July 30, 2011
Here’s What I Want, Internet
Used to be that when I googled myself in moments of abstraction, one of the results would be this thing called (I think) byliner.com that offered to ‘track your favorite authors’. And I always thought, huh, because if you’re someone who reads a lot, and especially if you read a lot online, you quickly realize that the secret to being a happy reader is not to read articles about subjects that are interesting to you, but instead to pay attention to bylines and read everything – no matter what it is, unless, of course, if it is sports-related – by writers you like, but I never looked at the byliner thingy, because at the time I had all the time that time contains to read all the whole blogs on the internet entire.
But I don’t have that time anymore, and also, I’ve gotten really bored with the internet (this happens sometimes) and byliner.com has been in the news, but now it appears to be a different byliner.com, which is all about helping you discover yet more things to read.
And, as this Techcrunch blogger says:
I just don’t think people are sitting around waiting for more long-form pieces to read. . . . My problem has never been finding more great long-form stuff to read– my problem is finding time to read it. I think there’s a niche group who will love this site. But largely, I think it’s designed for a mass audience that reporters like me wish existed. It’s one of those sites designed for the way we wish we were and the time we wish we had– never a great starting point when it comes to the consumer Web.
The whole thing about the information age is that we mere mortals need help sorting through it and weeding it down to something manageable, yeah? This has been a thing for awhile now. And I can’t zero out my feed reader every night like I once did.
So, what I really want, young smarties who develop such things, is something that looks and acts exactly like a feed reader, but into which I can plug the names of every author that I love and every subject that I’m particularly interested in, and when I get home at night, there will be a nice list of articles (or, on beautiful, lovely days, no articles at all) by my favorite people and/or about my favorite subjects, and that is all.
So, there might be, say, essays by Sarah Cottonmather and Bill Ford Abbott, a blog post by Ginger XX and four articles about cows, and that’s it. Except not that, because those are fake authors and I don’t find cows interesting, but you get the idea. So, I can read the stuff by the one really witty person on the mean hipster site, without having to subscribe to the site itself and scroll past all 500 daily posts about Friday Night Lights and Tinsley January and the Mumuu Initiative and deodorant commercials. And I’d like to skim the news every morning without ever having to see a single headline about Casey Anthony or sports.
“Good God, stupid,” you’re probably about to comment. “You can totally already do this, and everybody does, and why don’t you look into advanced forms of internet browsing the slightest, smallest bit before writing some whiny entitled post about why can’t you just read your precious Katha Pollitt and go home?”
At least, I hope this is what you’re about to say, because I’m pretty sure this thing I want already exists somewhere – can someone please clue me in about it? Thx.
When you guys have cracked this one, I have a really specific type of integrated desktop (for laptop, tablet or smart phone) that I’ve been mentally designing for years now, that pulls all your shit from everywhere and sorts it into four quadrants – ‘to read’, ‘to do’, ‘to watch’ and ‘to listen’ – with more specific folders under that, that you can divide up by date and category and other things if you want, or just leave in a big, long stream, and there’s more to it than that, but it’s something that I lie awake and fantasize about when I don’t have anything else going on, which is always.
Actually, maybe byliner.com is this thing that I’m looking for, so I’m going to look into it now, and I will report back.
UPDATE: It sort of is! You can follow your favorite authors, but it’s limited. For one thing, it’s a limited list of mostly established authors – no funny young things who are big fish on the smaller sites – and also, it’s not really a search engine-type thing that monitors those authors’ online publishing in real time. It’s more like, ‘User Bob submits that so-and-so published this essay in this journal in October of 2005!’ Um…helpful? What I want is a cross between a feed reader and google alerts. And it might be nice if it had an optional social component (although I have mentioned before that I am not a fan of virtually reading over each other’s shoulders), so you could see the list of your really smart friends’ favorite authors, so you know who to pretend you read, also.
UPDATED UPDATE: Actually, upon further investigation, Byliner is pretty much pointless for my purposes.
UPDATED UPDATED UPDATE: So, I found this here thing, uFollow, which is a lot closer to what I want, but it still fails to recognize a lot of the authors I like. I might try this for awhile, though.
UPDATED UPDATED UPDATED UPDATE: Yeah, no, uFollow? Also not the answer to my prayers.
(image via)
March 9, 2011
I Am Now One of the Cool Kids
A little while ago, my four-year-old Compaq Presario* slowly and gracefully ground to pretty much a full halt, and I did some polling and conducted some limited focus groups about what sort of computer I should buy, and after a very short period of consideration (mostly because, not having spent anywhere near as much as I’d thought I would in Morocco, I had some extra funds), I bought a MacBook. This is my first Mac, and I’ve had it for about 30 minutes now, and I’m proud to say, I’ve already figured out the trackpad and everything, and I think this is going to work out just fine.
The other thing I’ve done recently is I’ve started a Tumblr blog, entitled Pictures of Food, Daily Outfits, Celebrity Gossip and 10 Productivity Tips! It is basically an extended joke about the internet generally, and it is also the polar opposite of Accismus. I think those of you who will find it hilarious are already reading it, but I wanted to let the rest of you know, too, in case you’d like to check it out.
