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Miscellany: Of drapes and atheism

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I’ve been hit with the accursed virus that’s going around — not a computer bug; the sniffly, rhinovirus sort. Meanwhile, I’m working my way through Don Knuth’s “Structured Programming with go to Statements”; the Code Reads for that should be up within a day or two.

In the political world, I keep returning to the condescending fuss the GOP made before the election about Nancy Pelosi having already begun to choose her new drapes. President Bush followed up with more in his “we took a thumpin'” press conference.

And all I can think is, drapes? This election was all about pulling back drapes. Bush’s Washington has been a place of closed curtains and shut doors — from the Cheney energy panel to the secret rendition of prisoners to the zipped-up treatment of the press. Pelosi could mint some appropriate symbolism by simply leaving her windows uncovered. Whether she does so or not, let’s hope for a little more sunshine on the workings of government now that we’re no longer a one-party state.

If politics is too mundane and Iraq too depressing, go read Gary Wolf‘s wonderful Wired essay on atheism. It’s a great tour of the subject with stops at the doors of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. Wolf concludes that, although atheism is the logical and philosophically sound stance for a scientific person, there’s something off-puttingly evangelical about its most fervent advocates, and that’s why the great bulk of us non-believers tend to identify as agnostics instead.
[tags]atheism, nancy pelosi, gary wolf[/tags]

Fagles’ cadence

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Earlier this week I got a big kick out of Charles McGrath’s Times piece about Robert Fagles, translator of ancient epics. Fagles has just completed his classical trifecta, adding the Aeneid to his celebrated Iliad and Odyssey.

The other challenge was to keep the whole thing going for 12 books and some 12,000 lines. “You can’t let it sag,” Mr. Fagles said. “Cadence is everything, and that takes a lot of lung, a lot of nerve, a lot of luck.”

Cadence is everything, indeed! That’s a sentence spoken by someone who has so long been shaping the form of language to match the content that the two just spring forth entwined.

Another gem:

“Some days are very Iliadic,” he said. “You’re in a war. And some days it’s all about getting home; you’re like Odysseus. It all depends on what side of the bed you get up on.”

[tags]homer, vergil, iliad, odyssey, robert fagles, aeneid[/tags]

Steven Levy talks about his iPod book

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Steven Levy came to Sylvia Paull‘s Berkeley CyberSalon at the Hillside Club tonight to talk about the iPod and his new book, The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness. I haven’t read the book yet (Farhad Manjoo has, and his Salon review is a wonderful meditation on what, both good and bad, the iPod is doing to the experience of listening to music). There’s a nice excerpt online in Wired; Levy’s also got a blog on the topic.

Levy started off by largely disavowing his superlative title. Of course, he admitted, the iPod is far from perfect, from its too-easily-scuffable skin to its too-confining conception of digital rights management. He said the device represents more of a “perfect storm,” a perfect summation of all the issues that arise when a medium goes digital.

I have to say I didn’t find this too persuasive (maybe he makes a better case in the book!); it might be better just to say, “Book titles are chosen to get your attention,” and move on. Because everything else Levy has to say about the iPod is fascinating, amusing and important.

Levy sees the iPod’s shuffle mode as the key to its meaning — so much so that he got playful with the book, writing each chapter as a discrete unit so the whole book could be put on shuffle mode. There are four different sequencings of The Perfect Thing out there; no telling which one you’ll get. (Once upon a time, in my previous life as an arts critic, I did something similar in channeling the spirit of John Cage for a review of a celebration of his music.)

He asked the Hillside Club crowd how many listened to their iPod with shuffle on; I’d say about half the audience raised their hands. I wasn’t one — though I find shuffle an amusing novelty, mostly I love digital music for the control it offers me, the chance to be my own DJ, so why would I want to go random? After listening to Levy, I think I’ll try it more; he made a good case for seeing what interesting juxtapositions turn up between the music you’ve chosen and the moment you’re experiencing.

I asked Levy whether the pro-shuffle and anti-shuffle tribes divide by age, hypothesizing that maybe a forty-something like me is still rebelling against growing up listening to bad radio, whereas a younger person who grew up with digital music might be craving more serendipity. But Levy said he hasn’t noticed an age skew between pro- and anti-shuffle-ites (he’s a bit older than me and is a shuffle-ite himself). He guessed that it’s more like the division between people who have the patience to organize their lives around PIM (personal information management) software and those who can’t be bothered. That makes sense — the PIM devotees (I’ve long been one) would also have the patience to program their own listening.

