Into the Wardrobe

Cultural Observations of an iPhone User

2009-08-18T19:47:00.005-04:00

The advent of mobile devices not only allows us to be more connected, it shifts how we perceive activities like reading, and how we think of other devices, like computers. For example, two things I've noticed since becoming an iPhone addict:

Thing 1: When you read things on the iPhone that you used to read on your computer or in analog (a newspaper or a book, for example), you're still perceived as doing something much more frivolous and distracted, like fragmentedly texting or obsessively checking email. You're perceived as being unfocused on the world around you rather than focused on a piece of content. Tim and I noticed this once when he was reading a book and I was reading on the Kindle app, and he kept wanting to tell me to stop obsessively checking my email or something--and he had to keep reminding himself that I was actually engrossed in a Dickens novel.

Thing 2: My home computer has become much more fun, because much more of my stress-related email checking has moved to the iPhone, while use of my computer has basically degenerated into watching Battlestar Galactica DVDs (and writing the odd blog musing).

The Physical Book in 50 Years

2009-05-14T16:15:00.003-04:00

Here's a metaphor for how we'll think of books in fifty years: like candles.

We use candles now to mark special occasions, for a sense of cozy old-school nostalgia, for atmospherics, for decor, and in a pinch for their original use when the power goes out. But most of the time, when you really want to get something done, you flip a light switch.

In the future, physical books will also be used to mark special occasions (they'll be souvenirs) and to decorate your apartment and for atmospherics and nostalgia, and in a pinch when your computer or portable data device is on the fritz. But most of the time, when you're really going to want to get something read, you'll just turn on your Kindle/iPhone/magic-electronic-gizmo.

The Newer, Bigger Kindle

2009-05-06T11:11:00.009-04:00

Okay, I'm going to put out there right now that Kindle's newer bigger self is not going to work. I seem to be in the minority, so let me be clear about what I mean by that: It will not sell as well as the original-sized Kindle, and it is not the way of the future.

The ways in which it will be moderately successful are as follows: As an entrance into the Boomer market (i.e., people who find the iPhone and even the original Kindle too small). What's going to hold it back here somewhat is the price. For folks who are already slightly skeptical about digital, $500 is a pretty big chunk of change. It will also be somewhat useful for folks who depend a lot on graphics--students who use textbooks, professionals who use manuals. For everyone named above, it's an interim step backwards, opening up the market for more users to become comfortable with the technology that already exists.

It's also a threat to Apple, because it's an interim step in the direction of a new kind of laptop technology: something like this could be your new computer someday. Make it a touchscreen, with a touchscreen keyboard, and you could run a pretty full OS. Apple is already responding to this threat with their Mediapad. If the Kindle goes in this direction, that's the one way that this thing will become a big player.

But I'm not sure Amazon is going in that direction because they seem pretty set on thinking of this as a *reading* device. And that's the real problem. The media device of the future is going to have to be an all-in-one, like the iPhone is.

The all-in-one mindset is important for two reasons. First, portability: if the logic behind the Kindle is that you don't want to carry around multiple books, then you also don't want to carry around multiple devices, and you probably don't want to carry around a big one. Portability is a key factor in mobile devices, and this Kindle just ain't it. If you're in the general market (not Boomer, not infographics-focused) and you wanted a digital reading device badly enough to pay that much money for it, you would have tried out the original Kindle, and by now you'd be used to it, and so why ever would you get something bigger?

Second, because we always want more functionality, not less. Why would I want to carry around a huge slab of computer that can only do one thing, when I could carry around something that could also act as a GPS, as a phone, as a Red-Sox-game-score tracker? I already expect more of my mobile devices. I think this is really important: if Amazon is trying to present a disruptive innovation (something that does less but reaches a broader market), they've got their price wrong. And if they're just trying to present a new innovation, then they are just innovating by looking in the rear view mirror.

So fire away. Why am I wrong?

The New Role of Publishers

2009-04-23T09:23:00.002-04:00

Umair Haque makes a fascinating point in his most recent blog post when he urges the New York Times to acquire Twitter in part to "help the NYT rebuild detailed information about people, products, services, and news." In other words, the NYT becomes not just a source for information published by the NYT, but an aggregator of information provided by everybody.

What if that’s what publishers need to do today? Not just to provide content, but to help their customers share content between each other as well?

While some publishers are beginning to do this in a rudimentary way--OUP has a blog on which readers can converse through comments; HarperCollins has various reading groups--nobody has yet set this as their new business model.

You wouldn't only have to have discussion forums; you'd have to have space for people to upload their own work and the capability for your editorial team to sort it and comment on it somehow, so readers know what their getting (after all, one of the most important functions of the editorial team is as gatekeeper to good information). But a lot of the work would just have to be automated.

Is this the world we're heading to?

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

2009-04-08T15:11:00.005-04:00

…from Quirk Books (publishers of “Worst-Case Scenarios” and nothing else I have heard of) has sold almost 14K copies since its release on Saturday! Perhaps more amazingly, only one of those was to me!

What is Quirk doing right about word-of-mouth book marketing? I initially heard about the P&P&Z weeks ago on NPR's “Wait Wait Don't Tell Me” and one of my coworkers reports it was covered on the BBC world news this morning. I certainly Twittered about it when I preordered, and got the most RT’s I’ve ever had (ok, like 3, but still). I've even written a blog post about it! (Ooh, so meta!)

Is this just a case of good author track record (I hear Austen’s pretty hot right now…and for the past two centuries), a catchy title and idea, or are they actually doing something other publishers can emulate (perhaps in their own nice, brand-appropriate way)? Check out the publisher’s website - http://irreference.com/ - they’ve got plenty of space for reader feedback, tons of tschotschkes, quizzes, and much more. It's not all stuff that every publisher can do from a brand perspective (not all of us are publishing irreverent humor books), but there's certainly community-building inspiration here for all of us.

Out of Africa

2009-02-24T19:11:00.004-05:00

Just saw "Out of Africa" for the first time. It's a stunning film. This has something to do with the combination of Meryl Streep's slow, quiet voice and the expansive, serene vistas of Africa.

Yes, it's also to do with the attacks of lions and with Robert Redford's slow, quiet looks that hide a soul afraid of being caged in. And of course Karen and Dennis's argument before the fireplace cuts to the dilemmas of the 'plot' of the movie: trust, independence, freedom, dependability. Those are the human problems the film presents. Very nice and interesting to talk about, but not what makes the movie so perplexing.

The film's achievement is the lasting impression of peace it gives us despite the incredible disruptions at the end of its narrative. The answers to those human question are presented not by the unfolding plot but by those vistas, by that voice. The serenity of green and the roll of Karen's slightly labored lilt are what make you close your eyes after the movie ends and keep imagining it is still going on. Karen has gone out of Africa, but Africa has not left her, nor us.

From our greatest losses--the film tells us, reminds us, enacts for us--something, an overwhelming something, lasts.

Charging for the News

2009-02-10T20:07:00.006-05:00

Last night's Daily Show included an interview with Walter Isaacson, author of the recent Time cover story "How to Save Your Newspaper."

Isaacson practically got laughed off the stage with some of his old-fashioned ideas, but they're actually ones that I've come back around to recently.

It all revolves around the idea that one of these days we're going to wake up and realize that professional journalism is a) crumbling before our eyes, and b) the foundation of a stable democracy. Don't believe me? Look! A big stone tablet at the Newseum in DC even says so:

Professional journalism is crumbling before our eyes because we refuse to pay for it. I refuse to pay for it. Remember the New York Times's venture "TimesSelect?" When we all thought paying for just the op-eds and the sports section was ridiculous, and so they quit trying? And when was the last time you bought a print paper? Jon Stewart may have admitted that holding a print newspaper in your hand is just more satisfying, but I doubt that many people under the age of 25 would agree with him. It's these trends that are leading to the massive layoffs at the Times, at the Globe, at the Tribune, at NPR...the list goes on.

Of course, citizen journalists are all the rage right now, from CNN's i-report to bloggers on every topic to people who digg or del.ici.ous or Share stories. I think those folks and these media add a lot to journalism that was lacking before. I just don't think that they're a viable replacement for professional, paid journalists.

That's what it comes down to: paying the guys to go to Baghdad (as Isaacson said), who spend years digging into Madoff's past, who cover the beleaguered state of our crumbling urban schools. Stuff that might be missed by the i-Reports, stuff that takes more hours in a day than a part-time blogger has to devote pro bono. Whether or not the journalists are paid through large, authoritative institutions, they need to be paid.

We need to start getting used to that idea, and we need to figure out how to pay them. (Because even I am not going to pretend that paper newspapers are going to make a comeback.)

Isaacson actually brought up a good idea that I've been thinking about for a while: microcharges. It's like iTunes--you can pay a tiny fee per article that you read online. So you don't need to pay $14.95 a month or whatever--you pay for how much you use, but in small enough increments that it doesn't hit you where it hurts each time you click.

Jon Stewart countered that news articles are different from music in that you're much less likely to go back and consume that content again and again, though. It's a good point. Is it enough to keep people from buying?

My hope is that we realize how valuable professional journalism is before it's gone altogether. My sense is that the crux moment is coming: will we recognize it and suck up the price when it's here?

Update:
Disagreement: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/opinion/10kinsley.html

Becoming Un-Jane

2009-02-09T20:40:00.004-05:00

"Becoming Jane" ended with a caption that said, "Jane Austen went on to write six of the greatest novels in the English Language." The suckiness that goes into that useless and wrong capitalization of "Language" is reflected throughout the movie. I know, surprise surprise--listen, I like to give these things a chance.

If one put aside historical realities, the movie became merely one of those vapid creations that so often pass for romantic comedies. It was chock-full of approbation for disobeying parents, disregarding prudence, and generally disavowing reason and intelligence.

If you didn't put aside historical realities, of course, you'd find lots more things to be offended by: the number of times Jane takes off her hat in public, how she runs around and plays cricket with the boys, how she's making out with her boytoy beneath that tree in some lady's garden.

The best thing about the movie is that it didn't end happily. I don't mean that vindictively, I swear. I mean that the (historically-forced) ending alone shows a sense of independence from the typical romantic-comedy script--that sense of independence which Jane (in theory) values so very much. That it is missing from the rest of the film--with Jane falling unselfconsciously as she does for the village heartthrob and following him stumblingly from one end of England to the other--is perhaps not a surprise, but no less aggravating as a result. We are left with a sense that this isn't the true Jane, the one with the wit and the shrewd whistle-blowing on middle-high society. The one that's more Dr. Johnson than the Misses Brontë.

If it's this wrong about its heroine, how do we know how much of Jane's history the movie presents is actually true? How can we use it to add any kind of zing to our reading of her novels? What's the point of this movie???

True, I am sure that Jane wrote her heroines to act as she *wished* she acted, and not as she in reality did. Lizzie Bennett's wit is sharper and Eleanor Dashwood's heart is steadier than Jane's, most likely. Jane herself was likely correcting her foibles by the successes of her leading ladies. But if that were the point that this movie were trying to make, it needed to make it more deliberately and not, as I suspect, by pure accident.

Stimulated?

2009-01-29T20:35:00.009-05:00

Interested in the stimulus just passed by the House? check it out here: readthestimulus.org

Okay, so I've only made it through the first 150 pages so far--500 more to go. But in the meantime, some preliminary points of interest:

- p. 12, lines 1-5: "Section 1109. Prohibited Uses. None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available in this Act may by used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, or swimming pool." Seriously, no zoos?

- p. 14, lines 1-9: "Section 1112. Additional Assurance of Appropriate Use of Funds. None of the funds provided by this Act may be made available to the State of Illinois, or any agency of the State, unless (1) the use of such funds by the State is approved in legislation enacted by the State after the date of the enactment of this Act, or (2) Rod R. Blagojevich no longer holds the office of Governor of the State of Illinois." Of course Blago found a way to get himself immortalized.

