You May Be Able to Get There From Here

I’ve read no more of Dan Brown’s books than reading over a chapter of The Da Vinci Code. Because his books inspire so much enmity¹ among other writers who make much less money, I’ve wanted to impersonate the Typical-Brown-Reader and earnestly read one of Brown’s books. It’s doubtful if I ever would have completed this reading (or been earnest about it), however, so I decided to fortify my distaste for a author I’ve never read with the Telegraph’s list of worst sentences in The Lost Symbol and The Da Vinci Code:

“Death, in this forsaken place, could come in countless forms. Geologist Charles Brophy had endured the savage splendor of this terrain for years, and yet nothing could prepare him for a fate as barbarous and unnatural as the one about to befall him.” Opening Sentences of Deception Point.

My French stinks, Langdon thought, but my zodiac iconography is pretty good. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 3

“Although not overly handsome in a classical sense, the forty-year-old Langdon had what his female colleagues referred to as an ‘erudite’ appeal — wisp of gray in his thick brown hair, probing blue eyes, an arrestingly deep voice, and the strong, carefree smile of a collegiate athlete.” Angels and Demons, chapter 1

“He was sitting all alone in the enormous cabin of a Falcon 2000EX corporate jet as it bounced its way through turbulence. In the background, the dual Pratt & Whitney engines hummed evenly.” The Lost Symbol, chapter 1

“Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes.” Deception Point, chapter 8

Related Readings

• Several Writers Discuss Brown and The Lost Symbol in the Vulture Reading Room
• Jean Hannah Edelstein, I don’t Hate Dan Brown
• Stephen Amidon on The Lost Symbol in The Sunday Times

1. My favorite item of disgust for Brown: There is a Facebook page, I Hate Dan Brown Strictly for Literary Reasons. [↩]

From Lens Culture:

David Lynch is endlessly creative, and his artistic output is usually quite bizarre and surreal. Lynch’s latest project is as a photographer and collaborator with musician, artist and producer Danger Mouse. Together, they’ve created a multimedia installation that is now on display in Los Angeles.

Fifty of Lynch’s photographs are mounted on aluminum panels that seem to float on the gallery walls, converging with the moody rhythms of the music from Danger Mouse’s latest album, Dark Night of the Soul.

Untitled, 2009. Digital print mounted on aluminum. Edition 1 of 7. Courtesy Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles.

The full DJ Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse(Mark Linkous) collaboration¹, Dark Night of the Soul , can be heard at the NPR site, Dark Night of the Soul Exclusive.

NPR Music Blog description:

I’ve listened to the record all the way through at least a dozen times, and can confirm that Dark Night of the Soul delivers in every way you’d hope for. It’s beautiful but haunting, surreal and dark, but sometimes comical and affecting, with ear-popping, multilayered production work. It just gets more mesmerizing with every listen.

1. There are many other great appearances/collaborations on the album: Julian Casablancas, Vic Cheasnutt, Black Francis, the Flaming Lips, David Lynch, Jason Lytle, James Mercer, Iggy Pop, Nina Perssen, Suzanne Vega [↩]

Polaroid by Marion, http://www.flickr.com/people/mironabside/

Sam Jordison in the Guardian Books Blogs looks back on Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Jordison points out that much of Coupland’s novel may be lost on reader’s now:

Nor can Coupland be held responsible for the passing of time. The fact that the book is so tied-in to its era is also a mark of how well he was able to situate it. Even so, reading Generation X almost 20 years after it was written is a strange experience. So much of it has become engrained that it’s surprising to be reminded that it was once new – that one person coined all those ideas and terms. But it’s also unsettling because so much now seems distant. In the middle of a recession, it’s hard to feel sympathy for Coupland’s clever-clever characters, Andy, Claire and Dag, as they sit around the pool in Palm Springs and affect depression because their jobs aren’t fulfilling enough. They seem fortunate, innocent and irritating.

Yet, despite the aging of Generation X and the aging the words Coupland used and invented to describe this generation¹, it is still worth reading:

Gradually, however, to my surprise, I found myself warming to the book. Taken together, the stories began to offer a pleasingly skewed, whimsical view of the world. The adjectival excesses became forgivable when so much of the writing was also lovely (“Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being’s eyes”). The lead narrator Andy’s moaning also began to seem less superficial and more universally applicable. We might now think him lucky to have a job, but his deeper concerns still touch us all. Coupland teases these out with such gentle skill that I wanted to put my arm around the poor guy by the time he was saying things like: “I’m just jealous of how unafraid Tyler [his younger brother]’s friends are of the future. Scared and envious.

