wondering

how do you think the new nytimes paywall will affect their headlines? will they be flashier? grabbier? and how will it affect reader behavior? will people end up reading fewer than their allotted articles because they are hoarding their reads? will they read trashier pieces? more serious ones? will they forward them around less?

i would love to hear your thoughts on this evolving legal economy of reading the news.

Creativity

A few weeks ago, the WSJ (one of my new favorite publications...it's a long story) ran a piece about measuring and enhancing creativity in children (see: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704694004576019462107929014.html). Less interesting than the typical sounding of the death-knell of the American psyche are the examples of creative thinking in the form of samples and questions and answers from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking -- a standardized test that is used to measure creativity (I'll let you tease apart those contradictions on your own). Based on the sample answers provided below, it seems that the standard or non-creative responses are too literal: when presented with an image, it is too easy or obvious to assume that it directly represents something that it looks like. A creative answer instead looks at each image and considers the causes of which it might be an effect, as well as the intention behind it for example whether it is the product of error, misunderstanding, or confusion. The creative responses, in other words, build a story around each object and make sense of it in the context of a larger narrative, while the standard responses see only discrete projections of static objects.

Creativity Test

Examples of creativity-test answers from students in fourth through sixth grades

TASK ONE: List all the things this figure could represent.

COMMON IDEAS
--A tornado
--Hair
--A squiggle

ORIGINAL IDEAS
--Path of a dizzy bug
--A straight line poorly drawn

TASK TWO: List all the things this figure could represent.

COMMON IDEAS
--The letter "T"
--Blocks in a row

ORIGINAL IDEAS
--Bases in some new game
--Stones in an anti-gravity statue

The pace of youth is so dazzlingly hurtlingly accelerated it can render the background of youth -- the world and all the people in it -- seemingly static. This is an illusion, like the gentle list backward of the platform when the train starts. I don't know when the air around me became so viscous -- sometime in the past few years, I think. But now, back home, I perceive -- as if by means of a new sense -- the tracks that time has trailed through everything around me, the distance that we have all come, the subtle constant motion away from and then towards.

Get Rich Quicker

Officially open for business, my new carding venture: for a small fee, I will select, design, and/or write your cards for holidays, birthdays, special occasions, or just to let that special someone know you're thinking of them.

Prices may vary. Void where prohibited.

Sentences I have loved

A few doozies from the past few months:

"I like women from countries that have sustained political turmoil. Western culture seems to forge women that are valueless and inane."

That's from what is alleged to be Julian Assange's okcupid profile which now you need to sign in to be able to see. If it really is his profile, this seems a wee bit hypocritical to me. Isn't he supposed to be all about transparency?? But really, what can you expect from someone charming enough to write the above sentences in his quest for love?

"'If there was anyone who kept their calm, it was certainly me,' Mr. Sarkozy added."

From an NY Times article. It doesn't really matter what it was about.

"As a 16-year-old girl in the company of three adult men she was the least likely of the four to be carrying one, let alone two, heavy handguns. It is far more probable that she relied on the pocketknife found in her brassiere for any necessary self-protection."

This is from a 1979 Supreme Court case -- Ulster County v. Allen. I just think it's badass.

Commuting

6:50 am

Last night I rode the bus home and thought --

so dark and yet

so early, only 4:47 pm and already someone has pricked the skin

of the balloon of the sky and the light

has gone rushing out like air and the city

of San Francisco, Coit Tower, the TransAmerica pyramid, the Embarcadero Center

and all the blocky fortresses of capital with bay views

are zipping up their suits of silhouette.

But now the risen bits of sun are pooling on the bay's rim

and spilling out beneath the stuttering bits of cloud

and filling in the gaps between the interlocking fingers of highway on the east end of the Bay Bridge

where the 80 and the 880 and the 580 loop and ribbon

and a light that is one of the colors of the scarf I'm knitting with yarn remaining from a hat

edges up and over to shade the clouds on the other side of the Bridge

and I wonder whether this patchwork of vapor, this fragmented fog

always hanging over us is a mirror

or a screen.

On Internal Tension and the Word "About"

"About" means "concerned with" as in "this article is about the war in Iraq." Used in this way it refers to the central point of something, its gist, its core. Whatever meaning beats at its heart.

