Category: Discoveries

I hate Lev Grossman

September 23, 2010 /

What’s that? Lev Grossman wrote a vacuous cover article for Time? I am taken aback! The Stranger (and its sister publication here, the Mercury) grate on me with their preciousness from time to time, but I admire the execution of Noah Kalina’s mirror-parody. It would have fit right into Modern Humor Authority, and I don’t think I’ve ever said that before about something that actually showed up in print.

If none of the preceding makes sense to you, you can pretty much reduce this entire post to its title.

Epiphiniamb

August 24, 2010 /

I suddenly realized why I hate the “humor” in Shakespeare so much: comic timing depends on confounding your expectations of rhythm in speech, so nothing is funny in meter! Also Shakespeare was bad at jokes.

Pedagogues and Mountebanks

August 5, 2010 /

This is pretty spectacular.

“I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer – not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition – a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave.“

That’s an excerpt from Erica Goldson’s valedictory address, which she wrote and issued earlier this year. Read the whole thing: it’s brief but convincing.

I wasn’t first in my class, but I was close, and I was aware of many of the issues Goldson raises even then–though less concerned, at a more self-centered time in my life, and mostly just happy that they were working in my favor. (Another thing we had in common: the textbook inspirational English teacher.) I’m less complacent these days, less willing to accept the cruel theater of fear and shame that we expect smart young people to suffer with piety. Our schools are bad, and their splash damage is everywhere.

I’m not sure what use I can be to education reform right now. It’s one of those issues that is never urgent but always important, and I need to figure out a path to involving myself in the cause. Erica Goldson’s example seems like a good start.

“Like a zombie, it keeps on living”

July 19, 2010 /

I was bagging on the Washington Post the other day for letting itself bend to the government’s whim. I stand by that, but I also want to give the institution its due: their two-year investigation of the American intelligence industry is amazing, and terrifies me.

“When hired, a typical analyst knows very little about the priority countries – Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan – and is not fluent in their languages. Still, the number of intelligence reports they produce on these key countries is overwhelming, say current and former intelligence officials who try to cull them every day. The ODNI doesn’t know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process of trying to find out, the chief of analysis discovered 60 classified analytic Web sites still in operation that were supposed to have been closed down for lack of usefulness.

Even the analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is supposed to be where the most sensitive, most difficult-to-obtain nuggets of information are fused together, get low marks from intelligence officials for not producing reports that are original, or at least better than the reports already written by the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency or Defense Intelligence Agency.

When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the NCTC. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. “I told him that after 41/2 years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!” he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview.

Two years later, Custer, now head of the Army’s intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., still gets red-faced recalling that day, which reminds him of his frustration with Washington’s bureaucracy. “Who has the mission of reducing redundancy and ensuring everybody doesn’t gravitate to the lowest-hanging fruit?” he said. “Who orchestrates what is produced so that everybody doesn’t produce the same thing?”

July 13, 2010 /

After seeing it on LJ a couple times, I put some stuff from my blogs into the I Write Like tool. Different NFD entries came back as Stephen King, Douglas Adams and (oh God) Dan Brown. Anacrusis consistently gets tagged as Margaret Atwood.

I was prepared to disclaim this whole post, but I cannot argue with that at all. “The world’s longest-running Atwood microhomage” is a painfully accurate description of Anacrusis. You win, Mémoires.

Attention requisition notice

February 7, 2010 /

Here are things that are great!

Work Made For Hire is a smart, clear, unbelievably valuable blog about negotiation and freelancing. If you have ever argued a point or signed a contract, you need to be reading it.

MANual of Style debuted at a perfect time for me, as I’m finally figuring out how to dress myself like a grownup–which is exactly what the blog is about. It’s written in a series of lessons, but it’s also interesting just as a window into trend versus classic in men’s clothing.

An author named Tony Buchsbaum proposed a ratings system for books because he was startled to think his thirteen-year-old son might read the words “cock” or (yes) “manpole.” I am curious as to how Tony Buchsbaum grew up without ever being thirteen himself (perhaps his parents considered it unlucky?), but it gets better: a thirteen-year-old named Emily takes his argument and, in two comments, completely dismantles it. It’s an Ebert-on-Schneider-level takedown.

Is the writer actually thirteen? Who knows (I don’t see any reason to doubt it), but she’s certainly much more familiar with the experience of being a teenager than the people who think they need to be sheltered from scary words. Ratings systems are harmful, and teenagers aren’t the only ones restricted by them.

Synchrowonkery

January 29, 2010 /

Whoa, uh, remember that entry I wrote the other day about a 500% tax on corporate political contributions and campaign spending? Apparently Alan Grayson had the same idea. Like, exactly the same idea.

I sort of don’t think it will pass, especially with a figure as junior and divisive as Grayson sponsoring it, but hey! That’s pretty cool! There’s petition from Credo out there to show support for that and some others of his bills, which, y’know, is an Internet petition, but still.

Nononymity

October 2, 2009 /

Carrie Fisher blogs, apparently, and the evidence suggests that she’s been doing a bit of back-and-forth with the Internet in her own defense. Basically, people think she doesn’t look like she did in 1983. I will allow you a moment of shock.

On my west’ard migration a year and a half ago, while I was bumming around San Francisco on my own, someone–Sumana?–suggested that I take a night and go see a play. By happy coincidence, I was in town at the same time as Fisher, who was doing her show Wishful Drinking at the Berkeley Rep. So I got a ticket and went.

I learned a great deal about Fisher that evening (I hadn’t even known she was married to Paul Simon), and in the process saw probably the only good one-person show ever. I also laughed a lot. How can you avoid laughing at the image of Cary Grant calling up a teenage girl, at her parent’s slightly deranged request, to lecture her soberly about the dangers of LSD–twice? Or at a still from the bridge of the Death Star about which she noted that “I weighed about ninety pounds here, eighty of which I carried in my face?”

It’s one thing to know somebody is a writer; it’s another to see her perform in a self-written multimedia showcase that includes jokes about her own electroshock therapy. I liked Carrie Fisher before then, almost as much for her guest spot on 30 Rock as for Star Wars (and that was all before I knew she tried out for Han Solo). After that show, like became admiration, and she was elevated to the selective ranks of people who have secured my loyalty pretty much for good. Even if her blog posts are littered with unnecessary punctuation.

(In case you’ve noticed that I started dating a short girl with a screenwriting degree, a taste for wine and a sardonic sense of humor within months of moving to Portland: shhh.)

It’s not as if I think the people reading my blog are among those going “oh no how did princess lea get fat :(.” But I feel the need to state this anyway: Carrie Fisher rolls with my crew. And before you write a word against her, consider the fact that fuck you forever, and die in a hole.

Shitcock.