– Chris Rock on the elections
– The original Black Knight
– Real humans exist within Amazon
– Facebook for old people

OK, you know it’s a bad sign when a set of presidential debates leaves me wanting to vote for Mitt Romney.

The Republicans argued real issues. When there was mudslinging, it was about real differences in their policies. It was so different from every political debate I’ve seen.

But the Dems were boring as hell and tired-looking and negative to boot. Change, change, change–it’s become what we called in grad school an “empty signifier.”

Perhaps the reason is that the Democrats are so closely aligned on the issues that there’s no policy for them to debate. They argue about personality–leadership values, flip-flopping, who’s more negative–because they have nothing else to argue about.

Which I suppose speaks well of the unity of the democratic party, or something. But couldn’t they have hashed out some new ideas if their old ones were so similar? Ugh. It just left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

But perhaps part of the problem can be blamed on Gibson, who asked the Democrats lame questions. You ask the Republicans how to solve immigration but then you ask Democrats what’s the one thing they can take back? You ask only about their campaigns, not about the actual issues?

Somewhere between the hours of seven p.m. Thursday night and nine a.m. Friday morning, election fever hit Massachusetts. As the polls were closing and the percentage of precincts reporting rocketed and campaign ads began showing in Boston for the first time and as reporters gave their analysis while simultaneously zooming over en masse to even-colder New Hampshire in the pre-dawn hours to catch up with the candidates who were miraculously already there, neighboring Massachusetts got excited. I have friends going up to New Hampshire this weekend to campaign, to attend a rally, to hear a speech.

Lots of people appear to be shocked by Huckabee’s and Obama’s victories. I have to say I’m not.*

Huckabee has fascinated me over the past few weeks because his campaign managed to do what very few can. He had a) a different message, and b) he stuck to his message with not even a whiff of flip-flopping. There are a heck of a lot of people in this country who wanted to hear that message: “I’m a Christian leader, not ashamed of it, and by the way I’m more like you than like your boss.” He had some brilliant lines over the past few weeks that managed to characterize his opponents negatively without ever attacking them: “The Republican establishment will never nominate me, because I have such a hick last name.” “You want to elect someone who reminds you of your co-worker, not of the guy who fired you.” If you’re a good, Christian, middle-class person, this is your candidate. He has a nice smile, a slightly crooked tooth that’s cute but reminds you of his humble origins, and a kind demeanor toward all. While his liberalism-is-a-scourge** rhetoric has kept me out of all danger of falling for him, I have to say that for anyone who didn’t have that compunction he seemed like the perfect package.

But much as Huckabee was never going to win in New Hampshire, he’s doubly not going to win now. The moment the Iowa caucuses were over (well, really, before they were over, if you count The Tonight Show), Huckabee changed his message. He’s repeated so many times since then that he’s not changing his message that you’d know he must be even if it weren’t obvious. But it is: he’s dropped the Christian thing almost entirely and is now talking only about taxes. There goes his Christian base (it might take them a little while, but they’ll be disappointed about it soon enough). And his tax ideas are crazy. There goes his economically-based following. A consumption tax sounds quite in line with his fight for the middle- and lower-income classes, but seriously? A 23% sales tax would kill our retail economy, which, let’s be honest, isn’t doing so hot on its own right now. You really want a country where nobody buys Macs or cars or anything expensive, just so everyone can save? Save for what? You can’t buy anything. Please! All this to say that I will be awfully surprised if New Hampshire hearts Huckabee.

So Huckabee’s out, McCain is trying to get in, Romney’s trying to survive, Giuliani is so 2007. There we go with the Republicans.

Now for Dems! We all knew Barack was surging, though even I was surprised by the margin between him and Hil on Thursday night.