- All plans for use of the funds will be accessible to public viewing at Recovery.gov, a site to be set up and maintained by the newly named Accountability and Transparency Board for the bill.

- $18,500,000,000 for energy efficiency and renewable energy!!!

So far, so good, imho.

Remembering, and Calling

2009-01-28T15:10:00.011-05:00

In his short story "Pigeon Feathers," John Updike's fourteen-year-old character David is terrified of death: "a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels pour dirt into your face. There you will be forever...and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called."

The story is about faltering faith in God, and its desperate ending does nothing to convince us that Updike disagrees with his young mouthpiece's doubt. David has just cruelly shot a handful of pesky albeit beautiful pigeons when the story concludes abruptly: "He was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever."

Compared with this ugly brashness, David's earlier description of human death is much more palatable. And while it is true that every poet and perhaps every human legitimately fears being eventually forgotten in death, in pronouncing this fear, Updike also announces its remedy: the remembrance and "calling" of the living. Just as Wordsworth pleaded with his sister to "remember me and these my exhortations," I think that what Updike does here in effect is to remind us of what makes us most human (and least pigeonly): that we care about and can remember each other, even across the bridge of death.

Updike suggests that those actions are meaningful not just to ourselves, but perhaps (we can only imagine) to the dead as well. And so it is a human strength, and not a weakness, that when we gather around the "long hole" of a loved one, we choose to overcome the ugly brashness of death by engaging in the acts of remembering, and of calling.

My experiences of the last year have certainly informed my re-reading of Updike here, as those of you who know me probably suspect. But it is two deaths in the past week which have brought me specifically to put pen to paper (or fingertip to keyboard, I suppose), as friends, acquaintances, journalists, and I remember a coworker's father, and Updike himself.

The Lives of Others

2009-01-25T15:07:00.008-05:00

Just watched "The Lives of Others."[*Spoiler alert! If you just want my recommendation, you have it--go put this on your Netflix queue.] I spent the film dreading the ending more and more; while I couldn't help but hope for some sense of human, concrete closure, I feared it too: how could it not be contrived, set against the gritty randomness, the blindness, the cold East-German reality of the rest of the film?

But instead of being incompatably precious, the end of the movie forcefully served as an appropriately nagging reminder of the other lives lost throughout, in the twin senses of those who were killed, and those whose lives in the end belonged to the East German state and not to themselves.

It's a movie about one-way surveillance, and in the final minutes the tables turn: Georg is following his one-time Stasi surveillance man Wiesler, but, like Wiesler, he cannot bring himself to actually meet the man. And so the two are left to "meet" only in the dedication of Georg's new book as Wiesler's eyes read the note of thanks to his code name. The dedication reminds us of Wiesler's failures as much as his strengths; it stands in the place where a dedication to Christa-Maria should have been had things not gone so horribly wrong; and above all, like the surveillance that dominates the film as a whole, it is at the same time intensely impersonal and intensely personal.

It's a great ending that can simultaneously fulfill the hopeful human need of the watcher, and yet exist in harmony with the realism that leads up to it. It's optimistic without being trite: it suggests that there is, after all, some hope to life, in whatever strange and demeaned form it may take--from the colorful graffiti on the now-open Brandenburg Gate to the obsessive actions of a grey operative watching and being touched by the lives of others.

Immediate Impressions of the Inauguration

2009-01-20T17:22:00.004-05:00

There are no words to capture the experiences of the last few days. But you know me--I'll try.

Masses of tourists descending on the city; whole streets cut off to cars for the pedestrians to take over; taking in history through a new lens at the Newseum; helping a gay couple from LA take their Christmas card in front of the Capitol ("Aren't you guys excited?! Tomorrow's the first day of a new world!"); traipsing down the Mall in the gathering dusk and cold; everyone happy; the surge of enthusiasm and engagement among the African-American community; the calls of the kitsch-salesmen--"Obama! get your buttons! hand warmers! t-shirts!"; the bedazzled everything; the foam fingers--with two fingers up for peace; the lights of MSNBC, of ABC, of CBS; the lights of the Capitol; the Washington memorial fading into evening mist; a delicious dinner thanks to our hosts; a beer out on the town with crowds of friends meeting faraway friends; getting up early early early in the dark, with cries already ringing out in the streets; a free Obama donut on the way to the Metro; the "Obama" chant ringing through the halls of Union Station as we headed to the Capitol; the people, people, people everywhere; people streaming in every gate, walking on every closed street and onramp; the sense of looming hopelessness among folks who couldn't make it onto the Mall before the gates closed; standing in the back of the room as we watched the ceremony, able to watch everyone's faces and hear the cheers on the Mall at the same time; the tears on everyone's faces during the swearing-in and the speech; the chopper lifting Bush up over the Capitol to cheers and waves of (mostly-)good-natured good riddance; the frigid march back to Dupont up Mass Ave. through the throngs; swapping stories with Jacob and Heather; the sun-filled and quietly happy and tired bus on the way home; that sense of cold and tired and happy that settles on you after a day of skiing--and apparently after a day of inauguration.

America's Next Top Gift Idea

2008-11-29T09:32:00.005-05:00

Boxes of chocolates and sweets are so out, Legos have become stunningly expensive, and gift cards are a no-no this year. Still trying to figure out what to give people for the holidays? Because of the growing financial crisis, there is extremely high demand at food banks: consider donating funds in your family member/friend/coworker's name. Everybody's doing it. Here, for example, and for your convenience, are some links directly to regional gift donation pages:

- Philadelphia - Philabundance
- Boston - Greater Boston Food Bank
- New York - Food Bank for New York City
- Los Angeles - Los Angeles Regional Food Bank
- Washington, DC - Capital Area Food Bank

Pirate Reality

2008-11-20T08:39:00.004-05:00

Guys, I am so psyched about all the piracy off of the African coast right now. I mean, it sucks and all, but with all the other bad news about, this is the one thing that the media can kind of have a good time with. They have to keep it kind of subtle, but you can be sure every station and channel plays the theme song to "Pirates of the Caribbean" as they fade out of their daily pirate segment. And I forget who was doing the interview, but one of the NPR guys was talking to the head of one of the security companies working to quell the pirate situation, and it turns out they use some kind of sonar noise thing to chase the marauders away, and he (NPR guy) definitely had a hard time getting out "so you're saying you use iPods to keep the pirates at bay?" without losing it.

It's probably not great for the people dealing with this mess that nobody really wants to take them seriously. But it sure makes a nice interlude between talks of the non-existent auto bailout and ever-plummeting stocks.

The Problems (and Not) of Sarah Palin

2008-10-26T09:16:00.004-04:00

Us Dems are all up in arms about how much Sarah Palin spent on her wardrobe. Aha!--we cry--an instant showing of hypocrisy. Sarah and the McCain campaign are pushing the Obama-the-elitist-and-McCain-the-populist angle! And here they are spending lots of money! Proof that they are, in fact, elitists!

Unfortunately, to many people, elitism has much less to do with how much money you make or spend, and much more to do with how you communicate with them. I'm not talking about some intangible, mythical "connection," rather, about the candidates' accents. It's notable that the Republican party has milked this Eliza Doolittle's accent for all it's worth rather than teaching her which syllables to pronounce and how to say her vowels. And that Obama, unlike many successful Democratic (and of course Republican) candidates of the past, has nary a twang amongst his dulcet educated tones.

This all speaks less to how much money a candidate has, and more to how they were educated. And that's really what the Republicans are after: they want someone who was educated like they were. Obama is off-putting because his East-coast education is so foreign to them. Sad as that is, it is frankly a much more realistic basis for liking or disliking a candidate than is the amount of money they spend on clothes, or how many houses they have. I myself like to think I'll vote for the ticket that is the best educated (whether in schools or in practical experience) to lead my country--but for many Republicans, I think, that requisite schooling just looks different. In many cases people are going to vote for the person who is educated most like themselves, instead of someone who is educated for the position they are voting him into.

But I'm not here to argue that identity politics is wrong--I'm here to argue that it is very much at play, no matter how much various Republicans spend on Palin's wardrobe. Our crowing over absurd price tags misses the point: people will like Sarah Palin and think of her as non-elitist because she talks like them--no matter what clothes they dress her in at the ball.

The Problems (and Not) of Grant Balfour

2008-10-26T08:30:00.007-04:00

OK, to everyone who is all up and impressed by the Ray's risk-taking in loading the bases last night: I just want to make clear that loading the bases in no way could have helped the Phillies. Who cares is four (or three, or two) guys score? It's the bottom of the ninth in a tied game, and so it's only about whether one guy can score--Eric Bruntlett, who's already on third. There are no outs (i.e., you can't just get a forceout or two elsewhere to end the game without the run scoring). So you have to make it as easy as possible to get Bruntlett out at home. And therefore it actually helps the Rays and not the Phillies to walk two guys to create the forceout.

It sounds all dramatic to walk the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth, and in some ways those walks do signify drama: the Rays wouldn't have done it if the score had been more uneven, if one little hadn't meant the game, and if there hadn't been a lone baserunner on third that represented that run. But it's not that the Rays were impressively putting their World-Series lives on the line--or actually risking anything at all.

In other words, granting ball four was not among Grant Balfour's problems last night.

P.S. Much as I'm kvetching about this, it's the five-man infield that I find awesome. Never saw that before. Stuff for the ages.

Alan Greenspan

2008-10-23T23:16:00.011-04:00

Photo courtesy The New York Times

To me this picture embodies all the pathos, the sadness, the brokenness of a worldview gone wrong, of an old man whose success has suddenly crumbled into not just nothing, but into, as he knows, the suffering of millions, of billions. It's a Lear who has just felt control slip beyond his grasp in the land he handed over, listening with ears perked up to his verdict, meekly accepting his guilt, and helplessly staring a fresh unknown future in the face while carrying the burden of the entire past that he has been so mistaken about. You can see it in the pink watery droop just around his eyes, in the many wrinkles that just weren't there in the more familiar pictures, and perhaps most of all in the buttoned-up wry smile that speaks in negative of unshed tears, the unclenching of absurdity, and a fleeting vision of what had been and what was supposed to be--and an understanding better than most of the enormity of his error.

Obama/Bartlet '08

2008-09-22T14:57:00.002-04:00

I think many of us have imagined this meeting of the minds, but I do think it kind of falls flat. I thought Bartlet would be more helpful and encouraging of Obama. Sigh.

Barack Obama meets Josiah Bartlet

In Honor of the Day

2008-09-19T12:33:00.003-04:00

To be sung, lustily:

Most days are like all of the others,
Go to work, come back home, watch TV,
But, brother, if I had me druthers,
I'd chuck it and head out to sea,

For I dream of the skull and the crossbones,
I dream of the great day to come,
When I dump the mundane for the Old Spanish Main
And trade me computer for rum! ARRR!

Want more? go to Talk Like a Pirate Day Song lyrics

Firings and Regulation and Lies

2008-09-18T21:14:00.002-04:00

OK, so Barack Obama wants to deal with the economic crisis by introducing more regulation of the markets. John McCain is against more regulation. Instead, his solution to the crisis is to fire the SEC chair.

I'm not against firing the guy. It does appear that he missed something about his job in letting all this happen. But I think McCain's approach sends mixed signals: he is trying to appear very dramatically concerned about the crisis (to match Obama's own lashing of the government), but he's sticking to his conservative guns at the same time, without actually proposing any new strategy. Just firing people, Palin-style, isn't going to solve this problem. We clearly do need more regulation--or, if regulation for things like how much of a capital margin you have is already on the books--we need to enforce it more. We need to do more than just fire people. We can't just take the emotional steps and leave off the smart, strategic ones because they're less fun and cathartic.

