Monday, June 25, 2012
Waiting Game
During the two weeks of play that begin on Monday, professional tennis players at Wimbledon will return thousands of first serves. Many of those returns will be entertaining. Some will be remarkable. But all will give spectators an opportunity to improve on the personal and professional decisions we make in all aspects of our lives: by helping us learn to manage delay.
Watch Novak Djokovic. His advantage over the other professionals at Wimbledon won’t be his agility or stamina or even his sense of humour. Instead, as scientists who study superfast athletes have found, the key to Djokovic’s success will be his ability to wait just a few milliseconds longer than his opponents before hitting the ball. That tiny delay is why most players won’t have a chance against him. Djokovic wins because he can procrastinate – at the speed of light.
During superfast reactions, the best-performing experts in sport, and in life, instinctively know when to pause, if only for a split-second. The same is true over longer periods: some of us are better at understanding when to take a few extra seconds to deliver the punchline of a joke, or when we should wait a full hour before making a judgment about another person. Part of this skill is gut instinct, and part of it is analytical. We get some of it from trial and error or by watching experts, but we also can learn from observing toddlers and even animals. There is both an art and a science to managing delay.
In 2008, when the financial crisis hit, I wanted to get to the heart of why our leading bankers, regulators and others were so short-sighted and wreaked such havoc on our economy: why were their decisions so wrong, their expectations of the future so catastrophically off the mark? I also wanted to figure out, for selfish reasons, whether my own tendency to procrastinate (the only light fixture in my bedroom closet has been broken for five years) was really such a bad thing.
Here is what I learnt from interviewing more than 100 experts in different fields and working through several hundred recent studies and experiments: given the fast pace of modern life, most of us tend to react too quickly. We don’t, or can’t, take enough time to think about the increasingly complex timing challenges we face. Technology surrounds us, speeding us up. We overreact to its crush every day, both at work and at home.
Yet good time managers are comfortable pausing for as long as necessary before they act, even in the face of the most pressing decisions. Some seem to slow down time. For the best decision-makers, as for the best tennis players, time is more flexible than a metronome or atomic clock.
by Frank Partnoy, FT | Read more:
I analyzed the chords of 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.
For many people, listening to music elicits such an emotional response that the idea of dredging it for statistics and structure can seem odd or even misguided. But knowing these patterns can give one a deeper more fundamental sense for how music works; for me this makes listening to music a lot more interesting. Of course, if you play an instrument or want to write songs, being aware of these things is obviously of great practical importance.
In this article, we’ll look at the statistics gathered from 1300 choruses, verses, etc. of popular songs to discover the answer to a few basic questions. First we’ll look at the relative popularity of different chords based on the frequency that they appear in the chord progressions of popular music. Then we’ll begin to look at the relationship that different chords have with one another. For example, if a chord is found in a song, what can we say about the probability for what the next chord will be that comes after it?
The Database
To make quantitative statements about music you need to have data; lots of it. Guitar tab websites have tons of information about the chord progressions that songs use, but the quality is not very high. Just as important, the information is not in a format suitable for gathering statistics. So, over the past 2 years we’ve been slowly and painstakingly building up a database of songs taken mainly from the billboard 100 and analyzing them 1 at a time. At the moment the database of songs has over 1300 entries indexed. The genre and where they are taken from is important. This is an analysis of mainly “popular” music, not jazz or classical, so the results are not meant to be treated as universal. If you’re interested, you can check out the database here. The entries contain raw information about the chords and melody, while throwing out information about the arrangement and instrumentation.
We can use the information in the song database to answer all sorts of questions. In this introductory post, I’ll look at a few interesting preliminary results, but we invite you to propose your own questions in the comments at the end of the article.
Let’s get started.
1. Are some chords more commonly used than others?
This seems like such a basic question, but the answer doesn’t actually tell us much because songs are written in different keys. A song written in C# will have lots of C# chords in it, while a song written in G will probably have lots of G’s. That G chords are more popular than C# chords is likely only a reflection of the fact that it’s easier to play on the guitar and piano. So instead of answering this meaningless question, I’ll answer the slightly more interesting one of, what keys are most popular for the songs in the database?
