The Swirling Milky Way Mind

Gavin at Wordwright has a great list of articles about David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), to which I'll add just one: "Timothy McSweeney is Devasted and Lost," at McSweeney's. [No permalink yet.]

Ryan Boudinot, Martina Testa, Tom Bissell, Mac Barnett, Scott Rettberg, Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith, Peter Cook, Corinne Carlson, Evan Lavender-Smith, Dennis Mahoney, John Erik Riley, John Lingan, Eric Schulmiller, Jared Lipof, Evan Fleischer, Adam Hill, Matt Herlihy, Lorin Stein, Michael R. Hufford, Whitney Pastorek, and Animesh Sabnis all contribute.

From them we learn that Wallace dipped tobacco, smelled terrible, drank Diet Coke and carb milkshakes, used smiley faces for grades, trimmed cards and letters so to not waste paper, was an actual genius, was obscure and eclectic, wore wool socks with Birkenstocks and shorts or parachute pants tucked into his socks, is huge in Norway, liked postcards more than email, had read most of Chekhov, believed in the impossibility of lists, never heard from Thomas Pynchon, offered hope, and regularly took shots from undergraduate critics with humility and good cheer.

Such Charming Spies

What a marvelous story:

Ms. Conant tells the story of a handful of young, handsome, cosmopolitan British officers sent to Washington before Pearl Harbor -- at Prime Minister Winston Churchill's direction -- to ingratiate themselves on the social scene, subvert American isolationism and advance the British cause through good manners. America at the time was officially committed to neutrality, though World War II was raging in Europe, not least in Britain during the Blitz.

The central figure of Ms. Conant's volume, Roald Dahl, was a melancholy cad in the Royal Air Force who found later fame by writing exotic short stories and children's books such as "James and the Giant Peach." His colleagues included Ian Fleming, whose Bond renown was more than a decade away but who was in 1940 merely an Old Etonian in his early 30s who had not yet figured out what to do with his life. David Ogilvy, the Scottish wizard of 1950s Madison Avenue, was just developing his knack for polling and advertising when he was sent to America.

Yes; the authors of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Dr. No, and “Only Dove is one-quarter moisturizing cream” were drinking it up and doing lady congresswomen on behalf of His Majesty.

Also, they called themselves the "Baker Street Irregulars," in homage to Sherlock Holmes. Awesome.

The Days When Script Was King

New fun site to play with: Digital Scriptorium, hosted by Columbia University. As M.K. Hurley says over at In the Middle, the real value of the online database of manuscript images may be for teachers and students:

it is possible to work on manuscripts in an entirely different way now, even at the student level. Actually teaching graduate students how to read and work with manuscripts is far easier (and, from what it sounds, more pleasant) with the digital technology available on the web, replacing the far more difficult work of transcribing from fax or from a photocopy of the original MS.

But it's also not firewalled, which makes it available to anyone.

It fosters public viewing of materials otherwise available only within libraries. Because it is web-based, it encourages interaction between the knowledge of scholars and the holdings of libraries to build a reciprocal flow of information. Digital Scriptorium looks to the needs of a very diverse community of medievalists, classicists, musicologists, paleographers, diplomatists and art historians. At the same time Digital Scriptorium recognizes the limited resources of libraries; it bridges the gap between needs and resources by means of extensive rather than intensive cataloguing, often based on legacy data, and sample imaging.

Some of the MS scans are a little wonky, but others are mighty good. I was surprised by the detail in Albrecht Durer's "The Resurrection":

I also love this, because (at least I think) it is Francesco Petrarca's handwriting:

Should Have Wanted It More

Tina Fey and her glasses doing God's glorious work:

A Man Is Falling

Tom Junod, "The Falling Man":

In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did -- who jumped -- appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else -- something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. There is something almost rebellious in the man's posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end. He is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.

They began jumping not long after the first plane hit the North Tower, not long after the fire started. They kept jumping until the tower fell. They jumped through windows already broken and then, later, through windows they broke themselves. They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when the ceilings fell and the floors collapsed; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died. They jumped continually, from all four sides of the building, and from all floors above and around the building's fatal wound. They jumped from the offices of Marsh & McLennan, the insurance company; from the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading company; from Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors -- the top. For more than an hour and a half, they streamed from the building, one after another, consecutively rather than en masse, as if each individual required the sight of another individual jumping before mustering the courage to jump himself or herself. One photograph, taken at a distance, shows people jumping in perfect sequence, like parachutists, forming an arc composed of three plummeting people, evenly spaced. Indeed, there were reports that some tried parachuting, before the force generated by their fall ripped the drapes, the tablecloths, the desperately gathered fabric, from their hands. They were all, obviously, very much alive on their way down, and their way down lasted an approximate count of ten seconds. They were all, obviously, not just killed when they landed but destroyed, in body though not, one prays, in soul. One hit a fireman on the ground and killed him; the fireman's body was anointed by Father Mychal Judge, whose own death, shortly thereafter, was embraced as an example of martyrdom after the photograph -- the redemptive tableau -- of firefighters carrying his body from the rubble made its way around the world...

