How Does Obama Do It?

Part of the reason why some people in the progressive blogosphere were upset about, say, Obama's embrace of faith-based charities, is that they had convinced themselves that Obama agreed with them about everything. (The FISA bill is a separate issue; there Obama really did say he'd filibuster a bill with telecom immunity, and when the bill came, no filibuster and a yes vote.)

But generally, Obama seems to have an ability to make just about everyone think that he agrees with them, even when he doesn't. Conservatives like Andrew Sullivan think he's conservative, or at least "temperamentally conservative," which basically means "he's not a conservative, but I feel like he somehow gets it anyways," even though he's a liberal Democrat. Likewise, people to the left of Obama think that he is where they are, people who want to see radical change in race relations think he can single-handedly bring it about, and people who want a new bicycle think... you see where this is going.

But Marc Ambinder is the first to see that Obama's ability to make everyone think he agrees with them may first and foremost be a management strategy:

Obama was new to national politics, so new, in fact, that his circle of advisers and confidants hadn't yet fractured into competing camps with different philosophies. No factions means fewer leaks to the press.

As the campaign progressed, disagreements hardened and some advisers started to regularly ally with others against others, but Obama seems to have figured out a way to make sure that everyone in his inner circle felt empowered just enough; that they felt as if their views were being solicited and respected.

So -- no real factions, no leaks, little drama.

If there's a leadership lesson here, it's: cultivate productive disagreement by refusing to align yourself with any particular point of view; seek input from everyone; don't buy into the cult of the singular adviser or strategist.

Also see Ambinder's first post on "Management Secrets of Barack Obama": it's smart too.

Klein Schreiben

Modernist Inventions

A short list of late-19th and early-20th century inventions that bear some relationship to modernist art and literature:

1. The typewriter
2. The sewing machine
3. Pasteurization
4. The bicycle
5. Plastic
6. The machine gun
7. Dynamite
8. Barbed wire
9. The telephone
10. The phonograph/gramophone
11. The electric lightbulb
12. Paper-strip photographic film
13. The automobile
14. The motion picture/cinema
15. The zeppelin
16. Carbon paper
17. The vertical and lateral file
18. Safety razors
19. Radio
20. The airplane
21. Talkies (sound-synchronized motion pictures)
22. The bra
23. The zipper
24. Television

This is partly for my own use, but I'd be interested to hear thoughts from others.

So Simple, So Smart

I just downloaded a little app for the Mac called LatinEdit that is just dang smart, even in version 0.1, all the more so because what it does is so simple. It's designed to transcribe and translate Latin documents from an image file into digital text. It has three fields: one where you can view the image, a second where you can type the Latin, and a third for your translation. It includes the LatinWords dictionary onboard; even a novice or hack Latinist (like me) can take a stab at translation.

What I like best are the little touches. For example, there's a "Poetry" menu, with commands to mark long and short stresses, feet and caesurae. (The caesura mark looks like this: ‖) You can add and modify kerns and ligatures. There's keyboard shortcuts for these too. You can also mark passages for later revision, and insert and export footnotes. You can detail your preferences for the dictionary as well: if you only want definitions, or you want additional examples, or words in context, etc., set it and forget it.

Essentially, it's a workflow management application, but it has a clear purpose and is well-integrated. The only deficiency I can see is that you can only work from one facsimilie at a time; there's no way to collect, sort, and manage a database of images (a la iTunes or iPhoto), which could make working on a longer document a drag.

But the principle is great. I could easily imagine a GreekEdit, ArabicEdit, GermanEdit, etc., performing the same tasks. And for modern texts, add OCR and you've got a scanning, correcting, translating platform that would be a digital humanist's dream.

For the Snarkmarket Commencement File

Over at Snarkmarket, they love commencement speeches, so I'll jump on this one in advance: Patton Oswalt's speech at his high school alma mater. It includes a great joke about commencement speeches:

So, 1987.    That’s when I got my diploma.   But I want to tell you something that happened the week before I graduated.   It was life-changing, it was profound, and it was deeper than I realized at the time.

The week before graduation I strangled a hobo.   Oh wait, that’s a different story.   That was college.   I’m speaking at my college later this month.  I’ve got both speeches here.    Let me sum up the college speech – always have a gallon of bleach in your trunk.

And some experience:

I’ve seen endless daylight and darkness in Alaska.   I’ve swum in volcanic craters in Hawaii and saw the mystical green flash when the sun sinks behind the Pacific.   I got ripped on absinthe in Prague and watched the sun rise over the synagogue where the Golem is supposedly locked in the attic.   I stood under the creepy shadow of Christchurch Spitafields, in London’s East End, and sank a pint next door at The Ten Bells, where two of Jack the Ripper’s victims were last seen drinking.   I’ve fed gulls at the harbor in Galway, Ireland.   I’ve done impromptu Bloomsday tours of Dublin.

