June 3, 2004
Faces seen around town.
A clown on a wall:
An unrecognizable face on a lamppost:
Gandhi on the sidewalk:
Three faces on a wall:
An elusive face in a shredded poster:
UPDATE: I now know that the "unrecognizable face" is Andre the Giant and that it is part of a big art project. I'm not going to publicize it because I don't think artists should deface--even with a face--public property. I like to photograph things that are destroyed or partially destroyed, but not because I want to encourage destruction.
An unrecognizable face on a lamppost:
Gandhi on the sidewalk:
Three faces on a wall:
An elusive face in a shredded poster:
UPDATE: I now know that the "unrecognizable face" is Andre the Giant and that it is part of a big art project. I'm not going to publicize it because I don't think artists should deface--even with a face--public property. I like to photograph things that are destroyed or partially destroyed, but not because I want to encourage destruction.
SoHo art, not art.
A closeup of a gaudy scupture outside an art gallery, mellowed by the shade of a fire escape:
An exuberant sculpture reflected in a gallery's mirrored window:
Mannequins:
An exuberant sculpture reflected in a gallery's mirrored window:
Mannequins:
Manhattan vending views.
The view from Newark.
Why, yes, I am in Newark. Sorry to post so late, but I got up at 4:30 to get an early plane, and there was no WiFi in the airport, and I'm only now in a hotel room with internet access.
The taxi arrived early-- it was not yet 5:30 am--and the cab driver engaged me in conversation. Is that your VW Beetle in the driveway? That question was used to drag me into a long discussion about gas mileage and the bad people who buy cars that don't get good gas mileage and so forth. Yeah, I don't like SUVs either, but I don't really want to talk about it before 6 am. He likes driving the early shift, because he likes to see the sun rise, because there are only so many sunrises that are going to take place in one's lifetime, so one ought to try to see them all. Thanks, I always like to think about how short life is first thing in the morning, especially before getting into an airplane.
The people in the airport were mercifully quiet. Everyone seemed to get the idea that it was too early in the morning to talk. I arrived in Newark (for my conference tomorrow) only to find the hotel would not let me check in until 3. So I checked my bag and got on the PATH train for Manhattan, where I spent the day wandering around the Village and SoHo. Photos to follow this post very soon. I must first sort through the 100+ pictures I took before the battery died.
The taxi arrived early-- it was not yet 5:30 am--and the cab driver engaged me in conversation. Is that your VW Beetle in the driveway? That question was used to drag me into a long discussion about gas mileage and the bad people who buy cars that don't get good gas mileage and so forth. Yeah, I don't like SUVs either, but I don't really want to talk about it before 6 am. He likes driving the early shift, because he likes to see the sun rise, because there are only so many sunrises that are going to take place in one's lifetime, so one ought to try to see them all. Thanks, I always like to think about how short life is first thing in the morning, especially before getting into an airplane.
The people in the airport were mercifully quiet. Everyone seemed to get the idea that it was too early in the morning to talk. I arrived in Newark (for my conference tomorrow) only to find the hotel would not let me check in until 3. So I checked my bag and got on the PATH train for Manhattan, where I spent the day wandering around the Village and SoHo. Photos to follow this post very soon. I must first sort through the 100+ pictures I took before the battery died.
June 2, 2004
A new David Sedaris book!
There's only one person who writes books that I pick up the first time I see them and buy without even looking inside to see if it's good. That's David Sedaris, whose new book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim appeared yesterday in lots of nice big stacks at Borders. They weren't there the day before. They sprang up overnight. I picked one up immediately and set about to do the shopping that led me into the store in the first place.
I walked up the big central staircase. We have an amazingly large and nice Borders on the west side of Madison, a city that has plenty of people who carp lengthily about businesses that aren't locally owned. My answer re Borders, if I ever engage with this sort of carping, is that I lived and shopped in Ann Arbor back in the days when Borders was the local bookstore. Am I supposed to punish it now for being so good and successful? Let the local business be better and I'll go there. The local University Bookstore has filled up its first floor with T-shirts and sweatpants: they are the ones I chose to punish. On the other hand, I get my coffee on State Street at the locally owned Espresso Royale or (if I want a sandwich) Fair Trade. I walk past Starbucks, not because it's a chain, but because their coffee isn't as good. (They are remodelling it, making it more comfortable somehow, so I'll probably check it out.)
So, as I was saying, I walked upstairs at Borders, and one of the store employees saw I had the new David Sedaris book and said, "He's really funny." I said, "Yeah, I know. He's the one author whose books I buy right away without even looking inside." She said, "That's what everyone says."
I walked up the big central staircase. We have an amazingly large and nice Borders on the west side of Madison, a city that has plenty of people who carp lengthily about businesses that aren't locally owned. My answer re Borders, if I ever engage with this sort of carping, is that I lived and shopped in Ann Arbor back in the days when Borders was the local bookstore. Am I supposed to punish it now for being so good and successful? Let the local business be better and I'll go there. The local University Bookstore has filled up its first floor with T-shirts and sweatpants: they are the ones I chose to punish. On the other hand, I get my coffee on State Street at the locally owned Espresso Royale or (if I want a sandwich) Fair Trade. I walk past Starbucks, not because it's a chain, but because their coffee isn't as good. (They are remodelling it, making it more comfortable somehow, so I'll probably check it out.)
So, as I was saying, I walked upstairs at Borders, and one of the store employees saw I had the new David Sedaris book and said, "He's really funny." I said, "Yeah, I know. He's the one author whose books I buy right away without even looking inside." She said, "That's what everyone says."
What's distinctive about June 2?
It's Chris's birthday! Happy birthday to Chris and to anyone else who shares this excellent day for a birthday. Chris, the younger of my two children sons, is now 21.
UPDATE: Chris--who has a summer job at Whole Foods--emails:
UPDATE: Chris--who has a summer job at Whole Foods--emails:
Thanks for blogging about me. And feel free to mention that my first legal drink was an Appletini while you're talking about Gwyneth Paltow's baby's name. I've also been memorizing PLU numbers for every kind of apple we have at Whole Foods, so it's been very appley. If that's at all interesting; maybe it isn't.
June 1, 2004
Even The Economist is trying to figure out why Gwyneth Paltrow named her baby Apple.
It's a rather complicated meditation (link via A&L Daily):
Well, that still doesn't explain Apple. Re Apple, it's less helpful than US Magazine which said on the cover it was going to explain the name, which led me to pick up the magazine, check the index, look for page 34 (hard to do because these ad-filled magazines have very few pages with numbers on them), only to find this quote from Paltrow's husband: "We thought it was a cool name."
And not only doesn't The Economist explain "Apple," it is nerdily obtuse about why people give more weird names to girls. Obviously, it's the same reason men keep wearing gray suits decade after decade while women wear all sorts of colors, patterns, and styles. Back in the 60s I seriously thought that was going to change. (And I'm finding it too hard to get a good link to pictures of extremely mod "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" and completely hippie men's fashions.) But it hasn't. Despite the gay rights movement--it all boils down to: fear of looking gay.
Alexander Bentley, of University College, London, and his colleagues are studying the mathematics of cultural transmission. For this sort of work, birth records—which contain every instance in a country of one sort of cultural object, namely people's first names—are a particularly good source of data.
Dr Bentley looked at the frequencies of different first names in American babies. One of his findings was that the “mutation rate” in names is higher for girls than for boys. Parents, in other words, are more liable to be inventive when choosing a name for a baby girl. The researchers have found that for every 10,000 daughters born in America there is an average of 2.3 new names. For sons, the figure is 1.6.
Dr Bentley is not sure why this is the case. One possibility is that in a society where family names are inherited patrilineally, parents feel constrained by tradition when it comes to choosing first names for their sons. As a result, boys often end up with the names of their ancestors. But when those same parents come to choose names for their daughters, they feel less constrained and more able to choose based on style and beauty.
Well, that still doesn't explain Apple. Re Apple, it's less helpful than US Magazine which said on the cover it was going to explain the name, which led me to pick up the magazine, check the index, look for page 34 (hard to do because these ad-filled magazines have very few pages with numbers on them), only to find this quote from Paltrow's husband: "We thought it was a cool name."
And not only doesn't The Economist explain "Apple," it is nerdily obtuse about why people give more weird names to girls. Obviously, it's the same reason men keep wearing gray suits decade after decade while women wear all sorts of colors, patterns, and styles. Back in the 60s I seriously thought that was going to change. (And I'm finding it too hard to get a good link to pictures of extremely mod "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" and completely hippie men's fashions.) But it hasn't. Despite the gay rights movement--it all boils down to: fear of looking gay.
"17½-year-olds vary widely in their reactions to police questioning, and many can be expected to behave as adults."
