ducksanddrakes

At the L.A. Times, Dennis Dutton takes up a question about Oscar award categories.

Since the Academy takes no account of sex in designating best art direction or best editing, the question comes up every year: Why differentiate between actor and actress in awarding Oscars?

Dutton rises in defense of the status quo. In this post, I’d like to show two or three problems with his reasoning, chief among them the fact that he drifts from the subject of “acting” to the subject of “role.” These things are not identical, and so Dutton ends up unable to assess the question that he cites.

Dutton begins his argument presenting two contrasting scenarios. In the first, a parent has a sick child late at night and calls a clinic. In the second, a film director needs a replacement when a performer falls ill. Now, the parent will want “the best person” but the director will want a man or a woman. Why? Dutton explains:

Actors play roles, and there are as many potential roles as there are kinds of humans in existence. In particular, there are roles that are not interchangeable, either historically or biologically. This means that the sex of actresses and actors is intrinsic to their work in ways that the sex of a doctor is not. Central casting does not send a petite young woman to play a sumo wrestler, or a muscular hunk to play someone’s sweet aged mother. This isn’t sexism; it is the human condition. Drama and comedy do on occasion call for cross-dressing roles, but even these depend in the first place on our deep sense of the differences between the sexes: Cross-dressing does not obliterate the differences but rather heightens them.

I was wondering how long it would take to get to cross-dressing; it’s time to pause.

What argumentative problems does Dutton have so far? For one thing, the two scenarios don’t make a spectacular contrast: the parent needs a person while the director requires a replacement for a person – the actor or actress is a substitute for an individual who presumably already has a gender identity. A better scenario would have looked at the film writer, who is actually the source of the gendering that we are talking about. And even if we have a “deep sense of the differences between the sexes,” we also have an equally deep sense of the similarities uniting them, right?

Besides, there is nothing more deceiving than a “deep sense.” I try to keep my senses on the surface, where I can keep an eye on them.

Still, Dutton has a point about the specificity of dramatis personae, and his argument shows that extinct terms like “authoress” and “aviatrix” come across as sillier than “actress.” But what is acting all about, anyway? Dutton continues,

Acting is often about the experience of tension, joy, melancholy and obsessive madness that we call romance and love. Men and women, lovers and antagonists, alike and yet so different, are its center of gravity.The game of life, and therefore the game of fiction, is not one in which things might sort themselves out in every conceivable manner. Leaving contrived comic plots aside, men in real life do not bear children. The internal emotional life of a woman, which is what an actress may be called on artistically to express, is not that of a man. One purpose of drama is to make the inner life of each sex intelligible to the other. Shakespeare knew this — and so, when it’s doing its job, does the movie industry.

Here’s the problem: in Shakespeare’s lifetime there were no actresses. Women’s roles were played by boys until the seventeenth century; professional actresses didn’t really appear until the Restoration. So what Shakespeare actually knew was that he had to write women’s roles in such a way that a man could make that character intelligible to other men and women. Don’t believe me? Ask Gwyneth Paltrow, who won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, in which she plays a woman playing a man so she could be an actor playing a woman. Cross-dressing again!

How on earth do the conventions of the Shakespearean stage jive with Dutton’s idea? Here’s how the argument closes:

Long may we enjoy the color, richness and sheer entertainment value of love and war between the sexes. On stage and on the screen, rest assured that none of it will ever be effectively played by unisex acting persons. We need men and we need women. We need actors and we need actresses.

Except Shakespeare, who gave us plenty of color, richness and sheer entertainment, and got by with just dudes.

Finally: even if Dutton has a case that there ought to be gender-specific roles, he has not proven that the role is the actor’s craft. Maybe actors and actresses portray different creatures, but whether a man is playing a sumo wrestler or a woman is playing an aged grandmother, both use similar skills and training to undertake an identical activity of imaginative emulation. Acting isn’t the role, it’s doing the role, whatever it be. Actually, Dutton’s own concept of acting – “tension, joy, melancholy and obsessive madness” – is conspicuously gender-neutral.

Let me put it this way. We have an award for Best Writing rather than an award for Best Writer. We have an award for Best Editing rather than award for Best Editor. This formulation works optimally because it puts the emphasis on the craft, where it belongs. So let’s just give an award for “Best Acting” and be done with it.

“The rawhide thighs of the canyon straddling the knobbled blue spine of the sky:” Check out these springy selections from Monica Youn’s Ignatz, poems inspired by George Herriman’s Krazy Kat cartoons (h/t Stephen Burt)

Initially, the idea made no sense. “If the hyper-intelligent evil machines of the future were going to create a killer cyborg to infiltrate the rebel human population, why would they make it look like a steroidal freakazoid with arms the size of culverts?” Peter Sagal explains how director James Cameron decided to cast Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator.