C (and its relative minor, A) are the most common by far. After that there is a general trend favoring key signatures with less sharps and flats but this is not universal. Eb with 3 flats, for instance, is slightly (though not statistically significantly) more common than F with only 1 flat. Bb only has 2 flats but is way at the end of the popularity scale with only 4% of songs using that as the key.
2. What are the most common chords? Part 2
It’s much more interesting to look at songs written in a single common key. That way direct comparisons are possible and more illuminating. We transposed every song in the database to be in the key of C to make them directly comparable. Then we looked at the number of chord progressions that contained a given chord.
Below we’ve plotted the relative frequency that different chords occurred in descending order.
by Hooktheory.com | Read more:
In this article, we’ll look at the statistics gathered from 1300 choruses, verses, etc. of popular songs to discover the answer to a few basic questions. First we’ll look at the relative popularity of different chords based on the frequency that they appear in the chord progressions of popular music. Then we’ll begin to look at the relationship that different chords have with one another. For example, if a chord is found in a song, what can we say about the probability for what the next chord will be that comes after it?
The Database
To make quantitative statements about music you need to have data; lots of it. Guitar tab websites have tons of information about the chord progressions that songs use, but the quality is not very high. Just as important, the information is not in a format suitable for gathering statistics. So, over the past 2 years we’ve been slowly and painstakingly building up a database of songs taken mainly from the billboard 100 and analyzing them 1 at a time. At the moment the database of songs has over 1300 entries indexed. The genre and where they are taken from is important. This is an analysis of mainly “popular” music, not jazz or classical, so the results are not meant to be treated as universal. If you’re interested, you can check out the database here. The entries contain raw information about the chords and melody, while throwing out information about the arrangement and instrumentation.
We can use the information in the song database to answer all sorts of questions. In this introductory post, I’ll look at a few interesting preliminary results, but we invite you to propose your own questions in the comments at the end of the article.
Let’s get started.
1. Are some chords more commonly used than others?
This seems like such a basic question, but the answer doesn’t actually tell us much because songs are written in different keys. A song written in C# will have lots of C# chords in it, while a song written in G will probably have lots of G’s. That G chords are more popular than C# chords is likely only a reflection of the fact that it’s easier to play on the guitar and piano. So instead of answering this meaningless question, I’ll answer the slightly more interesting one of, what keys are most popular for the songs in the database?
C (and its relative minor, A) are the most common by far. After that there is a general trend favoring key signatures with less sharps and flats but this is not universal. Eb with 3 flats, for instance, is slightly (though not statistically significantly) more common than F with only 1 flat. Bb only has 2 flats but is way at the end of the popularity scale with only 4% of songs using that as the key.
2. What are the most common chords? Part 2
It’s much more interesting to look at songs written in a single common key. That way direct comparisons are possible and more illuminating. We transposed every song in the database to be in the key of C to make them directly comparable. Then we looked at the number of chord progressions that contained a given chord.
Below we’ve plotted the relative frequency that different chords occurred in descending order.
by Hooktheory.com | Read more:
Spoiled Rotten
The notion that we may be raising a generation of kids who can’t, or at least won’t, tie their own shoes has given rise to a new genre of parenting books. Their titles tend to be either dolorous (“The Price of Privilege”) or downright hostile (“The Narcissism Epidemic,” “Mean Moms Rule,” “A Nation of Wimps”). The books are less how-to guides than how-not-to’s: how not to give in to your toddler, how not to intervene whenever your teen-ager looks bored, how not to spend two hundred thousand dollars on tuition only to find your twenty-something graduate back at home, drinking all your beer.
Not long ago, Sally Koslow, a former editor-in-chief of McCall’s, discovered herself in this last situation. After four years in college and two on the West Coast, her son Jed moved back to Manhattan and settled into his old room in the family’s apartment, together with thirty-four boxes of vinyl LPs. Unemployed, Jed liked to stay out late, sleep until noon, and wander around in his boxers. Koslow set out to try to understand why he and so many of his peers seemed stuck in what she regarded as permanent “adultescence.” She concluded that one of the reasons is the lousy economy. Another is parents like her.
