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

Ever wonder about
Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age? At the age of 56:

“George Granville Leveson-Gower, duke of Sutherland, destroyed the homes of Scottish Highlanders and drove thousands of residents off the land to make room for sheep.”

Did Georgie have modern zoning boards to deal with? Noooooo! But I still feel so inadequate (sob)…

(Thanks for the link–even though I may now be traumatized for life–to Dave Barry.)

Have you noticed that male chauvinism is making a comeback? Thirty years after the feminist revolution, if you look at the rap videos on MTV or BET, you’ll find that “ho” and “bitch” are just about the nicest words used to describe young women.

That’s just the opening of
“The Return of the Pig”, an essay by David Brooks in the April issue of Atlantic Monthly magazine. So how is the Left defending women, including women of color? The Left can’t figure out what to do, says Brooks:

Many progressive thinkers, having inherited a century of radical European thought, assume that the most oppressive and reactionary parts of society are the rich, the powerful, and the well-born. …The rise of misogynistic rap culture dramatizes the inadequacy of that approach. … Rap and hip-hop came from the urban lower class. N.W.A., 2 Live Crew, Tupac Shakur, and Eminem … emerged authentically from the streets. …

It is the least privileged parts of society that are often the most sexist, reactionary and even materialistic. We have a dynamic urban culture that treats women like whores and that regards owning a Mercedes as the highest possible human aspiration, and the leading articulators of progressive opinion have almost nothing to say about it…

[Leftists] can’t seem to bring themselves to admit out loud that their most effective ideological enemies have turned out to be the same underprivileged people they wanted to rescue from exploitation.

Brooks may be stymied, but the Left need not be.
I found this eloquent bumpersticker on David Weinberger’s blog. To me, it embodies the way Leftists can get past the dead end where they, by which I mean we, are stuck.

Moral absolutes–they’re easy to ridicule when they’re the “absolute” morals of born-again Baptists from Birmingham, Alabama. But we on the Left have our own cherished absolutes–and we need to refresh our ambivalence about them too.

Is any remark claimed as “authentically Black” immune from criticism? If so, does that make any XX type who ever had sex a ho? Or should we switch perspective, and say any statement that degrades women is evil, deserving of powerful retaliation? If so, does that mean we should demand lip service to middle-class ideals before any kid from the ghetto gets to speak?

No–absolutes make for fast and powerful moral judgments, but not for intelligent moral judgments. Because….

Moral means ambivalent.

Betsy’s quote of the day:

‘You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,’ said Aslan. ‘And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor in earth.’

(C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian)

Reading this morning’s New York Times, I feel as bleak as the weather. From the Editorial, “War in the Ruins of Diplomacy“:

“Once the fighting begins, every American will be thinking primarily of the safety of our troops, the success of their mission and the minimization of Iraqi civilian casualties. It will not feel like the right time for complaints about how America got to this point. Today is the right time.”

The editorial goes on, powerfully and well, and you think they’ve said it all, until you check out Paul Krugman’s “Things to Come” and discover there’s more:

“So now the administration knows that it can make unsubstantiated claims, without paying a price when those claims prove false, and that saber rattling gains it votes and silences opposition. Maybe it will honorably refuse to act on this dangerous knowledge. But I can’t help worrying that in domestic politics, as in foreign policy, this war will turn out to have been the shape of things to come.”

Yesterday was such a beautiful day for walking around in Boston–sunny, balmy, full of the promise of spring. Today, a chill wind is moving across the melting heaps of disappearing snow, and the sky is gray. Dave Winer claimed he was bringing warm weather across the country from California. Yo, Dave, if yesterday’s weather meant you got here at last–did you decide to leave again sometime after Bush’s speech?

A rant worth raving about–and very funny–from Steve at OnePotMeal, starting with:

“Blogs are like fanfiction we write about ourselves.

Wars are like fanfiction politicians write about themselves.

If only politicians all got blogs they could show each other how cool and great they are instead of bombing the fuck out of the people who happen to be standing between their palaces.”

Betsy’s quote of the day:
“…with nations as with individuals our interests soundly calculated will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties, and history bears witness to the fact that a just nation is trusted on its word when recourse is had to armaments and wars to bridle others.”
Thomas Jefferson, Second Inaugural Address

“My blog is my email to the universe. I write what I want, when I want. People read when they want, what they want.”

I’ve just been filling out a questionnaire for a grad student studying blogging and gender. Did you ever notice that other people’s questions help you find out the answers to questions of your own?

