Maggie's Farm

Have I mentioned lately how much we like The Teaching Company? Check it out, if you aren't familiar with them. Great stuff, and a good alternative to Books on Tape if you spend time in the car. Sign up just to get their catalog - it's an interesting read in itself. This month, a piece on Michael Haydn. Michael? Yes, Joseph's brother, who frequently collaborated with Mozart. The Robert Greenberg music courses are spectacularly enjoyable, entertaining, and educational. But so is most of their stuff.

This turn-of-the-century Austrian artist has millions of admirers of his emotionally intense work. There is now a major show of his work at the Neue Galerie, which specializes in Austrian and German art (86th St. and 5th Ave., NYC).

This is his "The Artist's Wife."

Both Schiele and his wife died young in the flu pandemic of 1918. His bio here. 

More of his work here.

Bernard-Henri Levy's new book. He is an interesting and colorful French intellectual and psychoanalyst who considers himself to be "anti-anti-American." The book, his 30th, aspires to follow in de Toqueville's footsteps.

Quoted from the New York Magazine review:

American Vertigo, while somewhat adhering to the “footsteps of Tocqueville,” careers around, allowing him to drag the ironies out of Cooperstown (which he describes as a church), a suburban Chicago megachurch (“neo-paganist”), an anti-Semitic Indian leader, the Mall of America (“a church,” again), John Kerry (“a European at heart”), and a big retirement community (it reminds him of apartheid). He visits with clueless Hollywood liberal Sharon Stone (whom he manages to observe crossing her legs) and finds Las Vegas strippers mechanically standoffish (“the wretchedness of Eros in the land of the Puritans”). In Michigan, he marvels at the solidity of the American identity among Arab immigrants. (The book was finished before the riots broke out in Paris: “We have our crisis there, sure,” he says. “You had your riots in the nineties.”) In Dallas, at the assassination site of JFK, he wonders, “What is a myth that you no longer believe in that still functions?”

And amid all that is what seems to be his conclusion: that America is a curious sort of empire—not at all like Rome at its zenith or decline—with a particular character of individualism that he hopes will cause the country to do the good it could do in the world. He’s disappointed that we aren’t living up to our noblesse oblige responsibilities. “The reason I am so angry against neoconservatives is that they spoiled the very idea of intervention,” says the self-described Wilsonian. And he’s flabbergasted that the American left can be so accommodating to the puritanism of the right. There is, in fact, for a secular blue-stater, little in this book to disagree with: It has, at times, the reinforcement-of-a-worldview pleasures of a well-argued Frank Rich column, or, for that matter, The Daily Show.

Like many French writers, he may have a tendency to imagine that he is smarter than he is - but I would not put de Toqueville in that category. It's worth a minute to read entire review here.

Forgot to post this during Christmas Season; Dylan Thomas reading his splendidly poignant, nostalgic and warmly funny very short story. Sorry to be late with it. Next year, I won't forget. Listen anyway, and make it part of your life as it is part of mine, here.

Dead of a heart attack at 64. Damn. You expect people that matter to you, and add something to your life, to live forever. Loved the guy's music. This was my favorite album: The Exciting Wilson Pickett

Was the American Civil War the first modern war? And what role did slavery play? New book by Stout: Upon the Altar of the Nation. NY Sun review.

The definitive new Beatles biography, by Bob Spitz. The author of the iconoclastic Dylan: A Biography spent years working on this Beatles bio, a magnum opus which has had excellent reviews.

And now it's...
Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Deutschland is happy and gay!
We're marching to a faster pace
Look out, here comes the master race!

Lyrics from The Producers, by Mel Brooks

The Bird Dog family did a comparison - the new Producers movie compared with the original with Zero Mostel as Max Bialystock and Gene Wilder as Leo Bloom. As you know, the Broadway show was based on the 1968 movie, and then the new movie was based on the Broadway show (!?!).

The 1968 version wins, hands down. If only on Mostel's amazing FACE. This is Marx Brothers-quality farce from the spottily-brilliant Mel Brooks.

From Ten poor word usages which will expose our lack of education and could damage a career. Including "hopefully":

"Everyone uses "hopefully" as a shortcut for "I hope." It is not. Yes, the dictionary allows it, but that's just bending to popular usage. In my book, there is only one correct use for "hopefully." It's a synonym for "prayerfully"—as in, "She looked up hopefully and said, 'Dear Lord, please make it rain soon, or we'll have no harvest.'" Do you want to say "I hope"? Then say "I hope.""