“Leaving her BLEAK HOUSE, MADAME BOVARY picked up A HANDFUL OF DUST and threw it at THE GOOD SOLDIER. It was OVER, THE END OF THE AFFAIR:” Norm Geras challenges you to tell a very short story using the titles of novels.

In advance of the Academy Awards, Adfreak compiles the best film taglines of the last 30 years. Some favorites: Catch Me If You Can (“The true story of a real fake”), A Fish Called Wanda (“A tale of murder, lust, greed, revenge, and seafood”).

Nowadays, Foreign Policy reveals, we use video games to recruit solders, to train them how to think in challenging situations, even to cope with post-traumatic stress disorder after returning from overseas. Makes you wonder why we bother having real combat at all.

“Dear Janie: School is over and I am now a man of liesure. (Is that the way you spell it?)” When she was a teenager in the 1940’s, noted Egyptologist Jane Sellers corresponded with her high-school pal, Hugh Hefner.

Finally, at Smart Set, Jason Wilson reports that purchasers of the coveted Brunello di Montalcino can now check its authenticity by text message. That’s great, says Wilson, because tasting wine is “no different from study in any of the other humanities — reading works of Russian literature or looking at German Expressionist paintings or listening to Rigoletto.” OMG.

At Humanities, Ammon Shea reports on the best damn thing I’ve read about in a while. It’s a dictionary, but a special dictionary. Let me explain.

Now, as everyone knows, a “perfect” dictionary is impossible. First of all, as Shea points out, any dictionary is out of date before it is finished, as it will not incorporate words or usages added to a language during the duration of editorial revision. Second, no dictionary could be truly comprehensive. Why not? Well,

One might very well say that a perfect dictionary would include all the words in a language. But if this were so, it would include not only the hundreds of thousands of common and not-so-common terms found in an unabridged dictionary, but also several million scientific words that are used by only a handful of professionals. To include all possible words would swamp the vernacular of the language in a sea of jargon and specialized terminology.

Before you start waving fingers, let me concede that these first two problems have been diminished by online practices and digital media. Using a wiki-model database and crowdsourcing, the duration between compiling and publishing can be eliminated. What’s more, since there is no scarcity of material support – no maximum amount of paper to be printed upon – online dictionaries can hold the swamp of vernacular language without bursting. For the sake of argument, let’s even grant that a suitable editorial practice can be devised to make sure that the resulting dictionary doesn’t get soppy.

Even so, there’s a third problem. There always is.

Dictionaries are intended to reflect a language as it is used, whether spoken or written, and this can never be done in anything less than an incomplete fashion. In the United States alone there are now hundreds of thousands of books being published every year. To read all of them (and many are doubtless not worth reading) and keep track of all of the word usage and meanings within would require an army of erudite madmen.

Gotcha, hasn’t he?

If we include spoken instances of the language and online text, we’d need to record and analyze every usage of every word uttered, written, painted or scrawled on every surface, sign, screen or page by everyone everywhere instantly. Such a dictionary belongs in the world of speculative fiction because the idea of a dictionary is, at its core, a speculative fiction. That’s what makes it sexy.

But let’s get back to the good news. Evidently, despite all the vexing problems mentioned above, a group of researchers at the University of Toronto is attempting to create a perfect dictionary, one that includes not only every single word in a language, but every meaning conveyed by each of those words in every context in which it has ever appeared as written by every known native speaker.

There’s a trick to it, of course. You’ve got to start with a dead language.

The lexicographic work in question is the Dictionary of Old English (DOE), currently being compiled at the University of Toronto. This team of researchers, now led by Antonette diPaolo Healey, is working from a corpus that contains every known piece of Anglo-Saxon text (some three thousand items) and is fully searchable by computer.

Four million words, each formed out of the twenty-two letters of the Anglo-Saxon alphabet, and amounting to something like thirty-three to thirty-five thousand headwords. Nothing left out, everything included.

Shea’s article goes on to explain why we need such a dictionary. Turns out there are plenty of reasons: it will shake up Old English lexicography; it represents a new standard in using electronic searching for corpus study; it collates a language from the most pedestrian materials – wills, land records – along with revered epic poetry and engravings on stone and jewelry. Toronto’s project leader, Antonette diPaolo Healey, thinks that the DOE will also be of use to social historians and economists studying topics such as class structure and early taxation.

But that’s not what interests Shea:

After listing all these reasonable arguments for why we need a dictionary of Old English [Healey] added, almost as an afterthought “Plus, it’s our language.”

It is our language indeed [...] This makes me think how odd it is that we are such ardent admirers of museums full of partially reconstructed bone fragments, taken from animals that are millions of years removed from us, and yet we find it so difficult to warm to Old English. While it is true that this is a dead language, it has died so recently (at least compared with the dinosaurs whose fossils are perennially alluring) that the corpse is still warm.

