Context & Continuity

What a Coincidence! David Edelstein and A.O. Scott Find the Same Thing "Oxymoronic"

Oxymoronic.  How often do you hear that word in an eight-hour period?  Let me explain why that's the pertinent question this morning.

First I'll tell you what you already know: I have aggressive media consumption habits.  I tear through media like Henry VIII at a banquet.  My family believes it's an awesome and frightening habit. 

Second, at that banquet, i always make room for The New York Times and lots of airtime from National Public Radio and from NPR, I usually catch the program Fresh Air.

So, yesterday, while tearing through the Times, I came across A.O. Scott's review of the new George Clooney movie, The American and read this paragraph:

In addition to the priest, he befriends Clara, a prostitute — played by an actress with the splendidly oxymoronic name Violante Placido — who is so stirred by his bedroom prowess that she stops charging him and asks him out for dinner instead. (Some guys get all the breaks.) Meanwhile his business dealings with his client carry a sexual undercurrent that the American may or may not notice.  [entire review]

i noticed the use of the word "oxymoronic" because it was well played and not a word I read in the media on a regular basis.  --Until yesterday.

David Edelstein reviews movies for the NPR program Fresh Air and it wasn't a surprise to hear him queue up a review of The American because the movie was just released and that's how the media works.  What was a surprise was when he spoke this paragraph:

As in "Up in the Air," Jack does make a new friend, Clara, a prostitute played by the oxymoronically named Violante Placido. I wondered why she was so familiar, with her soft, open face and voluptuous body. It turns out she's the daughter of Simonetta Stefanelli, unforgettable as Michael Corleone's doomed Sicilian bride in "The Godfather."  [entire review]

I don't think the reviewers "borrowed" from each other.  Both David Edelstein and, especially, A.O. Scott are "made men" who don't have to struggle towards the top anymore.  Rather, i think that, just like when the lights are out, the room is "dark," if a character has the name Violante Placido, the name is oxymoronic.  Both reviewers noticed it and both called it out and neither could find a better word to describe it than oxymoronic. 

Interesting.

Your Next Assignment: Pre-Order the New William Gibson Book.

What can I say.  Well, William Gibson's new book is available on September 7, 2010 and features the return of Hubertus Bigend and (yes!) Hollis Henry, our favorite hero and last seen in Mr. Gibson's book, Pattern Recognition, and (yes again!) Milgrim from Spook Country.  Because I can't do any better, here's the description from Booklist via Amazon: 

After a gig investigating “locative art” for the “overly wealthy and dangerously curious” Hubertus Bigend, founder of the trend-forecasting firm Blue Ant (Spook Country, 2007), Hollis Henry finds herself once again under Bigend's employ. This time she is hired to discover the identity of the designer of a secret brand of clothing called Gabriel Hounds, whom Bigend hopes to enlist in his bid to get into the design, contracting, and manufacture of U.S. military clothing (and its inevitable spin-off into the mainstream consumer market). Military contracting, according to Bigend, is essentially recession proof. Meanwhile, the translator and cryptologist Milgrim (also returning from Spook Country), a former Ativan addict (now in recovery on Bigend's dime) with “zero history” (being off the grid, he has no credit or address history), is asked to assist Hollis in her investigation. What begins as a seemingly innocent apparel-related project takes on more sinister overtones when the two are followed from London to Paris by a competitor with shady dealings in the arms trade and a personal ax to grind with Milgrim. Gibson, who made a name with Neuromancer (1984) and other speculative takes on new technologies, returns to his familiar concerns with hacker culture, surveillance, paranoia, and viral marketing, with occasional digressions into the semiotics of fashion and celebrity and references to cosplay, base jumping, and the Festo AirPenguin (look it up).

Herewith, the Festo AirPenguin:

Please place your order now. 

WSJ: Joyce and Carter and Maybe Even Pollack Are Too Smart.

Above, we see a picture of James Joyce and the person responsible for James Joyce being the literary legend we know today, Ms. Sylvia Beach of the bookstore / publisher, Shakespeare & Company in Paris, published Mr. Joyce and for that the world owes her an everlasting debt of gratitude.  But that isn't the point I want to make.