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*Laugh if you want, but I bought that computer for around $400 when I repatriated in spring 2007, expecting it to last me a year until I was employed again and could buy a real one, and instead, it lasted for four years of heavy use with no problems, so, you know.
December 13, 2010
Why I Love The Atlantic, But Don’t Read It Anymore
At some point in my early 20s, I suddenly realized that I was dumber than shit, and so I started making myself read a lot of stuff I wouldn’t have bothered with before, trying to absorb it. The Atlantic was one of the first of these things that I actually enjoyed. I began working through it with an effort, but I quickly developed a true appreciation for its long-form political journalism, which was extremely well-written and involving, even for someone with very little context. So, I’ll always have a soft spot for The Atlantic, and I’ll put up with a lot of bullshit from it, because in the end, despite its frequent misses, when it’s good, it’s great.
Apparently, the magazine is on track to turn a profit this year:
The Atlantic, the intellectual’s monthly that always seemed more comfortable as an academic exercise than a business, is on track to turn a tidy profit of $1.8 million this year. That would be the first time in at least a decade that it had not lost money.
Getting there took a cultural transfusion, a dose of counterintuition and a lot of digital advertising revenue.
“We imagined ourselves as a venture-capital-backed start-up in Silicon Valley whose mission was to attack and disrupt The Atlantic,” said Justin B. Smith, president of the Atlantic Media Company, who arrived at the magazine’s offices in the Watergate complex in 2007 with a mission to stanch the red ink. “In essence, we brainstormed the question, ‘What would we do if the goal was to aggressively cannibalize ourselves?’ ”
They’ve basically embraced the internet and free digital content, as opposed to fighting it, and it seems to be paying off.
My only issue with their web presence is that you can’t get an RSS feed of just the monthly issue. I refuse to read anything that won’t show up in my RSS, because I can’t be bothered to remember when things publish, so I haven’t looked at The Atlantic in years, unless something else in my feed has linked to it and reminded me of its existence. You can get feeds for other, more frequently updated web-only content from them, but not of the actual monthly issues. I don’t know why. They’ll send you a weekly or monthly email with a list of links to the magazine contents, but I’m never going to read something out of an email. My feed is where I read stuff, and if I want to read a longer article, I’ll star it or keep it unread and come back to it, but I don’t come back to old emails looking for stuff to read. So, until The Atlantic makes that extremely simple fix, I’m not reading it, because I’m a Millennial and I’m entitled and lazy.
Related Articles
- The Atlantic Turns a Profit, With an Eye on the Web (nytimes.com)
October 25, 2010
How to Make Friends
Image via
I enjoyed this article about a rent-a-friend service. I’m not at all surprised such a service exists now, and also, of course, various people are absolutely obligated to react to it as if it is the next horribly scandalous step up from rainbow parties and ritual sacrifice, but as someone who has routinely moved to an entirely new location where I have no friends or contacts, I can certainly see the use of such a thing.
It is nearly impossible to make friends as an adult, at least in this country, at least in my experience. If you’ve never had to try it, here are the problems you run into:
For one thing, people do not talk to each other, or at least people don’t talk to me. I never understand it when others rhapsodize about how easy it is to meet people, how everyone’s so friendly and outgoing. Perhaps I give off some uncomfortable vibe I’m not aware of, but my conversations with strangers are never successful. They usually go about like this:
Stranger: ’Hey, is anyone sitting here?’
Me: ’No. Go ahead.’
[Long, awkward pause, carefully avoided eye contact on both sides.]
Me: ’Have you heard this guy read before?’
Stranger, jumping as if I’ve just announced I have recently really gotten into cannibalism: ’What?! Oh. No.’
[End of all possible conversation forever.]
This is what happens if you go to readings or mingle-events or shows or craft’s fairs or volunteer events or whatever trying to meet people: other people hang out with their scads of friends, trying to strike up a conversation with a stray will likely get you maced, and before very long, a bizarre and smelly old, old, old man will begin a conversation with you from which you will never escape. You will spend your entire night listening to a very, very old man’s political conspiracy theories and theories on women and he will lean far too close into your face and you will go to the bathroom and then sit in a far-away place and he will come over and find you and sit by you there, too, and when the event is finally over, he might even follow you to the train station. True, sometimes he is younger, sometimes he is female, sometimes the drift of his conversation varies, but always, always he is obnoxious and boring and completely deaf to social cues. I mean, avoiding this old man alone is reason enough to rent-a-friend: to buy some out of work actor two beers to come to the reading with you and sit next to you and make jokes with you all night. If you met that same unemployed actor at the event and tried to strike up a conversation with them in the old-fashioned way, they’d probably piss themselves from the social impropriety of it all.
I think my generation has been raised to be overly suspicious of strangers and the implied message we’ve internalized (if you wind up talking to some loser, everyone will think there’s something really wrong with you) is making it really difficult for all of us to meet new people.
In fact, I’ve paid hundreds of hundreds of dollars to make friends. On the dotted line, I was paying for improv classes, but you know what I really didn’t need at the time? Improv classes. And some classes, you drop you hundreds of bucks and get there, and then you spend weeks doing something you’re not that interested in with a bunch of people who never go to the bar after class, because they need to get home to their families.