So what initially seems like a selfish complaint about graduate life at the fag-end of Reganism starts to take on wider significance. It’s a quiet meditation on transience, futility, forging a personal morality. It’s also an entertainingly raucous look at how to have fun in the face of such concerns: at the pleasures and pains of family life and at friendship.

Related Readings:

• James Miller of The Observer reviews Generation A.
• Generation X: The Slackers Who Changed the World

1. Did Coupland coin the term, McJob? [↩]

David Foster Wallace lives on for an “Infinite Summer”
One giant book, 92 days, thousands of readers — and the world’s most ambitious reading group
Joe Coscarelli, Salon

David Foster Wallace on BookWorm
The terrible and sad impact of David Foster Wallace’s suicide caused us to want to remember him as he first appeared in the KCRW studios, fresh from the publication of his breakthrough novel, Infinite Jest. He was brilliant and charming—and his death is an enormous loss to American literature.
Interview with Wallace on KCRW

I’ve been re-reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer, along with the online book club.
I read parts of the novel a few years ago, and over the past few years I’ve became fond of his non-fiction. I’d decided I would read IJ again after listening to several Wallace interviews with Michael Silverblatt.
In Salon, Joe Coscarelli explains why it’s worth reading the tome with a online community. Coscarelli points to the unexpected and quirky topics that are raised when a large group interactively discusses the book:

On the hyperactive discussion forums, everyone from Wallace virgins to connoisseurs can offer interpretations and suggest topics (organized by the reading schedule in order to prevent spoilers). One reader wondered about the book’s setting — a futuristic hybrid of the United States, Canada and Mexico referred to as the Organization of North American Nations or by the acronym ONAN — sparking a conversation about the biblical character Onan and the notoriously wasteful practice of masturbation (i.e., onanism). Elsewhere, the novel’s reference to a “trial-size dove bar” sparked a debate about whether Wallace was referring to the chocolate or the soap. Eventually, a fan — whose source claims to have asked the author personally — announced definitively that it was, in fact, a reference to the ice-cream bar. Puzzling over this kind of pop cultural minutiae is all the more fun when reading along with a few thousand of your closest Internet friends.

Bits of Wallace writing uncover the dread and loneliness of living in a televised, mass media culture:

Of course, “Infinite Jest” also captures what Wallace called “a real American type of sadness” — that of “a white, upper-middle-class, obscenely well-educated” guy who is successful, and yet terribly lonely and adrift. Which makes the idea of bringing so many people together for a communal reading of the book all that more meaningful. To some, the “book club” may seem like an archaic social experience — connotations of housewives and airport novels abound — but many Infinite Summer participants enjoy the, well, infinite possibilities of this Web project.

I also find that Wallace’s style, with footnote within footnotes and topic that loop out of control, fits well— or anticipates— how readers approach reading in a digital culture.

On hearing some trivial news this week, that Amazon had pulled Animal Farm and 1984 from the bundle of books that ship with the Kindle, I was reminded of the 60th anniversary of 1984. I also was prompted to read Jeremy Paxman’s recent words about Orwell essays in the Telegraph.

photo courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidkonecny/

In praise of Orwell’s abilities as a writer:

Who would have imagined that sixteen hundred words in praise of the Common Toad, knocked out to fill a newspaper column in April 1946, would be worth reprinting sixty years later? But here it is, with many of the characteristic Orwell delights, the unglamorous subject matter, the unnoticed detail (”a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature”) the baleful glare, the profound belief in humanity. Because what the piece is really about, of course, is not the toad itself, but the thrill of that most promising time of year, the spring, even as seen from Orwell’s dingy Islington flat.

When he produced articles like this, hair-shirted fellow socialists got cross. Why wasn’t he spending his time promoting discontent, denouncing the establishment, glorifying the machine-driven future? It is a mark of his greatness that Orwell didn’t care. They – whoever they might be – cannot stop you enjoying spring. The essay ends: “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”

What makes Orwell great?