“Our offspring have simply leveraged our braggadocio, good intentions, and overinvestment,” Koslow writes in her new book, “Slouching Toward Adulthood: Observations from the Not-So-Empty Nest” (Viking). They inhabit “a broad savannah of entitlement that we’ve watered, landscaped, and hired gardeners to maintain.” She recommends letting the grasslands revert to forest: “The best way for a lot of us to show our love would be to learn to un-mother and un-father.” One practical tip that she offers is to do nothing when your adult child finally decides to move out. In the process of schlepping Jed’s stuff to an apartment in Carroll Gardens, Koslow’s husband tore a tendon and ended up in emergency surgery.
Madeline Levine, a psychologist who lives outside San Francisco, specializes in treating young adults. In “Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success” (HarperCollins), she argues that we do too much for our kids because we overestimate our influence. “Never before have parents been so (mistakenly) convinced that their every move has a ripple effect into their child’s future success,” she writes. Paradoxically, Levine maintains, by working so hard to help our kids we end up holding them back.
by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker | Read more:
ILLUSTRATION: Christoph Abbrederis
The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever
Fong, 48 years old, 6 feet tall with broad shoulders, pulls the ball into his chest and does a quick shimmy with his hips. He swings the ball first backward, then forward, his arm a pendulum of kinetic energy, as he takes five measured steps toward the foul line. He releases the ball, and it glides across the oiled wooden planks like it’s floating, hydroplaning, spinning counterclockwise along a trajectory that seems to be taking it straight for the right-hand gutter. But as the ball nears the edge of the lane, it veers back toward the center, as if guided by remote control. The hook carries the ball back just in time. In a heartbeat, what was a wide, sneering mouth of pins is now—nothing.
He comes back to the table where his teammates are seated—they always sit and bowl in the same order—and they congratulate him the same way they have thousands of times over the last decade. But Fong looks displeased. His strike wasn’t good enough.
“I got pretty lucky that time,” he says in his distinctly Chicago accent. “The seven was hanging there before it fell. I’ve got to make adjustments.” With a pencil, he jots down notes on a folded piece of blue paper.
His teammates aren’t interested in talking about what he can do to make his strikes more solid, though, or even tonight’s mildly competitive league game. They’re still discussing a night two years ago. They mention it every week, without fail. In fact, all you have to do is say the words “That Night” and everyone at the Plano Super Bowl knows what you’re talking about. They also refer to it as “The Incident” or “That Incredible Series.” It’s the only time anyone can remember a local recreational bowler making the sports section of the Dallas Morning News. One man, an opponent of Fong’s that evening, calls it “the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in a bowling alley.”
Bill Fong needs no reminders, of course. He thinks about that moment—those hours—every single day of his life.
Most people think perfection in bowling is a 300 game, but it isn’t. Any reasonably good recreational bowler can get lucky one night and roll 12 consecutive strikes. If you count all the bowling alleys all over America, somebody somewhere bowls a 300 every night. But only a human robot can roll three 300s in a row—36 straight strikes—for what’s called a “perfect series.” More than 95 million Americans go bowling, but, according to the United States Bowling Congress, there have been only 21 certified 900s since anyone started keeping track.
by Michael J. Mooney, D Magazine | Read more:
Photo: allBowling.com
A Weapon We Can’t Control
The decision by the United States and Israel to develop and then deploy the Stuxnet computer worm against an Iranian nuclear facility late in George W. Bush’s presidency marked a significant and dangerous turning point in the gradual militarization of the Internet. Washington has begun to cross the Rubicon. If it continues, contemporary warfare will change fundamentally as we move into hazardous and uncharted territory.
It is one thing to write viruses and lock them away safely for future use should circumstances dictate it. It is quite another to deploy them in peacetime. Stuxnet has effectively fired the starting gun in a new arms race that is very likely to lead to the spread of similar and still more powerful offensive cyberweaponry across the Internet. Unlike nuclear or chemical weapons, however, countries are developing cyberweapons outside any regulatory framework.
There is no international treaty or agreement restricting the use of cyberweapons, which can do anything from controlling an individual laptop to disrupting an entire country’s critical telecommunications or banking infrastructure. It is in the United States’ interest to push for one before the monster it has unleashed comes home to roost.
Stuxnet was originally deployed with the specific aim of infecting the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in Iran. This required sneaking a memory stick into the plant to introduce the virus to its private and secure “offline” network. But despite Natanz’s isolation, Stuxnet somehow escaped into the cyberwild, eventually affecting hundreds of thousands of systems worldwide.
