Context & Continuity

Robert Caro and His White Whale...

Remember when? 

It was 1982 and the Earth was a bit cooler than it is now.  My best friends and I were just off the boat docked in New York Harbor and were beginning to spend even more of our time thinking and talking about books.  William Shawn and Roger Straus (the elder) and Sonny Mehta hadn't arrived in New York City yet.  

And the first volume of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson was published.

I was remembering this when I read the cover story of this past Sunday's New York Times magazine, Robert Caro’s Big Dig. 

I was remembering the experience I had reading that book, a full body immersive experience that was just like when I first read A Wrinkle in Time or Tristram Shandy or Proust or, especially, Moby Dick.  I remember drinking every single word of it almost in one enourmous gulp that, were the water not so sweet and my thirst for even more so powerful, it would have surely drown me.  I remember reaching the end, feeling bereft, and then discovering pages and pages and pages of footnotes that were as riveting as what had come before it.  Footnotes several paragraphs long.  Totally smitten.  The author was mad and I was mad for him. 

My brother shared my enthusiasm.  As our parents are from East Texas and our last name is Johnson and our formative years were spent watching the people effectively depose that president ... well, we were triangulated.  And we already had a very good understanding that Johnson was almost invented by Shakespeare.  Look up "tragic flaw" in Harmon's Handbook of Literature and the picture would be of Johnson.  Instead of Shakespeare, Johnson earned Caro's biography and Caro is pursuing his White Whale across the waves. 

My brother read the subsequent volumes and I could not, concerned that the second embrace wouldn't measure up to the first.  Besides, I got it.  I understood the story, the arc.  My brother reports the rest of the work is as good as and maybe even better than the first volume.  --Perhaps, some day, I'll get around to it. 

In the mean time, if you are the type of person infatuated with words and want a "behind the scenes" story of the story, then I highly recommend the article in the Times.  If you are the type of person who loves to read about the person engaged in an epic quest, then, again, I highly recommend the article.  And if you are the type of person who admires the iconoclastic artist, the one who has a vision of something very particular -- and enormous -- and won't compromise one semicolon, then I highly recommend the article. 

A Zeesin Pesach

What You Shouldn't Have Missed in Today's NYTimes...

 

One Schlep Forward

Let's say your father and you are going on a religious pilgramage ... to Uman, Ukraine.  You're Jews.  Your father came out as gay when he was 46.  The father is a Reform rabbi.  The pilgramage is a like an Hasidic Burning Man. Who needs to come up with a great idea for a story when this is your life?  [more]

Without Gods

Alain de Bottom's new book on atheism and religion pays proper respect to both.  I've seen the video from de Botton's TED speech and was quite impressed how it honestly presented the short comings of both theology and religion.  From the book review today:  "De Botton looks around and sees a secular scoiety denuded of high spiritual aspiration and practical moral guidance." [more]

 

 

Why Bilinguals Are Smarter

Terrific story about the benefits of speaking two languages.  From the article:  

The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.  [more]

 

 

The Way We Read Now

The Week in Review section has a raft of articles on readig and literature.  This one, by Dwight Garner, is an ambivalent comparision of different e-reader platforms.  Here's an excerpt:  I’ve tried poetry on each of these platforms: Larkin, Dickinson, Philip Levine, Amy Clampitt. It’s not happening, at least not for me. There’s not enough white space, nor silence. The poems seem shrunken and trapped, like lobsters half-dead in a supermarket glass pen, their claws rubber-banded. Poems should be printed on paper, or carved onto the dried husks of coconuts, so one can hoard them.

The one bit of verse that charmed me, when read on the iPad, was Clive James’s brilliant and witty “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered.” This poem forces you to wonder: What will remainders look like in our digital future? Where’s the 99-cents bin going to be?

You can’t read an e-book in the tub. You can’t fling one across the room, aiming, as Mark Twain liked to do, at a cat. And e-books will not furnish a room.

Writing in The Times in 1991, Anna Quindlen declared, “I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”  [more]

Your Brain on Fiction

Another one of the article from this week's Week in Review on reading explores the brain / reading connection.  From the article:  Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.

Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells. [more]

My Life's Sentences

 

From the article:  The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life. It is a habit of antiphony: of call and response. Most days begin with sentences that are typed into a journal no one has ever seen. There is a freedom to this; freedom to write what I will not proceed to wrestle with. The entries are mostly quotidian, a warming up of the fingers and brain. On days when I am troubled, when I am grieved, when I am at a loss for words, the mechanics of formulating sentences, and of stockpiling them in a vault, is the only thing that centers me again.

 

Constructing a sentence is the equivalent of taking a Polaroid snapshot: pressing the button, and watching something emerge. To write one is to document and to develop at the same time. Not all sentences end up in novels or stories. But novels and stories consist of nothing but. Sentences are the bricks as well as the mortar, the motor as well as the fuel. They are the cells, the individual stitches. Their nature is at once solitary and social. Sentences establish tone, and set the pace. One in front of the other marks the way.  [more]

Comments and Rejoinders.

My last posting, regarding internet access as a human right, has sparked a certain amount of controversy that's filled up my inbox.  Here's a sample of one opinion. 

 

 

 

 

NYTimes, 1.4.12: Internet Access Is Not a Human Right

You already know that Vint Cerf was one of the founding fathers of the internet, so he's beeen thinking longer and harder about the technology and its impact for Quite Some Time. 

In the current issue of the NYTimes, Cerf has contributed an Op-Ed article:  Internet Access Is Not a Human Right.

Here's the relevant extract:

But that argument, however well meaning, misses a larger point: technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. For example, at one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it.

The best way to characterize human rights is to identify the outcomes that we are trying to ensure. These include critical freedoms like freedom of speech and freedom of access to information — and those are not necessarily bound to any particular technology at any particular time. Indeed, even the United Nations report, which was widely hailed as declaring Internet access a human right, acknowledged that the Internet was valuable as a means to an end, not as an end in itself.

What about the claim that Internet access is or should be a civil right? The same reasoning above can be applied here — Internet access is always just a tool for obtaining something else more important — though the argument that it is a civil right is, I concede, a stronger one than that it is a human right. Civil rights, after all, are different from human rights because they are conferred upon us by law, not intrinsic to us as human beings.

While the United States has never decreed that everyone has a “right” to a telephone, we have come close to this with the notion of “universal service” — the idea that telephone service (and electricity, and now broadband Internet) must be available even in the most remote regions of the country. When we accept this idea, we are edging into the idea of Internet access as a civil right, because ensuring access is a policy made by the government.

Yet all these philosophical arguments overlook a more fundamental issue: the responsibility of technology creators themselves to support human and civil rights. The Internet has introduced an enormously accessible and egalitarian platform for creating, sharing and obtaining information on a global scale. As a result, we have new ways to allow people to exercise their human and civil rights.

In this context, engineers have not only a tremendous obligation to empower users, but also an obligation to ensure the safety of users online. That means, for example, protecting users from specific harms like viruses and worms that silently invade their computers. Technologists should work toward this end.