Also, like the rich getting richer, those with friends get more friends. Once you manage to make one friend, you’re pretty much out of the woods. It’s a lot easier to meet new people when you’re out with friends you already have than when you’re out by yourself. In our society, unattached people are viewed with suspicion. People are rightly afraid that if they’re nice to you, they’ll never get rid of you (see: old man above). But when you have friends along, other people know they’ve nothing to fear from talking to you – you won’t demand a commitment at the end of it all – plus these other people don’t find you crazy, so you must be alright. So really, if you don’t have any friends, then renting a friend might enable you to meet new, actual friends. Sort of like a wedding band gets guys hit on, because, hey, some woman thinks they’re worth sleeping with.
I’ve always made friends the same way: I pony up for classes I don’t want until I locate a likely target, and then I force myself on them. I invite them places and invite them places and invite them places, and I invite myself places with them, and when I meet their friends, I do the same with their friends, and I just keep at it until somehow I am in the midst of their friend group, even though I’m the only one who didn’t go to college with them all. I’ve done it twice now, in two different major cities, in the exact same way. It works for me, but it takes about 6 months to a year, plus money and time for whatever classes, and I can certainly see how some people would prefer to just pay $25 or so for a stranger to come to the movies with them.
On an only slightly related note, the article above has some people spouting off about how a “friend” you have to pay is no “friend” at all, which obviously. This has become a trend in cranky cultural commentary lately, with the most frequent lament being “thousands of Facebook ‘friends’ aren’t really friends at all!” Well, no shit. Nobody thinks they are. People who complain about this are saying, ‘I define a friend as someone with who you have a long-lasting, personal and caring relationship over a period of years based on mutual respect and shared experiences, and I will apply that definition to any usage of the word ‘friends,’ no matter how casual or commercial, and cry the end of civilization accordingly.’ We all still know what a friend is. Nobody really thinks a blog ‘friend’ is a friend in the sense above, or that a rented ‘friend’ is, either. By ‘friends,’ Facebook means ‘networking contacts,’ and this rent-a-friend site means ‘companions’ or ‘people you can pay to go to dinner with you, so that you can enjoy yourself and not have to feel like a self-conscious loser the whole time, and that’s fine, even if these people are clearly not going to attend your wedding or your funeral.’ It means, basically, escorts from back before escort became a coded term for prostitute (was there such a time? There was, right?). There is a need for a paid, platonic companion, and I can think of many situations where it would be helpful to pay for a fake date, in order to make a social situation less awkward for any number of reasons (for example, even after you have friends, sometimes showing up somewhere with a “date” is a quick, easy, no-hurt-feelings fix to a brewing problem, but somehow, you never have a date to bring just when you really need one).
August 18, 2010
What About My Online Dating Profile Isn’t Working For Me?
My skin is white as porcelain
Between the cold sores on my chin.
My hair grows thick and lustrous red,
Most everywhere but on my head.
My eyes are wide and clearest blue,
And ooze the most entrancing goo.
My laugh is like a birdie’s tweet
When it’s been crushed ‘neath someone’s feet.
My chest is pert, my tummy flat
Beneath three hundred pounds of fat.
My breath smells sweet as breeze in May
In New York on trash pick-up day.
I know about the birds and bees –
I have a dozen STDs,
And am as skilled and fun in bed
As any corpse that lies there, dead.
My sense of humor is a wonder,
The cause of many a social blunder.
Kind and patient, loyal and true…
These words don’t describe me! How about you?
I am as talented and smart
As is a football player’s fart.
Guys say I could be thought pretty
If the last girl in the city.
My date last night did not even retch -
So message me quick, for I am a catch!
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Why am I still single? Thoughts?
February 1, 2010
11
I have not been blogging much lately, and so, in the style of the blog 11 Points, here are 11 things that I have been spending my time on lately, and enjoying immensely. All highly recommended:
1. Gail Collins. The New York Times was long overdue for a female columnist who wasn’t Maureen Dowd, and Gail Collins is more than the Times deserves: tart, smart, funny and perceptive, her takes on the issues of the day are both informative and cathartic. I just checked out one of her books, America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, but have only read the first chapter so far. I’ll let you know how it is. Also, in addition to her columns, Collins’s conversations with David Brooks are a treat. I have to confess, in the past, I have occasionally liked David Brooks, but he’s been heinous lately, and as his tenure at the Times goes on, he contradicts himself ever more blatantly. I dearly love a good journo fight, and Matt Taibbi (an occasional guilty pleasure for me, I’ll admit – his reportage may be spotty, but sometimes you just need a good, unapologetic rant) has lately been picking Brooks’s columns up in his teeth and shaking them back and forth until their necks snap.
2. The public library. I like to write in my books, dogear them, and read them in the shower, so for years, I insisted on buying books and keeping them in piles along my baseboards. But I don’t make that kind of money these days, and have finally learned to make good use of the public library. Yes, the inability to write in the books is a serious handicap, but otherwise, I am a total library convert. There’s a small branch near my house, and I can order whatever I want through the system to be delivered there, and they notify me by email when my holds are ready. Best of all, you can renew your books on the computer, and as long as nobody puts a hold on them, you can renew them indefinitely (I’ve renewed one 12 times already). And all for not one red cent (not counting city taxes). Beat that, Kindle.