So writes Justice O'Connor, concurring and providing the fifth vote, in today's Supreme Court opinion, Yarborough v. Alvarado. The Court leaves in place a state court conviction and reverses the opinion of the Ninth Circuit, which would have required a new trial excluding the statements that were given without Miranda warnings. Under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996--an omnibus congressional reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing--federal courts can only grant habeas corpus if the state court's decision “was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States.” The Supreme Court has cases saying when Miranda warnings are required, but none of them make the defendant's age a factor. The state court only has to get the clear rules of law from the Supreme Court cases right and then not apply them in a way that is unreasonable. The cases in question required police to follow an objective test of whether the person being questioned would feel free to leave. Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, concentrating on keeping the test objective, thought that "consideration of a suspect’s individual characteristics–including his age–could be viewed as creating a subjective inquiry." Thus, it wasn't "unreasonable" for the state court to fail to make any reference to the defendant's age.
Justice Breyer dissents, joined by Justices Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg:
UPDATE on the theory that some reader somewhere wants some opinion on the subject: This 5-4 split is a very old rift for the Court, which goes back far beyond the 1996 Act that gave the Justices some new terms and some new Congressional intent to take into account. Since at least the mid-70s, the Court has been split over what the role of the federal courts is in habeas cases for state prisoners. To put it simply, one side of the Court views the lower federal courts as having a role similar to the U.S. Supreme Court, making up for the fact that only a very few criminal cases will be heard by the Supreme Court on direct review. They think that the lower federal courts ought to serve as a surrogate for the Supreme Court, redoing the work of the state courts and correcting for mistakes in the articulation and application of law. The other side of the Court thinks that direct review is different from habeas review, and that the lower federal courts, exercising their habeas jurisdiction, should leave state court decisions as the last word unless a particular state court's performance is too far out of line (for example, to use the terms of the 1996 statute, if the state court missed the clear Supreme Court case law or applied it unreasonably). There are very basic differences about federalism here. One side mistrusts the state courts and thinks the federal courts are needed to ensure that there isn't a systematic underenforcement of federal constitutional rights. The other side thinks the state courts basically deserve respect as courts and the role of the federal courts should be to serve as a corrective only when state courts show some sign of not taking its duty to enforce federal law seriously enough. You might think the intrusion of Congress in 1996 into the whole longstanding debate would have resolved this conflict, but, quite interestingly, it hasn't. Congress has the constitutional role to make the statutes that govern federal jurisdiction, but the courts have to interpret those statutes, and the tendency to see in jurisdiction statutes what one thinks federal jurisdiction should be is very strong.
Justice Breyer dissents, joined by Justices Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg:
Alvarado’s youth is an objective circumstance that was known to the police. It is not a special quality, but rather a widely shared characteristic that generates commonsense conclusions about behavior and perception. To focus on the circumstance of age in a case like this does not complicate the “in custody” inquiry. And to say that courts should ignore widely shared, objective characteristics, like age, on the ground that only a (large) minority of the population possesses them would produce absurd results ....
UPDATE on the theory that some reader somewhere wants some opinion on the subject: This 5-4 split is a very old rift for the Court, which goes back far beyond the 1996 Act that gave the Justices some new terms and some new Congressional intent to take into account. Since at least the mid-70s, the Court has been split over what the role of the federal courts is in habeas cases for state prisoners. To put it simply, one side of the Court views the lower federal courts as having a role similar to the U.S. Supreme Court, making up for the fact that only a very few criminal cases will be heard by the Supreme Court on direct review. They think that the lower federal courts ought to serve as a surrogate for the Supreme Court, redoing the work of the state courts and correcting for mistakes in the articulation and application of law. The other side of the Court thinks that direct review is different from habeas review, and that the lower federal courts, exercising their habeas jurisdiction, should leave state court decisions as the last word unless a particular state court's performance is too far out of line (for example, to use the terms of the 1996 statute, if the state court missed the clear Supreme Court case law or applied it unreasonably). There are very basic differences about federalism here. One side mistrusts the state courts and thinks the federal courts are needed to ensure that there isn't a systematic underenforcement of federal constitutional rights. The other side thinks the state courts basically deserve respect as courts and the role of the federal courts should be to serve as a corrective only when state courts show some sign of not taking its duty to enforce federal law seriously enough. You might think the intrusion of Congress in 1996 into the whole longstanding debate would have resolved this conflict, but, quite interestingly, it hasn't. Congress has the constitutional role to make the statutes that govern federal jurisdiction, but the courts have to interpret those statutes, and the tendency to see in jurisdiction statutes what one thinks federal jurisdiction should be is very strong.
Newark!
Ah, Satan's Laundromat is photoblogging Newark. These are my kind of photographs, and I will be heading to Newark at the end of this week for the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics Annual Health Law Teachers Conference. I'm not a health law teacher, but I was asked to speak on the subject of New Federalism and Health Law. I'm only speaking for 15 minutes, but I'm charged up at the moment to draft an article with the title "Experimenting With Drugs in the Laboratories of Democracy: Assisted Suicide, Medical Marijuana, and Federalism."
It will be interesting to see Newark, a city I lived quite near when I was a high school student. We lived in Wayne, New Jersey, in a community called Packanack Lake, that had an exclusionary scheme--you had to be accepted into the "country club" to be allowed to buy a house--that got enough press that they sang a song about it on "That Was The Week That Was," which was kind of The Daily Show of its time. Except weekly. And David Frost was on it. Newark was considered too uninteresting/ugly/dangerous to visit. If you wanted to be in the city, you'd go to New York. Another thing I always held against Newark is that it impinged on my original home town of Newark, Delaware. If you said you were from Newark (pronounced "New Ark") and didn't add Delaware, everyone not from New-Ark would try to make you say it in an unpleasant slurred New Jersey way. And now the dominating New Jersey city has even overwhelmed my own pronunciation. I have to stop and think to say the name of my own home town right.
So maybe I'll have some gritty Newark sights to photoblog like Satan's. Or maybe I'll take a side trip to Wayne and see what's happened to it in the 30+ years since I've laid eyes on it. But you can't be in northern New Jersey without longing to be in NYC, and I intend to ensconce myself in a nice hotel looking out on Central Park on Saturday and Sunday. I want walk around the City again, and see some museums, including these frogs. Maybe I'll go to the theater, but it's too early to see The Frogs.
It will be interesting to see Newark, a city I lived quite near when I was a high school student. We lived in Wayne, New Jersey, in a community called Packanack Lake, that had an exclusionary scheme--you had to be accepted into the "country club" to be allowed to buy a house--that got enough press that they sang a song about it on "That Was The Week That Was," which was kind of The Daily Show of its time. Except weekly. And David Frost was on it. Newark was considered too uninteresting/ugly/dangerous to visit. If you wanted to be in the city, you'd go to New York. Another thing I always held against Newark is that it impinged on my original home town of Newark, Delaware. If you said you were from Newark (pronounced "New Ark") and didn't add Delaware, everyone not from New-Ark would try to make you say it in an unpleasant slurred New Jersey way. And now the dominating New Jersey city has even overwhelmed my own pronunciation. I have to stop and think to say the name of my own home town right.
So maybe I'll have some gritty Newark sights to photoblog like Satan's. Or maybe I'll take a side trip to Wayne and see what's happened to it in the 30+ years since I've laid eyes on it. But you can't be in northern New Jersey without longing to be in NYC, and I intend to ensconce myself in a nice hotel looking out on Central Park on Saturday and Sunday. I want walk around the City again, and see some museums, including these frogs. Maybe I'll go to the theater, but it's too early to see The Frogs.
What's in the Times Arts section today?
1. A Princeton student (Kathleen L. Milkman) gets a big article, with a big picture of herself, all about her senior thesis, on the first page of the Arts section. How does one pull off such a thing? She did a statistical analysis of the content of the stories in The New Yorker. (Hmmm .... sounds like a job I used to have.)
2. New Oprah's Book Club choice: Anna Karenina. (The nice Pevear/Volokhonsky translation.) Can't say anything against that, can you?
3. Stanley Kubrick's crazy archive has been transformed into a huge museum exhibit. I want to see it, but--right now at least--it's in Frankfurt, at the Deutsches Filmmuseum.
4. There's going to be a big fundraising concert for John Kerry at Radio City Music Hall on June 10th. It has a name: "A Change Is Going to Come." That title is based on the beautiful song "A Change Is Gonna Come," which was written by Sam Cooke after witnessing a civil rights demonstration in 1963 ("I was born by the river/In a little tent, and just like that river I've been running ever since"). I guess "Gonna" had to be changed to "Going to." But that is one of the best songs ever, and it never hurts to stop and think about how great Sam Cooke was. Go to that first link and see the list of artists who have covered that song. Artists appearing at the June 10th concert are: Jon Bon Jovi, Whoopi Goldberg, Wyclef Jean, John Mellencamp, Bette Midler, James Taylor, and Robin Williams.
5. David Foster Wallace has a new book of short stories and Michiko Kakutani is not being very nice about it.
The study was long on statistics and short on epiphanies: one main conclusion was that male editors generally publish male authors who write about male characters who are supported by female characters.... and left others wondering why the NYT put a big article about her on the first page of the Arts section. Standard reader response: What about my plucky graduate? The answer must be: we all care about the short stories in The New Yorker. ... Don't we?
The study's confirmation of the obvious left some wondering why Ms. Milkman, who graduates this morning from Princeton with high honors, went about constructing such an intricate wristwatch in order to tell the time, but others admire her pluck and willingness to cross disciplines in a way that wraps the left and right brain neatly into one project.
