Jonathan Taylor writes:
Tyler Cowen writes:
In the longer run I expect “annotated” books will be available for full public review, though Kindle-like technologies. You’ll be reading Rousseau’s Social Contract and be able to call up the five most popular sets of annotations, the three most popular condensations, J.K. Rowling’s nomination for “favorite page,” a YouTube of Harold Bloom gushing about it, and so on.
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Click on the image for a detailed view!
Jonathan Taylor writes:
“DOES anyone remember that, long before Madonna was a zillionairess with a fake British accent, she used to dance at the Roxy with a posse of Latino b-boys?” asked The Times‘s Guy Trebay in his April 7 profile of Paper magazine coeditor Kim Hastreiter. (Hastreiter does.)
Does anyone remember that, since long before becoming a fashion writer at The Times—and turning out some admittedly not-unmockable trend pieces there—Trebay has been a keen collector of the throwaway lines and gestures that take place well out of New York City’s spotlight? I do. His Hastreiter piece is a bit of a puff. But it apparently inaugurated a new rubric for his pieces, The Gimlet Eye, portending, I hope, a resurgence of rangier columns like those I used to cut out from The Village Voice with scissors.
Soon after Trebay joined The Times, a piece on “mopping,” or organized shoplifting of designer clothes—featuring a “transgendered person” named Angie E.—promised to bring to the paper’s ludicrously straight-faced fashion writing a bit of the unruly gentility Trebay had cultivated at the Voice. But as the years passed, I thought the Trebay I followed was slowly fading into the patterned wallpaper of the Sunday striving section.
To be sure, his fashion criticism has kept its zing, as in a recent Fashion Diary from Paris, in which he likens Ingrid Sischy, self-described as “triste” and yapping haplessly for Karl Lagerfeld after the Chanel show, to a baby seal stranded on an ice floe.
But in this past Thursday’s Gimlet Eye, Trebay reprises his Voice role as a one man Walk of the Town, feeling for the worn seams of the city’s public facades that betray its private dilemmas. Trebay gets predictable mileage from the presence of a safari game guide at a party at the Pierre. But it’s the second half of the column’s high society/New York freak dichotomy that showcases his laconic empathy. On an upper-Manhattan stretch of the Hudson shoreline, he talks to “Bridget Polk, who shares a name but little else in common with a famous Warhol actress,” and who makes ephemeral sculptures there by balancing local rocks atop each other [UPDATE: here’s Bridget’s “rock work” at her own site.] As in Trebay’s old collections of scraps of telephone conversations in the Voice, Trebay catches New Yorkers at their most ringingly Beckettian:
“People watch and watch and then they work up the courage to ask a question,” she said. And what do they ask? “They say, ‘Do you do these here?’ ”
The sculptor laughed then, as she does a lot, at the absurdity of other people and her own. “People say, ‘Do you use glue?’ ”
They ask whether she assembles the sculptures first and brings them with her to this stretch of shoreside riprap….
Still, she added, “I get more attention for this than anything I’ve ever done.”
Plus, I learned the word riprap—previously used in the Times only three times according to an archive search, all in connection with bridge collapses (unless you count a star racing horse of 1926–27, Rip Rap).
A set of, ah, news photos of the President you’ll savor. (Along with this illuminating background.) Thanks to the always inspiring Rosscott for the link! –E.G.
Martin Schneider writes:
A couple of weeks ago Emily, Jonathan, and I attended an event at the New York Public Library with David Remnick and Ta-Nehisi Coates. I wrote about it here. The New York Public Library has posted a video of the event here.
That event was pegged to the publication of Remnick’s new book about Barack Obama, The Bridge. In line with that fact, Remnick has recently appeared on The Daily Show and Real Time with Bill Maher. The Daily Show‘s website has video here; HBO, which airs Real Time, doesn’t let you see video for free, but a free audio podcast of all telecasts is available on iTunes.
