ducksanddrakes

“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, over-the-top, predictable – 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.

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.

At The Philosopher’s Magazine, Mike LaBossiere is following a story that is preoccupying slightly less philosophical magazines nowadays:

The recent media frenzy over the Tiger Woods‘ affair(s) raises numerous issues of philosophical concern. The one that I will focus on is the matter of the extent of our right to know about what goes on in the lives of others.

The objective is welcome.  LaBossiere seeks a way to keep the congress between privacy and publicity at a reasonable smolder, to help us all act like adults again.

But I’m doubtful about LaBossiere’s decision to use the language of “rights” to keep this party polite.  In this post, I’ll pressure this framework.  Of course there are plenty of reasons why a rights-based approach is attractive – it’s orderly, it’s predictable, it’s familiar – but as a matter of strategy my belief is that it will not provide the result that we want because it is too individualized in its mechanism to combat prurient fascination in media stories like the Tiger Woods scandal.

It is, after all, a frenzy.  And frenzies don’t yield to the nonchalance in which LaBossiere’s  framework is optimal.  Instead, I hate to say, we may need something larger and more amorphous, like good manners.

Let’s look at LaBossiere’s exploration. He begins by asking how we can balance the public’s right to know against the right to privacy.  The first move is to borrow from Mill’s account of liberty, which is rooted in the belief that one can only legitimately interfere in the liberty of another in order to prevent harm.

It can be argued by analogy that the same sort of principle can be applied to what people have a right to know about others. To be specific, a person has the right to know something about another person if not knowing this would be harmful to the person. For example, a person has a right to know if the babysitter she is considering hiring is a pedophile or not.

In the Tiger Woods case it is obvious that this sort of principle would not provide the public with a right to know what is going on in his life. This is because what he did or did not do does not harm the public, although people obviously find it of great interest.

This account hinges on two issues. First of all, we’d need to come to an agreement about the meaning of “harm.”  Second, we must sort out which deeds belong to the category of harm – even for powerful politicians, there must be deeds that do not have the potential to hurt the public, and remain beyond the ambit of the public’s right to know.

Bracketing those two problems, the underlying principle seems okay.  However  …

While the principle of harm does seem to be a reasonable basis for such a right, it might seem to be rather limited. After all, intuitively it would seem that people have a right to know things even when these things are not a matter of harm.

So much for Mill.  See, we can’t pattern our account of privacy rights using our account of liberty because the result gives privacy enormous default advantage that it might not require or merit.  What’s more, even if we had a hard and fast definition of harm, the burden of proof makes the plan unworkable: the public would need to know about a deed in order to decide whether or not that deed meets a test of harm and therefore needs to be known by the public.

I’m exhausted already.  Perhaps, rather than considering two competing types of rights – privacy and public knowledge – we should just concentrate on the former.

Time for a second proposal:

Another possible foundation for such a right is that people can give such a right to others. For example, when someone intentionally and knowingly provides another person with access to information then they have provided that person with the right to know. For example, if someone posts pictures of her drunken adventures on Facebook and has allowed her friends to view her photos, then she has granted them the right to know about said drunken adventures. As another example, a person can provide others with such a right because of their profession or the relationship they establish with that person.For example, if someone hires a lawyer, then that person gains a right to know about facts relevant to this professional relationship. As another example, when people enter into a relationship, then specific sorts of relationships provide a right to know. As a specific example, when two people are dating then they would seem to have a right to know certain things about each other that go beyond those that might be a cause of harm.

That’s a lot of examples.   In this framework, privacy is forfeited in quasi-contracts.  You want a Facebook account, a lawyer, a boyfriend?  Sign here and we’ll shave off part of your preexisting peace and tranquility.  This proposal surely mirrors the real world: we give away aspects of our privacy all the time, and this relinquishment has become a part of our economy and indeed our way of life.  LaBossiere’s account also has suppleness – not every act surrenders all privacy.  One’s privacy is not a whole picture to be stolen, but a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces can be bartered for other goods and privileges.

That’s what makes the case of Woods so interesting, because his puzzle pieces do seem to be traded all in one go, to everybody:

Tiger Woods went beyond being a gold professional and became a professional endorser of products ranging from razor blades to cars. In one commercial, the public was even invited in to see him reading a bedtime story to his child. As such, he was clearly establishing a relationship with the public that went beyond being a just a guy who swings a club.