2. New Oprah's Book Club choice: Anna Karenina. (The nice Pevear/Volokhonsky translation.) Can't say anything against that, can you?
3. Stanley Kubrick's crazy archive has been transformed into a huge museum exhibit. I want to see it, but--right now at least--it's in Frankfurt, at the Deutsches Filmmuseum.
4. There's going to be a big fundraising concert for John Kerry at Radio City Music Hall on June 10th. It has a name: "A Change Is Going to Come." That title is based on the beautiful song "A Change Is Gonna Come," which was written by Sam Cooke after witnessing a civil rights demonstration in 1963 ("I was born by the river/In a little tent, and just like that river I've been running ever since"). I guess "Gonna" had to be changed to "Going to." But that is one of the best songs ever, and it never hurts to stop and think about how great Sam Cooke was. Go to that first link and see the list of artists who have covered that song. Artists appearing at the June 10th concert are: Jon Bon Jovi, Whoopi Goldberg, Wyclef Jean, John Mellencamp, Bette Midler, James Taylor, and Robin Williams.
5. David Foster Wallace has a new book of short stories and Michiko Kakutani is not being very nice about it.
Unfortunately for the reader, such tiresome, whiny passages predominate in this volume. There are moments in "Oblivion" when we catch glimpses of Mr. Wallace's exceptional gifts: his ability to conjure both the ordinary (a Midwest motel room with a television stuck on the motel's welcome page) and the extraordinary (a Spider-Man-like figure, who may or may not be a terrorist, scaling the slippery side of a skyscraper); his ability to map the bumpy interface between the banal and the absurd."Reams and reams of stream-of-consciousness musings ... free-associative ramblings ..." -- sounds like a blog!
These moments, sadly, are engulfed by reams and reams of stream-of-consciousness musings that may be intermittently amusing or disturbing but that in the end feel more like the sort of free-associative ramblings served up in an analyst's office than between the covers of a book.
May 31, 2004
Sensual aftereffects of rain.
There is respite from all the rain, and now the front garden is teeming with insects that I'm afraid are baby mosquitoes. If anybody needs fresh chives, I've got them. I don't intentionally grow edible things in my yard. The chives have just lived on from the days when I did try to grow food:
But what are these? They look awfully lewd!
I'm not about to eat the mushrooms that are lolling about in my yard. But are they morels?
UPDATE: Yikes! Diva competition!
ANOTHER UPDATE: Tonya posts a relevant literary passages and relays dinner hilarity in the midst of which I said, "I thought my yard should be wearing pants."
But what are these? They look awfully lewd!
I'm not about to eat the mushrooms that are lolling about in my yard. But are they morels?
UPDATE: Yikes! Diva competition!
ANOTHER UPDATE: Tonya posts a relevant literary passages and relays dinner hilarity in the midst of which I said, "I thought my yard should be wearing pants."
WAC Life.
For Memorial Day, here are some scans from my mother's "WAC Life/War Department Pamphlet," dated May 1945.
The cover:
Chapter 1 (Text: "So you're in the Army! You've had your fears and doubts, your cheers and kidding, your tears and farewells. Now, as the boys say, 'This is it!' You're somewhat of a different person already. You're not 'that sweet little Smith girl from Sycamore Street' nor 'that awfully capable Mrs. Smith' any more. Now you're Mary Smith, enlisted woman ..." )
Chapter 2 (Text: "Your job as a Wac, in its broadest definition, is to back up the fighting man. Your place is to render a service to him, not to fight at his side. He depends upon the service which you provide. The fact that your function is service rather than combat does not put you in any secondary or subordinate position. Your activities contribute directly to the winning of the war. Activities such as yours could not alone win the war; but alone they could lose it if they were left undone or were done badly.")
Here's some advice from Chapter 7:
The cover:
Chapter 1 (Text: "So you're in the Army! You've had your fears and doubts, your cheers and kidding, your tears and farewells. Now, as the boys say, 'This is it!' You're somewhat of a different person already. You're not 'that sweet little Smith girl from Sycamore Street' nor 'that awfully capable Mrs. Smith' any more. Now you're Mary Smith, enlisted woman ..." )
Chapter 2 (Text: "Your job as a Wac, in its broadest definition, is to back up the fighting man. Your place is to render a service to him, not to fight at his side. He depends upon the service which you provide. The fact that your function is service rather than combat does not put you in any secondary or subordinate position. Your activities contribute directly to the winning of the war. Activities such as yours could not alone win the war; but alone they could lose it if they were left undone or were done badly.")
Here's some advice from Chapter 7:
As a people, we're earnest about this war. Our enemies have learned that we're deadly earnest. So are our Allies. We don't wail when things go badly, nor blow off steam at every victory. The fight goes on, come good news or bad.
The answer is
less round. Jeremy seems to be obsessing about his head and his fingernails after last night's dinner at which Tonya and I finally met the blogger from the other side of Bascom Hill who inspired us to pursue the special UW style of blogging that he pioneered. (What, you don't see the similarity?) Nina, who got the whole Jeremy-inspired blogging phenomenon started was also there. Ever perceptive of the smallest details, Jeremy has noticed that his acolytes can be kept track of alphabetically, as our last initials are ABC. So we need a D to continue the trend. (Hmmm ... there are three D lawprofs, but the prospects at least for now for a D are slim indeed.) Among the four of us, two bottles of wine were consumed along with many fried calamari and assorted slabs of beef and fish. Topics discussed: Blogging! And some other things (religion, dyeing one's hair, divorce....).
UPDATE: My sister divas have weighed in here and here.
UPDATE: My sister divas have weighed in here and here.
May 30, 2004
Misreadings.
Tonya has some thoughts on blog comments generally and specifically on my experience with them. She notes that the main problem she's had with comments has been readers misreading her (including not getting the humor). That reminds me of something I had wanted to say about the comments. It is actually something that bothers me as much as the rudeness and the use of personal attacks instead of substantive arguments. It is how badly people read!
This is a matter I notice as a law professor too. Being a lawprof offers many occasions for seeing how poorly people read. Even in a class of well-qualified students (something I feel sure of based on my Admissions Committee work), where the students have a strong motivation to read the cases carefully in preparation for class, I am continually surprised by how little of what is written is understood. Even before going more deeply into the context of the cases and the motivations of the decisionmakers, students find it hard simply to restate the reasoning laid down in the text. Even when sentences are read out loud in class, many students cannot then paraphrase what the text means. On exams, I beg the students to answer the question asked. I write several times in the text of the exam: "Remember, you can only receive credit for answering the question asked." Yet many students seem to read the question and derive only a general idea of the area addressed and launch into a flow of verbiage that is in no way aimed at the precise question.
The experience with comments on this blog has reinforced my belief that people are not reading with a clear head. I don't think I'm encountering unintelligent people (especially in the case of the students). I think people read with their emotions: they know what they want to see or what they are afraid someone might be saying, and their emotions take over the processing of the words they are looking at. Emotion is a necessary component of human thought, and we could not do without it, but part of education must be controlling the freeform flow of emotion long enough to see the words on the page. I realize every word means what it means because it is absorbed into an individual person's subjective mind, but people need to discipline themselves a bit to fend off the misreadings and misunderstanding that constantly pull us away from the mind of the writer we read to encounter.
For as long as I can remember, I have felt frustrated by how slowly I read compared to other people. I have though known a few other people, people I respect very much, who share the same frustration. Yet I also know the feeling of just glancing at an article and believing I know what it says. I know we can't spend our lives ponderously laboring over other people's sentences. But we need to be aware of when we are really reading without risk of misunderstanding and when we are being reckless. Certainly, there are times when we need to read accurately, such as when reading an exam question or before attacking something someone has written. Learning to read and reading well are a constant struggle. The author's ideas don't just pop into your head when you look at the words. A large part of what appears in your head is your own thinking, and of course, the main reason to read is to develop your own mind. You want to cause thoughts of your own. One reason for reading slowly is to stop and think (or blog about) your own thoughts. But you're misreading if you can't tell the difference between your own thoughts and the writer's.
UPDATE: Chad Oldfather of Oklahoma City University School of Law emails:
This is a matter I notice as a law professor too. Being a lawprof offers many occasions for seeing how poorly people read. Even in a class of well-qualified students (something I feel sure of based on my Admissions Committee work), where the students have a strong motivation to read the cases carefully in preparation for class, I am continually surprised by how little of what is written is understood. Even before going more deeply into the context of the cases and the motivations of the decisionmakers, students find it hard simply to restate the reasoning laid down in the text. Even when sentences are read out loud in class, many students cannot then paraphrase what the text means. On exams, I beg the students to answer the question asked. I write several times in the text of the exam: "Remember, you can only receive credit for answering the question asked." Yet many students seem to read the question and derive only a general idea of the area addressed and launch into a flow of verbiage that is in no way aimed at the precise question.
