One addendum to my previous post about the limitations of AI: I don’t think they’ve made one that stops what it’s doing and marvels over sunsets.
It’s the Part I Was Born To Play!
I listened to a neat interview with Brian Christian on the Monocle Weekly podcast last week (it’s edition 98, if you wanna download it). The lead interviewer, host Tyler Brule, admitted that he hadn’t read Mr. Christian’s new book, The Most Human Human
The premise of the book (and here’s a good review of it) is that our interactions with computers may help us learn more about what it means to be human.
One of the interesting points in the Monocle interview was that, while computers have grown ever more advanced and nearly won a Turing contest a few years ago, humans are veritably regressing to a less nuanced, less sensual world. That is, while they’re becoming more human, we’re becoming more computer-like. It’s a theme I’ve pondered for many years (including, probably, on this blog, but I’m too lazy to look it up). As Mr. Christian put it in the interview (transcription by me, with a little editing):
The computer represents simultaneously a chance to achieve the next enlightenment about what the human condition is all about, as well as a threat to that very condition. That to me is one of the great ironies. For example, if you look back over the history of philosophy, there’s been this ancient question: what is it that makes the human being different, special and unique?
Typically, philosophers, starting from Aristotle and Plato and on to Descartes have begun by trying to contrast human beings with animals. To differentiate humans from animals, you have to write the body out of the equation. Right from the start, philosophers zeroed in on the most abstract aspects of cognition, things like algebra and symbolic logic.
I think one of the great surprises for that line of thinking is that the development of the computer in the 20th century represented an intrusion into precisely those areas that were considered to be the unique hallmarks of human intelligence. What we’re finding is that a lot of what we considered to be the embodied, sensory, in-the-world experience actually represents a greater degree of cognitive and computational sophistication.
But one of the great ironies is that we’re now living in the world in a more disembodied way. Instead of actually going somewhere, we just go onto the internet and remotely interact with somebody who’s far away. To an observer from space, most jobs — regardless of what it is your job entails — would look the same: sitting at your laptop for 8 hours. Maybe you’re an architect, maybe you’re a lawyer, maybe you’re a journalist, but the experience has become almost totally disembodied.
Earlier in the conversation, he notes:
One of the strange things about the development of AI is that it’s sort of like biological evolution running backwards. Computers proved themselves capable of what we think of as being high-level tasks, like multivariable calculus and grandmaster chess, but they’re still trying to get their hooks into things like recognizing a face or understanding an ambiguity in a sentence.
I think it points out the unsung and not very celebrated complexity of life. It turns out that a lot of these tasks, precisely the things we take for granted, are many of the things that have proven the most difficult and most complicated for programmers to try to simulate.
In the interview, Mr. Christian doesn’t get at the notion that computers also don’t ask, “Why?”, which I think is a big deal, but I bet that comes up in the book at some point. Still, it’s a great leaping-off point, to explore how the heavy-duty, advanced, abstract thought isn’t exactly what “makes us human.” To Mr. Christian, who played the part of the human in a Turing Test competition in 2009 (hence the title of this post), graceful language remains the key to us.
In the Monocle interview, he talked about one of the ways in which our technology actually seems to lessen us:
Why are people talking in such a flat, emotionless way? Part of it is that so much of communication in modern life is happening through a technological medium. This takes the form of everything from e-mail and text messages and even cellphones. Compared to a landline, which has a vocal lag of 1/10th of a second, a cellphone has six times as long of a lag, 6/10ths of a second. By the time you’ve said something and the other person’s reacted, it’s going to be a minimum of 1.2 seconds before you get that feedback. Whereas, when you’re sitting across from someone, it’s instantaneous.
So there’s a certain style of humor or a certain grace that will leave a pause at the end of a sentence, that implies “I could be done talking, if you want me to be, or I could keep going.” There’s a certain grace to these 10ths of a second. And the more that we talk to each other over cellphones, the more that communication starts to enter this very rigid walkie-talkies style: “Now I’m talking, now you’re talking.” And we lose something as a result.
Being really aware of the kinds of concessions that technology forces us to make, gives us an opportunity to think more deeply about what’s going on when we sit down across a table from someone. It gives us an opportunity to approach those interactions a little more mindfully and, I hope, better.
I don’t think it ever occurred to me that latency is why I hate talking on cellphones. I figured it was something wrong with me, my feeling that the other person is always distracted, but now I think it’s an instinctive reaction to that extra half-second delay of conversation, the unbridgeable distance it signifies. (Of course, that doesn’t explain why I find so many face-to-face conversations unbearable or awkward nowadays.)
