Trends

Here is an article about Duncan Watts, a sociologist of trends who asks questions like this:

…we know that Madonna became a breakout star in 1983. But if you rewound the world back to 1982, would Madonna break out again?

To answer this question, Watts conducted an elaborate science experiment that yielded this result:

Trends, it suggested, aren't merely hard to predict and engineer -- they occur essentially at random.

So basically, Watts is challenging Malcolm Gladwell's "tipping point" theory by arguing that everything is meaningless. Which, btw, is my all-time favorite debate tactic. I used it in seminar just the other day:

Liz's colleague: It seems to me that modernist narrative technique owes more to Jane Austen than it does to Henry James.
Liz: Everything is meaningless!
Debate moderator: Liz wins again.

According to Watts, the band 52metro (cool name, guys!) could have just as easily become the breakout star of 1983 instead of Madonna; or the breakout star of 1933, instead of Hitler. In other words, nobody who is famous had to have become famous: that even includes Christina Aguilera, David Hyde Pierce, and Rachel Ray. Can you imagine the world without them? IT COULD HAVE BEEN. I want to see NOVA reenact that alternate universe, because it sounds completely, inconceivably insane.

Anyway, popular culture is founded on radical contingency, pass it on.
(Oh wait, the MC already came to that realization weeks ago, and all it took was the help of a little accident called Fleetwood Mac. A fragile, beautiful little accident.)

But you don't have to take my word for it!

Swimming
Unbelievable
Sea of Death
Always there for you
Neat

For more info on David Rieff's new memoir about his mom, Susan Sontag, go HERE, or contact your local library.com!

Mastery

So a couple months ago I filled out a form listing all of the classes I have taken in the last year and a half, and now I have a master’s degree!! Life. Anyway, the first thing I did, naturally, was to take it to Kinko’s and have it photocopied, and then have the photocopy blown up to comical proportions (5 x 6 feet), and then have that framed in pure gold and hung in my Jacuzzi room. The second thing I did was to pause, step back, and take stock of the last year and a half. I came up with the following list.

Ways I have improved myself since college
1. More confident tone in emails
That’s all I’ve got.
The list had some other things on it before, but they got crossed off in afterthought. Like:
2. Spend less money on pot
Afterthought: I’m not sure where this has left me. Plus, now I just spend money on adult things that I thought were stupid in college, like ordering any drink other than “water” in a restaurant.
3. Read the newspaper
Afterthought: Even though I’ve been reading the newspaper for a while now, I still feel like an impostor in the way you do at the gym for the first time. I’m constantly waiting for the newspaper to be like, “You’re using that elliptical machine backwards, idiot.”
4. More accepting of otherness
Afterthought: By accepting things that younger me thought were lame/baffling, and swore never to understand, I may be betraying my teen self. So #4 is sort of a pyrrhic victory. King Pyrrhus being in this case the World Music phase of David Byrne.

In short: Here’s to being a master, me. A true master of life.

Good News Day

I'm glad we still have news like this:
Young teens run away, likely headed West
Still no word from lovelorn runaway teens

Do it, Gage and Hannah. Throw your bi-polar girlfriend, your dog Mandy, and your Xbox into the family minivan and just live it.

It looks like everyone is going to these kids' myspace profiles, but I'm drawing a line. In an admirable, deeply attractive show of decency. Let's hope this one ends well.


On the less romanticizable intersections of being wrong, the internet, and misunderstanding relationships tip, this story:

Newmarket police investigating infant listed 'for sale' online

And finally CNN celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Day:

Voting These Days: a look at...RELATIONSHIPS?!

She says "I'm voting Obama." How does he play it?
*
Do you think they've discussed it yet? How did it go? I bet this picture is how it ended.
**
I'm voting for that.

*from InterracialCupid.com
** I don't know if THIS is Google or Wikipedia or what, but it has all the information you need.

Progress Report

Hey youtube, how's the world?



Well, everything seems to be in order. I'll just go about my business as usual. Maybe start that family I've been wanting, or, you know, think of other ways to invest in the future with a sound mind and heart.
Anyway, just checking in.
l8r

An amero for your thoughts

Hey, you guys like euros?
You guys: Euros! Aren't those are just for fat-cats?
me: NOT ANYMORE REALLY.

That's because Americans are getting their own euros! And they're called ameros!
AMEROS!

Not sold? Just think about how efficient it will make doing business with Canada.

You guys yesterday: I really want products that seem like American products but make me uncomfortable in ways I can't place, but it's such a hassell.
You guys tomorrow: I'M DROWNING IN GAYISH-SEEMING HAMBURGERS!!! THANKS AMEROS!!! THANKS FUTURE!!!!! THANKS MILLENNIAL CRIER!!!!!!!