Levy also talked about the strange experience people have when they find that their ostensibly random shuffle mode seems to play favorites; for him, Steely Dan just kept on showing up. A column he wrote on this topic evoked a torrent of amusing email, some of which he read. Deeper investigation among mathematicians led him to conclude that Apple wasn’t lying when it said that shuffle really is random — and that the experience people had of shuffle “favorites” is actually a statistical phenomenon known as “clustering” that turns up in nearly any random distribution.

Lee Felsenstein asked Levy about what the iPod’s triumph has done to narrow public space, now that so many of us are walking around with our own private soundtracks. Levy’s answer made sense for a New Yorker: “When I’m on the subway, I don’t really intend to do much social networking.” But what about outside of dense urban conglomerations (the kinds of places Steven Johnson celebrates in The Ghost Map)? Do we need more alienation in the cookie-cutter exurban communities where human connections get more and more tenuous? The “don’t bug me” message is useful on mean streets; but out in the vast wasteland, iPod-induced solitude may be worth worrying about.
[tags]steven levy, ipod, shuffle[/tags]

Steven Johnson interview — plus: where I’ve been

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Tonight on Salon’s cover — in our brand-spanking new home page design, which we’re quite proud of — you’ll find my interview with Steven Johnson. It’s about his fine new book, The Ghost Map, as well as sundry other topics, including his new tool for organizing the local Web, Outside.in; why cities aren’t environmental disasters; why nuclear terrorism is more of a long-term danger to city dwellers than bioterrorism or epidemic; how innovators change a scientific consensus; and more.

Johnson has been one of my favorite authors ever since his Interface Culture, which I wrote about back in 1997, so I relished the opportunity to talk with him once more.

Apologies for light blogging here. My spare time has been devoted to hunkering down on a big freelance project. It’s almost done, so normal programming here — including a return to Code Reads after an unplanned one-week break — will resume shortly. I have a couple of posts I wanted to make from OOPSLA, and a few other interesting things lined up.
[tags]Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map, cities[/tags]

Eye-raq: Santorum, Tolkien and terror

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I am the first in line to enjoy a good Lord of the Rings analogy. But there is something distinctly off in Sen. Rick Santorum’s effort to recast the Iraq War in Tolkienian terms:

Embattled U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum said America has avoided a second terrorist attack for five years because the “Eye of Mordor” has been drawn to Iraq instead.

Santorum used the analogy from one of his favorite books, J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1950s fantasy classic “Lord of the Rings,” to put an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq into terms any school kid could easily understand.

“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth.

“It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S.,” Santorum continued. “You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.”

The trouble here is not that Santorum is daring to compare a bloody real-life tragedy to a fantasy novel — pace my colleague Tim Grieve, who brought this bizarre tirade to my attention, or the spokesman for Santorum’s opponent, who complains, “You have to really question the judgment of a U.S. senator who compares the war in Iraq to a fantasy book.” That doesn’t bother me. Myths and fictions offer us powerful ways of seeing and talking about the real world. Popular politicians — like Ronald Reagan, who borrowed his “Evil Empire” imagery from George Lucas — understand this.

No, the problem is that Santorum’s analogy makes no sense. I think the senator means to offer a Middle Earth version of the GOP’s “We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here,” but he’s messed it up badly. (Warning: Tolkienian geekery ahead!)

First of all, in Tolkien’s saga, the good guys are outgunned and outmanned by the Dark Lord, whereas in our world, the U.S. is a “hyperpower” whose military, in 2001-2, seemed to bestride the world. Second, in Tolkien, the good guys sent Frodo with the Ring into the depths of Mordor as a sort of last-ditch, bet-everything gamble; then they sent an army to the gates of Mordor as a diversion — to keep the Eye occupied and distract it from the hobbits headed for Mount Doom.

Santorum says the war in Iraq was meant to keep the Eye distracted. But what kind of diversionary maneuver keeps more than a hundred thousand troops fighting and dying for years? And what are we distracting our enemy from? Who are our hobbits? What secret plan is underway to break the power of Al-Qaeda once and for all? None, of course, because this is where the analogy dissolves into air: In Middle Earth, the Dark Lord’s forces are centralized and his minions are incapable of operating independently; in our world, our enemy is organized as a headless guerrilla network. There is no “Eye” to distract.

