Elsewhere, January 9, 2011
Elsewhere: A collection of interesting links and articles that I’ve come across in the last week or so. Follow me on Twitter for more of the same.
The recent Tuscon massacre could represent a turning point in political discourse, but what kind?
Modern America has endured such moments before. The intense ideological clashes of the 1960s, which centered on Communism and civil rights and Vietnam, were marked by a series of assassinations that changed the course of American history, carried out against a televised backdrop of urban riots and self-immolating war protesters. During the culture wars of the 1990s, fought over issues like gun rights and abortion, right-wing extremists killed 168 people in Oklahoma City and terrorized hundreds of others in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park and at abortion clinics in the South.
What’s different about this moment is the emergence of a political culture — on blogs and Twitter and cable television — that so loudly and readily reinforces the dark visions of political extremists, often for profit or political gain. It wasn’t clear Saturday whether the alleged shooter in Tucson was motivated by any real political philosophy or by voices in his head, or perhaps by both. But it’s hard not to think he was at least partly influenced by a debate that often seems to conflate philosophical disagreement with some kind of political Armageddon.
The problem here doesn’t lie with the activists like most of those who populate the Tea Parties, ordinary citizens who are doing what citizens are supposed to do — engaging in a conversation about the direction of the country. Rather, the problem would seem to rest with the political leaders who pander to the margins of the margins, employing whatever words seem likely to win them contributions or TV time, with little regard for the consequences.
RSS is dying and you should be very worried:
If RSS isn’t saved now, if browser vendors don’t realise the potential of RSS to save users a whole bunch of time and make the web better for them, then the alternative is that I will have to have a Facebook account, or a Twitter account, or some such corporate-controlled identity, where I have to “Like” or “Follow” every website’s partner account that I’m interested in, and then have to deal with the privacy violations and problems related with corporate-owned identity owning a list of every website I’m interested in (and wanting to monetise that list), and they, and every website I’m interested in, knowing every other website I’m interested in following, and then I have to log in and check this corporate owned identity every day in order to find out what’s new on other websites, whilst I’m advertised to, because they are only interested in making the biggest and the best walled garden that I can’t leave.
Sure, RSS Is Dead — Just Like the Web Is Dead:
The fact that RSS may be fading in terms of mainstream user awareness is actually a good thing rather than a bad one. The sooner people can forget about it because it just works in the background, the better off we’ll all be — in the same way many of us have forgotten (if we ever knew) how the internal-combustion engine works, because we no longer have to pull over and fix them ourselves.
Abortion, adoption, infertility, and the paradox of the unborn:
Some of this shift reflects the growing acceptance of single parenting. But some of it reflects the impact of Roe v. Wade. Since 1973, countless lives that might have been welcomed into families like Thernstrom’s — which looked into adoption, and gave it up as hopeless — have been cut short in utero instead.
And lives are what they are. On the MTV special, the people around Durham swaddle abortion in euphemism. The being inside her is just “pregnancy tissue.” After the abortion, she recalls being warned not to humanize it: “If you think of it like [a person], you’re going to make yourself depressed.” Instead, “think of it as what it is: nothing but a little ball of cells.”
It’s left to Durham herself to cut through the evasion. Sitting with her boyfriend afterward, she begins to cry when he calls the embryo a “thing.” Gesturing to their infant daughter, she says, “A ‘thing’ can turn out like that. That’s what I remember … ‘Nothing but a bunch of cells’ can be her.”
[…]
This is the paradox of America’s unborn. No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed.
Caroline Langston’s “The Night Vigil”:
At its most basic level, the night is the time of essential spiritual ferment. That is why monastics have traditionally prayed through the night and slept during the day, Kyriacos Markides notes in his Gifts of the Desert, a journey through Orthodox monasticism. And it is perhaps our contemporary society’s neglect of the night vigil that lies behind our unwanted national epidemic of insomnia.
We wrestle with the invisible, yet rest in it as well. I welcome the task. Next year, I’ll try to take on my wakeful nights with a bit more intention.
