You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: No, really, I mean it, government services are a fascist plot to make 80 year old grandma’s take a cab…or something

Via John Cole at Balloon Juice, this.

Seriously…I keep trying to write long, thoughtful, (or at least sticky-bun-fueled) posts on the fundamental pillars of right-wing fail (check this space in a bit for an example of same), and then I bump into stuff like the complaints of tea-baggers that the government failed to provide enough taxpayer subsidized mass transit to enable them to jump up and down at the bars of the cribs, waving their rattles and whilst stomping their diapered thighs in anguished protest of the fact that….government is too intrusive to permit them the liberties their due as narcissitic spoiled screaming brats patriotic Americans.

You can’t make jokes about these people…they are every comic’s nightmare, the subject that stomps on its own punch line.

And of course, more deeply, they routinely evoke the classic question, the most pertinent ever asked of the American irredentist right:  “Have you no sense of decency?”

Then and now, that query answers itself.

Image:  Unknown artist, “The Swaddled Twins” 1617

Reviews I Love to Read … As Long As It Ain’t About My Book: Wieseltier v. Podhoretz cage match edition.

I’m not an unequivocal fan of Leon Wieseltier, but even those whose disapprobation runs far richer than mine would acknowledge that he can sling both words and snarks with the pros.

Case in point, this devastating review of a book that I will not read and an argument that deserves ground-zero treatment:  Norman Podhoretz’s lament and “when-will-they-come-to-their-senses” screed about the odd truth that his co-religionists fail to see religious necessity, obvious to him, in unquestioning support for the worst elements in US and Israeli politics.*, **

But, despite the urge to footnote indulged in below, let me cease by paraphrasing Einstein in his memorable rebuke of (Christian) German militarism:  why so many words, when you can read Wieseltier empty his magazine into the twitching corpse of Podhoretz’s long, long effort to nullify the imperatives within Isiah and Micah.  For a sample, enjoy this:

…this is a dreary book. Its author has a completely axiomatic mind that is quite content to maintain itself in a permanent condition of apocalyptic excitation. His perspective is so settled, so confirmed, that it is a wonder he is not too bored to write.

Yeeow….and that’s only the beginning.  Wieseltier goes on, through two web-jumps, delightfully, playfully, magisterially ripping Podhoretz new orifices into which scorn may flow yet more freely.  Have fun.

(And yes….writers do like reading thorough, relentless, even vicious Cato-like reviews…as long as the Carthaginian text thus ploughed with salt does not issue from their own computer, or that of their friends.***

*OK.  That’s the short version.  But it captures the gist.

**As a Jew with deep Zionist family history (my ancestor, Sir Moses Montefiore, was one of the first sponsors of Jewish settlement outside the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem), I got no problem with support for Israel — but I’ve never for the life of me understood the sheer folly of assuming “support” = “sheep like endorsement of whatever the government of Israel (or any other nation) says or does.  This is an old and stale argument, but Podhoretz is an old and stale arguer, so I suppose it all makes for a tedious kind of eternal return of the same BS ….

***Making the assumption that such solitary misanthropes as writers have friends, and not just “friends”…in the sense of those to whom one may complain freely of editors, agents, booksellers, and an insufficiently entranced public.  As it happens, as I age, my pleasure in and the number of writers who are genuine friends grows.  One of the compensations for the most annoying property of the arrow of time.

Image:  Rembrandt van Rijn, “Jeremiah lamenting over the destruction of Jerusalem” 1630

More Newton and the Counterfeiter action: BBC and Guardian edition.

I’ve been almost completely remiss in continuing both my diary of Newton and the Counterfeiter,(Amazon, Powells, Barnes and Noble,Indiebound and  across the pond at Amazon.co.uk, Waterstones, Blackwells, Borders,John Smith & Son). and in keeping up to date with the recent flood of reviews.  There is a lot I want to talk about those reviews — thanks to many, especially on the web, who’ve taken notice of the book and written for love of what they found there, good and bad — and some disputes I want to start, by way of talking about a topic of surpassing interest to me:  the information/culture crevasse we’re now straddling as the old review world collapses, but a web-based book culture has yet to reach the point where it can take on the matching of readers to books with the reach the old media possessed.