But as I mentioned, this idea of human flattening-out is something I’ve turned over in my head for quite a while. While singing along to The National’s “I’m Afraid of Everyone” this past year, I’ve had to deal with the fact that my language is deteriorating. Years of editing trade magazine articles, of denuding press releases of their adjectives, of keeping up with RSS, Twitter and Facebook feeds, of forgetting poetry: they’ve taken a toll on me. I’m at a loss for words. When I’m nearly asleep, I find my thoughts getting structured in terms of screens of information. It’s not a condition I’m happy about (as I type away on this screen).
This weekend, I decided to cut my computer usage back a bit. I read a book over that span, wrote almost no e-mails, didn’t work on the long post about our Toronto trip last weekend: nada. It was refreshing. This morning, I zapped a bazillion RSS items, ignoring whatever recording angel thinks I should be monitoring them all. I marked-as-read, I closed tabs, I deleted bookmarks. Then I reread and savored the last two chapters of The Leopard
Time for some poetry, before I get back to writing about single-use/disposable systems for bioprocessing tomorrow.
You, Sir, Are Bad-Ass: Doggie Style
My greyhounds get skittish when I stand behind them at the top of the stairs, so I can’t imagine strapping one to my chest and making a jump from 30,100 feet:
You, sir (and your dog), are bad-ass.
(Photo courtesy of K9 Storm Inc.)
The Silver Age
This post by Felix Salmon, part of his series about the ludicrous nature of the high art market, reminded me that I never posted my pic of The Andy Monument:
That was just north of Union Square, the afternoon of April 2, after My Brunch With Chip. Here’s some info about The Andy Monument.
Books-A-Nil
As I’m sure I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions, I’m not happy about the decline of bookstores in the digital age. I’ve spent countless hours wandering through bookshops of all sizes, listening for The Call, entranced by the simple notion of all those possibilities. Any one of those books could have been some sort of key into who I am, or who I was to become.
Now I have a library that can keep me occupied for the rest of my days. It’s likely I’ll never work my way through, but I’m happy to be surrounded by all these volumes and all they have to tell me. (Here’s a decent — but a bit obvious and silly — essay about how you can never keep up. I mean, you should probably read it, but don’t feel obliged.)
For the most part, I feel like I’ve left bookstores behind. If I spy a nice indie one, I’ll stop in and take a look around. On a jaunt through NYC a few weeks ago, I made a few pickups at The Strand and St. Mark’s Books (mainly, I just re-upped my supply of Hicksville
The chain bookstores? Well, let me share with you a pair of stories from the past week.
Last Friday, I stopped in at a not-yet-closing-down Borders during lunch. It’s around the corner from my office, and I didn’t want to head back to work right away. I looked through the magazine section first. I picked up Esquire’s Black Book for spring/summer ’11, because that’s who I am, okay? Quit being so judgmental and just praise my newfound fashion sense!
I drifted through the store for a bit. I took a look at the Graphic Novel (oh, how I hate that term) section, where I saw Dan Clowes’ new book, Mister Wonderful
Amazon turned out to be selling it for $10.50, almost 50% off. So I bought it through my Amazon app there and then, figuring I could wait a few days for it.
I still had that Esquire special ish, so I walked up front with that. There was a line 12 people long, with two cashiers working. I put the Black Book back on the shelf and left
Is it weird that I don’t mind waiting a few days for Mister Wonderful to be delivered to my door, but I do mind standing on line for 10 minutes with old people and housewives during my lunch hour to buy a magazine?
On Tuesday, I stopped at Paramus Park mall to grab some Chik-Fil-A (grilled chicken sandwich sans bun, since I’m triyng to keep kosher for Pesach). There’s a Books-A-Million in the food court area and, even though I once vowed to boycott that chain (they wouldn’t carry a book I was publishing), I thought I’d look around and see if they had any remainders that caught my eye.
I was happy to discover Tony Judt’s book Reappraisals
I walked up to the three cash registers, where I waited two full minutes for a cashier to sell me the book. None showed up, and no employee was in sight of the register area. I put the book down on the register and left.
Yes, I took a picture before leaving:
So I got my grilled chicken and waffle fries (not made with corn oil, or so they said), sat down at a table, tapped the Kindle App on my iPhone, and started reading a bio/sketch/essay from Cultural Amnesia, picking up just where I left off with my e-book the night before.
