From Flickr, via Digg.
Saturday, June 30, 2007
while on the topic of twentieth century literature
Alligator--elsewhere you allude to the bit of A Moveable Feast in which F. Scott Fitzgerald gets so worried about the size of his penis that he makes Ernest Hemingway look at it. The scene in question:
Finally when we were eating the cherry tart and had a last carafe of wine he said, 'You know I never slept with anyone except Zelda.'
'No, I didn't.'
'I thought I had told you.'
'No. You told me a lot of things but not that.'
'That is what I have to ask you about.'
'Good. Go on.'
'Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.'
'Come out to the office,' I said.
...
We came back into the room and sat down at the table.
'You're perfectly fine, I said. 'You are O.K. There's nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile.'
'Those statues may not be accurate.'
'They are pretty good. Most people would settle for them.'
They end up going to the Louvre together and talking about why Zelda would say something like that.
from an interview with Stanislaw Lem
Stanislaw Lem, on twentieth century fiction. From this interview:
ICR: In some ways, you are one of the most modern writers. Your fiction is usually based on the contemporary scientific problems and paradigms. But in other ways, you seem to have more affinities with 19th-century writers, what with your citations from Swinburne, your invocations of Schopenhauer, your Nietzschean problems. Do you find you admire 19th-century fiction more than 20th-century fiction?
Lem: The literature of the 20th century has lost its battle, or at least finds itself in retreat. I can see more and more books in bookstores, yet fewer and fewer ones that I would like to read. The tales of refugees from totalitarian countries reduce themselves to an exhaustive catalogue of social and psychological suffering that such systems treat their citizens to. These books cannot pick their readers up, and the lessons they teach are not pleasant. One could say that the job of literature is not primarily to entertain, move, and cheer us up, but as Conrad said, to "bring the visible world to justice." Well, in order to bring this world to justice, it is first necessary to understand it with one's intellect, to appreciate the wealth of its diversity. That, however, is now impossible, at least for any narrative convention involving plot, the sort that was crafted into perfection by l9th-century prose. (A fine exemplar, if not pinnacle, of this sort of prose is Tolstoy's War and Peace, for it contains both a sweeping historical view and a focus on individual people and groups.) Since I consider this epic approach no longer feasible today, if only because a microcosm of a few individuals does nothing to reflect the larger macrocosm of our planet, I aim instead to create models of the major problems that lie ahead of us, problems that humanity will have to face right now and in the coming decades.
Perhaps the retreat from the epic form was unavoidable, but it need not have meant sliding into escapism. I don't believe that literature should not entertain and humor us, but the goal which it must never surrender is that of being a medium for the intellectual, the philosophical, and the reflective (about the human condition). This is why I hold in contempt the nouveau roman and other assorted exercises of the avant garde, including whatever tortures human speech is subjected to by the lot of current experimenters. The writing of little poems for beautifully decorated fat monthlies like The Missouri Review, where they appear on glossy paper, is infantile.8 The fact that the mass production of these little poems never ceases is to me a symptom of the boundless naïveté of their authors and editors. At any rate, we happen to live in decadent, declining times, a fact that can be readily seen in contemporary music and art. It is impossible to envision either one in the 21st century, because "everything has been tried already." Not knowing what is ahead, I write in order to find out a little about it.
Systems, suffering, and escapism. Sounds about right.
science fiction
You, on the other hand, looked like a French peasant. But clean, as far as that goes.
This article in The Register astounded me. Apparently, the US military is working towards a massive simulation of the entire planet:
The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes" to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR....This whole project reminds me of the Stanislaw Lem story "Non Serviam," in which simulated beings begin to debate their proper relationship to their creator. Lem, if you haven't read anything by him, is one of the best science-fiction writers of the twentieth century. His short stories are akin to Borges', with more investment in probable futures as a means of interrogating philosophical problems.
SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors....
Of course, government agencies and corporations can add to SWS whatever personally-identifiable information they choose from their own databases, and for their own purposes.
Someone will do (has already done?) a great dissertation that figures out why authors like Asimov, Lem, and even William Gibson have so often been right about the future. Are the developments they describe implicit in the structure of society and existing technologies? Or does the fact that young nerds read them make them sulf-fulfilling?
more black tights
Hippo, I just wanted to tell you that you looked dashing last night and that the quail eggs were a good choice.
