Author: marginnotes_m4x28l

Speaking of the dangers of reading only people you agree with (and I believe we were), Sam Kean of 3quarksdaily insists that, while he hated the writing of William F. Buckley and William Safire, it wasn’t because they were conservatives.

Most people who disliked Safire and Buckley lumped them together because their writing could be overtly, at times even grubbily, political. But that wasn’t it for me either. I don’t mind political dust-ups and enjoy reading (not watching on television, mind you, reading) people of all orientations, left, right, wherever. Reading only what you agree with narrows you.

No, says Kean, “whenever I felt my blood hit 100°C during one of their columns, it wasn’t because I took offense with their views-I took offense with their grammar, their vocabulary, their goddamn syntax.”

Kean felt the two men were ruined by “the journalistic environment” in which they came of age as writers, which is interesting, because I’ve so often heard it said that writing for a daily is about the best training there is for a writer. (Although usually it was ex-reporters saying this, come to think of it.) But he makes a good point:

People who bitch nowadays about how poetry and short stories are workshopped to within a comma of their lives really need to spend a year writing for a publication and trying to slip anything cute by an editor, or writing speeches by committee for a public figure. That’s editing; that’s homogenizing and submission. …

When you really care about words and sentences, as [Buckley and Safire] did, seeing them hacked up hurts. …

What better way to hold onto your prose, to make sure that no one ever strikes a letter, than to make it so exasperatingly exact that in some sense it can’t be edited? Hyper-correctness became a style, a strategy, because perhaps that’s all that was left to them.

And here’s Kean’s description of the style:

[T]here’s a kind of literary-political righty that enjoys being perversely old-fashioned. This often shades over into a urge to distress if not shock people-a desire no less potent than in those radical “artists” who work in bodily fluids or set up exhibits featuring themselves masturbating to sounds of crying children. The writer-righties transgress via regress. They’re imps in bowties, good at getting a rise out of people and pimping emotions.

I’m just surprised Kean never once mentions George Will as another prime example.

At Scienceblogs, Razib Khan mentions an interesting-sounding new book called Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, by Michael Specter. I liked this:

The totally rational life, where all acts and opinions are subject to deep and thorough criticism, is not the human life… . But, serious problems emerge when our intuitive prejudices push themselves into the scientific domain. Natural science has over the past few centuries proven itself to be a marvel not by extension of our intuition, but contravention of that intuition resulting in an even closer fit to reality (contrast Newtonian physics with “folk physics”).

Indeed, what Khan calls the “genre of argument from intuition and plausibility derived from an emotional response” sounds very familiar. Is “denialism” of various stripes becoming more and more common, or does it just seem that way?

If it is becoming more and more common, it may be the internet’s fault. Science has long known that dividing people into like-thinking groups causes them to settle more and more firmly into their beliefs. According to this New Yorker review of Cass Sunstein’s On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done, the internet-“which makes it easy for extremists to chat with their soul mates”-only exacerbates this tendency.

There is virtually no opinion an individual can hold that is so outlandish that he will not find other believers on the Web. “Views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, can be found in large numbers on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible, or bizarre in most communities,” Sunstein observes. Racists used to have to leave home to meet up with other racists (or Democrats with other Democrats, or Republicans with Republicans); now they need not even get dressed in order to “chat” with their ideological soul mates.

At one point, the reviewer gently mocks “the assumption that people turn to the Web for information.” It seems to me we’d all avoid a lot of frustration if we could learn to distinguish between people who are truly seeking knowledge, and people who are merely interested in confirming that their suspicions are correct.

A lot of people smirk when it is suggested that hunting is a “sport.” Well, there’s all different kinds of hunters and all different kinds of hunting, and I know that part of this attitude comes from skepticism that using a rifle to kill something is truly sporting.

But a friend of mine took me hunting yesterday, and I have to say that it was ten hours of the most punishing physical activity I’ve experienced in a long time. (No, we didn’t shoot anything. If we had, it would have been more like fourteen hours, and I would have died.)

• Where can I get Dr. Bonner's in Missoula? #
• Mullan and Reserve! #
• Getting names wrong on Twitter. http://bit.ly/2mNaac #
• The difference between @Stokes, @StokesUP, @STOKESGYLT, and @Stokez. http://bit.ly/2mNaac #
• Upgrading my databases. #
• Adventures in typos: almost just told someone I was forwarding them an email threat. (for "thread") #
• Mt. St. Coen is extremely active and frequently erupts without warning. #
• "you can…hear Foer thinking: Yes, these arguments have been made…before, but they’ve never been made in this font". http://bit.ly/1QSKwv #
• Only in Montana: folks at next table discussing which bronc riders they will bring to their rodeo. Oh, and, they have a flow chart. #
• OK, so I have Google Wave. Now what? #
• "In an unfamiliar culture, it is wise to offer no innovations, no suggestions, or lessons." http://bit.ly/3oc1Mn #
• Trying not to take it personally when people have a different worldview from mine. #
• Anyone know any cops or anyone who would know some details about interstate pot smuggling, particularly how much good couriers get paid? #

Speaking of Nicolas Cage (and I believe we were), his fans know there’s only one answer to such an impertinent question.