I feel sad for smaller, independent bookstores that can’t survive the transition to digital. I don’t know what their value proposition will be, to entice readers to spend more than they “have” to on books. But the big chains? They can suck my nuts. They’re so dysfunctional, they can’t even sell me something when I want to buy it.
P.S.: St. Mark’s Books is where my wife & I first laid eyes on each other. I’ll always buy a little something there; that’s my idea of a value proposition.
Olden Times
In honor of the Kings’ likely departure to Anaheim, I decided to look up their history to see if anyone but Rick Adelman had gotten them to the playoffs in their time in Sacramento. (Also, I haven’t written about hoops in a couple of years, and the playoffs are about to start.)
Turns out they made the playoffs in their first year in Sacto (1985-86), and one more time ten years later. Outside of that, their entire playoff history coincides with Adelman’s tenure (1999 to 2005-06). And, of course, they’ve come nowhere near the playoffs since they fired him for, um, not being good enough.
I looked over that 1995-96 roster, to see how they’d managed to sneak into the playoffs. They went 39-43 that year, and their top players were Rock Richmond and Brian Grant (with half a season of Walt “The Wizard” Williams*). Among their top 5? Olden Polynice. Turns out OP put up 12.2 ppg & 9.4 rpg, making him their top rebounder and #4 scorer.
No great shakes, but it got me thinking that he’d likely end up with a $50 million deal if he were playing nowadays (after making around $20 million for his entire career from 1987-2004). Why do I say that?
Well, here’s a news item from ESPN’s NBA rumor page today:
Kwame Brown will be a free agent in July and head coach Paul Silas believes the center will have a lot of suitors.
Rick Bonnell of The Charlotte Observer writes: “Silas said after shootaround today he thinks there’s a strong possibility some team will make a significant, multi-year offer for Brown once there’s a new collective bargaining agreement. Brown has had a good season, particularly as an improved scorer. He no longer looks like someone who would have to work season-to-season on a veteran-minimum deal.”
Brown, who made the veteran minimum salary this season, averaged 26.0 minutes, 7.9 points and 6.8 rebounds.
That’s right: a “significant, multi-year offer” for someone who gets 8 points and 7 boards, needs more than half a game to get it, and is heading into his 30s. But in his NINTH season, he “no longer looks like someone who would have to work season-to-season on a veteran-minimum deal”! So that’s something!
Kwame Brown has banked more than $50 million in his washout career. They really need to have a lockout before someone’s dumb enough to sign him.
* I believe that 1995-96 Kings team did lead the NBA in awesome nicknames that season:
- Mitch “Rock” Richmond
- Brian “General” Grant
- Walt “Wizard” Williams
- Michael “Animal” Smith
- Lionel “L-Train” Simmons
- Corliss “Big Nasty” Williamson
- Kevin “Oscar” Gamble
- Olden “The Haitian Mutation” Polynice
What a wonderful audience
[This was intended as a podcast, but I’ve been suffering from a headcold all week, and my voice is even worse than usual, so I decided to try to write instead.]
Virtual Memories is not exactly a model of search engine optimization. This is the blog where I spent around two years writing a recurring feature about Montaigne’s essays: not exactly a bikini-babe traffic-generator. (Although I’d say the majority of my google-linked visits seem to come from .edu addresses seeking out particular Montaigne essays; I think it’s awesome that my “insights” may have made their way into college kids’ papers.) I concluded a long time ago that my tastes just don’t jibe with that of a mainstream audience.
But I’ve been thinking a bit about audiences lately. I spent the previous week in NYC for a pharma conference. Several people I met told me that they receive my magazine at work and that my From the Editor column is the first thing they read. I’ve gotten this a bunch over the years, and it always makes me happy; I put some work into writing my editorials, trying my best not to do a “[topictopictopicblather], and on page 44, you’ll find [contributor]’s take on [topic]” recapitulation of the table of contents. So it’s nice to get recognized for that. I’m happy to have an audience. (And I’m happy to have you guys.)
Last Saturday, I had brunch with Samuel R. Delany (Chip), whom I used to publish back in my small-press-night-job days. Chip turned 69 on April Fool’s Day, so I tried to put a group together to celebrate. Various cancellations and illness (my wife) left it at me, Chip, his partner, Dennis, and our pal Vince, who introduced me to Chip almost 15 years ago.