“What would it take for you to become an A-list blogger?” she asked. Here’s what I said:

“I would love to have more people read my blog and send me comments. I think if I keep doing what I’m doing–writing about stuff I care about and know about–that people who are interested in my stuff will find me. I don’t aspire to be an “A-list blogger.” Metaphorically–a real concert pianist plays 6+ hours per day. Great, we all love to listen to that pianist, and I love to read those glorious A-list bloggers. But…by practicing an hour or two a day, I can play pieces I enjoy, please all my friends, and have a good time. That’s the kind of blogging I aspire to.”

Betsy’s quote of the day: “I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.” (Samuel Johnson, 1709–1784)

Some of my favorites among the sons of heaven: Roadside America Hall of Fame.

Various industries are seeking to compromise the open, end-to-end architecture of the Internet and replace the public’s information commons with proprietary control. The enclosure of the Internet commons is being achieved through the attempted subversion of open technical standards; unprecedented expansions of intellectual property law at the expense of free information exchange; “techno-locks “that reduce the public domain and fair use rights; and the privatization of Internet governance.

That’s a quote from David Bollier, and it’s part of why I have reservations about The World of Ends. WofE is a lovely, compelling document–David Weinberger and Doc Searls are two of my favorite bloggers–BUT….

1. I don’t share their optimism about their audience.

   D&D urge businesses to give up on subverting the web to their own selfish goals, because it makes the web worse. Do businesses really care if the web gets worse? If I promised you a billion dollars tomorrow, but the cost was making the Internet just a bit worse –what would you do? How about if you knew that if you didn’t grab that billion dollar profit, someone else would do the dirty deed instead?

2. I don’t share their confidence in the future–or even the present.

   The Internet was built on a boatload of government funding, and run as a “gift economy” by academics for many years. That was then, this is now. Count the number of spam messages and popup ads you saw today if you don’t believe me. Who crushed Napster? Who killed web radio? Can you predict what the next target will be?

3. I don’t want stupid companies to stop making stupid mistakes.

   The alternative is that they work in sneakier ways. We all laugh at the fake “teen girl” website promoting beef–the next one will be more subtle. We all laugh at the fake weblogs for Raging Cow–the next company to try to market through weblogs will be smarter. People on Slashdot laugh at the astroturf posters who work for Microsoft. Do you think Microsoft can’t afford to hire people to spend time creating online personalities–charming, engaging, multifaceted–who just happen to think Microsoft isn’t all that bad?

I’m grateful to D&D for a clear, loving portrait of what the Internet could be and should be. But the Internet they describe is already being eroded. Corporate and government wolves are circling, all of them eager to bite off another piece of it for themselves. I say, let’s get ready to pull up our wagons in a circle to fight them off.

I took a spectacular-looking but harmless fall tonight, breaking loose from gravity for a microsecond–then I crashed. The air is warm, but earth underneath our feet still holds, like a grudge, the memory of those weeks of freezing.

As the landscape transforms to muddy pools over hidden patches of ice, it’s easy to fall out of love with snow. Remedy: Caltech’s lovely page of photos of snowflakes.

Do you remember your sense of mystery and awe when someone told you that no two snowflakes were alike? I remember feeling as if that were a mystery so close, I could almost catch it, almost grasp it, but not quite.

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” (Albert Einstein)

We live in a difficult, troubling, complex universe–more slippery than a Cambridge midnight sidewalk in early March–and yet, around any corner, we might tumble into a private source of joy.

Back to earth, now, I walked on after my tumble, heading out to the local diner for hasty dinner with my vegetarian daughter. My trousers were soaked, and I looked as if I had had a different, even more embarrassing kind of accident. I had an omelet, so good, and so delicious to be fed by someone else’s cooking than my own.

And it’s all the same universe–my wet pants, my embarrassment, my daughter’s serendipitous visit, the bruise that isn’t now bothering me much, the omelet, the worries about Iraq, and about my husband on a plane to Texas. I miss him. So I’m glad I found those snowflakes.

Sonnet XVIII, William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Awwww–thanks, William! So, your genius and your love made this person immortal. Only thing is, though, nobody can now figure out who this person was. Once again: if you want to be immortal, girls–or if you just want to be solvent–do it yourself!

The canonical path (for women) to immortality is to be adored by immortal men. Consider the life, and fame, of Alice Pleasance Liddell (1852-1934), the inspiration for Alice in Wonderland. Three photographs:

The first, taken in 1859 by Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) shows 7 year-old Alice posed as a beggar girl.