I’m still trying to decide between these two. For personality and ultimate message, I’m all for Barack. Unity, unity, unity, respect for other nations, and a breath of fresh air in Washington. But I’m also skeptical, along with a lot of folks, about the lack-of-experience thing. And at the end of the day, it’s fascinating to find that the Times candidate-comparison chart reveals that they have practically the same line on every issue, except that Hil explicitly stated that she’d get Congress’s approval before engaging the military in Iran, and she wants to require health care for all while Barack only wants to require it for the kids. Could it be that she’s more cautious about using the military than Barack? Could it be that he’s softer on health care than she? Because those are pretty huge things for me.

On the other hand, this difference points to much of my (and the country’s?) frustration with politics. Clearly Hillary said the Congress bit for show–meaning not that she wouldn’t do it, but that it is admittedly what everyone wants to hear. Barack, by loving the children the most, becomes more lovable. How calculated, I conclude. So how much can we really learn about a candidate by comparing their campaign statements line-by-line? Nobody can know what they’re really going to do.

Anyway, somebody please convince me one way or the other on Barack or Hillary, using policy and issue arguments and not just who’s a shinier speaker and who has been in Washington before. I want to be as excited about the primaries as my friends going to New Hampshire, but I’ve got some decisions to make first.

——————-
* I am surprised, however, by how hypey everyone’s being about it. Even David Brooks has gone off the deep end, calling the twin underdogs’ victories a “political earthquake.” Yes, David, people in America want change. But that was only Iowa! Let’s hear what a few more people have to say before deciding that we’ve all opened to a new chapter in American political history. Maybe I’m just being pessimistic, hedging my bets, but I don’t think it’s that easy.

** I don’t know how he defines it–he didn’t in the speech–but I define liberalism as valuing differences and being educated about them.

I don’t understand the New York Times’s new(ish) blog, The Board.

I don’t understand what makes the posts on the blog different from the editorials on the op/ed page, and thus why they have a blog at all. Their explanation is:

The Board is written by The New York Times editorial board, a group of journalists with wide-ranging areas of expertise, whose primary responsibility is to write The Times’s editorials. The Board will include a variety of posts that give background to the day’s editorials, cover other major topics of the day, or provide first-person take on an aspect of politics or society that we might not address in the editorial line-up.

And I guess they do that, kind of. But they’re missing some important elements that we’ve already come to associate with blogs, and which I think have to be present for a blog to be successful.

First, voice. These blog postings read no differently from articles on the op/ed page. Which are neatly written, I might add, but again, for that I’d just go to the op/ed page itself. Blogs need to be written with a more personal tone, one that takes down the curtain of formality between writer and reader. That doesn’t mean bad grammar (nooooo!); it does mean being playful, allowing oneself parentheticals, and being on the whole personable.

Linked into that is the second element, transparency. Blogs are supposed to be a way to see into worlds we wouldn’t otherwise have access to–usually people’s thoughts. So the content of an ed board blog shouldn’t just be background on the week’s news, but explanations as to editorial decisions and how those decisions were made. What do you get together and talk about, guys? And what kind of coffee do you drink when you do it? It’s those details in addition to your high-value content that will make The Board worth reading.

Lastly, timing. Blogs react to news, and they do it fast. I expected the Board’s blog to provide mini editorial-type commentary to news stories breaking throughout the day. Their own authoritative take, with their wonderful perspective and resources as NYT ed board members, of the same things that we’re all hashing out on our blogs. This week that’s the Kindle, Facebook’s most recent challenge to our ideas of privacy and the possibilities of the Web, the Golden Compass protests, and similar widespread issues. If they’re not careful, someone’s going to take their authority away just because they are in fact missing from that space.

Because I’m sure that one of the reasons that the NYT launched a blog for their editorial page was to confirm its continuing authority. Lots of companies are doing this now, and media/publishing companies feel the threat of obsolescence most of all, as thought dissemination is now threatening to find a new home rather than in the printed pages of newspapers and books. But you can’t just throw a blog up: you need to react to the new demands that these new technologies place on content. The NYT has a chance to be at the forefront of that change, but they’re just not doing it yet.

Lots of things to track these days.

