Hippo Dignity

Big ups to header-quote-provider Richard Powers, whose new novel The Echo Maker won The National Book Award for fiction last night.

I have a copy of The Echo Maker, bought at a Borders in Chicago with the Zombie Queen and King last month, still in my suitcase. I’m looking forward to sitting down with it soon. Ahead of it on the reading queue? The End, the last of the Lemony Snicket books, and Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between, bought at the Powell’s mothership in my new second-favorite city, Portland, OR. (Also bought at Powell’s: the awesome David Chinitz’s long-awaited T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, which does me the great honor of citing my paper on Eliot’s interest in, and criticism of, mystery fiction.)

As regular readers of my non-posting know, I’ve spent a lot of the past year traveling to do user research.

Part of what all that travel does to you — or, at least, to me — is make you value the specificity of your own local life all the more. At my coffee store, this past weekend, not only did the guy behind the counter know what I get and how often I generally come by (Vienna Roast, every other week), but he handed me a box of tissues as a way of gently telling me the cold was making my nose run.

But that also means you value the specificity of other people’s local lives, too. And so it was especially heartening, I think, to see the election results come out as clearly a national trend as they were. We’re different in a hundred thousand subtle and endlessly fascinating ways, but in the end, there are some things Americans can agree on, and that’s just got to give you hope.

So, today is the West Indian Day parade, which takes place down the major boulevard in my neighborhood and is generally one of the things I look forward to the most about the end of the summer. Today, though, I can’t go, as I’m about to head back out on the road for a week and a half. (Fear not, as my apartment is guarded by the superstitious paranoids next door and my robotic cat.)

Instead, I went down to Duane Reade to pick up some items to help me with a long flight in the middle of our government’s War On Moisture. (Towelettes, cough drops, the like). When I turned back up my block, a cop stopped me.

“Do you live on this street?” she asked.

“Yeah, I live here.” What was going on? I wondered. An accident?

“Can I see some ID?”

“No, I don’t have any with me. Why?”

“We’re only letting people who live on this street go through. What’s your address?”

I gave her the street number. “What street?” I repeated the name of the street we were on. “Cross streets?” I told her.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Extra security for the parade,” explained her partner. “We want to make sure no one’s walking through here with a bomb or anything.”

I just stared at him. “Extra security? I’ve been living here for seven years,” I said, “and I’ve never seen these streets get blocked off for the parade.” (Mind you, at this point we were a good five or six blocks from where the parade route goes.)

“Well, you know, 9/11?” he said sneeringly. “It changed things.”

I wanted to note that I hadn’t seen it change things in 2002-2005, inclusive, but I have a plane to catch for work and I really couldn’t risk getting picked up by the NYPD without ID on me and missing my flight. So I just said, “Look, I know you’re just doing your job, so I’m not gonna make an issue with you, but this is stupid,” and walked away as they laughed. There were no more blockades as I walked closer to the parade route.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are always a lot of cops on the street for the West Indian Day parade — there are a lot of people out, many of them drinking, and some crowd control is a good thing. But blocking off streets — and, again, these are streets within hearing distance of the parade but a good five-ten minute walk TO the parade — and saying that it’s “because of 9/11″? As I said to Terri, who used to live down the block, “of all the targets on al-Quaeda’s list, the West Indian Day parade is not one of them.”

All I can say, as I try to decide if it’s more worth it to me to wear my orthotics and not have foot pain or to put them in my bag and spare myself the five minute quiz at security about what I have in my shoes, is thank God the terrorists haven’t taken away our freedom, right?

While the lefty blogs are enjoying the downfall of The New Republic’s culture blogger Lee Siegel, who was canned for creating a “sock puppet” commenter called “sprezzatura” to defend him in comments, I find myself torn.  For while I as an observer of web culture love the idea of the coiner of the term “blogofascists” losing his job over a blogging malfeasance, as a big literature geek, I hate the thought that this is most people’s introduction to the very useful and far-too-underutilized concept of “sprezzatura.”