Tbilisi

2008-08-15T13:52:00.004-04:00

When I hear of its sad state in the news, I think of Georgia strongly, because I had just recently been taken there by a book, one which in its very core decries Russian imperialism. Here is Georgia:

From Ryszard Kapuscinski's Imperium, translated by Klara Glowczewska:

...One should see the museum in Tbilisi. It is located in the former seat of a theological seminary, where Stalin once studied. A marble plaque at the entrance commemorates this. The building is dark but spacious and stands in the center of town, at the edge of the old downtown district...The splendor and excellence of Georgia's ancient art are overwhelming. The most fantastic are the icons! They are from a much earlier time than Russian icons; the best Georgian ones came into being long before Andrey Rublyov...their originality lies in their having been executed largely in metal: only the face is painted. The most glorious period of this work spans the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. The faces of the saints, dar, but radiant in the light, dwell immobile in extremely rich gold frames studded with precious stones...There is an icon here on which several generations of masters worked for three centuries...

...Then there are the frescoes in the Georgian churches. Such marvels, and yet so little is known about them outside of Georgia. Virtually nothing. The best frescoes, unfortunately, were destroyed. Thhey covered the interior of the largest church in Georgia--Sveti Tschoveli, built in 1010 in Georgia's former capital, Meht, near Tbilisi. They were a masterpiece of the Middle Ages on a par with the stained glass of Chartres. They were painted over on the order of the czar's governor, who wanted the church whitewashed 'like our peasant women whitewash stoves.' No restoration efforts can return these frescoes to the world. Their brilliance is extinguished forever...

...Niko Pirosmanashvili is all the rage in Paris these days. Niko died in 1916. He was a Georgian Rousseau...Niko lived in Nachalovce, the Tbilisi neighborhood of the lumpen and the poor...Niko painted suppers like Veronese. Only Niko's suppers are Georgian and secular. Against a background of Georgian landscape, a richly laid table; at this table Georgians are drinking and eating...The culinary fascinated Niko...Niko's Georgia is sated, always feasting, well nourished. The land flows with milk. Manna pours from the sky. All the days are fat. The residence of Nachalovce dreamed at night of such a Georgia...Over and over again he painted his feasts, with that table against a mountainous landscape...

This Makes Me Happy

2008-06-06T13:45:00.001-04:00

I've been jarred a few times in the last day or two by someone using the male-gender-specific pronoun when referring to the presidential candidates. Somewhere along the way I just got very used to assuming that one of the candidates was a woman.

A Brotherly Band

2008-05-08T16:35:00.005-04:00

On company blogs, people talk most frequently about the results of what their company does. It's very infrequent that people talk about how the company does it (that's the trade secret, after all).

Are we ever going to get there? What would it take for us all to talk to each other about how we go about our business?

That is, to some extent, what the publisher O'Reilly's doing with their Tools of Change for Publishing conference and blog. Maybe it's because publishing as an industry's beginning to feel a little too squeezed? Like we all have to be in this together? Like we're all staring the beast in the face and think that throwing our lot together may be our last hope?

Well, maybe it's not that dramatic. But it's something that William Heinemann proposed in an Athanaeum article in 1892. Then it was shrinking profit margins due to exploding author advances and production costs. Now it's exploding author advances and flat sales.

So do we get more cutthroat (as in many cases we are), or do we, in Heinemann's words, and in O'Reilly's footsteps, "form ourselves into a brotherly band, and stand together against the inroads that are being made on our common interests"?

The Guy Who Makes the Lists, or, Aggregation Is Power

2008-05-05T10:42:00.005-04:00

The Wall Street Journal just came out with new rankings for most influential business leaders (here).

Obviously, this is a sparkly day for Gary Hamel (#1) and the rising stars just behind him.

But what does a piece like this do for Tom Davenport, the ranker himself? He may not be Gary Hamel, but his position as someone who we depend on to tell us who is isn't too shabby either.

The U.S. News and World Report gets as much out of the annual college rankings as the top ("top") schools. And is the Academy around for any other reason than to give us the Awards (I mean really)? These groups are powerful because we rely on them to get it right.

Point being, the guy who makes the lists--who tells you who to listen to, where to go to school, what to watch, what to read--may be just as important as the folks on the lists themselves.

And hence, the internet aggregators. Google makes its money by giving you authoritative lists (search results, feed reader). Digg.com does too. These companies aren't in the content business; they're in the list business.

We all know the content business in publishing is suffering these days. That brings up the question: Can, and should, you do both lists *and* content? Should the NYT list articles not in the NYT as "most emailed"? Would more people visit their site if they did? Should our company's site list competitors' books as "similar products" if that will make more people think of us as "the authority" in our field?

Helvetica

2008-04-05T08:14:00.003-04:00

I just watched the documentary film Helvetica and highly recommend it.

Yes, it's a documentary about a font (which, let's face it, you could have expected of me). But it's also about visual design and art culture history more generally. And I guarantee it will make you look at type differently--type on your computer, type in a TV ad, type on the spines of your books as you walk by your bookshelf. You'll start seeing things as if for the first time, which is one of my favorite hallmarks of a good film.

I've always turned my nose up at Helvetica as the most defaulty of default fonts. The film convinced me that it can and indeed should be considered in all thoughtful visual design, as it has been historically. I'm not sure that its argument that you could do absolutely anything with Helvetica was quite as successful. It's not just that the display version carries with it the baggage of the 1960s modernist aesthetic, I think; it's that I don't buy the idea that a font can be completely devoid of all inherent expression. Can it?

I also liked the final question posed--whether there is something about Helvetica that makes it universally, unrelativistically a good font: whether it's reached some sort of Platonic ideal of sans serifness. I think the answer is no (the lowercase a and g are too interesting for that). But it means something that the question is asked in the first place.

There were some shots of fonts which the film suggested were Helvetica but which I thought weren't. Anyone else notice them too? Or am I wrong?

HarperCollins's New Imprint

2008-04-04T15:04:00.007-04:00

Yesterday HarperCollins announced that they are launching a new imprint (no name yet) with an experimental bent. For one, the imprint will offer little or no author royalties; instead, the author will be involved in a profit-share with the publisher. Furthermore the imprint will refuse returns from overstocked booksellers.

The pros and cons of this move are being debated all over publishing circles and in the mainstream media: in Publisher's Weekly, in the Wall Street Journal, and in two separate articles in the NYT. And rightly so. Author royalties and returns are two archaic parts of the standard publishing model that are pecuniarily punishing for publishers. But doing away with them is fraught with risk--will the new imprint be able to sign big authors without the enticement of an advance? Will booksellers wave off the imprint rather than try to figure out more efficient ways to work with their inventory?

But what interests me here is *why* HC is trying these new models. The ideas have been batted around before, but I have a hunch that it's the proliferation of online content (free content in particular) that has made New Corp. bold enough to take this step.

Obviously money is one important consideration. Traditional print publishers are losing revenue because of online content. This is only going to get worse, and publishers need to figure out new ways of cutting major expenses. If these methods work well, we could see other publishers following suit down the road (though it will take a while).

But not drowning is only one part of swimming. This new model isn't just about cutting expenses; it's about new ways of looking at publishing.

For one, it suggests that authors and publishers are partners. This sounds like the flat-worldy internet influence to me. If authors can self-publish, or put all their work on blogs and make all the money they want from AdSense, then it seems that publishers do have to offer them something new to stick with traditional print publishing. I wonder if the fact that profits are shared tells only part of the tale--will authors and publishers work more like a partnership throughout the process too?

And the predominance of online book sales (over 2/3 of our books, for instance, are sold online) is just begging for the more POD-like no-returns model. It'll be harder for a bricks-and-mortar store than for Amazon, but it's time for Amazon to start setting the rules, and not B&N.

Apocalyptic predictions of doom aside, what other changes will the digital movement have on print publishing models?

What is Narrative Nonfiction?

2008-03-28T18:37:00.006-04:00

Technically, it's a nonfiction that reads like fiction: there are stories, or one overall story. There's tension and release, and a narrative arc.

We're thinking of trying to publish more of it at the Press. But how do you move from academic, professional, and practical nonfiction to this higher art form? Do you just hire a writer and have them work with your author and hope it comes out pretty? My guess is that it's not that easy.

What books should we use as models? Andrew Chaikin's "A Man on the Moon" and Jim Lovell/Jeffrey Kluger's "Lost Moon" are two of my favorites in this category. Chaikin's injects the human into the scientific, military rigor of the space program, but manages to actually maintain and honor that rigor all the while--a remarkable feat. "Lost Moon" is a little more pop and a little less scientific, but an even smoother read and, by the end, a page-turner. There aren't many other non-fiction books that I've picked up again and again.

What elements other than those listed above make up good narrative nonfiction? Have you read any nonfiction lately that you couldn't put down? Why not? What was so riveting?

Crossing the (Foul) Line

2008-03-28T18:20:00.003-04:00

Furman Bisher's recent rant about Opening Day in Japan is all over the blogosphere. Everyone seems to be poking fun at it, or at Bisher himself, for being too old-school (or just too old), as he complains that baseball's being played in Tokyo and being played by Japanese people. Ha, ha, isn't it funny.

NO! It's not! It's horribly racist and nationalist. Bisher's comments aren't just backwards; they're appalling. He is upset because Opening Day is being held in a country that once upon a time fought our country (let's not forget that we fought back), and being played by one of its countrymen. He's lumping everyone who shares attributes with the decision-makers of WWII-era Japan together with those decision-makers themselves.

How can we ever envision an end to the national and religious strife we see around the world if we use this kind of logic to defend even our kinder nostalgic musings?

Obama's Speech

2008-03-21T08:50:00.004-04:00

If you haven't watched Obama's race speech yet, please do so.

It's noteworthy, I think, that this speech prompted Jon Stewart to a moment of seriousness reminiscent of his brilliant (I mean it) Crossfire diatribe. There was no joking in his eyes (though the serious irony was pointed) when he summed up the speech as "an American politician speaking to Americans about race as though they were adults." In this speech Obama has done what Stewart pleaded with Crossfire to do: he moved beyond easy partisanship, told some uneasy truths, and has therefore gotten us somewhere* new. In Obama we'd have a president who not only understands and acknowledges the anger on both sides of a major issue, but makes bold to explain each side to the other, and proposes a solution.

But please, whoever your candidate of choice may be, just watch this--for its historical value, if for nothing else.

(It's just under 40 minutes, in 10-minute segments here)

------
* Yes, I am aware that the term "somewhere" is vague. I am aware that in general Obama gives us hope and visions and inspiration...about something vague. But I think in this race he has to. First, because Hillary so clearly has him beat on being able to talk all wonky-like. He can't hope to compete. Second, because when it comes down to specifics, their platforms are nearly identical. The value-added of Obama, the thing that makes him distinctive, is his ability to inspire and the way in which he does it--through truly thoughtful analysis and the courage to not just "tell truth to power" but to tell truth about power while in a powerful position himself.

The Roundup

2008-03-21T08:07:00.002-04:00

- Quirks of the OED

- This post over at Publishing 2.0 touches on the whole digital newspaper thing again, but most interesting is its last paragraph and the conclusion that sites need not fear directing traffic away from themselves straight into the arms of their competitors. Karp calls it "the Google rule": "the better job you do sending people away, the more they will come back."

- A really nice discussion of the leviathan topic "the future of the book" that points out that print is good for some stuff, digital is good for some other stuff, and that there exists a possibility of a happy medium. I'm not sure the medium is so happy (can you say wasted paper?) but it's interesting. (John, you'll like this one.)

More On Newspapers

2008-03-14T12:31:00.004-04:00

This post at Publishing 2.0 echoes my earlier diatribe about newspapers, particularly the New York Times, and web publishing.

The post talks about the different ways in which primarily web-native news aggregators' home pages appear: TechCrunch displays the day's constantly updating stories in reverse chronological order, like a blog, and Digg displays them either in chronological order or in order of popularity. The post hails these as digitally integrated and useful formats. The Times*, on the other hand, echoes its print format in many ways. Indeed, much of the page stays static through the course of a day, unless something huge happens. The article links the page's static-ness with its way of arranging articles: by "importance." Because somebody decides once a day that this article or headline is important, it lives on the homepage until tomorrow.

I'm right with this post's call for traditional journalism to really get more web-integrated.