Wael Khairy on why traditional special effects are better than CGI:
The full model mechanical shark in “Jaws” will always be scarier than the CGI sharks in “Deep Blue Sea.” Again, it has nothing to do with nostalgia and I’ll explain why in a moment. You see, Bruce (the shark in “Jaws”) is an actual large object. Bruce has a body and a jaw full of solid teeth. On the other hand, the sharks in “Deep Blue Sea” are computer graphics from 1999. Today, these sharks are no longer scary. The reason for that being is CGI does not date very well. Now that computer graphics are advancing in a rapid rate, the 1999 sharks look more like brightened catroonish screen misfits. The CGI is simply no longer as fresh as it once was. Yes, Bruce looks more fake but he will always be more real simply because he’ll always look the same and actually be there within the physical dimensions of a scene.
Patton Oswalt thinks that “geek culture” needs to die in order to save itself:
Fast-forward to now: Boba Fett’s helmet emblazoned on sleeveless T-shirts worn by gym douches hefting dumbbells. The Glee kids performing the songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And Toad the Wet Sprocket, a band that took its name from a Monty Python riff, joining the permanent soundtrack of a night out at Bennigan’s. Our below-the-topsoil passions have been rudely dug up and displayed in the noonday sun. The Lord of the Rings used to be ours and only ours simply because of the sheer goddamn thickness of the books. Twenty years later, the entire cast and crew would be trooping onstage at the Oscars to collect their statuettes, and replicas of the One Ring would be sold as bling.
The topsoil has been scraped away, forever, in 2010. In fact, it’s been dug up, thrown into the air, and allowed to rain down and coat everyone in a thin gray-brown mist called the Internet. Everyone considers themselves otaku about something — whether it’s the mythology of Lost or the minor intrigues of Top Chef. American Idol inspires — if not in depth, at least in length and passion — the same number of conversations as does The Wire. There are no more hidden thought-palaces — they’re easily accessed websites, or Facebook pages with thousands of fans. And I’m not going to bore you with the step-by-step specifics of how it happened. In the timeline of the upheaval, part of the graph should be interrupted by the words the Internet. And now here we are.
Google, iPhones, blogs, and the changing nature of book criticism:
What we can say, for sure, is that sustained exposure to the Internet is changing the way many readers process the written word. Texts are shorter and more flagrantly interconnected, with all kinds of secret passageways running into and out of one another. This has already changed the way we produce, read, share and digest our writing. Inevitably, it will also redefine what it means to practice book criticism, at least for those of us who aspire to write for something like a general audience.
[…]
If we want criticism to matter today, we have to treat it with more respect. This means abandoning the notion that it’s just hack work or service journalism or literary bookkeeping, or a sad little purgatory for people who haven’t managed to succeed as novelists. Book criticism, done well, is an art of its own, with its own noble canon and creative challenges and satisfactions. In fact, it’s one of the essential literary arts, a singular genre in which a lot of great writers have done their best work.
[…]
As book critics, our writing is a writing on writing. We respond to an author’s metaphors with countermetaphors; we criticize or praise a story by telling a story about it. My favorite work is always that which allows itself to imaginatively intermingle with its source text — to somehow match or channel or negate the energy of the text that inspired it. It can be imitative, competitive or collaborative; it can mimic or mock or scramble or counterbalance the tone of the source. It can be subtle or overt. But it will always have this doubled-over, creative quality: one memorable writer responding, in memorable writing, to another.
So it looks like those sudden animal die-offs may not be signs of the end times after all:
In the past eight months, the USGS has logged 95 mass wildlife die-offs in North America and that’s probably a dramatic undercount, White said. The list includes 900 some turkey vultures that seemed to drown and starve in the Florida Keys, 4,300 ducks killed by parasites in Minnesota, 1,500 salamanders done in by a virus in Idaho, 2,000 bats that died of rabies in Texas, and the still mysterious death of 2,750 sea birds in California.
On average, 163 such events are reported to the federal government each year, according to USGS records. And there have been much larger die-offs than the 3,000 blackbirds in Arkansas. Twice in the summer of 1996, more than 100,000 ducks died of botulism in Canada.
It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one who doesn’t like the SyFy Network:
And here’s the final insult: SyFy replaced Caprica in its coveted Friday lineup with WWE Smackdown, a wrestling extravaganza that is a far cry from science fiction. Wrestling? Unless it’s an alien vs. a Cyclops, it’s tough to see the science fiction angle. Every fan is now saying: What the frak?