Statistics I Thought I'd Never See

From the AP sports wire:

" [Vinny] Testaverde, who turned 43 Monday, was the first overall pick by Tampa Bay in the 1987 draft. He has played 19 NFL seasons and has 269 touchdown passes, eighth in NFL history, and is sixth with 45,252 yards passing."

I started following football as a kid in the mid-to-late 1980s. I was seven years old when Vinny Testaverde came into the league, and he was already a joke. He made a lot of money, threw a lot of interceptions, and played for a team that wore bright orange that never won.

The only team that was worse wore pink, and they were the New England Patriots. Which happens to be Testaverde's new team.

Testaverde had a brilliant college career at the University of Miami. But Miami quarterbacks had mixed success in the pros, and each generation seemed like a parody of the one before: Jim Kelly --> Bernie Kosar --> Vinny Testaverde?

It's stunning to me that Drew Bledsoe, who I still think of as a young quarterback, has now been in the NFL for thirteen years. But it's downright astonishing that Testaverde has now been to two Pro Bowls, and has become -- statistically, if nothing else -- one of the best quarterbacks of his generation.

I turned 27 a few weeks ago. Is it strange that I find myself most affected by both how many professional sports athletes are younger than I am -- and just how old athletes not much older than myself are beginning to seem?

Behind the Times

South Africa, folks: Apartheid to gay marriage in less than twenty years.

South Africa: where the minister of health tells people AIDS can be cured with garlic and beetroot.

South Africa: where, until the 1990s, sexual contact between members of different races was prohibited by law. (Sodomy and miscegenation laws were overturned around the same time.)

We have got to get with it.

A Randomly Beautiful Sentence

File under random whimsy. From Gmail:

"All messages marked spam have been deleted forever."

There's something about the balance and weight of it, that just feels right. Not just techno-speak. It tells the truth.

On the other hand, it's unexpectedly funny. The purported finality is absurd. If your email account is anything like mine, you're going to have to delete all messages marked spam "forever" in about five minutes. (And indeed, I've got more spam in my box since I began typing.) You could take the "forever" not as literal truth (that deleted spam messages are unrecoverable -- is this true? Where do they go?) but as ironic commentary on our deepest desires - that is, our deepest email desires - that we be done, once and for all, with messages we will not read, that we no longer wish to receive. We want spam to be deleted forever -- like a theological salvation, we want to be delivered from spam -- yet spam, like sin, is constantly renewed, something from which we find only momentary relief, if any at all.

Like all good lapsed Catholics, I believe in sin but not salvation. Likewise, I believe in spam. You could say that I only believe in spam. The "spam" folder gives us the assurance - perhaps false - that our other messages are NOT spam, that they demand at least reading and sorting, if not a reply. We can believe that the message for which we've been waiting, the good news, is on its way, because we have a sure means of detecting false prophets. (If anyone calls you to the desert or the inner rooms with promises of blemish-free skin, low mortgage rates, and sexual enhancements, do not believe it, for even the elect can be deceived.) But deliverance remains, perhaps always, only an outstanding promise, a possibility. Spam, and falsehood, is the reality.

Electronic letters, waiting for deliverance, and upon deliverance, acceptance, deleted, forever. Irretrievable. What never existed, had only little reality if any reality at all, shall exist even less. The power of purgation, of liberation or nullification. And what is done, is done -- the foregoing of the possibility of retrieval, that what was lost can be found again, regardless of our decisions, wherever it might hide, is what we bind ourselves to -- that here, if nowhere else, is certainty, finality; that these messages, if no others, I will never see again. Yet of course you will -- in fact, only these messages will stay constant, as jobs change, as friends, as online retailers shift and sway and fold, as email addresses and online profiles become defunct. Spam endures.

It's a negative theology. Only spam, by having no positive characteristics that we can attribute to any genuine earthly message, is real. Only spam is always at the top of your inbox -- present in this absence. We believe in spam precisely because we delete it. We ride its wave, and the wave rides us in return.

Eh, maybe not.

St. Stephen's Green, Dublin, October 2006

Deep, Interspecies Empathy

A terrific NYT article on elephants (really).

By Contrast...

Last week, the New York Times ran an article about Detroit's mildly successful body collection industry, which prompted my first Short Schrift post in months.