You can see the roots and traces of our language, evident even in the words that did not quite survive until the present day. Bealofus (liable to sin) did not last into our vocabulary, having been pushed out by the upstart and Latinate peccable (we apparently do not need more than a single word for this concept). But the bealoful of yesteryear became the baleful of today, and so even though bealofus lost the evolutionary battle it still tickles the familiar to see it there.

Hold up. Sure, I like what you’re saying. But isn’t the “tickle of the familiar” already there in several well-annotated etymological dictionaries of the extinct component languages that combine to form the family of modern English? And why does this product have to be our own for it to be deemed worthwhile? What if you’re not an English speaker? What if this was a dictionary of Etruscan, Nahuatl or Khitan – wouldn’t those be also equally perfect, equally valuable?

While I share the enthusiasm that motivates Shea’s rhapsody, I don’t understand his question. The value of the DOE should be obvious – it’s sort of a beautiful thing to do. Asking why we need it is like asking why we need drawings of perfect circles, why we need clocks that keep time precisely for a thousand years, why we need daredevils. It’s an embodied fantasy of completion, preciseness, perfection. There’s something archaic about that pursuit, more Pythagorean than postmodern. Perfection is beguiling.

And whatever it may be to lexicographers, the finalized DOE promises to be something everyone admires: a sheer human feat – harmless, ingenious, noble. Maybe the desire to create or witness feats of human ingenuity is a little embarrassing, but it’s also something we should like about ourselves. I mean, at the end of the day, what else is there in the human personality to counterbalance our baleful liability to sin?

Like crispness? Check out this roundup of the artwork of the French illustrator Floc’h. (h/t Frank Wilson, more here and here)

At the New York Times, Virginia Heffernan explains why The Hurt Locker deserves the Oscar for best sound editing – “[It's] alignment of death and silence, instead of death and booms, partakes of an aesthetic based on the idea that you’re deaf when you die.”  As a matter of style, she says, it’s “a kind of sonic Cy Twombly painting …”

Sayanythingblog was sure it had uncovered a secret agenda when it saw photos of books on the history of socialism on White House bookshelves. Alas, the volumes were put there fifty years ago by Jackie Kennedy. Norm Geras vanquishes this lunacy: “I would have thought (a) that it was OK to have whatever books you wanted in the land of the free, and (b) that having three books about socialism didn’t provide that definite a clue to a person’s political commitments.”

What’s editing? “It’s when you cross out a mistake and write the answer above it.” MRP discovers that one six-year old is learning how to make a quill into a pen.

“We should take a page out of her playbook and take a nine iron and smash the window out of big government:” The Awl catches Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty ignominiously endorsing the tactics of Elin Woods, in an impressive show of oratorical ugliness.

Imagine that you spent decades collaborating with one of the best short story writers of the postwar era. Then he dies, and your claims to joint authorship are rescinded. Twenty years later, you post online a few versions of famous stories that don’t exist in print anywhere, and Viking-Putnam shuts you down. That’s the sad tale of Norman Thomas di Giovanni, who collaborated with Jorge Luis Borges, and possesses — but cannot actually own — phantom translations of his fiction …

Finally, at Works Cited, Natalia shows how Obama’s Twitter feed uses a graph of declining job losses over the course of his tenure, reminding us how imagery reflects political style: “It’s the very cramming that makes it possible to say: Boom. Proven with statistics.“

At the Guardian, novelist Henry Sutton pens a top ten list of unreliable narrators.

The article begins noting that unreliable narrators have recently become more “reliably unreliable.” How’s that? See, back in the 19^th century, narrators tended to be unreliable because they were secretive, duped or weak. In modernist and postmodernist writing, however, narrators are practically required to be dark and complex. As a result, Sutton explains, “unreliability became inextricably linked with malevolence – not to mention duplicity, delusion, even derangement.”

Hmm. Let’s hold that thought and come back to it, after looking at a few entries on Sutton’s list.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)

Never straight with himself, let alone the ladies and gentlemen of the jury to whom he is ultimately addressing his words, Humbert Humbert arrived halfway through the 20th century, intent on justifying his appalling crime. Nabokov’s syntactical genius is the one true triumph.

Is this right? I haven’t laid eyes on this novel in a decade. I think of Humbert Humbert as justifying himself in the early parts of the novel, but the narration changes at the end. I direct the reader to D.G. Myers’ account: “Over the course of his novel Humbert gradually sheds his verbal ornamentation, his fine writing, as he comes to atone plainly for the evil he has done …”

Is the elegance of unreliability in its propensity to undo itself?