I hadn’t seen any of them in a year, and we had a fun, rambling conversation. At one point, Chip mentioned that he has a new novel coming out next year, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. I asked if it was along the lines of The Mad Man, the book of his I reissued in 2002, which I describe as “a scatological queer porno literary theory murder mystery thriller,” and which an alumni of my grad school once called, “The War & Peace of s***-eating.” (I told him that I consider it “The Anna Karenina of p***-drinking BJ scenes,” and he agreed that was a better comparison.)
The new book, almost 700 pages long, will have plenty of scenes in the same vein, he said.
Sitting across the table from the Creole Santa, I asked, “Chip, who do you consider to be the audience for this book?”
Just so you know, I wasn’t passing a moral judgement on his sexual tastes nor his literary depictions thereof. I was just curious as to why, after writing The Mad Man and scads of other fiction along these lines, he was doing it again, and at such length. (I pre-emptively declared that I was not about to launch into the argument that commercial success is the arbitrator of art.)
He answered that these are the books that he wants to write and, more importantly, to read. He figures that there’s a decent-sized market for these interests of his (as well as people who aren’t as interested in the sex but still love to read work by him), and that it’s simply a matter of reaching them. I admitted that, of the five books I published during my run, The Mad Man was the best seller.
He has the freedom to write what he wants, having built an audience over the decades. And it’s not like he makes a living off his books; the bulk of his income derives from his professorship at Temple.
The other author at the table mentioned that his agent had recently sent out word to the other reps at her agency (and to authors) that editors at the major publishing houses were dismissing repped manuscripts unseen now, unless they were either movie- or TV-sellable, or the author had a sizeable internet following. Navel-gazing “literary fiction” was a non-seller and thus a non-starter.
Inwardly, I cheered.
It’s an audience I once belonged to, but seem to have grown out of. Having fallen out of my literary circles, I don’t know who does read that sorta thing anymore. There are audiences I’m just not a part of, and can’t identify with.
Which just means I live in relative isolation, not that these audiences have or have not withered away. It also doesn’t mean that it’s an either/or. The Venn diagrams can be pretty entertaining. As I wrote in 7 Rooms of Bloom:
I reflected on [Harold] Bloom’s lifelong support of the New York Yankees. I told myself, “When you were drunk on Colt 45 in a Dallas hotel room, jumping up and down and cheering as Charlie Hayes caught the final out of the 1996 World Series, Harold Bloom was also cheering and . . . well, maybe not jumping up and down, drunk on Colt 45, but definitely celebrating.â€
After brunch, I took a walk through the city, bought some coffee beans, a bottle of Ethereal Gin, cheap clothes at Uniqlo, and a few remaindered copies of Clive James’ wonderful book, Cultural Amnesia, at St. Mark’s Books. There was a small rack of DVDs by the counter for impulse purchases. There, I noticed my brunch-mate gazing back at me. The Polymath, a 2007 documentary about Chip Delany, was in prominent position at the cashier. I thought, “The guy’s got an audience.”
A few days before brunch with Chip, I took Amy to see the revival of Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia at the Barrymore Theater on Broadway. Arcadia is one of my favorite pieces of writing; I’ve read the play six or seven times since discovering it in 1995, but had never seen it staged. So, yes, this was a bucket-list item for me.
Among the hustle of ticket-holders entering the theater, I was glad that producers (read: people with money) felt that there’d be an audience for a challenging play (comedy? mystery? Stoppard calls it “a tragedy with jokes”) about Romanticism, British landscape gardening, Latin, fractal geometry, literary scholarship, and Byron. And I was even more gratified that the thousand-seat theater was packed. (I splurged on orchestra seats a few rows from the stage; they were almost as good as at the Tom Jones show I attended in Vegas in 2004.)
Watching the play that night (I’d re-read the weekend before, after giving up on Kerouac) I found myself wondering just how many of the references — the poetry and the maths, particularly — were out of the reach of some of the audience members. I’ve grown so accustomed to being around “normal” people that I had no idea how much of the play would zoom by the rest of the audience. Were they devotees like me? Were they there because it was “smart” Broadway? What did it mean to be part of that audience? Who pays Broadway prices to see Arcadia in 2011?
