neilverma.net
a blog by Neil Verma
December 6, 2011 by nkhverma

Showing Off

Here’s the text of a monologue I gave at The Paper Machete last weekend, drawing on some research in my book.

One of Frank Lloyd Wright's designs for the Oboler compound

Even in the heyday of radio drama in the 1930s and ’40s, most Americans could name just two radio writers. One was Norman Corwin, famous for generous social tapestries with acres of cloying prose, a giant among broadcasters, who passed away only last month at the age of 101. The other was Arch Oboler, who would have been 104 tomorrow, and had a colorful career penning anti-fascist melodramas, but was perhaps most famous for his years working on the legendary late night horror program Lights Out!, which originated in 1934 in the old NBC studios in the Merchandise Mart here in Chicago.

As a writer, Oboler was more Aesop than Aeschylus, but the pictures he evoked in listener’s mind had the vision of a modern Goya — a morphology of shock, fantasy and bluster, stories of disembodied chicken hearts expanding to take over the earth, teleporting bankrobbers trapped in walls, monsters leaping from projection screens to terrorize far-flung camps. In “Spider,” two thugs on the lam hunt lucrative exotic butterflies in the jungle, where they are stalked by a man-eating spider. In “Murder in the Script Department,” two women are trapped in the tower of a radio station late at night during a freak earthquake, and spook themselves catatonic in fear of a nonexistent monster. In “The Day Sinatra Got Fat,” newlyweds confess they only married one another for money and prestige. Moments later, the two are transformed into pigs by mysterious green dust and are eaten by space aliens.

How many scripts like this did Oboler write? More than a thousand, he boasted. And his plays have persisted at the edges of modern experience for generations. I meet a lot of people nowadays who vividly remember hearing Lights Out! as kids on portable tape recorders around fires at sleep-away camp.

In the 1940′s it was the kind of radio you’d hear half asleep, or passing an open window at night on an unfamiliar street, or sitting in a parked car, unwilling to be alone in your thoughts. Listen to Oboler’s plays and you’ll hear modern life as if it were a psychotic Russian folktale, rich with the sound of writhing worms, of air sucked out of rooms, of bodies turned inside out.

Here’s a clip of what that sounded like.

Oboler’s career is also full of aggrandized myths. A Chicagoan descended from Latvian Jews, Oboler claimed that he was kicked out of the University of Chicago for talking back to a professor, a story I find thrilling but hard to buy, not because no University of Chicago professor is that vindictive, but because no University of Chicago student has ever been that cheeky.

Oboler struck out as a writer and sold his first script to NBC in 1933. By the end of the decade, he was airing up to sixty-five plays per year for Lights Out!, Grand Hotel and Irene Rich Dramas, then many wartime propaganda programs. As a director, he was famous for standing on a table top to cue actors. He once coached a performance from mike-shy Joan Crawford by telling her to perform barefoot. Oboler even used a Dictaphone while writing in order to select words that “sound like radio.” He was known to vanish suddenly from a party, returning with a completed script in a hour or two. In 1940, he commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a house in Malibu with a brook running under it, just so he could hear the sound effect.

Tallying up Oboler’s talents and boasts, radio historian John Dunning writes: “Genius . . . or show-off?”

Gatehouse at the Oboler compound

Of course, on the air, the geniuses were show-offs, all of them. In 1938, Columbia Workshop director Irving Reis hired sculptor Alexander Calder to design costumes and sets, for a radio play. Radio director Bill Robson made a name for himself by writing a script for Calling All Cars about a prison break at San Quentin; the program aired during the actual prison break, Robson rushed lines for a last scene to the studio as word came in over the wires that the fugitives were apprehended. Then there’s Orson Welles, whose first splash was an adaptation of Les Miserables that clocked in at seven self-indulgent hours, who tried out a dozen baskets before settling on the right one for the sound of catching decapitated heads in the guillotine sequence in A Tale of Two Cities, who thought nothing of carting in a ton of sand for a desert scene.

Show-offs don’t care who cleans up after them.

Oboler’s showiness included provocations. A vocal antifascist, he once gave a speech at Ohio State that advocated an outright “radio of hate” to incite bloodlust against the Nazis. In 1937, he made headlines for writing a racy skit about the Garden of Eden for Mae West and Don Ameche on The Chase and Sanborne Hour. The controversy had less to do with the script than with West’s provocative delivery, coupled with the reactions of a studio audience evidently more worldly than is usually captured by our caricatured sense of the popular values of the period. At any rate, after the broadcast, West was not invited to appear on network air for more than a decade.

When I first heard the play six years ago, I had just begun seeing my wife, who asked me why I studied radio plays, of all things, what the appeal was. Grandstanding a little, and perhaps inspired by Oboler’s burlesque, I explained that radio is about the irresistable. It communicates by luring, wooing, coaxing. In that sense all radio, I solemnly declared, was sexy. “Even Car Talk?” she asked. “Especially Car Talk,” I replied.

My point is that the steaminess of the Eden skit — and the horror of Lights Out! — is gobsmacking partly because it reveals the sensuality of listening itself, in the same way that nothing shows the idea of photography off quite like porn. And this was Oboler’s special talent, I think, to bumble from the lurid into the profound, to show too much about a medium that shows nothing.

The Oboler gatehouse today

Oboler’s career dwindled in the postwar as so many shows went off the air. Oboler did a little TV, a little Broadway, directed cult science fiction films and helped develop 3-D film technology, then eventually retired to that home out in Malibu, the one built around a sound effect.

In 1958, the house was the scene of a tragedy. Oboler’s six year old son Peter drowned in a pool of rainwater that had collected in an excavation on the grounds. Sounds like the plot of a late night radio play, doesn’t it?

It goes to show two things. First, it is later than you think, all the time. Second, there’s something true about Oboler’s awkward, irresistible dramatic world. Life is exactly like a psychotic Russian folk tale.

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March 20, 2011 by nkhverma

First Casualty

My friend John Griswold (a.k.a. Oronte Churm) has posted a short piece of mine at his blog The Education of Oronte Churm over at Inside Higher Ed. It’s based on recent talk I gave at The Paper Machete here in Chicago last weekend.