The Turn Of The Screw by Henry James (1898)

Is it a ghost story, or the tragic tale of a young woman undergoing a breakdown? Believing her two young charges are communing with the spirits of her two dead predecessors, the prim governess of Bly House becomes increasingly panic-stricken and erratic, until she’s left with a dead boy in her arms.

As an undergraduate, I studied this novel in a seminar with historian Nancy Partner, who used it along with Defoe’s “A Relation of the Apparition of Mrs. Veal” to illustrate narrative framing. I learned practically everything I know about close reading in that exercise. I can’t think of a richer set of materials than that syllabus; I can’t imagine a text more reliably elusive.

The Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1902)

Right at the start we’re told that Marlow likes to spin yarns. However, his tale of journeying up the Congo, in search first of ivory, and then the infamous Kurtz, is one of the most powerful stories in literature. Whether his story is strictly faithful becomes irrelevant, as Marlow ends up highlighting the moral corruption at the heart of all humans.

Heart of Darkness may exceed some threshold, here – the story is so thickly allegorical that the criterion of reliability ceases to have purchase. Maybe it’s not unreliable but areliable, if that’s a word.

Let me put it this way. In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth says that a narrator is reliable when he or she “speaks or acts in accordance with the norms of the work.” That sounds exactly right.  But what the hell are the “norms” of a work like Heart of Darkness? I just don’t know.

Maybe it’s best to move on.

(Wait! This just handed to be from the Department of Grouch: “Dear Guardian editors – There is no definite article in the title of Conrad’s novella. Please pull yourself together, thanks.”)

The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson (1952)

It was Jim Thompson, not James M Cain, who put the hard into hard-boiled, the noir into roman noir. He was also one of the first crime writers to take us into the heads of seriously twisted killers, if not out-and-out psychopaths. Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford is regarded as a pillar of the small Texan community he serves. Yet he’s in possession of a secret he doesn’t even admit to himself. When the bodies start to appear, the net slowly tightens.

Yet another novel I haven’t laid eyes on in a decade, but remember vividly. Why do unreliable narrators have the clearest voice, I wonder?

Well, Booth says that novels with unreliable narration make comparatively stronger demands on the reader’s powers of inference – they require more aggressive thinking. Maybe that’s what’s at the heart of this: a credibility derived not from a narrator’s attempt to obfuscate (which is never meant to be totally successful, anyway) but from a sense of readerly inclusion in events, a tactic of invitation to the kind of immersion that produces a memorable encounter. Unreliability produces reciprocity.

So perhaps nowadays a “reliably unreliable” narrator is indeed a malevolent force in the world of the fiction, but for those of us happily licensed by this narrator to infer our way into the novel, unreliability is a benign malevolence.

Is George Orwell’s1984 the most influential novel ever written? That’s what Geoffrey Wheatcroft says in a recent essay in the New York Times:

No other [novel] can have so enriched the language. Try a Web search for countless contemporary uses of Newspeak, the thought police or doublethink – the expressions, that is: a glance at the political pages or op-ed columns provides plenty of examples of what those brilliant coinings describe.

My, with all this “coining” and “enrichment,” Orwell is practically the Royal Mint. Maybe Orwell’s words are still in circulation but are his ideas really in good condition?

In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” Orwell excoriates writing “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Instead, he advocates writing as “an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.” Which of these two descriptions more accurately characterizes the op/ed prose that Orwell has supposedly influenced so profoundly?

In other words: How can a champion of the English language be so influential if the state of that language — especially in political writing — is so obviously dilapidated? Wheatcroft seems to measure importance as the provision of buzz words to dunderheaded hacks so that they can browbeat one another more wantonly. That’s like saying somebody makes the best baseball bats because of how many schoolyard bullies prefer them.

It’s also against the spirit of Orwell’s approach. Orwell criticized writers who borrow “ready-made” phrases and he deplored the use of specialized jargon where simpler words will do, so it is bizarre to celebrate him on the strength of the enduring appeal of his ready-made phrases and specialized jargon.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a lifelong admirer of Orwell. I just feel obliged to point out that he would probably consider Wheatcroft’s usage of “influence” a little barbarous. Yes, many people still borrow a word or two from 1984. But in doing so, they don’t testify to Orwell’s sway so much as ignore it.

(crossposted with WFTC)

“You’re six miles up, alone and falling without a parachute. Though the odds are long, a small number of people have found themselves in similar situations—and lived to tell the tale.” Here’s some advice from Popular Mechanics, at 120 miles per hour.

In British Columbia, Victoria’s Poet Laureate makes the mistake of venting her indignation over a moderately negative review. And she would have got away with it, too, if it weren’t for that meddling Scathing Online Schoolmarm …

What does it mean that Sandor Marai’s Embers has the same cover art as Dan Jacobson’s All for Love? Check out this gallery of recycled cover art.

