Column inches

Removing an ant from your ear canal

2010-07-13T15:36:00.001-04:00

The usually wonderful writer Anthony Lane uses a lazy analogy in describing some lyrics from a pop song.

Trying to get them out of your head is like trying to dislodge an ant that has crawled into your ear canal.

Not that hard I would imagine- I would stick my head under a sink.
More importantly an analogy fails when a reader is asked to understand something they know well by comparing it to something they don't know at all. Everyone knows what it is like to have a pop song that won't stay out of their head. Lane asks us to compare that to something very few people have experienced.

Techcrunch's weird analogy

2010-07-03T17:32:00.000-04:00

By extracting data from suppliers, Apple’s chip team has a feedback loop into product planning. All of this collective wisdom adds up, helping Apple decide what to roll-up, buy, license, or outsource. Imagine seeing your competition’s entire feature roadmap, and then planning your own SoC [System on a chip] strategy. It’s like seeing your neighbor’s wife naked, and deciding afterward whether you’re interested, even though you’re already married.

The SoC statement is completely understandable and the logical conclusion of several paragraphs of clear prose. Then a strange analogy about having an affair with a neighbor's wife is introduced. Analogies are good when they clear up complicated situations. They are bad when they make clear situations confusing.
My guess is the author has been thinking a lot about affairs lately.

Leaving Facebook

2010-06-21T14:29:00.000-04:00

I deactivated my Facebook account for a week and it was a very productive in terms of making me think about how I use the service.
There are the potential issues that I see

Privacy- FB's privacy issues are well known and I have nothing to add about them.
Communication issues (primarily as a replacement for email)
FB Bullying
Attention fragmentation
Virtual friendships vs. real ones

Communication issues
I want to own my emails- to be able to reply to them in the editor that I choose. For a long time I've been disappointed that FB forces me to use their system but not enough to do anything about it. In the time I have been away from FB my feeling towards my communication has felt "cleaner". It's an odd feeling to have in relation to technology but I think it's apt. It feels better to have one process for replying to people and to have everything in one place.
It seems to me that FB would like as much as possible to replace my regular emailing with their own system. They haven't made it inconvenient because they aren't good with technology but because they want me using their website. I respect their desire to earn a profit but it does make me feel bullied.

FB Bullying
When I attempted to deactivate my account FB showed me 6 (?) large profile pictures of my friends and below each it said that they would miss me- "David Charles will miss you" and "Stanley Salazar will miss you" etc. The approach worked well and did what it was supposed to do: it made me feel like I was abandoning my friends.
The problem is that it's not true and that all of my friends have my email. I'm not cutting my friends out. What I am doing is losing the communication that they don't direct specifically toward me. I don't believe that anybody will stop messaging me because I am not on FB but I will stop recieving many messages that people broadcast to the world.

Broadcast messages
There are the main types of FB posts

Ordinary snark and cool links- what I post and like to read
Reaction to world events
Events in people's lives

The only one I want to discuss the last one. I have found out that I don't want to know about events in people's lives unless they tell me specifically. Even if it is something minor it feels weird. Let's say I meet my friend Sedgewick and I remember from his FB posting that he saw The Bourne Ultimatum last Friday. While I'm talking to him I might start thinking about whether I should mention it or not and even wondering if knowing it makes me weird. (Then I realize that worrying about it really does make me weird etc.)
It may not be rational to think that remembering a public post is weird but I think that even if isn't weird it is unnatural. It interrupts the normal flow of conversation. Now instead of either The Bourne Ultimatum being discussed or not discussed it's in this half-discussed state until we get to it.

Virtual friendships vs. real ones
I think the main appeal for me about Facebook was the idea of reconnecting with old friends in a non-virtual manner. A few weeks ago I decided to think about how well that has worked out and realized that I had only met in real life one person who I had lost touch with that I had found again on Facebook.
(My results may be reflections of my own circumstances and are certainly affected by the fact that many of my old friends live far away.)

Attention Fragmentation
I've already discussed how knowing events from people's live can fragment a real life conversation. To some degree I think it also fragments my general concentration. When I write I try to isolate myself from other people's thoughts.