The term comes from Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528), and it means, basically, hard-won graceful mastery that betrays none of the effort of its creation.  Something that seems effortlessly perfect, even if tons of effort goes into it.  Think of what Martha Stewart might be like if she were able to unclench, and you’ll get the idea.

When we learned the term my first year in grad school, I understood it immediately.  In college, sprezzatura had been the unnamed goal of all my friends: even the papers you pulled an all-nighter on, you’d claim gave you no trouble at all.  Dense philosophical treatises?  You skimmed them before class, of course, although how anyone could have made such a good point about Husserl on only a brief acquaintance with the material boggled all your friends’ minds.  It was an attitude I had to unlearn in grad school, because of course in grad school the thing to do is bitch and moan about how hard it all is.

There was, however, one of my grad school cohort who managed to embody what can only be called a surly sprezzatura — Mike, who would famously say things like “I’d rather be asleep than having this conversation” and yet was probably the most incisive reader of the lot of us.  It was Hilary who first started calling him “Spretz,” and it stuck for a while, despite Mike’s wanting to have none of it.  As a result, when I think of “sprezzatura,” I don’t think of the chain-smoking semiotots of my undergrad years, but an amused bearded guy who told me that if you didn’t wake up every morning of your graduate education and think “do I still want to do this?” you were doing it wrong.  I’d hate to think that the term will be associated for a larger public with a James Kincaid-hating, Jon Stewart-bashing, pretentious jerk.  Take back the spretz!

Via Last Plane to Jakarta, I found Harp magazine (which, seriously, how had I not heard of this before?) and a short piece by John Darnielle titled “How Souled American’s Flubber Changed My Life.” It’s a lovely piece, and I’ll wait here while you read it, but my first thought on reading that title was “WTF is it
with Souled American?”

Some of my first conversations with Mark Lerner were about Souled American, and the beautiful set of posters he helped create as public fan art about the band. I think that there must be two types of people: those who have never heard of Souled American (or like me, have heard of them but never gripped enough by their music to seek more of it out (sorry, guys)) and crazy-passionate fans.

Of course, they’re not the only band of that type — I resonated with Mark’s relationship to Souled American because the only thing that got me through grad school was the drugs nervous breakdown Hats Mekons. In fact, I used to teach subcultural affiliation as a concept by wearing my “I ♥ Mekons” T-shirt to class. Nine people out of ten, I’d say, ask me “what’s a Mekon?” But as a result, that tenth person, who nods, or says yeah!, or says me too, that person feels, however briefly, like my comrade in arms.

(We would pause here for an excursus on how the Mekons’ music encourages that sort of sociality in a way that Souled Americans’ more introverted sound could lead to thinking of them as a private treasure, and in general on the ways in which artists work to construct their own audiences, but it is too long an essay to fit onto the Internet.)

I wonder: are there things about a band, other than its lack of mainstream success, that make it a candidate for this sort of fandom. Is there something about the directness of the sound? the lyrics? or is it something that’s just a quicksilver interaction between the person, the moment, the records in question?

I hate the word “meme” with a violent passion, so even though I accept Telecommuniculturally’s challenge, I’m going to call it a questionnaire. Which is my right, since it is one.

1. One book you have read more than once
I am reminded of Jesse Sheidlower quoting Umberto Eco about his library, “when people ask if I’ve really read all these books, I say, some of them more than once.” It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.

So I’ll say Winter’s Tale, by Mark Helprin, which in 10th grade or so I would read to the end and then immediately start reading again. There have only been a few books I can say that about, and certainly Winter’s Tale was the first. Helprin did a reading for his latest in Park Slope recently, and if I’d been in town I would have been tempted to go and say “I could not disagree with your politics more profoundly on a bet, but I love your fiction.”

2. One book you would want on a desert island
The best answer I’ve seen for this one is Robinson Crusoe, for the survival tips! Right now, it would be Infinite Jest, since I’d like the uninterrupted time to actually finish the thing, and it would be neat to go back to it now that we’re up to the time in which the book takes place. I’ve been on a bit of a DFW kick lately, what with his Federer piece in the Times and having a bit from The Broom of the System stuck in my head most of the early part of this week.