In New York City, the crime rate has dropped to lows not seen since the 1960’s, which begs the question – how does a young gangster represent?  The Village Voice investigates.

The New Republic digs up John Dewey’s diagnosis of the failure that brought about the Great Depression – excessive romance: “Human imagination had never before conceived anything so fantastic as the idea that every individual is actuated in all his desires by an insight into just what is good for him, and that he is equipped with the sure foresight which will enable him to calculate ahead and get just what he is after …”

“Detail upon detail; intrusive, absurd-loving narrator; Ukrainian village life; wonderfully caricatured characters who always seem to be performing:” You can tell how much Nicole Perrin enjoys reading Nikolai V. Gogol …

At Pomona College, Media Studies is being converted into a formal department. Professor Kathleen Fitzpatrick has mixed emotions: “What conversations won’t take place, now that our structure has become officially institutionalized?”

On the kid’s show Super Why!, characters called “Super Readers” solve problems in fairy tales by deciphering hidden letters that spell out a magic word, altering the course of story events through the power of reading. “Just what exactly is this supposed to teach children?,” asks D. G. Myers. “That sad stories can be brightened up by changing their endings? That Oedipus can escape his fate by magically transforming Jocasta into an ingénue? That Wilson’s shot misses Gatsby, and he runs off with Daisy, who isn’t really such a bitch after all?”

And finally: Back in 1885, Vermont farmer Wilson Bentley rigged a bellows camera to a microscope, and took the world’s first microphotograph of a snowflake. Over the next 45 years, he took 3,000 more, creating a body of work whose great visual power lies in total honesty.

Last week, two pieces of news coincided. First, Toyota announced a recall of vehicles due to a dangerous malfunction in their accelerators. Second, the Lancet retracted a paper that linked vaccines with autism. The scale of the recall was sweeping. The embarrassing retraction was unheard-of in a medical journal of the Lancet’s stature.

CNN covered both developments heavily in daytime rotation, especially the second. I caught an interesting exchange between medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen and a woman from Kentucky named Kim Stagliano, who has three children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders, which she attributes to their childhood vaccinations.

Cohen explained the retraction:

In 1998, a researcher named Andrew Wakefield published a study that showed that there could be a link between autism and childhood vaccines. Well, as you can imagine, a lot of parents really freaked out about this. So that’s what happened in ‘98.

And then in 2010, “The Lancet,” which is the folks who published that study in the first place, they retracted it. They basically said that it wasn’t done properly and they retracted it.

So this is what they said: “It has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al are incorrect. Therefore, we fully retract this paper from the published record.”

And this was the study that kind of started it all. This was the study that got people saying, oh, my goodness, should I vaccinate my child? I mean, you can imagine how parents felt when they read about that kind of a study.

Stagliano challenged Cohen on the facts, pointing out – correctly – that the Wakefield study did not show an association between autism and vaccination, it only conjectured that measles-mumps-rubella vaccines might cause an intestinal infection that could affect the brain. Cohen explained – also correctly – that the paper nevertheless had substandard methodology (10 of the paper’s 13 co-authors had already disavowed it) and has become a touchstone for the growing anti-vaccination movement, whose members should take the announcement as grounds for reconsideration of their thoughts on the matter.

As a correspondent who has covered this issue, Cohen had experience with people who use the Wakefield paper as proof positive:

No paper ever definitively shows anything, but this study was — I mean, I had people thrusting this study in my hands over the years, saying, “Read this, read this, it shows that vaccines cause autism.” That was the way that many people saw it.

Nothing ever definitively shows anything, but case reports showing a link, it has been touted as evidence showing that there is a link.

Now, Cohen is making a fine point about the poor state of scientific and medical literacy. The irony is that a public too-eager to heed published research is not equally eager to discount that research when it turns out to be faulty according to the publishers who lionized it. A study is unimpeachable because it appears in a trusted source, so much so that it becomes more trustworthy than the source that had invested it with authority in the first place.

The Lancet’s studies are gospel, but its retractions are balderdash.

Here is Stagliano’s response, which brings this all together for me:

Your lead-in of the Toyota story really hit me very closely to home. How would you feel if you were told by the federal government that in order to drive your children to school, tomorrow, you have to do it in a 2010 Toyota Prius? You’d be very nervous.

Now, Priuses aren’t driving off the road and crashing at an alarming rate. There may be a handful of them that have a problem. Would you want to put your child into that car and drive her to school tomorrow, and know that if you weren’t in that car, you wouldn’t be allowed to go to school perhaps?

That’s how people feel in the newly-pregnant, soon-to-have-a-baby world. It’s not the autism community.