As for black tights, yeah, what's up with that? I know that when I wear opaque black tights on my little crocodile legs, I look svelte. The tights, along with the pregnancy tops and 1960's-style tunic dresses allow a forgiving silhouette--the ladies who wear the tights now are just trying to prolong the magic and hide their winter weight into summer.
Friday, June 29, 2007
how disappointing
According to CNN.com, the lawyer for the astronaut has denied that she wore diapers for the drive to Florida.
According to the article, "Lykkebak didn't say why he waited until now to dispute the police report."
visualize whorled peace
I've been ignoring the whorls story. I'm assuming it's just the Coriolis effect.
Whenever I try to think about this, my brain hurts. Being gay is correlated with being left-handed. Being left-handed correlates strongly with being young, intelligent and wealthy. People who self-identify as gay tend to be younger and wealthier than the general populace. Polar bears are left-handed.
Wikipedia has this to say about differences between left-handers and right-handers:
Left-handed persons are thought to process information using a "visual simultaneous" method in which several threads can be processed simultaneously. Another way to view this is such: Suppose there were one thousand pieces of popcorn and one of them was colored pink. The right-handed person — using the linear sequential processing style — would look at the popcorn one at a time until they encountered the pink one. The left-handed person would spread out the pieces of popcorn and visually look at all of them to find the one that was pink. A side effect of these differing styles of processing is that right handed persons need to complete one task before they can start the next. Left-handed people, by contrast, are capable and comfortable switching between tasks. This seems to suggest that left-handed people have an excellent ability to multi-task, and anecdotal evidence suggests that there are more creative stems due to this ability to multi-task.
Who dyes popcorn one piece at a time? How gay is that?
Thursday, June 28, 2007
cranky crocodiles
Hey hippo, did you read about the whorls?:
Richard Lippa, a psychologist from California State University at Fullerton, is one of the leading cataloguers of the many ways in which gay people are different. I caught up with him a few weeks ago at a booth at the Long Beach Pride Festival in Southern California, where he was researching another hypothesis—that the hair-whorl patterns on gay heads are more likely to go counterclockwise. If true, it will be one more clue to our biological uniqueness.As he recruited experiment subjects, Lippa scanned the passing scalps, some shaved clean, some piled in colorful tresses. “It’s like a kind of art. You look at the back of people’s heads, and it’s literally like a vector field,” he says. “We assume that whatever causes people to be right-handed or left-handed is also causing hair whorl. The theory we’re testing is that there’s a common gene responsible for both.” And that gene might be a marker for sexual orientation. So, as part of his study, he has swabbed the inside cheek of his subjects. It will be months before that DNA testing is complete.
I was surprised at how many people quickly agreed to lend five minutes of their pride celebration to science. “If I could tell my mother it’s a gene, she would be so happy,” said one, Scott Quesada, 42, who sat in a chair for Lippa’s inspection.
“Classic counterclockwise whorl,” the researcher pronounced, snapping a photo.
I tried to test out this theory among five (self-identified heterosexual) guys who were in my apartment last week. It was hard, since they had shaggy hair. So I measured their index fingers.
cranky day continues
From a CNN article about research in traits correlated with homosexuality:
Why does Sylva, a graduate student at Northwestern University, care so much about how gay people walk? Because he's one of a growing number of researchers who think sexual orientation may be as basic as how you walk, something inborn that you don't choose.
Similar research has also established that the specialized walks of cowboys, pimps, runway models, spacemen and Egyptians are genetically-determined traits linked invariably to cultural identity.
media bias?
Maybe I've been reading too much Mickey Kaus, but this image hardly allays my concerns of a mainstream media bias on the immigration issue.
(full article)
UPDATE: That was fast. New image:
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
quick note
I just read that this weekend marked the 35th anniversary of Title IX.
Here's a nice (somewhat old) article about an event at Stanford with Billie Jean King to celebrate 35 years.
Billie Jean King, by the way, apparently still has nightmares that the game with Bobby Riggs has yet to be played.