What brings me back to the blog is an article by Mr. Terry Teachout appearing in the June 26, 2010 issue of The Wall Street Journal.  Mr. Teachout, who I've bloged about before here, came across an academic paper that sparked an idea for Mr. Teachout's column about how Modern music, literature and other arts might be too complicated for us to understand.  Observe:

Are certain kinds of modern art too complex for anybody to understand? Fred Lerdahl thinks so, at least as far as his chosen art form is concerned. In 1988 Mr. Lerdahl, who teaches musical composition at Columbia University, published a paper called "Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems," in which he argued that the hypercomplex music of atonal composers like Messrs. Boulez and Carter betrays "a huge gap between compositional system and cognized result." He distinguishes between pieces of modern music that are "complex" but intelligible and others that are excessively "complicated"—containing too many "non-redundant events per unit [of] time" for the brain to process. "Much contemporary music," he says, "pursues complicatedness as compensation for a lack of complexity."

"You have turned your back on common men, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence," H.G. Wells complained to Joyce after reading "Finnegans Wake." That didn't faze him. "The demand that I make of my reader," Joyce said, "is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works." To which the obvious retort is: Life's too short.

I've been thinking, a lot, about Modernism lately and I'm starting to put these ideas down on paper.  But for the time being, I want to write here that maybe it's still too soon to judge the lasting merits of Finnegans Wake or Eliot Carter.  Perhaps.  But part and parcel of that notion is that it's probably far too soon to summarily dismiss them.

Oh, and here's a link to the paper Mr. Teachout cites, Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems.

The Shame of Reading a Book in Public, According to the NYTimes.

I missed this trend altogether.  I didn't know there was social stigma attached to reading in public.  --Am I the last to receive the news? That's what I get for burying my nose between the covers.

I learned I was a social pariah when I was catching up on some of the bits I clip from the NYTimes.  This is what I found:

Debra Jaliman, a dermatologist in Manhattan, said that she believed technology like her iPad, which she uses to read everything from newspapers to novels, had helped banish social stigmas about reading alone in public.

“There may once have been a slight stigma about people reading alone, but I think that it no longer exists because of the advancement of our current technology,” she said. “We are in a high-tech era and the sleekness and portability of the iPad erases any negative notions or stigmas associated with reading alone.” [more]

It is a shame and a pity that taken more than half-a-century to learn this important lesson.  Given my reading habits, even, gasp, in public, it's a wonder I have any friends at all.

“I think, historically, there has been a stigma attached to the bookworm, and that actually came from the not-untrue notion that, if you were reading, you weren’t socializing with other people,” Dr. Levinson said. “But the e-reader changes that also because e-readers are intrinsically connected to bigger systems.” For many, e-readers are today’s must-have accessory, eroding old notions of what being bookish might have meant. “Buying literature has become cool again,” he said.

Buying literature has become cool again?  I bow to the gods of fashion.

We're Afraid of Hurting our Computer's Feelings.

This morning, in todays' Wall Street Journal, I was fascinated by these two paragraphs in the article, Sweet Talking Your Computer:

If you were asked how much you liked, say, a plate of lasagna, you would undoubtedly say nicer things to the chef than you would to a person who had no connection to the chef. This would be the polite thing to do. Would you also be overly nice to a computer that tutored you for 30 minutes and then asked how well it taught you?

To find out, I ran an experiment at Stanford University. After being tutored by a computer, half of the participants were asked about the computer's performance by the computer itself and the other half were asked by an identical computer across the room. Remarkably, the participants gave significantly more positive responses to the computer that asked about itself than they did to the computer across the room. These weren't overly sensitive people: They were graduate students in computer science and electrical engineering, all of whom insisted that they would never be polite to a computer.

Having been in close terms with too many computers over too many years, I'll confess to developing certain affections but only on the same level I do with my M150 Pelikan fountain pen.  A good tool is a good thing.  It might be interesting to deal out the data to see if there are any breaks along the age of the participants.  Maybe my daughters have a closer emotional relationship with their digital gear than I do with mine.

Oh, and one more thing about this article:  It has a priceless description of Microsoft's "Clippy" debacle.  Must read.