First, the Facebook Beacon outcry, media coverage, response, and response to response. Best overall coverage on the last few days on the Forrester folks’ Groundswell blog. Also a Times article. The Facebook protest group is wonderful in and of itself–users trust Facebook enough to use it to try to get it to change itself!–though the comments on it make me shudder. It’s just the grammar Nazi coming out in me, and the stop-making-obvious-and-stupid-arguments Nazi. My basic take on all this is that Facebook made a serious mistake (more serious than News Feed), has listened to its constituents, and is taking measured steps to do what it’s being asked.

It’s important to note that Facebook is not getting rid of Beacon, nor allowing you to opt out entirely, which is fine. It is now just doing what it stakes its reputation on: letting you decide for yourself what of your actions other people see. All these crazy people out there who are saying “oh, THIS is where these crazy teenagers draw the line? they post pictures of themselves drinking but now want Facebook not to post about their Overstock purchases?” are missing the point entirely. You should be able to post whatever you want about yourself–but the touchy Facebook moments are always when it’s someone else (or something else, like a program) that does the posting for you.

Second on my radar is our own office’s attempt to Groundswellize and begin thinking about how to use social technologies. It’s super exciting and I love the Press because everyone there is so into these ideas, and though many of us are new to the various sites, I think we’re all talking about the big picture in the right ways. Which is to say, we’re helping to construct the big picture. And people are excited to share their thoughts with the world and to get the world involved, which is what it’s all about.

Third, I’m home for a long weekend to celebrate my mom’s birthday. Happy birthday, mom! We’re going to get a Christmas tree and go for brunch and do yummy things like that.

Fourth, The Golden Compass. I have a sense this is about to become a volatile issue in my family, in which we have a few branches with little kids, and some of the branches are born-again Christian and some of the branches are fiery super-liberal. And all the branches come together at Christmastime.

I read the trilogy while writing my senior thesis on C.S. Lewis’s fiction. Pullman is a virulent anti-Lewis guy; he has said that he basically wrote his trilogy to give the “liberal intelligentsia” something to read to their kids other than that evil religious goo of Lewis’s. It has been remarked that he has managed to go 360 degrees from Lewis and isn’t that much different in the end (other than the whole God-killing thing, I suppose).

It’s the overall aesthetic idea of the plot which I find most interesting and appealing. Overturning Milton (and by his title Pullman makes it rather clear that he’s more interested in overturning Milton than overturning the Bible) has been a central project of English literature for the past few centuries, if you buy Harold Bloom’s arguments about poets’ anxiety of influence. Pullman does it with no holds barred–and I say kudos to him. He belongs up there with Beardsley and Wilde for challenging social mores for the sake of art.

Unfortunately, I don’t think his art is all that good (Wilde’s and Beardsley’s was). The trilogy doesn’t live up to the promise of the Milton-overturning. Creatures on wheels may have worked for Baum in Ozma of Oz, but here they’re a forced attempt to depict evolution by natural selection through fiction. Overthrowing Milton is a brilliant idea, except when it, well, fails.

One of the reasons it fails is that it’s so clear throughout the novels that Pullman has a personal vendetta against religion and God; and his anger gets in the way of his argument. I think he’s angry at God for a lot of the same reasons as Thomas Hardy, part of the original group who came up with the term “agnostic.” Hardy complained that if a Supreme Being did exist He was “either limited in power, unknowing, or cruel–which is obvious enough, and has been for centuries.” Pullman feels abandoned and mistreated by God, even if–especially if–He doesn’t exist. And furthermore Pullman’s angry at organized religion for the same reasons as Christopher Hitchens–it arguably causes more strife and death in the world than anything else. He lets this anger run wild in the books and it makes them frustrating to read in places.

The books aren’t entirely a hate-fest, though. It’s interesting to see where the love-patterns do come out–like between the children and their daemons. There’s real emotion there, which is what kept me reading through the something-hundred-odd pages of the trilogy. What do we have to learn from the alternate schema of love-in-the-world that Pullman is proposing? If we are free from God’s binding garden, as Pullman would have it, on what basis are we going to interact? (The Enlightenment would joyfully raise Reason to that pedestal.) I want to reread the books if just to figure out Pullman’s answers to these questions.