This week, there's an article about a New York divorcee who recently moved from Westchester into a one-bedroom apartment in midtown Manhattan.

Let's take a look.

1) "It’s very touristy. This is a neighborhood where they sell single bananas in the food stores."

2) When her marriage came to an abrupt end two years ago, she found this apartment, a condo she sublets for just under $3,000 a month and which she described as “dangerously close to Bergdorf’s.”

3) “On the Upper West Side, everyone knew everyone,” she said of her early years there. “It was too much! I thought: ‘I’ve got a lot of friends. I don’t want to fill my friend list right now. I want to go someplace where I don’t know anyone.’ I wanted to land on a different planet.”

4) Ms. Pierson, executive creative director at 141 Worldwide, a subsidiary of Ogilvy & Mather, is also a writer and has completed her fourth book, “Males, Nails, and Sample Sales: Everything a Woman Must Know to be Smarter, Savvier, Saner Sooner,” now available from Simon & Schuster.

5) Snowy days and thunderstorms did her in. “Once we lost power right before the Tonys, and I wanted to kill myself,” she said.

6) "I get to know the carriage horses. Just seeing them everyday and saying hi is fabulous.”

7) So delighted is she to be back in the city, in fact, that she even rhapsodizes about the garbage trucks that crowd onto her street every night. Perhaps it helps that the trash comes from the particularly well-heeled, out the back doors of the Plaza and Ritz-Carlton.

8) “White people kill themselves. Black people kill each other. Chinese people don’t die.”

Hint: one of the sentences actually comes from the article about Detroit.

Note: if I had one wish, it would be that everything were different. Starting with myself.

One Better

Who reads Short Schrift anymore? Unless you've left it on your RSS reader for sentimental reasons, or you're wondering whether its author has dropped off the face of the planet, nobody. That's what happens when you don't write for months on end.

I've had good excuses. I moved house twice, for complicated reasons better left unsaid. I fell into a deep dank hole of depression that turned out to be probably food poisoning. (Still coming out of that one.) I started classes again and became busier than I'd been in a couple of years.

So you'd think that a renewal in posts would be the result of some happy event that caused me to change my mind, refresh my point of view, renew my sense of sharing and togetherness with the world.

Wrong wrong wrong.

I'm blogging because as miserable as I feel these days, as little hope as I sometimes have for the world in which we live, I have one thing to be thankful for.

I don't live in Detroit.

How could a city like Detroit get worse? It's almost hard to believe. But there are so many nuggets in this bizarre New York Times article -- who wrote this? why'd it get printed? does anyone in New York or anywhere in the world care anymore about Detroit? or do they just like to kick it when it's down -- that have to be shared, with anyone who knows, or might know.

Like: "80 percent of people die naked and 70 percent die in the toilet. That means most people die naked in the toilet. I can’t explain it."

Or: “White people kill themselves. Black people kill each other. Chinese people don’t die.”

Possibly the best: "It was the height of summer and people were supposed to be outside and killing each other, dropping dead from sunstroke, etc. Mr. Thomas wondered how he was going to feed his children the next week."

My god. What's happened to us?

Football Politics

James Forsythe's recent post at FP Passport about the effect on Germany's World Cup wins on Angela Merkel's government belatedly reminded me of his similar earlier post titled "Tony Blair's World Cup Dream." (What's more, Forsythe predicted Merkel's success in a post titled "Kicking Off.")

Some highlights:

The good news for Blair is that for every day England are in the competition, there will be less space in the media for—and less interest in—news of the failure to deport foreign criminals, internal struggles, incompetence in the NHS, and the like. Equally the PM can expect to be the indirect beneficiary of any feel good factor and economic bounce created by a strong English performance...

Not only is Merkel getting great publicity with every Germany game (the TV cuts to her even more than it does to Posh Spice aka Mrs Beckham during England games), but she is also using the tournament to push through a series of controversial measures. The Times of London had a great article a few days ago about all the bills that Merkel is sneaking through while the public is captivated by the heroics of Ballack, Lehman et al.

These measures aren't small beer. The other day, she got parliament to endorse a 3 percent increase in sales tax. My friend Andrew Curry, who wrote the World Cup brothels piece for us and lives in Germany, tells me that this is the biggest tax increase since 1949. But there was hardly a whimper of public protest as everyone was too busy watching the football.