From the geniuses that brought you capitalism: not making everyone happy

If myspace has taught us anything it's that everybody loves these:

In analyzing the picture, however, tough questions arise. Namely:
How hard would it be to sell these tiny monkeys? It couldn't be that hard. I'm talking to you, capitalists. There is clearly a huge market. Now I'm thinking "maybe reality proves that the market is only for pictures of the tiny monkeys, and myspace has been erected as such a market, with a free flow of an infinite supply of tiny monkey pictures that we've all chosen to make for ourselves and participate within, at no cost, because that's how much we love the pictures of tiny monkeys."

But upon further consideration of the picture I'm thinking "I want the real tiny monkeys now."

This is an excerpt from my thesis "Capitalism: As great as we originally thought? Maybe, but probably not completely."

nsfw.(...?)

I guess it depends on where you work. If your boss is the kind of guy who would look over your shoulder and think something like "I know and love that the internet allows us to give voice to every dusty hidden corner of the immense, winding, cavernous haunted mansion within, our desires, both as it is a limitlessly plastic medium, and in that it creates the opportunity for others to find, recognize within themselves, an validate those desires, but in such an age moral judgments concerning pornography should center around what is really worth exploring or making people face in the shared light of day," then COVER YOUR SHIT UP


WHAT A G.D. PAIN

This is called "Car Stuck Girls"

Why? Who are people? What are they doing? Get a blog and write a little erotic fiction. Don't get real girls involved in this. They have things to do. Things like going to college, slumber parties, doing it for themselves, babysitting, being nurses, sisters, daughters, and mothers, and single mothers, bead work, and taking b&w pictures of their hands wrapped in their grandmothers' hands.

France: Shaving its Head to Cover Up the Balding

If you're looking for more proof that France is going through the nation-state equivalent of a midlife crisis, and is committed to acting it out on the world stage while the rest of us awkwardly avert our eyes, check out Bernard-Henri Levy’s weird obituary for Bhutto .

They have killed a woman. A beautiful woman. A visible, indeed a conspicuously, spectacularly visible woman.

A woman who made a point not only of holding rallies in one of the world's most dangerous countries, but did so with her face uncovered, unveiled--the exact opposite of the shameful, hidden women, the condemned creatures of Satan, who are the only women tolerated by these apostles of a world without women.

Cool obit, BHL, for real…but maybe you should stick to writing books that explain the essence of America?
Oh wait, you suck at that.
Vive la republique!

For real though

I'm sick of loving you

Hey guys,
You know I think the world of you, and this past year has been so great, so great, and I think you can do anything you set your minds to, really. I really thought it was going to be us for now and for the foreseeable future. But, while on the surface my heart is nothing but in it with you -- and I am a firm believer that such a surface is all there is -- for some reason loving you is just too much work for me right now. I'm exhausted. My heart is exhausted. I don't know where I'm going to go from here, but I've been hanging out with my old boyfriends a lot recently, and while they are flawed, overly tragic, and un-possessing of your tight, tight game, when I'm around them I remember a me I just can't be with you.


Keep in touch, guys. I wish you all the luck in the world.

Best,
Nick

Hey Karl!

Are your hands really that tiny or are you just happy to be covered in a bunch of little pieces of crap?

God, those are tiny hands.

Hey Karl!
Are you haunting my most recent dreams for a reason, or are you just happy to take the place of Melissa Manchester and my first baby-sitter (joined a cult)?

Hey Karl!
Cool trivia on your wikipedia page!

Open Love Letter to Hendrik Hertzberg

Why did I let my New Yorker subscription lapse? Reading the online version makes me feel like a poor person. Eew. Anyway, Here’s Hendrik Hertzberg on Romney vs. Huckabee:

[Romney] went on to patronize rival religions, administering quick head pats to Catholicism (“I love the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass”), evangelicalism (for the “approachability” of its version of God), Pentecostalism (“tenderness of spirit”), Lutheranism (“confident independence”), Judaism (“ancient traditions”), and Islam (“frequent prayer”—a bit feeble, that).

Missing from this litany, of course, was something to the effect of “I appreciate the deep commitment to reason of the agnostics and atheists.” Indeed, the only “religion” that Romney had anything rude to say about was “the religion of secularism.” He pointed scornfully at the “empty” cathedrals of Europe as evidence of “societies just too busy or too ‘enlightened’ to venture inside and kneel in prayer,” adding a little later that “any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty” has “a friend and ally in me.” Take that, NATO. On your knees.

Secularism is not a religion. And it is not true that “freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom,” as Romney maintained. What freedom, including religious freedom, requires is, precisely, secularism—which is to say, state neutrality in matters of religion. (Nor does religion require freedom, as the European past and the Middle Eastern present demonstrate; religions, plural, do, however.)

Amen, sister. Hendrik Hertzberg for president. Also, if you imagined him looking all roly-poly and lederhosened, you were wrong (and shame on you, racist). The man is dashing.