Thanks John!

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February 3, 2011 by nkhverma

Amplitude and Frequency

Here’s a cloud showing the most commonly used words (two of which I invented, by the way) in the 110,000-word book manuscript that I finished writing last month.

Guess what it’s about.

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February 2, 2011 by nkhverma

Abominable

Did you know that the origin of the word “blizzard” is a mystery? One theory is that it comes from the French blesser (to wound), but there’s no proof of that. “Blizzard” was first used in print in an Iowa newspaper called The Northern Vindicator (good name) between 1860 and 1870. Usage was later popularized in American newspapers during the hard winter of 1880-81.

I also looked up the word in the National Weather Service glossary:

A blizzard means that the following conditions are expected to prevail for a period of 3 hours or longer:

  • Sustained wind or frequent gusts to 35 miles an hour or greater; and
  • Considerable falling and/or blowing snow (i.e., reducing visibility frequently to less than ¼ mile)
  • That’s a pretty small definition for a big damn thing. How come there are so many technical specifications for a hurricane, but so few for a blizzard? Perhaps it’s because folks in northern climates have no patience for technicalities. When a blizzard hits, there’s not much science to talk about and not much use in doing so.

    By the way, the weather service glossary is full of wacky meteorological terms. Here are a few:

    Bright-Surge-on-the-Limb: a large gaseous stream (surge) that moves outward more than 0.15 solar radius above the limb.

    Foehn: A warm, dry wind on the lee side of a mountain range

    Knuckles: Slang for lumpy protrusions on the edges, and sometimes the underside, of a thunderstorm anvil.

    Texas Hooker: Low pressure systems that originate in the panhandle region of Texas and Oklahoma which initially move east and then “hook” or recurve more northeast toward the upper Midwest or Great Lakes region. In winter, these systems usually deposit heavy snows north of their surface track. Thunderstorms may be found south of the track.

    I’m going to go outside, toss around a few snowballs, and think about that for a while. I’m sure a joke will come to me.

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    February 1, 2011 by nkhverma

    Achievers

    My fearless sister Sonia Verma is reporting on the unrest in Cairo. Follow her on twitter.

    My brilliant colleague Hillary Chute is inventing a new field in comics theory. Read about her work here.

    My enterprising friend John Griswold has solicited new podcasts from an array of interesting poets, writers and editors. The project goes online this week.

    My dedicated colleague Larry Rothfield is covering the problem of protecting Egypt’s priceless antiquities during the crisis. Follow his observations here.

    And if you’re attending the annual meeting of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies next month, come see my talk on eavesdropping as metacommentary in film noir (or something like that), in a panel on “Rehistoricizing Cinema and Radio” that features some very exciting speakers.

    I’m in the first session, because that’s where they put the hotshots.

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    January 29, 2011 by nkhverma

    Preoccupied

    Hey you: like blowtorches, bonfires, poisonous spiders? Consider a career designing book jackets.

    Here’s an interview with tough guy Ernest Borgnine, who is 94 and still acting. Apparently the only thing he doesn’t like about movies is watching the final work. “I just don’t like to see my puss on the screen. I say, ‘Dummy, you could have done better.’”

    Claire Zulkey reviews TV shows for a living. Guess what bugs her. The comments:Being told that your mother should have had aborted you when she had the chance because of your opinion on ‘Lost’ [...] never goes down easy …”

    In her class on didactic modernism last week, Natalia Cecire asked her students to learn a piece of music from scratch and sing it together. That’s a way of modeling the preoccupations of modernist poetry, of course — difficulty in simplicity, going back to fundamentals, “learning from the ground up.” There was an ulterior motive for the exercise: “They’ve all sung in front of one another; nothing they wish to say about Pound’s Cantos could possibly be more risky …”

    In the early 1970′s, Clairol took hair conditioner out of the salon and brought it to the consumer market for the first time. The instructions told women to keep the product in their hair for half an hour, even though it only took two minutes for the product to work. Why? For the answer, check out this episode of Age of Persuasion on CBC radio.

    Finally, on this blog, I’ve long been critical of the “defense of the humanities” genre, in which writers and professors assume a rigid defensive posture, fixating on difficulties, cutbacks and failures. As an emotional matter, that’s morbid; at a tactical matter, it’s stupid. No one wins by playing defense alone. At Inside Higher Ed, Mary Crane has at last given voice to an alternative stance:

    I propose that all professors who are concerned about the future of the liberal arts try this thought experiment: pretend, for a moment, that we inhabit a utopian world where the value of liberal arts education is universally accepted. If you are freed from the burden of defense, what can you imagine? What can you create?

    Hear, hear.

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    January 27, 2011 by nkhverma

    Obligations

    At the Daily Dish, Conor Friedersdorf proposes that “obligatory editorials” on the State of the Union speech — and on similar topics, presumably — should end. Here, I’d like to consider Friedersdorf’s just complaint, arguing that its terms are a little miscast, but that they also suggest a remedy that might be a little more measured than terminating the editorial altogether.

    The post begins with a parable about a married man:

    He still loves his wife. But after 25 years of marriage, he has lost his enthusiasm for sex with her. Still. It is Valentine’s Day. And she has been hinting. So he takes her to a nice dinner, uncharactertistically orders an after-dinner drink, and feels extra discouraged when it only makes him more tired. He is 55. And so tired. Upon returning home, he wants more than anything to just fall asleep, but damnit, he makes the effort. He surprises her with a gift, lights candles, and dutifully makes love to her in the fashion he thinks that she will most enjoy.

    It is with similar enthusiasm that some responses to the State of the Union are penned.

    The dictionary says that “enthusiasm” means a “rapturous intensity of feeling” for something or someone — passionate eagerness directed at some object worthy of it. Did you know that the word comes from a Greek root referring to the state of being possessed by a god? It’s true. And throughout its history “enthusiasm” has consistently been used to indicate prophetic or poetic frenzy. An enthusiast is by definition excessively under the sway of an external idea, force or being, unable to control his or her own body and thoughts, like an oracle or ecstatic. And like all modes of rapture, enthusiasm is righteous and pleasurable because it is an altered state, a happy madness that makes excellence possible.

