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

Caution: Wikipedia trolls at play

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Is Hillary Clinton a giant shape-shifting reptile? Do ghosts use cellphones? Does Smithville, Iowa have a “quaint little library”? And how should Wikipedia reflect (or not) each of these sincere, not trolling, beliefs. (Trolls create a whole new set of wiki-problems.)

A veteran of some of the most hood-filled neighborhoods of Wikipedia, “Filll” has created a Wikipedia quiz-cum-learning-tool, the AGF Challenge Exercises. The challenges, based on real Wikipedia problems, include all three of the above. “AGF” stands for the Wikipedia policy “Assume Good Faith.”

He explains it to Durova:

When Wikipedia is criticized externally or internally over its handling of assorted situations, they are often extremely highly charged and emotional affairs, and often ongoing. This [the AGF Challenge Exercises] is a way to see a sanitized collection of problems in abbreviated and sanitized form, where critics inside and outside Wikipedia can offer their advice and suggestions.

In surprisingly-closely-related news, Harvard’s librarian Robert Darnton has a great essay in the June 12, 2008 issue of the NYRB. Most relevant bit:

Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the speedup in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in which information has spun completely out of control. I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively‚ and even how to appreciate old books.

And with help from Wikipedians like Filll, we can learn our own ways to make bad bits better.

Jane Austen’s writing table

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

This tiny table at Jane Austen’s house in Chawton was where she wrote the jewel-like novels that made her famous. If I ever feel like complaining about my workspace, I’ll remember hers, set in one corner of her family’s sitting room.

It won’t be in bookstores for another week but that didn’t stop two “reviewers” last week from posting low-ball reviews on Amazon. The book is How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, a colorful, profane, and surprisingly frank memoir of sleazy politics.

Media mentions of Allen Raymond’s book have mostly talked up his phone-jamming, for which his RNC pals threw him under the bus. The book details many stunts more colorful. Deceptive robocalls to Democrats from “scary black men” or “actors putting on thick Spanish accents” worked wonders at keeping them home on Election Day. Swapping soft money for hard–funneling GOP dollars to leftwing splinter candidates–engineering repeat contributions from donors who had already given their legal limit–Raymond names names and shows how each trick works.

Adam Cohen in the NYT says that this book may finally force Senate action on the long-delayed Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act. I hope it will.

I got an advance copy just a few days ago in response to my longtime phone-jamming blogging, and just posted my own review on Amazon too. It would be quite a job to track GOP lowballers around the two-way web but you may find it an interesting hobby. (On Barnes and Noble: “Pitiful and poorly written,” some prescient reviewer claimed on Christmas Day.)

Probably the biggest reason that GOP insiders want you not to read this book is not the rude first-person memories of Bush, Rove, Feather, Synhorst, et al. but the way showcases in-crowd contempt for their freeper supporters — “the Jesus-loves-guns crowd” — “the knuckle-draggers, the gunnies, and the committed ideologue nuts.” “The mouth-breathers who who decide GOP primaries might allow people to steal their money and send their children to impossible wars but they’ll cut no such slack for baby-killers.”

The book’s quite a read, and it could just make politics better.

sneering squirrel

Originally uploaded by Fifi LePew

Of all the condescending and unfairly snarky non-reviews of a good book I’ve seen in the New York Times, this morning’s haute hit-piece on Gods Behaving Badly takes the let-them-eat-cake gâteau.

..although Ms. Phillips fulfills her purely lighthearted ambitions for this story, she provides a cautionary example to budding novelists everywhere. Though her background includes stints as an independent bookseller and BBC researcher, she also has a blog full of her thoughts about the hot competition on a television dance-contest show. When writers lived on Mount Olympus, they didn’t talk about things like that.

A blogger? Dear me! And she blogs about TV dance contests? How dare such a low-life pen light-hearted novels about what-if worlds of deposed Greek gods stuck into modern-day London? You or I might imagine this concept is clever. The book’s craftmanship is so seamless you or I just may not notice the author’s “writing.”

You or I might even think those are virtues worth praising in someone’s first novel? Hmmph, sniffs Ms. Maslin, the novel is “flossy, high-concept.”

Author/blogger Marie Phillips mildly remarks that Maslin “could hardly squeeze another spoiler in and still stick to the word limit.” In fact, the plot spoilers are the best of Maslin’s obnoxious review, which falls apart even by its own limited logic when she tries to tell readers that these wildly inventive plot twists have been torn from a book that is (Maslin says) “sitcomlike” and “suggests the help of fiction-writing software.”

In case you can’t tell, I’m angry because I loved this book, first published in England and given show-placement in Uppsala’s English bookstore on the front table with Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman–whose fans will adore it. I don’t know Marie Phillips and I don’t want to know Janet Maslin, whose contrastingly reverent review of Dean Koontz’s glurge about his dead dog also makes me feel nauseous.

But then “real writers,” even when they stumble, all deserve real respect (“Nice clothes there, Emperor!”), quite unlike a mere blogger.

Landscape in October

Originally uploaded by Giorgos ~

And the always-amazing Montauk Rider says…

… here are the dusky smells of the past saying goodbye–the future saying hello.

Enjoy the days of nature’s last hurrah.

Stockholm is grayer and cloudier than the landscapes of Montauk Rider’s autumn, the autumn that I grew up in. Even so, I’m glad to be “home” from my latest journey.

