, ever-loyal assistant he sees with new eyes by the end of the film, learns about his alter ego, Mr. Downey’s Tony Stark goes deadpan.

“‘Let’s face it,’ he says. ‘This is not the worst thing you’ve caught me doing.’

“That running dialogue — between audience and actor, between Mr. Downey’s past and present — gives the film a symbolic power not usually found in comic book movies.”

5. “Stirring Things Up, Regionally Speaking”

“In his latest show, at Joe’s Pub every Monday night through May 11, Mr. Daisey makes a series of provocative arguments about how regional theaters, in pursuit of growth, have lost sight of their original mission: They have put more money into expensive new buildings than grooming and rewarding actors; despite lip service about promoting diversity and community, artistic directors want to keep theater as a luxury item for the wealthy; the importing of actors, mainly from New York, has divorced theaters from their communities.”

6. “Mining Post-9/11 America for Laughs”

“The signal achievement of both Harold and Kumar films is that they make race incidental without taking racism lightly; they presuppose an enlightened audience. ‘When we start to write, we’re under the assumption that everyone knows racism is bad,’ Mr. Schlossberg said. ‘If you don’t know that, you’re a moron. Harold and Kumar’s attitude toward racism is more frustration at having to deal with idiocy than moral outrage. We try to create a world where racism is stupid.’”

7. “Domains | Bill Nye: Greener Pastures”

“My house is attached to L.A.’s main power grid, but I make more power than I use. So, I send my excess energy back to the grid and my bill is just $7 a month, which is a connection charge.”

8. “Broadcast Spoofs”

“The Simpsons is past its prime. The Daily Show is admired but partisan. And each incarnation of Saturday Night Live bugs its audience in a new way. The Onion, though, is like overwork or pizza. It’s your patriotic duty to not not like it.”

More on Heath Ledger

A report that Heath Ledger “was told to seek professional help for his personal problems while filming The Dark Knight” surfaced earlier this week.

Money Quote: “Heath refused to talk to anyone out of character. If you tried to communicate with him normally instead of The Joker, he would just ignore you.”

This statement seems to support some of the things I’ve been saying for weeks now.

(Related post: “Did the Joker Kill Heath Ledger?”)

What the Word Intellectual Means

“What the word intellectual means to me today is, first of all, conferences and roundtable discussions and symposia in magazines about the role of intellectuals in which well-known intellectuals have agreed to pronounce on the inadequacy, credulity, disgrace, treason, irrelevance, obsolescence, and imminent or already perfected disappearance of the caste to which, as their participation in these events testifies, they belong.” —Susan Sontag, “Answers to a Questionnaire,” Where the Stress Falls

The Examination Dream

“Everyone who has passed the Matriculation examination at the end of his school studies complains of the obstinacy with which he is pursued by anxiety-dreams of having failed, or of being obliged to take the examination again, etc. In the case of those who have obtained a University degree this typical dream is replaced by another one which represents them as having failed in their University finals; and it is in vain that they object, even while they are still asleep, that for years they have been practicing medicine or working as University lecturers or heads of offices. The ineradicable memories of the punishments that we suffered for our evil deeds in childhood become active within us once more and attach themselves to the two crucial points in our studies—the dies irae, dies illa of our stiffest examinations.” —Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

The Tenure Gun

From The Chronicle of Higher Education comes an interview with M.H. Abrams. This bit stood out to me: 

The Mirror and the Lamp had been Abrams’s dissertation, and he also reminds us of a different era of academic production, when the tenure gun was not quite so impatiently pressed to a junior professor’s head. Abrams says he took “10 years of hard work revising the text,” rewriting the first chapter “at least six times.”

I love stories like this because they remind me that things, despite the rampant amnesia, were once quite different, and thus needn’t be the way they are presently.

(Related post: “Fewer Books, Better Thinking.”)

4.13.2008 New York Times Digest

1. “For Housewives, She’s the Hot Ticket”

“I cannot tell you how many of the e-mails that we got from last year’s ‘Work Out’ reunion that were women saying, ‘I am married. I have never looked at another woman. I have a huge crush on Jackie.’”

2. “In Job Search, Gonzales Sees No Takers”

“I wouldn’t say ‘rebuffed,’ said the lawyer, who asked his name not be used because the situation being described was uncomfortable for Mr. Gonzales. “I would say ‘not taken up.’”

3. “Requiem for Two Heavyweights”

“Mr. Buckley and Mr. Mailer represented something different. More than public intellectuals, they were citizen intellectuals, active participants in the great dramas of their time, and eager at times to pursue their ideas in democracy’s more bruising arenas…. The point is not that Mr. Buckley and Mr. Mailer deigned to mingle with the common folk, but rather that they defied the conventional distinction between words and deeds and with it the boundaries that insulate so many intellectuals from the broader world.”

