Top Docs

According to the International Documentary Association, the Top 25 documentaries of all time are:

1. "Hoop Dreams," directed by Steve James, Peter Gilbert and Frederick Marx
2. "The Thin Blue Line," directed by Errol Morris
3. "Bowling for Columbine," directed by Michael Moore
4. "Spellbound," directed by Jeffery Blitz
5. "Harlan County USA," directed by Barbara Kopple
6. "An Inconvenient Truth," directed by Davis Guggenheim
7. "Crumb," directed by Terry Zwigoff's Crumb
8. "Gimme Shelter," directed by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin
9. "The Fog of War," directed by Errol Morris
10. "Roger and Me," directed by Michael Moore
11. "Super Size Me," directed by Morgan Spurlock
12. "Don't Look Back," directed by DA Pennebaker
13. "Salesman," directed by Albert and David Maysles
14. "Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance," directed by Godfrey Reggio
15. "Sherman's March," directed by Ross McElwee
16. "Grey Gardens," directed by Albert and David Maysles, Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer
17. "Capturing the Friedmans," directed by Andrew Jarecki
18. "Born into Brothels," directed by Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski
19. "Titticut Follies," directed by Frederick Wiseman
20. "Buena Vista Social Club," directed by Wim Wenders
21. "Fahrenheit 9/11," directed by Michael Moore
22. "Winged Migration," directed by Jacques Perrin
23. "Grizzly Man," directed by Werner Herzog
24. "Night and Fog," directed by Alain Resnais
25. "Woodstock," directed by Michael Wadleigh

Astonishingly, I think I've seen all of these -- in most cases, several times. But it makes me wonder just how international the IDA really is. After all, Super Size Me is a very cute movie, but it's no La chagrin et la pitie, Berlin: A Symphony, or Man With A Movie Camera. Also, whatever you think about Ken Burns's later work, The Civil War is a masterpiece.

Via Kottke.

Um, what?

ummmmmmmmmmmmmmm....

In a move that was conceived and completed in less than six hours, the Yankees acquired Rodríguez from the Detroit Tigers for reliever Kyle Farnsworth on Wednesday. Five years after leading the Florida Marlins to a title, and two years after lifting Detroit to a pennant, Rodríguez becomes the regular catcher for the Yankees.

“I came to the office today just thinking about the Oriole game, not necessarily making a blockbuster deal,” General Manager Brian Cashman said. “I’ve been dealing with LaTroy Hawkins being designated for assignment; I’ve got some activity there, and at some point I hoped to conclude something on him. But nothing like this.”

The Hawkins move could wait. That was obvious at 10 a.m., when Cashman received a call from Dave Dombrowski, the president of the Tigers. Cashman says he has always appreciated Dombrowski’s direct style, and Dombrowski hit him with a thunderbolt: he wanted Farnsworth for Rodríguez.

Rodríguez, a 14-time All-Star, is hitting .295 with 5 homers and 32 runs batted in. Farnsworth is 1-2 with a 3.65 earned run average and was leading the Yankees with 45 games pitched.

The Kindle of the Mind

Wyatt Mason:

As reading is said to be dying, at least by our latest and most trusted oracles, rereading must not be dying but surely should be, by now, dead. And yet, all reading is rereading, even when we read the book in our hands for the first time. Whereas, when we watch a work of cinematic art for the first time, we cannot, in a theater, pause to appreciate a particularly compelling moment, or ponder a movingly complex insight into the human condition. But from the first crack of its spine a book has the pause-and-rewind option available at all times. This is not a detail I would use to argue for the superiority of reading as a delivery device for narrative entertainment so much as I would suggest that it is a significant feature of the difference between such experiences...

For readers one of the great miseries is to find oneself trapped on a bus without a book, and one of the greater miseries is to be trapped on a bus with a bad book, or merely a book that one has no desire, at the moment, to read. As such, the Amazon Kindle has been, if only conceptually, much on my mind. I haven’t used one, much less seen one, much less actually done any research about what they do. For me the Kindle is like cold fusion–a terrific idea of the space age that I’d be all for, if it were to exist.

My hypothetical Kindle is a device upon which would reside all the books I’ve read and which I either reread or know I will reread. It waits weightless in my (hypothetical) carry-on that I take with me on my (nonexistent) frequent international flights. At 40,000 feet, 15 hours from my (imaginary) destination, I could, uninvolved by The Widows of Eastwick, dip back into Pale Fire or The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill or Tatlin!. My Kindle would be a device devoted not to the new but to the old, a portable library of greatest hits without a miss, an iPod of ideal literature. But, of course, I do not travel. Bookshelves suffice.

