The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin.
Stuff I Should Be Reading: The Reactionary Mind
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Author Archives: Richard Bowker
Stuff I Should Be Reading: Physics on the Fringe
Might as well track them here, so I can look back at these entries and feel guilty:
Physics on the Fringe by Margaret Wertheim.
You Have No Idea
Along with Bill Cunningham, Claus von Bulow is also a real person who is stranger than we can imagine:
This line was so good that Jeremy Irons recycled it for another audience:
1Q84, Part 2
Four hundred pages in, the links between the two characters representing the two narrative threads are a lot clearer: they held hands once when they were ten years old, and now they are somehow linked forever, though they haven’t met since. Both are confronting a shadowy religious conspiracy. But there’s a fundamental weirdness, with one of them apparently having slipped into a parallel world imagined by the other. Suspense is building, as both characters find themselves in increasing jeopardy.
But the thing I’m having the most trouble with in Murakami’s weird universe is a basic real-world setup: one of the characters, Tengo, has rewritten someone else’s story at his editor’s behest, in order to make the story win a new-writer contest for a literary magazine. Apparently, in 1984 Tokyo, winning this contest is a big deal, with huge press coverage, and if it ever gets out that Tengo rewrote the story, there will be an equally huge scandal. Huh? Knowing nothing about Tokyo in 1984, I have no sense of whether this is realistic. But I’m pretty sure no one cares about awards from literary magazines in my neck of the woods….
I’m having a lot more difficulty with this than I am with the more straightforward fantasy elements of the story. OK, so one of the characters sees two moons in the sky; little people spin themselves out of a sleeping character’s mouth and make a dog explode. I’ll buy that. But a press conference about a short story???
Bill Cunningham
“If this were play’d upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.” So says Fabian in Twelfth Night, going all meta on us.
Bill Cunningham New York is a documentary, but if Bill Cunningham were a character in a novel, critics would condemn him as an improbable fiction. Who could come up with the idea of an 80-year-old guy who lives in a tiny apartment without a bathroom or a kitchen, pedaling around New York taking photos of the fashion of the moment for publication in the New York Times? Beloved by everyone who knows him, he’s never had a girlfriend or a boyfriend. He lives only for clothes, a humble monk in the religion of Fashion, but he himself wears the same serviceable outfit day in and day out. At Fashion Week in Paris, there is some trouble with his credentials; finally a man appears out of nowhere and escorts him in, saying, “You don’t understand. This is the most important person in the world.”
J.B.S. Haldane said “the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” The same is true of human beings, I suspect.
New Year’s Day
U2 live:
Typos
Spellcheckers can pick up most typos, but not all.
Turning a published novel written before the word processing era into an e-book involves scanning the physical book, then using OCR software to turn the scan into editable text. The company that did this for Summit (eBook Prep) did a fine job scanning and cleaning up the text, but things slip through. This one tickled me. The original sentence was:
He looked at the faces of his fans.
The scanning/OCR process turned this into:
He looked at the feces of his fans.
The spellchecker liked this just fine!
New Year’s Eve
This video has only 3.7 million hits as of the time of embedding. What’s the matter with people?
I notice that Charlie bit my finger — again! is approaching 400 million views. I wonder if this will lead to a worldwide decline in finger-biting; Steven Pinker should keep track of this for the next edition of The Better Angels of Our Nature.
Titles
The other night I was watching a video of Kenneth Branagh’s version of Twelfth Night:
Pretty good, although without the star power and heavier on the bleakness, I think, than the big-budget Trevor Nunn version. What struck me, though, was that Branagh decided to set the play in winter; he even includes a Christmas tree in one scene — it’s the prop behind which the conspirators hide during the Malvolio letter scene. This connected the play to its title, at least a little bit. The text itself has nothing to do with Christmas, or the Epiphany, or wintertime. There are theories as to why the play has its title, but, as with most theories about Shakespeare, there’s nothing much to back them up.
Shakespeare didn’t do much with titles. His tragedies and histories are uniformly named after their protagonists. His comedies seem to have throwaway titles — As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing. It’s almost as if he scribbled a few words on top of the manuscript before he took it to the Globe for the first rehearsal.
Titles for literary works are often problematic. How do you summarize a novel in a few words? How do you find the words that will make the book saleable? I have had editors change two of my titles — one of them for the better.
The best title ever was Great Expectations (most of Dickens’s titles were also just the names of his protagonists).
1Q84 also seems like a pretty good title, but that may only be because I haven’t heaved the book across the room yet.
Why a Galapagos tortoise?
Who doesn’t like Galapagos tortoises? Are you saying you don’t like Galapagos tortoises?
I’m told the web site needs more color. What’s more colorful than a Galapagos tortoise?
Richard Bowker 