What Orwell’s experiences— both as figure of authority and as scullion— had given him was a lived understanding of the human condition. It was this grounding in reality that bestowed a more profound political instinct than would be available to some sloganeering zealot. He had acquired a capacity to empathise with the foot-soldiers of history, the put-upon people generally taken for granted, ignored or squashed by the great isms of one sort or another. It conferred upon him the remarkable ability to achieve what every journalist and essayist seeks.

Colin Tudge reviews Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism, by Geoffery Miller in this month’s Literary Review.

Acknowledging the limitations of evolutionary psychology, Tudges writes about what Miller’s observations could mean for the marketing of products:

Evo psy has not had a good press, nor done itself many favours – but in principle Miller is surely right. As the Ukrainian-American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky commented in 1973, ‘Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution’ – and biology includes animal and human psychology.

[...]

Evolutionary psychologists seek to identify what we really need to do to get by and produce offspring, and what states of mind we need, and to trace the selective forces, deep in our past, that have shaped our predilections and capabilities. Such thinking suggests that the Freudian and behaviourist psychology now applied to marketing and to the economy in general is too eccentric or crude by half. For all its apparent success, marketing does not really press the right buttons, and most economic systems do not make us happy even when they are intended to.

So in our consumer economy it’s assumed above all that people like stuff. ‘Darwinians’ (albeit the kind that Darwin would surely disown) then tell us that it is ‘natural’ above all to compete – consumers flaunting bigger and better stuff, and producers vying to produce more stuff than anyone else. Stir in the device of money – cash can buy anything – and we finish up with a dogfight, with everyone battling to outstrip the rest, and marketeers helping the process along.

Tudge concludes that Miller’s book argues for human goodness, but not for the goodness of marketers:

Miller’s thesis is encouraging. Basically we are nice – or at least we want to seem nice, and are impressed by niceness. Marketing would be far more successful if geared to the big six manifestations of niceness – we might call them virtues. Contrary to the general impression, marketing does not have to lead to rampant consumerism and a gobbling up of precious resources. Its techniques, rooted in accurate psychology, can just as soon promote good ideas as damaging ones.

But Tulge says,

Yet I am left uneasy. Is it really true that astute marketing could in practice sell good ideas as readily as big and shiny stuff? Marketing is expensive. So the people who can afford to do it best are those who set out, not to spread sweetness and light, but to make as much money as possible.

An interesting story from James Galloway’s obituary of Robert McNamara:

The most bizarre incident involving McNamara occurred when he was president of the World Bank and, off on his summer holiday, he caught the Martha’s Vineyard ferry. It was a night crossing in bad weather. McNamara was in the salon, drink in hand, schmoozing with fellow passengers. On the deck outside a vineyard local, a hippie artist, glanced through the window and did a double-take. The artist was outraged to see McNamara, whom he viewed as a war criminal, so enjoying himself.

He immediately opened the door and told McNamara there was a radiophone call for him on the bridge. McNamara set down his drink and stepped outside. The artist immediately grabbed him, wrestled him to the railing and pushed him over the side. McNamara managed to get his fingers through the holes in the metal plate that ran from the top of the railing to the scuppers.

McNamara was screaming bloody murder; the artist was prying his fingers loose one at a time. Someone heard the racket and raced out and pulled the artist off.

By the time the ferry docked in the vineyard McNamara had decided against filing charges against the artist, and he was freed and walked away.

Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review of Book:

“This was the day General Motors came to the end of the road. I once asked a Sudanese politician to name the thing that in his eyes proved a nation was a nation. He didn’t hesitate: ‘The ability to make cars.’ Britain was a nation because it made Jaguars. Germany was a nation because of Volkswagen. America ran the world because of General Motors. Italy made Fiats and France made Peugeots, Japan made Toyotas, and even the Russians, struggling along the highway towards modernity, had the easily underestimated Lada. Was making cars once an indicator of national self-sufficiency? Is it still?”

