The Hanover Collaboration

This ad really resonates with me—it makes me want to work for intel. I’m not sure why. Probably because it is a spot-on potrayal about what geeky really means. Maybe its because the usual portrayal of geeky is so grating (e.g. hire geeks to set up your DVR!).

If Bertsimas walked into my lab, I swear to God, it would be just like that. I bet I could make money selling the t-shirt.

Between the inexorable improvements in Netflix and my mounting dread over my thesis proposal, I have been giving myself a much deeper understanding of the science fiction genre historically. From this, I would like to make the following observations so that the creators of future science fiction can make more lasting and historically significant contributions.

First up, Styles. This one is easy, the crazier the better. If anybody looks even remotely “hip” or “cool” or anything stylistically recognizable in your era, it will look painfully dated in the future. As I said, the crazier the better.

Second, tech. This is where the smart kids like to make predictions. Getting stuff right makes the work look sagely, getting it wrong makes you look stupid. Unless you’ve got someone like Kim Stanley Robinson on staff, you’re mostly going to want to keep this stuff as dialed back as necessary for the story line. But if you do have some predictions, I won’t fault you for going out on that limb.

Third, interfaces, controls. To the untrained, this might seem like “tech” and people with vision might be able to do something. While that’s somewhat true, this is dramatically harder than tech. Even if you do have Kim Stanley Robinson writing for you, best way to handle this is by minimization. While The Matrix Trilogy, or Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within, or even James Bond and his Quantum of Solace, make somewhat inspired attempts, despite how sweet they look now, I feel pretty confident saying that most of those things are going to end up looking stupid in the future. I think the right way to do it is more like Doctor Who’s “sonic screwdriver” or Star Trek’s “tricorder” where it’s operation is left to the imagination.

Which brings up the overarching principle: If something can be left to the imagination, leave it to the imagination. For example, using somebody’s console with a “code red” pop-up as a cut device is only going to make your movie look stupid, regardless of how much you spend on graphic design. How much harder is it to tell the actor to “give me a ‘code red’ expression” and shoot it from an angle where you can’t see the controls?

If you’ve ever worked in an office, you’ve probably been subjected to corporate art. It’s the grown-up version of those signs you used to see in gym class that said “There’s No ‘I’ in Team” or “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts”. I’d imagine companies spend billions of dollars on this crap, which is fucking fascinating because its blandness and predictability only reinforce the despair of slaving away for a soulless corporate entity. Well, I’m sick of it. So in the great tradition of Maddox, I present you with “I Am Better Than Your Corporate Art”.

11:13 AM me: i’ve had that album on stream for like 4 hours at this point i think i’m going insane
Evan: Is it good? I forgot my headphones.
11:14 AM me: yeah, i think so. i don’t really knwo him at all, so the hype is lost on me. but it’s good. i’m trying to get sick of it so i won’t buy it.
11:15 AM Evan: You stil buy music? (that was my jonshea impression) But, really, you still buy music? INTERNET, DUDE.
11:16 AM me: i like looking at the pictures
11:17 AM me: evan, i have to do a presentation… are you an expert on graffiti?
Evan: I am a Certified Expert on Graffiti.
11:18 AM me: Great. How do you feel about Basquiat?
Evan: OUTSIDER ART. FUNNY STRETCHERS. AFRICAN?
11:19 AM :D
11:20 AM me: Evan, that’s not an emotion. how do you feel? (he’s haitian)
11:21 AM Evan: ;_;
11:23 AM me: uh… Do you find any hypocrisy in his reclamation of African art from the tradition of Picasso and Matisse and his wholehearted embrace of the NY “scene”? ps I don’t knwo what that last symbol means
Evan: Wasn’t Basquiat sort of unaware/stupid? Why do I think that?
11:24 AM Like, not a very critical thinker/painter. He just sorta made paintings. They happened to resemble street art/African art, and NY loved him for it.
me: 11:25 AM He was Warhol’s best friend. Kevin Young thinks he’s worth 117 poems.
11:26 AM Evan: Who is Kevin Young? Is that some football player?
11:28 AM me: his first book was selected for the national poetry series!
Evan: BORING NEXT
11:29 AM he was named by Swing magazine as one of the most powerful people under age 30 in the United States!
11:30 AM Evan: Poets are powerful again? Eww.
11:31 AM me: yeah, poetry is the new outsider art.
11:33 AM Evan: Gross.

This got me laughing so hard I almost crashed my car today. I love the tongue-in-cheeck, the irony.

Here’s a teaser: “If you just throw out the first 12 chapters of Genesis, what’s to keep you from throwing out any other part of the Bible?”

Slate on Shakespeare for the masses. You know, for people who aspire to being “middlebrow”.