But I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Out goes static boredom (I too have stopped checking the NYT site more than once a day, while I check others frequently--bad news for the Times**). But why must we throw editorially-deemed importance out with it?

I use NYT's "most emailed" list heavily, but I like the homepage too, because there people I trust ("editors") tell me what to read. I don't have time to read the whole paper; I like that they pick stories for me *in addition to* the most-emailed ones. I think editors add value to my content consumption, and I don't want to lose that value.

In other words, I feel like the Times might actually be doing it right in trying to find a combination of these models--including both their printish front page and what Publishing 2.0 calls their "blog ghetto" at the lower-right corner of the page. It's just a matter, now, of finding the right amount of each.

-----------
*Yes, I know I italicize the NYT and leave the others in Roman. It's deliberate. I don't know what it means yet, but it does signal the changing ways in which we think about citing different kinds of material, no?
**Sorry.

A New Model for Digital Content?

2008-03-14T11:52:00.003-04:00

So you really want your content to be available digitally, your audience refuses to pay for it online, but you still want to make money?

The music industry is starting to get interested in a new idea explained on Wired.com yesterday:

In recent months, some of the major labels have warmed to a pitch by Jim Griffin, one of the idea's chief proponents, to seek an extra fee on broadband connections and to use the money to compensate rights holders for music that's shared online. Griffin, who consults on digital strategy for three of the four majors, will argue his case at what promises to be a heated discussion Friday at South by Southwest.

Why is this just about music? Why aren't the newspapers in on this, and other content publishers?

And, at the end of the day, does this model make sense? Consumers would still be paying for content, but not directly based on how much they consumed. Does it still make sense to pay for this stuff at all? Certainly artists, producers, publishers deserve to get paid for work that they do. But if the market is telling them that their work isn't valued enough to be worth payment, then is a monthly fee really going to work? Should they instead be trying to find other lines of work, or other ways to productize/monetize that work?

I'm Not With Stupid

2008-03-11T20:01:00.005-04:00

When you're a fan of something, you run the risk of people assuming you believe all the same things as every other fan out there. Fan stereotyping if you will.

To that point, as an Obama fan, I want to make clear that I do NOT believe, support, or even fathom this article in the Times. It argues, of all things, that Hillary's ubiquitous red-phone ad is racist.

I just don't get it at all. How do you get from "innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger" (which I grant you is super hypey but whatever) to "The danger implicit in the phone ad — as I see it — is that the person answering the phone might be a black man"?

The only concrete piece of supporting evidence in the piece is that there are no black people in the ad and that the mother is a blonde. And then the author makes the leap that OBVIOUSLY the undefined terror outside the house is therefore BLACK PEOPLE = OBAMA.

It's people like this that give the Obama campaign a bad name.

So Ready For the Primaries to Be Over

2008-03-05T17:25:00.004-05:00

Barack Obama plans to challenge Hillary Rodham Clinton’s contention that she has been more thoroughly scrutinized.

- NYT, 3/5/08

The irony here is killing.

Killing my interest in and commitment to politics, that is.

Office Space

2008-03-05T17:13:00.004-05:00

A major change that computers have brought into work life, but one that is rarely discussed, is office furniture arrangement.

Before computers, office desks faced out into the room, toward the door. You walked into your colleague's office and she was already facing you. You walked into your boss's office, and he (usually a he then) was already staring at you. If you walk into the big boss's office (hint: it's an oval), he's still staring at you.

That's because he doesn't have a computer. There are no nasty cords to hide. I think it's really all about the cords. Nobody wanted to stare at them or trip over them, so they've been hidden in cube corners and back walls. So now we all find ourselves with our back to our cube "doors" and office doors, and people have to cough or something to get our attention and then we wonder how long they were watching us slouch at our computers and play with our hair and maybe pick that piece of spinach out of our teeth. And it's just not friendly.

But what's going to happen now that we're streamlining the hardware? Are we moving toward a time where there will be no cords? If I had my way, I'd just be doing all my computing on my laptop now. No bundles of cords to hide.

Might we live to see the rebirth of the doorward-facing desk?

Mobile Content

2008-03-04T13:15:00.004-05:00

Here's the problem with publishers' and other content providers' initiatives to make more content available on mobile devices: People don't want more fragmentation between their computers and their mobiles; they want less. That's why they want more available on their Blackberrys and iPhones; they want to be able to access the same content from either portal. And so publishers should spend less time trying to come up with all new, exclusive mobile content, and more time trying to make sure that all of their content is accessible just as easily from a hand-held device as from a large screen-with-keyboard.

That's why we love the iPhone and are kind of put off by the Kindle: The iPhone lets you access the web you know and love while riding the T; but you can't get a Kindle book on your computer or your Blackberry, as far as I know. It makes it harder, not easier, to integrate your life digitally.

Newspapers Are Not Dead

2008-03-01T07:40:00.009-05:00

An NPR piece* the other morning about the future of newspapers got it wrong. The contributor, a nostalgic newspaperman, was mourning the apparently imminent demise of the medium, retelling his young son's reaction to the latest round of newsroom layoffs. "Why are you surprised, dad," he asked, "Why would I read a newspaper when I can find something on the internet, on Google, on blogs, or in a newspaper online?" So sad, the contributer noted, with this new generation will come the end of the newspaper.

The mistake here matters much because it's one the newspapers themselves are making, the very one that actually threatens their future.

The commentator's son, the commentator, and the newspaper establishment, have conflated the concepts of what a newspaper does, and what a newspaper is. And unlike Jack Sparrow, I'm more interested in the "does" part.

Let's handle "is" first, though. I think that sales (and production) of hard copy newspapers will absolutely plummet in the next five or ten years. I don't know anyone my age who prefers leafing through enormous pieces of dirty paper to try to find the end of that front page article, rather than clicking "Next." And how do you even read the New York Times without the "most emailed" box? That's the first place I go after I read what's above the fold ("above the scroll?"). The only advantage of the printed paper is that you can do the crossword properly. But after reading maybe a third of the articles, if you're being generous, you throw the whole pile of paper away--!! Unacceptable to our green (pun intended) minds. I think many of us will enjoy newspapers in the future the way we enjoy quality, old-school throwback items now. "Oh wow, a record player! Remember those? Let's hook that thing up and find some of my parents' LPs."

For a while there will still be printed papers in corporate lobbies and in the subway and on the steps of staid suburban homes. But yes, Mr. Newspaper Man, this is going away. It's just more convenient to read it all on the iPhone. (Even the newspaperman's son said he was still reading newspapers online!)

Thus, onto what a newspaper does.

A newspaper finds, reports (mostly in writing), and selects the day's news for us, under a particular brand. This, I argue, needs not go away. We actually need it now more than ever.

But by clinging to the hard copy culture of the newspaper--and even though the paper is available online--newspapers as a whole (not just hard copy) risk becoming obsolete in the next decade.

My morning and lunchtime routine consists of checking my personal email, reading the blogs that feed into my Google Reader, and checking out a few articles on the Times. More and more I feel a little impatient with the NYT. Why couldn't it just RSS feed its leading article so I don't have to go to a whole new site to get my branded, edited news?** Bah.***

Okay, okay, so the NYT is catching on. They have blogs. Some good ones, at that. Some, not so good. I've criticized the editorial board's attempts before. Here's why it matters. Blogs can't be the NYT's ancillary material. They need to be its new format.

Every column, every article, every space ("front page," "above the fold," "center column," "Friedman," "Dowd," "Friedman and Brooks, and also Collins but only if it's been posted in the last two hours OR is in the top ten most emailed"), needs to be feedable. I need to be able to choose which feeds I want. I want to be able to get "all the news that's fit to click" without ever going to the NYT's home page.

"All"? But I thought you just said I'd be choosing which feeds I want. So if I only want sports feeds, I'll miss the front-page headline, right?

Well, this is where the "select" part of a newspaper's job comes in.

I have too many feeds coming into my reader as is. If I'm going to be having all of these newspaper feeds in there too, I need someone to pick and choose them for me--still based on my preferences ("Friedman and Brooks"), but with some common human sense thrown in about other stuff I might be interested in and other stuff I should be interested in.

Tah dah! Isn't that in some sense what a newspaper does already? Prove your worth, editors, by editing. Send me, say, five articles a day that you think I should be reading, but that I haven't signed up for. So I can get the top travel story even though I haven't signed up for the travel feed (so that I don't get ALL the travel articles EVERY day), if you think it's worthy. Please do this! I need you to.

This way, the top stories get fed to everyone, regardless of their usual individual preferences, but all the niche audiences still get their niche stories fed to them too. And if you get really procrastinatory on a Friday afternoon at work, there's always more on the site, because then you actually feel like going there. Isn't that sort of the way a newspaper works now, in an analog version?--usually we only read top stories and maybe drill down to some things that interest us individually, and then only read the rest when we have time? Only now it comes to me, I don't have to go to it.

Anyway, this is only one vision of what newspapers could do to not just stay in the game, but to keep owning the game. They need to come up with new ways of getting us their content (the "most emailed" box is a great example of a great success). Their newsrooms, companies, and brands don't need to fall away; they could become stronger. Newspapers aren't dead, my friends. Despite their soon-to-be-archaic name, if they figure out and own this technology shift, they're only just beginning.

------

* Which I now can't find, hence no link and no way of checking if I remembered the piece accurately--sorry.
** Probably something to do with advertising dollars, which makes sense. You can't see the ads on a feed. But Reader's brilliant new gizmo for your links bar obviates that problem. You just click the link on your browser toolbar and it takes you through your blog posts one by one, at the blog's site--so you see it just as the blogger set it up, ads and all. It could stand to be perfected--for now you can only hit "next" and it would be nice to be able to pick and choose from amongst your unread posts, but it'll get there.
*** Call my generation lazy. I call us obsessed with efficiency.

Walk the Line

2008-02-28T13:24:00.003-05:00

There's a fine line that we're all beginning to run into these days. It separates our work life from our personal life, our online persona and blogging nicknames from our quotidian embodiment and real name.

People are all handling the presence of this fine line, this tiny fragile thread, in different ways. There's no right answer--especially in the case of online social technologies, there's no precedent. We're the ones out there trying to figure this out. Isn't that kind of exciting?

Here's what some people are doing:

- Charlene Li, top Forrester analyst and social web strategist, has two Facebook profiles, one for her friends and one for her professional followers.

- Wiggins, as he calls himself, blogs under a name that is not his own, though he invites friends who know who he is to read that blog.

- I took a few things off of my Facebook profile, took a deep breath, and began Friending people I know professionally. I hope that they will understand that it's a site primarily dedicated to my personal life--though it touches on how my personal interests intermingle with my work interests. Let's see how that goes.

- One of my coworkers is taking a LOT of things off of her profile so that she can openly participate in our new office Facebook group. She's hoping that her friends won't write crazy stuff on her Wall.

The reason we're beginning to run into this line more and more is, I think, because social technologies are inherently attractive because they expose our personal sides. Society's fascination with the personal lives of celebrities is now broadening to a fascination with other people's daily movements (this shift is for the better, I think--we focus on celebrities usually because they're pretty and rich, whereas we focus on the people we follow on the web because they share our interests, or are thoughtful, or engage us in some other way). We read GM CEO Bob Lutz's blog not because we want to hear propaganda about car manufacturing, but because it's his voice and it adds a sense of human-ness to the giant machine that is the GM corporation.

Moreover, for those of us who love our jobs, personal and work interests intermingle constantly. Is discussion of the Future Of Publishing for my personal profile, or my professional one?

So what can you do to admit that human side into your professional operations, to combine the two, without letting the indulgences of our personal lives affect the professionalism of our work lives?

Why My French Cousins Never Update Their Facebook Profiles

2008-02-27T12:58:00.004-05:00

This is a fascinating look at the geographical dominance of certain social networks, grace a Le Monde.

