In Soviet Russia, Rubik's Cube Solves YOU

Yesterday I checked out Like Shaking Hands with God (Seven Stories Press, 1999), a book of conversations about writing between Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer. Boy, am I ever glad I didn't buy it, and all hail once more to public libraries, the training schools of socialism! I hadn't heard of Stringer before, but one small virtue of this one is that it pointed me toward his books. Vonnegut I've read, of course, and Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the books I will keep no matter how I whittle down my collection in years to come. But here he just embarrasses me.



I do like his remarks about literature as

the only art that requires our audience to be performers. You have to be able to read and you have to be able to read awfully well. You have to read so well that you get irony! I'll say one thing meaning another, and you'll get it. Expecting a large number of people to be literate is like expecting everybody to play the French horn. It is extremely difficult [17-18].

But even here he goes a bit too far. Yes, a reader is a performer, as Vonnegut says. But though reading is harder to learn than spoken language, most people can learn to do it well enough. A significant part of the problem is that reading is generally taught in school in such a way as to discourage students from learning to do it well. If you're just playing a rousing game of "Ain't It Awful," of course, such considerations are unimportant. I do expect large numbers of people to be literate, though "large numbers" and "literate" both need to be defined. And that's leaving aside the question of whether people only respond creatively to written texts: understanding oral performance (which long predates the invention of writing and the spread of literacy beyond small elite groups) also involves complex skills of decoding and meaning-making.



What really annoyed me was this excerpt from Vonnegut's book Timequake, which was read aloud the evening this conversation took place:

A Luddite to the end ... I persist in pecking away at a manual typewriter. That still leaves me technologically several generations ahead of William Styron and Stephen King, who, like [Vonnegut's character Kilgore] Trout, write with pens on yellow legal pads.



I correct my pages with pen or pencil. I have come into Manhattan on business. I telephone a woman who has been doing my retyping for years and years now. She doesn't have a computer, either [40].

"Telephone"?! A true Luddite would write a letter with a quill pen, and dispatch it by messenger, who would wait for any reply and bear it back. Preferably on foot -- none of these newfangled 'railroads', as I believe the young people call them. He goes on to talk about sending some pages to his typist by post, using an envelope. An envelope, for heaven's sake -- a true Luddite would simply fold the ms. and seal it with wax and his personal seal. A gentleman has a personal seal, cuts his own quills, and grinds his own ink.



Vonnegut goes on to talk about the importance of face-to-face dealings with people, and I'm with him there. (So is Samuel Delany, who also discussed the importance of such contact at about the same time in his Times Square Red, Times Square Blue [NYU Press, 1999].) At the post office,

I put the waiting time to good use. I learn about stupid bosses and jobs I will never have, and about parts of the world I will never see, and about diseases I hope I will never have, and about different kinds of dogs people have owned, and so on. By means of a computer? No. I do it by means of the lost art of conversation [44].

I hadn't noticed that the art of conversation was lost. (To lose one art might be accounted a misfortune... But now that I think about it, gossiping in a queue, as fine a pastime as it is, isn't what is usually meant by "the art of conversation.") Vonnegut should have looked in the pockets of his other pair of pants, I know that's where I always find misplaced items. But technology hasn't a lot to do with that issue. As his admission about Styron and King shows, Vonnegut is aware that Luddism is relative. He uses advanced technology when it suits him, like his typewriter and telephone. And though I have a computer, and I even used a fax machine yesterday, I still value face-to-face dealings with people, as do all the younger people I know. Technology is often an excuse for shutting oneself away, rather than a reason; people became recluses long before Facebook.



As the poet Adrienne Rich once wrote: "Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around."



Which reminds me, Dennis Baron has an interesting new post at his Web of Language blog, "Computers Remember So You Don't Have To." He begins by describing studies which show that people who rely on computers and the Internet tend not to remember the information they get there.

More and more we’re saying to ourselves, “Why bother memorizing the names of the Oscar-nominated movies for 1939 when I can just look them up on IMDb?” Or, as the psychologists put it, “The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.”

Familiar so far, but instead of indulging in a technophobic rant, Baron continues:

But this is not surprising. Relying on an external database is nothing new: before digitized contacts files there were address books; before IMDb there were Leonard Maltin books. Before Wikipedia there were analog encyclopedias. And before Google there were librarians. As the experimenters acknowledge, humans have always recognized the role of individual expertise: we quickly learn who to ask for the best recipe, the most-accurate directions, the conversion from Fahrenheit to centigrade. That way we don't have to remember everything.