A final thought
Last week I went to a book reading where I knew one of the authors. His short story was good and we talked for a few minutes after. The conversation stalled a bit and he asked me if I was on a Facebook. I told him no and it felt right. He was an interesting guy and I will by happy to talk to him whenever I run into him. If we end up having a real life friendship that could be cool too but in no way did I feel that I wanted a FB friendship with him. I don't want to know what he's reading or if he's had a bad day. It's not that I'm not interested in that information- it's that I don't want to get it through FB.

"Grandpa doesn't have time"

2010-05-09T18:14:00.002-04:00

My phone conversation with my grandfather today-
Grandpa: You need to get married.
Me: Okay-
Grandpa: Grandpa doesn't have time
Me: I hear that
Grandpa: Grandpa doesn't have time

"miscast"

2010-05-01T14:40:00.001-04:00

"Miscast" is an oddly non-judgemental word and somehow appropriate to the theater. It means poorly cast but comes off seeming like there was just a bit of mixup. A miscast play has fundamental problems but "miscast" doesn't capture that.

his honey and his cross

2010-05-01T14:19:00.003-04:00

Simon's ability to stand outside himself and to observe the folly of Homo sapiens is both his honey and his cross: instead of working through the emotion he set up in some of his plays, he deflects it with laughs.

from the New Yorker.
The New Yorker often reprints train-wreck metaphors from other publications. This isn't so bad but I think it doesn't work well.

Thinking better without apostrophes

2007-09-08T17:51:00.002-04:00

When putting my thoughts down I never incorrectly use homonyms that don't contain apostrophes ("witch" and "which") but I will often use the word when it saves me an apostrophe ("it's" and "its").

When there's some flow to writing I feel like there is a type of split-thinking occurring: one part for the current sentence and the other for the following ones. The current sentence has been completed- it must only be maintained in memory while the fingers catch up. The following ones are where the thinking is going on- the choices of word and flow.

I want this first part of the brain, this secretary, to get the words out and leave me in peace. But but every sentence there he is sticking his head in the door with and bothering me. I bark at him to leave and he goes back and does the most awful job he can.

It is easier for me to write it wrong and then go back through when I hit some lull. It costs more time to do it this way but it that works. The reasons for the problem and this solution are deeply embedded in the process- that I'm tapping a keyboard and using a word processor.

The difference between typing and writing with a pen or pencil is that it is much less brain intensive. After a certain point we are all endlessly experienced with making the curves of letters but it continues to be something we have to do. Typing isn't like that. I have no memory of typing "continues" two sentences ago. It didn't feel different from "endlessly" or "curves". It didn't feel like anything. I thought the words and they appeared. (In this way typing is closer to speaking).

The level of this menial work has been flattened, or nearly. When we get close to the ground level we see that the apostrophes (and the capitalizations) don't quite work the way they should. They require effort. When I get to typing "you're" there's an instant where I'm back at the fingers to avoid "your'e" or "yoUre".

There are two reasons I find all of this interesting: learning about how people think, learning about how people think differently, and how thinking on this may affect technology.
The minutiae of how people think is rarely discussed. We know our friends opinions but not how they got there and that seems to be an exciting bit. I've never heard someone say how they get their words on the page.

Two words

2005-12-20T19:54:00.000-05:00

It seems to me that a one word poem, unless it consisted of a made up word, could never be any good. Its meaning would already have been absorbed at another time and there isn't much room for reimagination if it is only done by framing. Of course there is a staggering number of two word combinations many of them rarely if ever experienced. I was wondering if, as in any formal poem, there could be a method of writing a two worder- or is it that the regular lengths of structured poems have lengths that are related to the structure of language.

Martin Amis's Experience

2005-12-07T06:52:00.013-05:00

Experience is a sentence to sentence pleasure.