This is one of the frightening dangers of an uncontrolled arms race in cyberspace; once released, virus developers generally lose control of their inventions, which will inevitably seek out and attack the networks of innocent parties. Moreover, all countries that possess an offensive cyber capability will be tempted to use it now that the first shot has been fired.
by Misha Glenny, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Henning Wagenbreth
It is one thing to write viruses and lock them away safely for future use should circumstances dictate it. It is quite another to deploy them in peacetime. Stuxnet has effectively fired the starting gun in a new arms race that is very likely to lead to the spread of similar and still more powerful offensive cyberweaponry across the Internet. Unlike nuclear or chemical weapons, however, countries are developing cyberweapons outside any regulatory framework. There is no international treaty or agreement restricting the use of cyberweapons, which can do anything from controlling an individual laptop to disrupting an entire country’s critical telecommunications or banking infrastructure. It is in the United States’ interest to push for one before the monster it has unleashed comes home to roost.
Stuxnet was originally deployed with the specific aim of infecting the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in Iran. This required sneaking a memory stick into the plant to introduce the virus to its private and secure “offline” network. But despite Natanz’s isolation, Stuxnet somehow escaped into the cyberwild, eventually affecting hundreds of thousands of systems worldwide.
This is one of the frightening dangers of an uncontrolled arms race in cyberspace; once released, virus developers generally lose control of their inventions, which will inevitably seek out and attack the networks of innocent parties. Moreover, all countries that possess an offensive cyber capability will be tempted to use it now that the first shot has been fired.
by Misha Glenny, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Henning Wagenbreth
Sunday, June 24, 2012
I Never Owned Any Music to Begin With
When an NPR Music intern admitted to paying for almost none of the
11,000 songs in her iTunes library, David Lowery, of Cracker and Camper
Van Beethoven fame and lecturer for the University of Georgia's music
business program, took it as an opportunity to explain the ethics of a
sustainable music industry, and the debate went viral. Here's the initial blog post, with links to the professor's response and NPR's coverage of the debate below.
A few days before my internship at All Songs Considered started, Bob Boilen posted an article titled "I Just Deleted All My Music"
on this blog. The post is about entrusting his huge personal music
library to the cloud. Though this seemed like a bold step to many people
who responded to the article, to me, it didn't seem so bold at all.
David Lowery's response and NPR's coverage.
by Henry Molofsky, 3 Quarks Daily | Read more:
A few days before my internship at All Songs Considered started, Bob Boilen posted an article titled "I Just Deleted All My Music"
on this blog. The post is about entrusting his huge personal music
library to the cloud. Though this seemed like a bold step to many people
who responded to the article, to me, it didn't seem so bold at all.
I never went through the transition from
physical to digital. I'm almost 21, and since I first began to love
music I've been spoiled by the Internet.
I am an avid music listener,
concertgoer, and college radio DJ. My world is music-centric. I've only
bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds
11,000 songs.
David Lowery's response and NPR's coverage.
by Henry Molofsky, 3 Quarks Daily | Read more:
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Miso Soup (by CY Phang)
Recipe (cheating way to do it fast ):
1. Use 1 sachet of prepacked bonito daishi (bonito flakes stock), I used a non-MSG version. You can get them at supermarket, Japanese food section. Boil 2 pints of water, then add in the bonito daishi powder. Boil for about 10 minutes, then add 2 tbsp of miso (I used an organic version of miso).
2. Cut up the silken tofu into small cubes.
3. Wash up a small packet of enoki mushroom and add to the boiling soup. Sprinkle some dehydrated wakame (a type of seaweed, I bought the “instant” one at the supermarket) and boil with the enoki mushroom for about 3 minutes.
4. Dish the soup into a bowl and put in the diced silken tofu and sprinkle with some thinly sliced spring onion before serving hot.
5. ENJOY
Recipe (cheating way to do it fast ):
1. Use 1 sachet of prepacked bonito daishi (bonito flakes stock), I used a non-MSG version. You can get them at supermarket, Japanese food section. Boil 2 pints of water, then add in the bonito daishi powder. Boil for about 10 minutes, then add 2 tbsp of miso (I used an organic version of miso).