And for that matter, we don't have to memorize a lot of recipes because they're in the cookbook. We don't have to memorize the music we play on instruments because we have systems of notation that let us write it down. I've always had trouble remembering how to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade, even before computers, but that was because I so seldom had to do it. If I'd done it more, I'd have memorized it. I remember the birthdays of all three of my brothers and my niece, but after a few years BC (Before Computers) trying to work out a system on index cards, I keep track of the birthdays of my far-flung friends on my computer. Bitch about it if you like, but using such tools enables me to remember more birthdays than I could have done otherwise. My friends generally seem pleased when I send birthday greetings, and none have complained so far that I do by e-mail instead of sending a handwritten note in black ink on creamy white notepaper by manservant.



Baron then quotes Plato from the Phaedrus:

This invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

So, you see, it all started with writing. Or maybe it started when we first started covering our bodies with artificial skin so that we could live in colder climates, or when we began making stone tools instead of using our natural, god-given teeth to rip and tear. Back to the Stone Age! Back to the days before the Stone Age, when we weren't isolated and dehumanized by technology!

In Soviet Russia, Rubik's Cube Solves YOU

Yesterday I checked out Like Shaking Hands with God (Seven Stories Press, 1999), a book of conversations about writing between Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer. Boy, am I ever glad I didn't buy it, and all hail once more to public libraries, the training schools of socialism! I hadn't heard of Stringer before, but one small virtue of this one is that it pointed me toward his books. Vonnegut I've read, of course, and Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the books I will keep no matter how I whittle down my collection in years to come. But here he just embarrasses me.



I do like his remarks about literature as

the only art that requires our audience to be performers. You have to be able to read and you have to be able to read awfully well. You have to read so well that you get irony! I'll say one thing meaning another, and you'll get it. Expecting a large number of people to be literate is like expecting everybody to play the French horn. It is extremely difficult [17-18].

But even here he goes a bit too far. Yes, a reader is a performer, as Vonnegut says. But though reading is harder to learn than spoken language, most people can learn to do it well enough. A significant part of the problem is that reading is generally taught in school in such a way as to discourage students from learning to do it well. If you're just playing a rousing game of "Ain't It Awful," of course, such considerations are unimportant. I do expect large numbers of people to be literate, though "large numbers" and "literate" both need to be defined. And that's leaving aside the question of whether people only respond creatively to written texts: understanding oral performance (which long predates the invention of writing and the spread of literacy beyond small elite groups) also involves complex skills of decoding and meaning-making.



What really annoyed me was this excerpt from Vonnegut's book Timequake, which was read aloud the evening this conversation took place:

A Luddite to the end ... I persist in pecking away at a manual typewriter. That still leaves me technologically several generations ahead of William Styron and Stephen King, who, like [Vonnegut's character Kilgore] Trout, write with pens on yellow legal pads.



I correct my pages with pen or pencil. I have come into Manhattan on business. I telephone a woman who has been doing my retyping for years and years now. She doesn't have a computer, either [40].

"Telephone"?! A true Luddite would write a letter with a quill pen, and dispatch it by messenger, who would wait for any reply and bear it back. Preferably on foot -- none of these newfangled 'railroads', as I believe the young people call them. He goes on to talk about sending some pages to his typist by post, using an envelope. An envelope, for heaven's sake -- a true Luddite would simply fold the ms. and seal it with wax and his personal seal. A gentleman has a personal seal, cuts his own quills, and grinds his own ink.



Vonnegut goes on to talk about the importance of face-to-face dealings with people, and I'm with him there. (So is Samuel Delany, who also discussed the importance of such contact at about the same time in his Times Square Red, Times Square Blue [NYU Press, 1999].) At the post office,

I put the waiting time to good use. I learn about stupid bosses and jobs I will never have, and about parts of the world I will never see, and about diseases I hope I will never have, and about different kinds of dogs people have owned, and so on. By means of a computer? No. I do it by means of the lost art of conversation [44].

I hadn't noticed that the art of conversation was lost. (To lose one art might be accounted a misfortune... But now that I think about it, gossiping in a queue, as fine a pastime as it is, isn't what is usually meant by "the art of conversation.") Vonnegut should have looked in the pockets of his other pair of pants, I know that's where I always find misplaced items. But technology hasn't a lot to do with that issue. As his admission about Styron and King shows, Vonnegut is aware that Luddism is relative. He uses advanced technology when it suits him, like his typewriter and telephone. And though I have a computer, and I even used a fax machine yesterday, I still value face-to-face dealings with people, as do all the younger people I know. Technology is often an excuse for shutting oneself away, rather than a reason; people became recluses long before Facebook.



As the poet Adrienne Rich once wrote: "Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around."



Which reminds me, Dennis Baron has an interesting new post at his Web of Language blog, "Computers Remember So You Don't Have To." He begins by describing studies which show that people who rely on computers and the Internet tend not to remember the information they get there.

More and more we’re saying to ourselves, “Why bother memorizing the names of the Oscar-nominated movies for 1939 when I can just look them up on IMDb?” Or, as the psychologists put it, “The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.”