Exformation

From Kottke comes a neologism coined by Danish physicist Tor Nørretranders: "exformation." From Wikipedia:

Exformation is a term meaning explicitly discarded information...

Effective communication depends on a shared body of knowledge between the persons communicating. In using words, sounds and gestures the speaker has deliberately thrown away a huge body of information, though it remains implied. This shared context is called exformation.

Exformation is everything we do not actually say but have in our heads when, or before, we say anything at all - whereas information is the measurable, demonstrable utterance we actually come out with.

If someone is talking about cows; what is said will be unintelligible unless the person listening has some prior idea what a cow is, what it is good for, and in what context one might encounter one. From the information content of a message alone, there is no way of measuring how much exformation it contains

I see at least two problems with this definition. The first is that there is already an agreed-upon linguistic term for the kind of information identified here as "exformation." It's called "given information," i.e. "information that is assumed by the speaker to be known to, assumed by, or inferable by the addressee at the time of the speaker's utterance, because it is common knowledge, part of the extralinguistic context, or previously established in the discourse."

The second is that the short definition -- "explicitly discarded information" -- doesn't seem to match the extended definition and examples offered here. Assuming that somebody knows something about cows and then neglecting to mention those things is not explicitly discarding it. It's precisely the opposite: implicitly assuming it. Unless you say to your conversation partner, "I know you know many things about cows, so I choose not to mention those things now."

A better sense of "explicitly discarded information" would be to look at part of the body of information that is generated but then cancelled before some final state -- say, a researcher's notes which aren't included in the paper, an idea or an argument you could make in conversation but choose not to -- in other words, the full background of information which potentially would be relevant and can not be assumed to be common knowledge but which is nevertheless absent or cancelled to give greater emphasis to the information with greater force or value. And I think this is what Kottke might be referring to when he says "the more exformation you generate, the better your writing, design, art, photography, or blogging will be."

If you write ten pages every day and keep only your best paragraphs, the rest is exformation. Knowing a great deal about higher mathematics while teaching high-school algebra is exformation. (Most of teaching and teacher education boils down to managing exformation.) It's separating the piths and the gists, the luminous particulars, from the stream of information. It's the part of the iceberg beneath the surface, the part that gives what's shown its power.

More Right Than I Knew

I was looking through Short Schrift's archives for something else, and turned up this old post from September 2004, "Elections and the Political Imagination," where I managed to predict both the 2004 and the 2008 Presidential elections.

The incumbent's advantage is always that he or she already has the job. This is why elections -- especially presidential elections -- often turn out to be a referendum on the current office holder's performance -- or, referencing Louis Menand and myself, the performance of the country, or even that of the voter themselves. When things have been going badly, the principle of hope offered by a political challenger, especially hope for positive change, can be a very powerful (and positive) thing. Or you could put the Nazis into power; it works both ways.

An incumbent, then, especially in difficult times, needs to conquer the imaginative space of the electorate. This is the best way of outflanking the challenge posed by an incumbent -- any incumbent. When tough times hit California, Gray Davis responded in a practical, no-nonsense fashion, raising taxes and cutting spending. Voters wanted someone, anyone else, and wound up picking the candidate who (to put it nicely) had the most to offer the imagination.

This is the mistake pundits made when trying to generalize the California recall to the 2004 presidential election. When times are tough, people don't turn to Republicans or throw out the incumbent. They pick the candidate who appeals to their imagination, to their hope that tomorrow might be a better day. They pick Reagan over Carter, Clinton over George H.W. Bush, and (probably) W over Kerry. For the Democrats, picking Kerry over Dean or Edwards was an isolated blip, a moment of self-doubt and misguided Puritan moderation. In the name of electability, they picked a man who lacked the imaginative appeal to ever be elected.

HBO Analogies

This might be my new all-time favorite, from Barron YoungSmith at The Plank:

Ted Stevens predates the State of Alaska. In 1953, he drove to Alaska Territory in a Buick, and--like a modern Al Swearingen--he built himself into a local luminary, successfully lobbied Congress to make Alaska a state, and then used his position on the Senate Appropriations Committee to transform himself into a patronage-distributing warlord.

Another journalist quoted by YoungSmith calls Stevens "a frontier fertility god." YoungSmith also calls Stevens "a dying breed of primordial American, laid low by the encroachment of ethics, rules, and civilization."

When all of the journalistic references to The Sopranos are replaced by allusions to Deadwood or The Wire, then we'll know that we've turned a corner in our culture.