In 9/11, the documentary extracted from videotape shot by French brothers Jules and Gedeon Naudet, the filmmakers included a sonic sampling of the booming, rattling explosions the jumpers made upon impact but edited out the most disturbing thing about the sounds: the sheer frequency with which they occurred. In Rudy, the docudrama starring James Woods in the role of Mayor Giuliani, archival footage of the jumpers was first included, then cut out. In Here Is New York, an extensive exhibition of 9/11 images culled from the work of photographers both amateur and professional, there was, in the section titled "Victims," but one picture of the jumpers, taken at a respectful distance; attached to it, on the Here Is New York Website, a visitor offers this commentary: "This image is what made me glad for censuring [sic] in the endless pursuant media coverage." More and more, the jumpers -- and their images -- were relegated to the Internet underbelly, where they became the provenance of the shock sites that also traffic in the autopsy photos of Nicole Brown Simpson and the videotape of Daniel Pearl's execution, and where it is impossible to look at them without attendant feelings of shame and guilt. In a nation of voyeurs, the desire to face the most disturbing aspects of our most disturbing day was somehow ascribed to voyeurism, as though the jumpers' experience, instead of being central to the horror, was tangential to it, a sideshow best forgotten.

It was no sideshow. The two most reputable estimates of the number of people who jumped to their deaths were prepared by The New York Times and USA Today. They differed dramatically. The Times, admittedly conservative, decided to count only what its reporters actually saw in the footage they collected, and it arrived at a figure of fifty. USA Today, whose editors used eyewitness accounts and forensic evidence in addition to what they found on video, came to the conclusion that at least two hundred people died by jumping -- a count that the newspaper said authorities did not dispute. Both are intolerable estimates of human loss, but if the number provided by USA Today is accurate, then between 7 and 8 percent of those who died in New York City on September 11, 2001, died by jumping out of the buildings; it means that if we consider only the North Tower, where the vast majority of jumpers came from, the ratio is more like one in six.

Retrotopia

The two things I admire most about (Little) Professor Miriam E. Burstein are her omnivorous reading appetite and her consequently impressive wit about any and all things literary and Victorian. Can you be Casaubon and not take yourself seriously? Who knows? But let's give it a shot.

Burstein's review of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's Steampunk anthology shows off both her erudition and her humor equally well:

The VanderMeers admit up front that they've omitted several Big Names from the anthology because they write novels rather than short fiction; readers may understandably be a bit puzzled, then, to find that the anthology's first selection is...a brief excerpt from Michael Moorcock's The Warlords of the Air (1971).  If Moorcock, why not something from Gibson's and Sterling's The Difference Engine? In any event, the anthology offers one entry from the 1970s, two from the 1980s, five from the 1990s, and five from the 2000s, without explaining the rationale behind this particular chronological distribution.  Was steampunk all novel-length in the 70s and 80s? No interesting examples? A fad suddenly took off? I also note that only one of the 2000-era stories was originally published electronically, and that in the dual print/online SteamPunk Magazine, which is an interesting contrast to the more extensive online presence in the annual Dozois anthologies.

In some ways, The Warlords of the Air and James P. Blaylock's "Lord Kelvin's Machine" (1985; basis for the novel of the same name) were the least effective selections in the anthology, although for different reasons.  The Moorcock entry was just too short and out of context to work effectively as an excerpt.  Beyond that, though, and despite the actual subject matter, its use of dialogue shares a certain...tweeness...with "Lord Kelvin's Machine": both stories want to parody Victorian earnestness, but the resulting archness cloys quickly.  There's only so much of "Certainly, sir.  Steady-on, sir" (19) that a story can bear.

I love it when academics can bring both their scholarly and writerly chops to bear on contemporary creative work. I can only hope that in twenty years, there will be an explosion of fiction of nostalgia for the early twentieth century, where my knowledge of modernist fiction, silent film, and the electroplate printing process will pay off.

In Praise of Genius

I've used the iTunes store to buy music exactly once, right after they started selling albums without DRM. (For the curious, I picked up Saturday Looks Good To Me's Sound on Sound.) So when I fired up iTunes 8 and saw this annoying sidebar showing me all of the things related to my music that I could buy, I clicked it off right away.

But the new Genius feature that helps you make playlists of music similar or related to a single song is, pun intended, pretty smarty-pants.

Again, I've done it exactly once, but I've been enjoying it all day. After iTunes scanned my admittedly pretty monstrous library, I picked a song near the top, Smog's "A Hit" from his singles collection Accumulation: None. This album was catalogued as (Smog), with parentheses -- so Mr Callahan pops up right at the top of my library.

"A Hit" is a pretty genius lo-fi anthem in praise of lo-fi music: the title comes from the refrain, "It's not gonna be a hit, so why even bother.... with it." Just lay it down fast, and forget about it, indeed.