    For Friedersdorf, this divine overfeeling has been exorcised from the prose of those who cover the State of the Union and other political rituals. There’s no spirit in the prose. Lack of enthusiasm especially characterizes the writing in “movement magazines” of the left and right, whose editorials seem to be “going through the motions, feigning passionate intensity that isn’t there.”

    He continues, correcting a flaw in the initial analogy,

    In marriage, it is perfectly understandable for one partner to occasionally perform despite not being in the mood. Sex is built into the expectations. Justifiably so. But I’m skeptical about the system of expectations in political letters. [...] What I find pointless is the completely predictable boilerplate that gets published. The banal right-leaning editorial inveighing against the speech. The left-leaning editorial vaguely extolling its virtues.

    Wait a second. Why should the most partisan responses be the least “enthusiastic.” One would think that it would be just the opposite, that true believers might howl with the greatest passion. The trouble, I think, is that Friedersdorf has miscast the problem. It is precisely preexisting enthusiasm in movement organs that necessitates their moribund editorials on political acts in general and speeches in particular. Because true believers are already “possessed” by ideological positions, the writers in question cannot be “possessed” by passion for analytical insight into those positions. This is not a case of an obligation canceling out an enthusiasm. It is a case of a preceding enthusiasm precluding another.

    You can only be possessed by one god at a time. Don’t ask why, it’s just the rules.

    Besides, “enthusiasm” and “obligation” are not as inimical as they seem. Coming into English from Old French, “obligation” refers to acts constrained by oaths, contracts and promises. That which is obligatory fulfills a duty to which the obliged has previously promised to accede. Just as enthusiasm is the overcoming of will by an external power or ideology, an obligation is the overcoming of will to an external power by preceding agreement. Both are fundamentally forms of submission, either to God or Man — virtuous submission, but submission all the same.

    Does either one work to produce superior prose? Let’s face it: the husband in Friedersdorf’s parable isn’t going to get his mojo back by patiently waiting for inspiration to suddenly hit him like a vision on the road to Damascus, nor will he make much progress by mollifying his spouse “in the fashion he thinks that she will most enjoy” once or twice a year. Those options are going to be about as helpful as the after-dinner drink.

    Anyway, I don’t think an imbalance of enthusiasm is really at the core of Friedersdorf’s complaint. Let’s look at a USA Today editorial that irritates him:

    Obama appropriately called this “our generation’s Sputnik moment” — a time to be shocked into a new American awakening the way the nation was when the Soviets launched the first space satellite in 1957. But the nation’s staggering deficits also point toward what might be called a Hindenburg moment, one in which the debt-laden economy explodes like the infamous airship. Without stronger leadership than the president offered Tuesday night, that calamity will make his other goals unattainable.

    “Hindenburg moment?” Blech. Friedersdorf asks:

    Is that apt analysis? Or wrongheaded? Who cares. Either way, what is possibly the point of publishing it?

    In my view, the lack of enthusiasm isn’t the problem. It’s the lack of insight. The passage above has no original material that expands, illuminates, amplifies or elevates. It says nothing we couldn’t read elsewhere or predict beforehand from prepared remarks. In other words, it is an editorial that serves and submits to norms of public political discourse, rather than making the smallest effort to transform those norms.

    With that in mind, my hunch is that good editorial writing should probably be neither obligatory nor enthusiastic. Both are overly beholden to outside forces of God or Man. Instead, we might want the very thing that is smothered in both cases — individuality, independence, voice. Readers want irreplaceable critiques, and writers won’t produce them by doing what a yearly contract requires or by using their craft only to advance empyrean ideological objectives. They’ll only achieve apt voice and good analysis by loving writing more than politics.

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    December 19, 2010 by nkhverma

    Pizzazz

    The New York Times‘ Philip Corbett highlights some of the superior prose that appeared in his newspaper this year. In the holiday spirit, here’s a little constructive criticism for the writers that made Corbett’s list.

    A striking lead and other fine passages in a Steve Myers story from Iraq (Foreign, 12/7):

    KIRKUK, Iraq — Here in this contested city, as in much of Iraq, numbers are not facts. They are assertions.

    Even the simplest questions — how many people live here now and who? — invite a bewildering swirl of answers from regional officials, each laced with underlying political motives and threats of impending violence.

    The number of Arabs who have left since the American invasion in 2003 might be 250,000, or not; the number of Kurds who have since arrived is said to be far higher, or not. Turkmens once made up 60 percent of the city of Kirkuk, compared with 30 percent now. Maybe.

    Wouldn’t it be great if this story ran in more than one section, or on multiple dates — or both? Hey, the medium is dying anyway. As long as we still have pagination, why not let it be as numerically indeterminate as the topic of this terrific lead? What this newspaper needs is Borgesian pizzazz …

    An amusing and effective image from Sam Grobart (Business, 12/4):

    Cameras began showing up in phones almost a decade ago. For much of that time, image quality was akin to grainy shots of U.F.O.’s or Sasquatch. In the last few years, though, more powerful processors and better sensors have improved image quality to levels many consumers find acceptable.

    One wonders if the new processors and sensors would improve the image quality when the subject is a U.F.O. or Sasquatch. That’s impossible, of course. The moment that Sasquatch gets photographed, the photographic apparatus involved becomes immediately unreliable and obsolete. That’s Sasquatch for you: undermining the accuracy of any medium that purports to depict him. Rascal.

    A deft observation in Simon Romero’s intriguing piece about Colombia’s class-conscious beauty pageants (Foreign, 12/1):

    No pageant attracts as much obsessive attention as Miss Colombia. Paparazzi swarm the city each November. Gossip columnists speculate about plastic surgery, while investigative journalists try to uncover whether drug kingpins paid the surgeons’ bill. In a further stamp of legitimacy, Colombia’s intellectuals deride the event.