2. Cut up the silken tofu into small cubes.
3. Wash up a small packet of enoki mushroom and add to the boiling soup. Sprinkle some dehydrated wakame (a type of seaweed, I bought the “instant” one at the supermarket) and boil with the enoki mushroom for about 3 minutes.
4. Dish the soup into a bowl and put in the diced silken tofu and sprinkle with some thinly sliced spring onion before serving hot.
5. ENJOY
Ellison Buys Lanai
Larry Ellison won an America's Cup sailing in 2010, and then wrestled with San Francisco city leaders over his big plans for two waterfront piers. He owns a mansion atop a San Francisco hill with a sweeping view of the Golden Gate Bridge to the left and Alcatraz to the right. He has spent a fortune snapping up some of Southern California's most prized beachfront property in Malibu.
For Oracle CEO Ellison an island in the middle of the Pacific is right up his alley.
He built Oracle Corp. with $1,200 in 1977 and is the world's sixth richest billionaire. He inked a deal announced this week by the governor to buy 98 percent of the island's 141 square miles.
While detailed plans for the island have yet to be revealed, he's likely to do something "epic and grand," said Mike Wilson, who wrote the first biography of Ellison, "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison."
"He could build the world's largest rare butterfly sanctuary, a medical research facility to help him live forever or a really cool go-cart track," Wilson said Thursday – but only half-jokingly, because those are the kinds of outlandish interests Ellison has.
As a man who feels cheated by a limited life-span, he's like a kid who never grew up but yet is a great visionary, Wilson said.
Wilson said the high-tech maverick won't be concerned with how his lifestyle will jibe with a laid-back island where longtime residents are grappling with the loss of their pineapple fields to make way for luxury development: "I don't think his primary concern is fitting in with what Hawaiians want." (...)
While Lanaians are eager for someone who might restore agriculture to the island's economy or someone who appreciates the unique culture of Hawaii, residents also are familiar with living on what Castle & Cooke calls the largest privately held island in the United States.
"Lanai folks have always been sort of under this benevolent ownership, which goes back to the Dole days," University of Hawaii historian Warren Nishimoto said of Lanai's ownership in the 1920s by the founder of Dole Foods Co. "They never felt comfortable about what the future is for the island. It's at the whims of an owner."
by Jennifer Sinco Kelleher, Huffington Post | Read more:
Photo: Robin Kaye via Bloomberg News
Getting Lost in the Labyrinth of Medical Bills
Like most patients and their families, the ailing man’s wife — who didn’t want to be identified because of concern her husband’s care could be compromised — simply wanted to figure out how much she really owed. That simple question has no simple answer, as an increasing number of consumers are finding out now that they are shouldering a greater share of their health care costs — whether they have a high-deductible plan, coinsurance or because they’re underinsured (or not insured at all). How did the hospital or doctor arrive at these charges? Are the charges reasonable? And are the charges for services actually rendered?
Hospital care tends to be the most confounding, and experts say the charges you see on your bill are usually completely unrelated to the cost of providing the services (at hospitals, these list prices are called the “charge master file”). “The charges have no rhyme or reason at all,” Gerard Anderson, director of the Center for Hospital Finance and Management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Why is 30 minutes in the operating room $2,000 and not $1,500? There is absolutely no basis for setting that charge. It is not based upon the cost, and it’s not based upon the market forces, other than the whim of the C.F.O. of the hospital.”
And those charges don’t really have any connection to what a hospital or medical provider will accept for payment, either. “If you line up five patients in their beds and they all have gall bladders removed and they get the same exact medication and services, if they have insurance or if they don’t have insurance, the hospital will get five different reimbursements, and none of it is based on cost,” said Holly Wallack, a medical billing advocate in Miami Beach. “The insurers negotiate a different rate, and if you are uninsured, underinsured or out of network, you are asked to pay full fare.”