Familiar so far, but instead of indulging in a technophobic rant, Baron continues:

But this is not surprising. Relying on an external database is nothing new: before digitized contacts files there were address books; before IMDb there were Leonard Maltin books. Before Wikipedia there were analog encyclopedias. And before Google there were librarians. As the experimenters acknowledge, humans have always recognized the role of individual expertise: we quickly learn who to ask for the best recipe, the most-accurate directions, the conversion from Fahrenheit to centigrade. That way we don't have to remember everything.

And for that matter, we don't have to memorize a lot of recipes because they're in the cookbook. We don't have to memorize the music we play on instruments because we have systems of notation that let us write it down. I've always had trouble remembering how to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade, even before computers, but that was because I so seldom had to do it. If I'd done it more, I'd have memorized it. I remember the birthdays of all three of my brothers and my niece, but after a few years BC (Before Computers) trying to work out a system on index cards, I keep track of the birthdays of my far-flung friends on my computer. Bitch about it if you like, but using such tools enables me to remember more birthdays than I could have done otherwise. My friends generally seem pleased when I send birthday greetings, and none have complained so far that I do by e-mail instead of sending a handwritten note in black ink on creamy white notepaper by manservant.



Baron then quotes Plato from the Phaedrus:

This invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

So, you see, it all started with writing. Or maybe it started when we first started covering our bodies with artificial skin so that we could live in colder climates, or when we began making stone tools instead of using our natural, god-given teeth to rip and tear. Back to the Stone Age! Back to the days before the Stone Age, when we weren't isolated and dehumanized by technology!

Resistance Is Futile

The Taser has become the sex toy of choice among American law enforcement officers, as shown most recently by the experience of this Marin County citizen. How exactly do you "stop resisting" when you're in convulsions from electric shock? (via Digby, via Sideshow) I'm reminded of a passage from Merle Miller's 1972 semi-autobiographical novel What Happened. The narrator recalls an anti-Fascist demonstration in New York during the 1930s (page 56):

I remember in November of that first year The Clarinet Player and I were walking past the New York Public Library at Forty-second Street.

On the steps a hundred or so cops were using their billy clubs to beat the heads of fifty or so people, mostly young and scruffy-looking, as martyrs often are.

There were perhaps a dozen old people, too, and the cops were giving them an even worse time, one very old man in particular. Three cops with blackjacks were beating him on the head, the arms, the chest, the stomach. And a fourth was kicking him in the groin, and the old man was surrounded by a great pool of blood that grew larger every moment.

Several picket signs on the sidewalk said, "Protest the Munich Sell Out! Attend rally at ..."

After I was sick on the sidewalk, I said, "I didn't know such things happened."

The Clarinet Player touched me lightly on the shoulder.

"Baby," he said, "you are about two years old, if that, and that is one of the reasons I love you. Don't never change. What you don't understand is that about one thousand things like this happen every day in this town, and these here are white folks to boot. They usually don't hit white folks quite as hard as us niggers."

It's not really surprising, though, that Americans have no memory. (No one else does either.) You don't really expect stuff like this to be taught in school, do you? Only marginal, America-hating malcontents, professional leftists who need a drug test, remember stuff like this. We need to concentrate on the future, not the dead past.

I don't mean to demonize the police either, except for the incompetents who taze middle-aged men with heart conditions, unarmed ten-year-old children, bedridden old ladies, or importunate college students. But I'm not sure how much to blame even them when they face no consequences for doing it. (Just like the sexually predatory priests who were sheltered by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. You can't speak of a few bad apples when the whole organization mobilizes to protect them.) Not only are they often exonerated by official investigations, the comments sections of online news sites are littered with joyous citizens braying that the victims got just what they deserved and asked for. And maybe being tazed is preferable to such low-tech alternatives as having a toilet-plunger handle driven into your rectum, or being riddled with fifty bullets on the way to your wedding. Hey, at least no predator drones are involved. Yet.

Resistance Is Futile

The Taser has become the sex toy of choice among American law enforcement officers, as shown most recently by the experience of this Marin County citizen. How exactly do you "stop resisting" when you're in convulsions from electric shock? (via Digby, via Sideshow) I'm reminded of a passage from Merle Miller's 1972 semi-autobiographical novel What Happened. The narrator recalls an anti-Fascist demonstration in New York during the 1930s (page 56):

I remember in November of that first year The Clarinet Player and I were walking past the New York Public Library at Forty-second Street.

On the steps a hundred or so cops were using their billy clubs to beat the heads of fifty or so people, mostly young and scruffy-looking, as martyrs often are.

There were perhaps a dozen old people, too, and the cops were giving them an even worse time, one very old man in particular. Three cops with blackjacks were beating him on the head, the arms, the chest, the stomach. And a fourth was kicking him in the groin, and the old man was surrounded by a great pool of blood that grew larger every moment.

