Category Archives: guides and nudges

Saturday Links

Posted on by under Authors, guides and nudges, mainly rap music, sports

It’s Saturday and the weather here in LA is weird, so here are some ways to avoid having to go outside if you simply can’t bear it.

  • This short but sweet piece by Christopher Hitchens about the tyranny of waiters insisting on pouring your wine for you in restaurants is always worth revisiting.
  • Every year Bill Simmons ranks the top 50 assets in the NBA using a simple, but sensible metric: how likely the player’s current team would be to trade him. This year’s list is broken up into three installments, so prepare to lose  at least half an hour of your life.
  • Are you convinced that there’s no way someone could make a movie that successfully twins a meditation on the cosmos with testimonials about the atrocities committed by the Pinochet regime? You’re wrong. Nostalgia for the Light is a gorgeous documentary about just that, and it’s streaming on Netflix. I swear, it won’t make you feel nearly as bad as you’re assuming it will.
  • Kathryn Schulz has written a piece worth reading on why she hates The Great Gatsby. Not Luhrmann’s trite film version, mind you, but Fitzgerald’s novel. Obviously, I don’t agree with her assessment of the novel’s value. Virtually all of the reasons she gives for disliking the book are the precise reasons I love it. If there’s one excerpt from this article that sums up Schulz’s failure to actually engage the book on its own terms, it’s this one: “As readers, we revel in the glamorous dissipation of the rich, and then we revel in the cheap satisfaction of seeing them fall. At no point are we made to feel uncomfortable about either pleasure, let alone their conjunction. At no point are we given cause, or room, to feel complicit.” If you don’t feel uncomfortable or complicit (as Nick does) when reading about a culture that encourages people to use others up like natural resources, you have led a very moral, cloistered life that includes never having seen a rap video. Kudos to you for that, Ms. Schulz.

Fitzgerald’s Ledger

Posted on by under Authors, education, guides and nudges

In this Tuesday, March 26, 2013 photo, Elizabeth Sudduth, director of the Ernest F. Hollings Library and Rare Books Collection at the University of South Carolina, points at items in a ledger owned by author F. Scott Fitzgerald, in Columbia, S.C. The university has digitized the ledger and put it online for scholars. (AP Photo/Jeffrey Collins)

A couple weeks back I wrote about the impending release of some of Willa Cather’s letters. As if that isn’t exciting enough for fans of American modernism, today I found out that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous ledger can be viewed at the University of South Carolina library website. The money-mad Fitzgerald recorded each little bit of coin he brought in through his writing and the licensing of his works between 1919 and 1938, though there isn’t a complementary ledger of his rap-mogulesque expenditures. Transcriptions of the ledger have been available for some time, most notably in Matthew Bruccoli’s excellent biography of Fitzgerald, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. Still, it’s amazing to be able to search through this document and see Fitzgerald’s lovely handwriting up close. The digital humanities should focus on this kind of preservation and facilitation, not devising ways to hold virtual meetings with students in Second Life.

For a Blustery Day

Posted on by under guides and nudges, mainly rap music

I have been pretty busy for the past few days, but I will have a long-ish post up soon about what happened yesterday in Boston, among other things. In the meantime, I suggest you watch the following little documentary from Pitchfork about Belle and Sebastian‘s album If  You’re Feeling Sinister. If you are not yet a fan, it will make you want to go out and buy the album. If you are, it will make you like the album and the band even more. I hope Pitchfork continues to make films like this. [h/t to Adam Ted for sharing this with me]

Saturday Links

Posted on by under guides and nudges, mainly rap music, Other Critics, sports

A collection of ways to distract yourself from your friends and lovers this weekend.

  • Be sure to check out Kobe Bryant’s unintentionally hilarious Facebook screed that he wrote while hopped up on painkillers after tearing his Achilles tendon in a game against the playoff-bound Golden State Warriors. My personal favorite line is “This anger is rage,” which sounds like the title of a Sharon Olds collection.
  • If you enjoyed watching Peep Show by yourself last weekend, I suggest you follow it up by ripping through Whites, another English comedy about the hilariously inept. It ran for only six episodes, but each one is brilliant. It stars a bunch of people you might recognize from other shows (Sherlock, The IT Crowd , Peep Show, Jonathan Creek), and it was written by Peep Show‘s Super Hans!
  • Are you an aging hipster who decided not to go to Coachella because the thought of being out in the desert for three days surrounded by twenty-year-olds is revolting? Fair enough. However, that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on the music. YouTube is running live feeds of many of the acts all weekend. It’s like being there without all the dust and vomit. 
  • These articles aren’t exactly new, but Steven Hyden’s “Winners’ History of Rock and Roll” series at Grantland is fantastic. You may not like the bands he profiles (Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Metallica, Linkin Park, and The Black Keys), but the fact that they all became and remain popular has something to tell us about the popular art marketplace over the last forty years. Not everybody loves a winner, but at least we remember them.