That’s all by the by the by.  Here I just want to let anyone interested know that BBC Radio 4 has produced, and now finished broadcasting, a five part audio series (75 minutes in all) that is an abridgment of Newton and the Counterfeiter.  It’s five part iteration can be found here, and when the podcast version gets up, I’ll post that link too.

And to make my Labor Day weekend sweet, I checked my Google alerts just now (yes, I am that pathetic) to find that the novelist/literary critic-historian/writing pedagogue Rebecca Stott had lovely things to say about the book in The Guardian.  With that, I believe all the national dailies and Sunday papers in Britain (except The Sun, for whose inattention I am grateful, as I am that of News of the Week) have weighed in, and I’ll be noting others over the next week or so.  But Stott had such nice things to say that I couldn’t resist anticipating those roundups.  Money quotes:

In Levenson’s masterly hands, Chaloner emerges as an audacious criminal genius, a creature of a London described as a series of interconnected webs, a “swaying, shouting, shitting din – exhilarating, terrifying and incomprehensible”….

This is novelistic history writing of the best kind. Admittedly, the connections that Levenson makes – such as suggesting that Newton’s fury was driven by his conviction that counterfeiting was a perversion of alchemical practices – are sometimes overstretched. But the portrait he paints of a seemingly impenetrable London underworld and a genius making his way fearlessly into it in pursuit of a stable currency is mesmerising.

I’ll take that with my morning coffee any day.

Good Work Alert: Another MIT Science Writing Grad Student Making Good.

In today’s iteration of this sporadic series, check out some stuff by MacGregor Campbell, the man who is his own clan feud, and the pride of both the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing and The New Scientist‘s SF bureau, where he has interned this summer.

MacGregor, who had to suffer through the experience of being my advisee, is one of those polymathic students that can make their teachers feel both delighted and old.  He came to us as a musician and video artist, with a background in math and the teaching of that subject to high school students.  For a feel for his range and the flexibility of his mind, check out his blog, Main Sequence (a little slow to update just now, in the throes of his internship).

You’ll see there links to much of the work he’s done for the NS, along with his own sparks, but I’d like to draw attention to a couple of pieces.

First a little background.  Y’all may have noticed that the media landscape has changed a bit over the last few years.  One of those shifts has been to expect, increasingly as a matter of course, that prose on its own is not enough; the presentation of stories on the web is both enhanced by the incorporation of video, audio, and interactive elements, and it is transformed, at least in part, into work explicitly intended to entertain as well as inform.

More later, I’d guess, on the tension implied in that last statement, but here, just the practical problem for would-be writer/communicators in this evolving beat and medium.

The basic problem is this:  writing, creating good radio/audio, film making, and interactive design are all highly skilled crafts.  It takes time and practice — and talent, and passion, and habits of mind, and sensibility, ways of looking at or listening to the world — to get good or great at any of them.  The more one tries to master both the technical skills needed to, say, light, shoot and cut video, and to tell stories in the very different grammars of two or three different media, the harder it is to hone capacity in any one.

So, to MacGregor’s work:  check out these two interactives on health care, fine examples of why the web is a better delivery vehicle for mildly-enhanced prose than dead trees.  There is a reason traditional newspapers/magazines are bound for dodo-land, and it isn’t just MSM self-regard and feckless business decisions; the digital domain lets you do new, useful, sometimes transformative stuff with the material that is at the heart of the mission o f traditional media:  provide information within an apparatus that actually enhances a reader’s ability to understand what the writer is going on about.

And then look at this:  MacGregor (and friend’s) video on a development in robotics.

After seeing this, I wrote to MacGregor to ask him if the key point of …not quite dispute, but doubt…he and I wrangled over during the term had settled down for him.  I’m old fashioned about video, about new and integrated media in general.  I believe, strongly, in production and in the value of particular skills.  So when it came time to work with the MIT grad students on creating stories in audio and video, I emphasized a formal production procedure and sequence, the significance of writing your piece at every stage, from first story pitch, through articulated phases of treatment, shooting script, paper cut, and then on through the stages of editing and review.  And I emphasized old fashioned photographic and cinematographic skill, the use of a camera, knowledge of its particular properties, and above all, attention to lighting.  One thing we do differently at MIT than at some other programs is we bring in a national-shooter level DP to shoot for two days with our students — and to teach as the shoot proceeds about how to think about light, color, and motion as story telling tools, and not just decoration.