In such a role he crafted a reputation and image in the course of establishing a relationship with the public. The idea was, of course, that the public should trust his endorsements because he presented himself as the sort of person who could be trusted. After all, such endorsements presume the establishment of trust. While getting such endorsements depended on him being a great golfer, they also depended on him having a good reputation and a certain sort of image. As such, the image presented is a critical part of the relationship as well.

By entering into such a relationship based on trust Woods thus gave the public a right to know about what lies behind that carefully crafted image. After all, he was using his image and reputation to sell products and the public would thus have a right to know whether the image and reputation were legitimate or not.

As such, when he allegedly engaged in behavior that seems to directly contradict that crafted image, then the public had a right to know whether the claims against him are true or not.

In this sense, the scandal represents an exacerbated example of the kind of ordinary surrender made by anyone with the temerity to swipe a debit card or send an email that contains a product keyword.

While we may have arrived at an interesting philosophical truth about the meaning of celebrity, there are still at least two points about this last move that cast doubt on the aptness of the overall approach.

First, notice that LaBossiere’s argument only works if a scandal involves just one person.  Tiger’s Gatorade contract may surrender his quiet life, but it does not surrender the privacy of Tiger’s children, Elin Nordegren, Rachel Uchitel, Jamie Grubbs, Kalika Moquin, Cori Rist, Jamie Jungers, Mindy Lawton, Holly Sampson, Joslyn James, Loredana Jolie, unnamed mistresses 10, 11 and 12, Julie Postle or Theresa Rogers.  Some of the mistresses have surrendered their privacy as a result of the scandal, sure.  But if a significant portion of the other characters in the drama are not willing to sell out, how can we tell the story?  A media frenzy requires casts of thousands to make it unfold in a way that is suitably frenetic, so a model that is based on individual celebrities giving away their rights to the public eye will not be helpful so long as the rights of everyone else involved have equal moral force.  In short, this isn’t just Tiger’s story, so it isn’t just his privacy, and that complicates matters enormously.

Second, LaBossiere’s excellent account of celebrity makes me think that a possession other than privacy is at stake.  When a spokesperson endorses a product, not only does that product gain stature, but so does the spokesperson.  To be a spokesperson is to transform public admiration into authority to make recommendation.  The act is creative, but not stable.  Although Woods’ accomplishments helped achieve adulation, that adulation does not actually belong to him.  Woods is not only relinquishing his rights, he is also neglecting a public property that is only entrusted to him: The Idea of Tiger.  Woods’ privacy may be beside the point, because he is managing a set of feelings within the minds of fans that aggregate into a projection.  Nobody cares about what Woods has done to his family; people care about what he has done to our faith in him.

What do my apprehensions have in common?  Both emphasize that there are more stakeholders and stakes involved than a rights-based approach can economically manage.  We need something bigger than that.  In fact, we have been misunderstanding the question all along.  The Woods scandal thrives not in the absence of a common account of rights, but rather in the absence of a common etiquette.  It’s not about bad justice,  but about bad manners.  We cannot slake our desire to be disgusted, or perhaps envious, of Woods’ excesses.  That’s not a desire that a more rigorous framework for establishing privacy rights will moderate.

Do we even want it to?  There is a nice symmetry between Woods’ prurient behavior and our prurient interest.  The whole process can result in a cleansing to relieve the tedium and reinforce the everyday middle-class values on which the weekly-magazine industry depends.  In that sense, the Woods scandal may not just breech the wall between public knowledge and private life, but also brace the stories that we tell about it.

Yours truly, profiled.  Thanks, Norm!

“An unbelievable asshole but a day ago, Scrooge is now the picture of human kindness. I, for one, don’t buy it.”  Still, Morgan Meis does have terrific insight on hidden genius in Dickens’ prose …

If you’re following the health care debate, don’t miss this article from Reno News and Review.  “We are living through the Californiafication of America—a country in which the combination of a determined minority and a procedural supermajority legislative requirement makes it impossible to rationally address public policy challenges.”  Maybe the bill isn’t the story.  Maybe the story is that we’re no longer able to pass transformative domestic legislation of any kind.

What’s the signature product of the decade?  “The original white iPod is already on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and one can assume it will eventually take its place in the Smithsonian alongside the telephone and the cotton gin.”  Why do I still read Vanity Fair?  I’m a grown man.

