I’ve been reading Howard Blum’s “American Lightning” these days. It’s funny how fragmented it is in the telling. Blum has made a wonderful attempt to write the way movies are often cut, and how TV scripts are often formulated. He follows three major players in the investigation and prosecution of a case of terrorism from 1910: The filmmaker D. W. Griffith, The detective Billy Burns, and the attorney Clarence Darrow. In the telling, Blum has braided the strands tightly. I don’t disagree with how it’s done, it’s just that I’ve recently been very critical about that technique in general. When I’m reading it, I often wonder where the book is headed. The ‘cuts’ from one character to another can be as disorienting as a music video.
Certainly, the intent of the book was to show a parallel between Anarchist bombings in 1910 and the Jihadist attacks of 2001. It’s fun to read Blum’s account - it reads like fiction at times - but there are times I would rather just have the facts. I know this is how a lot of people prefer to read - to be taken along on a rambling journey. (I could accuse “Nixonland” of doing the same thing, come to think of it.)
Posted in books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:22:00 GMT
I have finally come to the last few pages of “Nixonland”. It has been quite a chore at times: Blow-by-blow accounts of the ‘68 and ‘72 political party conventions are fascinating in their way. I can’t knock it, but my interest flagged regularly. I guess I thought the book would end much later than it does, and I was fooled into thinking it would therefore move a little faster to cover all that ground.
Still, I didn’t know that much about Nixon’s early career - and his involvement in the McCarthyite communist witch hunt. And all the bad things about Nixon I did know were largely second hand. Or worse - just vague memories of other people’s opinions.
The book isn’t really about Nixon, though… It’s about a brand of cynical politics that polarized a nation. In many ways it reminds me of the tales of the early days of computer security: People could legitimately wonder why anybody would deliberately attack a computer network. In retrospect it seems naive to forgo paranoid levels of protection. When you can’t even identify the cause of a problem, or you’re too embarrassed to disclose that anything even happened, it’s hard to concentrate on normal business.
Posted in books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 16 Nov 2008 17:06:00 GMT
I was reading the chapter on Haussmann’s transformation of Paris in the 19th century in “Cities In Civilization” when I came across some untranslated French. It is common for an author to provide translations for such quotes.
An observer in 1882 described the traffic situation in Paris as “le dernier mot de l’obstructionnisme”.
And that was one of the shortest examples. So it was over to Google Translate for some answers.
That was when I remembered that I wanted to road test the machine with some Japanese. Well, it didn’t take long to find a stinker.
Japanese is not like English. Maybe that’s why I found it so durned interesting.
As you can see, I’ve taken the liberty of color coding the sentence. This will allow you to see how different the grammar is, and I hope it helps understand what went wrong with it over at Google.
Here we have a transitive verb “To Eat”, and ostensibliy we have a subject and an object… Then it gets weird. In Japanese, there are postpositional particles (which often function like English prepositions) that mark the role of a phrase within a sentence. With no spaces between words, you have to rely on other strategies. “Wa” marks the end of a “Topic” which replaces another marker - obscuring the role of that phrase. “Sae” adds the idea of “even”, thereby replacing another marker - which is also now missing, obscuring the role of that phrase, too. What we do know is that “tabenai” is the negative version of a transitive verb requiring an object to make sense. We’ve definitely got a subject and and object here in this sentence (sometimes we don’t have them - they could be implied because they showed up in previous sentences…), but which one is which? Cat or Fish?
Google (#1) thought Fish was the subject, and Cat was the object. How naive. They were probably relying on phrase order to figure it out. Phrase order is not that important in Japanese. In the English version, you know immediately from context that this is wrong - but that doesn’t prove anything: Nonsense can still be grammatically correct. It’s a theory. Isn’t that exciting? Every little sentence needs a theory. I love that. “The fish” is wrong, anyway: it’s quite clearly ”this fish”, and “Even this fish do not eat my cats” forces the verb into “would not eat”. So that’s two problems already. “Uchi” and “neko” are neither singular nor plural, so it could be “my cat”, “my cats”, “our cat”, or “our cats”. I see why they picked “cats”: Doesn’t “eat” suggest an ongoing or habitual activity where the object is likely to be plural? I’ve become more sensitive to the way some English nouns like “fish” can be a substance - an indistinct quantity. One or many fishes can still be described as “fish”.