The experience with comments on this blog has reinforced my belief that people are not reading with a clear head. I don't think I'm encountering unintelligent people (especially in the case of the students). I think people read with their emotions: they know what they want to see or what they are afraid someone might be saying, and their emotions take over the processing of the words they are looking at. Emotion is a necessary component of human thought, and we could not do without it, but part of education must be controlling the freeform flow of emotion long enough to see the words on the page. I realize every word means what it means because it is absorbed into an individual person's subjective mind, but people need to discipline themselves a bit to fend off the misreadings and misunderstanding that constantly pull us away from the mind of the writer we read to encounter.
For as long as I can remember, I have felt frustrated by how slowly I read compared to other people. I have though known a few other people, people I respect very much, who share the same frustration. Yet I also know the feeling of just glancing at an article and believing I know what it says. I know we can't spend our lives ponderously laboring over other people's sentences. But we need to be aware of when we are really reading without risk of misunderstanding and when we are being reckless. Certainly, there are times when we need to read accurately, such as when reading an exam question or before attacking something someone has written. Learning to read and reading well are a constant struggle. The author's ideas don't just pop into your head when you look at the words. A large part of what appears in your head is your own thinking, and of course, the main reason to read is to develop your own mind. You want to cause thoughts of your own. One reason for reading slowly is to stop and think (or blog about) your own thoughts. But you're misreading if you can't tell the difference between your own thoughts and the writer's.
UPDATE: Chad Oldfather of Oklahoma City University School of Law emails:
Even though I never got around to leaving a comment (I started to one time, and somehow via the registration process ended up instead with a blog of my own that I’ll probably never use), I’m sad to see your comment function go. ...
I couldn’t agree more with your Misreading post. I’m also continually struck by the number of times I encounter suggestions that what appear to be epic scholarly debates might have at least something to do with mutual misreading. One example is Posner-Dworkin. I’ve seen both of them accused of failing to understand what the other has written. I see this sort of thing all the time. Then it makes me wonder, like you: Is this how it is that everybody else seems to be able to read so fast? And then: Is this why so much scholarly debate often appears less like debate and more like people talking past one another?
The truth about bra sales and breast size.
Instapundit links to Living in Europe about how big breasts are getting in Denmark. The news comes from a lingerie company: ""We can clearly see a development. Where the standard size earlier was 75B, these days we sell at least as many C- and D-cups. It's my impression that young women today generally have much larger breasts. Many are slim and even use up to an E- or F-cup."
Well, good luck to big breast fans, but, quite aside from the fact that the "impression" is coming from a company that is seeking (and getting) publicty, you can't use the brassiere sales statistics as the measure of the size of breasts among women generally. The larger your breasts are the more likely you are to have to wear a bra every time you leave the house. The smaller they are the more optional it is: it's a matter of social convention and fashion. If social convention or fashion changes and there are fewer times when you feel you need to wear a bra just for the sake of wearing a bra, the ratio of large size bra sales to small size bra sales will increase. The large breasted woman needs a substantial collection of bras. A smaller breasted woman might go years without buying a new bra. Maybe there is a trend among small breasted women to resort to a bra only for the occasional somber occasion or sheer blouse or there is a trend toward regarding fewer occasions as somber or away from caring that a top is sheer or clingy enough to make it visible that you aren't wearing a bra.
Well, good luck to big breast fans, but, quite aside from the fact that the "impression" is coming from a company that is seeking (and getting) publicty, you can't use the brassiere sales statistics as the measure of the size of breasts among women generally. The larger your breasts are the more likely you are to have to wear a bra every time you leave the house. The smaller they are the more optional it is: it's a matter of social convention and fashion. If social convention or fashion changes and there are fewer times when you feel you need to wear a bra just for the sake of wearing a bra, the ratio of large size bra sales to small size bra sales will increase. The large breasted woman needs a substantial collection of bras. A smaller breasted woman might go years without buying a new bra. Maybe there is a trend among small breasted women to resort to a bra only for the occasional somber occasion or sheer blouse or there is a trend toward regarding fewer occasions as somber or away from caring that a top is sheer or clingy enough to make it visible that you aren't wearing a bra.
A weary Kerryism.
The Washington Post interviewed John Kerry:
I don't think "soaring" is quite the right word for anything Bush might say in an interview. Even "rhetoric" seems to be a stretch if you're talking about Bush speaking in his own words, as opposed to reading a speech. Bush has dealt with his lack of a way with words by just speaking very simply (and rarely). Kerry's problem with words leads him into wordy, pretentious-sounding rambles.
Kerry's use of the word "chauvinistically" is a mind-numblingly poor word choice. It reminds me of the time Ralph Nader said "Don't burlesque me." Except that Nader's use of "burlesque" is dictionary-perfect, just a dictionary definition not ordinarily heard outside of an English Literature classroom. Kerry's use of "chauvinistically" isn't quite right from a dictionary standpoint. It should mean: in a manner characterized by "[m]ilitant devotion to and glorification of one's country; fanatical patriotism." "Chauvinism" is a fancy word that--outside of idiomatic feminist usage--should be avoided unless it has a precision of meaning that makes it worth the risk of appearing hoity-toity. The precision of meaning that "chauvinistically" has that distinguishes it from the normal word--"patriotically"--is not anything Kerry even wanted to say, let alone had a special reason for risking appearing hoity-toity. And Kerry has a huge interest in avoiding appearing hoity-toity.
Now, let's look at the sentence as a whole: "The idea of America is, I think proudly and chauvinistically, the best idea that we've developed in this world." It's so boringly verbose! He could have said, "America is the best country in the world." But he had to relocate America into the realm of ideas for some reason: "The idea of America is the best idea in the world." What's with the intellectualization? Does he mean the the ideas in American law and government are the best ideas? Extra words should add extra meaning or precision. (The sentence does appear out of context, as the Washington Post editorializes that he was stumbling over words.) So at the center of his sentence is the standard incantation "America is the best country in the world," or perhaps "American ideas are the best ideas in the world," but he makes it "The idea of America is the best idea we've developed in the world." As if the idea that an idea has been "developed" adds some value.
Then he has that clunker clause breaking up the sentence: "I think proudly and chauvinistically." Why stop in the middle and say that he thinks what he's saying (I'm John Kerry and I approve this message)? Why add the adverbs at all (quite aside from the mistaken use of "chauvinistically")? It seems as though he caught himself expressing pride and patriotism and he felt it necessary to remark on his own attitude, as if from a distance. Here I am, having to be the candidate, saying the candidate things, so I have to say I believe in America again, because that's what's required. That's what I would think if I were in that position. I'd feel distanced and alienated: oh, no, here I am, having to say that again, feeling like it's a load of crap, even though I actually do believe that the ideas in American law and government are the best ideas. Maybe there's some reluctance and weariness about going through all the motions we require a person to make before he can be President. (Most of us would have gotten much wearier, much earlier in the game.) Maybe the slip of using "chauvinistically" did add precision to his expression--though not a precision he would want to appear in his statement. Maybe he genuinely thinks the endless professions of patriotism that are required of a candidate are a lot of baloney. I don't hold that against him--and I certainly don't think finding this kind of thing tedious means he's not patriotic. But I don't think talking like that is going to help his cause. And if he really is getting weary of having to say such things, why not make it as brief as possible? Because people are getting weary of these long sentences.
And by the way, the Washington Post could use some more copyediting: "the soaring rhetoric on freedom and democracy that are commonplace" should be "the soaring rhetoric on freedom and democracy that is commonplace."
During the interview, he eschewed the soaring rhetoric on freedom and democracy that are commonplace in Bush's speeches and news conferences. At one point, he stumbled over the words when he tried to emphasize his interest in promoting American values: "The idea of America is, I think proudly and chauvinistically, the best idea that we've developed in this world."
I don't think "soaring" is quite the right word for anything Bush might say in an interview. Even "rhetoric" seems to be a stretch if you're talking about Bush speaking in his own words, as opposed to reading a speech. Bush has dealt with his lack of a way with words by just speaking very simply (and rarely). Kerry's problem with words leads him into wordy, pretentious-sounding rambles.
Kerry's use of the word "chauvinistically" is a mind-numblingly poor word choice. It reminds me of the time Ralph Nader said "Don't burlesque me." Except that Nader's use of "burlesque" is dictionary-perfect, just a dictionary definition not ordinarily heard outside of an English Literature classroom. Kerry's use of "chauvinistically" isn't quite right from a dictionary standpoint. It should mean: in a manner characterized by "[m]ilitant devotion to and glorification of one's country; fanatical patriotism." "Chauvinism" is a fancy word that--outside of idiomatic feminist usage--should be avoided unless it has a precision of meaning that makes it worth the risk of appearing hoity-toity. The precision of meaning that "chauvinistically" has that distinguishes it from the normal word--"patriotically"--is not anything Kerry even wanted to say, let alone had a special reason for risking appearing hoity-toity. And Kerry has a huge interest in avoiding appearing hoity-toity.
Now, let's look at the sentence as a whole: "The idea of America is, I think proudly and chauvinistically, the best idea that we've developed in this world." It's so boringly verbose! He could have said, "America is the best country in the world." But he had to relocate America into the realm of ideas for some reason: "The idea of America is the best idea in the world." What's with the intellectualization? Does he mean the the ideas in American law and government are the best ideas? Extra words should add extra meaning or precision. (The sentence does appear out of context, as the Washington Post editorializes that he was stumbling over words.) So at the center of his sentence is the standard incantation "America is the best country in the world," or perhaps "American ideas are the best ideas in the world," but he makes it "The idea of America is the best idea we've developed in the world." As if the idea that an idea has been "developed" adds some value.