Some of the tracks that Genius pulled to match this one were pretty obvious, even a little dumb. For example, it dragged up two other Smog songs, "Cold Blooded Old Times" (the version from the same album as "A Hit") and, I kid you not, "Be Hit" from Wild Love. It also picked a track from the album Bill Callahan recorded under his own name, "Sycamore," which happens to be one of my best-loved songs.

But the vast majority of the rest of the playlist was nothing short of miraculous. Track 2, right after "A Hit," was Beat Happening's "Godsend" -- a song I hadn't heard in three or four years, but which won me over again immediately with its lo-meets-hi-fidelity beauty.

It also grabbed Guided By Voices' immortal "I Am A Scientist," Cat Power's bewitching "Nude as the News," The Silver Jews' "Tennessee," Pavement's early single "Box Elder," their late single "Stereo," and Galaxie 500's haunting "Tugboat"; a few cuts from My Bloody Valentine, including "You Never Should" and "Feed Me With Your Kiss"; and a few surprises, like Tender Buttons' "America's Boy," The Sea and Cake's "One Bedroom," Built To Spill's "Made-Up Dreams," and Brian Eno's "Here Come the Warm Jets," which all complemented the Smog beautifully.

The Eno was especially choice, and almost proved that Genius has a sense of humor: one of the best lines in "A Hit" finds Callahan lamenting, "I'll never be a Bowie, I'll never be an Eno... at best I'll only be a Gary Numan." No Numan in my iTunes catalog, otherwise "Cars" would be a great fit.

Songs, mostly demos, from Sonic Youth, Neutral Milk Hotel, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, The Mountain Goats, Spoon, and Yo La Tengo round out the set; I don't know if I could have made a better mix myself.

So, Genius, you have a fan in me. Even if I just got lucky today, I'll give it a whirl again.

From Cinerama to Blu-Ray

Dave Kehr writing for the New York Times:

The best reason for buying a Blu-ray player right now is Warner Home Video’s high-definition version of “How the West Was Won,” a film made 46 years ago in the highest-definition moving picture medium the world had seen: Cinerama. With its three strips of 35-millimeter film projected side by side with a slight overlap on a gigantic, curved screen, Cinerama offered six times the resolution — which is to say, six times as much visual information — of the standard film of 1952, when it was first used commercially.

Not even the finest home theater installation will be able to reproduce the scale and resolution of the Cinerama experience, or anything close to it. But moving from standard-definition DVD to Blu-ray generates a shock analogous to what the audiences of 1952 must have felt when the curtains parted to reveal the panoramic screen.

The images are so crisp as to feel almost unreal; the depth of field seems dreamlike, infinite, with the blades of grass in the foreground as sharply in focus as the snow-capped mountains in the distant background. Unfortunately, there is no way to bend even a flat-panel monitor to imitate the immersive experience of Cinerama’s curved screen, which tried to fill every speck of the viewer’s peripheral vision. But sit close enough, and that sense of enveloping depth returns. It feels like a three-dimensional experience, and in some ways is a more convincing illusion (and a much less visually painful one) than that provided by the two-camera 3-D processes that followed in the wake of Cinerama’s popular success.

That sounds awesome. You would think that in the digital age we could come up with some more creative ways to project images onto a screen -- you know, besides just using bigger film stocks and really big screens (cough Imax cough).

I sense an art-school project coming on.

Text for an Obama Attack Ad

Barack Obama:

We've seen what happens when Republicans control government. If you think that the government can only be a problem, then you have no interest in making it part of the solution.

I think our politics are the problem; and that good government is the solution.

Over eight years, the Republicans have replaced government with politics, putting people with no skills but the right ideology in positions of authority.

Meanwhile, they constantly denigrate our civil servants, men and women who've sworn to uphold the constitution and work every day to make our lives better.

For the Republicans, government exists to protect the people at the top.

I think change comes from the bottom up.

That's why I want to restore our faith in service: in federal and local government, in our towns and neighborhoods and churches all across the country. That's why I want to recruit an army of new teachers, why I want to invest in our infrastructure, and reward young men and women who choose to serve something greater than themselves.

I know. Michelle and I have spent our entire lives in public service, in Chicago, Illinois, and Washington, working to make your lives better, to let them know that none of us have to stand alone so long as we stand up together.

Forty-eight years ago, we were faced with a terrible threat, one that threatened to destroy the planet itself. But the man we elected President, a man who'd served his country heroically in uniform, knew that we could not defeat our enemies with guns and bombs alone, that we had to devote ourselves to tackling our problems at home, in the hope, faith, and love of country that we would need to create a more perfect union. It's that faith, hope, and love that we need to renew.

John McCain and the Republicans don't believe in that. I do.

I'm Barack Obama, and this is our message.

"You Don't Mind Singing An English Folk Song?"

In case it's not obvious, this weekend I rewatched No Direction Home, the Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan, and spent the rest of it looking up some of the clips on YouTube.

Here's the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem singing "The Butcher Boy," one of those ballads that, as Dylan says, "absolutely slay you."