Read all ten, including since and because, and .everyone and they.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Aldous Huxley 

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.
Mark Twain

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.
Bob Dylan

One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.
Dr. Karl Menninger

What is Truth? 
Pontius Pilate

We posted briefly on this new word "truthiness" a couple of months ago, but it deserves more attention. The word stands more or less in contrast to the non-word "factiness," as I understand it. It brings to mind the comment of a friend who once described the processed cheese we were putting on burgers as "a remarkably food-like substance." "Truthiness" is a truth-like substance.

The Mixing Memory blog (which deals mostly with Cognitive Psychology) has a nice short piece on the subject, and I quote here:

"Truthy, not facty" strikes me as a pretty good way of describing the way we usually think about things. Most of the time, when we're thinking about the world, we're not trying to determine whether the information we're receiving from it is factual, but instead working to integrate it with the representations we've already got. The information that we're likely to notice, and keep, is just the information that fits with those representations, regardless of whether that information happens to fit with the facts. If something is truthy because it fits with our beliefs, but not with facts, then a lot of what we'll end up believing with be truthy, not facty. It's because of this that you get things like cognitive dissonance or the confirmation bias. Those involve searching for and emphasizing truthiness over factiness.

Thus a cognitive psychologist, or maybe any psychologist, might find the new word handy because it has to do with the way our minds deal with things - in a rule-of-thumb, experience-based way which expects or wants  things to fit our existing ideas and images. (A "representation" is what psychologists and psychoanalysts call a package of memory, image, idea and emotion. It's called a "re-presentation" because it's constructed on the inside, and thus necessarily colored and distorted to varying degrees for all sorts of psychological reasons.)

I suspect that, for a long time, the idea of a round earth contained fact but lacked truthiness for many people who walked around all day on flat surfaces. Indeed, it lacks truthiness to me that my flight from New York to Paris flies over Newfoundland. How many things are apparently facts - the existence of quarks, a curved universe, the flight of the bumblebee, the movement of electrons in a copper wire - yet all lack truthiness.

For another example, I think Dan Rather, this fall, was trying to tell us that the CBS forged records "lacked factiness but contained "truthiness". Similar to the Al Sharpton-Tawana Brawley business, if you recall that story.

So it seems to me that Mixing Memory has the correct idea: What feels "truthy" is something that fits our preconceptions. And our preconceptions aren't bad things - we could not function without them, but how many of them can we prove to be True? (We live in a world of ambiguities, but crave certainty and solid ground so as not to go nuts. As in Huxley's quote: "You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you mad.") On the other hand, things that feel "truthy" can just as easily be lies, as happened this month with the Oprah Book Club's Million Little Pieces.

If we plan to use this word (which I do not, unless I use it with irony), let's use it with the connotation of an untruth or a lie - a "truth-like substance," and not as a watered-down version of truth. And let's view the professional purveyors of truthiness to be what they are - con-men, manipulators, and propagandists - whether they be advertisers, politicians, trial lawyers or journalists.

Indian Lore

 It was October and the Indians on a remote reservation asked their new Chief if the coming winter was going to be cold or mild. Since he was a Chief in a modern society he had never been taught the old secrets.  When he looked at the sky he couldn't tell what the winter was going to be like.  Nevertheless, to be on the safe side he told his tribe that the winter was indeed going to be cold and that the members of the village should collect firewood to be prepared.

But being a practical leader, after several days he got an idea.  He went to the phone booth, called the National Weather Service and asked, "Is the coming winter going to be cold?"

"It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold," the meteorologist at the weather service responded.  So the Chief went back to his people and told them to collect even more firewood in order to be prepared.

A week later he called the National Weather Service again.
"Does it still look like it is going to be a very cold winter?"
"Yes," the man at National Weather Service again replied,
"It's going to be a very cold winter."  The Chief again went back to his people and ordered them to collect every scrap of firewood they could find.

Two weeks later the Chief called the National Weather Service again.  "Are you absolutely sure that the winter is going to be very cold?"

"Absolutely," the man replied.  "It's looking more and more like it is going to be one of the coldest winters ever."

"How can you be so sure?" the Chief asked.

The weatherman replied,  "The Indians are collecting firewood like crazy."