There is another approach that people use — some very well, which worries less about the formal steps in either the writing process or the shoot, and seeks to acquire the material first, and then cut whatever you’ve got, on the theory that what matters most is the event in front of the camera, and not the art, or artifice of the person behind it.  Both views have their merits, and when MacGregor came to MIT, he was definitely more immersed in the latter approach.

So when I saw his robotics video I asked him if the hoops through which I made him jump in the preparation of this documentary whilst at MIT were of any value to him.

To my great satisfaction, he answered yes, for both axes.  The emphasis on formalizing the production and writing process helped him a lot, he said, and he had found from his experience with our cameraman why one might do the kinds of things he had always disdained as a “catch the moment” documentarian.  So I have to say that the links I’ve sent you too above give me pride as well as pleasure; it’s hard to know, sometimes, if anything one tries to teach actually matters.  Here, generously, from MacGregor, I have some confirmation.

(And, btw, if any magazine editors are reading this:  I strongly suggest you think in two person teams, not one-man-bands.  Find those on your staff or in your orbit who love video, and match them up with writers who love prose story telling.  You’ll get more work done at a higher level than if you ask a good reporter to stop thinking about what’s being said to him or her and start thinking about the lighting triangle and whether or not you’ve got a directional enough mike to make that HVAC outlet in the upper corner an solvable problem.  Just my two cents.)

Illustration:  Movie poster for “The Kid,” 1921

A Brief Note On Kleingate/Aimai grace note edition

The intertubes burnt up this last week with news of the latest tantrum by occasionally satisfactory MSM writer Joe Klein.  The essence of the fracas has been Klein’s shame at being outed for nasty (and inaccurate) stuff he wrote about Glenn Greenwald to a “private” list of about 300 journalists.

(Memo to Joe — back when I worked at Time Inc., when dinosaurs ruled the earth, I heard the legendary Henry Grunwald tell a small group of us peons that nothing in writing should be assumed to be private.  If he hand-wrote himself a note on a memo pad on his desk, he said to us, he simply took it as a given that its contents would be known to his counterpart at Newsweek within the day.  Email?  It’s like taking out an ad in Variety. It says little for the acuity — the mere competence — of a journalist that he would commit anything to such a public medium as a message to a listserve that he wasn’t willing to hear read out in open court.)

Into this furore came the story of  the n0w-famous confrontation on the beach between blogger/blog commentator Aimai and the Great Klein himself, also much discussed.  To Klein’s distress, I might add, given that (a) Aimai is a witty, graceful, and stilleto-wielding writer, and, as it turns out, possessed of some serious progressive and hard-core journalistic bloodlines, being as she is a grandchild of the genuinely great I.F. Stone.

Klein made another elementary error here: he assumed that his audience was composed of folks he outranked on some intellectual or journalistic or simply analytical scale.  He was wrong.

Aimai herself described the encounter here, and then her response to Klein’s digging himself deeper, here.

I wrote an admiring comment to the latter piece in which I gave the most love to this bit:

I didn’t confront Klein because I’m somebody. I’m nobody special. I confronted him because I’msomething important—I’m a reader. In fact—I’m one of his readers.* That, it seems, was the unkindest cut of all. Because Klein writes, after a fashion, but he doesn’t read much. Certainly, he doesn’t read like a reader—lots of sources, lots of texts, across genres, and with curiosity. And thus he doesn’t expect that of his own readers. And because he thinks we are helpless birds, mouths open to consume any old regurgitated pap from daddy’s crop, he doesn’t acknowledge the duty he owes to his readers. To be diligent, to be thoughtful, to be honest, and above all to remember what he himself has written. He lacks the ethic of responsibility in a journalistic sense.