....However this may be, I got very close to loving Jane. “I’m your wicked stepmother,” said Jane, after the wedding. And she was my wicked stepmother- but only in the sense meant by my son Louis, when he tells me (for instance) that he is “wicked at Latin”. Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate, and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you. And she worked on this little vice, and overcame it. When I see her now I resent our vanished relatedness, canceled by law but not by feeling. I also admire her as an artist, as I did then. Penetrating sanity: they both had that in their work. And I kept thinking, as I watched the household start to collapse, that if they could just stand back from this if they could write it instead, then, surely they would see.... But writers write far more penetratingly than they live. Their novels show them at their very best, making a huge effort: stretched until they twang.

This is honest, conversational, and well-written. The sentences vary without calling attention to themselves. This is because each structure is chosen to fit his meaning. There also is an effort to be impartial-to get outside of himself and understand the actions of others.
The paragraph is not as penetrating as I remember but this isn't much more than a better than average one.

Many of the criticisms of this book are true: the unexplained elisions of important figures (wives, etc.), an unwillingness to truly criticize people. But against such a smooth reading experience they don't matter. I can sit with this book every six months and enjoy a writer turning his full capabilities inward.

New Yorker

2005-10-14T10:39:00.000-04:00

I'm used to reading the New Yorker over a week so I didn't really understand how long it takes to get through in a sitting. It takes me about a day.
I sent a correction email to the editor about something I thought was a mistake. There's no reason why this should be my first one except that I happened to be near a computer. They had an architecture article that made a comment about an architect saying he would be the first person to design a building he'd never see. This contradicts what I know about major works of the past.

Update: I've sent a few more notes but had no responses.

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Digital Dictionaries

2005-10-12T22:59:00.000-04:00

It would be nice if they kept a list of the words you looked up. I looked up a few today and they'll all be gone by tommorow or later this evening. I could also look at the categories of words I don't know. I already know I have problems with architecture, plants, fish, clothing, and food.
Some of those I looked up today bombe, hillock, politesse.

Update (December): I no longer have any idea what these mean.

Why Combray?

2005-09-25T09:48:00.000-04:00

Proust and I aren't getting along. Is this supposed to be funny? charming? acute?

And so I no longer used to go into the little sitting-room (now kept shut) of my uncle Adolphe; instead, after hanging about on the outskirts of the back-kitchen until Françoise appeared on its threshold and announced: “I am going to let the kitchen-maid serve the coffee and take up the hot water; it is time I went off to Mme. Octave,” I would then decide to go indoors, and would go straight upstairs to my room to read. The kitchen-maid was an abstract personality, a permanent institution to which an invariable set of attributes assured a sort of fixity and continuity and identity throughout the long series of transitory human shapes in which that personality was incarnate; for we never found the same girl there two years running. In the year in which we ate such quantities of asparagus, the kitchen-maid whose duty it was to dress them was a poor sickly creature, some way ’gone’ in pregnancy when we arrived at Combray for Easter, and it was indeed surprising that Françoise allowed her to run so many errands in the town and to do so much work in the house, for she was beginning to find a difficulty in bearing before her the mysterious casket, fuller and larger every day, whose splendid outline could be detected through the folds of her ample smocks. These last recalled the cloaks in which Giotto shrouds some of the allegorical figures in his paintings, of which M. Swann had given me photographs. He it was who pointed out the resemblance, and when he inquired after the kitchen-maid he would say: “Well, how goes it with Giotto’s Charity?”

Palm beach brings out the best in writers

2005-09-25T09:24:00.000-04:00

Money is cheap on the Gold Coast, and there is a lot of it floating around. A thirteen-year-old boy recently found a million dollars' worth of big, finely cut diamonds in a brown bag on the railroad tracks near Hollywood. His aunt made him turn in the loot, but nobody claimed it, and his neighbors called him a fool. Which was true. There is no place for Horatio Algers down her on the Gold Coast; hard work and clean living will get you a bag of potato chips and a weekend job scraping scum off the hull of your neighbor's new Cigarette boat.