Then he has that clunker clause breaking up the sentence: "I think proudly and chauvinistically." Why stop in the middle and say that he thinks what he's saying (I'm John Kerry and I approve this message)? Why add the adverbs at all (quite aside from the mistaken use of "chauvinistically")? It seems as though he caught himself expressing pride and patriotism and he felt it necessary to remark on his own attitude, as if from a distance. Here I am, having to be the candidate, saying the candidate things, so I have to say I believe in America again, because that's what's required. That's what I would think if I were in that position. I'd feel distanced and alienated: oh, no, here I am, having to say that again, feeling like it's a load of crap, even though I actually do believe that the ideas in American law and government are the best ideas. Maybe there's some reluctance and weariness about going through all the motions we require a person to make before he can be President. (Most of us would have gotten much wearier, much earlier in the game.) Maybe the slip of using "chauvinistically" did add precision to his expression--though not a precision he would want to appear in his statement. Maybe he genuinely thinks the endless professions of patriotism that are required of a candidate are a lot of baloney. I don't hold that against him--and I certainly don't think finding this kind of thing tedious means he's not patriotic. But I don't think talking like that is going to help his cause. And if he really is getting weary of having to say such things, why not make it as brief as possible? Because people are getting weary of these long sentences.
And by the way, the Washington Post could use some more copyediting: "the soaring rhetoric on freedom and democracy that are commonplace" should be "the soaring rhetoric on freedom and democracy that is commonplace."
Octopus in the rain.
Today is another one of the many days when traffic is redirected in Madison so a race of some sort can take place on the city streets. Sometimes it's a competitive race, like the bike race a week or so ago that I photographed or a triathlon, and sometimes it's a fundraiser. Judging from the speed of the runners I saw as I gave my son a ride to his summer job this morning, today's race is a fundraiser. And it is pouring rain. It's rained almost continually for a month, but today's rain is the hardest yet. But the dedicated runners were out there plugging away. A lone spectator stood on the street corner under an umbrella, and the workers at the Octopus car wash--who don't get much business in the pouring rain--were standing out under the roof overhang, perhaps sympathizing a bit but enjoying the break from work that nature had bestowed on them.
I wanted to link to a picture of the Octopus and could only find this huge amateur photograph. I'd love to take a picture of it myself, but not in this rain. It's one of those odd roadside America sights, a very well-executed giant octopus, smiling and holding car wash implements in every tentacle.
As for me, I got soaking wet getting to my car which was parked too close to the overgrown hedge (a hedge that I do plan to clip some day when it dries out). Now, having overslept, I'm finally getting to the NYT, which stayed dry in its blue plastic bag. It's a good day to read the Times, do the acrostic, grade some exams, watch a movie, and eat dinner in a restaurant. There will be no inrush of comments like yesterday to distract me. I'm sad about killing the comments, but they had to go.
Last night, I looked at some of the most popular blogs and noted some of the very best ones that don't have comments: Instapundit, Talking Points Memo (which I added to the blogroll ... oh, you're up to your little posing-as-a-moderate games), Andrew Sullivan (I hope he's okay--he said he'd be back and he's been gone since Thursday), The Volokh Conspiracy ("'Bobo' appears to [be] getting incorporated into French"--the French have discovered Fantasia Barrino? I wonder if David Brooks is irked at Fantasia for usurping his coinage?). Then you have the most popular blogs that do accept comments, Eschaton and Daily Kos, which are hardcore partisan political blogs of the sort that go well with the kind of comments they draw. There's no sense that the comments there are changing the overall feeling of the blog. Kos is so political that when he tried to talk about music yesterday, he wrote: "my favorite band -- Bad Religion -- has a new DC coming out next Tuesday." It's an endless anti-Bush rally over there, and maybe a lot of people are developing their commenter style in that hothouse environment, and when they go and post in a place that is not an ongoing political rally, they just don't know how to act and don't even know how awful they sound.
You would think the left would be interested in speaking to people who are in the middle, whom they need for their side to win. Yet they were taking the attitude that it's not possible to be in the middle. I imagine their hatred of Bush is so strong that they may seriously think anyone who is even considering voting for him is a hardcore right-winger! They seem to get actively mad at you if you aren't willing to go on record denouncing the war and so forth. One of the worst qualities of left-wingers I have known is their self-flattering belief that they are the good people and that those who don't agree must be bad people. Ironically, that is the same you're-either-with-us-or-against-us attitude that I often hear them accuse Bush of taking.
I wanted to link to a picture of the Octopus and could only find this huge amateur photograph. I'd love to take a picture of it myself, but not in this rain. It's one of those odd roadside America sights, a very well-executed giant octopus, smiling and holding car wash implements in every tentacle.
As for me, I got soaking wet getting to my car which was parked too close to the overgrown hedge (a hedge that I do plan to clip some day when it dries out). Now, having overslept, I'm finally getting to the NYT, which stayed dry in its blue plastic bag. It's a good day to read the Times, do the acrostic, grade some exams, watch a movie, and eat dinner in a restaurant. There will be no inrush of comments like yesterday to distract me. I'm sad about killing the comments, but they had to go.
Last night, I looked at some of the most popular blogs and noted some of the very best ones that don't have comments: Instapundit, Talking Points Memo (which I added to the blogroll ... oh, you're up to your little posing-as-a-moderate games), Andrew Sullivan (I hope he's okay--he said he'd be back and he's been gone since Thursday), The Volokh Conspiracy ("'Bobo' appears to [be] getting incorporated into French"--the French have discovered Fantasia Barrino? I wonder if David Brooks is irked at Fantasia for usurping his coinage?). Then you have the most popular blogs that do accept comments, Eschaton and Daily Kos, which are hardcore partisan political blogs of the sort that go well with the kind of comments they draw. There's no sense that the comments there are changing the overall feeling of the blog. Kos is so political that when he tried to talk about music yesterday, he wrote: "my favorite band -- Bad Religion -- has a new DC coming out next Tuesday." It's an endless anti-Bush rally over there, and maybe a lot of people are developing their commenter style in that hothouse environment, and when they go and post in a place that is not an ongoing political rally, they just don't know how to act and don't even know how awful they sound.
You would think the left would be interested in speaking to people who are in the middle, whom they need for their side to win. Yet they were taking the attitude that it's not possible to be in the middle. I imagine their hatred of Bush is so strong that they may seriously think anyone who is even considering voting for him is a hardcore right-winger! They seem to get actively mad at you if you aren't willing to go on record denouncing the war and so forth. One of the worst qualities of left-wingers I have known is their self-flattering belief that they are the good people and that those who don't agree must be bad people. Ironically, that is the same you're-either-with-us-or-against-us attitude that I often hear them accuse Bush of taking.
May 29, 2004
About that comments function....
I've had a week or so of experience with the new Blogger comments function, so let me pause and assess and explain. At first, there were too many zeroes, which looked so lonely. Then, commenters started showing up--during a week when I was getting a lot more traffic on the website generally. I was impressed by how smart and well-thought-out nearly all the comments were, which was great, especially since I allowed anonymous comments, with no registration required. But ... the last couple days I've been getting a fair number of comments that were getting abusive and repetitious, and I was not enjoying having to monitor these. Since nearly every commenter was Anonymous, I couldn't tell if it was just one overenthusiastic poster or several people, but I got tired--in the last 24 hours--of getting dragged over to the comments pages just to keep things from looking ugly. I'm certainly not blogging so I can spend my time writing out thoughtful answers to an anonymous person who is being abusive.
Here's a list of things people who were not being reasonable were saying about me:
Here's a list of things people who were not being reasonable were saying about me:
1. I claim to be a moderate, but I'm only posing as a moderate for some nefarious reason.I can't be running over to the comments page every few minutes to respond to this sort of thing. I'm going to keep the comments function, because most people are really great about comments. For all I know, there was just one person who decided to sandbag my blog. To him I say: get your own blog. (And to the charming person who asked if my (now deceased) parents got married two weeks after they met because my mother got pregnant, I say: do you know anything about the menstrual cycle?) To the rest of you, keep commenting, I do appreciate it, but now you've got to register, because I want to be able to bar posters that I decide are wasting my time and annoying me.
2. I think I'm so great because I'm a moderate, and I keep showing off by doing this whole "I'm a reasonable person" routine--which is obviously a manipulative trick.
3. I am outrageously right wing, and this is especially bad because my parents served in the military during or just after WWII.
4. I'm showing off by writing about legal matters, and I think I'm so great because I know more than other people about such things, and I'm taking unfair advantage by resorting to the use of this knowledge.
5. It's bad of me to indulge in humor if I'm writing anything that tinges on the Iraq war.
6. I shouldn't express outrage about art unless I first express outrage about things that are more outrageous--chiefly the war.
