Greg Brown

I miss the future. (video from the 1958 Disneyland TV show, via...

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:05:53 -0600

I miss the future. (video from the 1958 Disneyland TV show, via John Gruber)

I chased the sunset to the shore of Lake Michigan today.

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:42:12 -0600

I chased the sunset to the shore of Lake Michigan today.

One of the neat things about some computer games is that they...

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:44:23 -0600

One of the neat things about some computer games is that they can be “modded,” adding player-created elements and even entirely new forms of gameplay.

In this case, they added a DeLorean… that works.

(As a bonus, you can watch it with appropriate music too.)

Robert Caro interviewed by Charlie Rose

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:35:58 -0600

Robert Caro interviewed by Charlie Rose:

Occasionally my obsession with Robert Caro’s obsessions - the use of power, LBJ’s rise to it, Robert Moses’ command of it - flares up again and I start re-reading all the stuff I can get my hands on.

This interview is pretty new - from April 10th of this year - and it’s popped up since my last dive into this stuff. Robert Caro talks about his grand project to chronicle Lyndon B. Johnson’s life, and how he’s eventually going to finish it. There are plenty of anecdotes about LBJ and Caro’s efforts to chronicle it, and some of them are charming as all hell.

One excerpt:

Charlie Rose: You go to an office, you wear a coat and tie. Why?

Robert Caro: Well I’ll tell ya. My books take so long to do, seven to eight years, that - and my publisher really doesn’t bother me. I never get asked, “how are you coming? When are you going to hand in?” - that it’s so easy to fool yourself that you’re working harder than you are. So you have these devices to remind yourself that you’re going to work. This is a job. It’s just a device; I count the words at the end of the day and I wear a coat and tie.

Follow-up notes on Changing My Mind

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:02:00 -0600

I finished Zadie Smith’s new essay book Changing My Mind today (after picking it up on Wednesday), and it’s pretty good overall although somewhat hit-and-miss.

Unlike some other essay collections, the pieces were written for a variety of different aims and can kind of jerk you around somewhat in between them. Some are memoirs, some are pieces of reportage, and yet others are straight-up essays. Most do just fine standing on their own, but there are a few that I felt in the dark about; they seem designed to accompany movies or essay collections, and fall flat without that guiding context and exposition.

But when it clicks, it clicks. Her essay on David Foster Wallace, as mentioned earlier, makes for an amazing coda to the book and his life. The essay “Speaking in Tongues” is equally excellent - dashing from subject to subject in a surprisingly elegant fashion, unexpectedly looping back on itself in a charming way. And her essay on “That Crafty Feeling” is some of the best writing advice out there. Reading those three essays makes you wish that Zadie Smith made those kinds of sweeping arguments more often, because she has the talent to do it.

One of her best essays, “Fail Better,” is oddly absent from the collection; I can only surmise from a throw-away reference at the beginning that it’s meant to form the foundation of another book, one on writing and moral philosophy. But if you like that essay, you’ll like the three I mentioned above. In one of the more amazing moments of total readerly immersion I’ve ever seen, I handed “Fail Better” to my girlfriend as she arrived back from a trip to the local coffee-place; she proceeded to walk to the other room while reading it, lie down on the bed, and stay that way until the end of the essay - never getting up, breaking eye contact, or setting down the latte in her hand from the start.

That Zadie Smith is one hell of a writer.

An example page from Edward Tufte’s book Beautiful...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:50:39 -0600

An example page from Edward Tufte’s book Beautiful Evidence, part of a larger excerpt explaining sparklines.

I love this style of layout, with the footnotes slotted over to the side of the material. It means the book takes up more space, but visually illustrates how the text and annotations connect - as well as making it easier to write in your own footnotes.

I’ve been reading Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm for a few weeks now, and part of the reason it’s taken so long is because I’ve been trying to underline and annotate the text as a way of grappling with its scope and scale. A book tasked with recreating the public sphere and political mood of the first half of the sixties, it’s so self-referential that I’m finding it hard to tease out parallels and even self-sufficient stories. Underlines are my way of carving out a lesser text, a facade to the relentlessly-rich book that birthed it.

I’m halfway through Changing my Mind by Zadie Smith, a...