Hunter s. Thompson

"The drama of diamonds! Yes, diamonds are a girl's best friend... This exquisite necklace! A unison of noble gems. Yours for a mere - $250,000."
This was the seasonal Gucci party, given at the Gucci arcade and fronted by Gucci himself (or, rather, by 'Doctor Aldo Gucci' himself. 'Doctor': don't you love it?) Gucci himself is a resplendently handsome maniac with operatic manners and impossible English. 'Let us give thanks that God has forgiven this evening' and so on. Swanky girls and jinking pretty-boys modeled the Doc's latest creations. Gucci then repaired to the minstrel's gallery and, with a tambourine in one hand and a microphone in the other, actually mimed to the songs being played be the sedative pop group behind him.

Martin Amis

Six Feet Under loses its realism

2005-09-25T09:02:00.001-04:00

During the first season of Six Feet Under a few of the characters sit down to watch TV. There's a 1980's sitcom on (Family Ties, The Cosby Show?) and it was a jarring moment. There wasn't much of the old show on but it brought back to memory how nothing happened on thoses shows- they were endlessly repeating interactions between set characters.
I'm nearly through with the fourth season and the show has grown weaker. The editors have never wanted a scene longer than a minute which not only makes me feel babied but decreases the impact of major scenes. There was an episode where everything was building towards a dinner of conflicts. Schedules were being made, people were taking themselves on and off the list, there was planning and worrying. People sat down, I imagined the ways it could blow up and ... it was over.
The characters' motivations are no longer clear which make them hard to identify with. After his wife's death Nate becomes depressed, hostile, irresponsible and crazed and then, after burying his wife, a smiling saint. If I had heard these events would happen to him I would have predicted neither of these transformations.

People I saw today

2005-09-25T08:52:00.001-04:00

I saw a new bakery, Babycakes, in the neighborhood and decided to go in. As I entered a small boy who was positioned adjacent to the door, made a move to go under me. I raised my leg to block him before remembering that this was not a cat or a dog- that he would not immediately dart into traffic or run away.

In midtown there was a person driving a bicycle rickshaw wearing a Chucky mask. It had the static look of masks but was tight on his face making the effect a bit stronger.

Chopping up our online selves

2005-09-25T07:28:00.000-04:00

I have a photo website which isn't linked with this and computer one which is. I've thought about linking them up so that the 2 readers of this site can find the other one and the three readers there can... There might also be unforseen ways in which the two interact.
The problem is that the more that I combine unrelated things the only thing that links them is the person. If there is a site of only photos, it is more straightforward to view them without thinking about who took them than if there is a book review below them.
The websites that I like, even if they are only by one person, do not feature that person. This reminds me that nearly every song I listen to is by a band not a musician. If it is by a single person then they tend to have renamed themselves (ie Mountain Goats).
If reading a more personal one in the first few sentences not only are you trying to answer what it's about but whether it is of value to you. One of the reasons that having a site be about something specific is that there is a known value.
The idea of the site also makes writer's focus clear. If he is evaluating a painting the first sentence may show the thesis. This is takes more work when the entry is about someones travels in Bangladesh.

Congrats

2005-09-24T13:11:00.000-04:00

Two of my friends just got some major press
Christian's Seattle Monorail project on boinboing
Susan Margolis made it into my hometown paper

Cleaning

2005-09-21T07:58:00.000-04:00

In between the pages of my new copy of Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House are two pistachio shells which I'm using as bookmarks while I look up what a "backsplash" is on the web. From the context, I'm fairly sure that it is not the type of thing that happens while swimming toward the edge of a pool. It is some type of furniture.
Last night I was variously described as an "animal", a "dog", and a "monkey" due to some other events involving pistachio shells and whatnot. So the natural reasoning might be that I'm reading this because the book was thrown at me.
Instead I ordered it, after reading about it on Cool Tools. My hopes were that after understanding the science of keeping house, I might be more willing to do it. At the least it is always interesting to be introduced to a new world.

This is probably a subject for another time...
The subtitle of the book irks me because besides being a cliche the phrase "art and science" is based on a poor conception of science. It suggets that science is rigid list of steps that needs to be tempered with art.
Nearly every area of science is declared more "art than science". "Up until now visualizing gene transcripts has been more art than science,(link)" "Scientists might add one foreign gene to an organism to produce a drug like insulin. The technique is more art than science given the brute trial-and-error...(link)." But this is what practicing science is, it has to grapple with uncertainty.