In the Daily Show appearance, Remnick called Jon Stewart a “sweetie pie,” and Stewart confessed to an unhealthy obsession with The New Yorker‘s weekly caption contest. The two men briefly discussed Barry Blitt’s originally notorious and now merely legendary cover featuring Michelle and Barack Obama from July 2008. Remnick remarked that The Daily Show “saved our bacon” on that particular subject. It’s well worth checking out Stewart’s coverage of that furor, to recall both the truly ridiculous (and apparently unanimous) condemnations The New Yorker received from the cable news outlets and Stewart’s own bottomless sensibleness.
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Click on the image for a detailed view!
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Martin Schneider writes:
A centrist friend today forwarded me an email from a Republican friend. This person, whom I don’t know, is a staunch Republican who works in Boston. The message ran, in part:
Obama is destroying this country, I am not nuts.
Also, read about what is happening in MA with its healthcare. This is what may happen to the country under Obamacare
By now we’re all used to entrenched opposition to Obama’s health care plan, so that part doesn’t faze me at all.
What struck me is the phrase, “Obama is destroying the country.” It occurred to me that a liberal would be less likely to use those words, if the accusation were flowing in the opposite direction.
Let me be clear about what I am and am not saying here. I’m not saying that Republicans are more paranoid or more unfair or more ideological. Those things may or may not be true, but in any case I’m not saying them right now. There was plenty of rhetorical excess coming from liberals when George W. Bush was president, and it’s useless to deny that there is some equivalency between the two sides. This is not about liberals being better than conservatives; it’s about liberals being different from conservatives.
“George W. Bush is destroying the country!” Is that something we heard a lot, a few years ago? I would submit that it is not, although the phrase “George W. Bush is ruining the country” may have been more common. Destroy and ruin are pretty close to synonyms, but I submit that there is a subtle and meaningful distinction. To destroy something is further down the line; destruction is totalistic and irreversible, ruination not so much. To destroy something is to annihilate it, whereas to ruin it might mean making it subpar in some fundamental way. And I think the two groups of speakers were using the words with such distinctions in mind.
What did liberals actually say about Bush? It seems to me that liberals were more likely to worry about Bush “taking over” the country, trample all over our civil rights, take us down the path to fascism, and so on. In short, liberals, deep down, felt that Bush was an obstacle in the way of the good side of America expressing itself. The concept of Bush “destroying” America just seems odd to me—how would he be able to do that without my consent or the consent of many millions of his opponents? He would not be able to do that.
It’s well known that conservatives are attracted to a theory of the “constitution in exile.” I don’t want to debate the merits of that position right now; what’s striking, though, is that conservatives are prone to the idea that there is an essence of America lurking about somewhere, and that essence can be threatened in an almost physical manner. If something should happen to that essence of Americanism, then (one might say) the country is destroyed.
Liberals don’t think like that. Liberals are more likely to think that Americanness, liberty, equality, dignity, and so on are things that reside in individual Americans—every American. Since liberals don’t believe in some Fort Knox of Civic Virtue somewhere underground, it is not in their style to imagine it being threatened by an ideological or despotic nuclear strike, so to speak. (Yes, I have Goldfinger in mind here.) As long as there are Americans who resist despotic government, cherish liberal ideals, and so forth, then America will still exist. Or something like that, this is a tendency and an assumption, not an explicit premise, usually.
One last thing. It’s often been noted that conservatives favor simplicity and liberals complexity. One need only mention Darwin, evolution, climate change to see that difference. Again, I’m not giving out awards for superiority here, this is descriptive. But this idea of a top-down presidential ability to “decide” whether America will be “destroyed” or not, this also strikes me as a conservative way of looking at the world. Ayn Rand believed in the primacy of great men of action, and she is a conservative icon. But there’s another resonance here that interests me.
Students of Tolstoy will be familiar with the epilogue to War and Peace, in which Tolstoy tries to suss out the true meaning of Napoleon: is history dictated by Great Men or is it dictated by the complex and unswervable tides of history? It seems to me that conservatives find more allure in the Great Man theory (“Obama is destroying this country”), and liberals are more attracted by the complex river metaphor.