7. I shouldn't be writing about whatever I'm writing about because I should be expressing outrage about the war.
8. I don't know anything about country music because I heard Shania Twain and thought it was Melissa Etheridge.
"Oh, so you think I'm annoying you, you right winger? You think it's all about you, don't you? Oh, boo hoo hoo, you're annoyed. Our soldiers in Iraq are being killed every day! Why don't you write about that!"UPDATE: I thought I could delete individual commenters if I used the registered commenters setting. If I can figure out how to do it, I'll put the comments back. The comments already written still exist, and I can redisplay them. Sorry for the many excellent commenters I've undisplayed. If you comment on my posts in your blog and link to me, I will try to respond (to reasonable things), but I can't handle comments here unless I have a way to bar the people who aren't willing to live up to my standards. It's not a matter of excluding viewpoints--I love good debate--it's entirely about the form of expression and the personal remarks, and, especially, the intolerable remarks that were made about my dead mother.
"You have to understand. There was a war."
The AP reports:
My father was drafted into the Army after the end date of the war, so he was not, technically, a veteran. They are both dead now and so are among the many of their generation who did not live to see the memorial. They met in the Army. My father had one of those Army office jobs, and so did my mother, who was transferred from working on battle fatigue cases to an office job when it was learned that she could type. My father had made some coffee in his office, and my mother went into the office attracted by the smell of coffee. They were married two weeks later. Personally, I owe my own life to the Army and the smell of coffee, but to be more like my mother, I shouldn't tell it as a personal story: There was a war. People did what had to be done.
Bells tolled from the National Cathedral and swing music from the 1940s rang out at the Mall as veterans of World War II assembled by the tens of thousands Saturday for the dedication of a memorial to their great struggle.My mother was a WWII veteran. She joined the Women's Army Corps for reasons she would never put in personal terms. I used to ask her, "Why did you join the Army?" I wanted to hear the details of a teenager who cared for her infant sister, named Hope, who was doomed by spina bifida, incapacitating the poor baby's mother with grief, and who went to college, at the University of Michigan, when she was only 16. I wanted to hear about how she had a great passion to leave Ann Arbor, where she had lived all her life, to have new adventures. But her answer was always devoid of a personal story. It was always: "You have to understand how it was for everyone at the time. There was a war."
A service of celebration and thanksgiving at the cathedral opened a day of remembrance for a passing generation. Old soldiers, many gripping canes or in wheelchairs, welcomed the tribute to their service while lamenting that the memorial has come too late for so many of their comrades.
"I wish they would have done it much sooner because there's a lot of people from that generation who are gone," said Don LaFond, 81, a Marine Corps veteran from Marina Del Ray, Calif., taking his seat at the Mall on a cool spring morning.
Only about one in four veterans of the war is still alive.
My father was drafted into the Army after the end date of the war, so he was not, technically, a veteran. They are both dead now and so are among the many of their generation who did not live to see the memorial. They met in the Army. My father had one of those Army office jobs, and so did my mother, who was transferred from working on battle fatigue cases to an office job when it was learned that she could type. My father had made some coffee in his office, and my mother went into the office attracted by the smell of coffee. They were married two weeks later. Personally, I owe my own life to the Army and the smell of coffee, but to be more like my mother, I shouldn't tell it as a personal story: There was a war. People did what had to be done.
The high cost of hot chocolate ... and the joys and anxieties of speaking without notes.
Jeremy explains "why a hot chocolate at starbucks is $3, while a hot chocolate at borders is $133," with suitable photographic illustration. And scroll down for the harrowing tale of how he reconfirmed his belief in the proposition: "go with only minimal or no notes for any talk of 30 minutes or less." Hmm ... I have a 15 minute talk I need to do next Friday .... Note: he doesn't say go with minimal preparation, just minimal notes.
Anyone worth listening to speak at all is much better to listen to when they are speaking straight from their head not their notes. (Which is why closed book exams are better, by the way.) You just have to get over the anxiety of worrying that the pressure of the occasion will cut off your access to the place in your head where the relevant information resides. Too bad politicians have to read their speeches: they have to worry that one misstatement or misguided locution will cause them trouble. That's why my plan for the campaign is: submit it in writing. If it's already in writing, let me read it. I can do that in less than half the time it will take you to deliver it as a speech.
That reminds me of an anecdote about F.A. Hayek that I just heard this morning on C-Span--yes, I watch C-Span while getting ready in the morning!--told by the author Gregory Nash. After adding the word "serfdom" to my Google search when the whole first page came up Salma Hayek, I found the anecdote told by another author (here). The C-Span version of the anecdote included the additional detail that Hayek had never given a public speech before and was told he would need to do so only the night before, but here's the key part:
Anyone worth listening to speak at all is much better to listen to when they are speaking straight from their head not their notes. (Which is why closed book exams are better, by the way.) You just have to get over the anxiety of worrying that the pressure of the occasion will cut off your access to the place in your head where the relevant information resides. Too bad politicians have to read their speeches: they have to worry that one misstatement or misguided locution will cause them trouble. That's why my plan for the campaign is: submit it in writing. If it's already in writing, let me read it. I can do that in less than half the time it will take you to deliver it as a speech.
That reminds me of an anecdote about F.A. Hayek that I just heard this morning on C-Span--yes, I watch C-Span while getting ready in the morning!--told by the author Gregory Nash. After adding the word "serfdom" to my Google search when the whole first page came up Salma Hayek, I found the anecdote told by another author (here). The C-Span version of the anecdote included the additional detail that Hayek had never given a public speech before and was told he would need to do so only the night before, but here's the key part:
After The Road to Serfdom (1944) became a bestseller, the University of Chicago Press rushed the author F.A. Hayek into the lecture circuit, a new experience for him. He told an interviewer, “When I was picked up at my hotel [in New York]...I asked, 'What sort of audience do you expect?' They said, 'The hall holds 3,000 but there's an overflow meeting.' Dear God, I hadn't an idea what I was going to say. 'How have you announced it?' 'Oh, we have called it 'The Rule of Law in International Affairs.' My God, I had never thought about that problem in my life…I asked the chairman if three-quarters of an hour would be enough. 'Oh, no, it must be exactly an hour...you are on the radio."It turns out, the talk was a big success. Was that because Hayek was so brilliant he was able to do well even with shocking disadvantages, or did all of these nightmarish problems make him better? He was no doubt shocked into a very energetic state and he was forced to be spontaneous and tap straight into his inner resources. But who with fair warning could plan to do things this way? We hear the anecdote about the time it worked, but many speakers have fallen disastrously when unprepared. Still, many overprepared speakers are horrible. Yet they are never horribly exposed and humiliated as they experience their failure. Notice that no one ever has a real nightmare about standing at a lectern reading a prepared speech that is very dull. (Yes, I know that might be because it is impossible to read in a dream).
Kerry's mysterious mix of issues and the muted left.
Adam Nagourney, in today's NYT, examines the mystery of "Why the Democrats' Left Wing Is Muted" about Kerry, given the positions he's been taking lately about the war. Hmm ... I see I just wrote "positions," and I notice that the article running right next to Nagourney's (in the paper Times) is "Kerry Redoubles His Attack Over the War" by Robin Toner. While Nagourney concentrates on Kerry's failure to appease antiwar Democrats and explains their seemingly mysterious support of him in terms of intense hostility to Bush, Toner writes of the Kerry "campaign's current mix of patriotism, support for the troops in Iraq and scalding criticism of the policies that put them there":
One can easily portray Kerry as a man who takes so many different positions in such a confounding mix that no one--no one with any real potential to actually vote for him--ever gets too upset. Yet, obviously, Kerry has a careful balancing act to perform, and he seems sensible about trying to hold on to the middle. For the antiwar side, he seems to be offering only a feeling that he's going to wind things down more quickly and effectively than Bush, but Bush is trying to reach the same goals Kerry is stating. (This is why I'm not deciding between the two candidates until October: I'll see what Bush has actually done between now and then.) Kerry is urging--Toner reports--that we get away from "partisan politics" and "just think common sense about our country, about what it should be doing." I don't argue with that. It's hard for him to get specific about what he would do, since he wouldn't be starting to do anything until over eight months from now. How can he use common sense to figure out what should be done that far in the future when things are changing every day so far out of his control? That's the downside of not being an ideologue.
Ralph Nader is puzzled that the left wing of the Democrats isn't more active pressuring Kerry to move in their direction, as Nagourney reports:
So Nader really wants something in return for supporting Kerry, but he isn't finding that he has a constituency to deliver over in the deal. He's becoming irrelevant. There seems to be a lot of common sense going around these days.
On the second day of a two-week drive to establish his credentials on national security, Mr. Kerry also told an audience of veterans that Mr. Bush had shortchanged their health and benefit programs while carefully protecting tax cuts for the wealthy....
Mr. Kerry said it was impossible to predict what the situation in Iraq would be when - if elected - he took office. But he said neither the United States nor its allies could afford a failure in Iraq, and repeated his call for Mr. Bush to engage more countries in the transition.
"I promise you this," he said, "I am going to get the troops home as fast as possible, with honor and the job accomplished in the way it needs to be, and we will bring other people into the process."