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050829/pf/nbt0905-1037_pf.html

Revere- counterlife

2005-08-13T16:36:00.000-04:00

Finishing Philip Roth's The Counterlife there's a feeling of exhuastion. Jew, Jew, Jew. For an atheist Jew there's so much talk about being Jewish. It almost forces a review to look at the book as a Jewish text.
If this can be avoided, it's clear that the book fails on first principles. It's only talk. There's monologues and dialogues and monologues about dialogues. There are letters sent to cover what was missed in the dialogues and replies to those letters. Each needing their own p.s. 's and p.s.s.'s in order to contextualize what's been said.
It takes the pleasure out of reading when there's is nothing to imagine. And it doesn't leave room for what we look for in literature.

The Frick

2005-08-06T10:09:00.000-04:00

The Frick is a relaxing museum. The floor is carpeted, the walls are warmly colored. There was a comfy couch in a long room where I sat looking at paintings by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Velazquez, Goya and others.
Derived from a coal magnate's (Frick) collection, the curation is based on his own feelings of harmony rather than similarities in era or style. These contrasts create directions for thought- what makes the paintings go together, what makes paintings more effective.
His home, designed by Thomas Hastings, is worth seeing for the architecture. In a high, skylit middle room is a long pool with a fountain. Its walls are windowed so you can look into some of the rooms.

MOMA vs. Met

2005-06-29T19:13:00.001-04:00

My first visit to the MOMA was a seminal experience and I would still recommend it for people that are going to be in NYC only once but as time goes by I find that when I have to choose I pick the Met.
The ideal viewing experience for art is at a rich person's home sitting on a long sofa with some food. The room nicely heated, the wall coverings and lighting pleasurable and the art's dimensions in proportion to the room.
In the Met at times you are in a rich person's room (transplanted from some 16th century villa) with wood floors, a carved ceiling, antique chairs and the art in its original context. This is calming and natural, it feels less like inspecting art and more like tourism. There are other varieties of rooms. The Japanese garden with its soft light, trees, weathered rocks and running water. The American sculpture garden where you can eat while looking at sculptures, a bank facade, fountains, and the entrance to the Tiffany home. Also the long Egyptian room with the pyramid, medieval room with the gigantic gate, etc and even on a weekend you can often have these spaces to yourself.
The MOMA, like McDonald's, is designed to be uncomfortable in order to increase turnover. With a $100 million renovation the MOMA can't use plastic seats but it puts them in a fraction of the rooms near comparatively minor works. It's a sort of anti-curation where the works are overwhelmed by the white lights and huge walls. They are either reflexively grouped or have no relation (the sculpture garden). There also seems to a curious prominence given to works such as all black paintings, paintings of stripes, and exploded cartoons which causes many people to laugh the art off, move on quickly, and take other works less seriously. To my mind, even if taken seriously these works are hard to get lost in.
There are other touches. The rooms are excessively cold and vents seem to be positioned over the existing seating. The art on display at the cafeteria is minor *. The guards have a special aggressiveness (perhaps abetted by management.) I have back problems and sometimes use a folding seat but they prevented me (this was not a problem at the Met.).
You can see the way these things affect people at the MOMA people are noisier, ruder take more pictures, and move more quickly. At the Met you will see people quietly clustered around the introductory text of the show and the people who skip it carefully avoiding getting into the line of sight.

*I haven't seen the new cafeteria.
Notes:
Here's more definitive, better written criticism of the curatrion.

Hipster

2005-06-18T06:46:00.000-04:00

"Hipster" originally referred to poor, black, jazz performers. It later grew to encompass blacks and whites who were dedicated to jazz and beat poetry.* They thrust themselves out of the main culture, lived in fallen-down neighborhoods and were working with new art forms.
The current use is the opposite of the former meanings. There are now "trust fund hipsters" who are making neighborhoods too expensive. If they lack money they use what is derisively called "hipster PDA's" (note pads). Most importantly it means uncool- "[someone] who derives his identity largely through his association with a subculture which has been deemed hip". The following of counter-culture music has become another example of trying to fit in.
It now reflects only on the speaker, meaning "there are people who either dress better or attend cooler events than me, and I'm better than them because that is all they care about. And that makes them uncool." The speakers also seem to be wanting recognition of their use of a "cool" word. The unremarkable "hipster PDA" is frequently mentioned in magazines and websites (22,000 Google hits). Is there anything so special about using a notepad to record events?