The second, taken by the famous Victorian photographer Julia Cameron (1815-1879), shows Alice as a young woman–posed as the mirror image of Carroll’s beggar girl.

The third shows Alice at 80, when she was eking out her income by lecturing on her experience as “Alice.”

The brilliant but shy Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson first met Alice when she was (almost) four–he was twenty-four. Three years later, Alice inspired Carroll/Dodgson to dream up the
Alice in Wonderland story during a boat trip–he published the story in 1865. Its sequel, Through the Looking Glass, appeared in 1871.

Supposedly, Queen Victoria’s fourth son Prince Leopold, fell in love with Alice when he was at Oxford. He was dissuaded from wedding a commoner, and Alice got married in 1880 to another Oxford student, named Reginald Hargreaves.

Now (if not earlier) her story diverges from fantasy. Of their three sons, two were killed in action in World War I. In 1925, Alice’s husband died too. She was 73. No passionate young men gathered round to adore and protect her. She was reduced to selling Carroll’s hand-written manuscripts, and later to touring the US giving lectures. She confessed to her last surviving son that she was “tired of being Alice in Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful? It is – only I do get tired!”

(I remember a football-playing college boyfriend with a bad knee, whose doctor told him, “Twenty years down the road, your football glory plus ten cents will get you a cup of coffee–assuming the cost of coffee doesn’t rise.” For most of us, once we are 80, telling the story of all the men who worshipped us way-back-when won’t pay the rent. In that way, Alice was lucky.)

If any girl got a ticket to immortality from the man who adored her–Alice surely did. So, how immortal is she? According to Google the hits for “Alice Liddell” plus the hits for “Alice Pleasance Liddell” add up to about 4,000–Lewis Carroll himself gets more than 164,000. In fact, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron has about 4 times as many hits as little Alice.

The moral? If you want to be immortal, girls–or if you just want to be solvent–do it yourself!

Thanks to Joho for a link to Halley’s Alpha Male series. Brilliant, fascinating, funny adult writing.

But…it’s hard to picture my own favorite men hoping other men envy them, or wishing large groups of women would crave their touch. “Alephs” are too busy thinking about–oh, I don’t know–quantum computers, or saving the whales, or making weblogs better. They live in a world that fascinates them. Like Halley’s Alphas, the Alephs have lots of “stuff” they’re longing to show you. But the Alephs show off their stuff because they are really interested in it, and really interested in sharing its delights with you–and if that kindles a sexual spark, and fireworks follow, it’s a real event in the life of the Aleph male*. It’s exciting and meaningful, not a minor variation on what he did to some other girl last week.

Halley, I think your writing is wonderful–and your research on Alphas sounds like lots of fun! But… give Alephs a chance and see if you don’t like them even better.

* There are Aleph females too, of course. I like them too.

Any box of Droste cocoa shows an infinite series of beautiful Dutch ladies holding trays with boxes of Droste cocoa, and so on–Netherlanders call such images “Droste effects.” Dutch graphic artist MC Escher delighted in similar and even more complex designs. Is their hypnotic spell purely artistic? Metaphysical? Mathematical?

Physicists at the University of Leiden have created some gorgeous studies and animations of Escher’s “Print Gallery”. (Warning: artistic non-fungible-time warp. )

One of the original researchers, Bart de Smit, will be speaking at MIT on Tuesday, March 13. To quote the MIT lecture announcement:

One of M.C. Escher’s most intriguing works depicts a man standing in a gallery who looks at a print of a city that contains the building that he is standing in himself. This picture, with the title Print Gallery, contains a mysterious white hole in the middle. Two years ago, Hendrik Lenstra discovered the mathematical structure of this print. Using well known mathematical results about elliptic curves, Lenstra showed that what Escher was trying to achieve has a unique mathematical solution….. With help from artists and computer scientists, we have constructed a completion of the picture.The white hole turns out to contain the entire image on a smaller scale, which in the Dutch language is known as the Droste effect…. In the talk, the mathematics behind Escher’s work and the process of making the completion will be explained and visualized with computer animations.

That’s coming up Thursday,
March 13,
4:15pm – 5:30pm, in MIT’s 10-250. I don’t know about you, but I can hardly wait.

This fascinatingly ugly object is a
Critterbug, marketed as a cat toy, but in fact a battery-powered laser pointer. Available where cat toys are sold (I paid $12.95 plus tax in Cambridge, MA), it is just what you need to spice up any PowerPoint presentation. Available in many hideous colors-I think my favorite is green, but the red has a certain shock value all its own.