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May 6, 2005
The court’s decision that the FCC does not have authority to regulate all digital devices is a major victory and a cause for rejoicing. Congratulations to all those who worked so hard to safeguard our Internet from this particular federal agency. (See Susan Crawford…)
An Italian blogger, Gianluca Neri, looked under the blacked out marks on a US gov’t PDF and discovered that there are an average of 25 attacks a day on coalition forces in Iraq. See Paolo Valdemarin’s bloggage of this. [Technorati tag: iraq]
Yesterday, my second day in Italy, was overwhelming. All I can do is list my itinerary, especially since I have only a few minutes this morning before day 3 officially starts.
Yesterday I was in Naples. The day began with an an early walk in the area around my hotel, which is a few blocks from the Piazza del Plebescita. (All spellings approximate!) I went up the small alleys as the city was getting started. I wished I had brought a sound recorder just to capture 5 minutes of street sounds as the small stores cranked open and the children were walked to school. Then Derrick, my host, interviewed me for an hour for the U of Naples TV; it was a more philosophical interview than I’m used to, and was invigorating because of that.
Then Derrick dropped me at Herculaneum. When Vesuvius blew up, the wind carried the ash to Pompeii, but 50 feet of mud covered the much smaller town of Herculaneum. A third of the town has been excavated. I walked through it for 1.5 hours. You get a lively, and moving, sense of how humane and social life was there (well, slaves excepted). I won’t attempt to do justice to the experience of being a chronological voyeur.
Then, after an excellent lunch (pasta arrabiata and some excellent pizza), I gave a talk at the university, with non-simultaneous, interactive translation. I talked about – guess what? – how the miscellaneous, which traditionally is where the structure of knowledge fails, is becoming in the digital world where knowledge begins.
Then Derrick, eleven grad students and I took the 40 minute ferry ride to the isle of Capri, where we had a late (11pm) dinner at which I spent more time talking about Heidegger than I have in 20 years.
It was dark when we arrived so I had no sense of the place until this morning when I went on a short walk through Anacapri, where we’re staying. Anacapri is the “anti Capri,” although unfortunately not in the Opposite World sense…it’s just on the other side of the island. I’m not going to try to describe it because I’m too new here, and, besides, I have to go join Derrick for breakfast. What I saw this morning, though, was impossibly lovely, so lovely that I don’t yet trust my reaction.
Even I am envious of myself.
May 4, 2005
Steve G has a vlog about Steve J’s talk at Harvard last week. I missed the talk (I was on a plane) and I haven’t seen Steve G’s report because I just got off a plane. But I figure it’s a safe bet to recommend it to you…
You can’t go wrong with that as an opening sentence. Esspecially if you follow it up with:
I’m writing this from an Internet cafe in Naples.
So, ok, I’m willing to stop my travel whining and admit that I am privileged beyond reason to be able to go to places like these. I don’t know how I got so lucky, but next time I ever moan about traveling, just slap me across the face with something spelled in Italian. Anything.
The flight was fine: I got an aisle seat and saw an episode of Scrubs I’d missed. 1.5 dramamines knocked me into a veal-like sleep for almost 4 hours. Then we drove to Rome where, after a few loops, I hooked up with Derrick de Kerckhove. Derrick heads the McLuhan program at University of Toronto, teaches at the University of Naples, and occupied an endowed chair at the Library of Congress. Not too shabby. We took the train to Naples and a cab to my hotel, the Chiaja Hotel de Charme, which, without Derrick as a guide, I would never ever ever have found: You have to know to ring the bell to be let in through a 4-foot high door within a massive brown door. Lovely on the inside, though. I left immediately to walk around a little, had a terrible slice of pizza, and found this Internet joint. (3.50 euros per hour).
Anyway, the day has been way too rich to capture. I haven’t even said anything about the fascinating hour conversation I had at 3am (Boston time) with Jon Luca Botanica (whose name I’m undoubtedly mispelling massively – Sorry Jon Luca! [Embarrassing Stoopid American correction: Gianluca Baccanico.]) on the ride to Rome about his attempt to understand the Internet via Kant’s sense of space and time. Jon Luca is one of Derrick’s students. I am in for a stimulating few days.
Must go drain my senses by going through my email…
May 3, 2005
Eric Norlin points out that Congress is about to pass a national ID law, although it’s in the guise of mandated guidelines for state drivers licenses. The legislation is attached to a big Iraq bill, so it will go through without any discussion.
Is it the end of democracy? Nah. But totalitarianism comes in on little cat feet, one rational step at a time.
Steven Johnson gracefully responds to a bunch of reviews of his book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, including mine.
In his response he says something that I don’t recall his book saying flat out:
…the long-format, multithreaded TV drama — when viewed as a single narrative spanning several seasons, and not as isolated episodes — is an incredibly rich platform for precisely the literary values Dave celebrates. We don’t have a lot of opportunities in culture to tell a story that lasts a hundred hours, but that’s exactly what we’re taking in on The Sopranos or Lost or Six Feet Under. I feel totally confident that those shows will stack up very nicely against Madame Bovary a hundred years from now, if not sooner.
My head is swimming with responses. Steve’s writing tends to have that effect on me.
