April 2007

At BookTruck.org (a group blog for librarians), Mimi notes that with the nightmare at Virginia Tech, mass-media coverage has been almost entirely conditioned by the new-media “surround”:
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Imagine my excitement when I turned on TF1 last night to see my two crushes amongst France’s Great Men engaged in intellectual naked mud wrestling together. Patrick Poivre d’Arvor was interviewing Nicolas Sarkozy, and was as benignly indifferent to Sarko’s expressive eyes and small man ego as if he were talking to his puppet on Les Guignols. Sarkozy punctuated his remarks by referring directly to PPDA as “Patrick Poivre d’Arvor”. It was odd, and I’m sure there’s some history behind it. Does anyone know the story?

Through the campaign, Sarkozy has been even more invigorated, more expansive, more himself. He finally wrestled an endorsement out of Chirac a couple of weeks ago, when it was obvious that Super-Menteur was hurting only his own credibility by witholding approval of his prodigal son. Sarkozy is off the leash and thriving on it. A political campaign gives expression to his infamous hyperactivity in a way the mere presidency of France never could. He’s growing into the role, but he’ll never be amiable like Chirac or grand like Mitterrand. Sarkozy is charmingly insecure. He completely spoilt his statesman act last night by pointing out how he rises above the insults of his rival candidates by refusing to address them.

This morning, in a political broadcast, Segolene Royal was looking much less exhausted than she has over the last few weeks. She articulates perfectly the nation’s desire to live out its values of fairness and justice and accommodate the rest of the world purely on France’s terms. If France’s presidency was the figurehead role initially envisaged in its predecessor republics, there would be a place for this sort of thing. Without naming names, she referred to those who are ‘bulimics of power’, implicitly contrasting her own, more measured approach. But while Royal says she’ll steer France away from the ‘neo-liberal’ policies of the last five years, in practice it would mean more of the same when it comes to the economy. Chirac has stayed a steady course purely out of lassitude, Royale would do so out of a popular, Canute-like belief that France can stand alone against ‘de-localisation’ and ECB interest rates.

The dark horse is, of course, Francois Bayrou. Try as I might, I never seem to switch on the telly when he’s talking. I’d love to see PPDA give him a good working over.

There’s a useful blog covering l’affaire Wolfowitz “here”:http://www.worldbankpresident.org/ . So far as I can see the Wall Street Journal is almost alone in spinning a pro-W line (what a surprise!).

I was sick of the whole Don Imus thing about two minutes into it, and did not expect willingly to read a long discussion of the subject. But Phil Nugent’s commentary is on target. The rhythms of his rant are always so beautifully well-modulated:

The talk radio world, one that Imus worked hard to shape, is one where overpaid white guys who did well in the voting for the title of “Class Clown” at their respective high schools sneer at blacks, women, gays, what have you, in a dismayingly self-congratulatory tone. The self-congratulation comes not from the cleverness of their material–nobody could be that self-deluded–but from the fantasy that they’re speaking truth to power and taking on The Man by being, and here hold tight while we flash back to the thrilling days of 1993, “politically incorrect.” Their natural audience is people who hate their lives and, at least for a few minutes a day, like to imagine that they’re outlaws by listening to some peabrain on the radio make fun of, say, homeless people or the victims of the 2004 tsunami. This stuff is not hard to do. Lest you think I’m being self-righteous here, let me make it clear that I know how easy it is to do funny ethnic voices and make fun of gay stereotypes because I’ve done it, usually very late at night, often on car trips when I was trying to keep myself and someone else awake, always when my cerebral wattage had reached the draining point and I couldn’t think of anything to say that would actually have counted as funny. In my defense, nobody was throwing millions of dollars at me at the time, and if they were, I like to think that I would have differed from the Imuses and the Opie and Anthonys of this world in that I would have made some effort to actually earn the money. (I remember that when Howard Stern began a short-lived tenure of having his show broadcast in New Orleans, he held a press conderence, and one of the local reporters asked him how he would compete with the hilarious, daring wild man talk guy who was already doing a New Orleans morning show, and whose name escapes me. Stern, who’d clearly never heard the local guy’s name, said something like, what’s he do, like a Southern guy and a black guy and a gay guy, all the while doing high-school level impersonations of a drawling hick, a Stepin Fetchit type, and a nelly dude, which did indeed sound exactly like the local guy’s repertoire of funny voices. I remember that the New Orleans reporter was stunned by this, and seemed genuinely unaware that there was some yokel doing the same basic act at some radio station in every city in America.)