The textbook I took the example from (William McClure’s “Using Japanese: A Guide to Contemporary Usage”) supplied (#2). This represents the theory that Cat is the subject and Fish is the object. I agree. They editorialize thusly: “Sae places extreme emphasis on the noun in question, and is often followed by a negative”. There is another thing the Topic-wa construction can do: Provide a contrast. I only mention it because it’s a perfect way to pull an object to the front of the sentence. Here in this sentence, the contrast is this fish versus all other fish (the “not this fish”).
I moved the “not” for #3. It’s subtle, I know, but I like it. I just had to have the last word.
As I think about it, the textbook is less concerned with giving a natural-sounding English version than you or I would be. In fact, most of the Japanese textbooks I have seen do the same thing: English translations that make the subtleties of the Japanese examples more explicit, at the cost of sounding ridiculous.
I like to pull “not” to the beginning of the English version, even though there is nothing wrong with #2 here. The distinction may not be completely neutral, but having both versions available is nice when you have to fuss with the rhythm, timing, cadence, or alliteration of the larger utterance this sentence would appear in. On the face of it, though, as a stand-alone sentence, I get inspired by the distribution of the “Noun-sae, Verb-nai” construction in the Japanese version to produce another distributed construction in English. I just feel a little uncomfortable leaving the “not” with the verb when that “even” is there: Better perhaps to have them together. And I wonder if #2 is not simply trying to leave as much of the original as unmolested as possible.
The only thing left now is the “yo”. I was looking for some reason “yo” would inform the emphasis in the English version, and I didn’t find any. In Japanese, in addition to “phrase particles” (“wa” and “sae” in this example), there are sentence particles. The sentence particles typically indicate the speaker’s understanding of who knows what. That can be powerful in a language of subtlety: If I don’t want you to think I’m claiming to know more than you do, I might turn a statement into a question, or an imperative into an invitation. That’s part of the famous “can’t say no” reputation of Japanese, having the option to shift to the less confrontational version in every circumstance. “Yo” is the strongest member of the group: It means that I don’t think you know about the content of the preceding statement. It’s not so imposing when it refers to personal facts - in this case literally the inner workings of my house, and the dietary habits of its feline member - which won’t cause much embarrassment when I imply that you don’t know. So with the English translation, it might be nice if we could capture that revelatory tone. But the emphasis provided by “sae/even” seems to do the trick.
Posted in computer-interface, books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:52:00 GMT
Thanks again to Jason Kottke for pointing out an interesting thing I might have missed: Obama has apparently read Michael Pollan and taken him seriously (…full Time interview with Obama here. A book excerpt and Pollan interview here ).
My dear sweet mother has been telling me all my life that “they’re messing with the food”. As a kid I already knew her theory that chemical additives and cheap substitutions were causing the rise in childhood allergies. I took it seriously, even when I was skeptical (in fact maybe I owe my skepticism to her).
It’s the same old story of Prometheus that we get into with every new technology, isn’t it? Ham-fisted attempts to take the benefit of a new idea ignore the dark side of tinkering with nature and suddenly you’ve got high rates of cancer in your neighborhood, or soft cadmium leaching into your bones - and you don’t know why.
But that’s okay - they assure us - it will all be fixed in version 2.0… I’ve got as much enthusiasm for new technology as the next guy, but it does seem to be a youthful obsession - I could be losing my grip on it. And, technology is mute on the problem of risk management and quality assurance - those things are up to us. Which takes me right back to externalities and the temptation to cheat for higher profits. And the need for us to all make these decisions together. One of the effects of profit is to abstract away all those externalities, making them seem not to be anyone’s fault in particular.
The Pollan article is right up my alley: It’s another angle on the Peak-Oil Problem. I just wrote a big thing on inflation last night, then spent part of this morning editing it, and it just occurred to me that cheap energy will naturally worm its way into everything we do. I see an analogy with money bidding up derivatives in lieu of raising consumer prices: Supply and demand operating on ingenuity. But, the ingenuity is only in plentiful supply because the raw inputs are so cheap. Pull that pin out of the machine, and the whole thing could fall apart. If cheap energy boosts the process at every stage, then prepare to see the process decidedly unboosted.