It’s hard, in truth, to find any useful Middle Earth analogy to the Iraq War: the parallels break down across the board. Still, you might think of Bush’s invasion of Iraq as the equivalent of a beleaguered Gondor, attacked by the armies of Mordor across the River Anduin, sending its army off on an expedition to Far Harad, after its leaders issued proclamations that the White Council had incontrovertible evidence of the Haradrim’s possession of Rings of Mass Destruction.

Something like that, anyway. But as you can see it really doesn’t work, even when you try harder than Santorum.
[tags]iraq, rick santorum, tolkien, lord of the rings[/tags]

Cool projects: MadLiberals, JPG

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  • If, like me, you spent some significant portion of your childhood in the back of a car dreaming up parts of speech to complete Mad Libs, you may find this site, and the book it’s based on, irresistible. Even if you didn’t, it’s worth a look. MadLiberals takes the classic fill-in-the-blanks game and updates it for the Bush era. The Web site offers a few interactive “MadLiberator” pages; an old-fashioned book is also available.

    (Full disclosure: My agent, Stuart Krichevsky, also served as the agent for MadLiberals, and he wants people to know that a substantial chunk of the proceeds will go straight to various charities and nonprofits.) And here, for the heck of it, are some more, more traditional, amusing Mad Libs.

  • Derek Powazek and Heather Champ have been publishing a cool little photo magazine called JPG for some time. Now they’ve expanded the project into a Web community intended to feed the magazine with contributions. (More on their blog.) Derek is a veteran Web designer and instigator of Web communities; Heather created the Mirror Project way back when. So it’s no surprise they’ve put a lot of thought and care into their project. The photos are pretty great, too.

9/11, Breughel and Auden

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Thomas Hoepker's 9/11 photo The photo shows five people on the Brooklyn waterfront on 9/11. Two crouch, facing the smoke rising from lower Manhattan; three others stretch out on the embankment, facing away from the unfolding tragedy.

The photographer, Thomas Hoepker, waited four years to publish the image. He told David Friend, the author of the 9/11 book “Watching the World Change,” that his subjects were “totally relaxed like any normal afternoon.” Frank Rich wrote about the photo in his column last Sunday, saying it represented how the 9/11 trauma “would recede quickly for many.”

Now there’s a bit of a controversy, fanned by David Plotz in Slate, who argues that Rich was wrong on the face of it: “They’re almost certainly discussing the horrific event unfolding behind them. They have looked away from the towers for a moment not because they’re bored with 9/11, but because they’re citizens participating in the most important act in a democracy—civic debate.”
Ed Cone agrees.

Surely the photographer who was there understands the moment best? But wait — now one of the people in the photo has written in to Slate to say, no, the photographer got it all wrong, he never even talked to the people he was photographing, and of course they were talking about the attack on the World Trade Center and not just going about their daily business.

Breughel's IcarusWho knows? I wouldn’t jump to blame-throwing in any direction. Rather, I’d note that the power and the appeal of the image lies in the archetype it evokes, one that goes back to an extremely famous Breughel painting: Breughel’s Icarus. You’ve probably seen it — it’s the one with the closeup of the ploughman in the foreground and the mythic tragedy unfolding so far in the distance it barely registers. W.H. Auden explicated the painting in his “Musee des Beaux Arts”; it’s about relative perspective, life going on while great events unfold in the background, and the way the ripples of tragedy and heroism pass over the surface of deep waters leaving nothing behind.

If Hoepker got his explanation of his image wrong, it’s important to know; and bless the Internet for making it easy for people to correct the record. Still, the image is potent on its own because it plugs into this tradition of thought. The people in Hoepker’s photo may have been fully engaged with the events of 9/11 at the instant the image was captured, but the image itself tells a different story, one of people at a safe remove from tragedy, unaffected visibly by it.

As Auden said: Suffering “takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” Towers fall, yet “everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster.” That’s the truth, and I think that’s ultimately what Rich was writing about.
[tags]9/11, photography, w.h. auden, breughel[/tags]

Music: New Goats, Winters, Black, YouTube anti-stars

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Several of my favorites have new albums out:

  • Leading the pack, the Mountain Goats’ latest, Get Lonely, lives up to its title via a series of hushed, introspective tracks that create a landscape of desolation. Through headphones, these songs — many delivered in a fragile falsetto that might be echoing over a Martian moraine — feel almost unbearably intimate. This album has none of the rollicking word-party spirit that propelled its triptych of predecessors — Tallahassee, We Shall All Be Healed and The Sunset Tree — and as such it is far less immediately winning. (For a hit of the more uptempo Goats spirit, there’s “Babylon Springs,” a superb five-song EP the Goats released last winter.) But it’s powerful and memorable. John Darnielle (whose writing and singing leads the band of two) plainly had no interest in repeating any kind of formula, so instead of trying to build on the considerable success of Sunset Tree, he’s decided to take us down a dark road in winter. It’s a bleakly moving trip.