“It’s what you could call a derivative, an egalitarian fantasy that gains appeal only once socially moulded notions of supremacy are brought to nought:” Aresh Shirali has finished reading Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice, and thinks that John Rawls’ theory of an Ideal State is still standing …

Happy Birthday to the Ottendorfer Library, the first and oldest free public library in New York City, where Max Ernst and Bertolt Brecht once lectured.

Just when Jeff Sypeck had strayed from his mission to discover unexpected manifestations of medievalism in everyday life, before him appeared a romanesque groined vault, complete with a tetrapylon, cunningly disguised as a bus stop in Maryland …

“His book, a collection of lyrical prose meditations on Melville’s Moby-Dick, redounds with collapsed binaries and aporetic splits, contradictions that reciprocally create themselves, terms that imply and give rise to their opposites.” This is B. K. Fischer reviewing Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary at Boston Review. “But the deconstructive move, the self-conscious trafficking in verbal paradox, becomes almost a tic …”

Finally, celebrate the end of 2009, the year of the tantrum, with Craig Silverman’s roundup of the year in media corrections.  A sample, from The Guardian,

A comment piece about achievement and frailty in the lives of artistic greats mentioned Wagner’s reminder to his favourite Vienna chambermaid to wear purple knickers next time they met. A Wagner expert points out that the pants in question were pink (To understand genius, forget the purple knickers, 19 August, page 28)

Glad that’s settled.

Here’s Norm Geras on the cliche of the week:

The view that Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize has been premature is incoherent. Here’s why. Either Obama already deserves the prize or he doesn’t. If he does, then it isn’t premature. And if he doesn’t, then it’s only a guess – or if you prefer a hypothesis – that he will at some point come to deserve it. In that case the award is just wrong since he may never come to deserve it. Who can know the future? Not even the Nobel Peace Prize committee.

Oh snap.  Still, something about this reasoning isn’t quite right.  How about an illustrative comparison?

This is not like a premature declaration of the innings in cricket, where we know for sure, for example, that had Adam Gilchrist not declared when he did, he could have declared later and not lost the Test.

Cricket?  Hell.  Got anything else?

It’s not like a premature baby, where we have a strong evidential basis for thinking the baby would have been born later had it not been born now. So, whether deserved or undeserved, the award to Obama can’t be said to be premature – although one day we may able to say that it was premature.

Now I’ve got you.  In dumping the adjective “premature” Geras has let the baby out with the bathwater, neglecting the terms “prize” and “award,” which are the nouns that are actually modified by the adjective in the first place.  So if Geras’ sentence is sound, then the question shouldn’t be whether or not the conferring of the award or the deserving of the award is premature.  Rather, the question ought to be: can prizes and awards themselves be premature?

Let’s ask the Oxford English Dictionary, whose definition of “prize” actually contains a direct reference to the Nobel in the word’s primary usage, section 1c:

A reward or trophy offered to a person displaying particular merit in a skill, art, field of study, etc., in a competition, exhibition, etc., designed to promote such activity or study. Now freq. qualified by the name of the person who founded the prize or in whose memory the prize was established, as Pulitzer prize, Nobel prize, etc.

It’s a curious array of performance actions described here – display, exhibition, promotion.  These are activities of specifiable temporal span, resembling the predictable duration of the pregnancy analogy.  Although any future Nobel-worthy act is indeed only a guess, we have a strong evidential basis for thinking that the display of the merit will go on for at least three years, which makes the award at least open to the allegation of prematurity.  We can’t know if Obama will do a Nobel-worthy deed, but we can know that the Obama show will be in town for a little while, which means that the language of “maturity” can be tied to a metric that is skeptical  that the performance has reached its promised climax.

What about the other noun that Geras uses – “award?”   Here are the aspects of the definition that seem to fit the situation:

1. A decision after examination, a judicial sentence, esp. that of an arbitrator or umpire; the document embodying it.

2. a. That which is awarded or assigned, as payment, penalty, etc., by the terms of the judge’s sentence or arbitrator’s decision.

b. Something conferred as a reward for merit; a prize, reward, honour.

Notice that all of these definitions point less to the event of the awarding and more to the material object itself – “the document embodying it;” “that which is awarded;” “something conferred.”

This opens up an intriguing possibility: is the medal itself “premature?”  Is the perceived aspect of “prematurity” not lodged in the honor that the thing confers, but instead embedded in the very Scandinavian gold that marks the conferring?