3. Susan Schorn’s McSweeney’s column. I go back and forth on McSweeney’s, and particularly on their columnists. Some are good, some are boring, many have long outlived their original gimmick, good for only a post or two, but weirdly extended. But one of their new columns, Susan Schorn’s meditations on martial arts, self-defense, anger, weakness, and related topics, is fantastic – and not just because I’m into karate lately. I agree with Schorn about everything, and wish she lived next door to me, so that I could bother her all the time (and all of her other humor pieces are great, too). Speaking of karate:
4. Shotokan karate. I have been training at a local dojo since August (I’m currently a yellow belt), and I am obsessed. Fantastic exercise, and a wonderful outlet for pent-up aggression, karate is sport, art form, self-defense training and a study in focus and discipline, all in one. I try to make three classes a week, and, while I still couldn’t beat up a four-year-old, my kiai has deepened from Chihuahua to Rottweiler.
5. Jezebel and The Awl. I am putting these together, because my enjoyment of them is similar. For some reason, when Jezebel debuted, I immediately decided that I didn’t care for it. I can’t remember what about it offended me, because I’ve really been enjoying it lately. In addition to the progressive and feminist news alerts, there are hearty round-ups of celebrity gossip. And while I am not interested enough in celebrity garbage to actually read up on it, I must admit, do I want to know when Brad and Angie finally break it off, or when Lindsay Lohan ODs in a club bathroom, or when somebody has a major weight reversal? Yes! Yes, okay? I do want to know that! I admit it! But I don’t need to know the deets – I just want a headline and a photo, and that’s what Jezebel delivers. Now, The Awl, helmed by former Gawker editor, Choire Sicha (aka the only person who ever wrote for Gawker that I actually liked), is a hilarious, well-written chronicle of all things that would particularly interest…well, Brooklyn dwelling, underemployed pseudo-writers like moi. Plus, it is one of those lovely, rare blogs in which the commenters expand on (and often outshine) the posts. Kinder than Gawker and sharper than The Gothamist, The Awl fits just right. If I could only read one blog, this would probably be it.
6. Amanda Palmer. The former Dresdan Doll has an awesome solo album. Plus, she’s engaged to Neil Gaiman, and showed up at The Golden Globes with her boobs and her pit hair out. She’s a fucking badass.
7. Small, well-done, original blogs. Tiring of sprawling, massive, constantly updating blogs, I have lately been discovering small, creative, focused sites that do one thing and do it well. Edith Zimmerman writes hilarious very short stories. Tom Oatmeal (who I found through EZ) makes milk come out my nose. And firmuhment is continually brilliant and original – scanned documents that inspire essays, short stories, and humor. I’m not sure if firmuhment is a single author deal or a team effort, but every post has obviously had a lot of work put into it, and I appreciate that.
8. Firefox’s new skins. I spent the lion’s share of my day staring at my browser, so anything that makes it more visually appealing makes me happy. Firefox’s new skins are a small adjustment that, surprisingly, makes a big difference. Currently, I’m enjoying Spring II. Goes well with my igoogle theme.
9. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I resisted getting into this back in high school when everyone was super into it, and haven’t gotten into it since, because I didn’t want to consume seven seasons of TV. But my coworker has them all on DVD. Uncle, okay? I’m through six seasons already, and ready to register as an official member of the Joss Whedon fanbase. In addition to the overall awesomeness of the series, I enjoy identifying basic karate moves in the fight choreography.
10. My new phone. After three shameful years of hitchhiking on my parents’ family plan, I finally ponied up and got my own phone plan, and a phone with a full keyboard and a camera. And man, it makes a huge difference! I no longer wince at the sound of a text message arriving: it doesn’t take me a year to peck out a response anymore, and my phone looks cool and is really fun to use. And yesterday, when my brunch coffee came in a giant bowl with no handle, I was able to document it quickly and easily, no forethought required.
11. My rabbit, Thomasina. Thomasina is so freaking adorable!! And I love having a pet! This was a good move. She’s my little pal, and she does hilarious things and entertains me, and she’s cuddly and fun. Right now, for example, I am trying to write, and she is collapsing her little grass hut on top of her head, and making eyes at the rabbit she thinks lives in my closet mirror! OMG, she’s a gas. I won’t work at all today.
May 19, 2009
On the Kindle
Initially, as with most new tech gadgets, I didn’t understand how this device was any different from a small portable internet thing, like an iphone or a blackberry, or anything else. As far as books go, I much prefer to read them in 3-D. But then, somebody raved about how with the Kindle, you can lie in bed and read without your arms getting tired. And I thought, well, that alone is reason enough to want one. Then, I thought about backpacking and how toting books (and finding good English-language books) was a huge hassle, and thought, well, that’s a really good reason to want one.
But then I looked at the offerings on Amazon, and they hardly had any of the titles on my book list. Meanwhile, titles are around $10, and I’ve been a devoted library user for a couple of years now. With the library system, the selection is much, much better and it’s entirely free. The only annoying part is, I can’t make notes in the margins and anything in the book I might want to refer to later for whatever reason, I have to type out before I return it. With the Kindle, I suppose that would not be a problem, although I don’t recall if there’s a feature where you can make margin notes, but I’m sure if there isn’t, there will be eventually. So, I think I’d probably like to have one, once they expand the selection of available titles.