And also some wisdom:

All of you have been given a harsh gift.  It’s the same gift the graduating class of 1917, and 1938, and 1968 and now you guys got – the chance to enter adulthood when the world teeters on the rim of the sphincter of oblivion.    You’re jumping into the deep end.   You have no choice but to be exceptional.

But please don’t mistake miles traveled, and money earned, and fame accumulated for who you are.   

Because now I understand how the miraculous, horrifying and memorable lurk everywhere.    But they’re hidden to the kind of person I was when I graduated high school.

all one / odor and mortal taste

Allen Ginsberg at the trial of the Chicago Eight:

WEINGLASS. At approximately 10:30 that evening what was happening in the park?

GINSBERG. There were several thousand young people gathered, waiting. It was dark; there were some bonfires burning in trash cans. Everybody was standing around not knowing what to do. Then, there was a sudden burst of light in the center of the park and a group of policemen moved in fast and kicked over the bonfires.

WEINGLASS. What did you do when you observed the police doing this?

GINSBERG. I started the chant “Ommmmm.”

Ginsberg was also asked to read some of his poetry:

GINSBERG. “The Night-Apple.”

Last night I dreamed
of one I loved
for seven long years,
but I saw no face,
only the familiar
presence of the body;
sweat skin eyes
feces urine sperm
saliva all one
odor and mortal taste.

FORAN. Could you explain to the jury, having said that, what the religious significance of that poem is?

GINSBERG. I could, if you would take a wet dream as a religious experience. It is a description of a wet dream, sir.

 

Finally:

COURT. You are shouting at the Court.

KUNSTLER. Oh, Your Honor.

COURT. Shouting at the Court the way you do.

KUNSTLER. Everyone has shouted from time to time, including Your Honor. This is not a situation. …

COURT. Make a note of that. I have never. …

KUNSTLER. Voices have been raised.

COURT. I have never shouted at you during this trial.

KUNSTLER. Your Honor, your voice has been raised.

COURT. You have been disrespectful.

KUNSTLER. It is not disrespectful, Your Honor.

COURT. And sometimes worse than that.

GINSBERG. Ommmmmm.

The Obamas on The New Yorker

My first thought was, what’s with Michelle’s afro? Obama’s outfit and the Osama painting and even Michelle’s rifle and ammo clip all suggest a coherent (if toothless) theme: that the Obamas are secretly Muslim terrorists.

The Afro is, I guess, meant to suggest 70s-era black nationalism: a second “fear,” which is that the Obamas and particularly Michelle are black militants or Communists or otherwise “un-American.”

This cover is about blackness as much as it is about “terrorism” or any other purportedly race-neutral satirical point that can be made about it. And I think that’s where the fault line is: the smooth blending of blackness with terrorism, foreignness, and danger that lies beneath the “secret Muslim” whispers.

Counterfictionals

I put on Star Wars today to 1) calm my son down and 2) distract myself. Then I watched Empire twice, because I love Star Wars/A New Hope so much, and Empire even more. So I got to thinking: what would I change about these movies? George Lucas seems to have thought that a few more digital animals, music sequences, and poorly executed additional expository scenes (that clarify nothing that need clarifying) make these movies perfect. But what if you were to rethink them in a much more serious way?

The best idea I came up with involves Han Solo. Harrison Ford famously argued with Lucas that Solo didn't need to return for the third movie: joining the Rebellion, winning Leia, and finally losing his life as a sacrifice for Luke completed his character arc.

And there's something to that. But I also think that Han's rescue from Jabba's palace is one of the best parts of the uneven (but still I think unfairly maligned) Return of the Jedi. So here's my solution: Luke, Leia, and co. still return to Tattoine to save Han, and the early scenes play out much the same as in Jedi. But instead of being rescued to play out the string (and Han really is a shadow of his former self in most of the rest of Jedi), he's killed, Von Ryan's Express-style, either during or just after the group's escape from Jabba's barge. If you really want to stoke the Star Wars fanboys, let Boba Fett kill him before he gets swallowed up.

Think of what that gets you in the story. The pit in your stomach from the end of Empire comes back with a vengeance. There's real jeopardy now -- no sense at all that the heroes can just fight their way out of whatever trouble they get into. Leia, filled with loss and anger, taps into a part of the force she's never felt before, startling Luke and Yoda. Now instead of convincing Leia that he can't run away from confronting Vader, he has to convince her that he can try to turn him back to the good side of the force, instead of destroying him, as Leia would wish. (Total parallel with Vader and the Emperor in Empire, where the Emperor wants to kill Luke, Vader wants to turn him.) Above all, the Emperor's threat to kill all of Luke's friends, and Vader's to turn Leia to the dark side, would both have real bite.

Anyways, that's the movie I would have made. Don't get me started on the prequels.

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.