Speaking of Non-Majority Rule

Posted on by under education, guides and nudges, in the news, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

Piggy-backing off of Ryan’s piece, I thought many of you might find this article from The Week interesting. I am not a very good liberal when it comes to gun control, but not because I have any special love of guns. I have only fired one a couple of times, and frankly didn’t get the appeal. The fact that people can talk about “gun culture” is bizarre, and doesn’t square with 2nd Amendment defenders’ claim that guns are simply tools. They’re not. Spatulas are tools, and there is no such thing as “spatula culture.” Guns are something altogether different.

So no, guns aren’t my thing. The reason why I am a bad liberal on gun control though is because I don’t think much of what the government can do will decrease the number of guns in this country or the prevalence of gun violence. By some estimates there are almost as many firearms in America as there are people, and nearly half of U.S. households own at least one gun. We’re too far down the rabbit hole to simply ban most guns and think it will accomplish anything. While I believe that there should be background checks on every kind of gun sale, even this won’t stop the kinds of mass shootings we saw in Connecticut or even Colorado. And that really shouldn’t be our priority. What is needed is a change in “gun culture,” and that starts not with pieces in Mother Jones (although everything written in their article is true, they’re preaching to the choir), but with gun owners like Paul Brandus standing up to the NRA and its minions in government. Brandus writes:

The NRA has also spread the false notion that the Second Amendment was designed to protect you against government tyrants. Unless you’re a constitutional scholar, you’ve probably bought this one hook, line, and sinker. Someone who is a constitutional scholar, Professor Robert Spitzer of the State University of New York College at Cortland, points out that Article I of the Constitution allows militias to “suppress Insurrections,” not cause them. If you think the Constitution allows you to rebel against the government, guess what? The Constitution says you’re a traitor. Writes Spitzer: “The Constitution defines treason as ‘levying War’ against the government in Article III and the states can ask the federal government for assistance ‘against domestic Violence’ under Article IV.”

It’s not your fault that you don’t know this. How would you know to wade through a giant appropriations bill from 2011, or to sift through the Constitution’s fine print? And it is this — your lack of knowledge — that the NRA and its toadies on the Hill are banking on. One of my favorite quotes from the father of our Constitution, James Madison, comes to mind: “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance.”

As with everything, culture matters. The NRA claims to speak for all gun owners, but it doesn’t represent even a majority of these people. Not even close. And yet the NRA seems to determine how both sides of the gun control debate talk and think. The left gets itself in a tizzy every time Wayne LaPierre says anything, which is exactly what he wants. The NRA feeds on a collective sense of powerlessness that many people feel. If liberals really want to decrease gun violence in America, they’ll stop overreacting to everything the NRA does, stop demanding legislation that won’t accomplish anything, and start building a culture where kids are better educated, more employable, and less likely to buy the bullshit the NRA is selling.

Fabulous

Posted on by under American Masculinity, guides and nudges, in the news

Fifty years from now, people will likely consider Steven Soderbergh the best American filmmaker of his era. While he hasn’t also written, shot, edited, and produced all of the over thirty films he has directed (slacker), his contributions to both mainstream and independent cinema so far outpace most of his contemporaries that the Academy should probably just give him the Lifetime Achievement Award now. The fact that he is retiring from feature filmmaking is a cultural bummer. However, he is leaving us with one final feature that may hint at a new direction in his career. Behind the Candelabra is a biopic about Liberace starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon that is going to be airing on HBO because it was deemed, according to Soderbergh, “too gay” for any studio in Hollywood to give it distribution. That sounds like the punchline of a particularly blue Borscht Belt joke, but it’s apparently true. My hope is that that this move by HBO means they will give Soderbergh a TV show on the network, as his talents seem well-suited for what TV has become in the last few years. It would be a shame to simply lose such an artist to posterity.