However, today I read this:
As widely reported, Amazon.com opened the floodgates last week, making it easy for weblogs to get on Kindle. Like their Marketplace-model, this is an easy way for them to make money as the middleman, at little cost and trouble: as they take a whopping 70% of the subscription price Kindle owners are willing to pay for this content — a price Amazon reserves the right to set (i.e. no giving away your blog for free or at a token price) — they should fare fairly well, even if not too many people subscribe.
I really can’t see paying to read blogs on a Kindle that I already read for free all day long on the computer (or portable internet device of any other type other than the Kindle). There’s been a disturbing amount of consensus lately (amongst All Them who blog and so forth) that the honeyed days of bountiful free online content are coming rapidly to an end, and that – however incrementally - providers are going to start charging for content. Perish the thought.
Honestly, I love blogs, but they’re rather an unhealthy and time-consuming addiction for me. If my free supply were to be cut off, I don’t think I would pay for it – first of all, because I rarely pay for anything ever (the only time I ever listened to music was during the brief Napster window), and secondly, because I really shouldn’t be spending so much time reading blogs in the first place. It’s good to keep abreast of current events, but I ought to be reading books, or writing, or figuring out why my life is lazily whirling in an eddy. Plus, once you’ve paid for something, it starts to feel like a guilty obligation, as anyone who’s ever watched their New Yorkers pile up knows. I don’t subscribe to magazines anymore, because the stacks of them are a constant reprove, and if I paid for online content, unread posts would be the same.
On the plus side, I’ve noticed that a lot of blogs I subscribe to in my RSS feed that previously only put the title of posts and a short summary line in the feed have switched to displaying entire posts in the feed, which I much, much prefer. As the blog I linked to above explains, this is likely because they are preparing to offer themselves up to Kindle. Well, whatever. I’ll keep flipping through my RSS as long as it’s free and easy to do so.
And when things change, they change.
August 22, 2008
I’ve Been Reading: Then We Came To the End and Remainder
Regular readers of this blog will know that I am no fan of superstars. I resent the hell out of anything beloved by all. But sometimes somebody will deserve every last lick of praise they get, and Joshua Ferris is one of those people. I can’t even hate. TWCTTE is a fantastic novel – hilarious, relevant, charitable to everybody, and well-written. Go read it now, because no matter who you are, you’ll enjoy it. Damn it.
Remainder, on the other hand, is a whole bunch of nothing. I can’t believe I finished it. I got about thirty pages in, and thought, ‘Ah, this is very interesting. I think it’s going to go in one of several directions, and can’t wait to see which.’ Twenty pages further in, I thought, ‘Huh. It hasn’t gone anywhere yet.’ Twenty pages further in, ‘Still in the same place.’ And when I finally finished it, ‘Well. That really was just about that. All the way through.’
Wow, those are some slight reviews. So, here are some cool things this week:
Scientists got blood from stem cells:
Scientists have used embryonic stem cells to generate blood — a feat that could eventually lead to endless supplies of type O-negative blood, a rare blood type prized by doctors for its versatility.
Computer scientists thought of a good way to make use of those text boxes you have to fill out online all the time:
You may be deciphering a word from a decaying old book, helping to transform a historic text into a new digital file.
This entertainer found a way to use cicada shells to adorn herself (via CP). If you’ve never experienced the weird joy that is picking cicada shells off a tree, you should probably do that at some point. When I was a little kid visiting my grandparents in Mississippi, my Granddaddy and I used to pick grocery sackfuls of cicada shells off the trees in the front yard. We had no real object in this harvesting – I don’t know exactly what happened to the sacks full of bug shells, but it’s far more likely my Grandmother threw them out than that she wove them into her hair.
Also, this NY Times article proclaiming that coffee is nothing but good in every possible way, and even overconsumption of coffee works nothing but good effects on your body is the best news possible, and makes me feel utterly vindicated. I’m sure it’s unreliable and probably the studies behind it were funded by giant, evil coffee cartels, but I don’t care. I choose to believe it, because it is what I want to hear. Now all I need is an article saying that a cake-based diet prevents cancer.
July 1, 2008
More People I Don’t Like
Tibetans are getting stale on the Dalai Lama’s insistence on nonviolence. This article says that nonviolence worked for Gandhi and others, and ends with this uplifting quote:
This week’s talks are unlikely to yield much, if any, progress, and could push more Tibetans to the boiling point. But listen to Gandhi again: “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall — think of it, always.”
Hmmm. Do you agree with Gandhi’s assertion? Discuss.
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You don’t see many critics around these days. Is it because there are no longer non-participatory enthusiasts of the arts? Or is that a good thing?
Trying to maintain critical distance today is thus a practice in self-alienation. The distance might as well be infinite. The proclamations might as well be made in outer space. So we need another metaphor. If criticism isn’t about distance anymore, maybe it can be about closeness. I’ll tell you what makes sense about closeness right away. In today’s cultural world, a bird’s eye view of the situation doesn’t get you very much. There is nothing to sort out from up there because there is simply too much culture in too much variety. The distance, the desire to categorize and judge, is overwhelmed by the very pluralism it seeks to understand. The only solution is to get down into the mix and participate. You need to grab works of art and hold onto them tightly. Stepping away from them even a little bit is to risk losing touch altogether.