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My friend Scott Kaufman asked me to point you to the book event The Valve is hosting on Amanda Claybaugh’s The Novel of Purpose. He was even considerate enough to write this post for me — links and all! [Though, truth to tell, I did edit it a little bit. And the fact that I am saying as much in brackets shows that there are limits to how much control of the author function I will give up.– sm]

Miriam Burstein has already thrown her hat into the ring. And Scott [SEK, that is, not me-sm]* has written a briefer on the context in which Claybaugh’s book is, as we say in the [academico-litcrit] biz, “intervening.”

So if you find the 19^th century, social reform, literary realism or the works of Dickens, Bronte, and Twain at all interesting, I [or we? something like that-sm] suggest you check it out.

* [this is kind of like “Temptation Inside Your Heart” on the “lost” Velvet Underground album which has a couple of tracks of Lou Reed commenting on the song and arguing with his own commentary: “I can talk to myself if I want to….”-sm]

Obviously the reason why old comics provoke a certain sort of joke is the underwear on the outside, plus dialogue that, apparently, dare not speak the name of whatever the hell it is the characters are trying to discuss. But sometimes this can really be taken to extremes:

What are we supposed to think? Johnny Thunder is a gay robot? But this isn’t really what I wanted to talk about tonight.
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For I was not an aging, racist shock-jock.

Then they came for the ones who had ‘lost’ all that email, and I said nothing. For I had not ‘lost’ all that email.

It seems to me this has been a weak week for Republican push-back.

And now, back to your previously scheduled comics blogging.

Betwixt these weekend comics posts, I might as well make a plug for Top Shelf Productions, a (mostly) comics small press, which is having a 10th B-Day sale. The long and the short is, a bunch of titles are marked down to $3, even $1, until Weds, April 18, so long as you buy $30. I just bought several titles, including some for the kids. (If I didn’t already own all the “Owly” titles, I would have snagged those, at a slight discount. Plus there’s some marginally marked down Alan Moore, but I’ve got that already.) Most of the titles have previews so you can browse with a modicum of informed efficiency. I bought: [click to continue…]

I’m working up a longer post on this important subject. But, in the face of a certain natural skepticism, expressed in comments to my previous post, I have decided to seed discussion with a pair of frames from All Star Comics #24 (Spring, 1945):

If you happen to be at a scholarly institution with access to All Star Comics archives, vol. 6 [amazon], you can consult the original. Otherwise, you can wait for my update.

TONIGHT: Wildcat explains five fifteen centuries of German perfidy.

If you, like me, are a professional philosopher, sometimes it seems like you have to talk about the whole Descartes thing … well, sometimes it seems like you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting yourself giving a lecture about how maybe there’s an Deceiving Demon messing with you to a considerable extent.

Now: probably you don’t have good art skills, so you just draw a circle on the board and announce to the students, with confidence that brooks no demurral, ‘this is YOU’. (Or, rather, your MIND.)

Students [collective Troy McClure imitation]: It’s like he’s known me all my life!

You [blushing modestly]: Well, I do have a Ph.D.

But suppose your students still insist that they don’t get it about the whole Deceiving Demon thing. Well, with this one-size fits-all graphic, you can explain 53% of all known epistemological problems. I give you: Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen’s Brain In A Jar!

hat tip: ISB

Those are some clear and distinct shorts he’s wearing, if I do say so myself.

TOMORROW: Hawkman explains the Treaty of Versailles.

John Holbo’s naming of the two-step of terrific triviality reminded me that this manoeuvre is one of the basic steps in the nature-nurture dance. I looked at
Steven Pinker’s agile performance
a while back.