    On some level, it’s deeply wounding that critique has become little more than a form of legitimation. Part of me thinks that Colombia’s intellectuals at least deserve a fast buck in this scenario. Perhaps Romero has stumbled upon a potential market for intellectuals the world over: the derision business. Let perfume manufacturers pay English departments for deconstructing the cultural politics of their ads, policymakers fork over cash to intellectuals decrying their overseas abuses, and conservative talk-show hosts provide a bonus for scientists who continue to stubbornly insist that global warming is for real. We can call it “derision dues” or “foil fees.” Something cute.

    A nice touch in Jacques Steinberg’s look at the growing use of wireless clickers on campus (National, 11/16):

    But the greatest impact of such devices — which more than a half-million students are using this fall on several thousand college campuses — may be cultural: they have altered, perhaps irrevocably, the nap schedules of anyone who might have hoped to catch a few winks in the back row, and made it harder for them to respond to text messages, e-mail and other distractions.

    I wonder how many people read this article online under a swollen blinking ad for Black Swan, with seventeen open tabs, nine other running applications, and talking on the phone, while updating a Facebook status and sharing the article on Twitter. The gods of distraction laugh at the humans with their puny clickers.

    Jesse McKinley on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the great Happy Meal debate (National, 11/4):

    The board, whose political leanings can sometimes fall somewhere between Democrat and Dadaist, passed a ban on restaurant toy giveaways unless the aforementioned meals meet certain healthy nutritional standards for calories, sodium and fat.

    A marvelous phrase. Remind me to tell you my theory about how the Glenn Beck television show is basically a subtle form of ‘pataphysics …

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    September 22, 2010 by nkhverma

    Write Back At You

    Stare at yourself in the mirror. What do you see? In a new study, 66% of respondents say that after ten minutes, they begin to see deformations. 48% start to see a monster …

    What upcoming show has a curatorial jury including Darren Aronofsky and Takashi Murakami, and recently accepted 23,000 submissions from 91 countries? Why, it’s the “‘YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video” to be exhibited at kiosks in Guggenheim Museums around the globe.

    The American education system has problems. But are they teacher problems? Jarrod Drysdale points out one reason why we just don’t know: “Standardized tests measure a student’s performance because the student is the one taking the test. Thus, such tests are only indirect measurements of a teacher’s performance. Teachers cannot ensure learning; they can only ensure teaching …”

    From fricassees and hasenpfeffer to smoked-goose pastrami — check out Jane Ziegelman’s culinary microhistory of five immigrant families who lived at 97 Orchard Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side between 1863 and 1935.

    “You’re alone and you’re not even told why you’re there. You just fall out of the sky into the middle of this amazing landscape with mountains, sea, desert, and forest, and go wherever you want …” This is video artist Bill Viola, speaking of his new piece The Night Journey, which aims to re-invent the video game as artwork. “The more you do things mindfully, the more is revealed to you …”

    And, finally, Gene Weingarten is sad to report that at the age of 1617, following a long illness, the English language has died. How does he know? Why, it’s all over the newspapers:

    The Lewiston (Maine) Sun-Journal has written of “spading and neutering.” The Miami Herald reported on someone who “eeks out a living” — alas, not by running an amusement-park haunted house. The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star described professional football as a “doggy dog world.” The Vallejo (Calif.) Times-Herald and the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune were the two most recent papers, out of dozens, to report on the treatment of “prostrate cancer.”

    Actually, I’m encouraged that so many local newspapers even still exist in this “doggy dog world.” Here’s to you, Free Lance-Star.

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    September 8, 2010 by nkhverma

    Zero-Sum

    In this recent article, Wall Street Journal theater critic Terry Teachout considers the political conversion of playwright David Mamet, author of such celebrated plays as American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross and Oleanna.

    Let me refresh your memory. About two years ago, longtime liberal Mamet wrote an article for the Village Voice excoriating his erstwhile “brain-dead” political positions, and explaining that his core views are better reflected in the distrust of big government and faith in the free market that he takes to be the centerpiece of libertarian-conservative thought.

    Mamet:

    Tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

    The extremism of this statement ensures its failure. Government built the National Parks system, landed men on the moon, and made it a lot easier for disabled Americans to take the bus to church like everybody else. These things make David Mamet cry? That’s a rational response.

    Here’s some more:

    I found not only that I didn’t trust the [Bush-era] government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.

    Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.

    I almost wonder if Mamet is writing a parody. What’s disturbing about this article is that it cavalierly uses the most simplistic elaboration of the liberal-conservative divide — virtuous founders vs. decrepit modern politics; the market vs. government; Bush vs. Kennedy. Mamet rests lazily on on arguments that I’ve heard a thousand times from writers without a scintilla of his talent. You’d think he’d have some fancy trick, some new and compelling point. But he doesn’t. He just says the same damn thing everybody does, and he doesn’t even say it very well. That’s embarrassing.

    Perhaps my objection is essentially aesthetic. A good conversion story should be like a good Aristotelian drama in that it does not just contain a reversal, but also an element of revelation, of sudden insight. That element is lacking here. Ironically, the problem with the conversion of this major American dramatist is that it is completely lacking in any drama whatever. Mamet comes across like a guy who is used to ordering corned beef and realizes he prefers turkey, and then writes an extended essay on this thrilling transformation.

    Back to Terry Teachout, who explains that the conversion should come as no surprise.

    The only unexpected thing about this conclusion is that it took the author of American Buffalo (1975), Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), and Speed-the-Plow (1988) so long to reach it. In these hard-headed plays, which established him as a major voice in American theater, Mamet respectively portrays small-time crooks, unethical real-estate agents, and ambitious Hollywood executives as engaged in identically savage battles for power over one another. His foul-mouthed characters behave like scorpions in a bottle, determined to sting or be stung. They have no past or future, only the unremittingly bleak present, though they somehow manage to entertain us—if that is the word—because of the manic energy with which they do their frenzied dances of death.

    The battles in which Mamet’s characters are engaged, as one of them remarks in American Buffalo, the most archetypical (and artful) of his portraits of American life, are zero-sum games in which only one player can win: “It’s kickass or kissass, Don, and I’d be lying if I told you any different.”