(You want a review? Billy Crudup was great, taking up the role of literary sleuth Bernard 15 years after he played the role of the tutor, Septimus Hodge. (I only wish I could have seen Billy Nighy play Bernard as he did in the first London run.) Lia Williams did a great job as Hannah, but missed the cue where she was supposed to slap Bernard, and tried to make up for it later, confusing Crudup for a moment. Grace Gummer was pretty entertaining and OHMYGODLOOKSEXACTLYLIKEHERMOTHER. Raul Esparza ran through some of his lines too quickly, which maybe he was supposed to do because his character’s a theoretical mathematician, but still. And I wanted to punch out the girl who played Thomasina from the moment she opened her mouth. Seriously, she almost wrecked the whole play for me, with her shrill, impatient delivery and frantic hand-gestures. I know she’s playing a precocious 13-year-old student in 1809, but the role has to be quieter. Or maybe that’s just because I’ve had the script silently playing in my head for 15 years now, and it wasn’t shrill there.)
To get back to my point, I’ve been thinking about audiences. The big news story here has been about Charlie Sheen’s disaster of a theater show, and whether anyone who pays money to see Charlie Sheen’s theater show has a right to expect, um, anything worthwhile.
I have my audience, both here and at my day job, where I’ve got 20,000 subscribers. Chip has his, and some of them stick with him through some unfriendly territory. Arcadia has its audience, and I belong to it. How do we find a voice, in all the cacophony? How do we dare presume that we’re worth listening to? It’s been 8+ years for me & this site, and that question’s arisen again and again.
Which brings me back here. The biggest surge this site ever got was when Instapundit linked to my post about Proust, Love, and That Damned Hegel Quote. (If you’d like a semi-podcast angle to this, here’s an audio recording of it from a few days ago. It’s about 6 minutes long, and 4.8mb.) It was only a few thousand visitors, since he posted the link on a New Year’s day, but I was amazed to see those numbers of people checking out something that’s ultimately a pretty personal post.
So thanks for reading, and thanks for coming back for more.
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Unrequired Reading: MARCH!
It’s time for another month’s worth of tweets and funny links, dear readers! Remember, you can keep up with these more easily by following my feed at twitter.com/groth18!
The Things He Carried (he being @acontinuouslean)
* * *
Even in @ArcadiaBroadway I am. yfrog.com/gy1r6hvj
* * *
Great @michaelbierut piece on 15 years of design-work for United.
* * *
EVERYONE has trouble finding their way around #neworleans
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Wisdom from #TomFord: (I still wear shorts, but I’m in the ‘burbs, so hey.)
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NYC: dancing in the ’70s wasn’t all Soul Train
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@jeremoss lays a palimpsest over 7th Ave. bet. 47 & 48: #vanishingNY
* * *
The Arab world’s greatest contribution to society? #Coffee! #justmyopinion
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My top symptom of depression is when I’m convinced I’d fail a #TuringTest. Spambots have it easier than I do
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Kindasorta pet sounds (via @bldgblog) #bringthenoise
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@thebookslut (whom I’m hoping to interview soon for my podcast) on writers and their politics: #KnutthePolarNazi
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I gotta get around to reading #Lanark sometime, since a trusted pal gave it to me a while ago: #andIshouldvisitGlasgow
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Good thing they didn’t goof on @DeadliestCatch: #nabokov
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Explaining the Northern Lights: #auroraborealis (make sure you watch this time-lapse video that shows up at the end)
The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.
* * *
Why do people get angry? #theydriveinNJ #iwouldhaveaskedforHappyGilmore
* * *
Cutest thing ever: greyhound puppy edition #greyhound #sickeninglycute
* * *
Mallrats of 1990: I was no great shakes back then either: #napoleondynamite
* * *
RT @radleybalko – Prosecutor: “You bet your ass I ain’t gonna be mean to Willie Nelson.â€
* * *
I did a #screenhijack of the electronic billboard at the Annapolis Mall in ’94 and posted some @danielclowes messages.