Saturday Links

Posted on by under Book Recommendations, guides and nudges, in the news, Other Critics

Here’s a weekend reading/viewing list for your edification and pleasure:

Speaking of Narcissism

Posted on by under education, guides and nudges

Just a quick dispatch from the higher ed front-

The other day I was talking to my upper-division social science writing students about how humanities and social science departments feel pressured to justify their places on university campuses. What this has led to is both fields trying to be more like the hard sciences.  This has been disastrous for the humanities, as “theory” and identity politics have supplanted reading and writing as the discipline’s core. As for the social sciences, by demanding to be taken as seriously as the big bully on campus, they’ve only made their own efforts look like cheap imitations of the real thing.

I’ll have more to say about how humanities departments have destroyed themselves in due time, but that’s not what I want to do now.  What interested me was my students’ reactions when I used the term “navel-gazing.” Most of them laughed. When I asked why they were laughing, a young man (who seems bright and serious) in the front of the class said that he had never heard that phrase before, and that seemed to hold true for most of his classmates. This shocked me, as it is a phrase that I feel like I run into quite often in book reviews, political discussions, and take-downs of particularly out of touch cultural figures. I’ll spare you a sermon about what this incident says about what college students are and are not reading. Instead, I will paste some of the entries from the OED on this and related phrases below, as I find them fascinating. I particularly like the reference to Los Angeles. Feel free to accuse me of navel-gazing.

navel-gazing n. = navel contemplation

-1959   Canad. Jrnl. Econ. & Polit. Sci. 25 242   Contemporary Americans are inclined to regard such activities as navel-gazing, and to be more interested in the practical utility of models and specific operational techniques.
-1972   Publishers Weekly 10 July 27/2   David Obst has no monopoly on national navel-gazing.
-1990   Independent 27 July 19/6   Navel-gazing has taught these men and women to accept that there has to be someone in authority for the firm to work.

navel-contemplation n. meditation or contemplation, esp. of a self-absorbed, complacent, or profitless kind

-1921   D. H. Lawrence Let. 2 May (1962) II. 650   Your Nirvana is too much a one-man show: leads inevitably to navel-contemplation.
-1974   Times 27 June 18/3   To fight off the navel-contemplation mood induced by our move of office.
-1986   Q Oct. 76/1   Writing with these musicians has forced Simon to look up from navel-contemplation towards the open sky of entertainment.

navel-contemplator n. = omphalopsychite n. at omphalo- comb. form ; (also more widely) a person who indulges in navel-contemplation.

-1856   R. A. Vaughan Hours with Mystics I. vi. vii. 300   They call these devotees Navel-contemplators.
-1986   Financial Times (Nexis) 11 Apr. i. 19   We are in Los Angeles where the sun shines, the night life sparkles, and navel-contemplators of the world unite.

omphaloskepsis n. (also omphaloscepsis)  [ < omphalo- comb. form + ancient Greekσκέψις inquiry (see scepsis n.)] = omphaloscopy n.

-1925   A. Huxley Those Barren Leaves v. iv. 366   The flesh dies… And there’s an end of your omphaloskepsis.
-1952   H. Ingrams Hong Kong i. 22   The British saw London as the world’s capital. Omphaloscepsis has always been one of the world’s troubles.
-1983   Verbatim Summer 23/1   Presumably, one arrives at game theory through omphaloskepsis.

omphalomancy n.  [ < omphalo- comb. form + -mancy comb. form; compare French †omphalomantie (1752), omphalomancie (1868 in Littré)] divination by the navel, esp. the art or practice of divining the number of future children a woman is to have by counting the number of knots on the umbilical cord of a baby born to her (obs. rare); (in extended use) the art or skill of predicting or estimating numbers of people (rare).

-1652   J. Gaule Πυς-μαντια 165   Omphelomancy, [divining] by the navell.
-1892   New Sydenham Soc. Lexicon,   Omphalomancy, the prophesying of the number of future children a woman will have according to the number of knots on the navel-string of the child born.
-1987   Amer. Jrnl. Sociol. 93 210   The last chapter is a brief exercise in omphalomancy, an estimate of intellectual progeny in leading roles.