Everything Changes. Don't Be Afraid.

It's what has to be the most unexpected (and disappointing) band breakup since The Dismemberment Plan. Sleater-Kinney says goodbye. [Pitchfork]

Joyces and Joyceans

After two schriftless weeks, where's Short Schrift been? I've been teachin' the children -- the ways of Algebra II, the SAT and its subject tests, essay writing, and the history of western civilization. Out on Philadelphia's Main Line suburbs. It's not a lot of hours, but I'm finally getting well compensated for all this useless knowledge. Plus, I've been painting my bathroom, visiting some of my favorite redheads, and well, if you don't know any other big news, give me a call some time. (I've been trying to take Short Schrift semi-anonymous -- so some of the big personal news will just have to remain, for the moment, conspicuous in its absence.)

But I was snapped out of my stupor by a really good New Yorker article on Stephen James Joyce -- grandson of James, probably my all-time favorite writer, and caretaker of the Joyce estate. Scholars need approval from the younger Joyce (now in his seventies) to include quotation of more than a few short passages of James Joyce's published works or any quotations at all from the unpublished writings. SJ Joyce has made this very difficult -- not only for academic writers, but also for fans of the works who want to stage readings, hold festivals, and the like. One of the interesting things about the article are all the general questions it raises: extensions of copyright, the relationship between academics, authors, and publishers, what constitutes fair use, and likewise, what constitutes an invasion of privacy.

Stephen Joyce sometimes has very sympathetic reasons for becoming an obstacle to scholars looking to pry into the lives of the Joyce family. But as Max's article makes clear, he seems to enjoy making the community of Joyce scholars kiss the ring and exercising his will arbitrarily (e.g., a letter he wrote to a scholar at Purdue explaining his refusal for publication permissions by the vulgarity of "Boilermakers," Purdue's mascot) as much as any genuine desire to maintain his family's privacy. He's been quick to sue authors and publishers -- and publishers, especially, have been loathe to fight the lawsuits, even when there's a prima facie case for fair use. Lately, Joyce scholars have started to rebel -- the International James Joyce foundation has begun an inquiry into SJ Joyce's behavior, and Lawrence Lessig at Stanford has mounted a suit on behalf of the Joycean Carol Schloss against the estate, arguing that SJ Joyce's interference constitutes an abuse of copyright.

Between this story on Joyce, Louis Menand's periodic forays, and Janet Malcolm's essays on Gertrude Stein, The New Yorker's gotten very good at covering scholarship of modernism. One interesting point of confluence -- Malcolm's 2005 essay, "Someone Says Yes to It: Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and The Making of Americans" included a profile of another "interfering" figure in modernist scholarship, this one a scholar who has (to date) refused to make public his interviews with Alice B. Toklas.

There's something very funny about scholarship on modernism because of this -- because we're at the margins of copyright expirations, because so many people still living control access to the documents, and because there are, in fact, so many documents that some still haven't been fully explored, the archive work is all over the map. If you're a classicist, or even a Renaissance scholar, you have an entirely different set of problems when you work on a well-known author -- even the manuscript material is (for the most part) entirely available -- you just need the linguistic skills, the critical acumen, and the travel money to get to it and do your thing. One day you might turn up that long-lost manuscript in the stacks somewhere, but I doubt it. As a modernist scholar, it's an entirely different set of negotiations to get your hands on the archive in the first place -- and then you need to figure out what the hell to do with it.

And as the Stein example shows, scholars aren't all great innocents, operating in the public interest. You can make a decent amount of money by editing an author's unpublished writings and putting it out with a trade or university press -- but if you can hold off on that process and keep the archive a (relative) secret until you've milked it for all you can, you can make a name for yourself -- or at least get tenure.

And sometimes, the motivations aren't even as simple as that. Stephen J Joyce and the guy who interviewed Toklas for his dissertation all those years ago (I've googled to death and can't find his name) both somewhat snarkily turned their back on the academic world entirely, turning their sole, self-appointed right to be caretaker of the legacy into a point of honor. It's one crazy world when simple greed doesn't seem to explain it all.