With the exception of Medicare and Medicaid, experts say, the amount paid for services — or the price your insurers pay — is based on the market power of the insurance company on the one side and the hospitals and providers on the other, and the reimbursement agreements they ultimately reach. So large insurers that command a lot of market power may be able to negotiate lower rates than smaller companies with less influence. Or, insurers can place hospitals or providers on a preferred list, which may help bolster their business, in exchange for a lower reimbursement rate. On the other hand, well-regarded hospitals may command higher prices from insurers.
by Tara Siegel Bernard, NY Times | Read more:
Hospital care tends to be the most confounding, and experts say the charges you see on your bill are usually completely unrelated to the cost of providing the services (at hospitals, these list prices are called the “charge master file”). “The charges have no rhyme or reason at all,” Gerard Anderson, director of the Center for Hospital Finance and Management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Why is 30 minutes in the operating room $2,000 and not $1,500? There is absolutely no basis for setting that charge. It is not based upon the cost, and it’s not based upon the market forces, other than the whim of the C.F.O. of the hospital.”
And those charges don’t really have any connection to what a hospital or medical provider will accept for payment, either. “If you line up five patients in their beds and they all have gall bladders removed and they get the same exact medication and services, if they have insurance or if they don’t have insurance, the hospital will get five different reimbursements, and none of it is based on cost,” said Holly Wallack, a medical billing advocate in Miami Beach. “The insurers negotiate a different rate, and if you are uninsured, underinsured or out of network, you are asked to pay full fare.”
With the exception of Medicare and Medicaid, experts say, the amount paid for services — or the price your insurers pay — is based on the market power of the insurance company on the one side and the hospitals and providers on the other, and the reimbursement agreements they ultimately reach. So large insurers that command a lot of market power may be able to negotiate lower rates than smaller companies with less influence. Or, insurers can place hospitals or providers on a preferred list, which may help bolster their business, in exchange for a lower reimbursement rate. On the other hand, well-regarded hospitals may command higher prices from insurers.
by Tara Siegel Bernard, NY Times | Read more:
Friday, June 22, 2012
Please RT
The signed-up user is apt to have more mixed feelings. At its best, Twitter delights and instructs. Somebody, often somebody you wouldn’t expect, condenses the World-Spirit into a great joke, epigram, or aperçu. What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed, you think, and favorite the tweet. Or: So funny, and you retweet. Pretty nice, also, when the ricocheting retweets say that the witty one is you! As for instruction, you can learn a lot from Twitter. Your Facebook or face-to-face friends may let you know what they think you should read, hear, watch. But are you friends with the famous environmentalist who, live-tweeting the apocalypse, tells you each time a new locality sets an April heat record in March? Or with Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose ghost had a feed? It’s an education to follow an experimental poet in Calgary obsessed with the digitization of art; a lefty Keynesian who’s crunched the numbers on student debt; an Occupier who reports whenever one of her comrades gets attacked by the NYPD. A tweet’s a narrow window, but nothing says that one of those can’t disclose — or, by way of URL compressers, link to — a big terrain.
Look at your Twitter feed at the wrong moment, however, or send a dumb tweet yourself, and a bad infinity opens up onto the narcissistical sublime. What tweet is that, flashing, subliminally, behind the others? In exactly 140 characters: “I need to be noticed so badly that I can’t pay attention to you except inasmuch as it calls attention to me. I know for you it’s the same.” In this way, a huge crowd of people — 40 percent more users since last year — devalue one another through mutual self-importance. The much-tweeted-about Lena Dunham has said her father finds Twitter “infinitely unrelatable”: “He’s like, ‘Why would I want to tell anybody what I had for a snack, it’s private?!’ And I’m like, ‘Why would you even have a snack if you didn’t tell anybody? Why bother eating?’” (...)
The Rise of the Tweet takes place amid an internet-induced cheapening of language, in both good and bad senses.
The economic cheapness of digital publication democratizes expression and gives a necessary public to writers, and types of writing, that otherwise would be confined to the hard drive or the desk drawer. And yet the supreme ease of putting words online has opened up vast new space for carelessness, confusion, whateverism. Outside of Twitter, a coercive blogginess, a paradoxically de rigueur relaxation, menaces a whole generation’s prose (no, yeah, ours too). You won’t sound contemporary and for real unless it sounds like you’re writing off the top of your head. Thus: “In The Jargon of Authenticity, Adorno went bonkers with rage, and took off after Heidegger and the existentialists with a buzz saw, loudly condemning the sloppy word that these dumb existentialists sloppily use to brag about how they know what is real and what isn’t.” This appeared on a blog (The Awl), so its blogginess shouldn’t be held too much against it. But all contemporary publications tend toward the condition of blogs, and soon, if not yet already, it will seem pretentious, elitist, and old-fashioned to write anything, anywhere, with patience and care.