What I love about this, above the topical joy of this exacto-fine dissection, (Klein “writes, after a fashion”….yeeow!), is the way she celebrates reading as a a vocation.

That strikes a chord — and perhaps corrects an error I’ve made for years now. Each year, at this season, I tell my students that if they want to succeed as writers, they have to start reading like a professional.  And by that I mean they can’t just read for pleasure, or for the information or whatever. They have to read with an attention to form, to technique, to the work behind the words that they can identify.  And that’s true.  Reading to penetrate the process of writing that gave rise to what one perceives as the success or failure (or perhaps better, merely the qualities of) a piece of writing is something that writers do all the time, ultimately almost unconsciously, as part of our continuing education.

But Aimai’s comment points to something deeper, I think.  Reading like a pro is an instrumental practice; we do it to achieve something through that action.  Aimai’s reading is a craft: it is at once a means to some desired outcome and  an end in itself, a process that is its own reward.

And that’s what I want my students to grasp; it’s what I want to remember to do, to avoid being swamped by the fact of information when I want to achieve understanding — and even more, that deep pleasure when I get what some other voice is trying to tell me, across whatever distance of time, experience, distance.

So, starting yesterday in the orientation for the next class of MIT science writers, I told the newest crop that they need to read like pros, certainly, but never to stop thinking of themselves as members of a craft.

One more thing — Aimai had a little more to say, it turned out, and she was kind enough to respond directly to my comment on her blog with a story, one that tells a great deal about the difference between a genuine reader and writer and those masquerading as such in our public discourse now.

She wrote:

Since I’ve been outed as Izzy’s granddaughter (one of three), Tom Levenson, I’ll tell you that my earliest memories of my grandfather were of watching him walk down to the Out of Town News Agency, [now gone, and lamented, as the greatest repository of the world’s newspaper I ever knew in the middle of Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA–tl] when he was visiting, and return with a stack of newspapers. Izzy read from the back of the paper to the front, something I still do. I think it was because, as he said, “you never know on which page of the Times you’ll find a page one story.” Another reason was that the meat of the story was always low down and the mere teaser at the front was usually very deceptive.

He would start at the back and then tear the paper into long strips of columns that he would clip together and then compare across writers, newspapers, and of course across time and genre.

A few years ago I read a biography of Darwin. He spent years working on earthworms, every afternoon in his study. One of his sons, upon hearing that a neighbor’s father was going out in the afternoon, asked “but when does he work on his worms?” That’s the way I feel about the practice of reading. Surely, every journalist does the same thing? But then, you meet up with a Klein, and you find out that they *aren’t working on their worms at all.*

Thank you, Aimai, for this story.  You don’t get to be Mr. Stone unless you do Mr. Stone…

That is all.

Image:  Pieter de Hooch, “Woman Reading a Letter,” before 1684.

My Note to President Obama in response to an email eliciting support for the ongoing health care intiative:

I received an OFA email just a little while ago telling me of all the hard work being done on health care, for which I thank you, Mr. President, and those of your exceptional staff.  But I have to say that I do have a line in the sand:  insurance companies are not part of the health care system.  They are part of the health care industry.  Any “reform” that does not address the quite different incentives implied in that distinction will fail.

Translation:  a public option is not window dressing.  It is an essential element of any real reform.  I’m not going to organize for America until and unless you bring this home right.

Sincerely,

Tom Levenson

Image:  attributed to Caravaggio, “The Toothpuller,” before 1610.

A Modest Proposal for the Hold Music on the Congressional Phone System:

Via Balloon Juice, I learn of the latest obsession of those with too much time to do stuff and too little cranial resources to do it with.

Hence, in the spirit of charity and a selfless desire to help, I’ve searched the intertubes for an audio selection that will satisfy (how could it not) both the DFHs and the wingnuts for whom syncopation is unAmerican.  Please, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid et al: put this in my ear the next time I call to demand a public option now, tomorrow and forever:

Brain/eye candy: timelapse of L.A. wildfire

Extraordinary video of fire as both process and kinetic sculpture.Footage by Dan Blank. Music by Brian Eno.

Shot on Panasonic HS-300.

Actual length: 40 mins.
Filmed from Tarzana, CA

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