ducksanddrakes

I’m giving a paper next week on I Was a Communist for the FBI and other scenes of weirdness in 1950’s radio at the Mass Culture Workshop at the University of Chicago.  If you’re affiliated, interested or even just available, come tear my argument to shreds and put it back together again.  Paper and details here.

At Slate, Tom Vanderbilt explains the history of urban gamboling and takes traffic reporters to task: “Jaywalking makes better copy for columnists than actually probing the complex nature of traffic safety.”  Take his word for it, bub, there’s nothing pedestrian about jaywalking.

Claire Potter believes Facebook rumors that University of California leadership wants to coax instructors into teaching classes for free, as a result of budget woes.  She suggests an entirely new approach: maybe we ought to just run higher education at a loss.  “It’s something the United States has to be willing to not make a profit on — in fact, to accept large losses on — in order to create generations of young workers, artists, politicians and technicians who are the nation’s capital …”

James Wood’s hostility toward Thomas Pynchon is better than yours: “Surely the issue is not what a novel’s characters are (round, flat, major, minor, caricature, sketch etc) but what a novelist does (or doesn’t do) with them: what is seriously at stake in the entire novel of which they form the fabric. And what Pynchon does with his characters, increasingly, is juvenile vaudeville …”  Ouch.

At Electric Literature, Jonathan Ashley animates a single sentence from a forthcoming novel by Michael Cunningham.  The sentence?  “Peter tried to murder his brother only once…”

The mystical William Blake wanted to follow Plotinus to a non-place, explains Morgan Meis.  “This is a funny goal for an illustrator to have [...] To portray this world, Blake would have had to draw his way back to a blank page …”

“This witty and heavily illustrated volume features more than 300 vintage book advertisements – startling and strange, beautiful and funny – that together reveal a kind of secret history of American literature of the last century:” A little of the old razzle-dazzle from Dwight Garner’s new book Read Me: A Century of American Book Advertisements.

If Fred Halliday’s article is an indication, our grasp of the Cold War is reaching a stage of reflective clarity, a denouement: “The greatest achievement of communism may well turn out to have been not the creation of an alternative and more desirable system contrasted to capitalism, but its contribution to the modernisation of capitalism itself …”

And finally, Michael Quinion investigates 17th century fox-hunting to explain why we use the term “red herring”  to describe misleading clues: “Before modern refrigeration and speedy transport,” you see, “fish could not be got to customers more than a few miles inland before it went bad,” which made them useful for training or confusing hounds, a process that was eventually turned into a political metaphor by journalist William Cobbett in 1807.

Unless that’s just what they want you to believe …