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.

Fun With WMP

Unlike virtually everyone else I've ever met, I primarily use Windows Media Player to organize and listen to my digital music collection. I've got iTunes, too, and I use that maybe 20% of the time, mostly to burn CDs and sync with my iPod. But I've been stuck with WMP since 2001, before iTunes even came out for Windows -- partly because of the whole learning effects thing (I know how to use it) and partly because WMP works uncommonly well at organizing a large music collection. In particular, my collection spans multiple hard drives -- which iTunes just doesn't do as well. (At least, I don't know how to make it do it as well).

As it turns out, Windows Media Player 11 Beta has recently been released. There are things about it that drive me nuts -- for example, the "monitor folders" feature has improved, but it's impossible to easily add just one file or folder to your library. Instead, it scans your entire collection to see if you've added one new track. Eventually, I figured out a fix -- you have to disable the monitor folders feature for most of your folders. Which is sort of like shooting your horse so you can get in the saddle. But I digress.

What WMP 11 does particularly well -- once you figure out the meant-to-be-intuitive-but-really-isn't interface -- is give you multiple views on your music. For example, you can choose to view by album, album artist, contributing artist, year released, etc. -- then re-sort within each grouping. The sorting doesn't just change the order, but also groups each category entry together. So, for example, if I sort by Artist, then select "The Flaming Lips," then sort by year, it'll group all of the entries according to the year released, with little subheadlines for each category: "2003," "2004," etc.

So recently, I selected "Artist," then sorted by total number of tracks -- so I can see which artists take up the most space (at least by track number -- I could also do it by total file size). Some of the results in my top 20 were a little surprising:

1) Various Artists -- 1706 tracks. (Duh. This includes compilations, box sets, etc.)
2) Bob Dylan -- 450
3) The Beach Boys -- 298
4) The Beatles -- 294
5) The Rolling Stones -- 248
6) The Mountain Goats -- 224
7) Pavement -- 194
8) The Flaming Lips -- 190
9) Talking Heads -- 179
10) Yo La Tengo -- 178
11) Dylan Thomas -- 173
(I downloaded a free box set of Dylan Thomas recordings about a year ago.)
12) Johnny Cash -- 172
13) The Who -- 165
14) David Bowie -- 159
15) The Kinks -- 154
16) Guided By Voices -- 152
17 [tie]) John Lennon -- 149
17 [tie]) Magnetic Fields -- 149
19 [tie]) Original Soundtrack -- 143
19 [tie]) Smog -- 143

The Mountain Goats at #6 were the big surprise for me -- I mean, yeah, John Darnielle and co. are prolific, and I have most of their stuff, but it's mostly attributable to the fact that (like Guided By Voices) The Mountain Goats write really short songs. If you re-sort by total time, they drop below the top 20, while John Coltrane and Miles Davis shoot to near the top. Guided By Voices' 152 tracks only wind up being about 5 1/2 hours of music -- Jim O'Rourke covers almost an hour more with only 36 tracks.

Likewise, I was surprised by The Beach Boys -- I'm a huge fan, but not a completist of theirs at all, and I don't think I have more than three of their studio albums. It's buttressed by a couple of box sets and the complete bootleg sessions for Smile and Pet Sounds. But I still would have thought that Dylan would have blown them away by much more than he did.

Surprises at the low end -- only twelve tracks each from The Breeders and The Sex Pistols -- which, when I was a teenager, I thought were two of the greatest bands ever. (I've got a cassette of Last Splash around here somewhere.) And only six from Ornette Coleman (The Shape of Jazz to Come), eight from Rod Stewart (Every Picture Tells A Story -- a criminally underrated album by an artist who, when he was good, was very, very good), and just thirteen from Paul McCartney. Apparently I don't have any of Sir Paul's solo stuff except Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, which came out last year. A situation I shall have to remedy.

More Music: Songs about NYC

Alright, kids; I've got another mix CD for any and all interested. This one I made over the past six months for my sister Kelly, who moved to New York City late last year. It's called All Directions at the Same Time, and it's chock full of songs about New York -- mostly songs about moving to New York. I also tried to stay away from some of the tried-and-true pop standards (Sinatra, etc.). Also, to make it manageable, I picked (again) a generic focus on indie and classic rock, plus some soul and disco sides.