There is something inspiring in the sight of Nature preparing for long winter sleep–I was wishing that I could express the thought somehow, I’m grateful Montauk Rider did so.

Lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy, pride–the old Seven Deadly Sins name things that make us stupid. And maybe our best protection against their power is knowing their names, so that our simple brains can guess it’s time to fight back when we see one of them kicking down our mental doors.

Why is there no one-word name for the deadly sin that sucked all brain cells from the brains-big-as-Buicks of Robert McNamara and Arthur M. Schlesinger?

“You like me, you really like me!” may be an inaccurate quote of Sally Field’s 1985 Oscar speech, but it’s a dead-on reflection of Sin #8, a craving at least as deadly as anger or avarice, much stronger than pride. The craving (O, junior high school!) for Popular Kids to pull us into their clubhouse–and backing that up, the fear that if we displease them we’re pushed out forever.

Maureen Dowd never names Sin #8 in her scathing review of Schlesinger’s memoir, but she scalpels its diagnostics like a surgeon:

Schlesinger knows he is too easily beguiled and seems never to have allowed moral or ideological differences to interfere with his social pleasures…

Over decades of friendship with Henry Kissinger, he only slowly fathoms the diplomat’s “overpowering ego” and Machiavellian ways. “I like Henry very much and respect him,” he writes in 1969, “though I cannot rid myself of the fear that he says one sort of thing to me and another sort of thing to, say, Bill Buckley.”… By the time of Watergate, Schlesinger deems Kissinger “one of the most disgusting figures” in the Nixon White House.

Yet when Gerald Ford takes over and Henry asks Arthur to lunch at the State Department, our diarist overcomes his distaste…. Kissinger .. tells Schlesinger that Nixon was sometimes evil and lazy (with the work habits of Hitler) and a liar and obsessed with destroying the reputations of the Kennedys, and that he had Howard Hunt forging documents proving that John Kennedy had ordered the assassination of Diem. “He was unquestionably a weird president, but he was not a weak president,” Kissinger says. “But everything was weird in that slightly homosexual, embattled atmosphere of the White House.” Schlesinger doesn’t press on the “slightly homosexual”; he deems Henry “a highly intelligent and charming man.”

Is there one word strong enough for the stupidifying power of Sin #8?

“Conformity” is far too bloodless. It doesn’t capture the craving, the intoxication, the horrible fear of ending up shut outside if you don’t “go along.” Sin #8 needs a new name and maybe “Junior High School Sin” is ugly enough to deserve it.

It may no coincidence that so many whistleblowers have been outsiders whose keeping quiet could never have won them acceptance into the exciting secrets of the Big Boys’ Clubhouse.

Happy, happy moment when I was 11

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Bright red is the favorite color of most small children. What a surprise it was, when someone told me this! Oh, you mean I was supposed to change my favorite color when I grew up?

October leaves in Norway and Sweden are rich in dark greens and yellows–but I miss the scarlet extravagance of autumn maple trees. I love this tree image from photoninja Judith Meskill…

Even more than that, I’m grateful that Judith added a poem of her own to her maple tree image. Judith’s title was “Walk with me…” For some reason (October melancholy?) her poem made me write my own first-poem-in-quite-a-while, a poem for my friend from childhood Mary Parfitt. Mary died of a brain tumor in 1989, so if I want to send her any messages now, blogging a poem is as good a way as any.

Walk with me
into a memory our past lives inhabit
but we do not.

Walk with me into
remembered October. Remember

the trees,
the beautiful whispering leaves,
scarlet tale-tellers,
undaunted by December.

Inhabiting other Octobers,
I remember
you.

A plow spared this daisy, but November will not

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Right up against the edge of this plowed field, one small daisy plant celebrates its so-improbable survival with a few flowers.

I’m guessing that late September may be too late for these flowers to set seeds–but what do I know? I’m not a botanist and, for that matter, I am not a little Swedish daisy.

Good luck, little plant.

We who are about to blog salute you.

Frank Wilczek at Uppsala Waterworks Museum

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Rumor has it that quarks and gluons abound in the cities of Sweden.

So, given that 2007 – 2008 is Frank’s sabbatical year, we’re headed to Stockholm (and Uppsala) for the fall term. Frank will be doing research and writing while finishing up a couple of books in progress. I will be boning up on philosophies of science in general and Nobel history in particular for my book Meta-Physics: Lives With, About, and Sometimes After the Cosmos.

Our plane leaves Boston tonight, which I hope excuses some of the recent silence on this blog.

Filmmaker Errol Morris says human faith in what Othello called “the ocular proof” is often misplaced–but not because he doubts the existence of “a real world” or “a fact of the matter”:

…photographs attract false beliefs – as fly-paper attracts flies. Why my skepticism? Because photography can make us think we know more than we really know.

Morris created those iconic “switcher” ads for Apple as well as a number of well-received documentaries. One of my favorites is his short “Oscar night” film–watch it now!– that includes Gorbachev praising Russell Crowe and my friend Sidney Coleman telling Morris:

The movie is playing a game with you. And it’s a game you’re happy to play.

Errol Morris, now making a movie about Abu Ghraib, is wrestling with some angst about truth and images. I wish any of the political candidates now soundbiting our ears had anything as interesting to say.

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p.s. And I do believe it’s Millie‘s birthday today–happy 82, Millie! Millie loves comments, so get over to her birthday blogpost and leave one!