4. “A Fresh Look at the Apostle of Free Markets”

“Five years later, Ronald Reagan entered the White House, elevating Mr. Friedman’s laissez-faire ideals into a veritable set of commandments. Taxes were cut, regulations slashed and public industries sold into private hands, all in the name of clearing government from the path to riches. As the economy expanded and inflation abated, Mr. Friedman played the role of chief evangelist in the mission to let loose the animal instincts of the market.

“But with market forces now seemingly gone feral, disenchantment with regulation has given way to demands for fresh oversight, placing Mr. Friedman’s intellectual legacy under fresh scrutiny.”

5. “Roger Ebert, the Critic Behind the Thumb”

“His writing may lack the polemical dazzle and theoretical muscle of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, whose names must dutifully be invoked in any consideration of American film criticism. In their heyday those two were warriors, system-builders and intellectual adventurers on a grand scale. But the plain-spoken Midwestern clarity of Mr. Ebert’s prose and his genial, conversational presence on the page may, in the end, make him a more useful and reliable companion for the dedicated moviegoer.”

6. “A Young Actor With Nothing to Hide”

“In the opening minutes of the film (which is scheduled for release on April 18th) Mr. Segel, the 28-year-old actor who is also a screenwriter of the movie, has just stepped out of a shower when his girlfriend declares that she is breaking up with him. Too devastated by the news to put on his clothes or grab a towel, Mr. Segel — for 73 excruciating frames — remains literally and utterly exposed.”

7. “Jazz on Screen: The Sparks Are Eclectic”

“Classical music, like classical narrative filmmaking, prefers to execute detailed plans. Jazz starts with a spare, flexible plan and finds its magic in solo flourishes and the give and take of musical conversation. It encourages happy accidents and flights of fancy, phenomena that are often verboten in filmmaking because there’s so much money at stake.”

8. “After a Decade Away, Portishead Floats Back”

“Now Portishead has rematerialized, resuming a career that has always moved in slow motion. ‘It’s amazing how quickly 10 years can go,’ said Adrian Utley, who plays guitars and keyboards, over coffee at an elegant Munich hotel the night before the band’s performance.”

9. “Pure Science”

“One other question lingers: What makes a scientific experiment beautiful? Johnson favors simplicity — not just clean, artful experiments, but those that let us replace convoluted theories with simple explanations. Galileo applied uniform mathematics to the motion of all objects, contradicting Aristotle’s idea that heavier objects fall at faster rates. William Harvey showed that one form of blood circulates throughout the body, not two. Newton proved colors are refracted light beams, not Descartes’s complex ‘spinning globules of aether.’

“Historically, few people seeking beauty in science have displayed a baroque sensibility. The traditional aesthetic is classical, invoking the simplicity and symmetry of revealed forms — whether they have been revealed on a cluttered lab bench or through elegantly spare theorizing.”

10. “Total Recall”

“Computers organize everything they store according to physical or logical locations, with each bit stored in a specific place according to some sort of master map, but we have no idea where anything in our brains is stored. We retrieve information not by knowing where it is but by using cues or clues that hint at what we are looking for.”

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The Simulation of Learning

“The knowledge accumulated in our print culture infinitely surpasses the learning of Socrates. In a survey of reading habits today, Socrates would score low. His scant scholarship and his lack of academic titles, foreign languages, resumé, and published work would prevent him from competing for important posts in the cultural bureaucracy, which would confirm his criticism of the written word: The simulation and credentials of learning have come to carry more weight than learning itself.” —Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance

3.6.2008 New York Times Digest

1. “Ask Me About My Flux Capacitor”

“Ms. Reilly, a design enthusiast, began the hunt for her DeLorean six years ago — as a birthday present to herself. She spent a year doing research, learning all she could about the DeLorean’s characteristics and quirks. She spent another year looking for the right car — black interior, gas flap (in later models, access to the tank was under the hood), the optional automatic transmission — before settling on one. She bought it on eBay for $13,000 in 2004. Since then, life has been a chain of small adventures.”

2. “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop”

“To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.”

3. “Suzuki Is Nearing Milestones at an Unprecedented Pace”

“The Japanese-born Suzuki, in his eighth season in the major leagues, is on the verge of several significant achievements. He entered the season 130 hits short of 3,000 for his two-country career and could become the youngest player in history to reach that professional milestone, although it would not be an official major league record. He is also approaching the most career hits for a Japanese player, needing 216.

“In addition, he is seeking 200 hits for a record eighth consecutive season, which would tie him with the turn-of-the-19th-century star Wee Willie Keeler, who did it from 1894 to 1901.”