Music in North Korea

2008-02-27T12:48:00.003-05:00

This gave me goosebumps:

The New York Philharmonic was betting that its rendition of the Korean folk song "Arirang" would be the emotional climax to its historic concert here last night. Instead, the audience created a climax of its own.
As orchestra members finished the encore and stood to leave the stage, the crowd of 1,400 clapped more and more loudly. A few of them waved. The Philharmonic's trombone and trumpet players did, too.
With that spark, the North Koreans burst into cheering and waving, from the front rows to the top balcony. The ovation continued for another five minutes.

Backstage later, some musicians were in tears. The ovation "sent us into orbit," said music director Lorin Maazel. He said he interpreted the audience as saying, "We understand the gesture of coming here. It could not have been easy for you. We appreciate that you did."

- Evan Ramstad and Peter Landers for the Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2008.

Happy Presidents' Day!

2008-02-18T21:02:00.001-05:00

To honor the occasion, some inappropriate YouTube content:

Cox & Combes' Washington

Campaign Sound Bites

2008-02-12T12:01:00.000-05:00

The possibility of Huckabee as president might be frightening, but he is emerging as a national leader in providing sound bites (and I actually agree with some of them instead of cringing).

See today's Caucus post.

Primary #2

2008-01-09T22:33:00.000-05:00

Well, Hillary's won in New Hampshire, and the media's having a rip-roaring time being as shocked all over again, as shocked as they were when Barack won Iowa.

(I'm no closer to deciding whom to root for, and thus my rooting energies are going to have to be redirected into general commentary.)

Now the real fun begins, though. Both candidates are going to have to come up with something new, and I have no idea how people are going to react. I'm now all out of predictions. All bets are off. Let's go!

The Roundup

2008-01-06T20:13:00.000-05:00

- Chris Rock on the elections
- The original Black Knight
- Real humans exist within Amazon
- Facebook for old people

The Actual Debates

2008-01-05T22:57:00.000-05:00

OK, you know it's a bad sign when a set of presidential debates leaves me wanting to vote for Mitt Romney.

The Republicans argued real issues. When there was mudslinging, it was about real differences in their policies. It was so different from every political debate I've seen.

But the Dems were boring as hell and tired-looking and negative to boot. Change, change, change--it's become what we called in grad school an "empty signifier."

Perhaps the reason is that the Democrats are so closely aligned on the issues that there's no policy for them to debate. They argue about personality--leadership values, flip-flopping, who's more negative--because they have nothing else to argue about.

Which I suppose speaks well of the unity of the democratic party, or something. But couldn't they have hashed out some new ideas if their old ones were so similar? Ugh. It just left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

But perhaps part of the problem can be blamed on Gibson, who asked the Democrats lame questions. You ask the Republicans how to solve immigration but then you ask Democrats what's the one thing they can take back? You ask only about their campaigns, not about the actual issues?

The Candidates' Debate

2008-01-05T08:04:00.000-05:00

Somewhere between the hours of seven p.m. Thursday night and nine a.m. Friday morning, election fever hit Massachusetts. As the polls were closing and the percentage of precincts reporting rocketed and campaign ads began showing in Boston for the first time and as reporters gave their analysis while simultaneously zooming over en masse to even-colder New Hampshire in the pre-dawn hours to catch up with the candidates who were miraculously already there, neighboring Massachusetts got excited. I have friends going up to New Hampshire this weekend to campaign, to attend a rally, to hear a speech.

Lots of people appear to be shocked by Huckabee's and Obama's victories. I have to say I'm not.*

Huckabee has fascinated me over the past few weeks because his campaign managed to do what very few can. He had a) a different message, and b) he stuck to his message with not even a whiff of flip-flopping. There are a heck of a lot of people in this country who wanted to hear that message: "I'm a Christian leader, not ashamed of it, and by the way I'm more like you than like your boss." He had some brilliant lines over the past few weeks that managed to characterize his opponents negatively without ever attacking them: "The Republican establishment will never nominate me, because I have such a hick last name." "You want to elect someone who reminds you of your co-worker, not of the guy who fired you." If you're a good, Christian, middle-class person, this is your candidate. He has a nice smile, a slightly crooked tooth that's cute but reminds you of his humble origins, and a kind demeanor toward all. While his liberalism-is-a-scourge** rhetoric has kept me out of all danger of falling for him, I have to say that for anyone who didn't have that compunction he seemed like the perfect package.

But much as Huckabee was never going to win in New Hampshire, he's doubly not going to win now. The moment the Iowa caucuses were over (well, really, before they were over, if you count The Tonight Show), Huckabee changed his message. He's repeated so many times since then that he's not changing his message that you'd know he must be even if it weren't obvious. But it is: he's dropped the Christian thing almost entirely and is now talking only about taxes. There goes his Christian base (it might take them a little while, but they'll be disappointed about it soon enough). And his tax ideas are crazy. There goes his economically-based following. A consumption tax sounds quite in line with his fight for the middle- and lower-income classes, but seriously? A 23% sales tax would kill our retail economy, which, let's be honest, isn't doing so hot on its own right now. You really want a country where nobody buys Macs or cars or anything expensive, just so everyone can save? Save for what? You can't buy anything. Please! All this to say that I will be awfully surprised if New Hampshire hearts Huckabee.

So Huckabee's out, McCain is trying to get in, Romney's trying to survive, Giuliani is so 2007. There we go with the Republicans.

Now for Dems! We all knew Barack was surging, though even I was surprised by the margin between him and Hil on Thursday night.

I'm still trying to decide between these two. For personality and ultimate message, I'm all for Barack. Unity, unity, unity, respect for other nations, and a breath of fresh air in Washington. But I'm also skeptical, along with a lot of folks, about the lack-of-experience thing. And at the end of the day, it's fascinating to find that the Times candidate-comparison chart reveals that they have practically the same line on every issue, except that Hil explicitly stated that she'd get Congress's approval before engaging the military in Iran, and she wants to require health care for all while Barack only wants to require it for the kids. Could it be that she's more cautious about using the military than Barack? Could it be that he's softer on health care than she? Because those are pretty huge things for me.

On the other hand, this difference points to much of my (and the country's?) frustration with politics. Clearly Hillary said the Congress bit for show--meaning not that she wouldn't do it, but that it is admittedly what everyone wants to hear. Barack, by loving the children the most, becomes more lovable. How calculated, I conclude. So how much can we really learn about a candidate by comparing their campaign statements line-by-line? Nobody can know what they're really going to do.

Anyway, somebody please convince me one way or the other on Barack or Hillary, using policy and issue arguments and not just who's a shinier speaker and who has been in Washington before. I want to be as excited about the primaries as my friends going to New Hampshire, but I've got some decisions to make first.

-------------------
* I am surprised, however, by how hypey everyone's being about it. Even David Brooks has gone off the deep end, calling the twin underdogs' victories a "political earthquake." Yes, David, people in America want change. But that was only Iowa! Let's hear what a few more people have to say before deciding that we've all opened to a new chapter in American political history. Maybe I'm just being pessimistic, hedging my bets, but I don't think it's that easy.

** I don't know how he defines it--he didn't in the speech--but I define liberalism as valuing differences and being educated about them.

The Board

2007-12-01T08:41:00.000-05:00

I don't understand the New York Times's new(ish) blog, The Board.

I don't understand what makes the posts on the blog different from the editorials on the op/ed page, and thus why they have a blog at all. Their explanation is:

The Board is written by The New York Times editorial board, a group of journalists with wide-ranging areas of expertise, whose primary responsibility is to write The Times's editorials. The Board will include a variety of posts that give background to the day's editorials, cover other major topics of the day, or provide first-person take on an aspect of politics or society that we might not address in the editorial line-up.

And I guess they do that, kind of. But they're missing some important elements that we've already come to associate with blogs, and which I think have to be present for a blog to be successful.

First, voice. These blog postings read no differently from articles on the op/ed page. Which are neatly written, I might add, but again, for that I'd just go to the op/ed page itself. Blogs need to be written with a more personal tone, one that takes down the curtain of formality between writer and reader. That doesn't mean bad grammar (nooooo!); it does mean being playful, allowing oneself parentheticals, and being on the whole personable.

Linked into that is the second element, transparency. Blogs are supposed to be a way to see into worlds we wouldn't otherwise have access to--usually people's thoughts. So the content of an ed board blog shouldn't just be background on the week's news, but explanations as to editorial decisions and how those decisions were made. What do you get together and talk about, guys? And what kind of coffee do you drink when you do it? It's those details in addition to your high-value content that will make The Board worth reading.

Lastly, timing. Blogs react to news, and they do it fast. I expected the Board's blog to provide mini editorial-type commentary to news stories breaking throughout the day. Their own authoritative take, with their wonderful perspective and resources as NYT ed board members, of the same things that we're all hashing out on our blogs. This week that's the Kindle, Facebook's most recent challenge to our ideas of privacy and the possibilities of the Web, the Golden Compass protests, and similar widespread issues. If they're not careful, someone's going to take their authority away just because they are in fact missing from that space.

Because I'm sure that one of the reasons that the NYT launched a blog for their editorial page was to confirm its continuing authority. Lots of companies are doing this now, and media/publishing companies feel the threat of obsolescence most of all, as thought dissemination is now threatening to find a new home rather than in the printed pages of newspapers and books. But you can't just throw a blog up: you need to react to the new demands that these new technologies place on content. The NYT has a chance to be at the forefront of that change, but they're just not doing it yet.

Never a Dull Moment

2007-12-01T00:29:00.000-05:00

Lots of things to track these days.

First, the Facebook Beacon outcry, media coverage, response, and response to response. Best overall coverage on the last few days on the Forrester folks' Groundswell blog. Also a Times article. The Facebook protest group is wonderful in and of itself--users trust Facebook enough to use it to try to get it to change itself!--though the comments on it make me shudder. It's just the grammar Nazi coming out in me, and the stop-making-obvious-and-stupid-arguments Nazi. My basic take on all this is that Facebook made a serious mistake (more serious than News Feed), has listened to its constituents, and is taking measured steps to do what it's being asked.

It's important to note that Facebook is not getting rid of Beacon, nor allowing you to opt out entirely, which is fine. It is now just doing what it stakes its reputation on: letting you decide for yourself what of your actions other people see. All these crazy people out there who are saying "oh, THIS is where these crazy teenagers draw the line? they post pictures of themselves drinking but now want Facebook not to post about their Overstock purchases?" are missing the point entirely. You should be able to post whatever you want about yourself--but the touchy Facebook moments are always when it's someone else (or something else, like a program) that does the posting for you.

Second on my radar is our own office's attempt to Groundswellize and begin thinking about how to use social technologies. It's super exciting and I love the Press because everyone there is so into these ideas, and though many of us are new to the various sites, I think we're all talking about the big picture in the right ways. Which is to say, we're helping to construct the big picture. And people are excited to share their thoughts with the world and to get the world involved, which is what it's all about.

Third, I'm home for a long weekend to celebrate my mom's birthday. Happy birthday, mom! We're going to get a Christmas tree and go for brunch and do yummy things like that.

Fourth, The Golden Compass. I have a sense this is about to become a volatile issue in my family, in which we have a few branches with little kids, and some of the branches are born-again Christian and some of the branches are fiery super-liberal. And all the branches come together at Christmastime.

I read the trilogy while writing my senior thesis on C.S. Lewis's fiction. Pullman is a virulent anti-Lewis guy; he has said that he basically wrote his trilogy to give the "liberal intelligentsia" something to read to their kids other than that evil religious goo of Lewis's. It has been remarked that he has managed to go 360 degrees from Lewis and isn't that much different in the end (other than the whole God-killing thing, I suppose).

It's the overall aesthetic idea of the plot which I find most interesting and appealing. Overturning Milton (and by his title Pullman makes it rather clear that he's more interested in overturning Milton than overturning the Bible) has been a central project of English literature for the past few centuries, if you buy Harold Bloom's arguments about poets' anxiety of influence. Pullman does it with no holds barred--and I say kudos to him. He belongs up there with Beardsley and Wilde for challenging social mores for the sake of art.