Several picket signs on the sidewalk said, "Protest the Munich Sell Out! Attend rally at ..."

After I was sick on the sidewalk, I said, "I didn't know such things happened."

The Clarinet Player touched me lightly on the shoulder.

"Baby," he said, "you are about two years old, if that, and that is one of the reasons I love you. Don't never change. What you don't understand is that about one thousand things like this happen every day in this town, and these here are white folks to boot. They usually don't hit white folks quite as hard as us niggers."

It's not really surprising, though, that Americans have no memory. (No one else does either.) You don't really expect stuff like this to be taught in school, do you? Only marginal, America-hating malcontents, professional leftists who need a drug test, remember stuff like this. We need to concentrate on the future, not the dead past.

I don't mean to demonize the police either, except for the incompetents who taze middle-aged men with heart conditions, unarmed ten-year-old children, bedridden old ladies, or importunate college students. But I'm not sure how much to blame even them when they face no consequences for doing it. (Just like the sexually predatory priests who were sheltered by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. You can't speak of a few bad apples when the whole organization mobilizes to protect them.) Not only are they often exonerated by official investigations, the comments sections of online news sites are littered with joyous citizens braying that the victims got just what they deserved and asked for. And maybe being tazed is preferable to such low-tech alternatives as having a toilet-plunger handle driven into your rectum, or being riddled with fifty bullets on the way to your wedding. Hey, at least no predator drones are involved. Yet.

For Watching TV Without Nausea, Try Dramamine

Just to keep things in perspective it's useful periodically to point out that one cannot watch TV without frequent nausea. One tunes in for a run-of-the-mill fifteen-minute broadcast of evening news on "NBC, the Community Minded Station" -- this is part of the station's public-service obligation -- and what does the newscaster Merrill Mueller show us? First governor Rockefeller and his bride returning from their honeymoon, looking merry enough; the Governor's first piece of official business will be a conference on Civil Defense. We cut the the President going into his birthday dinner in a New York Hotel; the dinner is at $1,000 a plate, and brings in $550,000 for the Democratic campaign fund; the President goes past a charming crowd of pickets demanding jobs and rights for Negroes and carrying a Jim Crow coffin; the President turns to grin at the camera. Cut directly to a suburban kitchen where a mother and her two children demonstrate the advantages of certain two-ply paper towels. We are back with the President in New York, dedicating a war-memorial at the Battery, and he is explaining that it is more natural for sons to bury their fathers (somehow this is especially disturbing coming from his mouth, but "it means that every generation must defend our freedom"). ... Next to some stock-market figures and a graph; and so to Gordon Cooper, the astronaut, reviewing boy-scouts in his home town and urging them to become Eagle Scouts, though he never made it himself.

This is from a column on TV that the anarchist man of letters (as he liked to call himself) Paul Goodman briefly wrote for the New Republic in 1963. It's collected in Format and Anxiety: Paul Goodman Critiques the Media (Autonomedia, 1995). Every now and then a liberal will yearn publicly for the days when the news media were the adversary of power, independent and fiercely critical. I always wonder when those days were. As this excerpt shows, very little has changed in the past 40-odd years.

For Watching TV Without Nausea, Try Dramamine

Just to keep things in perspective it's useful periodically to point out that one cannot watch TV without frequent nausea. One tunes in for a run-of-the-mill fifteen-minute broadcast of evening news on "NBC, the Community Minded Station" -- this is part of the station's public-service obligation -- and what does the newscaster Merrill Mueller show us? First governor Rockefeller and his bride returning from their honeymoon, looking merry enough; the Governor's first piece of official business will be a conference on Civil Defense. We cut the the President going into his birthday dinner in a New York Hotel; the dinner is at $1,000 a plate, and brings in $550,000 for the Democratic campaign fund; the President goes past a charming crowd of pickets demanding jobs and rights for Negroes and carrying a Jim Crow coffin; the President turns to grin at the camera. Cut directly to a suburban kitchen where a mother and her two children demonstrate the advantages of certain two-ply paper towels. We are back with the President in New York, dedicating a war-memorial at the Battery, and he is explaining that it is more natural for sons to bury their fathers (somehow this is especially disturbing coming from his mouth, but "it means that every generation must defend our freedom"). ... Next to some stock-market figures and a graph; and so to Gordon Cooper, the astronaut, reviewing boy-scouts in his home town and urging them to become Eagle Scouts, though he never made it himself.

This is from a column on TV that the anarchist man of letters (as he liked to call himself) Paul Goodman briefly wrote for the New Republic in 1963. It's collected in Format and Anxiety: Paul Goodman Critiques the Media (Autonomedia, 1995). Every now and then a liberal will yearn publicly for the days when the news media were the adversary of power, independent and fiercely critical. I always wonder when those days were. As this excerpt shows, very little has changed in the past 40-odd years.