I don’t know why Matchstick Men doesn’t get mentioned more often in discussions of Nicolas Cage’s better work. It has an enjoyably intricate caper/long-con type of storyline, and Cage chews up the scenery as an OCD grifter who finally meets his match.

My friend Kevin, the current First Citizen of Baltimore (an honorary title he made up), passes along this Forbes article on America’s Best City Parks.

The article focuses first on the big-name parks like Central Park and Chicago’s Millenium Park, but then there’s this:

Patterson Park in Baltimore, for example, is steeped in needles history; it was the site of Union encampments during the Civil War, and houses several unique, historic buildings. It’s also full of present-day pleasures–skating rinks, pavilions and playgrounds–that connect the surrounding neighbors to the space.

The article has a slideshow of all of the parks mentioned, including this shot of the pagoda in Patterson Park.

Of course, if you haven’t seen Patterson Park during a Great Halloween Lantern Parade, you haven’t lived. Here are some shots from 2005:

This one isn’t from Patterson Park, but it is also from Halloween 2005, and I feel it’s just as important:

Yes, that is someone using a lasso to try to control a berserk Pikachu.

Like most people, you’ve probably always wished that you had a job like this:

[The employer] has gone to extraordinary lengths to maintain the anonymity of is [employees]. Many of [the employer’s] top executives have never met [one of these employees].[Employees] are advised not to disclose their line of work, even to their parents… .

Right? But of course you figured that the psychic toll of doing undercover police work or operating as a spy in hostile territory would be too high. You’ve seen Donnie Brasco. You know what Nietsche said:

He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Indeed. One day you’re protecting the national interests, the next day you’re stabbing a guy in the head with a fork in the hallway of a shitty little hotel in Buenos Aires and it’s all just another day at work.

Well, great news. As I just learned from this fun New Yorker piece (available to non-subscribers), you could always become an inspector for the Michelin hotel-and-restaurant guide. From the sound of it, Michelin inspectors get to have all the fun of being an undercover operator, and the biggest danger they face-psychic or otherwise-is clogged arteries. (Apparently a Michelin inspector “is required to eat everything on her plate” when she is on the job.)

You’re welcome.

We just started watching season 5 of The Wire, and I’m remembering that one thing I love about this show is the way it promotes good (i.e., boring but vital) police work, like the surveillance and records-combing Freamon has been running for a year as the season opens. The show makes it look like this stuff is really an art, and I guess it is.

Anyway, I couldn’t find a good Freamon clip on Youtube, but I like his quote in here about how “all the pieces matter,” because that pretty much sums up what I’m talking about.

While waiting for Coen to fall asleep after his 1:30 a.m. feeding (he’s pretty much like clockwork on that one), I started flipping through today’s New York Times and found A.O. Scott’s review of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Werner Herzog’s latest movie.

I enjoyed the original, Abel Ferrara’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant, especially the scene where the titular character, played by Harvey Keitel, is smoking crack in a tenement hallway and an old woman sticks her head out of her door to see what’s going on and he pulls his gun and yells at her to go back inside, crack smoke pouring from his mouth, his NYPD badge swinging on a chain around his neck.

I do love a good tableau.

Anyway, I probably wouldn’t watch a straight sequel of that movie (and the original didn’t bear re-watching the one time I tried, although maybe a first date was the wrong setting), but I sure as hell will watch what Scott describes as “neither remake nor sequel” but rather “its own special fever-swamp of a movie, an anarchist film noir that seems, at times, almost as unhinged as its protagonist.”

And did I mention that Nicholas Cage stars?

Oh, yes. Oh, yes he does:

Fueled by Nicolas Cage’s performance – which requires adjectives as yet uncoined, typed with both the caps-lock key and the italics button engaged – Mr. Herzog’s film is a pulpy, glorious mess. …

Mr. Cage’s New Orleans cop … clings to an insane sense of professionalism even as his demons drive him around every bend in the Mississippi River.

[Cage] is a jittery whirlwind of inventiveness, throwing his body and voice in every direction and keeping [his character], the movie and the audience in a delirious state of imbalance.

Sometimes his loose-limbed shuffle and sibilant drawl suggest Jimmy Stewart as a crackhead.

What more do you need to know?

The latest Coen brothers movie, A Serious Man, apparently concerns “an ordinary man’s search for clarity in a universe where Jefferson Airplane is on the radio and “F-Troop” is on TV ….” The description concludes:

Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis. Can anyone help him cope with his afflictions and become a righteous person ““ a mensch ““ a serious man?

I’ll admit I’m eliding a lot of other plot elements listed here, but still: somehow, this just doesn’t sound very interesting.

On the other hand, I think I’ve thought the same thing about the initial descriptions of at least half of the Coen brothers’ movies over the years, and yet I can honestly say I’ve never seen a bad movie from these guys. Including Intolerable Cruelty, which you shouldn’t rent if you’re looking for something like Blood Simple, but as long as you read the description and know the type of movie you’re in for, it’s not bad.

Although the A Serious Man preview is better than the description, it still doesn’t exactly set me on fire. Still, who am I kidding-I know I’ll see this movie someday, simply because the Coen brothers made it.

No wonder that we named our kid after don’t mind the coincidence that our kid has the same name as the Coen brothers.