This is all to remind us that economics is not just about money. Much of the theory of economics has developed in recent centuries, long after money hit the scene. To live life obsessed with money is to ignore the processes by which wealth is actually created; It results in all manner of streetcorner hustle - no matter if you’ve got a three piece suit and a downtown office suite.
It also emerges that people will play some dangerous games with nature when they’ve got their eyes on the dollar. Well intentioned folk come up with reasonable standards for the mass market, then ingenuity strikes: Every loophole is exploited, studies are commissioned to find the minuscule benefit in an additive. From Pollan’s book “In Defense Of Food”:
Yet as a general rule it’s a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound “whole-grain goodness” to the rafters. Watch out for those health claims.
Posted in politics, economics, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:23:00 GMT
Among the other books I am reading right now, I started re-reading David Hackett Fischer’s “The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History”. I wanted to consult it after reading some of the Floyd Norris Blog at the New York Times this afternoon. I read “Great Wave” a couple years ago, and I suppose I am instinctively looking for background material in making sense of the current economic situation. Here’s a little gem from the introduction:
“The economic consequences of decelerating population growth are[:] slowing demand and downward pressure on prices throughout the world, which lead in turn to severe financial crisis in economies that were organized on expectations of very rapid growth.”
This cuts right to the heart of the matter: ”expectations of very rapid growth”. If we are having trouble because of our expectations… Is there anything we can do?!?!
Posted in books, economics | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 26 Oct 2008 02:45:00 GMT
Check out “Inspired Reading” on the Goodness Blog.
I asked a group of outstanding graphic designers the following question… Please recommend a book that you have found particularly inspiring or meaningful to your development as a creative person? The one restriction: Please no books on graphic design.
They came up with a few of my favorites on there, but Stella Bugbee chose two of my favorite books: “All Consuming Images” and “Ways Of Seeing”.
How well do these things transfer? I don’t think of myself as primarily a graphic designer - It’s one of my marginal skills, and just one of many interests. It’s something I can’t afford to ignore. Truth be told, a book like “Ways Of Seeing” might violate the restriction - but just barely. The interesting thing about the question is the crossing over from idea to image.
Posted in books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 20 Oct 2008 01:35:00 GMT
Hunh… It sounds like more “Small Is Beautiful”:
STEVEN MILLHAUSER - “The Ambition of the Short Story”
I particularly liked: “The novel buys up the land, cuts down the trees, puts up the condos. The short story scampers across a lawn, squeezes under a fence.”
Posted in books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 13 Oct 2008 02:12:00 GMT
Okay, I’ve only browsed the book, never really sat down to scrutinize it… But one of the things I remember that they say White People Like is “Not Owning A Television”. Mainly for the purpose of bragging that they don’t.
We’re headed into an uncertain future for television, perhaps: I know people who watch TV on a cell phone. Not, you know - a lot of people like that - but all the same… I can watch some shows on my laptop - not too shabby. Meanwhile, ever larger flat screen plasma or LCD or whatever they are come on the market - screens so big you might not have a big enough wall to hang them on… And, watch out for tight turns in stairways: once I got a couch stuck in mine.
I was deliberately unplugged for a time in the 90’s. When my sister and I first moved in together, we watched a lot of dinnertime Simpsons episodes on the tiny B&W I salvaged from my childhood. Then she dropped it. The tuner knob was busted. I took it as an omen… but later on I discovered that a pair of pliers could tune it just fine. I left it on UHF and discovered a channel with lots of foreign films and newscasts. After that, I inherited first one bulky Zenith, then the Sony from my dad - a man with plenty of televisions. Coincidentally, also the only person who ever mentioned “Stuff White People Like” to me, despite having worked for a bookstore when it came out and having reported it many weeks as a best selling item.
Such a short period of time - such a brief experiment in… well, what would you call it exactly? Am I more overwhelmed by culture because I have a more developed critical sense, and can’t let anything upsetting slide, or is that all just a load of crap? I must have something of the spirit of the intellectual - even if I haven’t really done much with it.