    Is this right? I thought that the point of these plays is that the characters stuck in these scenarios are full of pettiness, confusion and blunder. I mean, the guys in Glengarry Glen Ross are salesmen ready to claw each other’s eyes out over a brand new set of steak knives. Calling that a “frenzied dance of death” misses the joke of it. These titanic struggles are only interesting because they are so small-minded, giving these plays a signature mood of human self-delusion. To rationalize Mamet’s early work into his current politics we have to take away all of its edge, and that would be a shame.

    And why do we need to fit old Mamet into new Mamet, anyway? The attempt to impose total coherence over a lifetime body of work usually comes across as intellectually desperate. Poet John Dryden admitted that although Shakespeare had the “largest and most comprehensive soul,” sometimes his plays could also be “flat” and “insipid.” Writers, like people, are inconsistent, and that’s okay. Actually, when you think about it, by arguing that the old Mamet “prefigures” the new Mamet, Teachout diminishes the profundity of the conversion itself.

    So what’s “conservative” or “libertarian” about Mamet’s plays? Teachout writes,

    [Mamet's plays] present human behavior rather than trying to explain it. None of the characters is obviously sympathetic, nor do any of them step forward at evening’s end to reassure uneasy audiences that they are seeing man at his worst and that a well-regulated society has the power to lead him in the paths of righteousness. Instead, Mamet portrays human life as a Hobbesian war of all against all, leaving it to the viewer to draw his own conclusions about the ultimate meaning of the struggles for dominance that he witnesses on stage. The only difference between Mamet then and Mamet now is that he has decided that government intervention can do little or nothing to ameliorate the effects of these struggles, and that men do better to work out their differences through the operation of free markets.

    Teachout has elected to pursue this line of reasoning for obvious reasons. By arguing that the anti-liberal Mamet “presents” rather than “explains,” the essay aligns these plays with a whole set of attributes that conservatives often associate with their point of view — hard-headedness, practicality, a more accurate reflection of the actual world, the provision of a choice to a consumer. These are essential components of libertarian rhetoric. The only trouble is that we could apply this very model of “showing without explaining” to plenty of works by people all over the political and aesthetic map, including Chekhov, Pinter, O’Neill, even Ionesco.

    My sense is that Teachout’s argument gets snarled on an unfortunate misidentification. In fact, he is not describing “conservative theater” or “libertarian theater,” but something else — “drama.” Mamet himself has recently written that all theater is about a conflict between good and evil: in comedy and tragedy, good wins; in drama it’s a tie; evil only gets to win in film noir. If Mamet is right, then Teachout’s philosophy seems to be that there is something inherently market-based and anti-government about “drama” because it is about ties between good and evil. Does that sound right to you? Part of me is delighted to concede the point (personally, I prefer comedy, tragedy and noir, in that order) but there remains something wrongheaded about it, since in the real world most “dramas” tend to be written, performed and watched by liberals, and in the past the lack of cozy resolution in these plays has been the very hallmark of soft, liberal equivocation.

    Besides, it seems peculiar for Teachout to define Mamet’s libertarian-conservatism through the unremitting nihilism of plays that contain struggles without any hope of reconciliation. The drama that Teachout describes doesn’t so much make a case for market-based solutions as a case against the very existence of solutions of any kind — in that sense, these are not plays against “the government,” but plays against the premise of politics itself.

    Perhaps the chilling prospect of that abyss is just what has made Mamet so compelling to liberal and conservative alike over the years. Mamet’s plays don’t just have political ideologies, they eat them.

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    August 17, 2010 by nkhverma

    The Bug Room

    Before I was born my father was a paleontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. We had all kinds of stuff around the house that he “borrowed” while he was on surveys and never gave back — flashlights, tents, sleeping bags, instruments. Also, he still had friends at the Museum, so whenever we visited I got to go in the side entrance, meet scientists, see store-rooms, and check out the laboratories where they remove rock from fossilized dinosaurs using small drills and dental equipment.

    Jealous?

    During one of these visits, I heard about – but never saw – the famous “bug room.” See, whenever an exotic animal dies at the zoo or wherever, the museum is supposed to preserve its bones for study. Staff carefully dismember the carcass. Then they put the bits and pieces into a pitch-dark room full of thousands of skin beetles and other carnivorous bugs and wait a few days until the pieces were picked clean. Despite all our technology, it seems, nobody has ever come up with a gentler or more efficient way to free a gibbon from its ligaments or liberate a tiger from its meat.

    Of course, that’s the kind of story that eleven year-old kids go bonkers over. So maybe it was a lie. I never saw the room. Still: it’s the kind of idea that haunts you.

    Anyway, one time I went to visit the museum with my dad and my aunt. She had a job as an archivist at a huge bank. I went to work with her once or twice and she showed me photographs of remote prairie villages in the 1930′s. I also got to see the vault, which is dug right into the bedrock underneath Bay Street. My aunt had a Master’s degree in art. Her apartment was all hardcover books and color-blocked canvases. She and my dad hated each other’s guts, but while I was a kid I still got to go and stay with her from time to time. She’d take me to the big city mall, to book fairs, to jazz clubs. She took me on my first ride on a subway.

    At the museum, we saw the collection of Chinese artifacts. The museum has a world-class collection from the Yuan dynasty. Rumor has it that a lot of it was illegally smuggled out of China in the 1930’s by an Anglican bishop who stuffed artifacts into the baggage of traveling missionaries. My dad’s friends told stories of their predecessors lifting whole trainloads of priceless ancient relics from warlords with no immediate use for their own national patrimony. It’s a great collection, see it some time.

    Anyway, after our visit, we met up with my dad and were confronted by a group of homeless people asking for money. It was one after the other down the block, asking for change, for food, anything. All kinds of people – men, women, old and young. Panhandlers hang out around the Museum because the tourists flock there in the summer; Toronto didn’t really have a whole lot of attractions back then.