Despite the internationalization of automobile manufacturing, O’Hagan points out that the public, as citizens and drivers, connect the welfare of their nation with the welfare of thier nation’s cars.  There is even a personal emotion of nationalism we feel when driving:

Behind all this stands the culture of driving and the fact of traffic. We love driving and we hate it, we praise it and we slate it, but our relationship with cars is a lively element in our relationship with ourselves and other people. The downturn in the industry chills us, but mainly because – and we don’t feel this way about pharmaceuticals or petrochemicals – it makes us imagine we might have to stop being who we are. I speak as a fairly late convert to the life-enlarging potential of cars: for 36 years I was happy to go around the country on buses and trains, taking the Tube to any destination I ever wanted or needed to visit, to work and to cinemas, on dates and on expeditions, without ever feeling at a loss. When I took taxis it was just another form of being in the hands of others. It meant listening to speeches I found actively aggressive and paying over the odds for the privilege. Then I began taking driving lessons and the world suddenly opened up to me in a way I now depend on. The first long drive I took after I passed my test was a kind of baptism: I put down the windows and let all life’s unreasonable demarcations fly behind the car, enjoying the illusion that I now had a friend who cared for my freedom.

David Byrne in the Times Book review:

“I’ve ridden a bike around New York as my principal means of transport for 30 years, so I’m inclined to sympathize with the idea that a cycling revolution is upon us, and that it’s a good thing. Like Jeff Mapes, the author of “Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities,” I’ve watched the streets fill over the years with more and varied bike riders. It’s no longer just me, some food delivery guys and a posse of reckless messengers. Far from it.”

The review mostly surveys the topics in Mape’s book, but Byrne’s words are interesting:

For decades, Americans have too often seen cycling as a kind of macho extreme sport, which has actually done a lot to damage the cause of winning acceptance for biking as a legitimate form of transportation. If your association with bikes is guys in spandex narrowly missing you on the weekends or YouTube videos of kids flying over ramps on their clown-size bikes, you’re likely to think that bikes are for only the athletic and the risk-prone. Manufacturers in the United States have tended to make bikes that look like the two-wheeled equivalent of Hummers, with fat tires and stocky frames necessitating a hunched-over riding position that is downright unsafe for urban biking and commuting. But that’s been changing for at least a few years now. Whew.

In addition to designing bike racks, Byrne is completing a collection of writing and photographs about his 30 years as a biking enthusiast, Bicycle Diaries.

I recently discovered a profile of Piotr Wozniak and his creation, SuperMemo, written by Gary Wolf last year in Wired. SuperMemo is a database and program that, using an algorithm, provides a person with repetitive, timed review of facts and other memorized items— its computational flash cards, not unlike what we all used in grade school, and biology students continued to use in college.

“SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?”

“Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains.”

Photo: Patrick Voigt

The eccentricities of Wozniak seem easy to point out. For instance, “One of his most heartfelt wishes is that the world have one language and one currency so this could all be handled more efficiently. He’s appalled that Poland is still not in the Eurozone. He’s baffled that Americans do not use the metric system. For two years he kept a diary in Esperanto.” But Wolf takes care in the article to consider how the  idiosyncrasies of Wozniak the person are revealed in his program. Despite some early and sustained commercial success, SuperMemo has never changed how computer users remember things. (Indead, the current trend (e.g. Remember the Milk and other ‘Getting Things Done’ applications, too numerous to list as examples) is toward rapid capturing information and systematically storing it.) Yet, as Wolf observes, this is probably not why SuperMemo faulterd as a product:

“… Wozniak has ridden SuperMemo into uncharted regions of self-experimentation. In 1999, he started making a detailed record of his hours of sleep, and now he’s working to correlate that data with his daily performance on study repetitions. Psychologists have long believed there’s a correlation between sleep and memory, but no mathematical law has been discovered. Wozniak has also invented a way to apply his learning system to his intake of unstructured information from books and articles, winnowing written material down to the type of discrete chunks that can be memorized, and then scheduling them for efficient learning.”

More over,

“… one of Wozniak’s friends who worked as a manager at the company during its infancy, thinks that Wozniak’s focus on his own learning has  tunted the development of his invention. “Piotr writes this software for himself,” says Murakowski, now a professor of electrical engineeringat the University of Delaware. “The interface is just impossible.”

There are several ancestors to SuperMemo, I’ll list the applications that are maintained and free.:

• The Mnemonsyne Project, a cross-platform research and study application.
• Genius, a memorization program for OSX
• Anki, which is an application I’ll be trying out to refresh my Spanish vocabulary and commit some math principles to memory
• spicyelephant.com/, is a web-based implementation of the concept