*Even historically "hipster's" picture is somewhat confused. A hipster "wore a beret, dressed completely in black, smoked mentholated Kool cigarettes, wore sunglasses even after sundown". This is not a good description for many of the famous ones- Lenny Bruce, Miles Davis, Ginsberg, and Kerouac.

Before night falls

2005-05-29T07:58:00.000-04:00

Before Night Falls is frustrating because there is a feeling of a greater book that could have been made from these experiences. The ones listed are so plentiful and devastating that it seems that they weren't able to get the attention they deserve.
Any paragraph has as much action and more consequences than a typical New Yorker short story. Here is a picking of the best paragraph from a random page:

And then one day a big scandal erupted at the Library. Two well-known women employees had been caught in the ladies' room making love. The women were brought before Maria Teresa who pardoned them, saying that this was none of her business and concerned only their husbands, and there was nothing for her to do. Precisely for being so generous Maria Teresa could not avoid having more and more "enemies" infiltrate the library: resentful people who could not forgive her for the fact that they owed their jobs to her. One of them was Maria Luisa Gil, who hated Maria Teresa with a passion simply because she wanted the job of director for herself. She was a Stalinist Spaniard, married to an old stalwart of the communist party. She was filled with bitterness which she covered up with apparent sweetness. Little by little those enemies started to make headway, saying Maria Teresa was a lesbian, an aristocrat, and a counterrevolutionary, and they finally managed to get her replaced. Lisandro Otero was the one to tell Maria Teresa that she had been ousted. Like a good partisan custodian and enemy of culture, he took great pleasure in firing the person who created the institution. The new director was the none other than the captain of Fidel Castro's police, Captain Sidroc Romos. Maria Teresa left the library in tears.

This could be a movie pitch. Instead it is one of a stunning series of events including avoiding gun fire, hiding in trees, beatings, robberies, prison killings, disfigurements and above all sex in proportions best described with forecasts or statistics. The number of partners certainly exceeds the book's pages but what about its commas?
This may be the only way the book could have been written- as a defiant record in the gaps between fleeing the police, avoiding informers, and another lost manuscript.
None of this is to say that this isn't a great book- it changes one's perspective. Making us aware that this was a person nearly dying* to be sexually, politically and artistically free.

*In my rereading I was surprised to see that there was a time people were dying to get to Gauntanamo.

My Google answers links

2005-05-28T17:06:00.000-04:00

when is a brita filter done
Trading - what are the odds of making enough money to be worth it
occassional extra keyboard happenings
dell inspiron 4150 will not wake up from suspend
Places for people who love culture to live.
Connection refused for only some urls
Is it possible for muscles to go on the wrong side of bone through movement?
Getting established as a choreographer
dell inspiron 4150 will not wake up from suspend

Picking a place to live

2005-05-28T15:21:00.000-04:00

I plan to stay in New York for some time yet but there are times when the expense, danger, lack of space...

NYC is the third worst overall for air. Also scoring near the top for lead in the air and water pollution. This is not only bad news for current asthma sufferers like myself, NYC is now at the point where one in eight children have asthma and one in four in certain parts as opposed to six percent for the general population.
Diesel fumes are responsible for 4000 deaths per year in New York State. This might have to do with the 30,000 trucks entering Manhattan each day.

Whether I will stay in the U.S. is uncertain so I've sought out information on other cities. I wasn't able to find isolated pollution reports but did find some Total Quality of Life stats which use pollution as a factor. New York makes it to 39th on the list of the world's best cities and nationally the US only makes it to thirteenth.

Note:
At one point I asked a related question using Google Answers.