    My dad grew up in India, so he knew a thing or two about panhandlers. He’s a gently guy, but he still called them “beggars,” muttering something about how they’re all lazy sons-of-bitches and just trying to get drunk. This bothered me. He enjoyed saying it too much. That made him seem weak. It’s not fitting to demean other people like that, to delight in judging them.

    My aunt gave a look and stopped, deciding to exploit this teachable moment, perhaps because she never had any children of her own. She pointed to the oldest of the homeless people as if he were suddenly under glass. She explained that what made us different from that guy was exactly nothing. There but for the grace of God. The guy looked at me with a little bit of pity. Or maybe he had a severe untreated mental illness, like many homeless people. Or maybe this happened to him a hundred times a day. Or maybe he was trying to figure out how to turn the situation to his advantage. That’s what I’d do.

    We walked on, giving nothing, taking nothing. There was no harm done, apparently. Both my aunt and my dad thought they’d triumphed, but the truth is they were both just being cheap, in different ways.

    Everybody’s a plunderer.

    Years later, I learned that my Aunt was an anti-Semite. She believed that Jews, homosexuals and the French were working together to take over the world. What a compendium of paranoia! I felt ripped-off.

    Before I was born my father worked as a paleontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. He still had friends there when I was young, so I got to go in the side entrance, meet scientists, see back store-rooms, and most importantly check out the laboratories where they remove rock from fossilized dinosaurs.

    Jealous?

    During one of these visits, I heard about – but never saw – a special room in the museum called the “bug room.” Apparently, whenever an exotic animal dies at the zoo or wherever, the museum would keep its bones for study, and so staff would carefully dismember the carcass. Then they’d drop their pieces into this room full of millions of carnivorous bugs and wait a few days until the pieces were picked clean. Despite all our technology, nobody had ever come up with a gentler or more efficient way to free a llama from its ligaments or liberate a tiger from its meat.

    Of course, that’s also the kind of story that eleven year-old kids totally go bonkers over. So maybe it was a lie. I never saw the room. But it’s the kind of image that haunts you.

    Anyway, one time I went there with my dad and my aunt. She had a job as an archivist at a huge bank. I went to work with her once or twice and she showed me photographs of 1930’s architecture in crazy places like Saskatoon. I also got to see the vault, which is dug right into the bedrock underneath Bay Street. My aunt had a Master’s degree in art. Her apartment had nothing but books and canvases. She and my dad hated each other’s guts, but while I was a kid I still got to go and stay with her from time to time. She’d take me to the mall, jazz clubs. She took me on my first ride on a subway.

    On one occasion, she decided to take me to the museum, where we saw the collection of Chinese artifacts and later met up with my dad. They have great stuff from the Yuan dynasty. Rumor has it that many of these artifacts were illegally smuggled out of China in the 1930’s by Anglican bishop William Charles White, who allegedly stuffed the bags of traveling missionaries. They told stories of lifting whole trainloads of priceless relics through corrupt warlords. It’s a great collection, see it some time.

    Anyway, after our visit, we were confronted by a group of homeless people asking for money. It was one after the other in a whole line down the block. Panhandlers hang out around the Museum trying to get some money out of the tourists who flock there in the summer; Toronto didn’t really have a whole lot of tourist attractions back then.

    Now my dad grew up in New Delhi, so he knew a thing or two about panhandlers. He’s a gently guy, but he still called them “fucking beggars,” muttering something about how they’re all too lazy to work and just out to get drunk. It bothered me that he was so low. I’ve never liked small-mindedness, smugness. Also, he seemed to enjoy saying it too much. That made him seem weak.

    My aunt gave a look and stopped us in our tracks, no doubt relishing this teachable moment, perhaps because she never had any children of her own. She pointed to the oldest of the homeless people, a guy who looked like he suffered from a wrenching mental illness, the kind that almost nobody can survive. She explained to me in no uncertain terms that the difference between me and that guy was exactly nothing.

    We walked on, giving nothing, taking nothing. Both my aunt and my dad thought they’d each triumphed, but the truth is they were both just cheap, in different ways.

    Years later, I found out that my Aunt was an anti-Semite. An inventive one: she believed that the Jews and the homosexuals and the French were working together to take over the world. Ever heard that one before? Didn’t think so. When I found out about that, I felt rotten.

    Everybody’s a plunderer.

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    July 23, 2010 by nkhverma

    Merit

    “I began the work by visiting a rubber plant in India and an iceberg lettuce farm in Arizona. Then I designed a telekinetic machine.” Video artist Mika Rottenberg on her recent work, Squeeze.

    The New York Times has discontinued it’s humor blog, “a function of the reality of limited resources in a medium where any number of worthy experiments are possible, but all can’t be sustained.” Check out this sign-off, with an old bit from Laurel & Hardy — a little light humor for ongoing tough times.

    Evgeny Morozov can really unpack the rhetoric of Internet enthusiasm. His review of Clay Shirky’s new Cognitive Surplus: “Shirky’s digital populism not only blinds him, McLuhan-style, to inconvenient facts, it blinds him to the immense complexities and competing values inherent in democratic societies. He says he is writing about Western democracies, but they are unrecognizable in his book, for they appear to have been sterilized completely of social conflict …”

    Ever wonder which dystopian novel is expresses who you are as a person — Player Piano, Snow Crash, The Handmaid’s Tale? There’s a quiz for everything.

    Have you read Gene Weingarten’s piece on the lost art of the headline? It’s terrific: “Early this year, the print edition of The Post had this great headline on a story about Conan O’Brien’s decision to quit rather than accept a later time slot: ‘Better never than late.’ Online, it was changed to ‘Conan O’Brien won’t give up “Tonight Show” time slot to make room for Jay Leno.’”

    “In a house with two young boys, two young cats, and two aging dogs, odd repetitive noises can only mean trouble:”  Writer Oronte Churm has been disturbing old dust and is now beset by coincidences involving boy scout merit badges and pink dolphins.

    Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind is causing a stir. Read D.G. Myers’ review: “With gentle logic and a zinging prose, Robinson shows that the modern enemies of mind, those who engage in ‘a hermeneutics of condescension,’ claim the authority of science without practicing ‘the self-discipline or self-criticism for which science is distinguished.’ In the end, thought without mind is self-refuting.”