One can easily portray Kerry as a man who takes so many different positions in such a confounding mix that no one--no one with any real potential to actually vote for him--ever gets too upset. Yet, obviously, Kerry has a careful balancing act to perform, and he seems sensible about trying to hold on to the middle. For the antiwar side, he seems to be offering only a feeling that he's going to wind things down more quickly and effectively than Bush, but Bush is trying to reach the same goals Kerry is stating. (This is why I'm not deciding between the two candidates until October: I'll see what Bush has actually done between now and then.) Kerry is urging--Toner reports--that we get away from "partisan politics" and "just think common sense about our country, about what it should be doing." I don't argue with that. It's hard for him to get specific about what he would do, since he wouldn't be starting to do anything until over eight months from now. How can he use common sense to figure out what should be done that far in the future when things are changing every day so far out of his control? That's the downside of not being an ideologue.
Ralph Nader is puzzled that the left wing of the Democrats isn't more active pressuring Kerry to move in their direction, as Nagourney reports:
"There are antiwar Democrats who will fume and still vote for Kerry," Mr. Nader said, adding: "I don't think Democrats should give their candidate a pass on the war. If Democrats are so freaked out by Bush that they are, like, 'Do anything you want, John, we'll support you,' well, as I told him in our meeting, he's not going to be left with a mandate." ...
Mr. Nader said he could not understand why unions, antiwar groups and other traditional Democratic constituencies were signing on with Mr. Kerry without insisting they get something in return. And he criticized Mr. Kerry for not making real concessions to the antiwar crowd.
"He's listening to Shrum," said Mr. Nader, referring to Mr. Kerry's senior political adviser, Bob Shrum. "He's listening to all the cautious advisers. They are saying don't cater to these antiwar people, they have nowhere to go. They are going to vote for you. You know the old game."
So Nader really wants something in return for supporting Kerry, but he isn't finding that he has a constituency to deliver over in the deal. He's becoming irrelevant. There seems to be a lot of common sense going around these days.
May 28, 2004
Old bumper sticker fulfilled, but Al Gore isn't.
Surely, you've seen this famous lefty bumper sticker:
Luckily, there was a high level of competence on the part of our soldiers, even though they were denied the tools in the numbers they needed for their mission. But what a disgrace that their families had to hold bake sales to buy discarded Kevlar vests, so the soldiers can stuff them into the floorboards and sides of the Humvees that they have to ride around in without any armor. Bake sales for body armor! What kind of policy is that?
Note: Try finding the transcript of the Gore speech on the web! It's not on the Moveon.org website anymore. The Washington Post article about the speech shows what is supposed to be a link to the transcript of the speech, but the link just takes you to an empty Moveon.org page. I transcribed the quote above from my TiVoed C-Span coverage.The Moveon.org home page has a link to a transcript of a Gore speech, but if you click on it, it turns out to be a speech from February 5, 2004 (which I printed and read, assuming it was this week's speech--no speech date appears on the home page). There's also a link to a January speech by Gore on the home page. Moveon.org sponsored the Wednesday's speech, and in the words of the Washington Post, it was "the highest-profile appearance by Gore since he endorsed former Vermont governor Howard Dean for the Democratic presidential nomination." I tried my best to find a link to the transcript before taking the trouble to transcribe it myself. I realize links go dead, and unintentional snafus occur. Send me the link if you have it. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to have been deliberately eradicated. I feel compelled to conclude that it's been roundly judged a complete embarrassment.
UPDATE: Now that I've watched the entire speech, let me say that I think much of the coverage of it has been unfair. Drudge and others acted as if he freaked out. I haven't gone over the speech and checked the accuracy of all of the statements, but it is simply untrue that he appeared crazy in some way. There were perhaps two points when he resorted to yelling, but he was shouting over a loud ovation in the auditorium. His voice, as heard over the television, is not ideally modulated, but it was probably adapted to the acoustics in the room as he heard his own voice. He gets a little Jimmy Stewart-y in places. He wipes his brow a few times with a big towel, which looked funny, but clearly the room was too hot, and he was sweating. Most of what he said sounded rational to me: it is important to take the Abu Ghraib abuses very seriously. There's some political posturing in calling for various resignations, but there was nothing irrational about that. People who found the most ridiculous freeze frame or replayed an isolated clip treated him very unfairly. I will say that the NYU crowd was not as serious as the subject matter required. They did not just applaud, they laughed, sometimes inappropriately. The audience seemed so excited about laughing at Bush, that it lost touch with the subject matter being discussed. I think one could see that Gore did not approve of this response. Maybe my perceptions are skewed: I thought he did well in the first debate with Bush in 2000 and was surprised at the way he was ridiculed in the press. Maybe I have I higher tolerance for Gore attitudes than most people, but I really can't see why he's being shredded for this week's speech.
FURTHER UPDATE: A reader figured out a way to get to the transcript:
ADDED SATURDAY MORNING: The difference between the URL the reader found and the one in the Washington Post link is that that latter has "-transcript" after "rumsfeld." Also, and more importantly, the Moveon.org home page now has the Wednesday speech featured at the top of its home page with a good link. But none of that was there last night when I wrote this post. It can't be that they are just slow putting up material on their website, because the Post had a link that went dead. You'd think if the Post website was linking you, you wouldn't let the URL go dead, and then later use a different URL. Especially a group like Moveon.org which specializes in being a website and sponsored this important speech. I see that they are now trying to sell a DVD of the speech. And the new URL has a lot of Quicktime clips from parts of the speech. Maybe last night when I couldn't find the transcript, they were shifting over to this really elaborate new page. Clearly, they aren't trying to scuttle the material, which I suspected last night. The presentation of key clips is a good way to counter the unfair clipping that Gore's critics were doing. I approve!
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Luckily, there was a high level of competence on the part of our soldiers, even though they were denied the tools in the numbers they needed for their mission. But what a disgrace that their families had to hold bake sales to buy discarded Kevlar vests, so the soldiers can stuff them into the floorboards and sides of the Humvees that they have to ride around in without any armor. Bake sales for body armor! What kind of policy is that?
Note: Try finding the transcript of the Gore speech on the web! It's not on the Moveon.org website anymore. The Washington Post article about the speech shows what is supposed to be a link to the transcript of the speech, but the link just takes you to an empty Moveon.org page. I transcribed the quote above from my TiVoed C-Span coverage.The Moveon.org home page has a link to a transcript of a Gore speech, but if you click on it, it turns out to be a speech from February 5, 2004 (which I printed and read, assuming it was this week's speech--no speech date appears on the home page). There's also a link to a January speech by Gore on the home page. Moveon.org sponsored the Wednesday's speech, and in the words of the Washington Post, it was "the highest-profile appearance by Gore since he endorsed former Vermont governor Howard Dean for the Democratic presidential nomination." I tried my best to find a link to the transcript before taking the trouble to transcribe it myself. I realize links go dead, and unintentional snafus occur. Send me the link if you have it. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to have been deliberately eradicated. I feel compelled to conclude that it's been roundly judged a complete embarrassment.
UPDATE: Now that I've watched the entire speech, let me say that I think much of the coverage of it has been unfair. Drudge and others acted as if he freaked out. I haven't gone over the speech and checked the accuracy of all of the statements, but it is simply untrue that he appeared crazy in some way. There were perhaps two points when he resorted to yelling, but he was shouting over a loud ovation in the auditorium. His voice, as heard over the television, is not ideally modulated, but it was probably adapted to the acoustics in the room as he heard his own voice. He gets a little Jimmy Stewart-y in places. He wipes his brow a few times with a big towel, which looked funny, but clearly the room was too hot, and he was sweating. Most of what he said sounded rational to me: it is important to take the Abu Ghraib abuses very seriously. There's some political posturing in calling for various resignations, but there was nothing irrational about that. People who found the most ridiculous freeze frame or replayed an isolated clip treated him very unfairly. I will say that the NYU crowd was not as serious as the subject matter required. They did not just applaud, they laughed, sometimes inappropriately. The audience seemed so excited about laughing at Bush, that it lost touch with the subject matter being discussed. I think one could see that Gore did not approve of this response. Maybe my perceptions are skewed: I thought he did well in the first debate with Bush in 2000 and was surprised at the way he was ridiculed in the press. Maybe I have I higher tolerance for Gore attitudes than most people, but I really can't see why he's being shredded for this week's speech.
FURTHER UPDATE: A reader figured out a way to get to the transcript:
Take a gander at this:That's a strange way to find it, so it doesn't dispell the impression that they are trying to get rid of it.
http://www.moveon.org/pac/gore-rumsfeld.html
I found this by looking for "rumsfeld" in the URL of a MoveOn webpage (it's the last result when you do that search)...
ADDED SATURDAY MORNING: The difference between the URL the reader found and the one in the Washington Post link is that that latter has "-transcript" after "rumsfeld." Also, and more importantly, the Moveon.org home page now has the Wednesday speech featured at the top of its home page with a good link. But none of that was there last night when I wrote this post. It can't be that they are just slow putting up material on their website, because the Post had a link that went dead. You'd think if the Post website was linking you, you wouldn't let the URL go dead, and then later use a different URL. Especially a group like Moveon.org which specializes in being a website and sponsored this important speech. I see that they are now trying to sell a DVD of the speech. And the new URL has a lot of Quicktime clips from parts of the speech. Maybe last night when I couldn't find the transcript, they were shifting over to this really elaborate new page. Clearly, they aren't trying to scuttle the material, which I suspected last night. The presentation of key clips is a good way to counter the unfair clipping that Gore's critics were doing. I approve!