In 7th grade or so, my parents took me on a real culture kick with that stuff. I’ve generally disliked going to Shakespear plays although I pretended not to so I wouldn’t look stupid. By the end, if the acting was really good, I could follow enough of the language to catch some subtext or word-play. Up until then it took everything I had to follow everything that they are saying openly. The only times that I enjoyed it was if I had just, as in during the few days, read the thing in a copy that had good footnotes.

It wasn’t until reading Robert Pinky’s column in Slate that I realized we are in the midst of a truly important time: that’s right, it’s National Poetry Month! Which means, of course, ghazals for breakfast, poet statue unveilings in local parks (or not, but what’s Dante without Pinsky!), readings at even the Seawitch, innumberable voices rising in a chorus of luminous verses…

Ahem. More likely, NPM means dirge-toned renderings of the present state of poetry—to the extent that the proliferation of professionalized, uninspired hacks (well, I know of at least one, for a fact) could comprise a collective. This general lament, oddly enough, made me think of David Brooks’s recent column in the NYT. To briefly hack his argument, Brooks writes that the strength of the Republican Party is not its ability to portray a collective view, but rather the large number of opposing factions therein that guarantee a place for more people under the larger umbrella of Republicanism. In the last few decades, there has been an explosion in the number of people reading and writing poetry for, I would argue, similar reasons. The diffusion of poetry (a negative happening, in some opinions) into competing “movements” (language poets, deep imagists, Symbolists, Beats, New Formalists, and anyone else with a pen and free time) has meant that more people are likely to find one of these groupings appealing. Nevertheless, within all of these groups, there were few voices as strong in the last century as Robert Creeley’s, who sadly passed away last week at the age of 78.

It’s easy enough to assume that an artist engages, as Dylan Thomas puts it, a solitary, sullen art. And as neatly as this appeals to the melodramatic adolescent in us all, it’s no way to live a life. Both in person, and in his work, Creeley embraced the idea that poetry was essentially human, and his aesthetic mirrored that. Art as a means of locating oneself in a world in which locations were increasingly difficult to come by. Consider his most famous poem, “I Know A Man.” It’s hard to miss the power of these lines, the angst of communicating (or at least trying to) in world that is out of control:

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.

This past February, Creeley taught a three-week workshop at UNCW, as it turns out his last, that I will remember not only as long as I continue this “poetry thing,” but as long as this “life thing” goes on as well. While there are certainly others who have greater claim to his memory, it is a testament to his personality that anyone who knew him will be saddened by this news. From the second he walked into the classroom, Creeley treated us as peers. The first question he asked was, simply, Why do you write? Not as a challenge, but out of genuine interest in why people still, somehow, find reasons to turn to art.

When I required my students to attend Creeley’s on-campus reading, an often rambling affair with poems punctuated by personal observations or anecdotes, their reactions were almost unanimously twofold: 1) “He reminded me of my grandfather” and 2) “I couldn’t tell when he was reading his poems and when he was just talking.” The first reflects the person, the second the craft and how the two are intricately linked. For Creeley, poetry was an utterance, a human utterance, that reflected both speech and the general human condition. In this reflection lies its importance. Compare the “sullen art,” to the end of Creeley’s poem “So There”:

Thinking of you,
baby, thinking
of all the things

I’d like to say and do.
Old fashioned time
it takes to be
anywhere, at all.

Moving on. Mr. Ocean,
Mr. Sky’s
got the biggest blue eyes
in creation-

“here comes the sun”!
While we can,
let’s do it, let’s
have fun.

It was certainly odd (at first) to have a poet who started his own writing career sending letters (longhand!) to William Carlos Williams encouraging our class to set up a blog. But having gotten to know him a little bit and begin to understand how important Creeley considered communication to be in the life of a poet, it makes sense. And viewing this memorial to Creeley at Conjunctions, it is touching to see so many voices coming together and sharing their own memories in way that would have previously been impossible. Once during class, with his typical modesty, Creeley said, “I have no idea specifically what poetry is but it’s something like the ability to hear water in an empty pool.” Today, thanks to his writing and teaching, there are that many more people lying on the deck, leaning over the pool’s lip, listening.