    “What would you do with a souvenir threat? Carry it in your wallet like a talisman and brandish it at surly cashiers?” At TNR Ruth Franklin attends a reading of threats by Amelia Gray, and wonders why it is that women poets nowadays are so reticent to express red-blooded anger.

    I’ve been doing some reading about the life of Pythagoras. According to one legend, the ancient philosopher once miraculously overcame the bite of a poisonous snake. Know how? He bit it right back. I love that story.

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    July 12, 2010 by nkhverma

    Melancholy

    When I heard about Mel Gibson’s new bigoted rant, it got me thinking about his old bigoted rants, and pretty soon I was thinking about rants in general, which finally made me think of Shakespeare.

    You probably know that Gibson starred in Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet back in 1990. To promote the film Gibson also made a video entitled Mel Gibson Goes Back to School, in which he toured high schools doing play readings with students. In the video, Gibson says that his favorite passage from Hamlet is a soliloquy from Act 1, Scene 2. The monologue starts like this:

    O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
    Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
    Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
    His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
    How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
    Seem to me all the uses of this world!
    Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
    That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
    Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

    What a tantrum! In this unweeded garden of verbiage there are eight exclamation points and just one full stop. T.S. Eliot famously argued that Hamlet’s problem is that he seems to lack an “objective correlative” for his emotions. Sure, Hamlet is furious about his mother’s decision to marry his uncle just a month after his father’s death, but nothing has actually happened on stage yet to turn that brooding into a wish for the canonization of oblivion. In other words, it’s the hissiness that’s baffling. Eliot:

    The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study to pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fit the business world; the artist keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions. The Hamlet of Laforgue is an adolescent; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and excuse.

    Does Gibson? Let’s compare diatribes. His tirade against girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva starts out as a complaint about whether or not she lied to him about having breast implants, which strikes me as an infinitely trivial objective correlative for what ensues.

    Gibson: So you’re not lying to me about fake tits?

    Grigorieva: I never have.

    Gibson: Yes yes you did. You said they weren’t, you fucking lied to me.

    Grigorieva: I didn’t. I never said anything of the kind. You never asked me I never told you. Or maybe you asked me but I never lied about this.

    Gibson: [Sighs] I’m a liar, who cares. They look ridiculous, get rid of them why don’t you. Anyway …

    Grigorieva: That’s none of your fucking business.
    Gibson: It is, it is I’m just telling you, it’s just an appraisal. Keep em if you want. Look stupid. See if I give a fuck. But they’re too big and they look stupid.

    “Appraisal?” Yuck. What is it with Mel Gibson and breasts — remember when he called that LAPD officer “sugar tits?” Onward:

    Gibson:  They look like a Vegas bitch, like a Vegas whore. And you go around sashaying in your tight clothes and stuff. I won’t stand for that anymore …

    Grigorieva: I don’t walk around in tight clothes, I stay at home for most of the time.

    Gibson: … You go out in public and it’s a fucking embarrassment to me. You look like a fucking bitch in heat. And if you get raped by a pack of ni**ers it will be your fault. Alright? You are provocatively dressed all the time with your fake boobs that you feel you have to show off in tight outfits and tight pants and you see your pussy from behind and that GREEN thing today was enough. THAT’s provocative, okay?  I’m telling you, I’m just telling you the truth. I don’t like it. I don’t want that woman. I don’t want you. I don’t BELIEVE you anymore. I don’t TRUST you. I don’t LOVE you. I don’t WANT you.

    The racial slur is just one reason why Gibson comes across as such a jackwagon. Also, like Hamlet, his intensity is out of all proportion to the situation. In fact, his rage is so excessive that it even undermines his stated position. Gibson clearly does want her, hence the fireworks.

    But what is it about her that he wants? That’s hard to ascertain. Gibson starts out like a parent chastising a teenage daughter for wearing a short skirt to church, but by the end of the rant his tone sounds more like a teenager himself, bitching about being grounded, stomping around his room until his hormones subside. I’m surprised he doesn’t threaten to run away from home. Maybe Mel didn’t quite make it back to school, but he seems to have made it back to the schoolyard.

    Which brings me back to the soliloquy, and it’s second obvious feature — Hamlet’s obsession with his mother’s sex life, which is just as involved as Gibson’s. Here is the second half of the monologue, in which Hamlet describes the suspicious brevity of Gertrude’s mourning before she up and married Claudius:

    Let me not think on’t–Frailty, thy name is woman!–
    A little month, or ere those shoes were old
    With which she follow’d my poor father’s body,
    Like Niobe, all tears:–why she, even she–
    O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
    Would have mourn’d longer–married with my uncle,
    My father’s brother, but no more like my father
    Than I to Hercules: within a month:
    Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
    Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
    She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
    With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

    Whatever else he intends to express with all the galled eyes, dexterous events and incestuous sheets, it’s pretty clear that Hamlet gets self-righteous satisfaction from judging the sexuality of women, particularly his mother. Sure, he’s  tormented by his mother’s degradation, but the fine detail in his imagination suggests that he also gets a kind of enjoyment out of the torment. So does Gibson. That’s part of what’s so revealing about the rape comment. My theory is that Gibson relishes imagining this scenario with the provocative dress — you can picture him sitting around thinking about it, turning it over in his mind, coming back to it when he gets distracted by something else. That’s the kind of guy that he is, and it fits in with his racism and paranoid anti-semitism. His misogyny and bigotry are but manifestations of a deeper poverty of character that is the propensity for seething, childish, obsessive fixation.

    That’s what makes him scary. He’s the kind of person that you don’t want to think about you in moments when he is all alone with his thoughts.

    For me, Hamlet‘s ultimately about just this spiritual illness. Sure, there are plenty of problems with the play, but what isn’t a problem is the way that Shakespeare gradually unravels his hero’s weary, stale, flat and unprofitable propensity for morbid fixation, orchestrating accidents that tease from Hamlet the appropriate level of action needed to bring equilibrium to the world of the play. No other character is really like that in Shakespeare’s fiction. That’s why Hamlet’s rants — as gross, misogynistic and immoderate as they are — always come across as more reflective than rude.

