Kafka's Desk

From the Diaries:

24 December 1910. I have now taken a closer look over my writing desk and have seen that nothing good can be done with it. So much is lying around, it forms a disorder without symmetry and without any of the hospitality of disordered things that otherwise makes any disorder bearable. Let disorder spread as it likes over the green cloth, that was permitted even in the stalls of old theatres. But that in the standing room

25 December 1910. up out of the open compartment under the top part of the desk come leaflets, old newspapers, catalogs, picture postcards, letters, all ripped into pieces, opened into pieces in the shape of an uncovered flight of stairs, this disgraceful state of affairs spoils everything. Individual, fairly enormous things from the stands crop up in the greatest possible activity, as if in a theater shopkeepers were allowed to balance their account books in the orchestra, the carpenter allowed to hammer, the officer to swing around his saber, the clergyman to address the heart, the scholar to address the understanding, the politician to address the civic sense, for lovers not to restrain themselves, etc. On my writing desk only the shaving mirror stands upright, as is needed for shaving, the clothes brush lies with its brushing surface on the cloth, the coin purse lies open in case I want to count it, a key protrudes from the bunch, ready for work, and a tie loops itself in portions around my undone shirt collar. The next higher compartment of the top part, already crammed by the the closed small paper drawers, is nothing but a junk room, so as if the lower balcony of the stands, really the most visible part of the theater, were reserved for the commonest people, for old men-about-town whose filth gradually comes out from within, coarse fellows who let their feet hang over the balcony railing, here families with so many children that one can only glance over them quickly, without being able to count them, set up the filth of poor nurseries (in fact it’s already spilling into the orchestra) the incurably ill sit in the dark background, fortunately one sees them only if one shines a light back there, etc. In this drawer lie old papers that I would long ago have thrown away if I had a wastebasket, pencils with broken points, an empty matchbox, a paperweight from Karlsbad, a ruler whose edge would be too bumpy for a country road, old collar studs, blunt razor blades (for which there is no place in the world), pince-nezes and a still heavier paperweight of iron. In the drawer above -

Miserable, miserable and yet well intended. Yes, it is midnight, but since I am quite rested, that is an excuse only in that I would have written absolutely nothing during the day. The lighted electric lamp, the quiet room, the darkness outside, the last moment of waking, they give me the right to write even if that is the most miserable. And this right I use hurriedly. That’s how I am.

Also in Deutsch, if you're into that sort of thing.

Public Feedback For Jackass Journalism

Via Daring Fireball.

Count the Ways

At around 5:30 in this video is one of my favorite Peanuts or poetry jokes ever:

The Sound of AM Radio

She & Him (aka Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward), "Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?":

• MTV
• Music Videos
• MTV Shows
• Entertainment News

It's like June Carter meets Dionne Warwick. I love it.

Gavin Is Wrong

My very good friend Gavin at Wordwright is very wrong when he says that "the Clinton/Obama dichotomy was largely a rhetorical mirage" and that Obama is really a "centrist in progressive clothing."

First, there's nothing "rhetorical" or "unsubstantial" about authorizing war in Iraq and agitating for ops in Iran in order to cultivate an appearance of toughness. If Democrat politicians are rewarded rather than punished for "tacking to the center" when Republicans want to invade and occupy foreign countries, then we will always have liberals in name only, especially if they want to be President someday. Here Matt Yglesias is right: if Clinton had come out tough and firm against the war in Iraq early, or even a few years in, Obama's candidacy would have had little to no oxygen, with the netroots or anyone else.

Second, I simply do not buy that Obama's health care plan is any more "centrist" or less progressive than Clinton's. Paul Krugman may think that opposition to unfunded mandates is just a Republican talking point, but the difference is that Republicans use the specter of the government requiring everyone to buy insurance to scuttle any real health care solutions. Obama is taking away that objection, and that objection is neither trivial nor partisan.

Back in March, a law professor at Loyola College and a consumer watchdog published an essay attacking the Clinton plan (or any plan requiring everyone to buy insurance) as unconstitutional:

Are health insurance mandates constitutional? They are certainly unprecedented. The federal government does not ordinarily require Americans to purchase particular goods or services from private parties.

