Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

The Boston Globe was got lots of publicity for blasting Republican efforts to disguise press releases as “letters” from local readers. But the Globe was not the only one to complain.

• The Times Herald-Record called them “phony letters … an insult to readers”.
• The Press of Atlantic City called them ” canned letters from partisan Web sites.”
• The Christian Science Monitor warned of “the danger…when powerful interests overwhelm ordinary citizens’ voices.”

Maia Cowan’s Astroturf page lists even more angry newspapers, with links.

Now, as David Weinberger points out, GOPTeamleader.com is urging its fans to write angry letters to the Boston Globe–and thoughtfully offers that now-discredited “genuine leadership” form letter as a starting point.

Coupling negative ads with calls to action lets spin-mongers recruit angry people to do their dirty work for them. Irate callers and letter-writers harass your enemy’s staff, and if those staff members try to present their own side of the story, it’s at your enemy’s expense. There are a lot of angry people in the world who are willing to do work like this for free. But working for GOPTeamLeader.com has an added benefit–you get “GOPoints” if you write to abuse the Globe.

I am an addicted amateur advice-giver. Just ask me–or don’t even ask me–about anything I know, however slightly. The best restaurant in Cambridge, MA (Temple Bar). The most amazing sight on a cross-country car trip (Arizona Meteor Crater). The coolest museum in Los Angeles (Museum of Jurassic Technology).

And now for some meta-advice: Do not trust advisors. We may just be preening, we may not value the trade-offs in any decision the same way you do, we may even be mistaken.

So does that mean each generation must reinvent the wheel? No. Find people who have the outcome you hope for and ask them how they got there. For example, if you want to raise kids, find somebody whose kids you really like and ask how the family worked. Repeat until satisfied.

I think that covers it, don’t you? Meta-advice not to take advice, even mine–followed by my advice. Hmmmm.

Why should credit card victims do all the cyberbegging? I too have something I really, really want:

• If you intelligently oppose war with Iraq: Would you please send a civil e-mail to some pro-war blogger.
• If you intelligently support war with Iraq: Would you please send a civil e-mail to some anti-war blogger.

In either case, I am cyberbegging you to point out in a civil way that you would like that blog to work toward convincing you its POV is right–but not by accusing you of moronic villainy. Promise that you, in your turn, will give them credit for being decent, intelligent people–although they disagree with what you believe so strongly.

On both sides of the Bush-and-Iraq divide, intelligent and kind people are being pushed further apart by angry folks full of abuse, devoid of ideas. We all have to live together on this little planet, and hating each other helps nobody.

Disclosure: War on Iraq does not meet my private criterion for war, which is, “Are the government’s goals so vital, and is warfare so clearly the only path to these goals, that I would willingly give my own life to this effort?”

But my POV is irrelevant to my cyberbegging goal. Won’t you help? Please tell me if you did.

Picture a penguin, or a dignified man wearing tails. Add a generous white mustache, slightly askew, as if he’s had tee much martooni. That’s our cat Sylvester.

I first saw him 19+ years ago, lying hopeless and sad in a tiny pet-shelter cage, so his official Valentine’s Day birthday is a fiction. He was so timid that, when he came home with us, he hid behind the refrigerator for hours. Now he is confident of welcome in any lap of any guest. Unfortunately, he most loves those laps that belong to allergic guests.

Sylvester was born to live in Cambridge, Mass. He is more “entitled” than the most brazen Harvard Square pedestrian.

One night we had guests for dinner, with the most distinguished of lady guests in my usual chair, right next to my husband. Sylvester, displeased, pronged his claws up through the chair into her dignified bottom. “Oh my!” she said. We shooed Sylvester off, saying “Bad cat, bad cat,” but he was still smirking under his lopsided mustache.

Happy birthday, Sylvester dear. I look forward to combing your now-motheaten fur coat for many more years.

The teenage dream world of 50s sci-fi art now seems as far away and idyllic as Rivendell. Visit Terry Gibbons’s project Visco to see

“…a visual catalogue of the cover art of the science fiction, fantasy, weird and horror fiction magazines from the early twentieth century to the present day.

This is the landscape of Spielberg’s boyhood dreams–jagged lunar peaks under purple skies, heroes whose space helmets look like inverted fishbowls, space villainnesses in see-through veils or pasties, bubblicious space ships in every crayola color. I especially liked this grumpy but somehow likeable monster from the first issue of Amazing Stories.

Thanks to Gary Farber for this link, as well as for his inspiring list of quotes. My favorite, from Sidney Hooke:

“Before impugning an opponent’s motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments.”

Did you get the memo? Irony is over.

And besides, this is Valentine’s Day.

So, let me un-ironically direct you to the world’s most beautiful website, showing the work of Vienna photographer Linda Kim Davies. Her specialty is sepia-photographs of the beautiful Viennese “caryatids–architectural columns that look like classically draped or undraped women.