    So while Mel Gibson’s career may be finished, I’m surprised to discover that I still hold out hope for his immortal soul. At least he’s got an appreciation for the very literary parable that is best able to draw him out of his infantile egomania.

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    June 21, 2010 by nkhverma

    A Fine Romance

    In romance, do opposites really attract? Nah. Journalist David McRaney has been reading the research.

    Not only are you more likely to be attracted to and marry people of the same culture, religion and status, but you’ll probably stick by them in the long run. Why? Well,

    People who are more like you are more fun to be around, easier to talk to and more likely to like the same movies and TV shows you do. They’ve read the same books and loved them as much as you did. If they have yet to read those books, you can look forward to introducing them to your favorites.

    When you discover new things, you respond to them in a similar way. You say, “That’s awesome!” They say, “Yeah, that’s really cool.”

    When you find someone who matches up with your personality, they validate your beliefs and world-view, they confirm your outlook.

    McRaney’s overall reading of the research rings true, but the reasoning in his post could be spruced up.

    First, “likeness” is not clearly defined. One study focuses on religion, another focuses on sense of humor, another on appearance, while yet more compare several criteria. McRaney’s argument conceptualizes all of these forms of “similarity” as relatively interchangeable. To me, sharing religion is one thing, having the same favorite episode of Lost is something else, and genetic homology is a different thing. Lumping them all together seems counterintuitive.

    Defining terms is important for any argument, but the problem is especially acute here because the nature of similarity is part of the mythology of romance. When I teach Pride and Prejudice, I ask my students to consider how Austen encourages us to assess the characters relative to one another at various junctures in the novel. Students instinctively grade characters according to class status. Using that criterion, it’s easy to see how unlikely the pairing of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy really is. But what if we consider the characters based on who comes off as the “coolest?” Whatever separates them, Elizabeth and Darcy seem far cooler than virtually anyone else in the novel, and if the capacity to intrigue us and invite speculative admiration is the basis for assessment, then the marriage seems inevitable. Which of these two criteria should we follow – class, cool, neither? McRaney’s conclusions ought to give us some equipment to know when to discard one criterion or another.

    My point is that when it comes to romance, some similarities and oppositions are invariably more prominent than others. Good novelists manipulate that discrepancy, but good social researchers should control for it.

    My second criticism has to do with the nature of the argument. I wish that McRaney did not merely expose the falsehood of the “opposites attract” idea, but also asked what that falsehood itself might mean. Dispelling myths is super, but I want to know where those myths come from, what values underlie them, and what forces perpetuate them. In many instances, a myth is less interesting than its stubborn persistence.

    McRaney does point us in exactly the right direction. Here are some of the conclusions he draws from the literature:

    Most people want a partner with whom they share a lot in common, not who challenges their every notion of how the world works.So, what about choosing someone who looks like you. Does it go that far? Are you really that much like Narcissus pining away at his reflection?

    Maybe.

    [...]

    It seems as though you are looking for someone with a great outlook on life and a wonderful sense of humor, and the rubric, the standard by which you judge potential mates, is you.

    The allusion to Narcissus is smart, but not in the way that McRaney thinks. A mirrored reflection is not a likeness of the self. Instead, a mirror shows us the reverse of ourselves, so Narcissus was attracted to his precise opposite. Perhaps a similar effect obtains in real life: the more similar our lover is, the less similar he or she appears to be. While we love people who reaffirm our world-view, we love them best when they appear not to. And so there is a relationship between the delusion of our preferences and our actual preferences. Deep down, we may want somebody just like ourselves, but in order to find that person in the mirror of the outer world, we have no choice but to seek that which our senses will identify as our reverse.

    This lines right up with the Narcissus fable. According to Ovid, Narcissus eventually did realize that it was only his own reflection before his eyes. Only after attaining this awareness and continuing to abide in the illusion did Narcissus pine away. Here’s what Narcissus says in the moment of realization:

    Alas! I am myself the boy I see. I know it: my own reflection does not decieve me. I am on fire with love for my own self. It is I who kindle the flames which I must endure. What should I do? Woo or be wooed? But what then shall I seek by my wooing? What I desire I have. My very plenty makes me poor. How I wish I could separate myself from my body!

    Dang. Nobody needs that kind of metaphysical anxiety. Moral of the story? Sure, the belief that opposites attract is a deception, but perhaps it’s one better left undisturbed.

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    June 9, 2010 by nkhverma

    Might

    There’s an upcoming show at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art on Alexander Calder’s influence on sculpture (inset: Nathan Carter, Traveling Language Machine with #3 Frequency Disruptor and Disinformation Numbers Station, 2007). Did you know that Calder once designed costumes for radio plays? Yes, I said costumes.

    Conjurer James Randi has spent 1 hour and 44 minutes in a submerged steel coffin. How did he do it? “It’s a matter of using some common sense to start with. You don’t want to use up a lot of oxygen …”

    Here’s a mischievous new initiative: in the U.K. poets are eavesdropping on strangers and turning the phrases they overhear into poetry. The idea is to “bring writers out of their sweaty garrets and into the streets and coffee houses.” Who will be most embarrassed by this, I wonder.

    Screw the new iPhone. If you want to really bring the action to life, check out these vintage VCR advertisements.

    What is a museum? “A place for a secular ritual,” says Tino Sehgal, “where categories that constitute the basis of our society are enacted and exercised.” After what he pulled at the Guggenheim, he should know.

    Stephen Burt surmises that social networking isn’t an addiction, but … “Anyone who regrets time spent online, anyone who spends hours clicking on photos and links and then asks where his morning has gone, has experienced at least a bit of the feeling that addicts know: the sense that our brains’ pleasure centres, our immediate impulses, have led us astray.” Want to read more? Go ahead, click the link. You know you want to. No one’s watching.

    And, finally: ever wonder what makes the red pen the mightiest of all? An expert reflects.

    This blog is shutting down for a few weeks. It’s about time that I took a hike.

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