But "about" also means "near," "close to," "approximately," as in "it was about 6:30 am when the sun rose on one side of the Bay Bridge."

And it means "all around" as in "there were flowers planted all about the castle."

On in near around at the center of. Is there any preposition that "about" does not contain?

Sometimes I feel sad and my sadness is not "about" anything. This might sound strange unless you think of moods being like the weather -- the sun does not rise "about" anything -- it just rises. Or unless you think about the other meanings of "about" -- the sun rises and casts its light all about the city.

Stop Apologizing: A Manifesto to the Women in My Life

Dear All the Women in My Life:

Please stop apologizing, at least to me. You have done nothing wrong, you are lovely: you are talented, radiant, smart. You read articles and make tarts from scratch and ride bicycles, sometimes down mountains. I admire your courage and grace and insight.

But lately, I have been troubled not only by specific acts of self-deprecation but by the persistence of the reflex-apology, especially when I am on the other end of it. Women—and I don’t just mean in general, or all women, but many women whom I personally know and regularly speak with—apologize with disturbing frequency and for the smallest of acts. Women apologize for being early, for being hungry, for being busy, for asking me questions that I am being paid by the University of California to answer for them, for being confused, for disagreeing with me or with other people, for being wrong, for being right, for being tired, for thinking something is interesting, for not having read something that is being discussed, or worked hard enough, or stayed up late enough, or cared enough, or known ahead of time what could only have been learned through experience.

Some might argue that the casually tossed off “I’m sorry” does not really literally mean that the speaker is sorry, but is instead a sentence ornament like “How are you?” or “I’m fine.” That it is akin to the placeholder “like”: a structural element devoid of independent meaning. But I disagree on both counts, since the prevalence of both ungrammatical “like” and “I’m sorry” seems symptomatic of a general tendency to qualify not only our statements but ourselves. And dismissing this as mere syntax, a grammatical tic, only reveals how deeply our self-editing instinct is embedded.

Please consider this a blanket absolution. At least as far as I am concerned you are all forgiven.

Ever,

B.

More on Annie Dillard

Just something to think about:

"Nor presumably does baitfish consider itself baitfish."

I am about to spoil a big part of Annie Dillard's "The Maytrees," so if that book is on your list, read no further!

About a third of the way into the book, which is thick with rhyme, assonance, and alliteration (see, e.g., "He saw the tide line -- shell bits and turnip parings, paper, fish racks, shark cartilage, culch" or "Even the mudflat was matte"), Toby Maytree leaves his wife Lou. They had been very much in love and his departure is a shock that the characters spend the rest of the book absorbing. Lou copes by climbing a monument in town with broad views of "flat sky, flat sea, and flat land" of Cape Cod. High up in the salty air, surveying the scraped world below her, Lou begins to learn to let go.

"For one minute by her watch, she imagined liking Maytree impartially. For only one minute by her watch she saw him for himself. That day, having let go one degree of arc only, for one minute, she sighted relief. Here was something she could do. She could climb the monument every day and work on herself as a task."

Thirty pages later, her son Pete, a fisherman, has a similar desire to ascend out of emotional turmoil into cool recollection.

"Could he surmount his trash-ditch thoughts and work above them? Could he let them come and go without bias, minnows schooling about his feet? Simply slosh through them and let the waves wash over? He could build on the mainmast a crow's nest. With his life, with his mind, he would build him a crow's nest, rope by rope and plank by plank for as long as it took."

Lou's actual monument has become a monument of the mind -- a way of being apart, above, out of the wrack and wreckage of investment and disappointment. Lou, heaving herself up actual steps, realizes the distance she is covering and the immensity of her task. She is quitting Toby like a drug and can only stand to do so for a minute at a time. Pete, too, recognizes the paintstaking nature of the work of self-removal. Rope by rope. Plank by plank. For as long as it takes.