4. “Let Computers Compute. It’s the Age of the Right Brain.”

“Now that computers can emulate many of the sequential skills of the brain’s left hemisphere — the part that sees the individual trees in a forest — the author Daniel Pink argues that it’s time for our imaginative right brain, which sees the entire forest all at once, to take center stage.”

5. “Online Commercials: Now That’s a Hard Sell”

“Hulu has only short clips for other programs, rather than full episodes. That’s understandable for ‘Saturday Night Live’ but not for ‘Law & Order.’ It also has 110 movies, mostly titles that failed to impress critics, like Dude, Where’s My Car?, and fills out its catalog with long-forgotten television shows like ‘Adam-12.’”

6. “Stretching for a New Film Role: The Lead”

“He has played characters created by John Updike and the Coen brothers. He was the psychiatrist in There’s Something About Mary who pretended to listen as Ben Stiller’s character droned on about his romantic problems. In Flirting With Disaster he was the gay federal agent who ran through the desert in his underwear after inadvertently eating a meal laced with drugs. He’s been the ghost of an undertaker who gets pulverized by a bus in Six Feet Under and Woody Allen’s doctor in Hannah and Her Sisters.

“But now, after playing supporting roles for the better part of three decades, he is finally getting his shot at being the leading man.”

7. “First Came Crazy, Now Comes Odd”

“Earlier, while Danger Mouse napped, Cee-Lo made the same point. He said that he grew up listening to funk and hip-hop, and ‘everybody from ABC to R.E.M., Billy Joel to Billy Idol.’ When Danger Mouse first played him sample tracks in 2003, including the strange groove that would become ‘Run,’ he could not believe his ears.

“‘As soon as I heard the music, it immediately struck me as mine,’ he recalled. ‘I said, I can’t see anyone doing anything to these tracks but me. And I mean the real me, the inner me, the me deep down that nobody knew I was made up of. All of me.’”

8. “Duck and Cover: It’s the New Survivalism”

“Faced with a confluence of diverse threats — a tanking economy, a housing crisis, looming environmental disasters, and a sharp spike in oil prices — people who do not consider themselves extremists are starting to discuss doomsday measures once associated with the social fringes.

“They stockpile or grow food in case of a supply breakdown, or buy precious metals in case of economic collapse. Some try to take their houses off the electricity grid, or plan safe houses far away. The point is not to drop out of society, but to be prepared in case the future turns out like something out of An Inconvenient Truth, if not Mad Max.”

9. “Al Gore’s New Logo”

“A logo is routinely the most difficult component to design because it is so important, and usually the client wants to be closely involved. An effective logo is a kind of calculus, the sum of disparate parts that adds up to a memorable image or icon.”

10. “The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett: Making It”

“Sennett’s book gathers case after case in which we see how the work of the hand can inform the work of the mind. Moreover, it is through his insistence that thought arises in relation to craft that Sennett comes to one of his more intriguing interventions, a reimagining of the Enlightenment in terms not of ideas but of how craftsmen learned to work.”

11. “Our First Black President?”

“To anyone who tracks it down today, Chancellor’s book comes across as a laughable partisan screed, an amalgam of bizarre racial theories, outlandish stereotypes and cheap political insults. But it also contains a remarkable trove of social knowledge — the kind of community gossip and oral tradition that rarely appears in official records but often provides clues to richer truths. When he toured Ohio in 1920, Chancellor claimed to find dozens of acquaintances and neighbors willing to swear that the Hardings had been considered black for generations. Among the persuaded, according to rumor, was Harding’s father-in-law, Amos Kling, one of the richest men in Harding’s adopted hometown of Marion. When Harding married his daughter, Florence, in 1891, Kling supposedly denounced her for polluting the family line.”

It’s Called Erudition

“When a colleague of mine returned from an MLA convention in Toronto around that time, he told a story that nicely illustrated the trend. One afternoon he hopped on a shuttle bus and sat down next to a young scholar who told him she’d just returned from a panel. He replied that he’d just returned from France, where he’d been studying for a semester.

“What are they talking about?” she asked.
“Hmm?”
“Is there any new theory?”
“Yeah, in a way,” he answered. “It’s called ‘erudition.’”
“What’s that?” she wondered.
“Well, you read and read, and you get your languages, and you go into politics, religion, law, contemporary events, and just about everything else.” (He’s a 16th-century French literature scholar who comes alive in archives.)
She was puzzled. “But what’s the theory?”
“To be honest, there isn’t any theory,” he said.
“That’s impossible.” He shrugged. “Okay, then, give me the names, the people heading it.”
“There aren’t any names. Nobody’s heading it.”

—Mark Bauerlein