The closest we come is when government imposes a condition on the grant of discretionary benefit or permit. For instance, in most states, you must have auto insurance to drive a car, or you are required to install fire sprinklers when building a new house. But in such cases, the "mandate" is discretionary – you don't have to drive a car or build a house. Nor do you have a constitutional right to do so.

But Americans do have a constitutional right to live in the United States. Accordingly, neither federal nor state governments can require you to purchase health insurance as a "condition" for residency. The Supreme Court has drawn a distinction between requirements that are flat-out imposed by government and those imposed as a condition for discretionary benefits.

Essentially, a compelled purchase constitutes a "taking of property" which violates the due process clause. And these aren't right-wing hacks advocating we do nothing about health care:

There are far more sensible and constitutional ways to provide health coverage. Government-funded insurance (such as Medicare or single-payer insurance) or regulation and tax subsidies to encourage voluntary participation (as in Obama's plan) both contain costs more efficiently and avoid the slippery slope of unconstitutional mandates.

Face it, folks. I know it's hard to believe, but we've got a real liberal Democrat who's running for President. And he's going to win.

Look Out On The Sidewalks

Okay. Now, I would never never ever in a million years say anything negative about bicyclists, since I don't get paid by the pageview. I am pro-bike-lane, pro-mass-transit, don't own a car, and love and respect all of you prickly helmeted freaks. And the killing of a cyclist in DC is outrageous. Cyclists, continue your war with motorists unabated. You'll get no further argument on the subject from me.

But fuck you, Will Wilkinson:

People complain about bikers breaking traffic laws. Well, I’m guilty, and I’m damn well going to keep doing it. A lot of traffic regulations make sense for cars, but just don’t for bikes. For example, I ride home almost every day the wrong way up a one way street, and nobody coming the other way gives a damn. Why should they? I honestly don’t give a fig about my carbon footprint (and anyway, since I’m not a breeder, I really should get carbon carte blanche). But I like biking because it’s faster than driving — because I blow through stop signs, go the wrong way on one-ways, etc. Were I suddenly to become fastidious about heeding traffic laws intended to regulate cars, one of the main advantages of biking over driving would evaporate. So I think people who do give figs about carbon really ought to encourage bikers to break traffic laws, or at least promote EXTRA traffic laws for drivers, in order to increase the relative benefit of biking.

1) Traffic regulations aren't there just to protect and regulate cars or bikes. They're for everyone. That includes we poor souls who walk and ride trolleys and buses on the streets. Whatever your perceived moral or technical superiority or the indifference of/to those around you, it makes a difference. When you zip past the wrong way on a one-way when a rider is trying to get off the bus, or run a stop sign when somebody's trying to cross the street, it makes a difference. If I could condense my complaint about cyclists into one sentence, it's that just like the motorists they criticize, ultimately their concern is only for themselves and their contempt for the people who get in their way.

2) Where did this meme come from that says people who have children are environmental sinners and people who don't are saints? The argument that I am somehow responsible for all of the energy consumed and pollution created by my offspring is bad enough, but the pretense that because you haven't passed along your genes, that you can then consume and pollute as much as you want is atrocious. Since you're not breeding anyways, you won't mind when I tell you to go fuck yourself.

3) "[E]ncourage bikers to break traffic laws, or at least promote EXTRA traffic laws for drivers" is really the epitomization of the vacuousness of libertarianism. No rules for me, more rules for people I don't like.

This is the way I talk when someone tells me they don't give a shit about me or my family.

High-Information Money

Nate Silver, "The Other Advantage of Opting Out":

If you simply know someone's name and either their address or their telephone prefix, you can determine their location (with 100 percent accuracy), their gender (with virtually 100 percent accuracy), their race (with high accuracy), their income level (with fairly high accuracy), and possibly something about their age. By cross-referencing other databases, you might also know something about their past voting behavior, and their level of engagement at different phases of the campaign. You have even more information if you know their employer and occupation, as required on FEC disclosure forms.

So apart from greasing the wheels of the campaign, the other thing that private fundraising provides a campaign is an incredibly rich source of data: essentially a real-time, n-dimensional focus group of its supporters...

Fundraising data isn't the only way to collect this sort of information -- but it's a particularly efficient one, especially for a campaign that relies heavily on Internet financing and has thousands of donations rolling in each day. If it makes the difference of being able to react to a dangerous situation 24 hours sooner than you might otherwise, or seeing an extra move ahead, that's how campaigns are won and lost.