But a more practical question is the children. Much as I’m all for reading and discussing these books, even I feel like I might balk at letting the kiddies see the movies. Am I being suddenly over-conservative? My argument is that it would completely confuse kids to be absorbed in a culture that still presents God as a good being (even an atheist, liberal local culture does this passively at this point) and then to see a movie trilogy that makes killing God its premise? Am I not giving kids enough credit? Would they ask questions? Or would they just be scared? Would they sense that Pullman is mean-spirited? Or would they get his aesthetic project? Would they become atheists but still understand the values of the Narnia movies?

And the real questions: why does it tweak me out so much to see anti-Golden-Compass protests if I too fear the books’ implications? And since when do I fear the books’ implications? But wait, since when don’t I fear the books’ implications?

Maybe the hardest thing about conversations about the Golden Compass it that the books make us really think about what we believe, and come to terms with it in a modern, everyday context. And because like fundamental religions the trilogy doesn’t create any kind of space for someone to believe both in a religion and in modern liberal values, it becomes just another intolerant voice creating strife.

Went to the Boston Antiquarian Book Fair this afternoon. A glorious collection of old books, old prints, old maps, first editions of books from Dickens to Harry Potter, really old editions of Ovid, and not-that-old art book editions of Edward Lear.

Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe had a great showing. Everywhere you turned were books by or about them. Is this a fad, or are there just more books by them out there? Pop or cult fiction meets Legitimate Literature? Catch-22 was also fairly ubiquitous. Other notables were a first edition of the single-volume Dombey and Son, and a first edition of Charlotte’s Web which White had inscribed to Nabokov.

And then there were maps. So many, many maps.

When poking through dusty old print shops, I usually look for maps of England or Maine or Boston or other places I know. There’s something so wonderful about looking at an old map or reading an old description of a place you know well: some things will be very much the same, and others will be delightfully different. But so many of the maps today were of Boston and New England that I became numbed to them and began watching for something quite different: a differentiation of aesthetic pattern.

Maps of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries are usually as crammed full of information as possible. Hill-signs indicate mountains, mounds, and inclines; rivers, as alleyways of knowledge, are drawn in particular detail. Toponyms proliferate, filling blank areas with grey when viewed from a distance, and with a complex web of names when viewed close up. Where no information is available, cartographers fill empty spaces with sea dragons and tall ships, fierce, befeathered native peoples and cute little bunny rabbits. The result is a kind of fractal aesthetic: the image can be viewed at varying “zoom levels.” At the lowest level–“zoomed out”–there is a uniform buzz or fuzziness to the image. You can’t really appreciate more than a few of these at one sitting unless you’re really looking for something specific, which I wasn’t.

So instead, the maps that caught my eye today were entirely different from these. One is an early chart of the Carolina coast and a few nearby islands. Most of it is ocean and unexplored territory. There are maybe three toponyms on the whole map. Instead rhumb-lines (lines indicating the winds and compass directions) dominate the image, giving a sense of a perfectly clean geometry. The cartographer has made no attempt to embellish. There are just straight, intersecting lines, and one ragged coastline running across a third of the page. Clean and simple, if ripped haphazardly in two.

Another map was of the Philippines. It too eschewed with most toponyms. Each cluster of islands had its own color shading, and that was the only decoration.

These maps are best viewed from a distance; they just don’t have zoomability. But today their simpler, larger spatial gestures offered me an alternative to squinting through familiar and unfamiliar placenames, bringing to mind Mondrian and a squigglier kind of Barnett Newman. These maps seemed postmodern in the face of the rest of the modern hubbub, and, in the face of a zooish conference hall, bespoke a different kind of calm, fresh, basic form and function.