The Peace Prize has a unique design among the traditional Nobels.  The four “Swedish” Nobels (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine and Literature), were crafted by sculptor Erik Lindberg, while the Peace medal was designed by Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland.  Today, they’re even minted in different places – the Swedish medals come from Myntverket in Eskilstuna, while the Peace medal is cast by Den Kongelige Mynt – the Royal Mint – in Kongsberg, Norway.

Here’s the Literature Nobel

and here’s the Peace

Vigeland was not an engraver by trade, but a sculptor.  Notice the rough surfacing of the Peace, particularly the unfinished quality of the bust of Alfred Nobel, along with the fraternal triumvirate depicted on the back with linked arms to symbolize brotherly unity.

When the Nobel Foundation laid out its rules in 1900, it was specified that recipients would be given “a gold medal bearing the image of the testator and an appropriate inscription.”  Depending on the discipline, these inscriptions vary slightly.  For instance, the Literature award takes its inscription from Virgil’s Aeneid:

Inventas vitam juvat excoluisse per artes

The Nobel Foundation site offers an idiomatic translation “And they who bettered life on earth by their newly found mastery,” as well as the literal “Inventions enhance life which is beautified through art.”

Compare this retrospective and reflective statement to the epigrammatic inscription on Vigeland’s Peace Prize:

Pro pace et fraternitate gentium

“For the peace and brotherhood of men.”

A noble sentiment.  But comparatively speaking, you have to admit that it is a little aspirational, a little ahead-of-itself.

Climate change doesn’t interest me much.  In high school, my chemistry teacher taught me that when you alter the chemical composition of a substance – phenolphthalein, carrot cake, Earth’s atmosphere – that substance will behave differently.  So just as too much sugar in my coffee makes me mean, too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to change in the many life-support systems that the atmosphere touches.  We can argue about the direction, pace or extent of that change, but the principle itself should be familiar to anybody who’s ever chosen one kind of barbecue sauce over another because it had just the right amount of zip.

So the facts are dull.  But the dispute over climate change is infinitely perplexing.  For one thing, I don’t get the anger. If climate change is a hoax, what is the ulterior motive behind it?  As a student of fiction, I’d argue that a dastardly hidden agenda is essential to any compelling conspiracy narrative, but the climate skeptics seldom offer a juicy one, so it’s always a little unsatisfying to read.  I’ve also never understood why believers make so much fun of deniers.  There will always be skeptics; calling them nincumpoops makes you look like a bully, and that only hinders progress toward a cooperative response.

The reason for all this anger and combativeness may be that each side of the dispute thinks that it owns all of the facts.  Worse – each side believes that the other is only pretending; disputants don’t concede that opposing belief can be conscientiously held.  So the only line of attack is an ad hominem allegation of mendacity, which means that the debate isn’t about what’s happening in the world but about whether or not the other fellow has the standing to discuss what’s happening in the world.  This makes the argument like a middle school dance: a debate that never ends because it can never begin, which is maddening for anyone who cares about orderly argument.

So what should we make of the situation?  Although the debate is unable to really get going, it still persists, so the disorder must be producing something of value.

That’s the question I had in mind when I read this observation by Cato Institute writer and journalist Cathy Young:

In the unfolding debate over “ClimateGate,” the affair of the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia that offer an inconvenient peek behind the curtain of climate science, one thing is clear. Virtually every commentator’s position on the issue – is this a scandal that exposes global warming as a scientific sham, or a faux scandal stoked by climate-change denial propaganda? – can be predicted by his or her politics. You can look at the byline or the publication, and predict with near-100 percent accuracy what the article will say. It is no surprise that The Wall Street Journal deplores the arrogant and dogmatic mindset of the “warmists,” or that The New Republic assails the brazenness of the “deniers.”

While the facts are ostensibly the same, the interpretations differ so dramatically that we might as well be talking about two different realities.

How did this debate devolve to such a point?  Young has a hypothesis.

I will freely admit that I don’t have enough knowledge of science or familiarity with the scientific method to be able to come to a truly informed conclusion at to which version of “ClimateGate” is right. Neither, I suspect, do some 95 percent (or, more likely, 99 percent) of people who have spoken out on the issue, on either side. That means they are likely to go with their political instincts and listen to those “experts” who reflect their own preconceived opinions. Conservatives and libertarians, who see the crusade against global warming as an attack on capitalism and freedom, are very likely to think that the hacked emails are devastating to the case for human-made global warming; liberals and leftists, who see global warming denial as an attempt to protect greed and unbridled consumption, are very likely to think that the only real scandal is the deniers’ shameless manipulation of public opinion in an attempt to discredit solid science.