This analogy is brilliant and devious. It’s devious because it misidentifies the crux of the dispute. In the Toyota case, there is no disagreement about the evidence of a faulty accelerator, but that is not the case with the vaccine. By making the comparison, Stagliano presupposes that everybody already agrees that the vaccine is as deadly as a runaway Prius. That characterization does not capture the situation – hence Lancet’s retraction.

So Stagliano’s analogy is specious. But it’s also clever. By transforming the argument from a medical debate to a policy debate, she has removed it from Cohen’s realm of expertise. This argument has now ceased to be about how people ought to respond to scientific developments. Instead, it has become a narrative about who should decide what’s best for children – parents or the government – a debate in which physicians and science are peripheral. So an argument about finding the facts has become one that marginalizes the very people who seek the facts.

Now, I don’t know a thing about autism. And I don’t think Stagliano’s dishonest. I just think that if this world needs satisfactory analogies – and it does – this one should be repudiated.

Last month I mentioned that Scott Stein of When Falls the Coliseum has been kind enough to let me write a series for WFTC about exaggeration, hyperbole and other unsung accomplishments in the field of human folly.

WFTC is a lot edgier in tone than ducksanddrakes, so the series is zestier than the stuff I post here.

Check it out, if you’re interested:

• On age-inappropriate words
• On lefty academics
• On Chuck Norris
• On clean diesel
• On Warren Beatty’s sex life
• On the worst obituaries of 2009
• On punctuation in the columns of Paul Krugman

Early one Saturday morning, when Frank Wilson was just a boy, he found a dead man outside of his home. The stranger had suffocated himself in his car. “The only thing I remember feeling was curiosity. It inspired no nightmares…”

Want to read a book about the history of the Polonez, Dacia, Wartburg or Volga? No? Maybe one about the Yugo, the worst car in human history …

“Art is so persistent in all our cultures because it is a means of the culture to survive” – this is graphic designer Milton Glaser, interviewed at Big Think – “And the reason for that, I believe, is that art, at its fullest capacity, makes us attentive …”

“I live in this land, where I languish in dread,” so says the irascible collier to Charlemagne in The Taill of Rauf Coilyear, a 972-line Middle Scots poem recently translated by our friend Jeff Sypeck.

Check out this snappy history of the ampersand: “the word was created as a slurred form of ‘and, per se and,’ which was what the alphabet ended with when recited in English-speaking schools …”

He was “Willing to auscultate the heart of every animal, of thousands of cats, dogs, elephants, crocodiles, mice, but rather less adept at sounding the hearts of human beings:” At NYRB Wyatt Mason explores the pernicious anti-Semitism of Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

Liesl Barrell is underwhelmed by a Stanford project to produce neat-o animations of epistolary exchanges between members of a “Republic of Letters” in the eighteenth century: “Writers of the past had friends, apparently.”

A few years back, FBI profiler Joe Navarro was on a Carribbean cruise. “One friend said to the group, ‘Let’s do this again next year.’ I happened to be across from him and his wife as he spoke those words. In the cacophony of resounding replies of ‘Yes!’ and ‘Absolutely!’ I noticed that my friend’s wife made a fist under her chin as she grasped her necklace.” A few months later, lo and behold, they divorced – what is it about body language …

Finally, at World Hum, Paul Lynch asks whether or not cities have their own unique smells: “In a blindfold test, could you sniff the difference between Marrakesh and Hong Kong?”

Breathe deeply, humans.

So the reason we’re supposed to dislike Avatar is that it seems like a rip-off.

Observe:

and

Is does this type of accusation have justice?  When we dismiss a film because it seems to pirate material, what are we really saying?

It’s true that Avatar has echoes of Fern Gully and Pocahontas. It also reminisces Dune, Dances With Wolves, Lawrence of Arabia, and Princess Mononoke. But the accusation of derivative creativity never feels as castigating as it is intended to be. Sure Avatar is full of hackneyed character-types, lame tropes, and borrowed narrative sequences. Big deal – so is Star Wars, so is Shane, so is Citizen Kane.

It reminds me a little of the accusation of historical inaccuracy. Time and again, we hear that a film about World War II, ancient Rome or the Wild West is bad because it is “historically inaccurate.” Yet there are also some very fine films about these periods that play quite fast and loose with “the facts.” Shakespeare didn’t get history right and he knew it. John Ford did the same thing. But those failures never seem to undercut achievement – indeed they rarely even register for the viewer.

Something else is always going on when films are cudgeled for inaccuracy or piracy. Often the problem is that the film does not pull off what it attempts; there is something distractingly wrong with the fiction but for one reason or another we can’t quite articulate what that something is. We call things false not because they fail some test that we rigorously apply, but because we feel vaguely cheated and do not understand that reaction.