Unfortunately, I don't think his art is all that good (Wilde's and Beardsley's was). The trilogy doesn't live up to the promise of the Milton-overturning. Creatures on wheels may have worked for Baum in Ozma of Oz, but here they're a forced attempt to depict evolution by natural selection through fiction. Overthrowing Milton is a brilliant idea, except when it, well, fails.

One of the reasons it fails is that it's so clear throughout the novels that Pullman has a personal vendetta against religion and God; and his anger gets in the way of his argument. I think he's angry at God for a lot of the same reasons as Thomas Hardy, part of the original group who came up with the term "agnostic." Hardy complained that if a Supreme Being did exist He was "either limited in power, unknowing, or cruel--which is obvious enough, and has been for centuries." Pullman feels abandoned and mistreated by God, even if--especially if--He doesn't exist. And furthermore Pullman's angry at organized religion for the same reasons as Christopher Hitchens--it arguably causes more strife and death in the world than anything else. He lets this anger run wild in the books and it makes them frustrating to read in places.

The books aren't entirely a hate-fest, though. It's interesting to see where the love-patterns do come out--like between the children and their daemons. There's real emotion there, which is what kept me reading through the something-hundred-odd pages of the trilogy. What do we have to learn from the alternate schema of love-in-the-world that Pullman is proposing? If we are free from God's binding garden, as Pullman would have it, on what basis are we going to interact? (The Enlightenment would joyfully raise Reason to that pedestal.) I want to reread the books if just to figure out Pullman's answers to these questions.

But a more practical question is the children. Much as I'm all for reading and discussing these books, even I feel like I might balk at letting the kiddies see the movies. Am I being suddenly over-conservative? My argument is that it would completely confuse kids to be absorbed in a culture that still presents God as a good being (even an atheist, liberal local culture does this passively at this point) and then to see a movie trilogy that makes killing God its premise? Am I not giving kids enough credit? Would they ask questions? Or would they just be scared? Would they sense that Pullman is mean-spirited? Or would they get his aesthetic project? Would they become atheists but still understand the values of the Narnia movies?

And the real questions: why does it tweak me out so much to see anti-Golden-Compass protests if I too fear the books' implications? And since when do I fear the books' implications? But wait, since when don't I fear the books' implications?

Maybe the hardest thing about conversations about the Golden Compass it that the books make us really think about what we believe, and come to terms with it in a modern, everyday context. And because like fundamental religions the trilogy doesn't create any kind of space for someone to believe both in a religion and in modern liberal values, it becomes just another intolerant voice creating strife.

Old Printed Things

2007-11-18T17:30:00.000-05:00

Went to the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair this afternoon. A glorious collection of old books, old prints, old maps, first editions of books from Dickens to Harry Potter, really old editions of Ovid, and not-that-old art book editions of Edward Lear.

Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe had a great showing. Everywhere you turned were books by or about them. Is this a fad, or are there just more books by them out there? Pop or cult fiction meets Legitimate Literature? Catch-22 was also fairly ubiquitous. Other notables were a first edition of the single-volume Dombey and Son, and a first edition of Charlotte's Web which White had inscribed to Nabokov.

And then there were maps. So many, many maps.

When poking through dusty old print shops, I usually look for maps of England or Maine or Boston or other places I know. There's something so wonderful about looking at an old map or reading an old description of a place you know well: some things will be very much the same, and others will be delightfully different. But so many of the maps today were of Boston and New England that I became numbed to them and began watching for something quite different: a differentiation of aesthetic pattern.

Maps of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries are usually as crammed full of information as possible. Hill-signs indicate mountains, mounds, and inclines; rivers, as alleyways of knowledge, are drawn in particular detail. Toponyms proliferate, filling blank areas with grey when viewed from a distance, and with a complex web of names when viewed close up. Where no information is available, cartographers fill empty spaces with sea dragons and tall ships, fierce, befeathered native peoples and cute little bunny rabbits. The result is a kind of fractal aesthetic: the image can be viewed at varying "zoom levels." At the lowest level--"zoomed out"--there is a uniform buzz or fuzziness to the image. You can't really appreciate more than a few of these at one sitting unless you're really looking for something specific, which I wasn't.

So instead, the maps that caught my eye today were entirely different from these. One is an early chart of the Carolina coast and a few nearby islands. Most of it is ocean and unexplored territory. There are maybe three toponyms on the whole map. Instead rhumb-lines (lines indicating the winds and compass directions) dominate the image, giving a sense of a perfectly clean geometry. The cartographer has made no attempt to embellish. There are just straight, intersecting lines, and one ragged coastline running across a third of the page. Clean and simple, if ripped haphazardly in two.

Another map was of the Philippines. It too eschewed with most toponyms. Each cluster of islands had its own color shading, and that was the only decoration.

These maps are best viewed from a distance; they just don't have zoomability. But today their simpler, larger spatial gestures offered me an alternative to squinting through familiar and unfamiliar placenames, bringing to mind Mondrian and a squigglier kind of Barnett Newman. These maps seemed postmodern in the face of the rest of the modern hubbub, and, in the face of a zooish conference hall, bespoke a different kind of calm, fresh, basic form and function.

Goals and Motivations

2007-11-17T18:33:00.000-05:00

The other day a friend and I were bemoaning our regular office smorgasbord and the effort it requires to go to the gym every day. She said, hesitantly, that at the moment she was focused in on one goal that sounded--she knew--kind of silly: to fit into a particular shirt by New Year's. It was silly, she reiterated, but it did keep her going to the gym day in and day out.

I don't think this sounds silly at all. I do it too: I motivate myself to exercise by setting concrete, short-term goals, like being able to wear a favorite skirt without feeling all squished in the middle.

The reason we think this might sound silly is that we feel that we really should be motivated to go the gym because of some grand, bigger reason, like staving off heart disease so we can live to see our grandkids. But thinking of that while in my twentieth minute on the elliptical just doesn't keep my pace up. Trying to figure out what to wear later that day will. This says less about the relative importance of these goals (grandkids vs. clothes), I think, than about the immediacy of the question.

So are things like Health and Grandkids useless as motivation? I don't think so. But because they're more abstract, more intangible, more far off, they motivate us in a different way. We encourage ourselves to make those "silly" mini-goals precisely because we know that they're a way of heading us in the direction of the major goal in smaller, more digestable chunks. If it weren't for this major motivation behind it all, we'd call our mini-goals "excuses" and not "goals."

When we were talking this over at lunch today, Tim asked me whether I thought gym-related mini-goaling differed by gender. Did men do the same thing? Yes, we concluded, and their mini-goals might be strinkingly similar: fitting into clothes, impressing the opposite sex at a particular event, and so forth. They might speak about them differently, however, making more public their goal to impress a girl with their biceps than their worry about how their waistband was getting tighter.

Enosh

2007-04-17T20:49:00.000-04:00

In the days after September 11, 2001, we went through it. The checking up on friends--have you heard from...? oh he's ok...? but have you heard from...? One name kept coming up, after everyone else had been heard from, accounted for, checked off. We never heard from Maurita Tam. Concert choir was devastated. We had been on tour with her the year before, with her quick smile and her kind words and unexpected laugh. On Thursday it rained, and there was a memorial service. We sang one of the tour songs for Maurita, and for everyone else who died on that shaken day, and then we retired the song from our repertoire. It has been running through my head since events at Virginia Tech began to unfold yesterday, when students were asking those same questions, and there were those eerily familiar scenes of university students boldly showing emotion and coming together to share a pain so utterly unassociated with bright college days. The song has been running through my head, all day. It helps, somehow.

"Enosh kekhatsir yamav..."
(As for man, his days are like grass...)
(Psalm 103:15-18)

Happy Self-Denial-Ritual Season!

2007-04-06T10:51:00.000-04:00

It's an odd year.

As always, Passover and Easter are close on each others' heels, and conversations about keeping Kosher and fasting on Good Friday have hit the blogosphere right on schedule. Yet it seems this year nobody's actually doing any observing. It's a killer week in the semester--midterms to take, midterms to grade, degree qualifying exams, theses all but due. I have a friend who's intensely dieting and can't afford to cut anything more out of her daily caloric intake. Myself, I'm coming down with something and, while I'm abstaining from the chicken soup, I'm still going to stuff myself with everything else my body needs to fight off the ick.

My first reaction to all this would be to observe that fasting and keeping Kosher are ways of making us very aware of what we eat and grateful for it, and making us slow down and reflect on, to put it the clichéd way, the important things in life, putting everything else into perspective. What are we missing by saying that our diet, our schoolwork, our common colds, are excuses not to do these things? Aren't they those less-important-things-in-life that a day of fasting is supposed to remind us are less important to begin with? The ritual of fasting, like any other ritual (see sociologists Victor Turner and Mary Douglas), is supposed to change the state of our being in some way. We're refusing to be changed this year.

But on the other hand, the number of reflective conversations I've had with (myself and) other non-observers might indicate the contrary. We're all clearly thinking about fasting, food, tradition, reflection, and what's important in our lives. The awareness is still there, precisely because of the fact that we're making the decision to still eat leavened bread or food on Friday. Maybe in some way not participating in a ritual that we know exists is a ritual in itself.

Mmmmm

2007-03-11T12:19:00.000-04:00

A warm early-southern-spring day. You can smell the green.

It just might be a porch-sitting (and porch-thesis-writing) kind of day.

Woah, meta.

2007-03-10T15:40:00.000-05:00

I am using the Longman handbook, which I am reviewing (as part of the job hunt), to look up the MLA citation style of a review published by Longman (as part of my thesis).

Why Literature?

2007-03-09T10:09:00.001-05:00

So after a conversation with my sister and brother-in-law last weekend, I've been thinking about one of those questions that literature students always get and never, I think, know exactly how to answer. Basically it asks why literature is so elliptical, and therefore elitist.

Let me qualify. My sister and brother-in-law are both well-educated, especially in their fields of IT communications and geology, respectively. They're smart, well off, and entirely satisfied with where their education has gotten them in life.

My brother-in-law likes to maintain that, other than being kind of nice, literature is pretty useless, and literature professors are doing everything they can to dupe universities into thinking the opposite. My sister just says she doesn't "get it."

We were arguing about religion the other night, which we do frequently, and which really gets all of us thinking on all cylinders. I brought up Tess of the D'Urbervilles, one of my favorite novels, to talk about agnosticism and the feeling of being abandoned by an imperceivable God who, in Hardy's words, "must be either limited in power, unknowing, or cruel." The allusion seemed to catch my brother-in-law's attention (I think he thinks that all of nineteenth-century literature assumes the omnipotence, omniscience, and goodness of God without question), and as he was intrigued by the psychology of agnosticism, we kept talking about it.

Within a few minutes, though, the conversation turned to literature. Why did Hardy need to write the novel, my brother-in-law asked, if that's what he was saying in it? Why didn't he just come out and say it? Putting it in novel form seemed like just another conspiracy to keep the wrong people from "getting it" and thus maintaining that they had something to teach.

One answer, I suppose, is that this is my interpretation of the novel; whether or not it's what Hardy meant to write is another story. We can get into these is-the-author-dead conversations, but it doesn't help with my brother-in-law's primary, rather Marxist, question: why is what's said through literature impossible to convey directly in a manner that a "layperson"--that is, one without a strong education in literature, or a strong background in reading it--would understand? These are people for whom irony has little resonance; of "he was not the least of men" and "he was the greatest man" they would see the latter as more laudatory (the author of Beowulf would argue with that, I fear); and you can't tell them that they are supposed to feel the opposite because that's just not how literature actually works. If I can say "being an agnostic makes you mad at God," and a list of other statements about what the novel is "saying," why bother writing the novel and then having to teach people how to make those interpretations?