Well, I don’t know. I can say that the New York theater scene, at any rate, is in desperate need of more objective gatekeepers, and I think a large part of the problem is that anybody who goes to theater here is trying to do theatre here. I would say more, but I don’t want to burn any bridges.
–
Now, here is some criticism I can get behind:
Gladwell dresses up all of his “realizations” in fancy clothes and too much make-up. He gives himself powers that he doesn’t have. He pretends to have sorted things out that he hasn’t sorted out. He imagines a possible control, and pretends that he has achieved that control. All the while telling people, whispering into their ears, precisely the kinds of things they would like to believe. And then (it must, I’m sorry, be said) he goes on wildly lucrative corporate speaking engagements spinning out the same titillating stories combined with his shoddy conclusions. I even kind of hate, I must confess, the way he looks. His hair all scruffed up just so. His cute little suits. It makes the skin crawl.
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Also in popular things that I have an irrational hatred of, Facebook has done away with the singular “they”:
Confronting complaints of ungrammaticality from speakers of English and untranslatability from speakers of other languages, Facebook will now be more in-your-face about choosing a gender identity. If you haven’t filled the information out on your Facebook profile, you’ll now get a prompt asking if you want to be referred to as him or her. But they’re not getting too insistent on sexual dimorphism, since users can still opt out of the gender choice, in response to what Gleit calls “pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting.”
Folks, I’ve finally joined Facebook. After adamantly refusing to join, and telling everybody who brought it up to me (repeatedly) that I would never, ever join, and that was final, I’ve gone back on my resolution and set up a profile. I resent the hell out of it, but I got sick of inviting people to things (my party, an upcoming show), and them being like, ‘Oh, well, I’d love to come – are the details on your Facebook page?’
Fuck all of you, and your stupid social networks. There damn well better not be yet another must-join new one a month from now, or I’ll…resentfully set up a profile on that one, too.
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Apparently, if you are bothered by gay people, you like calling them homosexuals, which is clinical and gross sounding, as opposed to “gay” which sounds happy and fun-loving. An impressionable child would surely have much less interest in becoming a “homosexual” (snooze) than a “gay” (woohoo!). So, right-wing news site OneNewsNow.com does a quick replace all on stories from the AP. Guess what, though, sometimes the word “gay” appears in a non-sexual context. Like, say, Tyson Homosexual (née Gay), who just qualified for the Olympics in the 100 meters, or Memphis Grizzlies’ forward Rudy Homosexual (née Gay), who often gets great penetration in the paint.
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The rise of the nerds:
From the late 19th century onward, it was more or less accepted that the ideal purpose of American education and parenting was to produce athletic, popular young men and women, the sort who end up in business, law, or politics. But sometime during the 1980s it began to be a lot harder to dismiss the awkward kids with thick glasses, obsessive interests, and no social skills. . . . As computers began to play a larger role in business, education, and life in general, the former class presidents were learning that the former class geeks held everyone’s future in their hands. Soon one nerd (Alan Greenspan) was running the economy, another nerd (Al Gore) was running for president, and two unbelievably rich nerds (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs) were changing the ways a lot of us lived and worked.
(via 3QD)
The article focuses heavily on male nerds. I don’t always get on well with male nerds, as I often find them to be immediately dismissive and condescending toward attractive women. We were all unpopular in high school, but there are more constructive ways of dealing with it than being a triumphant asshole to anyone who reminds you of those who once rejected you.
Speaking of, when scientists attempt to study humor:
Blindfolded subjects are tickled by experimenters who they are told are machines. The sexual banter in an all-night diner in upstate New York is surreptitiously observed. People study cartoons with pens stuck in their mouths (to contract the facial muscles associated with smiling). An experimenter “accidentally” spills hot tea on herself when a jack-in-the-box erupts nearby. One Boston psychologist, the co-author of a paper entitled “A Threshold Theory of the Humor Response”, published in The Behavior Analyst last spring, understandably felt obliged to state in a footnote that her surname really is “Joker”.
(via A&LD)
June 30, 2008
Survival Is Overrated
You know, I just want to say that I’m sick of reading all about why Americans are so stupid they can be sold water if it’s packaged attractively. While it’s true that some people can be sold anything, the vast majority of people buy bottled water everywhere now not because it’s attractive, but because water is no longer available for free when you’re not at your house. I don’t buy a billion bottles of Poland Springs for a buck a pop because I think there’s some sort of cachet in it. I buy them because no mini-mart-owner in the city is going to give me a cup of tap water gratis when he could make me spend a buck. Sure, you might get a Dixie-cup-full at Starbucks or something if you buy something else with it, but if you have to keep nagging bored and frustrated service employees to refill your thimble-full of water, only to start the process all over again with another surly teenager after you’ve walked two more blocks and are completely dehydrated again, at some point, you’re just going to buy a damn bottle of water.
And yes, of course, if I thought ahead and always brought a bottle of water from home around with me everywhere, I could avoid this expense. And if I always brought an umbrella, and a light sweater, and Aspirin, and tampons, and Band-Aids and a change of shoes and a novel and an energy bar and a thing of mace, I would always be prepared for every situation, wouldn’t I? But I’m consistently not – I guess it must be because I’m so foolishly attached to overpaying for an attractively packaged commodity that used to be free.