It has. And we all won.
meat the press
From The Impulsive Buy, via Serious Eats:
There’s something about unabashedly artificial flavoring that’s both charming and nostalgic…sexual, even.
The full article is a several-hundred-word review of the new "Cereal Straws"--Froot Loops, made into a straw through which one can drink artificial milk. Its conclusion:
Sadly, the cereal straws live in a paradoxical existence; humans cannot eat and drink at the same time.
Serious Eats also links to The Food Section's interview with Lauren Fleisher, who, um, makes plush meats.
lifetime piling up
More about history and style:
"It's been over a year since the end of the Eighties. This gives us some distance, some perspective. The Eighties are now, officially, history.
The Eighties were a decade of comebacks: suspenders, mini-skirts, Roy Orbison, Sugar Ray Leonard... But the really big comeback was history. We got rid of history in the Sixties; saw what the world looked like without it in the Seventies; and begged it to come back in the Eighties.
And it did; it came back with a vengeance. In design, history came back as well. Suddenly, there were countless books--big, glossy, oversize volumes--and starchy little journals devoted to the history of design. Career were constructed around this fascination. Conferences, too. And there's nothing wrong with studying the history of design. In fact, it's healthy and smart, especially for design professionals. At the same time, the indiscriminate use of history has produced some really bad, unhealthy design. History in itself isn't bad, but its influence can be."
--Tibor Kalman, J. Abbott Miller and Karrie Jacobs, "Good History/Bad History"
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
u is for ugly architecture
Eyesore of the month is a hilarious and smart site. I like the description of "dreary death box" for February 2007.
answers for hippos
Hippo,
What you've said makes sense, and the trucker hat phenomenon encapsulates the velocity. This reminds me of Baudrillard's work on the hysteresis of the millennium:
This kind of acceleration by inertia, of the 'racing', the exponentiality of extreme phenomena, produces a new kind of event: strange, altered, random and chaotic events which Historical Reason no longer recognizes as its own. Even if, by analogy with past events, we think we recognize them, they no longer have the same meaning... Now, we are in a history which is being unmade - this is why they appear ghostly to us.
--from "Paroxysm: The End of the Millennium or the Countdown"
There are two ways to talk about fashion, first in the sense of personal style and second as an industry. Personal style today is defined by the lack of coherence you mention. Rather than how past decades were marked by particular looks, the new thing seems to be a mishmash of past artifacts, which, in their arrangements and knowing, decontextualized historical setting, are exciting. It's the 80's hippie renaissance cavewoman look, or a composite of every ten years since whenever and into the future. I don't think the speed at which things are co-opted makes the possibility for fashion--defined this way--impossible. The meaning just tends to be more individualized. That's what endures--not the clothes themselves. The fashion industry operates on seasonal trends and biannual shows. It's an old model; the clothes are supposed to last for a given amount of time. Trends like this summer's hippie thing and the mid-90's ankle boots for fall will appear ghostly to us as soon as they hit the stores.
The main exception to Baudrillard that I can think of comes from my East Village neighborhood, where tight black jeans have been cool for over thirty years. I'd argue that at least here, their meaning hasn't changed.
Another thought: unlike hippie pacifism, or even the brash nihilism of punk, we kids today don't have a generational ethos. (My mom once pointed out that if the hippies had one, they don't remember it. Even so!) Is there even a counterculture? I raged at my desk today. Anyway, it's easier to come up with very clear clothing-related signifiers when the youth culture has something to talk about. I saw Mama Cass-style caftans at a thrift store last weekend and just thought they looked cool, if not dated.
today in penguins
According to CNN, giant penguins used to live in Peru.
Penguin 1: You look like an extinct giant penguin.
Penguin 2: How do you know I'm not?
future former vice president?
According to Sally Quinn in today's Washington Post, Republican leaders are growing tired of the Vice President:
The big question right now among Republicans is how to remove Vice President Cheney from office. Even before this week's blockbuster series in The Post, discontent in Republican ranks was rising. (full story)
Equally interesting is this anecdote that she drops in passing:
I remember Barry Goldwater sitting in my parents' living room in 1973, in the last days of Watergate, debating whether to lead a group of senior Republicans to the White House to tell President Nixon he had to go.
I wonder whose house these Republicans are meeting in now..