Someone could write an entire article (maybe even a book) detailing all of the ways political money is different from regular money. In ordinary contexts, money is anonymous; in political contexts, money is high-information demographic data. In ordinary contexts, money is transactional; in political contexts, an explicit quid pro quo transaction is usually illegal. In ordinary contexts, money is silent; in political contexts, money is "speech." Und so weiter.

Text In Your Viz

Kevin Kelly has a smart post on what he calls "vizuality," which he explains as "visual literacy" -- what he really means is more like "video markup," the ability to bring the same resources of identification, reference, marginal comment, etc., to video as we can to text. For example, why can't we link or point not just to a particular scene or frame in Casablanca, but to a fez on the head of a background character that may be only intermittently visible throughout the scene?

One of the frustrating things about working in cinema studies is that you don't have these reference tools down, both in the sense of "being handy" and in the sense of "conventionally standard." Put another way, there's no good way outside of video to "quote" video. Dropping a movie clip into a Word document only begins to do the job: again, you need to be able to insert, highlight, add asides and ellipses -- in other words, to select and to emphasize. It's like the difference between being able to give a page citation and being able to give a line.

There is one howler in Kelly's post: "Cinema has always resisted text, even to the point of preferring dubbing foreign languages rather than permitting subtitles." Not true! All you need to do is to look at silent and early sound films. Not only do you have the intertitles, you sometimes see close-ups of documents, i.e., letters, newspapers, etc., which the audience is expected to read in order to follow the plot. Sometimes you even have text painted on the screen, which the characters then interact with -- The Cabinet of Dr Caligari has a good example of this.

This is one of the problems I'm working on right now, specifically with respect to German film, and it's far from sorted out. But it suggests that if we're looking to better understand the synthesis of text and image and its possibilities, we need to look beyond recent memory and towards technologies that for one reason or another have been left by the wayside. Silent film is one of these; illuminated manuscripts and woodcuts are another; there are countless more.

Via Snarkmarket.

Literary Monoculture, Continued

I posted on the idea that consumption of books is converging just as music consumption is diverging here. Now Sebastian Mary at if:book weighs in, near the end of a longer post:

The buying practices necessitated in order to keep a large bookstore financially viable these days have skewed the kinds of books that are deemed saleable profoundly; the redemptive promise of the Web was that the magical long tail might create markets for even those niche publications that have been edged out of mainstream publishing and book sales.

And yet (as I understand it - corrections welcome) for a book to be sold in more than one place online it must be equipped with a set of tags (ISBN, summary, thumbnail image etc) according to a metadata standard. Without these, the multiplicity of bookselling affiliate schemes, APIs and so on will not be able to carry the title, and the book will not sell. And this additional informational labor is beyond the technical and time resources of many small publishers. So while a bookstore (in its ideal, pre-Scott Pack form at least) might be imagined to carry a genuinely serendipitous mix of local publications, the manager's choices, remainders, bestsellers and second-hand titles, this slick performance of serendipity relies on several intricate but invisible additional layers of technologization. Thus, while it gives the feeling of serendipity, the data architectures required to sustain the 'bookstore' metaphor push the available selection ever more towards a literary monoculture.

There's Good News and Bad News

The Guardian reports on a private collection of Franz Kafka's papers. The good news:

Previously unseen documents, postcards, sketches and personal belongings of the Czech-Jewish writer, who wrote in German, have been gathering dust in the home of Esther Hoffe, the former secretary of Kafka's friend and executor Max Brod since his death in 1968. Hoffe's refusal to relinquish the documents led to a literary game of cat and mouse between her and the state of Israel, under pressure from the country's cultural elite, which on one occasion even led to her arrest on suspicion of smuggling Kafka's writings out of the country.

Now, following her death at the age of 101, Kafka lovers hope the row may have come to an end. Researchers are ready to pounce on the contents of Hoffe's flat, fully expecting the items will throw new light on the mysterious writer who died at the age of 41, as well as his friendship with Brod, his greatest champion.

And the bad news. The Beinecke it ain't:

But authorities in Tel Aviv have warned that the papers, with their high sulphuric acid content, may have stood up poorly to conditions in Hoffe's damp flat in the centre of Tel Aviv and to the hordes of cats and dogs which she kept until two years ago when health inspectors intervened after neighbours complained about the stench.

Yick.