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So, the big news lately is the Supreme Court’s decision striking down the D.C. gun ban. I don’t have a passionate opinion one way or the other on gun ownership, but here’s one thing I don’t understand:
I’ve heard champions of Second Amendment rights pose the hypothetical scenario that, if you let the government disarm you, in a few decades, you will have a more totalitarian society, and then it’s only a matter of time before the nightmare dystopia ensues and the governmental hit squads come banging at your door. And you’ll be an unarmed sitting duck. And I get that – I too believe that inevitably, at some point, society as we know it will crumble and we’ll go into some sort of The Road situation. But it seems to me that even if you have a whole bunker of guns, if a bunch of people come armed to your door with intent to take you in, you’re done. It doesn’t matter if you have weapons – unless you also have more people with weapons than they have with weapons, they will win.
I think that the real key to surviving when the infrastructure crumbles is to be small, fast, and not missed by anybody. And to not have anything that anybody might conceivably want. So, while gun control opponents can’t believe everybody’s so placid and docile and moronic as to allow their right-to-bear-arms to be chipped away at without a fight, I rather can’t believe everybody’s so placid and docile and moronic as to be gigantically fat, out of shape and laden with expensive possessions (and small, stumbling, needy children).
Come on, people. Your only chance for surviving in a post-apocalyptic world will be to dart around on the margins and feed at night — and to have nothing you love and nothing you’ll miss. I promise you, if a posse ever comes to my door, I will not be defending my “property.” To hell with my property – I’ll be out the back window and over the border before they can hoof it up the front steps.
Anyway, the world might end before any of this comes to pass:
I can well understand why the Times doesn’t want to give sustained big play to the possibility that the world will end on or around Labor Day. In addition to the civic-minded concern that this might create worldwide panic, there are practical matters of self-interest. If the possibility weren’t realized, as most scientists seem to expect, then the Times would look foolish. If the possibility were realized, it would have no opportunity to collect a Pulitzer, because the Times, the Pulitzer board, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which gives out the award, and every last Times reader would all be obliterated, along with the rest of the planet.
(Plus, too, the North Pole might be free of ice this year:
“From the viewpoint of the science, the North Pole is just another point in the globe, but it does have this symbolic meaning,” Serreze said. “There’s supposed to be ice at the North Pole. The fact that we may not have any by the end of this summer could be quite a symbolic change.”
via FP Passport)
Really, I’m just not as attached to life as we know it as most people seem to be. If I woke up in the world of Wall-E tomorrow, I guess I’d kind of miss the Internet.
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Why a continued American presence in Iraq can’t be compared to West Germany and Japan after WWII:
But setting all those concerns aside there’s one distinction between the case of Germany and Japan and Iraq today that gets far too little mention. It’s not a matter of culture or religion. It is the fact in the aftermath of World War II, both Germany and Japan had been conquered by the United States and her allies in a wars of aggression that Germany and Japan had started. The civilian populations of each country, whatever their war guilt, had experienced shattering levels of violence and privation in the final years of the war. And both countries were immediately faced by nearby hostile powers they feared much more than the United States.
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Public transit: it doesn’t really hit the poor hardest…
In fact . . . poor people do relatively little driving. They differ from middle class and wealthy people in that utility bills take up a very large proportion of their income. Not only should this specific point be remembered, but one should also recall as a general rule of thumb that if you see a large, powerful, well-organized lobby citing the needs of the poor as the rationale for something or other they’re almost certainly full of it.
…and plus, you can get drunk while you ride:
Carl Zimmer and Paul Ehrlich are talking about the need for alternative modes of transportation. He rightly makes the point that there’s a difference between designing a city for cars, and designing a city for people. Also makes the somewhat idiosyncratic point that with transit “you could at least be having a drink on your way home”
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Rob Cockerham at Cockeyed.com plays pranks, usually on various chain stores. Today, he has a new one involving posting clever signs in Home Depot storage sheds:
Despite an ambitious number of signs, I felt my local home depot wasn’t addressing some of the strongest benefits of owning a garden/storage/privacy shed/mini-garage/closet. I decided to make some new signs and try them out!
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Last but not least, I hope some day to make this list.
June 6, 2008
I Am SOOO Out Of Here
Dear Readers,
I am camping for a week, off the grid entirely. If I do not go insane or get eaten by a bear, I will be back a-postin’ on Monday, June 16th. In the meantime, take deep breaths, hit up the archives, and just try to endure. You’ll be stronger readers for it, I promise — all seven of you.
Love,
Elizabeth
May 28, 2008
Some Outrages, and Some That Aren’t, Really
Apparently, Rachael Ray wore a Palestinian scarf in a Dunkin’ Donuts ad, and right-wingers were so upset that DD had to pull the ad. As all of my regular readers know, a number of ads outrage me, but they’re all still on the air. If only the boys at Little Green Footballs would turn their considerable influence to rooting out misogyny in advertising…
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If there’s one country that could turn shit into gasoline, it is so Sweden:
Cars using biogas created a stir when they began to be rolled out on a large scale at the start of the decade. The tailpipe emissions are virtually odorless, the fuel is cheaper than gasoline and diesel, and the idea of recovering energy from toilet waste appealed to green-minded Swedes.
(via The Morning News)
(It’s not all that successful, however.)
