Matins

¶ We’re frowning deeply, but trying not to scowl, over Peggy Nelson’s “post-Enlightenment” apologia for texting at the dinner table. Her scenario sounds like one of those glamorous movies that you wish you could inhabit — but can’t. Which is not to say that Ms Nelson is entirely wrong about the increasing fluidity of social context, or about the significance of a shift from points (you and me) to connections (us). But the promised land that she claims to inhabit lies very far from where we’re standing. (Nieman Storyboard; via kottke.org)

Eventually I learned to stop worrying and love the flow. The pervasiveness of the new multiplicity, and my participation in it, altered my perspective. Altered my Self. The transition was gradual, but eventually I realized I was on the other side. I was traveling with friends, and one of them took a call. Suddenly, instead of feeling less connected to the people I was with, I felt more connected, both to them and to their friends on the other end of the line (whom I did not know). My perspective had shifted from seeing the call as an interruption to seeing it as an expansion. And I realized that the story I had been telling myself about who I was had widened to include additional narratives, some not “mine,” but which could be felt, at least potentially and in part, personally. A small piece of the global had become, for the moment, local. And once that has happened, it can happen again. The end of the world as we know it? No — it’s the end of the world as I know it, the end of the world as YOU know it — but the beginning of the world as WE know it. The networked self is a verb.

We’re beginning to inhabit ad hoc, overlapping, always-on virtual salons — you’re talking to someone, and then you both get pulled off into different directions, to form different shapes and vectors within the conversations, and then come together again, having never really been apart. You can even have multiple conversations via multiple media with the same person in the same span of time. Single conversations are one-dimensional chess; our language games have increased in complexity. And, potentially, in reward. Because with its ability to feel distant stories in a more personal manner, the expanded self points a way towards those stories becoming more relevant, and perhaps more actionable.

Lauds

¶ How does James Franco do it all? A portrait of the movie star as a performance artist, Sam Anderson’s New York piece has us wondering about what goes up… Having servants who masquerade as pals helps. (via MetaFilter)

Franco’s main artistic obsession—the subject that echoes across all of his various media—is adolescence. This seems appropriate on several levels. His own adolescence was unusually formative: It turned him from an obedient young math prodigy into a turbocharged art fanatic. His defining characteristic, as an actor, is an engaging restlessness—adolescence personified. In fact, you could say that Franco’s entire career is suspended, right now, in a kind of artistic adolescence. We’re watching him transition, a little awkwardly, from one creature (the Hollywood-dependent star) to another (the self-actualized, multiplatform artist). Like real adolescence, it’s a propulsive phase in which energy exceeds control. It’s about extremes—the hysteria to distinguish oneself, to break the rules, to leap into the world and do impossible things. Franco is developing all kinds of new strengths, but at the cost of some of his dignity: His intellectual skin is a little spotty, his artistic legs are suddenly too long for the rest of his body.

It’s the kind of ragged transition that most actors pay good money to have smoothed over by publicity teams. Yet Franco is making a spectacle of it. Which is, in a way, brave. One of the central points of Franco’s art and career, as I read them, is that adolescence isn’t something we should look away from, a shameful churning of dirty hormones. It’s the crucible of our identity, the answer to everything that comes later, and we need to look long and hard at it, no matter how gross or painful it might sometimes feel.

Prime

¶ James Kwak suggests another reason why Elizabeth Warren would be a great consumer advocate: she doesn’t believe in “Mickey Mouse economics.” That would be the generation of “facts” about economic behavior that are squeezed from unrealistic assumptions about homo economicus. Mr Kwak refers to a blog entry in which Ms Warren complained about a contracts class of first year law students at Harvard that talked itself into believing that the following analysis (of a forum-limiting clause as a benefit to consumers) actually made sense — which it does, but only if you’re in a law-school classroom trying to sound sharper than everyone else. (The Baseline Scenario)

(We repeat: the following is nonsense.)

Forcing people to sue in Florida (or to accept binding arbitration in the forum of the company’s choice) deters frivolous lawsuits and lowers costs for the company, and it can pass those savings onto consumers. Why does it pass those savings onto consumers instead of putting them into shareholders’ (or managers’) pockets? Because in a perfect competitive market, if Alpha Cruise Lines doesn’t, then Beta Cruise Lines will, and Beta will underprice Alpha, . . . Consumers will read the fine print and can make an informed choice between the lower price with the forum selection clause and the higher price without the forum selection clause.

Tierce

¶ At You Are Not So Smart, a helpful word about the The Anchoring Effect.

When you need to choose between options, or estimate a value, you need footing to stand on.

How much should you be paying for cable? How much should your electricity bill be each month? What is a good price for rent in this neighborhood?

You need an anchor from which to compare, and when someone is trying to sell you something they are more than happy to provide one. The problem is, even when you know this, you can’t ignore it.

When shopping for a car, you know it isn’t a completely honest transaction. The real price is probably lower than what they are asking for on the window sticker, yet the anchor price is still going to affect your decision.

As you look over the vehicle, you don’t consider how many factories the company owns, how many employees they pay. You don’t pore over engineering diagrams or profit reports. You don’t consider the price of iron or the expensive investments the manufacturer is making into safety testing.

The price you are willing to pay has little to do with these considerations because they are as far from you at the point of purchase as the population of Venezuela.

At last we have a term that explains the difference between describing someone as “wise but irritable” and as “irritable but wise.” The term that follows the conjunction is the anchor.