Anyway, this reminds me of a vaguely related point I’ve been meaning to make for a while. Debate over the relative influence of environment and heredity on intelligence has been going on for at least a century without much change or resolution, or any obvious reduction in the level of vitriol. The only significant new information in the last few decades has been the discovery that average IQ scores have risen substantially over time (the so-called Flynn effect). There has been vigorous debate over whether this effect is real or spurious.

On the other hand, no-one seems particularly exercised about the relative effects of nature and nurture on height, even though the observed patterns seem to be much the same: a fairly high correlation between parents and children, significant class effects, a correlation with wages and a surprisingly strong increasing trend over time.

And much the same things can be said about health, except that the parent-child correlation is specific to particular conditions.

Height, health status and measured intelligence are all positively correlated so it seems as if we should be looking for the same kind of explanation in all cases. This will be left as an exercise for readers (that is, I haven’t got around to working on it myself).

Update The comments do a good job of making my point. There’s plenty of vitriol on the subject of intelligence, but not much new. On the other hand, there’s some interesting, and reasonably civilised, discussion of genetic and environmental determinants of height.

Driving home today I saw a guy standing by a busy downtown intersection holding a large sign that read, “9-11 Was An Inside Job.” It doesn’t quite rise to seeing a giant muppet-like creature holding the same sort of sign, but maybe he’s working on it.

_Update_: Here’s a recent piece from the _Chronicle_ about 9-11 Conspiracy Theories in academia. (Hat tip: Evan Goldstein.)

Every once in a while, I will read something that seems uniquely precise in describing aspects of my own condition. A piece from early last fall by Jerome Weeks — at that point book critic for the Dallas Morning News — was very much a case of that happening:

As Mark Twain observed, anything you’re not obliged to do is play. Anything else is work. And as a book journalist, one is obliged to race after the Media Now-Now-Now – what critic David Denby once called “information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs.”

What’s more, book culture may seem a dwindling, quaint endeavor to advertisers in mad pursuit of illiterate teens and at a time when arts coverage in general is getting dumped or fragmented into a million Web sites. But there are hundreds of thousands more new books released per year than TV shows, sports programs, movies or CDs. For all the talk of the death of print, more people have access to more books now than at any time in history.

That’s amazing but it means keeping up is a full-time sprint. A book columnist must read in gross tonnage, read hastily in trains, planes and lunch lines and read books no one should bother with. One can endure a film or a concert for two hours; reading a pointless book can take days. Recall those dreaded high school assignments: A bad book can seem like a prison sentence.

I know, I know. You spend your time heroically putting out fires and saving lives in the ER. All of this reading doesn’t really sound like work to you. But it is. Otherwise, we wouldn’t pay researchers, law clerks, teachers or librarians.

OK, so we don’t pay them much….

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Jonah Goldberg is now grumbling that people are calling him stupid. But, to be fair, the upshot of Goldberg’s indignant response to Henry’s post would seem to be that Henry was actually too charitable to Goldberg’s original post. But I’m getting ahead of my story. Goldberg complains: “Any fair reader of my post (hint, that excludes Henry) would see that I was criticizing liberals and conservatives for not taking culture into account enough.” Now what would that too low accounting value be? “My point was not that culture is everything, but that government isn’t everything.” That is, Goldberg is claiming that the assignment of a non-zero significance to culture is bold contrarianism that places him at odds with both left and right. Of course, far from being a bold position, the claim that culture is not nothing is something everyone would grant freely, if it seemed to anyone worth mentioning.

To put it another way, Goldberg is making a standard rhetorical move which has no accepted name, but which really needs one. I call it ‘the two-step of terrific triviality’. Say something that is ambiguous between something so strong it is absurd and so weak that it would be absurd even to mention it. When attacked, hop from foot to foot as necessary, keeping a serious expression on your face. With luck, you will be able to generate the mistaken impression that you haven’t been knocked flat, by rights. As a result, the thing that you said which was absurdly strong will appear to have some obscure grain of truth in it. Even though you have provided no reason to think so.