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:11:21 -0600

I’m halfway through Changing my Mind by Zadie Smith, a collection of essays dealing with books and other things of interest.

The final essay examines David Foster Wallace through his brilliant (and horrifying) short-story collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, and is easily worth the price of admission alone. I started reading it in the drive-through lane of a local coffeeshop, and was so entranced as to forget little things like oh coffee is coming and I am sitting in a car.

Gratuitous Picture Of Yourself Wednesday: Sunset Edition!

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:51:45 -0600

Gratuitous Picture Of Yourself Wednesday: Sunset Edition!

Literary guilt, quantified

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:27:06 -0600

Today I rearranged my library here in Michigan just so I could figure out exactly how much I’m slacking in my reading vs. book-buying habits:

Books read ≈ 20 inches

Books unread ≈ 40 inches

Uh-oh.

"Pinball attracted a different crowd than video games like Defender and this is the fundamental..."

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:37:00 -0600

“Pinball attracted a different crowd than video games like Defender and this is the fundamental theorem of pinball economics: pinball skill is transferrable. If you can pass, stall, nudge, and aim on one machine you can do it on any machine. This is both a blessing and a curse for pinball developers. The blessing is that pinball players were a captive market. The curse was that to keep the pinball players interested the games had to get more and more intricate and challenging.

Pinball developers struggled with this problem as pinball was slowly losing to video games. Video games competed by adding levels of play with increasing difficulty. Any new player could quickly get chops on a new game because the low levels were easy. This ensured that new players were drawn in easily, but still they were continually challenged because the higher levels got harder and harder. By contrast, the physical nature of pinball, its main attraction to hardcore players, meant that there was no way to have it both ways.”

- Jeff Ely, writing about The Economics of Pinball. (link via Jason Kottke)

A Roland Emmerich Haiku

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:20:26 -0600

Rewatched Godzilla;
I found it strangely mundane.
Touché, Twenty-twelve.

Why yes, 2012 does have the most absurd song-over-credits...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:35:44 -0600

Why yes, 2012 does have the most absurd song-over-credits and associated music video ever. We had to flee the theater.

2012 is easily the best comedy I’ve seen in theaters the...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:13:00 -0600

2012 is easily the best comedy I’ve seen in theaters the last few years, eliciting giggles from the very first scene and escalating to a near-death experience during the California destruction sequence (viewable online as the “Extended Scene”).

I was really worried going in that Roland Emmerich’s drama wouldn’t be up to the high kitch bar set by the explosions, but the movie didn’t disappoint. 2012 takes careful care to set up each character, giving them scenes to stand and deliver their inner drama before gingerly sending them off to their death. But despite the time spent fleshing out every single character in the cast of dozens, none really advance beyond a caricature. Even the hilarious performance by Woody Harrelson as a conspiracy nut succeeds because it highlights the caricatured nature of it all. And the constant disaster distracts from any organized attempt to tell a story; as my girlfriend remarked afterwards, “the old guy trying to call his son was kind of sweet and made me sad, but then a tsunami went over the Himalayas.”

The one flaw to the film - keeping it from Best EVER status - is being a little overlong. The movie successfully invents and reinvents itself for the two hours or so, but the last chunk of the film changes John Cusack’s role from “barely outrunning disaster dude” to “possibly killing a significant chunk of the human race by accident until he makes it OK again by fixing his oopsie”. It’s a sequence that feels like it lasts forever, redeemed only by the deadpan, gravitas-laden delivery of the best line ever: “we’re on course to crash into the north face of Mount Everest.”

Oddly enough, we were the only pair laughing in the theater - which otherwise consisted of older couples. I think they were expecting a John Cusack movie, and were wholly shocked to find something different and better.

Quizipedia

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 15:11:44 -0600

Quizipedia:

Learn random things via an automatically-generated Wikipedia quiz! (link via Andy Baio)

megamindy: GPOYW: Yeah, I did it edition. Fact: rays of light...

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:59:40 -0600

megamindy:

GPOYW: Yeah, I did it edition.

Fact: rays of light normally radiate from Mindy’s head. The ceiling fan is a mere coincidence.

So I finally captured a cell-phone photo of the elusive...