3. One book that made you laugh.
Joy in the Morning, by P.G. Wodehouse. Really, anything by Wodehouse will do.

4. One book that made you cry.
I rarely cry at books, at movies, TV, any of that, but The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay just made me weep.

5. One book you wish you had written.
Emma. Or, as John Ramsburgh once called it, in full Kowalski-voice, “EMMMMAAAAAAAAAAA!” So sharp, so funny, so beautifully constructed. Read it once, and then read it again to really get all the jokes. Sigh.

6. One book you wish had never been written.
Oh, hm. Mein Kampf is too easy, isn’t it? Spengler’s Decline of the West, then, without which Germany wouldn’t have been ready for the creepy little Austrian anyhow.

7. One book you are currently reading.
Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction, by Paul Dourish. I’m so lame. But I do groove on the way that the importance of thinking of the user as embodied actor moving in historically specific space(s), the pleasures and limits of embodiment, is starting to grab hold in interaction design, if only because I’ve already done so much of the reading already.

8. One book you have been meaning to read.
I’d like to re-read Mason & Dixon before the new Pynchon comes out. At Powell’s last week, I bought Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between, David Chinitz’s T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide, Alison Bechdel’s memoir Fun Home, Where The Action Is, and a UI patterns book. Oh, and Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which I’m looking forward to.

9. One Book That Changed Your Life.
Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 didn’t so much change my life as bring my life into clearer focus for me, which helped me change it, mostly for the better. Computers, literature, the difficult importance of being in the world rather than just observing it… what’s not to love?

10. Now tag five people
This is always the part of these things that make me cringe, so as much as I’d love to see, say, Amy, Terri, Harry, Shana, and David answer this, I refuse to insist, especially since I know David doesn’t read anything other than instruction manuals.

(Note: edited 10/16/06 to correct the Eco quote (thank you, Jesse) and the Powell’s haul list.)

At the end of a long research project: we’ve logged something like 20,000 miles in the air so far, and that’s before the two trips out west to present our results.   I want to do a full-on Jan Chipchase and post about the pleasures and terrors of doing user research far from home, but for now I’ll leave you with this vivid warning sign from the Milan subways.  Never attempt to have sex with the train doors, people, and have a good weekend.

Ultimately, the meaning of a tool is inseparable from the stories that surround it.  Consider the similarity between what is involved in creating and using a tool and the sequence of narrative.  Even the chimpanzee picking up and peeling a twig to “fish” for termites requires the mental projection of a sequence, including an initial desire, several actions, and successful feeding.  The sequence becomes more complex where more tools are involved, or when the same tool is used in several ways.  Composing a narrative and using a tool are not identical processes, but they have affinities.  Each requires the imagination of altered circumstances, and in each case beings must see themselves to be living in time.  Making a tool immediately implies a succession of events in which one exercises some control over outcomes.  Either to tell a story or to make a tool is to adopt an imaginary position outside immediate sensory experience.  In each case, one imagines how present circumstances might be made different.

– David E. Nye, Technology Matters: Questions to Live With

Proof of Clive’s theory that history now happens twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as videogame: the Zidane headbutt game. Created, of course, by someone at an Italian address.

I was heartbroken by the awful end of Zidane’s game, and career. But even I have to admit that it’s a pretty amusing piece of Flash.

I listen to less classical music these days than I ever did, and it was never my primary music love. But I listen to and read enough about it that sometimes, an extraordinary artist still catches my attention.

I was introduced to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s work through a rave review by Alex Ross of the New Yorker. So it’s apt in a way that I should learn of her untimely death from cancer at 52 from his blog as well.

One of the first things I bonded with Turi over was Lieberson’s work — I lent her my copy of Lieberson’s Handel arias shortly after we started working together. She invited me in turn to what was supposed to be a performance by Lieberson of a new work by her husband, composer Peter Lieberson, as part of a series of quasi-educational concerts by the New York Philharmonic. The Liebersons cancelled that concert, and we saw Elliott Carter speak to a performance of a recent work instead — wonderful, and inspiring to see a man so engaged with his art in his late 90s — but we were both hoping that next season, we might get to hear what we’d missed.