Monday, June 25, 2007
questions for crocodiles
Alligator,
You mention the cyclical nature of fashion. One of the arguments I've heard recently is that not only is fashion cyclical, the velocity of fashion is speeding up. What used to be a steady trend, people argue, goes from unheard of to rare to omnipresent to ridiculous to ironic so quickly that fashion as such can't really exist.
What do you think? Is fashion possible? Or at this point, is there just a bunch of floating subcultures and trends, that can be quoted, adopted, appropriated, or mocked without any real coherence?
Hippo
i guess it's social justice day
Jane Galt has this wonderful post pointing out a problem with various woeful laments of the fattening of America.
One of the criticisms of the set point theory is that people used to be thinner. And it is true, there weren't so many obese people around. But we are fooled by old movies into thinking that this means everyone used to be thin.
But look at this randomly selected ninth grade photo...
(Set point theory is the argument that all people have a weight that their body tends towards, because of the structure of their metabolism, or--I've read recently, because of the structure of the cells themselves.)
psyched for summer
I'm amused by the Summer of Love revival. I realize it's the fortieth anniversary of the moment, but isn't every summer the summer of love, in a way? Maybe it's my upbringing, but don't people reference hippie-related things all the time when it comes to this season? The official mediastorm over it just seems a bit forced. Didn't we just exhaust peasant tops a year or two ago? (They annoyed me, also worth noting that trend coincided with all the late 70's post-punk shit, heh). Even so, I could watch old concert footage from the late 60's and early 70's forever. If the anniversary's an excuse for more television movies and rock docs, that's more than okay with me. Here is where I recommend one of my all-time favorite rock docs, Festival Express (the other being The Last Waltz).
I was talking not long ago about bringing back bellbottom Levi's as a reaction to skinny jeans, and then today I saw this slideshow on style.com. I sewed myself burgundy velour bellbottoms in 1998 that look a lot like the pants Mick Jagger wears in Rolling Stones Rock n' Roll Circus. I miss them. I made a pattern based off 1998-era flared pants. It's funny how this stuff is reprised, and not even ten years later, fashion magazines again parade out this silhouette as completely novel. I guess the cyclical nature of fashion is pretty obvious, right? Oh well.
Also, as every article about the 2007 summer of love has mentioned, the Whitney is currently paying tribute. Jerry Saltz's review in New York Magazine last week was excellent.
Here is an unbelievably good essay on Janis Joplin by Ellen Willis, via Salon.
oyyy
AL Daily links to a WSJ review of Girls Gone Mild.
I'm infuriated by the sloppiness of the language. The author of the review conflates feminism, post-feminism, and "the eroticized culture," leading to pablum like this:
And indeed the bad-girl image -- revealing clothes, a willingness to engage in casual sex, a glorification of the inner "bitch" -- is strangely popular these days. It is the kind of daring post-feminist pose -- presented as liberated and free of gender stereotyping -- that shows up in music videos, racy advertisements, gossip columns and celebrity profiles.As a result, feminism can be safely contrasted with "kindness," "modesty," "goodness," "beauty," and "self-respect." Let's hear that list of places in which daring post-feminism can be found one more time:
...music videos, racy advertisements, gossip columns, and celebrity profiles.Each of these things writes coolness, hipness, or desirability on and through the female body. Calling the culture "eroticized" is begging the question. Behind that bizarre passive past participle is a series of questions: whom is being eroticized? by whom? for what purpose? by what process?
There might be non-feminist answers. I would have liked to have read them.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
c is for modular cookie landscape system
I'm fascinated by Werner Aisslinger's "Modular Cookie Landscape System."
It reminds me a little of Bernard Tschumi's Parc de la Vilette, only in baked-good form. And slightly more human-scale.
uses for a time machine
The King's Storeroom has episode guides and temple layouts for every single episode of Legends of the Hidden Temple. Along with a 624-user forum and extensive photo gallery.
If I ever get the chance to go back in time, I'm totally gonna print this site first and then head to Vegas.
Dear internet: Did I tell you I'm totally useless and can barely cook? I'm in support of cous cous for all occasions with parmesan and garlic. Outside of cous cous, though, I'm happy to find recipes that don't require the use of ovens, stoves, and techniques I do not understand. I want to make this pizza.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
art
I've been greatly enjoying the website of the artist Nina Katchadourian.