The other day a friend and I were bemoaning our regular office smorgasbord and the effort it requires to go to the gym every day. She said, hesitantly, that at the moment she was focused in on one goal that sounded–she knew–kind of silly: to fit into a particular shirt by New Year’s. It was silly, she reiterated, but it did keep her going to the gym day in and day out.

I don’t think this sounds silly at all. I do it too: I motivate myself to exercise by setting concrete, short-term goals, like being able to wear a favorite skirt without feeling all squished in the middle.

The reason we think this might sound silly is that we feel that we really should be motivated to go the gym because of some grand, bigger reason, like staving off heart disease so we can live to see our grandkids. But thinking of that while in my twentieth minute on the elliptical just doesn’t keep my pace up. Trying to figure out what to wear later that day will. This says less about the relative importance of these goals (grandkids vs. clothes), I think, than about the immediacy of the question.

So are things like Health and Grandkids useless as motivation? I don’t think so. But because they’re more abstract, more intangible, more far off, they motivate us in a different way. We encourage ourselves to make those “silly” mini-goals precisely because we know that they’re a way of heading us in the direction of the major goal in smaller, more digestable chunks. If it weren’t for this major motivation behind it all, we’d call our mini-goals “excuses” and not “goals.”

When we were talking this over at lunch today, Tim asked me whether I thought gym-related mini-goaling differed by gender. Did men do the same thing? Yes, we concluded, and their mini-goals might be strinkingly similar: fitting into clothes, impressing the opposite sex at a particular event, and so forth. They might speak about them differently, however, making more public their goal to impress a girl with their biceps than their worry about how their waistband was getting tighter.

In the days after September 11, 2001, we went through it. The checking up on friends–have you heard from…? oh he’s ok…? but have you heard from…? One name kept coming up, after everyone else had been heard from, accounted for, checked off. We never heard from Maurita Tam. Concert choir was devastated. We had been on tour with her the year before, with her quick smile and her kind words and unexpected laugh. On Thursday it rained, and there was a memorial service. We sang one of the tour songs for Maurita, and for everyone else who died on that shaken day, and then we retired the song from our repertoire. It has been running through my head since events at Virginia Tech began to unfold yesterday, when students were asking those same questions, and there were those eerily familiar scenes of university students boldly showing emotion and coming together to share a pain so utterly unassociated with bright college days. The song has been running through my head, all day. It helps, somehow.

“Enosh kekhatsir yamav…”
(As for man, his days are like grass…)
(Psalm 103:15-18)

It’s an odd year.

As always, Passover and Easter are close on each others’ heels, and conversations about keeping Kosher and fasting on Good Friday have hit the blogosphere right on schedule. Yet it seems this year nobody’s actually doing any observing. It’s a killer week in the semester–midterms to take, midterms to grade, degree qualifying exams, theses all but due. I have a friend who’s intensely dieting and can’t afford to cut anything more out of her daily caloric intake. Myself, I’m coming down with something and, while I’m abstaining from the chicken soup, I’m still going to stuff myself with everything else my body needs to fight off the ick.

My first reaction to all this would be to observe that fasting and keeping Kosher are ways of making us very aware of what we eat and grateful for it, and making us slow down and reflect on, to put it the clichéd way, the important things in life, putting everything else into perspective. What are we missing by saying that our diet, our schoolwork, our common colds, are excuses not to do these things? Aren’t they those less-important-things-in-life that a day of fasting is supposed to remind us are less important to begin with? The ritual of fasting, like any other ritual (see sociologists Victor Turner and Mary Douglas), is supposed to change the state of our being in some way. We’re refusing to be changed this year.

But on the other hand, the number of reflective conversations I’ve had with (myself and) other non-observers might indicate the contrary. We’re all clearly thinking about fasting, food, tradition, reflection, and what’s important in our lives. The awareness is still there, precisely because of the fact that we’re making the decision to still eat leavened bread or food on Friday. Maybe in some way not participating in a ritual that we know exists is a ritual in itself.

A warm early-southern-spring day. You can smell the green.

It just might be a porch-sitting (and porch-thesis-writing) kind of day.