Okay, I hear you saying, “Who wants to look at beautiful women’s breasts?” But the musical background is hypnotically lovely, a loop of Phillip Glass piano music, (and IMO Phillip Glass was born to write looped Flash music) probably played by Linda’s husband, conductor Dennis Russell Davies.

So get over there–click on “Images” or “Invocation”. Click on “Essays,” and you can download Diane Shooman’s scholarly essay on caryatids, “Sex with the City.” And have a great day.

• Scientists have discovered why the folks we love smell so darn good.(Thanks to Google News)
• Oooooo! Steve, the super-villain from Linux.
  (Thanks to Dan Berlinger)
• The new, international dog translation device.
  (Hey, don’t you always check out Mike Magee’s Inquirer?)

I know you’ve not tested your template in various browsers, machines, monitors, and so forth.

For the record, I’m using Mozilla 1.2b or so. On a small monitor, Win98, 64 megs of RAM on a Pentium 1, only 166 mhz, ancient, steam-powered, machine. Most of which is irrelevant to finding your font size completely unreadably small ant tracks. Switching Mozilla up to boosting text to 150% does work, though.

Just offering a datapoint.

Thanks for blogging.

(Continued from E.B. White, Part 1)

White uses and reuses the device of surprise reappearance by an apparent digression. We readers have seen this trick before, but each time we love it all over again. The “retired” soprano comes back for just one more concert? Hurray! And if the soprano comes back at the end of the show, for just one last bow, we’re even more thrilled.

A joke with a “capper” gives twice the dose of humor (both surprise and congruence.) Revival with a new image or a new setting gives you new insight into big topics like change, eternity, death. (White attempts a much wider range of subjects than Barry.)

White’s diction is quirky. He writes for New Yorker readers and for himself–the general level is quite a bit higher than Barry’s. He rummages through his treasure-chest of words looking for just the one needed right now, bringing forth things new and old. Most often, a short, direct word does the job–“his hard little body, skinny and bare”–but White has no false shame about “teeming” or “petulant.” And he makes no apology for “slummiest” or “pawed over.” White himself is not slumming. He is writing for equals.

The girders that hold up White’s essays are found in Strunk (later Strunk and White.) “Use the active voice.” “Put statements in positive form.” “Omit needless words.” I would like to compare the original Strunk (available online) to the more famous Strunk and White. White’s additions would be full of meaning–but this is a pleasant goal for a more-leisured future.

Strunk says, “…the proper place for what is to be made most prominent is the end.” This rule “applies equally to the words of a sentence, to the sentences of a paragraph, and to the paragraphs of a composition.” White took the advice to heart.

In Once More to the Lake, White’s last two paragraphs draw together all the essay’s big themes. Then, in this now comfortable, familiar setting, White’s ending delivers an even-more massive surprise.

Here’s how he does it: A thunderstorm brings back the themes I call “Then” and “Now”– the long-ago summers of childhood and this summer’s trip with his own young son. White also revisits two closely-related themes I call “Eternity” and “Change” –the indestructible one-ness of lakeside summers, despite an admission that “Now” some detail has changed. (The others are all going swimming, but “Now” the narrator sits languidly watching.) One last time, we share White’s “Illusion” of changing places with his son or his father. The author watches the boy of today, feeling once more what he felt as a long-ago boy, but in the final word of the final phrase of the final sentence, we see what has been, so far, so carefully hidden: “death.”

Wow.

The essay Here is New York (only excerpts online) is less finely crafted. White’s major theme throughout is “his” New York–a brisk catalog of the city’s pleasures and fears, virtues and flaws, tossed off in a series of small, sharp images that add up to one huge impressionistic daub, like a “face” made up of a hundred tiny photographs. This part is brilliantly done. Less successfully, the end (an expression of hope for the United Nations) seems merely tacked on, for all his craftsmanship.

Still, let’s see how the master tries for his effect. This essay has lots of short-run themes–ideas that crop up a few times in successive paragraphs, then disappear. In the final paragraphs White brings back many of these, reminding us of our shared journey thus far–images of construction, housing projects, the invisibility of big events, racial harmony, sky-scraping buildings with planes overhead, now seen as an emblem of menace.

The final paragraph comes back to specifics, one single specific tree in Turtle Bay, a symbol both of the city itself and of all that we have to lose when we lose what we love. By no coincidence–White first published “Once More to the Lake” in 1941; “Here in New York” dates from 1948–the final word of both essays is the same image of the fear of infinite loss: “death.”

Two weeks after starting this blog, I went to Dave Winer‘s blogger meeting at Harvard. Fortunately, I enjoyed being so outclassed by so many experts–experts not just in blogging, but in the meta-blogging world of cool software. It was a fascinating mix of people and interests.

You can enjoy the February 11 event, thanks to Donna Wentworth’s blog of it, and Dan Bricklin’s photos.

Dinner at the Bombay Club–anyone who wants proof of Dave Winer’s quick wit can find it in the blogs of Daniel Berlinger (Archipelago) and Michael Joseph (Notio).