In the current issue of New York Review of Books, under the half-guise of career retrospective, John Leonard offers a critique of novelist Jonathan Lethem. Leonard’s problem with Lethem is less with his writing and more with what he sees (fairly good-naturedly, I thought, though Sasha Frere-Jones disagrees) as current trend for deifying cultural minutiae. In addition to Lethem, Leonard calls out Rick Moody, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Franzen for propogating a “bundle of bombast about ephemera.” Now, don’t get me wrong, I love pop culture as much as the next guy, but I think Leonard has a fair point: nerd appropriation has gone too far. NPR, I turn to my steely gaze to you…

Driving home from class the other night, I caught a segment of All Things Considered, titled Pimp My Ride: The Ultimate Bodyshop Model for Hospitals. (Full disclosure: the fact that I caught any sort of news programming on WHQR, my personal archenemy, is a minor miracle given the station’s unfailing propensity for classical music. To be fair, there are 4 hours of Morning Edition, but 5 a.m. to 9 a.m… do those hours even exist?). In this commentary, Joe Wright expresses his desire for hospitals to be more like the custom shops on “Pimp My Ride” (Sure! Why not? Let’s do it!): willing and able to offer the quick fix for its ailing “patients”, turning lives around with a wave of a flame decal. Which is all fine, etc, etc, etc, but goddamn if “Pimp My Ride” wasn’t my last bastion of unironic, unmetaphorical, brainless entertainment. And now its been painted meaningful by NPR’s somber hues. Xzibit would not approve.

Am I grateful that ten years down the line I may be able to toss a “Pimp My Ride” reference into casual conversation? Of course. I await that fateful cocktail party with open arms. But is this all necessary? Well… Leonard writes: “Boomers have made sure that their every febrile enthusiasm since Pampers will last longer than radioactive waste, on digital cable or DVD. Gen-Xers are just as solipsistic; anything that ever mattered to them must have been profound.” Though a little harsh on Lethem, Leonard has a point: sometimes you just have to walk away. (And that means you, NPR. Take your stentorian tones and leave my MTV alone).

I agree to an extent with Leonard on his assessement of Lethem’s most recently (and kind of spectacular) novel The Fortress of Solitude, a book that’s only failing comes when the protoganist, Dylan Ebdus, revisits his superheroic childhood as an adult. Earlier in the novel, when the reader is asked to believe in the fantastical flights enabled by young Dylan Ebdus’s magical ring, we are as much placing faith in our own faith in a child’s imagination than anything Lethem has created. (The scenes of Dylan flying over Brooklyn are magical – picture Alfonso Cuaron’s vision of Harry Potter’s flight over Scotland, but with graffiti, the Brooklyn Bridge, and dope-dealers). But when Dylan flies again as an adult, this turn (a cop-out in Leonard’s opinion) somehow diminishes what we’ve previously imagined as Dylan’s childhood escape from a motherless upbringing. It seems, that in order to truly move on, Dylan must have had to leave his magic powers in the past.

Because some things are better left behind. The other night I caught a little bit of (ok, all of) of CBS’s “Spring Break: Shark Attack,” and it was spectacularly awful (in a good way), but let’s just leave it that way. I hope that the folks over at NPR do the same, especially those watching from the ER, looking for advice. Because even I know that you never remove an impaled object, especially when the splattering blood is going to alert a swarm of killer sharks.

Growing up, my parents made sure I had an appreciation for music. I have a pretty good ear and some training so I presume I am one of the people who have large overlap between speech and music processing as opposed to someone who just uses the old bits of the brain. In those old bits somewhere, some dick forgot to check the length of a buffer and some people like John Williams have designed exploits that take over this portion of your brain and make you feel whatever they want.

As a result of my childhood, I am largely immune. I decide what emotions (if any) I am going to have at a movie, not JW.

But in the car yesterday this song came on. It was called “In My Daughter’s Eyes.” The lyrics were banal and the melody was unoriginal and it made my eyes water. I was like, “What the fuck is going on here? This is a country song.” By the second verse, I’ve narrowed it down. The instrumentation as far as I can tell is Singer, cello, piano, 2 violins but the 2nd sits most of the song out (if he exists at all). The only one of these that has any intrisic traction for me is the cello but that wasn’t it. The cello part climaxed in the intro and was just playing support.

The singer was very good. Maybe she sounded a bit like Anne Murray whose 8-track I wore out listening to when I was four. Was that it? During the second verse, I figured it out.

The exploit is a couple of notes that define sad chords like “she was sent to rescue me/ I see who I want to be.”
The primer to the exploit is that it was a 5 bar phrase. On the 5th bar you’re ready for some resolution as a reward for surviving the sad sent note. But you forgot that the last phrase was only 3 bars and instead you get hit with another sad note. The crux of the trick is the who note. The singer and violin are both a little bit dragy. After setting up these notes they making you wait the extra little while for it. At the same time, she “greases” onto the note from a little below. The affect is a palpable reluctance. It sounds like it is so physically painful to sing it that she is having trouble bringing herself to do it.

By the third verse, I was on to it; I was ready. They’re just playing me. Oh, but they played me so beautifuly.

Now that they’ve got me figured out, I guess they’re going to make me cry in movies now too. How embarrassing. I might pay the 99 cents and do intervals on the thing.