    At an in-store show last week at Amoeba in the Haight, down the street from my old Cole Valley home, Darnielle talked about his difficulties writing this new batch of songs, which started out as a song-cycle about monsters before evolving inward. He elaborates in this L.A. Times piece about the making of the new album:

    There had been something in the personal responses of audiences and correspondents that made a total return to older styles seem dishonest. These songs did not feel dishonest. They came from some sad and frightened place, and felt like natural heirs to their predecessors…

    Writing with these priorities in mind is a new thing for me because I used to put all my focus on just telling a good story and trust any issues of tone to resolve themselves. New priorities replacing old ones is the constant process of writing for me; maybe this time next year I’ll want to write about imaginary kingdoms under the Earth instead of flesh-and-blood people walking desperately across its surface.

  • Then there is the new disc from The Long Winters, Putting the Days to Bed — a more consistently, rockingly upbeat set of songs than its wonderfully motley predecessor, When I Pretend to Fall. Warmly, tunefully distorted guitar clothes the bones of John Roderick’s opaquely bitter songs; this time out, though, the pop spring overpowers the resentment, and even when he’s snarling out the “Positively Fourth Street”-esque put-downs of “Rich Wife,” he sounds like he’s having a blast:

now tell me is your high horse
getting a little hard to ride?
And your little bit on the side
getting harder to find?

When you get restless at night
but it’s too late to start
and there’s nothing left to eat in this house
but your heart

I’m thoroughly enjoying Putting the Days to Bed, even though it’s less musically adventurous than both When I Pretend and the wonderful Ultimatum EP.

  • The prolific Frank Black is back with more Nashville recordings. I wasn’t in love with Black’s first Nashville batch, last year’s Honeycomb; it’s not that I don’t like Black turning to country — it’s just that Honeycomb sounded a bit listless, and Black’s singing was strangely restrained, in some places entirely numbed-out. On the new double-CD, Fast Man/Raider Man, Black sounds more engaged again, and the whole set has more crackle. (Rolling Stone talks to Black here.) It’s a lot of music, and I can’t say I’ve yet found any of it as immediately great as the long run of Frank Black and the Catholics albums. But I’ll give it time.

This process of influence, imitation and inspiration may bedevil the those who despair at the future of copyright but is heartening to connoisseurs of classical music. Peter Robles, a composer who also manages classical musicians, points out that the process of online dissemination — players watching one another’s videos, recording their own — multiplies the channels by which musical innovation has always circulated. Baroque music, after all, was meant to be performed and enjoyed in private rooms, at close range, where others could observe the musicians’ technique. “That’s how people learned how to play Bach,” Mr. Robles said. “The music wasn’t written down. You just picked it up from other musicians.”

…That educational imperative is a big part of the “Canon Rock” phenomenon. When guitarists upload their renditions, they often ask that viewers be blunt: What are they doing wrong? How can they improve? When I asked Mr. Lim the reason he didn’t show his face on his video, he wrote, “Main purpose of my recording is to hear the other’s suggestions about my playing.” He added, “I think play is more significant than appearance. Therefore I want the others to focus on my fingering and sound. Furthermore I know I’m not that handsome.”

And if you’re tired of Pachelbel, there’s always this amazing “While My Ukulele Gently Weeps” (courtesy Gary Wolf).

Random notes

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  • Visual design guru Edward Tufte’s new book, Visual Evidence, is out. I haven’t read it yet, but if it is anything like its three predecessors it will not only be eye-opening but will embody the principles it espouses. I wrote at length about Tufte almost a decade ago in Salon, in March ’97.
  • “What happens when you take everything in your house and make one giant chain of dominos?” Some people in Japan find out. It’s on YouTube. I saw it because Doc Searls linked to it back when only 250,000 people had viewed it, and now over 500,000 have, and we should really be shooting for >1,000,000, so I’m doing my part.
  • Who knew there was a They Might Be Giants tribute album with covers by the Wrens, Frank Black, and the Long Winters? (The latter two also each have new discs out or on the way.)