The accidental progenitor of the blogorrheic style is David Foster Wallace. What distinguishes Wallace’s writing from the prose it begot is a fusion of the scrupulous and the garrulous; all of our colloquialisms, typically diffusing a mist of vagueness over the world, are pressed into the service of exactness. To a generation of writers, the DFW style was the sound of telling the truth, as — in an opposite way — the flat declaratives and simplified vocabulary of Hemingway were for a different generation. But an individual style, terse or wordy, can breed a generalized mannerism, and the path once cleared to saying things truly and well is now an obstacle course. In the case of the blogorrheic style, institutional and technological pressures coincided with Wallace’s example. Bloggers (which more and more is just to say writers) had little or no editing to deal with, and if they blogged for money they needed to produce, produce. The combination discouraged the stylistic virtues of concision, selectivity, and impersonality.
by The Editors, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Bluebirds at Moraine State Park. From livingroomtunes.com
The Ahh-ness of Things
[ed. Cherry blossoms are thought to be particularly symbolic of the concept of mono no aware. The transience of the blossoms, the extreme beauty and quick death, has often been associated with mortality and the ephemeral nature of life.]
The word is derived from the Japanese word mono, which means "thing", and aware, which was a Heian period expression of measured surprise (similar to "ah" or "oh"), translating roughly as "pathos", "poignancy", "deep feeling", or "sensitivity". Thus, mono no aware has frequently been translated as "the 'ahh-ness' of things", life, and love. Awareness of the transience of all things heightens appreciation of their beauty, and evokes a gentle sadness at their passing.
via: Wikipedia
My Father’s Voice
So it was that George Plimpton’s accent could not be imitated. On “Saturday Night Live,” even the great impersonator Dana Carvey couldn’t get it quite right. Alan Alda, portraying my dad in the movie version of “Paper Lion” (his book on playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions), didn’t bother with his voice at all. He got the personality totally wrong, too. Alda’s version was always angry or consternated, like a character in a Woody Allen film, while my dad, though he certainly faced hurdles as an amateur in the world of the professional, bore his humiliations with a comic lightness and charm—much of which emanated from that befuddled, self-deprecating professor’s voice.
Of course, my dad had tried out for the role of himself and not gotten it, though he would go on to have a steady film career playing one version or another of a striking white-haired figure with a distinguished, chivalrous voice in bit roles in some twenty or so movies, including “Reds” and “Good Will Hunting.” Fortunately, in the upcoming film “Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself,” which documents his life, adventures, and work as participatory journalist and editor of the Paris Review, my dad will be playing himself one more time. Premièring on June 21st at the SilverDocs festival, in Washington, D.C., and directed by Tom Bean and Luke Poling, the film contains interviews with notable friends and peers like Hugh Hefner, Peter Matthiessen, and James Lipton, though the majority of this remarkable account is narrated by none other than George Plimpton. (The filmmakers assembled his voice-over from recorded speeches and other archival footage.) As Poling puts it, “George was known as an unrivaled raconteur and, in making a film of his life story, it only seemed natural to allow him to tell it.”
If you didn’t know the man, you could, I think, be fooled by the voice. I mean, if George Plimpton wasn’t my father and I’d never met him, and I heard that voice emerge from his lips and matched it with his severe Roman features and his usual blue blazer, oxford shirt, and tie, I might have assumed that he was a little pompous or snooty or affected.
Actually, that’s not far off from how my mom felt when she first met him. She was having lunch at P. J. Clarke’s with the publisher Bennet Cerf and his son Chris, and my dad swooped over to the table (he was wearing a cape) and introduced himself in that ridiculously gallant voice: “Bennet, Chris, what a pleasant surprise! …And what have we here?” My mom’s initial impression was that he was a little hoity-toity—“I mean, who did this guy think he was?”
But the second time they met, it was, in fact, my father’s voice that won her over. She’d wandered out to the balcony of a lonely Manhattan cocktail party, and was standing out there, smoking a cigarette and looking down mournfully at the street far below, when from behind her she heard a voice: “I know a better way down.”
by Taylor Plimpton, The New Yorker | Read more:
Photo: Taylor Plimpton.
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