In other words, the accusation of piracy is always subsequent to a judgment of poor quality. It’s not that a critic detects that a film borrows from others and then deems it poor. Rather, the critic decides it is poor for other reasons – it’s facile, predictable, politically problematic – and then justifies their statement with the piracy allegation, in the belief that by saying a film is unoriginal we are saying something unimpeachable. Afraid to call something ugly, we settle on calling it filched. Unwilling to talk art, we talk copyright law.

We designate something unoriginal, ironically, because we do not have anything original to say about it.

The real trouble with this reasoning is that its final assessment has no causal relationship to the grounds that are there to support it, since metrics of accuracy and originality are never wielded consistently. And by reaching for such pat explanations, we curtail thought prematurely, and miss an opportunity to reflect on our own reaction more honestly. In truth, all of our assessments begin and end as aesthetic ones. When we dismiss films as rip-offs, we cheapen our own reaction and despoil our basis for judgment.

That sucks. Personally, I thought Avatar was a pretty good movie. It’s too long, and the visual baubles hurt my eyes. But it’s nice to see something really expensive that also shows real marks of forethought and craftsmanship. I know the film is all about motion capture, but it actually also reminded me of more archaic film practices. In Avatar you see action sequences, establishing shots and long takes that give the impression of having been sketched, erased and re-sketched, scanned and reorganized and recolored over the course of a long period of time by a hand that took a lot of care. The duration of that process of visual conceptualization is encoded within the composition of the scenography. That reminded me how interesting storyboards are, how interesting they always have been.

Still, I can empathize with those who felt a little unfulfilled by the movie. Maybe there just wasn’t enough sex in it. Of course, that’s also true of Fern Gully, and don’t even get me started about Lawrence of Arabia.

What’s that you say? Deleted scenes?

Typical.

“‘Why are they doing that?’ my companion whispered. ‘It’s a scrum,’ I said, divesting myself of one of the two things I know about rugby. ‘Yes, but why are they doing that?’ she persisted.”  While visiting South Africa, Claire Potter goes to see Invictus.

“Book burning seems terribly wrong but we have to get rid of unsold stock for pennies and some of the pensioners say the books make ideal slow-burning fuel for fires and stoves. A lot of them buy up large hardback volumes so they can stick them in the fire to last all night:” A dispatch from Great Britain, where the negative symbolism of an act is overcome by its pragmatism.

Meanwhile, at Bibliographing, Nicole Perrin looks back at her year in reading and runs the numbers: “Mean page length was about 234 and median was 224.”

Over at Open Letters, they’ve started a blog of readings from Walt Whitman.  Here’s a memory of Manhattan omnibus drivers of the Knickerbocker era, from Specimen Days: “They had immense qualities, largely animal—eating, drinking, women—great personal pride, in their way—perhaps a few slouches here and there, but I should have trusted the general run of them, in their simple good-will and honor, under all circumstances.”

Why does the verb form of “refrain” mean something so totally unrelated to the noun form?  Language Hat discovers a word with two histories.

At Boston Review, Stephen Burt considers Rachel Zucker and the poetry of motherhood: “The point is that these long, long lines, these stutters and splutters and blanks and lists, can portray, with more verve than anyone else has brought to such tasks, what it is like to be this person, this mother and teacher, at wit’s end: exhilarated, exhausted, exasperated, and able to show how it feels.”

“‘Are we still strong enough to spear mammoths, but now tender enough to spare them?’ [...] ‘Does the cosmos contain any mammoth that we have either speared or spared?:’”  At the Guardian, Stuart Walton reads G.K. Chesterton’s odd book What’s Wrong With the World, which is now 100 years old.

Finally, Churm passes along a recipe for his Aunt Margie’s famous Great Northern beans and ham, which is reputed to have magical powers: the more you eat, the more you’ll earn in the new year.

“It’s food for the poor, who dream of dollars one at a time …”

That sounds delicious.

The Times has something by Jonathan Galassi, president of the publishing house Farrar, Straus & Giroux:

Are e-books a new frontier in publishing, a fresh version of the author’s work? Or are they simply the latest editions of the books produced by publishers like Random House?

See, the estate of novelist William Styron has recently licensed the text of his novel Sophie’s Choice to Open Road Integrated Media. Galassi’s question is about whether or not the licensing is the estate’s to give in the first place, because like many novels, Sophie’s Choice wasn’t the product of a single imagination, but also represents the creativity of a number of people at the publishing house:

It was an old-fashioned book publisher who decided that William Styron’s work was worth reading in the first place. Hiram Haydn signed him up and edited his debut novel, “Lie Down in Darkness,” which Random House published in 1951. As Mr. Styron himself later said, both Mr. Haydn and his subsequent Random House editor, Robert Loomis, had a “genius for catching me out in my weakest or most slipshod moments, but never tried to impose their ideas on mine. It’s the moral support that’s been so valuable.”