I know all of the arguments for how literature evokes emotion rather than telling you about it (though again, it just doesn't seem to evoke those emptions in precisely those people who are questioning its value); I know that we all have different interpretations, new ones every day; I know that when kids analyze literature they learn critical thinking skills. But in my brother-in-law's ideal, practical world, all those things could be done away with (though it would be rather like 1984, perhaps). Maybe all we're left with at the end of the day is literature's beauty: that's the reason that it has triumphed over Newspeak as a better way of communicating. Maybe they believe there's a version of 1984 that actually works and doesn't degrade the subject? But Orwell denies that possibility. But I can't use that argument: they don't want literature to justify its own existence; they need outside proof.

My great worry here is that as education becomes more specialized, especially at the big state schools, a whole segment of the population will be skeptical of literature to the point of thinking about conspiracies and such. Which isn't to say that there haven't been large portions of the population who were not exposed to a literary education before this time. Especially after the institution of public education in the nineteenth century, there was a growing divide between those educated persons who were given a liberal, classical education (upper classes), and those given a much more practical education in the sciences (middle classes). And part of the reason that public education was even begun was that upper-class voters feared that the newly enfranchised middle classes would "vote wrong." But the fear of those upper-crusters then looks like it might be coming to pass now: practical education is overtaking an education in the humanities that I believe still has immense value. I don't like that such thinking places me with the upper-crusters, but there it is.

This is turning into a class debate, but I want to keep literature itself in the picture: how can literature and the study of literature continue to justify its existence if the growing majority of people cannot understand it, or choose not to bother? What makes literature so great? Why literature?

Where did the pirate get his golden statue?

2007-02-27T12:53:00.000-05:00

At the Oscarrrrs!

This is my favorite photo from this year's Academy Awards:

The New York Times, February 26, 2007

It has a touch of Cinderella to it, the way everyone is standing just a bit apart from Penélope, as if the force of her beauty is keeping them at arm's length. The divide between the world of the crowd and the world of Penélope and the photographers is is more than one of space: it's one of light, color, time (the hustle and bustle of the stampete versus her statuesque image), and chronology (looks like she belongs in the glory days of Hollywood). The framing of the picture, with the enormous Oscar looking massively and impassively away from the scene, seems ominous to me--not regal, as I think it was meant to.

Book Meme

2007-02-21T22:20:00.000-05:00

huzzah, books!

Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a 10 foot pole, put a cross (+) in front of the ones on your book shelf (I'm taking multiple crosses to mean multiple editions), and asterisk (*) the ones you’ve never heard of.

(I’m going to add “indifference” as a category by not marking some at all).

+1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
+++2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
++5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
++6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
++7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
+++8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon) *
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry) *
+11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
+14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
++16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)*
18. The Stand (Stephen King)*
+19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
+20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
+21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
+22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)*
+25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
+28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
+34. 1984 (Orwell)
+35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
+36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)*
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
+39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)*
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
+++45. Bible
+46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
+49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
+50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
~~51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)~~
+52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
+53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
++54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)*
+57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)*
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)*
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
+61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)*
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davies)*
+66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
+68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
+++70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez) +
+73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
+75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)*
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)*
+80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)*
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)*
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)*
++85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)*
+87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)*
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)*
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)*
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)*
+92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)*
+94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)*
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)*
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford) *
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)*
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Metaphor

2007-01-29T12:04:00.000-05:00

Kipling has some terrific metaphors. I think Orwell would like this one in particular:

"Now a break in a railway system produces much the same effect as a break in a word or a lizard. The two sundered sections grow exceedingly lively."

Winter

2007-01-29T10:19:00.000-05:00

I've been listening to a lot of Coldplay lately. It's chill, good working music; it reflects my kind of quiet sadness at having Tim far away. Their sound has that same open windsweptness as the music of Sigur Rós and Martin Lauridsen (one of my favorite choral composers). Winter as both quiet and exciting, subdued and cozy and frightening, tormented and comfortable.

Maybe this is why I'm writing my thesis on climate.

Back

2007-01-26T18:25:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm back in Charlottesville now, and have apparently, since Christmas, been going through an output dry spell. Does this ever happen to anyone else? It's not just that I'm not producing proper work (I actually have been adding pages, however dreary, to my thesis), but that I haven't got much to say other than that. I just feel that I should put something up here to voice my continuing existence.

Instead of writing, I have been soaking in things: while I was recuperating from having the wisdom taken out of me (all four wisdom teeth! and I learned that they're called such in many Indo-European languages), I read a few Rider Haggard novels and a Marryat novel: so lots of imperial adventure there. My mom got me a BBC Dickens collection for Christmas, so we watched a lot of those. I moved on to Christmas gifts soon and have been working through Pinker's "The Language Instinct," a popular scientific study of language and cognition (much in the style of "Guns, Germs, and Steel"). I'm also auditing a course on cartography this semester, and since barnesandnoble.com is slow, the first few books on my syllabus have not arrived, so I'm immersing myself in the later books, which have arrived, and which are fabulous. Who knew the theories of cartography were exactly the same as those of literature, but with visual theory added in (more like visual poetry, I suppose)? It's dense but wonderful.

Oh, and over break Tim and I went to the Folger and drooled on their exhibit of early modern writing life after the advent of printing. One of my favorite displays was of the cryptographic methods used at the time; one was called a "casement letter." Both parties, writer and recipient, would have a physical guide to writing, called a casement, which was essentially a piece of thick, stiff paper with little windows cut out. This would be placed over a sheet of paper and the letter would be composed in the windows. Then the casement would be removed and the rest of the sheet of paper would be filled in with random sentences, so it would be impossible, in effect, to figure out the content of the true letter. The recipient would place their copy of the casement over the letter when they received it, and voila, the original letter would appear. With the casement over the page, though, the letters are suggestive of Jess's work in Organic Funiture Cellar. There's a sense of lightness to the page, and also a sense of being let in to view scattered bits of something. I guess what I'm saying is that in both cases the sense of confusion is strongly accompanied by the joy of being able to see even pieces of something, of being let in just for a little bit, of a child standing on tiptoe at a high window to glance at the sky.

Anyway, the kitchen timer calls: must take pasta out. More later?

Christmas

2006-12-25T13:23:00.000-05:00

For a lot of people, at the center of Christmas are family, friends, laughter, and cookies. Call me cold and heartless, but the center of Christmas, to me, is still the religious principle, the magnum mysterium of the divine becoming earthly, the ideal becoming real (maybe I've been reading too much Plato). This morning's gospel reading was the beginning of St. John, my favorite passage in the Bible--you know, the "in the beginning was the Word" one. One line particularly struck me because of our running theme in Chaucer class all semester, and in thinking about it I realized that in those lines is what I believe to be the true meaning of Christmas:

And the Word became flesh;
And made his dwelling among us.

My Chaucer professor got us all quite interested in the poetics of dwelling: what it means to dwell and how we express that meaning through language. Dwelling, we learned, originally implied a temporary state: to dwell meant to linger, but only for a while. Part of learning how to "dwell" on this earth is learning how to deal with our own temporariness. God, in theory, never needs to deal with this sense; he is the binary opposite of temporality. But in Christianity, the birth of Christ represents God allowing himself to become temporary for a time, to "dwell"--to linger--among us.

But dwelling is not just being. It's a way of being (see Heidegger); it's the way we interact with the space around us. Dwelling means dealing with that world, its people, its weather, its fate, its greenery. To make a dwelling means both to build a house, and to build this kind of relationship with the world. Christ, John is telling us, built his home here on earth, with all the temporality that that implies.

There's something marvellous there, especially in the idea that it's the "word" that's coming to build its dwelling with us. John was so deeply aware of language that he managed to write the entire opening to his gospel writing about it and its limits--and God--all at the same time. The word become flesh indeed.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and much love to everyone else.

early grey

2006-12-23T08:14:00.001-05:00

the spring-sounding birds (you know the ones i mean) are chirping ferociously outside, as the fog is beginning to lift over newly-greened night-rain grass. the temperature's low, but swiftly rising with the clouds, making me feel like wearing pretty bright colors and light things, struggling through with only a sweater when i really maybe should be wearing a jacket on top. there's even a holidayish smell to the air, a twinge of stillness and excitement and worry whether i remembered everything i wanted to do for the family gathering. yes indeed, it sure feels like easter morning.

Po'try

2006-12-17T08:55:00.000-05:00

Fine, fine. I'll give it a go.

The first poem I remember reading was...
Just with my eyes? "Where the Sidewalk Ends." Really understanding that there's more to poetry than rhyme and a meter? "The Waste Land," senior year of high school. I remember writing, in green ballpoint pen, on the top of the first page, "THIS is poetry???"

I was forced to memorize numerous poems in school and...
...this statement is not as true as it should be. Kids should have to memorize far more poetry than they do. The only poetry I ever had to memorize before college was in French; to this day I can still recite "La Cigale et la Fourmi" and wow my friends in the French Department here (thank you Madame Amiry). But memorizing these poems and the Middle and Old English verses I learned by heart in college gave me something more than brilliant party conversation material. Memorization heightens awareness. Knowing each word, each pause, each punctuation mark and accent made me think about them more, makes me feel them more. On a practical level, such close attention taught me the grammar of each language better than any fill-in-the-blank quizzes or parsing assignments; I also thing that memory games like this help strengthen memory itself. But on a soulfully practical level, I feel like I could really only begin to read a poem once I'd memorized it. It's partially the fact that you have to spend a good deal of time with a poem to memorize it (if you're me anyway), and partially the power that comes from knowing how it all fits together and what comes before what, being able to keep the whole poem in your head simultaneously at the same time as knowing how it runs chronologically. If only I had the discipline to keep memorizing poetry now...it makes me wonder how my poetry papers would be different if I memorized each verse before I wrote.

I read poetry because...
I am looking for an expression of something I feel strongly, with or without knowing it.

A poem I'm likely to think about when asked about a favorite poem...
is Wordworth's "Tintern Abbey." It's so comforting and homey and absolutely revolutionary and transgressive all at once. And probably more importantly, Wordsworth and I agree about the importance of place.

I write poetry, but...
...nobody is ever meant to see it. It's me venting, and is very teenage-angsty. No pretensions of greatness. Line breaks occur entirely for dramatic effect and have nothing to do with meter. In her self-effacing introduction to "I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono," Dar Williams captures exactly the combination of fondness and contempt that I have for my poetry.

My experience with reading poetry differs from my experience with reading other types of literature...
In some ways, a lot. Intensity. It's just so rich. I wonder if a poem could survive if it weren't in some way like chocolate ganache. But I also like to question why we don't call prose poetry; in children's literature, for example, they overlap a lot. Is The Cat in the Hat a poem? Is Goodnight, Moon? Czeslaw Milosz wrote prose poetry, as did Baudelaire. How does the opening to Bleak House differ from these works? Indeed, how does it differ from the opening to "Prufrock"?

I find poetry...
...everywhere I look? on the third shelf up on my big bookcase? difficult?

The last time I heard poetry...
We read most of the poems on our syllabus aloud this semester in Late Victorian lit. It's amazing how few of us know how to read poetry aloud (me included, definitely). One or two of the readings were okay. But we don't know how to relish words without making it sound forced. Hence we either over- or undercompensate, with effects that leave the poet turning in his grave and the rest of us squirming in our seats. It's a delicate and difficult and rigid balance--but somehow it feels so right and free and easy when you finally hear it.

I think poetry is like...
...similes.

The Future of U.S. Involvement in Iraq

2006-12-15T20:39:00.000-05:00

Seriously, read this.

"Whatever the military force to be maintained in Iraq, it is clear that it should be local. The American military system has now had three years' trial, and has failed in every point in which failure was prophesied. The officers, hating Iraq, and having no knowledge of native languages or customs, bring our Government into contempt among the people; recruits in the States dread enlistment for service they know not where..."

OK, fine, so I did some substitution of terms. American for English. Iraq for India. But the rest of this was written in 1868 by historian Charles Wentworth Dilke, concluding his work on the British military in India. What haven't we learned?

"Moreover," Dilke continues, "medding in Afghanistan [has] long since proved to be a foolish and dangerous course..."

