Miscellaneous Details
Notes on things read, in an attempt to remember them
Tag: poetry
Engaging poetry
A strange little tale from Benjamin Aleshire, poet for hire.
Big Data vs. Big Dada: Writing poetry on demand at a New Orleans tech convention
"I'd like my poem to be about, 'How to help people'—it's for my boss," a cheery young woman tells me, an hour before we close up shop on the final day of the conference. This assignment moves me profoundly—after a thousand poems about anniversaries and dense explications of maverick approaches to data analysis, someone seems sincerely interested in the human condition—an embodiment of the benevolent side of the tech industry. Despite my rage at companies like Facebook for their complicity in the election of a psychopathic demagogue, among many other sins—Silicon Valley aspires to a fervent streak of altruism that falls squarely into the tradition of idealism going back to the 1800s.
The subject for her poem is a question philosophers have wrestled with for centuries, leading to Marx's indictment of capitalism as a virus which will ultimately eat itself, unless it's eradicated by a system which doesn't require exponential profit at the expense of workers and the environment. I don't say any of this, because not even Marxists enjoy the mansplaining of Marx—instead, I say, "That's so beautiful, it makes me think of the roots of idealism."
"I was thinking more along the lines of customer engagement. Like, 'How can we help our customer engage more with our product and our content?'" she informs me. Oy.
Needless to say, it doesn't end well.
Author Terry MadeleyPosted on 15 December, 2019 18 December, 2019 Categories CultureTags Benjamin Aleshire, poetry, technologyLeave a comment on Engaging poetry
So, farewell then, Clive
Sad to hear about the loss of Clive James (and Jonathan Miller and Gary Rhodes) earlier. A man of many talents.
TV reviewers the world over owe debt to Clive James – Irish times
live James, who died this week, was a man of many impressive parts, poet, essayist, literary critic, broadcaster, songwriter and blogger among them. But for me, it was the TV reviews he wrote for the Observer newspaper from 1972 to 1982 that left the most vivid and lasting impression. That's partly because James essentially invented the newspaper TV review as a particular sort of place where writers could flex their muscles and show off in a way that might have been frowned on elsewhere. But it was mostly because he was so damned brilliant at the job that everyone who followed remains in his shadow.
Clive James' best quips – from Beyoncé takedown to Arnold Schwarzenegger 'condom full of walnuts' jibe – Mirror
On novelist Barbara Cartland: "Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff."
"Windows is Shutting Down" – Caltech
Clive James is an illustrious expatriate Australian poet and author living in London. The title (and opening phrase) of his poem will be familiar to everyone reading these words. I've read them often enough myself, but it has taken James's wit to point out how they should have grated painfully on my grammatical ear. It is a marvellously chosen example to illustrate his claim about declining grammatical standards, since digital technology has been such a powerful force for generating mangled syntax.
It's through his TV work that I know him best, and his shows in the 80s and 90s were compulsory viewing.
Clive James on Television – ITV, 14th August 1988 – YouTube
The Clive James Show (Carlton) – 26th May 1996 – YouTube
And yes, that last one does include a demonstration of the musical talents of one Margarita Pracatan.
Author Terry MadeleyPosted on 1 December, 2019 4 December, 2019 Categories CultureTags Clive James, poetry, television, writingLeave a comment on So, farewell then, Clive
This report is ███████████
So what are we to make of the Mueller Report on Trump's dealings with Russia? Here's The Economist's take on it.
What to make of the Mueller report: Robert Mueller's magnum opus
The first 170 pages concern Russia. … Paul Manafort, Mr Trump's campaign chair, who was deep in debt to a Russian oligarch, shared internal polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, one of his Kiev-based employees with apparent links to both that oligarch and Russian intelligence. Even Rick Gates, Mr Manafort's right-hand man, believed Mr Kilimnik was a "spy". That did not stop Mr Manafort from meeting Mr Kilimnik. George Papadopoulos, a junior foreign-policy advisor who pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators, tried to let the campaign know early on that the Russians had compromising material on Mrs Clinton (nobody thought to tell the FBI). Donald Trump junior arranged a meeting with a Russian lawyer who promised "dirt" on Mrs Clinton. And of course Mr Trump himself was pursuing a Trump Tower Moscow project until just five months before the election, while simultaneously pushing for better relations with Moscow. None of this may have been illegal, but had voters known about it they might have made a different choice. …
The report's second part deals with obstruction of justice. … The striking thing about this section, when read in full, is how self-wounding Mr Trump's behaviour has been. Had he simply kept quiet, and let Mr Mueller complete his investigation into his campaign's links into Russia, the obstruction investigation never would have happened. Instead, he interfered clumsily on many occasions, allowing the special counsel to amass a damning record of the president's truculence, dishonesty and contempt for federal investigators.
The report itself is quite an important, historical document, though.
Mueller Mania is in full swing, and people are paying a pretty penny for the free report
The Mueller Report is available for free on the Justice Department's site (here). But that didn't stop publishers from printing it for profit.
Simon & Schuster's Scribner published a version "presented with related materials by The Washington Post" — available for $10.22 as a paperback or $7.99 on the Kindle — that topped Amazon's best-seller rankings. Publisher Skyhorse's version, featuring an intro by a Harvard law professor, claimed the #2 spot (at $9.20 in paperback); publisher Melville House's straight-up version (just $7.27) took the #3 spot. …
People aren't buying books, they're buying mementos
The fact that people bought enough copies of a free report to mint not 1 but 3 separate best-sellers may seem unlikely, or even downright dumb.
But it's not the first time a government document has gone big: The Starr Report (about President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky) and the Pentagon Papers both became popular best-sellers after printing in 1998 and 2011, respectively.