Shop Talk

I just came across this while reading up on “dialogue” for a paper (that’s coming along fantastically, I'm glad you asked). It’s from Postmodern Culture 2.1 , and it’s actually by Jerome McGann, not “Sheri Meghan,” but he is using that pseudonym to make a point about dialogue, context, and performativity [ed. note: gay].
That thing you smell is the musk of early-90s-academic angst. But if you find that appealing, then read on (and if not, then skip ahead to my glorious unpacking):

AN ABC OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY: A DIALOGUE by SHERI MEGHAN

a. A: As Moses Hadas always used to say: "The only interesting talk is shop talk."
b. B: All shops are closed shops, more or less. Suffocating. If you're not a professor and you find yourself, by circumstance, dropped among a bunch of professors at lunch, how interesting do you imagine you will find their conversation?
c. C: Well, suppose you came there as an ethnographer. Then the shop talk might seem very interesting indeed.
d. A: But it wouldn't be shop talk anymore it would be ethnographic information. And if the professors were conscious of themselves as ethnographic subjects, even they would not be producing shop talk any longer.
e. B: A blessed event, the coming of the ethnographer to the ingrown conversations of the closed shop. And more blessed still should she come to the smug halls of late- 20th century academe. Enlightened halls, open--or so their citizens like to think--to every kind of talk.
f. A: And so they are.
g. B: Only if the talk is framed in a certain way. The academy is the scene where knowledge has been made an object of devotion. Its two gods, or two-personed god, are science (positive knowledge) and philology (the knowledge of what is known). It is a cognitive scene, a scene of calculations and reflections. It is the country for old men. Children, whether of woman or of Jesus born, do not come there--unless it be to leave behind their childlikeness.
h. C: They do not come because the knowledge of the childlike person is experiential rather than reflective.
i. B: Socrates in his trance, Alcibiades in his cups?
j. C: They will do nicely as signs of what both justifies and threatens every symposium, every state--the Outsiders that are within. Admired and hated, sought and feared; finally--because every state, every closed shop, is what it is--expelled.
k. B: And what then of your ethnographer, that darling of the modern academy? Is it not the ultimate dream of Wissenschaft that all things should submit to reflection, that experience itself should become--field work? In the ancient world of Plato that sick dream appeared as the Socratic philosopher; more recently it came as the nightmare of the positive scientist, mystified forever in the figure of Wordsworth's Newton, "voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone." Mary Shelley lifted his mask and we glimpsed the haunted face as Victor Frankenstein, whose monstrous creature is the index of Frankenstein's soul as it has been observed through the lens of an outsider's--in this case, a woman's--sense of the pitiful.
l. C: So you don't care for ethnographers either.
m. B: Well, they are our latest Faustian types. Benevolent colonialists. Today their shop talk--it is called Cultural Studies--has given the modern academy some of its most effective means of self-mystification. As if the academy could harbor within itself its own outsider, its own critical observer.
n. A: That "critical observer" you are imagining is the real illusion. All observers are inside the shop. If they weren't they wouldn't even know about the shop, couldn't see it, and hence couldn't talk at all. Shop talk is "interesting" because people share their differences.
o. C: So for you it is not merely that "The only interesting talk is shop talk"; more than that, "Shop talk is all there is!"
p. A: Exactly. But some shop talk is more interesting than other shop talk.
q. C: And what makes it more interesting?
r. A: Every shop has many conversations going on inside of it all the time. The most interesting conversations are those that get everybody else talking--talking about them, or talking in their terms.
s. B: But where do those new and interesting conversations come from? Inside the shop?
t. A: Evidently.
u. C: Why "evidently"? Is the rapt Socrates inside or outside? And what about Alcibiades--drunk or sober? We all remember how, and where, he died.
v. B: Inside or outside, it doesn't matter. The point is that every shop must be something other than what anyone, inside or outside, could think or imagine it to be. The shop must be, in some sense, beside itself. Irrational. Other than itself. Otherwise it cannot accommodate--either conceptually or experientially-- anything "new."
w. A: Put it that way if you like. Shop talk is often irrational. Just so you don't bore us with ideas about absolute critical differentials.
x. B: Have it so if you like. Just so you don't insult us with ideas about knowing or accommodating otherness. No shop--no academy--can do so. Otherness comes like a wolf to a sheepfold. Later, when the damage is done, the priests--let us say, the professors--will indulge their shop talk of explanations.

The idea of discourses as shops got me thinking. In analogies!

1. Shop of academia = the Bibelot Shop (sorry people who didn’t grow up in Minnesota.)
2. Shop of the MC = Creative Kidstuff (sorry again Eastcoasters: my analogical frame of reference is Midwestern. Deal with it. It will shovel your walk or yield up its parking space if you ask nicely.)
3. Shop of law = Jamba Juice
4. Shop of evolutionary psychology = Old Navy. In that it falls apart at the seams as soon as you touch it, and that it’s basically just Banana Republic (=the shop of anthropology) but nominally less racist.
5. Shop of the blogosphere = IKEA. Admit it, we're all happy it's around.