Bookland

2006-12-15T11:17:00.000-05:00

Since I've now entered some 200 of my books into LibraryThing, I've been spending a lot of time looking at copyright pages. It's interesting how the effort to catalog books, or to provide concrete, categorized information about them, has evolved over time. From my recent wealth of experience, the ISBN was created to help solve this issue around 1965 (turns out it was 1966).

Since then, CIP (the Library of Congress's Cataloging-in-Publication program) data has been added as a way to quickly summarize a book's metadata. But Oxford University Press has apparently recently decided to stop providing CIP data on their copyright pages, and even fails to include the book's ISBN, leaving the cataloger hunting on the back cover, where more often than not there are a few layers of dirtily peeling university bookstore price tags which prove irkingly difficult to remove. Why has OUP stopped providing CIP data? Is it because it looks so unintelligibly commercial? It seems awfully unkind to their books' cataloguers, of whom, let's face it, there will be tons since most of their books will end up in libraries.

Then there's a book I have by Rudyard Kipling. It's old, but nowhere in the book does there appear a single date. The only information on the copyright page is "Printed in the United States of America." This publisher, presumably from about a century ago, apparently did not care about including publication information. But the impulse to include metadata on or near the title page wasn't anything new in the twentieth century; I'm thinking primarily of the lavish self-description of John Bunyan's publisher, Nathaniel Ponder, who took all pains to put dates and his address etc., etc. in the first editions of "Pilgrim's Progress." Why would Kipling's American publisher leave all the info out? Is it a pirated edition? Does that matter?

Back to ISBNs, I've also managed to memorize the ISBN prefixes for several major publishers. It's a neat trick. "Oh, you read 0-14-043916-1 today? How do you like Penguin's new style for their Classics series?" I'm definitely going to bust that shit out at holiday parties. Good times.

Scarring Children Everywhere This Christmas

2006-12-14T17:23:00.000-05:00

I'm wrapping the presents for my small cousins in wrapping paper covered in big, happy snowmen. On two of these presents so far, the end of the paper that follows the gift lengthwise has coincided with the level between the head-snowball and the middle-snowball. Hence a lot of headless snowmen parading around my small cousins' presents. Do you think this will be traumatizing to them? (Provided that they don't rip all of the paper off before they even notice that it is covered in big, happy snowmen.)

Books!

2006-12-13T10:20:00.000-05:00

Thank goodness that it's no secret that I'm a huge dork, or else this post might disillusion some people.

Thanks to Liz, I have discovered and therefore completely devoted my morning (and probably most of break) to LibraryThing. Check out my catalog so far under my username, agwieckowski. I've only done the books in the living room so far, which is mostly the nonfiction that I've selected to bring here from my parents' house. There's more nonfiction there in PA, and also in my bedroom...and then there's fiction.

Oh, thesis. I was so psyched to write you! And then I got to do something that involved both organization and books, two of my favoritest things ever. Poor thesis.

Pink Elephants on Parade

2006-12-12T13:44:00.000-05:00

Jessica's post reminded me of the Moan and Dove in Amherst, where they actually have delightfully appropriate Delirium Tremens glasses. The lighting is poor but you get the idea.

Spiritual Doppelgangers

2006-12-12T11:52:00.000-05:00

Do you ever see people and realize that they're having your life, but an alternate version? This happens to me most frequently when it's someone I envy--I just find myself thinking, "Wait, that should be me!"--indignantly. They usually share some attribute with me (more often than not it's both hair color and vivacity), and then they have also got things that I have not got, that I then fixate on. One girl I know is cheerful, smiley, has a head full of brown ringlets, loves Victorian novels, and now she's engaged to a boy she fell in love with in a classroom as they argued over books. Wait, that should be me! Once upon a time, it was Amanda, the ballerina fairy who found the right things exciting and happy, and got Tristan in the deal. Wait, that should be me! It's not that I'm unhappy with my life. It's just that sometimes I get these flashes of alternative lives, some better, some worse.

Amanda and I, luckily, became good friends. Maybe it had to do with the discovery of realism, or the reality of, the alternate life. But more likely than not, I've found, these spiritual doppelgangers and I don't actually get along, despite my best efforts.

Sometimes, when I imagine my subjective universe (that is, God has built the world as my personal boot camp)(and he's built your world as your personal boot camp--don't worry, I'm not that self-centered), I wonder what I'm supposed to learn from seeing these people and knowing them to be my alter egos. Perhaps I'm supposed to see that their lives may not be that great after all, and that I'm lucky to have what I do. Maybe I'm just supposed to learn to keep my envy under control and learn humility. Or maybe I'm supposed to just be aware that I'm being tested. Or maybe that it really, despite everything my mind tells me, is not all about me.

Reviewing the Holocaust

2006-12-12T09:46:00.000-05:00

I'm really interested in this conference in Iran questioning whether the Jewish Holocaust really happened.

In theory, when I first heard about it (from some indignant person or other), I actually liked it because (ow, stop throwing stuff at me!), as a liberal, I believe questioning the basis of what I have been taught to believe. Furthermore if they were to find that the Nazis did, in fact, do these horrible things, it would only make our outrage even more firmly grounded, and would silence all of the naysayers.

But perhaps everyone's outrage stems from the fact that they are less idealistic than I, and they realize that it never really works that way.

The problem is that this conference, which is priding itself on being removed from the knee-jerk reactions of the West, is no more removed from bias. The speakers are made up entirely of supremacists and others who deny, a priori, the slaughter of the Jews during the Holocaust, primarily because they see its major outcome as the creation of Israel. It's infinitely unlikely that they'll come up with any kind of unbiased conclusion. Therefore the only outcome of the conference will be the propagation of the theory that the Holocaust did not happen, and the further characterization of Zionist Jews and (despite the conference's very interesting efforts to the contrary) Jews everywhere as militarily aggressive, dangerous lying bastards.

What I'm now interested in is everyone's reactions to the conference, and what that can teach us about how far we've come since 1945. Or 1948.

One of the participants says that they are so glad that this is the first time they have been able to speak their mind freely, having been imprisoned for some years in Germany for expressing the idea that the Holocaust did not happen. Germany has very strict laws, which are, as far as I know, fully supported by the majority, that preclude anything like the Holocaust ever happening again. Many of these laws admittedly deny civil liberties. Is it worth it? It's just interesting to hear a supremacist speaking like a victim. But I guess that's what this is all about: it's a big game of Just Who Is The Victim Here.

One of my friends has pointed out that the intensity of the reaction in the West should be proof enough that the Holocaust did happen. I don't think this makes sense. The West is reacting to our image of the Holocaust. If that image is not well-founded, then that doesn't mean people wouldn't react to it. On the other hand, if she's saying that the intensity of the reaction is based on the stories of individuals who have told them to their families, that's something else--hard to make up that conspiracy.

I also have a Zionist friend who sees this conference as proof that Israel is legitimated in its military aggression. His comments are the most emotional thing I've ever heard him say. And for sure this conference is revealing the deep rift in the ways history is taught in the Islamic world and in the West: I myself had never thought about how political Islam saw the Holocaust. And so it becomes another legitimation for U.S. aggression toward the Islamic world.

Anyway, I guess my point is that there's something scary in the West's reaction to all this. We're so worried about letting it all happen again that we're shutting ourselves off from any, any conversation about it. I'm not, not, not suggesting the Holocaust did not happen. I am one of those people that has individual family stories. Stories that make me angrier than anything else ever has. The conversation I want to have doesn't have to do with whether the Holocaust happened or not, but with our ability to talk of the Germans as victims, with our ability to not be overwhelmed with guilt to the point of putting lines on someone else's map, etc., etc. I'm not defending the conference, which is chock full of biased people and, as I said, isn't going to do anything but perpetuate conservative, racist, religionist, and generally cruel views. I'm also not suggesting that we undertake some campaign to dull our own reaction. I don't think that's right. My comments are more of an observation than a call to arms (which I guess is my style). Rather I'm suggesting that if a similar conference happened in fifty, a hundred years' time, that the reaction would be different, and that wouldn't mean that we were any closer to letting it happen again.

Tesoros

2006-12-11T20:29:00.000-05:00

The Philadelphia Museum of Art, as seen from below. The red flags advertise their current exhibit of Latin American art from the first three hundred years of European conquest.

Graduate School Exams

2006-12-11T14:54:00.000-05:00

Is there any situation in which being essentialist or reductive is acceptable, useful, or positive?

We have final exams as graduate students here at UVA. Readers of my plan will already know how irate I am about them as well as my reasoning: they don't say anything about how much we read or how well we read it; they stress us out; professors don't read them; they are a big waste of time. But today Carolyn pointed out the basic reason why such exams are, in her (irate) opinion, harmful: they force us to essentialize what we learn. If our job as scholars is to identify nuances and to make accurate statements rather than generalizations, then these exams have absolutely nothing to do with our true work here. Are they just to make us do the reading over the course of the semester? Shouldn't the $20,000 per year that I'm paying to be here, or the six years of her life and a future of ease and wealth that she's giving up be enough to convince us to do our work dutifully?

Carolyn is equally irate over having to give reading quizzes to her undergraduate students; she feels that one-page response papers not only give students a chance to think for themselves, but assures them that such thought is as or more valuable than the ability to reproduce the information that has already been presented to them. As a graduate student, Carolyn feels particularly angry that professors are asking her to lower herself to the level of regurgitating information or summarizing a topic so broad that it would be laughable as a dissertation topic ("Question 2: Simply put, what is the novel in the eighteenth century?"), sensing that there is something wrong in the department's valuation of its graduate students if this is the sort of "work" they are expected to produce, even as just a sidenote at the end of a semester.

Mark, equally frustrated, was trying to come up with reasons why such essentialization is useful. Are these the kind of questions that will be on our orals (in which case, I would ask, what are our orals trying to accomplish)? Or will a journalist come along once we are famous professors and ask us for a sound byte about something that has about 34,208 dimensions but that they'll only give us twenty-five words or less to discuss?

The question seems to me to be the difference between being correct, and being practical. Whatever answer Carolyn gives in the hour she has to explain what a novel is in the 18th century, it's not going to be correct, which is what frustrates her. But perhaps being able to be incorrect in a particular way is valuable as well. In my family, that means being able to explain why poetry is amazing to a Christmas table full of people who wouldn't know a poem if it ran them over. Certainly Carolyn's answer won't be useful or even valid to a scholar. But perhaps this is the only method of translation to a culture that isn't as interested in what is correct as they are interested in easy definitions of things. I think back to when I used to work in the corporate world, and the greatest skill you could have was to be able to say what you needed to convey as quickly as possible, to hell with nuances. To be able (technically and emotionally) to make the concessions necessary to essentialize is perhaps a (dare I say) essential part of exporting our work to the non-academic world. Because if we can't do that, what are we really doing?

And, furthermore, perhaps it's even academically useful to be able to synthesize. If you're doing work on nineteenth-century novels, knowing what a novel was in the eighteenth century will be useful, even if what you remember from that eighteenth century class is somewhat generalized and dumbed down, don't you think? And, if the complaint is that this generalized snapshot of the eighteenth-century novel is the "generally accepted" view only, isn't that interesting and useful to know too? I find that one of my biggest problems in developing and writing criticism is that I don't know how the majority of people will read the text; I have a hard time saying that "at first blush, it seems that x is the way that this should be read" because I just read things differently from most people, even the first time around. That eventually makes writing original criticism easier, but first I have to figure out how other people read the text. Obviously this can and should be done by every critic by consulting other criticism, but I think I have a harder time than some other people knowing how "everyone" reads a text. Which is maybe where knowing the essentialized version of what other people think of something might come in handy.

So again I ask whether this kind of re-presentation of learned material is useful. What do you think?

Welcome, me.

2006-12-10T11:43:00.000-05:00

Well, it's about time I had a blog.

The name comes from my favorite series of children's books, of course. I'm inviting you into my wardrobe, that magical (liminal!) space where the crazy happens.

Enjoy!