The miniature mogul of blogging.
So I read How Can I Sex Up This Blog Business? (which I nerdily picked up on via How Appealing). Who knew Wonkette and Gawker and Gizmodo and Defamer were part of a miniature media empire run by a man with a very large head who lives in a SoHo loft but has to move his laptop around in it to try to pick up a WiFi signal from outside his building? Did you know that a blog like Gawker or Wonkette draws $5,000 to $10,000 a month in blog ads and the writer gets something like $1500 or $2000 of that to submit to the direction of this small-time mogul--whose name is Nick Denton--who pushes them toward sex and sadism and (oh, what did we do before we had a word for it?) snarkiness. Denton isn't exactly getting fabulously rich pocketing the difference, but he does get to keep the brand name if the writer moves on (like to a better paying job). So Wonkette isn't Wonkette?
Lust for Lunch.
We had some lunch today at Crave, which seems to be a worthy new restaurant, just off State Street on Gorham (easy to miss if you're walking up State Street, but just a few steps away):
Walking back to the Law School, I saw a man preaching from the concrete pulpit that overlooks Library Mall:
He was holding up two signs and imploring people to open their hearts to religion.
A man with a long white ponytail, sitting on a metal bench just in front of the pulpit, was trying to eat his box lunch in peace:
Suddenly, the white ponytail man starts shouting back at the preacher man: "Why don't you just shut the f*ck up? What makes you think you have anything to say to me?" The preacher yells back, getting quite passionate, saying he was trying to teach love. The white ponytail man taunts the preacher, he shakes a plastic fork at him and dares him to come down from the pulpit and confront him face to face. The preacher man gets angry and throws down his signs and turns but then stops himself. The white ponytail man gets more heated up, saying, "You are so f*cking arrogant! You have nothing to offer me!" Sounding uncannily like Kirk Douglas playing Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life, the preacher seethes, "I want to help humanity!"
Walking back to the Law School, I saw a man preaching from the concrete pulpit that overlooks Library Mall:
He was holding up two signs and imploring people to open their hearts to religion.
A man with a long white ponytail, sitting on a metal bench just in front of the pulpit, was trying to eat his box lunch in peace:
Suddenly, the white ponytail man starts shouting back at the preacher man: "Why don't you just shut the f*ck up? What makes you think you have anything to say to me?" The preacher yells back, getting quite passionate, saying he was trying to teach love. The white ponytail man taunts the preacher, he shakes a plastic fork at him and dares him to come down from the pulpit and confront him face to face. The preacher man gets angry and throws down his signs and turns but then stops himself. The white ponytail man gets more heated up, saying, "You are so f*cking arrogant! You have nothing to offer me!" Sounding uncannily like Kirk Douglas playing Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life, the preacher seethes, "I want to help humanity!"
"What scenes would one like to have filmed?"
This is a great question that Robert Hughes asked Vladimir Nabokov in 1965. You can read his answer in one of my favorite books, Strong Opinions. (If you want to get an idea of what Nabokov wrote about in Strong Opinions, you can consult this elaborate index, which someone was nice enough to put together.) Feel free to use the comments section to answer the great question, which assumes someone could have been present at any time and place in history with the equipment to make a film. Here's Nabokov's great answer to the great question:
Shakespeare in the part of the King's Ghost.
The beheading of Louis the Sixteenth, the drums drowning his speech on the scaffold.
Herman Melville at breakfast, feeding a sardine to his cat.
Poe's wedding. Lewis Carroll's picnics.
The Russians leaving Alaska, delighted with the deal. Shot of a seal applauding.
Reliving the chad experience ... and CNN preening.
Last night, we watched CNN Election 2000: 36 Days That Gripped the Nation, which came in the mail yesterday. I explained my reasons for wanting to see it here. It was okay, it provoked some laughs, and it got us to pause at one point and get into a whole big debate about the best way to count the ballots all over again. (I said that Bush's best argument was that the punchcards were designed to be read by machines, so the best stopping point was the machine recount, because at least the machine had no opinion about who should win, and if human beings started looking at the cards, which were never designed for human eyes, human subjectivity would necessarily creep in. And that reignited the old argument.) But I was disappointed by the way CNN constructed its little documentary. It was TV hackwork. Having just last week seen a beautifully constructed political documentary--The Fog of War--I cringed at the lameness of CNN's little paste job. At least they could have maximized the footage of the historic events. There was a decent amount of footage of county officials squinting at punchcards, people holding signs with saying like "Sore/Loserman" and chanting "Get out of Cheney's house," and reporters trying to report on a Supreme Court opinion as they were glancing at it for the first time. But far, far too much of the documentary consisted of various CNN reporters, well-dressed and made-up and overlit against a black background, reminiscing about how they felt when the events were occurring. It was like those "I Love the 80s" shows on VH-1 were they plunk a celebrity in front of the camera to reminisce about something they'd just shown a clip of (e.g., show historic footage of Rubik's cube, then have, say, Juliette Lewis prate about how she had a Rubik's cube when she was ten years old and found it very hard to do). It's always so glaring that it's filler, as the celebs talk especially slowly, with pauses, and usually seem to be making half of it up or doing a retake. The real message is, we don't think you will pay attention to the footage (or we can't edit it into a good enough form to make it worth paying attention to), so we' ll just mesmerize you with a celebrity. Now, the intense focus on a single talking human being can, in fact, be great. The Fog of War is the example of how to do that well. But there is no way on earth that the diverse ramblings of Judy Woodruff about waiting out the election results can compare to the brilliantly edited speech of a brilliant and complex man--Robert S. McNamara--who lived through the most interesting events of a century!
The blatantly partisan blogosphere.
This blog is a mix of things. Like many, perhaps most, blogs, the mix is based on what catches my attention and inspires me. I enjoy discovering what the mix turns out to be. Some of what catches my eye is political. A political observation, especially if it catches a presidential candidate making a mistake, draws a lot of traffic to the blog. I like to think some of these people will stay around for the other components of the mix, but I realize it will only be a small percentage of the people who are drawn by the political gotcha that got the link. But I was quite struck by comments on this post yesterday, taking the position one ought to avoid politics altogether:
The blogosphere is blatantly partisan. ... I think it's quite difficult if not impossible to find any well-reasoned political debate on the internet .... It's hard to appear to be an equal-opportunity offender or critic much less actually be one. I haven't seen any large-scale blogger who really effectively does either.I think that's well put, but terrible if true. We should cede the political speech to the hardcore partisans? A moderate observer of political things ought to opt out of political speech because of the danger of being used by the hardcore partisans that somehow rule the blogosphere? That's far too big a price to pay and far too pessimistic. It's far too perfectionistic too: of course, no one can become completely balanced in the center and dish out criticism in precisely balanced portions. And what does it mean to be "really effective" as a blogger? It's always just one more day of assorted posts, one more sampling of the mind of this particular blogger, out there for the world to dip into. If I were more of a hardcore partisan, I suppose I would worry that I might somehow, in my meanderings, hurt Kerry/Bush, and then I will have lost the game. The demonstration of my nonhardcore, nonpartisanship, is I don't care enough about that to worry the way this commenter thinks I will.
I know, politics is important, and potentially interesting, but when I see stuff like this I am reminded both of why the Supreme Court doesn't hear political questions and what a very wise famous computer named JOSHUA once said:
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"
Whatever happened to "minimizing the template"?
I just noticed that the photographs overlapped with the sidebar. Why I spent as much time on changing the template as I did last night without noticing the problem--that's something I can't explain, other than that I just forgot the problem from the last time I tried to change the template and the photos happened to be low enough on the front page not to be next to any sidebar content and the lack of a sidebar dividing line left the side space clear.
Sour grapes version: the type on Minima was too hard to read and was hurting my eyes, the white background made the dark ad banner much more obvious, and that template had a problem with line spacing that was undermining its prettiness. Now, back to substance!
UPDATE: Blogger has some sort of bug that is causing the template to jump back to Minima when I edit an old post. What could cause that? Let's see if it happens this time ....
FURTHER UPDATE: Ah, good. I have no idea why the problem cured itself and I don't trust it not to happen again. It's definitely a good idea to keep a copy of your template in a separate document, so you can copy it back into the window if it decides to revert to an earlier incarnation.
Sour grapes version: the type on Minima was too hard to read and was hurting my eyes, the white background made the dark ad banner much more obvious, and that template had a problem with line spacing that was undermining its prettiness. Now, back to substance!
UPDATE: Blogger has some sort of bug that is causing the template to jump back to Minima when I edit an old post. What could cause that? Let's see if it happens this time ....
FURTHER UPDATE: Ah, good. I have no idea why the problem cured itself and I don't trust it not to happen again. It's definitely a good idea to keep a copy of your template in a separate document, so you can copy it back into the window if it decides to revert to an earlier incarnation.
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