Taupe Like Me

Two good essays from The Root on multiracial identity. The Root is consistently a great read, if you're not on it already.

Monique Fields, "Black Like Mommy, White Like Me":

Simone snuggled up beside me and pointed to my face. "Mommy," she said, "is a black girl."

How observant, I thought, for a 3-year-old to make such a distinction. "Yes," I said, "Mommy is a black girl."

"Simone," she continued, "is a white girl." In all the time I had dreamed about being a mother and teaching my daughter about her African and European heritage, nothing had prepared me for a statement like this.

I demanded to know who had told her such a thing, but my question was met with silence.

"Well, you're a black girl," I said, knowing that I wasn't being any more accurate than she had been a few moments earlier.

Simone repeated her newfound knowledge to her father and added, "Daddy is a white boy."

He told her she was neither white nor black. "You have the best of both worlds," he said.

His explanation wasn't perfect, but it was certainly better than mine...

Back inside our Alabama home, I was uncomfortable, as if someone was watching our every move. I knew, by the way Ken and I reacted, that our latest dilemma was significant. If we flubbed this one, the one we had known was coming, how could we possibly be counted on to find the right things to say about boys, drugs, choosing the best college or any of those other tough parenting subjects?

David Swerdlick, "The Audacity of Taupe":

It's a word that makes a lot of people cringe—particularly those new-age parents that you see around town with light-brown children sporting fluffy, misshapen halfros. But it's also a lot catchier than the very clinical sounding "biracial," and a lot shorter than "blessed with a dual heritage," as my mother used to say. Don't blame us for turning a one-time insult into a three-syllable declaration of interdependence. After all, Spanish words frequently sound better than English words: "Señorita" is sexier than "Miss" and "huevos rancheros" flows easier than "Grand Slam Breakfast," so it stands to reason that "Mulatto" rolls off the tongue a lot smoother than "half breed" or "Strom Thurmond, Jr." If the lovely Rihanna and her island nation hadn't already laid claim to "Bajan," we might have gone with "Beige-an."

This is all about empowerment. My people have taken a word that originally marginalized us as plantation butlers and Huxtable daughters and turned it into a term of endearment. Sometimes, in passing, I query one of my brethren with, "What's up, M-word?" Or occasionally I chastise my sistren by saying, "M-word, please." They understand. They feel me. In a certain patois that some have called "Mubonics," they know that all I'm really saying is something like "Guten morgen, meine freunde!" or "Bitte, baby." And when people ask me why it's OK for us to use the M-word when they can't, I have to tell them that it's a biracial thing...they wouldn't understand...

The other day I pulled up to the Starbucks drive-through window, ordered an iced coffee, and naturally I asked the barista to add half-and-half. When she asked how much I wanted, I couldn't resist telling her to "make it 'Obama,'" and I'm happy to report that she got it just right. With any luck, a craze for venti, half-caff, low-fat Obama coffees will sweep the nation. This could be the breakthrough we've been waiting for. It's a nice, safe way for everybody, regardless of race, creed, color or roast to show their solidarity with Generation M.

For readers who don't know, my son is a light-skinned, red-headed, curly-haired, blue-eyed multi-culti cutie, with a brown-skinned mom and a translucently white dad. So this is something that we think about -- or more often encounter -- a lot.

Makes You Feel Like A Man

The Onion, "Girls = Boys In Math."

The Card Catalog

Walter Benjamin, "One Way Street":

The card index marks the conquest of three-dimensional writing, and so presents an astonishing counterpoint to the three-dimensionality of script in its original form as rune or knot notation. (And today the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index.

Kevin Kelly, "One Dead Media":

Edge-notched cards were invented in 1896. These are index cards with holes on their edges, which can be selectively slotted to indicate traits or categories, or in our language today, to act as a field. Before the advent of computers were one of the few ways you could sort large databases for more than one term at once. In computer science terms, you could do a "logical OR" operation. This ability of the system to sort and link prompted Douglas Engelbart in 1962 to suggest these cards could impliement part of the Memex vision of hypertext.

The "unit records" here, unlike those in the Memex example, are generally scraps of typed or handwritten text on IBM-card sized edge-notchable cards. These represent little "kernels" of data, thought, fact, consideration concepts, ideas, worries, etc., that are relevant to a given problem... Each such specific problem area has its notecards kept in a separate deck, and for each such deck there is a master card with descriptors associated with individual holes about the periphery of the card. There is a field of holes reserved for notch coding the serial number of a reference from which the note on a card may have been taken, or the serial number corresponding to an individual from whom the information came directly (including a code for myself, for self-generated thoughts).