* * *
I’m loving me these Out of Print t-shirts: #nakedlunch #mobydick
* * *
“Militant” bombing of bus stop in #Jerusalem: #goodthingitsnotterrorism
* * *
GREAT piece on the big problem with Big Idea books: #jointheclub #iwouldntjoinanyclubthatwouldtakemeasamember
* * *
Holi isn’t the same without #karlpilkington #anidiotabroad
* * *
The (Frank) King of Gift Shops: #gasolinealley
* * *
Fear & Loathing in LV, 40 years later. #hst
* * *
I really gotta get to re-reading #thucydides sometime. http://bit.ly/i6mQmJ
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Coincidentally, I have #Impromptu coming in from @netflix tomorrow: #chopin #liszt
* * *
Cheech & Chong should sue for royalties: #nicedreams
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How to kill a zombie: #themoreyouknow
* * *
No pic of Spencer Tracy playing Ultimate Frisbee? (thanks, @kottke!) #katherinehepburn
* * *
Hey, @kottke! I see your #katherinehepburn and raise you a #farrahfawcett!#sk8ergirl
* * *
Swaziland’s king faces strikes! He should name Richard E. Grant as his successor! #withnailandswazis #wahwah
* * *
Speaking of #richardegrant, let’s have lunch! #whenisthenextbookcomingout
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Is @gsk about to relive #officespace? #ibelieveyouhavemystapler
* * *
Neoconservatives: advocates of a new managerial state. Also, kindasorta fascist?
* * *
@simondoonan on the flattering adjacent and the $12k jacket: #pythonsareexpensive
* * *
@nytimes to conduct digital experiment on Canadians! #greatwhitepaywall #blamecanada
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@gregbeato offers an ode to the mall: #somehowradioshackisstillinbusiness
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Who watches the watch, man? #bespokewatch
* * *
George Michael’s beard: Iron and Wine covers “One More Try”
* * *
My cholesterol dropped 60 points within a year after I got a dog (who needed regular walkies) #gogreyhound
* * *
The bank is closed, bitch! #bankshot #hoopitup #timduncan
* * *
I was so hoping @therealshockg was part of this article on the N. Korean Digital Underground. #humptyhump
* * *
Henry Miller: Brooklynite #tropicofhipster
* * *
Should I take my #coffee more seriously? done and done! #pourover #caffeinedreams
* * *
Unreal City #dubai #moneychangeseverything
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Before/Ater palimpsest pictures of earthquake & tsunami damage in Japan. #disastersunday
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Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, 25 years later. #disastersunday #atomicsafari
* * *
Louisiana gulf coast ecology, post-Katrina & BP: #disastersunday
* * *
Awesome Sam Lipsyte piece on cheating and the new #Monopoly. #goreadTheAsk #nownownow #SamLipsyte
* * *
I’m very happy that there’s a Montaigne renaissance going on. #nowforplutarch
* * *
Via @AlexBalk of @theawl, an encomium for Local Hero, one of the most wonderful movies ever.
* * *
Whither the big box? Wither, the big box!
* * *
Chuck Person had something to do with DEFENSE? I call shenanigans. #firsttimeforeverything #nba #lalakers
* * *
“My God, it’s full of stars” #afghanair (whole set here)
* * *
The Torah is wheat, the Bible is not Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. #itrynottodiscussreligiontoooften
* * *
What happens to the Aerotropolises that fail? #justwondering
* * *
New Orleans documentaries, in black and white. #mardigras
* * *
Financial Times = Scientology: “every time you reach one level, you realize there’s another, more expensive level awaiting you.”
* * *
100 Days of Designitude: via @designobserver
* * *
V5 Precise is my office-pen of choice, but I use Pilot G-2 05 for travel: retractable, less leak-prone. #mypenishuge
* * *
Who needs therapy? Here and here – #iprobablydo #drugsandvideogames
* * *
The bottom of the world: beautiful pictures from Antarctica! thx, @in_focus!
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I wondered what became of Mats Wilander: #havegamewilltravel #bywinnebago
* * *
I gotta get out west to In-N-Out and hit up that secret menu. #bestburgerever
* * *
I’ve pretty much bailed on contempo fiction. Does it still suck?
* * *
NYer interview with Tom Stoppard about @arcadiabroadway. #whatiscarnalembrace
* * *
Yay! Drugs cost nil to discover! No wonder R&D productivity is falling apart and FDA approvals are at record lows!
* * *
“How To End A Conversation“: I usually feign death.
* * *
I guess I have to catch up on those American Masters docs, huh? #pbs #americanmasters #lovedLOVEDtheschultzone
* * *
“This could be the greatest critical roundtable in Comics Journal history.” #dilbert #noseriouslydilbert
* * *
Ron Rosenbaum on the man who questioned the bomb. #youdroppedabombonme
* * *
#charliesheen via #wittgenstein via @walterkirn
* * *
I used to play the Journey vid just so I could kill #steveperry. #videogamedeaths #nosinistar?