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Turns out John McCain’s policy for dealing with the mortgage crisis was courtesy of a lobbyist for UBS bank:
MSNBC reports that McCain’s economic guru, Phil Gramm, advised the campaign while he was a paid lobbyist for the Swiss bank UBS. In other words, Gramm was advising McCain on what to do about the mortgage crisis while he getting paid push the legislative agenda of one of the major architects of the mortgage crisis.
As MSNBC reported, UBS deregistered Gramm as a lobbyist for the company on April 18th, though he continues to serve as a vice chairman of the bank. But that was fully a month after McCain’s speech outlining his own approach to the crisis.
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The Dalai Lama would like to attend the Olympics:
China reacted coolly on Thursday to a suggestion from the Dalai Lama that he would be happy to attend the Beijing Olympics, and suggested talks with Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader’s envoys may be delayed by the Sichuan earthquake.
(via FP Passport)
Also, here’s a cool picture of Gloucestershire’s annual cheese-rolling (one man appears to be in a pig suit).
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Don’t miss this Slate article about who’s actually responsible for disciplining UN peacekeepers when they go on child rape-a-thons in the countries they’re supposed to be helping:
Though the United Nations has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to sexual exploitation and abuse, the most severe action it can take is repatriation of the accused-at the contributing nation’s expense-and, if the accused is eventually found guilty, a block on future service in U.N. missions.
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Several articles lately professing shock at how little some people trying to live on a shoestring budget spend and eat have left me wondering: am I out of touch, or is everybody else? Because I spend so much less and eat so much less than the people in the “shocking” examples given in these articles…I mean, good lord:
Mr. Driscoll has since started packing two peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch. Dinner might be two baked potatoes. On a recent Monday, it was franks and beans. On a good night, he might spend up to $6.
If people really consider this an absolutely shocking sign of deprivation, I must be doing far, far worse than I ever thought. And as much as I joke, I actually think I’m doing pretty well. (Oh, I should clarify that the articles I’m talking about, including the one linked above, are the articles about young starving-artist types, not the articles about actual poor people.)
May 27, 2008
Norton Recommends Some Updates
Norton AntiVirus recommends that you install several updates. Would you like to install the updates now?
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You have chosen to install the following updates. Click to install the updates.
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To install these updates, you will need to close your browser. Please close all browser windows and then click ‘continue.’
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You have chosen to continue installing updates. Are you sure about this?
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You have chosen to go ahead and install updates. Norton will provide a small form giving you the opportunity to format the updates in a specific fashion and store them in any number of locations on your harddrive. If you would like Norton to make these decisions for you, click ‘Whatever.’
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You have selected that you would like Norton to make these decisions for you. Does this include all these types of future decisions, or just this one specifically?
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You sure? Norton doesn’t want to be presumptuous.
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Norton has begun the installation process. At this point, Norton needs you to open Microsoft Word, and type a brief paragraph about how this process is going for you. Norton needs a little feedback on how it’s doing as an Antivirus program.
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Whoa, whoa, whoa, Norton needs you to close Word now. Norton didn’t think you’d take so long to formulate your thoughts, and now Norton needs you to close out of everything so that Norton can finish installing.
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Do you want to do this now or later?
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Because Norton can finish this later, if you’d rather.
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Okay then. You just seemed kind of annoyed. Norton’s happy to work around your schedule, you know. Norton is merely trying to update your virus protections so that you have the best possible security.
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Okay. Just, you know. It’s Norton’s job.
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So, Norton is just about finished installing these updates, but first, Norton has a few more questions for you. Would you like to enter an information profile that Norton can then efficiently and securely fill out automatically on online forms, such as purchase orders?
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Are you sure? It’s a pretty neat feature, and while it might take a little time right now, in the long run-
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Okay, okay. Just offering – there’s no need to be rude. We’re about done here.
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…Would you want Norton to back up your hard drive now? Because Norton can do that – did you know? Norton has noticed you’ve been backing up your files yourself, and Norton could totally handle that for you, if you want to take a few minutes to-
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–Alright. Norton will just finish this one thing and get out of your hair then.
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What? Well, yeah, you’re going to have to restart for these updates to take effect, but you can do it now or later. Whenever. Norton doesn’t give a shit.
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Okay. Fine. Then go ahead and do it now. Norton will be here when you reboot. Just, Norton has things to do today, too, you know, so move this along.
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Hi again. Okay, so would you like to hop over to Norton’s website and set up an online profile now?
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Well, it’s just so that you can– Okay, fine! Fine! Do it now, do it later, never do it, Norton doesn’t care! It’s for your benefit, it’s not like Norton’s getting anything out of it. Fine. You’re all updated now, and Norton’s going to get out of here. Get back to your oh-so-important work.
You Know What Would Be Fascinating?
If there were some way you could see what people write in the comment boxes and then think better of and delete, rather than post! That would be really interesting, probably far more interesting than the comments people actually go ahead and leave.
And by ”that would be really interesting,” I of course mean, ”I just scared the crap out of myself by suddenly realizing that this probably already exists, and that the editors of blogs I respect have been reading my inarticulate, unedited and ignorant kneejerk reactions to their posts for years now.” But that’s just me being paranoid, because that technology doesn’t exist, right?
Right?
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