Perceptive publishers know that people don't buy these books for the info they contain, but the emotions they evoke: A physical Mueller Report meta-memorializes months of dramatic, scandalous, and conversation-starting news cycles in a single, boring book.
You would have thought we had had enough by now.
Remember when Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, shot himself in the foot with some sloppy document formatting? Mueller's report wasn't much better, initially — it was just a collection of scanned images.
The official PDF of the Mueller report has been updated in a subtle but important way
The decision immediately elicited groans from people trying to search the report for juicy details. A giant file of images has no text to search. It was also condemned by a group involved in setting technical specifications for the portable document format: "This deliberate and unnecessary act made the document substantially harder for anyone and everyone to use, forever," wrote Duff Johnson, executive director of the PDF Association, in a delightful review of the file's nerdiest details.
News organizations and Mueller fanatics quickly addressed this problem by running the PDF through a process known as optical character recognition (OCR) to add searchable text to the document. So, to review: The Mueller report was written on a computer, then printed out on paper, scanned back into digital images, and finally regenerated into text using software.
Of course, not everything in the report has been made available to us. As this image from FlowingData shows, a significant amount of redaction has taken place.
The redacted version (pdf) of the Mueller report was released today. Here's the thumbnailed view for a sense of the redactions.
And as this Quartz Obsession post explains, redaction is big business.
95 million: Documents classified by the United States in 2012
2 million: Employees the National Archives estimates it would take, given a year and a half, to review one year's worth of current classified output of one US intelligence agency
14,462: Peak size of the US government's World War II-era Office of Censorship, whose duties included redacting letters
But let's end this on a more creative note.
The Trump-era boom in erasure poetry
Published less than a month after Trump's first executive order banned citizens from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen from entering the country for 90 days, "Form N-400 Erasures" is an example of erasure poetry, a poetic form that has spiked in popularity since Trump's elections galvanized a culture of resistance online. Also known as blackout or redaction poetry, this is a type of poetry created from the substrate material of an existing text. Obscure many of the words, these poems command, and you will find the sentences that have been there all along.
While erasure can mimic the violence of the state, it can also expose the human cost of suppression, and symbolically restore a voice to the silenced.
Erasing the language of Trump, on the other hand, provides the particular satisfaction of watching Trump say exactly what he means, stripped of bombast. That perverse pleasure drives "When You Win It's Winning," Ariel Yelen's erasures of four of his speech transcripts. Here, Trump is hyperbolic and boastful as ever, but in erasing certain words, Yelen has him articulate the implications of his rhetoric. "I / want / a new America / an / America / so / reckless / s / o / disastrous / s / o / chao / t / ic /," he says. "I / am / what is wrong with this country."
Author Terry MadeleyPosted on 26 April, 2019 5 November, 2019 Categories CultureTags documents, Donald Trump, e-books, pdf, poetry, politicsLeave a comment on This report is ███████████
Walls of beige
Remember that post about the real life Amazon bookstore with its books all facing out? Well, here's another strange set of shelves.
In defense of keeping books spine-in
I've gathered that this is a controversial declaration, and that I risk inciting upset, even outrage. When, earlier this year, various publications reported on a growing trend of books shelved spine-in, many writers I know—who, by and large, are fairly big-hearted, tolerant people, respectful of differences, wary of orthodoxies—collectively lost their shit. Disgraceful, they said, appalling. No one who authentically loves books does this.
The author R.O. Kwon goes on to explain where her love of her "walls of paged-through, dog-eared beige" came from, and outlines some of the unexpected benefits of such an arrangement. It reminded me of this jokey bookshop photo that was doing the rounds some years back.
But let's leave the last word on how we arrange our books to the poet Brian Bilston.
Author Terry MadeleyPosted on 14 August, 2018 16 October, 2019 Categories CultureTags book shelves, books, Brian Bilston, poetryLeave a comment on Walls of beige
For want of a comma, $5 million was lost
See? I told you these kinds of things were important.
Oxford comma dispute is settled as Maine drivers get $5 million
Ending a case that electrified punctuation pedants, grammar goons and comma connoisseurs, Oakhurst Dairy settled an overtime dispute with its drivers that hinged entirely on the lack of an Oxford comma in state law.
The dairy company in Portland, Me., agreed to pay $5 million to the drivers, according to court documents filed on Thursday.
The relatively small-scale dispute gained international notoriety last year when the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit ruled that the missing comma created enough uncertainty to side with the drivers, granting those who love the Oxford comma a chance to run a victory lap across the internet.
And now read this poem on the importance of the Oxford comma, from Brian Bilston.
Author Terry MadeleyPosted on 14 February, 2018 7 November, 2019 Categories CultureTags Brian Bilston, language, poetry, punctuation, writing
Poet Wallace Stevens, much admired – kind of.
The detached poet
Of course, none of this prevented him from publishing some of the most linguistically inventive poetry in American history, and it's a testament to his talents that he'll be remembered as one of the 20th century's greatest poets, despite not being a particularly intellectual or even reflective one.
Damning with faint praise, especially the part where the article lists all the events and changes that have happened during his lifetime, that have all passed him by.
Author Terry MadeleyPosted on 27 January, 2017 11 September, 2018 Categories CultureTags book reviews, books, poetry, Wallace Stevens
This Miscellaneous Details blog is a record of some of the web pages and articles I've enjoyed reading, on a range of subjects, in an attempt to remember them and find connections.
Data & records
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An unsettling self-portrait
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Grammar society admit's defeat
Dreaming of past Christmas presents
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K E Garland on Sledging with Beethoven
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