All of this is prelude to something I just read in “Nixonland” this afternoon. The same paragraph that just had me fussing about the “eggheads”…
(Nixon went on television to defend himself against calls to resign as vice-presidential candidate in 1952…) There weren’t all that many televisions in America then, though the number of sets was growing exponentially, as part and parcel of America’s postwar economic boom. These were the types [the eggheads] who took pride in themselves, already, for not owning them… They saw themselves as the guardians of American decency.
Incidentally, I see myself in a similar relation to mobile phones: As the market for these things was still approaching saturation, I had a lot of disdain for all those people who didn’t seem to have anything worth communicating. It felt like a poor use of the airwaves, and a sure sign that the resource was not being priced correctly - no doubt the management of those airwaves was the reason. Anybody who complains about their cell phone bill now is an idiot: it could be a lot more expensive, and they could be using it for only the most urgent needs. But that’s off-topic.
There are probably going to be many waves of technology with the same effect: inspiring a backlash of conservatism from all corners of the political spectrum. Take the book - now in danger, but once the world changing new technology that humbled manuscripts, papyrus, and stone tablets.
I have to wonder now… Over the course of a few paragraphs, Perlstein has really stirred up my mind:
The liberal capitalism that had created this mass middle class created, in its wake, a mass culture of consumption. And the liberals whose New Deal created this mass middle class were more and more turning their attention to critiquing the degraded mass culture of cheap sensation and plastic gadgets and politicians who seemed to cater to this lowest common denominator - public-relations-driven politicians who catered to only the basest and most sentimental emotions in men.
You know who else catered to the basest and most sentimental emotions in men?…
Study well the man at Nixonland’s center, the man from Yorba Linda. Study well those he opposed. The history that follows is their political war.
Posted in politics, media-studies, books | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 12 Oct 2008 22:56:00 GMT
One of the last books I bought at Olsson’s was Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland: The Rise Of A President And The Fracturing Of America”. Admittedly, I have a minor obsession with things that were happening in history around the time of my birth, but maybe as I think about it, this is just an illusion. The time of my birth is simply a convenient benchmark when trying to understand what lead us to this moment - continuous processes all, to be sure.
Richard Nixon: I’ve heard the name tossed about all my life. It was just too soon for me to think of him as history until lately. As I embark on Perlstein’s account of the man, I see that there really was somebody standing at the imaginary point so many changes appeared to pivot around. Silly me… This must be yet another illusion: identical to the cosmological problem of every point in the universe appearing to be the center from which the whole thing is expanding. But I’m not so sure. Let me tell you what I’ve got so far.
In Jonathan Chait’s “The Great Con”, which I read last summer, I discovered something about how the Conservative wing of the Republican party was ousted. John McCain is in some ways trying to reclaim that territory, but perhaps none of those voters will trust him after so many years of playing along with the neo-conservatives. It doesn’t matter how many times Sarah Palin says “Maverick”. If you dream of a time when Republicans were truly conservative, you’re also dreaming of balanced budgets and racial segregation - Eisenhower apparently thought tax cuts were irresponsible fiscal policy. Instead we get Reaganomics and the Laffer Curve - dubious in the long term, but guaranteed to rev things up in the short.
One more distant point of reference here is Jefferey Scheuer’s “The Sound Bite Society”, which seemed to say: Television favors arguments that are easier to express quickly; You’ll run out of time trying to map out the nuances of a more complicated policy. This is how we got Bill Clinton: A guy who understands all the subtle gradations will only get so far in politics without charisma. Hey - he’s the only Democrat in the White house since Carter. Maybe Obama will clinch it when McCain implodes. Not exactly an attractive trait. Hmmm… remind me that there is an important thread here for later.
Nixon came along at the right moment to pass himself off as a “regular guy”. In contrast to the establishment “eggheads”. A striver among elites. A striver suppressed by the elites. Plenty of people could identify - people who don’t want some smug bastard at the helm. The elites were correct when they complained about Nixon pandering to baser sympathies - but that just made them look even worse.
Posted in politics, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 12 Oct 2008 21:22:00 GMT