This one also includes an album cover, in the form of a Microsoft Excel file I made, which you can print up if you dig it and want to make your own CD.

Lastly, I would love to hear what anyone who downloads these albums thinks about them -- feel free to comment, criticize, suggest alternatives, etc.

Tracklist:

1. "New York City" (Home Recording) -- John Lennon
2. "Marching Bands of Manhattan" -- Death Cab for Cutie
3. "The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth" -- Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
4. "Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard" -- Paul Simon
5. "Song for Myla Goldberg" -- The Decemberists
6. "Living for the City" -- Stevie Wonder
7. "Stayin' Alive" -- The Bee Gees
8. "The Big Country" -- Talking Heads
9. "Hard to Explain" -- The Strokes
10. "The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side" -- Magnetic Fields
11. "Chicago" -- Sufjan Stevens
12. "Poses" -- Rufus Wainwright
13. "We've Been Had" -- The Walkmen
14. "NYC" -- Interpol
15. "Waltzing Matilda" (Short Version) -- Lou Reed
16. "When You Got to New York" -- Saturday Looks Good to Me
17. "The Irish Rover" -- The Pogues/The Dubliners
18. "100,000 Fireflies" -- Magnetic Fields
19. "After Hours" -- The Velvet Underground

Surprise

Surprise is the title of the new Paul Simon record -- just released Tuesday -- and it is freakin' great. Stephen Thomas Erlewine at All Music Guide has two nice write-ups of the album: an enthusiastic review and a timeline comparison of Simon's career with that of his surprising collaborator on Surprise, legendary glam-to-prog-to-punk-to-ambient-to-producing U2 electronics innovator Brian Eno.

I don't know if anyone in the history of pop music has been as consistently good for as long over the course of a career as Paul Simon. All of the other long-career greats -- Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Johnny Cash, The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Madonna, Prince, David Bowie -- had stretches or at least whole albums that even most diehard fans would rather forget. In 35 years as a solo artist, Paul Simon has released ten albums. None are bad, and if you strike Songs From the Capeman and One Trick Pony, songs associated with a musical and movie, respectively, you have eight albums that nearly everyone acknowledges to be great, and at least three -- Paul Simon, There Goes Rhymin' Simon, and Graceland -- widely considered to be among the very best of their era, even outright masterpieces.

I think Surprise needs to be considered in those same terms. I don't know whether everyone will like it. You have to get over a few things. Most of the album doesn't really jump way over the line in terms of sonic experimentation -- the closest parallels I can think of to its overall sound are Dylan's two albums with Daniel Lanois (Oh Mercy, Time Out Of Mind), albeit leaning towards Eno's production work on Talking Heads's Remain In Light or U2's Achtung Baby. It's listener-friendly, perfect for the slightly graying progressive audience already warmed up by indie composers like Sufjan Stevens on NPR. When I first heard the opening riffs of "Outrageous" (Track #3), the implausibility of the nearly 65-year old Simon sassy-skatting over punk-funk guitar took me aback. But by the time you get to the classic-Simon chorus (I predict that virtually everyone will call this song "Who's Gonna Love You When Your Looks Are Gone?"), all is forgiven. The push-pull between Eno and Simon is like that over the whole album: two aging superstars stretching their limits and showing the kids how it's done. I told some friends the other day that it was like going to a family wedding and watching your parents get up, go to the dance floor, and start to break dance. You just can't entirely believe it.

Simon's always occasionally dipped into the well of funk, albeit more often Spanish-inflected grooves than Parliament-Funkadelic. But the music on this album, while as sweet and wry and smart as anything that's come before, has an overt aggression that Simon's almost always masked. The drums, electronics, and guitar that kicks in at the end of standout "How Can You Live in the Northeast?" sounds closer to Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks" or The Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" than anyone could have expected to hear. Yet the album still has the same lyrical and intellectual preoccupations: aging, relationships, God, history, escape, family, America. Simon's always had a sharp edge in his lyrics that people often miss -- here the razor just sticks out a little farther from the candy wrapper. There's a terrific line on another great track, "Once Upon A Time There Was an Ocean," that sums it all up:

I figure that once upon a time I was an ocean.
But now I'm a mountain range.
Something unstoppable set into motion.
Nothing is different, yet everything's changed.

That's Paul Simon, and that's this album. Very highly recommended.