Table of Malcontents originally pointed me to her Sorted Books project, but I was most moved/amused/intrigued by her Uninvited Collaborations With Nature.
elsewhere on the web
I've been enjoying the ongoing adventures of of 'Grownup Gamer' over at Blogging Zelda. It's only for video-game heads, but it's truly terrific.
He's replaying the Zelda games, in order, and blogging as he goes. Each post is the perfect length, and it's bringing back memories..
cutting edge research
This is slightly off-topic, but Yahoo! Answers has an entire thread on whether a hippo would beat a crocodile in a fight.
The answers, of course, favor the hippo. My favorite:
yeah, hippos are underestimated in our culture. they are shown as stupid animals but in reality are magnificent creatures. they are docile but when disturbed are dangerous. They can run faster on land than a human and have large canines. hippos are very hostile towards crocodiles and crocodiles are unable to snap their mouth constantly. they are ambush attackers and rely solely on their first attack, their necks are not designed for long battles.
after things
This is really only a quick reaction, but Robert Bloomingfield over at Terra Nova has a couple of posts talking about in-game property rights in virtual worlds as 'permissions.'
Here's the active question in his second post:
In my last post, I discussed inworld “property rights,” which (to prove that yes, I can learn) I am now going to call “permissions.” Every virtual world grants or withholds a variety of permissions to players, including permissions to transfer, copy or modify inworld objects, to know the attributes and properties of those objects, to enter land and buildings, etc.I've enjoyed (and been frustrated by) reading the debate in the comments, and I'm beginning to see how complicated the idea of 'rights' is.
In this post, I want to ask readers about the state of contracting in virtual worlds. What worlds have gone beyond the plain-vanilla simultaneous transfer, in which one player gives up a permission in exchange for another (like paying cash for a weapon)?
In my real-life job, I've worked with homegrown software systems a few times. One in particular, was designed to allow people to publish events to the Internet. Certain people were allowed to type in text, others to post things to the web, and still others could do both. Moreover, certain people had the authority to authorize other people to undertake some or all of these functions.
To enable all this functionality, every individual could be assigned membership in one or more groups, which we mapped onto various roles, which were associated with various privileges. At the same time, individual events all had permissions, which enabled people with different roles to do different things. And there were groups of groups and events of events and groups of groups of groups and so on.
Confused? I was.
Online debates about property rights risk getting bogged down in this sort of muddle of permissions, privileges, and capabilities.
At their most basic, property rights guarantee of the ability of an agent to do something that agent can do. The idea then refers to two things:
a) a common conception of what it is that I am entitled to do to something that is 'mine'
b) the system for legally resolving disputes about a)
Specific property rights, I'd argue, arise from the assumptions inherent in a) and the answers to disputed cases to b). (I just read an interesting article--somewhere! argh--about how historically, property rights as a legal concept come into being as a way of resolving questions of inheritance. I'll try to track down a link.)
There are all sorts of issues with b) in virtual worlds: how complex transactions can be implemented in a code base; how non-compliers can be penalized; how contracts can be recorded and guaranteed; etc. Lots of exciting things are happening as solutions to these problems evolve in various communities.
But there are also really interesting complexities with with a). In virtual worlds, agents, items, and abilities are all convenient fictions. Something like what we consider property rights can be implemented by programmers with operations enabled in code base, roles assigned to users, and attributes defined for virtual things, but there's no one-to-one relations. On top of that, there are social conventions imported from the real world and applied to "virtual things" with a different set of valences.
It'll be interesting to see how the discourse changes.
robot love
Clive Thompson's great blog referred me to an incredible Washington Post story about the bonds soldiers in Iraq are developing with the robots they interact with every day.
The story is filled with telling details:
"Near the Tigris River, operators even have been known to take their bot fishing. They put a fishing rod in its claw and retire back to the shade, leaving the robot in the sun.
Of the fish, Bogosh says, 'Not sure if we ever caught one or not.'"
I found it really touching. Then again, I'm still a little shaken from watching the My Life on the D-List episode about Kathy's dad.
Friday, June 22, 2007
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