The Garden & The Window

L started teaching last week, which I am tremendously excited about. The first topic he tackled was close reading and he introduced it with a metaphor: imagine that the text you are reading is a garden you are looking at through a window. You can look through the window at the flowers and notice their colors, their crowns of petals, the sunlight tracing each blade of grass. Maybe there is a bench in the garden. Who is it for? When was it built? Or you can shift the angle of your gaze and focus on the window itself. Is the glass smudged? How wide are its panes? Can you see your own reflection in it?

Most people when they read look at the garden: the flowers are the characters whose lives we admire and watch grow. It is lovely to look at a garden; we may feel many things. Students and scholars of literature when they read must learn to look at the window: how does the depth and texture of the language through which we read shape our view of the world on the other side?

Learning to see the window takes time -- even learning to care about the window takes time. After all, the garden is so beautiful. And sometimes looking at the window seems silly. Isn't transparency in a window's very nature -- its sole defining feature? Do we do a window a disservice by refusing to look past it?

But over time, the glass' grain emerges. It becomes possible to see within it a bank, a thread where a core of liquid cooled, and the scarce scratches scored by beads of sand colliding. The garden may be pretty but the window is epic, ancient, the site of revolutionary encounters between irrepressible forces.

It is only after the window has occupied you for so long and with such intensity that you have ceased entirely even to wonder about the garden that you make a most surprising discovery: there is no garden there at all -- whether it has disappeared or whether it never existed in the first place is a question for experts beyond your level.

What L didn't tell his students is that if you look at the window long enough, one day it will be the only thing you can see.

After God, there is no more skilled practitioner of parataxis than Joan Didion. "Miami" opens by juxtaposing two short lists of the possessions with which recently deposed presidents have fled Cuba. Didion does not use parataxis merely for effect, though effective it is at evoking both dislocation and intimacy -- dislocation because the austere use of coordinating conjunctions tends to leave the reader adrift in a haze of objects and social conventions whose relationships to one another and to the author are neither accessible nor transparent, and intimacy because of the presumption that they are (both accessible and transparent; in other words, that Didion and the reader are on the same page).

So, for example: "The rain that day had been blowing the bits of colored glass and mirror strung from the tree in the Malaga courtyard and splashing from the eaves overhanging our table and we had been talking in a general way about action of the Left and action of the Right and Carlos Luis had said that he had come to wonder if silence was not the only moral political response." You can almost hear the chills running down Hemingway's spine.

No, parataxis is not just a syntactic conceit but the logic by which Didion's pieces unfold. She does not seek to set us adrift; we are adrift. She just wants to make sure we don't forget that the horizon won't get any closer, no matter how fast we paddle.

Central to her project are three recurring devices: one is the dis-editing or disaggregation of a popular narrative so as to reveal all the material left on the cutting room floor; another is the identification of the social cues and codes from which the kind of narratives she takes apart are assembled; and the third is the use of quotation marks around otherwise unremarkable bits of dialogue to distance the reader from the tropes of everyday life so she (the reader) can begin to look at them critically.

Here is an example of all three: "That the [Miami] Herald should have run, on the 1985 anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, a story about Canadian and Italian tourists vacationing on what had been the invasion beaches...was, in this view, not just a minor historical irony, not just an arguably insensitive attempt to find a news peg for a twenty-four-year-old annual story, but a calculated affront to the Cuban community, 'a slap,' I was repeatedly told, 'in the face.'"

Syntactically innovative and lexically precise, her sentences may also be the best crafted of any I have ever read. (Except for L's, he wanted me to add. He also points out that this excerpt is not paratactic, which is true. It was selected to do different work in this post.)

Adding to the distance and alienation and also the intimacy is the fact that Didion never quotes herself, only other people. When she figures in her own scenes, she is always listening or taking notes or watching. The only voices we hear are those from which we are being critically distanced, and the author herself seems to reach us across a span of silence. No one, the reader is tempted to believe, has heard her voice but me.

i have now read all the words in "infinite jest"

but the term "finished" in no way applies to my relationship with the book.

talking about "infinite jest" while reading it

is like giving a weather report from inside a storm. 

all you can say is that right now it's pretty wet and more rain is falling...

DFW

I have fallen hard, again, for David Foster Wallace. In high school I was intrigued by Brief Interviews and Girl with the Curious and liked both but was never tempted to dip into the novels. In college I exploded through A Supposedly Fun Thing and have never doubted that it's one of the all-time great and wonderful works of creative non-fiction. And I've stumbled across some of the scattered essays from Consider the Lobster and elsewhere over the years.