Sext

¶ Theo discovers Joni, causing “awash” of memories in his mother, Dominique Browning. (Slow Love Life)

This week I’m going to listen to all the Joni discs I own; as I sit here, I’m playing Clouds, from 1969. (And yes, I know, that means the music is in the background, but I was so moved to write that I couldn’t help myself. I’ll listen to the record again after I publish the post. And take Theo to the grocery store. And finish the laundry.) She sings the anti war anthem, The Fiddle and the Drum, with no instrumentation at all–that’s how strong is her voice–and her confidence. “Can we help you find the peace and the star…” Joni Mitchell’s songs have always had a profound moral decency–in the political, do what’s right, sense. Even the wild abandon with which she lost her heart seemed important, to me, in my twenties. That she has been able to accompany those of us who love her through our entire lives–and through hers–must be one of the miracles of our days.

Another is watching a new generation discover, and appreciate, the beauty that our generation can bequeath to them–in some enormous, global ways, we are leaving our children such a mess, that it helps to think also about the great things we have given them. Joy began to flicker through my aching sadness. There is nothing lovelier than sharing moments of transcendent beauty. I yearned to reconnect with the girl that I once was, the girl who believed that art would burn through grief, and that love was transformative. “Songs to aging children come; Aging children, I am one.” 

We like nothing better than listening to all three performances of “A Case of You” — Blue, Miles of Aisles, Both Sides Now — in a row, especially because we like the last one best.

Nones

¶ Niall Ferguson on the sudden setting of the United States’s imperial sun. Nobody knows when our overstretched economy will “go critical,” but we have a fairly clear idea why it will. (Real Clear World)

For now, the world still expects the US to muddle through, eventually confronting its problems when, as Churchill famously said, all the alternatives have been exhausted. With the sovereign debt crisis in Europe combining with growing fears of a deflationary double-dip recession, bond yields are at historic lows.

There is a zero-sum game at the heart of the budgetary process: even if rates stay low, recurrent deficits and debt accumulation mean that interest payments consume a rising proportion of tax revenue. And military expenditure is the item most likely to be squeezed to compensate because, unlike mandatory entitlements (social security, Medicaid and Medicare), defence spending is discretionary.

It is, in other words, a pre-programmed reality of US fiscal policy today that the resources available to the Department of Defense will be reduced in the years to come. Indeed, by my reckoning, it is quite likely that the US could be spending more on interest payments than on defence within the next decade.

We do not believe that a drastic reduction in American military forces is possible or even desirable: the United States is socializing and upward-mobilizing thousands of young people with no occupational alternatives other than crime. But it is clear that military expenses and commitments are going to have to be reconsidered from the ground up, with arms manufacturers and other contractors forced to fold their tents.

Vespers

¶ We wish that Dylan Suher had published his appreciation of the classic Chinese Novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber, back in the spring, because then we would have planned a summer re-read. Here is a novel that makes Proust sound like Elmore Leonard. It’s not too late! (The Millions)

What is most striking to me about the experience of reading this book, however, is not the length. It is the vast distance between The Dream of the Red Chamber and the modern sensibility. In the post-Lish verbal economics of the contemporary novel, where every word has to count, the dramatic waste of words in Red Chamber is astoundingly alien. I am aware, of course, that not every novel is plot-driven, but most novels do tend to have some sort of force propelling them forward, some sort of urgency, whether that urgency is derived from the events, the character, or themes alluded to by the work. Dream of the Red Chamber, on the other hand, is unbelievably comfortable with its own languor. It is often content to bring the story to a complete standstill while it explains the minutiae of household management. The novel often seems to proceed only with a great reluctance.

I won’t tell you it isn’t occasionally boring to read this novel. I also won’t tell you that it isn’t maddening. Or that, after reading every excruciating detail of the umpteenth drinking game, I didn’t want to angrily trample it, like an apostate stomping on the cross. But the extravagant waste of the prose is also part of the overall design of the novel. The low signal-to-noise ratio causes the mind to actively search for the tiny anomalies that reveal the profundity behind the endless series of parties.

Compline

¶ Jesse Smith deconstructs that snappy but meaningless phrase, “state of the art.” Who knew that its first use, a century ago, was apologetic? “In the present state of the art, this is all that can be done…” (The Smart Set; via  Arts Journal)

Of course the phrase is used for much different purposes today. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “state of the art” as “the current stage of development of a practical or technological subject; freq. (esp. in attrib. use) implying the use of the latest techniques in a product or activity.” Nothing about “current” or “latest” is inherently qualitative, and yet over the last century, the phrase itself has taken on an almost exclusively positive connotation.

Nobody, for example, describes the Gulf oil spill as a state-of-the-art environmental disaster, even though the deepwater drilling technology that made such an event possible is as state-of-the-art as it comes (according to Oxford’s official definition). But take a refrigerator ad: “The GE Profile refrigerator has a state-of-the-art 3-stack drawer system with a deli drawer, a fresh food drawer and a CustomCool™ drawer that can thaw meat in hours or chill a bottle of wine in minutes.” GE doesn’t describe its refrigerators as being state-of-the-art to suggest limitations or any possible technological glitches that could come with so new a technology as the CustomCool drawer. The phrase instead implies that you can’t do any better than a GE refrigerator — what with its ease of thawing meat and chilling wine — and isn’t doing better the whole point?

Have a Look

¶ Check out the buckle. Check out the story. (NYT)

¶ Fabien Clerc. (via The Best Part)

¶ “Inside the Glenn Beck Goldline Scheme.” (Good)

¶ The late novelist David Markson’s library, on sale at the Strand. (LRBlog)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 at 10:30 am.