First, I want to drop Lost and Six Feet Under from the discussion because I personally don’t much like either. The one episode of Lost I saw was (IMO, of course) melodramatic crap — sentimental flashbacks, trumped up Big Events — and Six Feet Under is undisciplined and random; it’ll do anything to be interesting. For purposes of Steve’s point, we should be able to substitute whatever we think is the best of long-form TV. To my mind, that’s The Sopranos. Likewise, if Madame Bovary doesn’t do it for you, then pick some other work of literature that you consider to be incontestably first rate.
Second, Steve’s point about having 100 hours to tell a story is excellent. That’s especially true on networks with the British TV sensibility of ending a series when the story is done. (Are you listening, Will? Are you paying attention, Grace?) A literal retelling of a complex, multi-character novel by, say, Dickens, might equate to, what, one season of The Sopranos? (On the other hand, how do you compare the complexity of a 100-hour series with The Iliad’s brief but poignant indications of the “back story” of its mortal characters that open out into the unspoken enormity of death?)
Third, my point initially wasn’t about the relative quality of TV and books. It was that books develop a sympathetic understanding that TV (and theater and movies) — and especially video games — don’t, no matter how good they are. Those media show us characters behaving in a world. At those media’s best, we understand how that world looks to the characters, how they’re interpreting their choices, how they understand one another. But books do something different. They don’t just show us characters in a world, they show us that world. By “world” I don’t mean the things of the world — a show like Deadwood is wonderful at showing us that sense of a world — but the world of interrelated meanings. This does not mean that books are better than everything else. It does mean that they’re better at this way of showing than anything else…and this way of showing has moral implications. (Unfortunately, I’m not sure I’m right about what I’m claiming to be a unique feature of books. You should be throwing Shakespeare in my face right about now.)
Fourth, Steve is right that The Sims is a highly ambiguous environment, and thus is a counter-example to my statement that video games present relatively simple, rule-based environments. But The Sims remains a simplification of real life, whereas Madame Bovary reveals the bottomless complexity of real life.
Fifth, there’s a practical sense in which I think Steve is wrong about how The Sopranos and Madame Bovary are going to stack up. In a hundred years, even high definition TV images are going to look as old fashioned as hand-cranked silent movies. And, the acting styles and camera styles are going to feel outdated. When you tell your kid that Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made, there’s not a chance she’s going to prefer it to Pulp Fiction. So, if The Sopranos stacks up to Madame Bovary in 100 years, it’ll only be because both are only ever viewed if your English teacher asigns them.
I actually didn’t mean to say in my original comments on Steve’s wonderful book that the great books are better than the great TV shows. I only meant to say that books do something valuable beyond what Steve points to when he’s defending video games and television. There’s nothing about videotape that makes it a medium incapable of containing art. I just don’t know how to do the comparison. There are points of similarity between Emma Bovary’s story and Carmella Soprano’s. In my heart, though, I think Madame Bovary, Sense and Sensibility and Ulysses are better than The Sopranos. (On the other hand, I’d argue for The Sopranos over Dickens any day.) Perhaps part of it is that Flaubert didn’t have the luxury of 100 hours, so he expresses more of the world in shorter bursts, and that tells us something about how the world bodies forth its infinite meaning. For me, part of the awe of art is its ability to transcend its own limitations. ( Yes, I do find something wonderful about well-rhymed poetry.) Having a hundred hours relaxes the limits. That doesn’t mean art can’t happen there. It just makes it very hard to compare it with more limited forms.
Are such cross-media comparisons meaningful in any case? On the one hand, no. They’re just too different. On the other hand, I’m confident that The Odyssey is better than Gilligan’s Island, so apparently I do think such comparisons are possible. It’s only when you get to the best of each medium that the discussion becomes as meaningful as whether wearing your baseball cap backwards makes you look stupid or, for that matter, whether bloggers are journalists. [Technorati tags: StevenJohnson ebigfy sopranos]
May 2, 2005
Although the Viceversa catalog refers to this as “Voodoo display with 5 kitchen knives,” I prefer to think of it as “Kill Mr. Bill.”
[Thanks to Tim Hiltabiddle for the link.]
Amazon’s concordance feature is fun and sometimes revelatory. For example, the list of the 100 most frequently used words in my book Small Pieces Loosely Joined begins with “although” and ends with “yet,” which reflects my unfortunate tendency towards mealy-mouthedness. The two most used words in the book are “Web” and “world,” which is another interesting reflection of what the book is about.
You can get to the concordance for any book for which Amazon has the full text by hovering over the cover image and selecting “concordance” from the popup… [Technorati tag: amazon]
I fly to Italy tomorrow to give a talk in Naples and then to spend a couple of days with an odd grad student offsite meeting being held in Capri, under the tutelage of the international Derrick Dekerckhove.
I have found in mentioning this to people that I get zero travel sympathy, so I have given up trying, although the truth is that I wouldn’t mind a couple of “Oooh, you poor, hard-traveling person! It must be so tiring!” What you don’t understand is that I am totally an indoor Jew. The loveliness of the outdoors is to me as the loveliness of quarks: I’m never going to experience it firsthand or ever actually understand it.
I’ll be back on Sunday. The only tan I get will come from the lovely quarks emitted by my laptop’s screen. That is my pledge to you.
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