But this summer I picked up again A.S.F.T. and the jolt of familiarity, recognition, intimacy was almost troublingly vivid. And so now I have started Infinite Jest and I have no qualms and my hands do not shake when I hold it and I do not sigh when I fit all of its thousand or so pages into my bag and I do not think it strange that I might need two bookmarks to proceed through the whole of it. Which I will do. Even if it's all I do this fall.

Because reading David Foster Wallace especially now this summer after so many years of not reading him and never reading his novels, it's like that person in your life, I think everyone has one and I may have several, that person who is there is no other way to say it just really the most brilliant person you know, who seems not to ever walk across a room but to be always propelled forward by the gust of an idea swelling their mind like a sail, but you've never really been so close because in spite of this brilliant mind there is also a lot of pain and it is very close to the underneath of their skin and you can see it there when the sun hits in a certain way, illuminating their veins like rail lines on a city map, and so maybe you see them, i mean really see them, only a few times a year. And when you do, you sit at a table and talk. They talk, mostly. You are so involved in what they're saying, your mind responds so eagerly, that it may be hours before you realize that you haven't actually spoken in hours, and then you forget again, and but then you think they are talking maybe a little too fast or maybe it's a little too loud and you do a mental check for which of your neighbors might be home and which of the ones who might be home might mind, and maybe you get up to double-lock the door or put on some music. And maybe when you come back you lean away a little at this point. Maybe you duck your head or stop making such furious eye contact. The force of what's being said is enough to shave a layer of shine off the table. For a moment you've lost the thread but when you have it again, it is brighter than before.

And then the sun comes up and you go to sleep.

Full Circle

A few weeks ago I saw David M*tchell read from his new book at a bookstore in the West Village. The book, reviewed extensively in pretty much every major literary publication currently on my coffee table, is about Dutch traders on the Japanese island of Dejima in the 1800s, the closest that the closed nation would allow foreigners to approach.

At the reading, he said many beautiful things. This is one of them:

Over the course of the novel, the main character, Jacob, falls in love with a Japanese woman, Orito. Their courtship includes impromptu vocabulary lessons in one another's tongues. "What does Jacob mean in Dutch?" "What do you call this flower?" Etc. At one point, Jacob asks Orito the Japanese word for persimmon -- "kaki," she tells him. They share one, in a luscious passage of flesh-bright prose.

Here Mitchell paused from his reading. "You know," he said, and I'm paraphrasing, "I give readings in the Netherlands and people speak such good English there they can follow me without a problem. But when I got to that passage, I wanted to make sure it was clear, so I asked what the Dutch word for persimmon was. It's 'kaki.'"

Had his novel been written in the native language of its characters, Victorian-era Dutch, he would have known that already. But instead, this funny coincidence is in fact no coincidence at all: the word is a trace of the trade that he was writing about all along.

metaphor: from Gk. metaphora "a transfer," "a carrying over," from metapherein "transfer, carry over," from meta- "over, across" + pherein "to carry, bear"

translate: from L. translatus "carried over," serving as pp. of transfere "to bring over, carry over," from trans + latus "borne, carried"

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php

When we think about languages existing and persisting over time, we tend to focus on how they change -- new words being coined, others going stale, rules we no longer follow. The other day, a friend of a friend treated to me on a short disquisition on words that didn't make it into the new volume of the dictionary.

But this article by Frank Kermode in the New York Review of Books about a new translation of the Bible made me wonder about the opposite phenomenon. I think (and this is based on no actual information) that certain works of literature (the King James' Bible, Shakespeare plays, etc.) weigh like anchors, keeping English from drifting too far out to sea. The prevalence and currency of these texts maintains their legibility and their legibility maintains certain features of the English language.

Think of it as a cosmic struggle between Hamlet and Twitter over our souls.

And also...

How come an amnesiac is someone suffering from amnesia but an aphrodisiac is something inducing aphrodesia? 

What is with these suffixes??

Things I Am Wondering About

How come you can be heart-broken but not heart-warmed?