Rousseau

"Nothing is more depressing than the general fate of men. And yet they feel in themselves a consuming desire to become happy, and it makes them feel at every moment that they were born to be happy. So why are they not?" Jean-Jacques Rousseau

From a review of a new book about Rousseau, by Dirda in the WaPo:

"Rousseau's contemporary, the arch-conservative Edmund Burke, labeled him "the Socrates of the National Assembly" (that is, of the hated French Revolution). Come the 20th century, this radical thinker had grown into the great beast of all who revere traditional institutions, worship in established churches and either fear or exploit the common man. Yet no one, of whatever political or philosophical persuasion, would deny how deeply Rousseau's sensibility pervades the past 250 years, from the poetry of the Romantics ("One impulse from a vernal wood/May teach you more of man . . . ") to the slogans, pop songs and lifestyles of the 1960s: Drop out, "Let it be," back to Nature, hippies, communes, self-realization. Yet Rousseauian ideals also lie behind our unabated, unassuaged longings to live more humanely in a bureaucratic, technological and often unjust world. Even the staunchest meritocrat or most self-satisfied scion of inherited wealth must find it hard to discount the truth of the discourse on inequality's final ringing lines: "It is manifestly against the Law of Nature . . . that a handful of men wallow in luxury, while the famished multitudes lack the necessities of life."

Such thrilling emotional language has always contributed to Rousseau's powerful appeal. Contrary to a widespread misconception, many philosophers have also been superb prose stylists -- just think of Plato, Hume or William James -- but this largely self-educated former valet may be the finest of all. Rousseau actually had to beg his readers to disregard his "beau style" and just pay attention to his ideas. But this is impossible. His sentences are musical and absolutely limpid, at once classically balanced yet intimate, oracular and confessional. One is simply swept along, no matter what the subject."

Read entire review.

Politics and the English Language

The above-named essay by Orwell made a big impression on me when I first read it in high school. I cannot say that I follow his rules, but I do aspire to.

In this piece in Appellate Advocate, Orwell's basic rules of writing are applied to legal briefs.

Book-Based Travel

Travels with Homer. From an extraordinary essay by Halkin titled Sailing to Ithaca:

"I first set foot on the island of Ithaca by swimming ashore. This was not how it was done by Odysseus, who was carried from a ship in early dawn by the sailors conveying him on the final leg of his long journey home. “Then they stepped forth on the land,” Homer tells us, “and first they lifted Odysseus out of the hollow ship . . . and laid him down on the sand, still overpowered by sleep.”¹ He would have had to be sleeping quite soundly not to awake, for we have just been told that, in beaching, the ship “ran full half her length on the shore in her swift course, at such pace was she driven by the arms of the rowers.” That must have given her a powerful jolt.

One cannot beach a modern yacht, which has a keel to give it stability in the water. Ancient Greek ships lacked true keels and so—at least to judge from Homer—they often capsized in rough seas. Nor did ancient Greek harbors have docks or piers. The Greek coast is rugged and its mountains continue down to plunge beneath the water line, making the drop-off too steep to allow for the sinking of pilings in Homer’s time. And while one could always moor or anchor offshore, this made loading and unloading cumbersome. The best harbor was a protected spot with enough sand or gravel for oarsmen to put a ship on."

Read the entire wonderful essay. 

Our Brit blogger cousin Mr. Free Market posted this photo of his non-local non-fox hunt with non-horses and non-foxes in front of the non-local non-pub on non-New Year's Day. God Save the Queen. Good old civil disobedience, in the tradition of Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. Bravo, Brits.

Two Books

Just finished Freddy and Fredericka. As often with Helprin, it is an adult fairy tale but, as is rare with him, it is filled with slapstick humor and vaudeville-style routines. One of the best scenes: Freddy telling the psychiatrist in the mental hospital where he is sedated and in a straight jacket that he is the Prince of Wales, and that the Governor of California will shortly order him released. (He is, and the Gov. does.) May I say that it is the sort of tale that can keep you up reading far too late?

And just found this one: Ordinary Wolves. Looks like a tale about the Real Alaska by a real Alaskan. Very good Bookslut review here.

A Mini-Cooper paint job

 

Robust, synergistic and scalable solutions to overutilized language: Just think outside the box and you'll be good to go.

Here's a site for trite, cliched, and over-used words from the tech world. Here's a list of annoying words from 2003 - still annoying. Here are 18 nasties. Lake Superior State University has begun work on their 2006 List.

This is from an email making the rounds: