Essays: July 2008 Archive Page

Interesting observations on the internet's response to the death of Randy ("The Last Lecture") Pausch.

You interacted with Randy through a little box embedded in a webpage. Your headphones piped his voice clear and strong into the center of your brain, almost as if some deep part of your own mind was delivering his nuggets of wisdom. He was talking to you alone, not the hundreds packed into a theater or your family gathered around the television. In response, then, it made sense to get personal and say, directly, "Thanks, Randy. We'll miss you."

This mourning splits the difference between the small and generally private funerals of our friends and family and the public spectacles that marked the passings of Stalin, or Elvis, or Princess Di. Millions of people grieved alone in the asynchronous communities of the internet. --Alexis Madrigal

I tell my free-verse-loving creative writing majors that Picasso learned to paint traditional portraits before he chose to put two eyes on one side of a figure's nose, so that learning the traditional rules of grammar will make your writing more powerful, since if you choose to ignore a convention, it will be a deliberate action, rather than something that happens because you don't know any better.

When transcribing spoken words, reporters regularly cut out an "um" here and an "uh" there.  Since punctuation is often just an approximation, different reporters who hear the same passage don't always record it the same way. (See "Ladies and Gentlemen [?] we got him." for a brief overview of how reporters variously puncutated the dramatic pause in Paul Bremer's 2003 statement on the capture of Saddam Hussein.)

But what if you're quoting an e-mail from a source whose computer apparently doesn't have a shift key?  You can often work around it through indirect quotation:

Using the clipped lingo typical of online chatter, Saha said she would be right back ("brb") because her kid sister's rabid wallabee had gotten stuck in the air vent again ("ksrwsiava").

When does standardizing a language change the sentiment too much? There's a whole side industry of bloggers who enjoy picking apart President Bush's published verbal gaffes.  Certainly anything a public figure says at an official event is fair game, but when an ordinary citizen suddenly becomes a source of news -- perhaps by being related to a crime victim -- it may appear patronizing to publish their ungrammatical statements either verbatim, or with an encrustation of parenthetical corrections. 

Online communication adds yet another layer of uncertainty. When is it appropriate to leave the cyberspeak as is, without parenthetical clarifications or silent corrections?  The NYT offers a great reflection on the relationship between cyberspeak and standard written English.

My problem with message-board language brings up a prior problem in journalism: the difficulty of translating spoken language into written language. The philosopher Jacques Derrida gained notoriety by dimming the bright line between what was known in strange pre-Internet lingo (French, was it?) as langue and parole. He thought the written-spoken distinction was suspect and by turns collapsed and reasserted itself in the merry game of signification.

Nothing works more Frenchly and merrily this way -- shape-shifting at a rapid pace -- than Internet language, which morphs from standard English (a dialect of which has become the Web's lingua franca) to other languages and dialects to slang and emoticons and acronyms and phonetic miscellany. (Take "hey guys, i'm stoopid. DOH! meh. GAH. :O wth." Can this communication be taken as an admission of some kind of error? Can it be faithfully paraphrased as "she admitted her mistake on a message board"?) I can't tell how much of this keycap casserole belongs in ink on paper or how much of it makes sense there. -- Virginia Hefferman

You won't find this sort of thing on the TV news shows. Stanley Fish:

Milton's poetry never lets you relax. Even when one of the famous similes wanders down what appears to be a desultory path of mythical allusions and idealized landscapes, it always returns you in the end to the moral perspective that had only apparently been suspended. So after rehearsing the story of Mulciber's leisurely fall from heaven "like a falling star," Milton's narrator says, "thus they relate, erring," with the harsh judgment of "erring" now attached to any reader who had been entranced by the "fable" put forth by the devils. ("Paradise Lost, I", 740-747).

I just saw Wall-E with the family. It's rare for me to suggest that we all go see a movie -- my wife is the cinema buff. But I had read outstanding reviews, and it is a Pixar film, so I went in with high expectations, and was satisfied. It didn't knock my socks off; the "Daddy, is he really dead?" ending was predictable -- I think the death of a supporting character was probably necessary to boost the emotional energy, but I did like the supporting cast of malfunctioning robots (I wanted them to have more screen time).  But those are quibbles.

For bedtime reading, my son and I are going through How to Survive a Robot Uprising, and I just taught him about the uncanny valley last night. So it was interesting to see how human the robots seemed in this film, and how artificial the humans seemed (though that's a design choice that fits well with the story). In the New York Times, Frank Rich writes a thoughtful review of Wall-E:

This movie seemed more realistically in touch with what troubles America this year than either the substance or the players of the political food fight beyond the multiplex's walls.

While the real-life grown-ups on TV were again rebooting Vietnam, the kids at "Wall-E" were in deep contemplation of a world in peril -- and of the future that is theirs to make what they will of it. Compare any 10 minutes of the movie with 10 minutes of any cable-news channel, and you'll soon be asking: Exactly who are the adults in our country and who are the cartoon characters?

Almost any description of this beautiful film makes it sound juvenile or didactic, and it is neither. So I'll keep to the minimum. "Wall-E" is a robot-meets-robot love story, as simple (and often as silent) as a Keaton or Chaplin fable, set largely in a smoldering and abandoned Earth, circa 2700, where the only remaining signs of life are a cockroach and a single green sprout.

The robot of the title is a battered mobile trash compactor whose sole knowledge of human civilization and intimacy comes from the avalanche of detritus the former inhabitants left behind -- a Rubik's Cube, an engagement ring and, most strangely, a single stuttering VCR tape of "Hello, Dolly!," a candied Hollywood musical from 1969. Wall-E keeps rewinding to the song that finds the young lovers pledging their devotion until "time runs out."

Pixar is not Stanley Kubrick. Though "Wall-E" is laced with visual and musical allusions to "2001: A Space Odyssey," its vision of apocalypse now is not as dark as Kubrick's then. The new film speaks to the anxieties of 2008 as specifically as "2001" did to the more explosive tumult of its (election) year, 1968. That's more than upsetting enough.

Wilfred M. McClay:

The humanities are imprecise by their very nature. But that does not mean they are a form of intellectual ­finger-­painting. The knowledge they convey is not a rough, preliminary substitute for what psychology, chemistry, molecular biology, and physics will eventually resolve with greater finality. They are an accurate reflection of the subject they treat, the most accurate possible. In the long run, we cannot do without ­them.

But they are not indestructible, and will not be sustainable without active attention from us. The recovery and repair of the ­humanities--­and the restoration of the kind of insight they ­provide--­is an enormous task. Its urgency is only increasing as we move closer to the technologies of a posthuman future, a strange, ­half-­lit frontier in which bioengineering and pharmacology may combine to make all the fearsome transgressions of the past into the iron cages of the future, and leave the human image permanently ­altered.

The mere fact that there are so many people whose livelihood depends on the humanities, and that the humanities have a certain lingering cultural capital associated with them, and a resultant snob appeal, does not mean that they are necessarily capable of exercising any real cultural authority. This is where the second sense of burden comes ­in--­the humanities as reclamation task. The humanities cannot be saved by massive increases in funding. But they can be saved by men and women who believe in ­them.

From MetaFilter, which is better known as a link filter, comes this detailed story about one small but important part of the Battle of Gettysburg.

They smash into the oncoming lines and stop the Southern charge, but their success proves their undoing. As they push the center of the rebel lines back, the wings enfold them and they are soon caught in a sack. For every Minnesotan fighting, there are 6 Alabamans trying to kill him, sometimes from the distance of a handshake. The rebels are so thick around the 1st Minnesota that many Southerners are injured by friendly fire. The Minnesotans take cover behind trees and boulders as their world is reduced to smoke and screams, the ssszzz of bullets passing and the thock of bullets hitting home. Colvill is struck in the shoulder and foot. LTC Adams is hit six times. Maj. Downie is shot through both arms. Cpts. Muller and Periam, along with Lt. Farr, are all killed. Every officer is a casualty. The flag of the 1st Minnesota falls 5 times and is picked up 5 times. They fail to capture the enemy colors. They have stopped the charge, but they cannot retreat because they know that Hancock's implicit orders were to hold the rebels until he can patch the hole in the lines above them. So they stand and die.