Off the Road
Life is too short for crappy books. I’ve tried to impress that notion on friends, acquaintances and co-workers who would tell me that they were reading [x] but not enjoying it. Now, I don’t mean that a good book is one that panders, just that a reader should have some degree of joy or curiosity about a book.
A few years back, one of my co-workers told me he was struggling with Infinite Jest
“Depends on what you mean by better.”
“Do you ever find out what’s on the videotape that amuses people to death?”
“. . . No. Infinite Jest is actually a thousand-page novel about boredom. That’s the joke.” In my opinion.
He put it down and went on to something else.
Which brings me to On the Road
I first tried to read Kerouac’s novel in the summer of 1991. I was staying at a college pal’s family’s farmhouse in Athol, MA, and there was a limited selection of books at hand, one of which was an old mass market paperback of On the Road. Back at Hampshire, it was praised by plenty of people I didn’t like and whose taste I didn’t trust, but I thought I’d give it a shot.
The characters, I recall, didn’t demonstrate much character and the writing itself was plain and uncompelling. Thirty-five pages in, I was bored shitless and put the book aside. Instead I read Gaiman & Pratchett’s Good Omens
Twenty years later, I found myself willing to try Kerouac again. At a book party in February, I met the writer Fred Kaplan and his wife, writer and NPR/WNYC host Brooke Gladstone. I’d enjoyed Mr. Kaplan’s writing on Slate for years now (mainly covering the Defense Dept. beat), and mentioned that to him. He told me a little about the book he’s working on and, two G&Ts into the evening, I decided ot tell him that I had yet to read his book, 1959: The Year Everything Changed
I know authors don’t like to hear about how people haven’t read their books, but I told him that I’d been interested in the book for a while and promised to get it for my Kindle the next day. He was amiable about it. Certainly moreso than Greill Marcus, who once lectured me about the content of Lipstick Traces
Anyway, I did download 1959 from Amazon and read it over the next week. Weirdly, the Kindle format of 1959 puts an extra line-break after every paragraph, so the entire work looks like it’s composed of aphorisms. I enjoyed it, although it didn’t have the voice that I find in nonfiction work by, say, Clive James or Ron Rosenbaum, whose book party we were attending that evening. (Speaking of which, buy Ron’s new book! It’s the bomb
The sections on Allen Ginsberg and the obscenity case for Howl
I bought it for my Kindle, and gave it another shot. This time, I made it a quarter of the way through before surrendering.
I was expecting some sort of lyricism that would show Kerouac’s aesthetic competition with Ginsberg, or a benzedrine-fueled madness that reflected Burroughs’ influence on him, or maybe some of the sheer poetic-mystic beauty of the idler’s life that Henry Miller was so good at in Tropic of Cancer
Instead, I still found the events uninteresting, the language flat, the characters (still) not having have much by way of character, and no serious observations about America or its crippled, postwar ideals. I’m still incredulous that this book was a monster hit for half a century. I know the Eisenhower years were boring, but was this really such a great alternative?
So I acknowledged that slogging along through a book I didn’t like was reinforcing the crap mood I’ve been in lately, and yesterday I picked up Arcadia
Moral: go back to the first sentence of this post.
Who Am I?
I’m the guy who was in serious doldrums this evening. I think it’s anxiety about work, but it’s been running me down for a while now. I feel overwhelmed, unable to get ahead because there are so many fires to put out. I’ve been talking to people less and less, and having more difficulty just keeping up a normal conversation.
When I got home tonight, I was pretty burned out. The mile with the dogs didn’t help much, and I came home and found myself staring out the window, emptying the dishwasher, and otherwise trying to avoid looking at computer or TV screens.
Eventually, I went downstairs to the library. Still dolorous, I looked over some shelves of books and told myself, “I’m never going to read any of these.” Then, on a whim, I reached out to pick up one of several collections of essays by William Gass, whom I haven’t read in many years. I opened The World Within the Word
At first, I kept losing focus, partly because of Gass’s gorgeous by sneaky prose but mainly because thoughts from the office kept intruding. So I began reading the pages aloud. I thought it would be good practice for the podcast, because I need to learn to record prose without falling into my distant, nasal, uninflected tone. But reading it aloud, finding the rhythms of the sentences, also drove all the office banalities from my mind.
I’m the guy who’s amazed at how far he’s fallen from himself.
UPDATE: Here’s a 9.5-minute audio clip of me reading from the essay! Enjoy! Or try to!
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