Loomis and Styron passed proofs back and forth; the typeface and dust jacket came from Random House designers;  the importance of the work was underscored by commissioning large-print versions and audiobooks for the disabled.

And through it all, Mr. Loomis and his colleagues kept in touch with Mr. Styron, monitoring the life of the book through its various permutations.

But now that we have electronic licensing, all of the other figures who nursed the life of the book vanish; the author’s heirs alone are entitled to sell the license to another company. But as Galassi points out, any e-book will contain much more than the author’s words,

It will also comprise Mr. Loomis’s editing, as well as all the labor of copy editing, designing and producing, not to mention marketing and sales, that went into making it a desirable candidate for e-book distribution. Mr. Styron’s books took the form they have, are what they are today, not only because of his remarkable genius but also, as he himself acknowledged, because of the dedicated work of those at Random House.

[...]

An e-book distributor is not a publisher, but rather a purveyor of work that has already been created. In this way, e-books are no different from large-print or paperback or audio versions. They are simply the latest link in an unbroken editorial chain, the newest format for one of man’s greatest inventions: the constantly evolving, imperishable book — given its definitive form by a publisher.

I admire committed publishers. But I have a few concerns about this line of reasoning.

First, Galassi’s apprehension is more philosophical than he realizes, because the book he’s talking about represents even more than its content and invisible editorial husbandry. Styron also did not invent the language in which his novel was written, nor did he pioneer the style that it adopts, nor is the genre of the historical novel his own. And what about the printer and proofreader, the company that made the ink, the men who made the machines that felled the trees to make the pulp with which to make paper on which to put printed prose?

Maybe that sounds too smartypants. How about this – isn’t the book still famous mostly thanks to Alan Pakula’s film version?  Shouldn’t Meryl Streep get a piece of the action? Surely that performance does more to enhance the financial viability of the new e-book than, say, the dust jacket design. If we’re really going to displace the notion of the author and take the “life of the book” seriously, then legitimate claimants to ownership pluralize more geometrically than Galassi supposes, and you don’t have to be a cigarette-smoking post-structuralist to think so.

Second: doesn’t it seem weird for Galassi to lament that the ownership of a text is kind of a myth, since the publishing industry is built on that myth? The fantasy of ownership is what makes the monetization of fiction possible, and it’s funny to hear the head of a publishing house play the commodity fetishism card like some kind of bohemian in a 1970’s theater collective. Besides, isn’t all of this stuff about who owns what settled by contracts? I mean, editors and typesetters have their own salaries, and although it may be true in an absolute sense that their work is inside the book, all of these contributors surrender that place for the greater glory of a fixed income, and I’m guessing that the decision to do so isn’t something that they agonize over.

Wait: doesn’t Sophie’s Choice start out when the protagonist gets fired from an editing job in a big publishing house? That’s something to chew on.

If you can get past the paywall, check out my article in the Journal of American Studies at Cambridge University Press.  It’s about some of the zany sound effects in Lucille Fletcher’s radio play “The Hitch-hiker.”

I’m tucking this blog in for a short nap.  As it slumbers, here are a few pieces of news, and other things to watch out for in the new year.

First of all, after directing traffic to Donor’s Choose for the last year and a half, I’ve decided to spotlight Modest Needs for a while.  Both organizations have worthy missions, and you should consider donating in this holiday season.

Second, in 2010 I’d like to start a series in which I interview a scholar, researcher, writer or grad student in the midst of a new project.  My hope is that this will be a heuristic for the interviewee, help publicize his or her work, and give me a little more experience at interviewing.  I’d also like to use this opportunity to learn about how researchers communicate, with a view toward better practices.  Research can be a vivid and wondrous process, and that’s something that can be conveyed more forcefully than it usually is.  Any project qualifies – especially in the humanities and sciences – as long as it has matured to the point at which it is possible to reflect on its origins, yet still early enough to be uncertain about its future.  If you’d like to be a guinea pig, drop me a line.

Also: to replace my recently-concluded series on handwriting, I’m going to start a new series of posts on engraved inscriptions.  If you have a good image of text carved into something – anything – by all means send it in to me.  I’m teaching a class on the aesthetics of text this Winter quarter, so this series could also serve pedagogical purposes.

Finally, I’ve started an occasional series of posts about exaggeration over at When Falls the Coliseum.  Visit!

When I started this blog, I intended it to focus on arguments – their internal structures, whether or not they coincide with thinking, how they could be improved or distorted in interesting ways.  My focus has been on unpacking lines of reasoning to ascertain how they work.  Over the last 150 posts, this mission has evolved to encompass a wider field of issues related to writing.  Going forward I’ve decided to embrace that evolution.

Maybe you embrace it too?  Sure you do.