[...]

Public trust is something scientists must work hard to maintain. When it comes to science and public policy, the average citizen usually has to trust scientists – whose word he or she has to take on faith almost as much as a religious believer takes the word of a priest. Once that trust is undermined, as it has been in recent years, science becomes a casualty of politics.

The point of view is extraordinary.  A champion of facts, Young submits that 99 per cent of the spokespeople on the issue do not have a grasp of the situation, yet she does not call on them to quit speaking.  What’s more, she seems to fault the scientists for the politicization of their work, as if climate change scientists were not the least equipped figures in this argument to protect their product from spin.

And I think that Young is missing the larger implication of her perspective on the recent scandal.  What she’s shown is that climate change isn’t a debate, it’s a pretext for debate, one in which science isn’t a set of evidence but rather a medium for two realities to have a conversation with one another.   It’s a pure and clarified opportunity to take a position, a performance of values that eschews more reasoning than it requires.  Taking a side is more like making a lifestyle choice than casting a ballot.  That’s what makes the argument so valuable: it helps us define who we are in relation to others precisely; the greater the acrimony, the more self-satisfied we feel.

This is a situation that we can remedy.  After all, why is science a medium rather than a resource?  As a matter of fact, Young is onto something in the last paragraph: we’ve never really been able to articulate what the relationship between policy and science ought to be.  Unlike a religious relationship, the use that politicians make of research is not protected by mysteries, protocols and standards.   A believer trusts a priest because that relationship is set up by ordinance, legitimized by sacrament, and rigidly patrolled; this is not the case in the relation between the scientist and the public.  It is only in the absence of standards for accepting and using science that argumentative profligacy became the norm and the science itself became the decrepit accomplice of self-congratulation.

That’s a problem on which we should focus some effort.  If we could come to some agreement about how research science ought to inform public policy in the first place, then the relative merits of climate change arguments would be revealed by the degree to which it matches or distorts that agreed-upon process, and the debate would have much more clarity.  After decades of merely persisting, the climate change debate could actually begin.

In 1936, an infamous Chicago murderer was stabbed to death in prison after approaching another inmate for sex.  That afternoon, legend has it, Edwin Lahey of the Daily News wrote the greatest lead in the history of the news: “Richard Loeb, a brilliant college student and master of the English language, today ended a sentence with a proposition.”  But did the wicked little phrase ever really see print?  John Aloysius Farrell follows up on an urban myth …

Pour yourself a cup of coffee and read Hanna Rosin’s wonderful Atlantic story about the “Prosperity Gospel” in the contemporary American Church, and its place in the Great Recession.  The phenomenon is not as straightforward as it may seem: “While they’re trying to be closer to God, instead they become American …”

A recent longitudinal study finds evidence that loneliness is contagious.  No kidding!  As lonely people close off from others, the remaining members of their friendship networks seem to close off as well.  It’s spooky: “Our social fabric can fray at the edges, like a yarn that comes loose at the end of a crocheted sweater …”

Why is it easier to strike up a conversation about Iran policy than one about literature?  D.G. Myers has his finger on it: “Books are becoming a private vice in America like pornography or online poker.”

Is it “eigenvalue” or “igon value?”  At language log, Mark Liberman finds an embarrassing error in Steven Pinker’s critique of the rigor of Malcolm Gladwell’s methods.  See, if you actually go back to the original New Yorker article, Steven …

The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York has a new exhibit on the many contributions of the Morganthau family, focusing in part on how WWII-era Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau Jr. faced the “challenge to balance Jewish and American agendas.” At HNN, Arnold Reisman takes on this astounding understatement …

I’m delighted to see that the Criterion Collection has at last added a beautiful edition of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire to their catalog.  It’s the thinking person’s stocking-stuffer this year.

Finally: one day in 1994, conceptual artist Gabriel Orozco nailed four ordinary Dannon yogurt container lids to the walls of the Marian Goodman Gallery. Although they represent no craft on the part of the artist, Yogurt Caps should naturally be part of the upcoming Orozco retrospective at MoMA, says curator Ann Temkin.  Panic ensued at the Museum when it appeared that the caps had vanished or been sold to a private collector.

Luckily, Orozco prepared decoys …