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:29:00 -0600

So I finally captured a cell-phone photo of the elusive “Dr. Seuss Truck,” dubbed by me because it sucks up leaves through its snout (seen to the right of the dude with the rake). The sides and back are plastered with musical notes, only enhancing the sense of stepping into a childhood book.

My workplace is weirdly wonderful.

I have a gender-inappropriate love for this movie. As I told my...

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:11:00 -0600

I have a gender-inappropriate love for this movie. As I told my girlfriend last night, “it’s an almost-perfect film; the only way it could be better is if Batman showed up halfway through.”

Bonus amazing:

Check out the blatantly photoshopped cover images. Meg Ryan has the neck of Stretch Armstrong.
The critical rave quote on the back is - and I’m not making this up - “Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan should win the Nobel Prize for chemistry!”

"The debate about Heidegger reminded me of a conversation I had with philosopher Berel Lang on..."

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:11:00 -0600

“The debate about Heidegger reminded me of a conversation I had with philosopher Berel Lang on “the evolution of evil,” an exchange I wrote about in Explaining Hitler. We discussed whether Hitler represented a new depth of evil and what the next step down into the abyss might be. Were there degrees of evil—that led to Hitler? And would Hitler lead to degrees of evil beyond his own?

I had suggested Holocaust denial was such a next step, in the sense that it added insult to injury, but Lang disagreed, arguing that Heidegger’s postwar silence on Nazism exemplified the next step in the evolution of evil. After the war, this purportedly great and comprehensive philosopher never published anything that addressed the fact of the Holocaust that his party perpetrated. It just didn’t impinge on his worldview. He had time to write polemics against mechanized agriculture but not industrialized murder. Lang thought Heidegger’s indifference was a whole new kind of evil.”

- Ron Rosenbaum, writing in Slate about new criticism of Heigegger’s Nazi past (and how he thinks that contaminated Hannah Arendt’s own work). It’s a hard passage to argue against.

"Now that she was abroad, the hat was a sentimental object. When she went to visit Tomas in Zurich,..."

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:34:00 -0600

“Now that she was abroad, the hat was a sentimental object. When she went to visit Tomas in Zurich, she took it along and had it on her head when he opened the hotel-room door. But then something she had not reckoned with happened: the hat, no longer jaunty or sexy, turned into a monument to time past. They were both touched. They made love as they never had before. This was no occasion for obscene games. For this meeting was not a continuation of their erotic rendezvous, each of which had been an opportunity to think up some new little vice; it was a recapitulation of time, a hymn to their common past, a sentimental summary of an unsentimental story that was disappearing in the distance.

The bowler hat was a motif in the musical composition that was Sabina’s life. It returned again and again, each time with a different meaning, and all the meanings flowed through the bowler hat like water through a riverbed. I might call it Heraclitus’ (“You can’t step twice into the same river”) riverbed: the bowler hat was a bed through which each time Sabina saw another river flow, another semantic river: each time the same object would give rise to a new meaning, through all former meanings would resonate (like an echo, like a parade of echoes) together with the new one. Each new experience would resound, each time enriching the harmony. The reason why Tomas and Sabina were touched by the sight of the bowler hat in a Zurich hotel and made love almost in tears was not merely a reminder of their love games but also a memento of Sabina’s father and of her grandfather, who lived in a century without airplanes and cars.”

- Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (p. 92-93, olive edition paperback). The passage comes from an entire section about misunderstood words that carry differing and opposite meanings for the two lovers, and the kind of conflict that can cause.

I feel this effect every day, even in daily conversation. Words, tossed out lightly, are received and gingerly unpacked, the meanings regressing out into infinity like a hall of mirrors.

This is what came to mind in reading Mills’ musing about an active mind, one unable to see words for what they are. It’s why I find it hard to write dialogue in fiction, because so often I only hear the meanings it carries and cannot reverse the process except in my own peculiar way.

Early Disappointment

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:06:58 -0600

While still waking up this morning, I browsed NYTimes.com and a headline caught my eye in the popular section:

“Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Truth”

Only after clicking did I realize it actually said “Expanding Islands of Trash.” I liked the other mental image way better, New York Times dot com. :(