In the US these cards were sold as McBee Keysort Cards and InDecks Information Retrieval cards. McBee cards were often used in libraries to keep track of books in interlibrary loan programs.

Two examples of card catalog art, via somebody. (I know I didn't trip on these two all on my own, but NetNewsWire isn't talking.)

Post Card Swap

Cartalog

Abstracts of Nicholson Baker's classics "The Author vs. The Library" and "Discards":

ANNALS OF SCHOLARSHIP about the scrapping of library card catalogues and replacing them with computerized systems. Tells how various libraries, including the New York Public Library, Harvard, and others, have discarded their index card files and replaced them with inferior on-line systems. Tells about the Online Computer Library Center, which computerizes card catalogues. On-line catalogues are wonderful things in principle. Without on-line catalogues and the circulation and acquisition modules of software with which on-line catalogues are linked, libraries would simply not have been able to process all the books and journals that were arriving on their loading docks. Tells about the history of card catalogues, beginning in 1791 with the French Revolution, when the government asked for names of books confiscated and stated that information should be written on playing cards and returned to the central government. In January of 1901, the Library of Congress began printing its catalogue cards in quantity and selling them in sets to any library that wanted them. Writer visits OCLC. The cost of computer technology now consumes nearly 30 per cent of the typical American library's budget, according to one estimate, forcing it to cut book purchases, reference staff, and skilled cataloguers. The technology that libraries are actually buying turns out to remedial software meant to correct the hash that earlier technologies have made of information once safely stored on paper. Tells how some librarians are saving their paper card catalogues and about artist Tom Johnson, who is saving Harvard's discarded Widener library cards. Maybe the riskiest, most thought-provoking piece of conceptual art that anyone could create out of these found materials is the original card catalogue, enclosed in its own cabinets, sitting undisturbed somewhere within the library it once described.

P.S.: I figured out where the card catalog art came from -- this NYT/Paper Cuts post by Gregory Cowles on the greatness and (mostly) shortcomings of the Dewey Decimal system. The first comment, extolling the Library of Congress system, is mine.

You've Been Waiting With Bated Breath

... to find out the latest news about Darwinian Literary Criticism! You remember. Half-baked "evolutionary" readings of texts that read like Herbert Spencer but without the nuance? "Madame Bovary's Ovaries"? Science without the science? Self-flagellations about the sad state of literary studies and the persecution of the only folks with the answer?

You got it. There aren't really any new ideas in this Chronicle piece, because the hucksters peddling self-styled "Darwinian" criticism don't have any. But somebody in the credulous academic media got around to asking people doing legitimate work straddling literary criticism and science what they thought about this stuff. Here's the verdict:

• F. Elizabeth Hart: "throwing the baby out with the bathwater. … It's somewhat ridiculous to say that scientific method can help us to shed light on all of the questions that literary theory has been engaged with."
• Franco Moretti: "If Literary Darwinism manages to improve the way to understand and explain literary form, then it will be a great step forward, but if it eludes form, or just doesn't 'see' it, then it will mean exactly nothing."
• Joseph P. Tabbi: "If you're interested in questions of sexism, you need to look at more than expressions of stereotypes; you need to look at the way that the narrative is shaped; you need to look at questions of closure in narrative, questions of sequence, and questions that fall into the category of narratology. I'm not sure that by taking samples and doing statistical processing that you're going to get very far."
• Alan Richardson: the work he's seen from the evolutionary literary theorists "is riddled with basic errors in study design and methodology."
• David Miall: "what you've got is just another way of coming up with interpretations of texts, and I'm not sure we need that, so urgently … unless they really have something new to tell us about the nature of the text. And if there is something new, there should be a way of validating it empirically. So in that sense, their resistance to doing empirical studies seems to be a real disability. It's disappointing that they don't go to that next stage."
• And: "many in the group have no background in statistics or evolutionary biology, and they frequently work alone instead of in groups with scientists, unlike many of the cognitive theorists and empirical literary critics. (Carroll said that he recently gave himself 'a crash course' in statistical analysis, but neither he nor Gottschall has any official training.)"

Bad criticism, worse science. And surprise: "The scholars tend to see themselves as outsiders: denied jobs at prestigious universities, tenured positions, and grant money because of the iconoclastic nature of their work. Gottschall is still an adjunct, and he says he believes that no one of a 'principally Darwinian bent' has tenure, except for those who originally started down a more-traditional path."