There is another lit crit thing — I consider it a perversion, myself — that they call “reading with critical distance”. From the writer’s point of view, it as if one has knocked oneself out to prepare a bang-up with-all-the-trimmings Thanksgiving dinner, and had one’s guests troop in, weigh and measure the viands and photograph the table — and then depart having eaten not one bite.
It’s dinner, dammit. You’re supposed to eat it, and be nourished.
And then sit around discussing it, sure, and ask for the recipes, and exchange cooking tips and anecdotes and tales of dinners past, and so on to the limits of the metaphor.
Reading with critical distance only seems to me very nearly the same as not reading at all. For one thing, such a reader is very likely to miss all the essential emotional connections evoked between the lines. To switch metaphors, it’s like serving to a tennis player who stands there and doesn’t hit the ball back, watches it roll off to the side of the court, and then says, “I don’t see the point of this game.”
Bash ’em with me racket, I will…
So whoever it was who was finding this sort of analysis disturbing, I suspect what was happening was you were being pulled out of a former full engagement with the story by this sort of approach to the text, and rightly feeling that something valuable was being taken away, without necessarily being replaced with something of equal or greater value. Trying to hold both modes of reading in one’s brain at the same time must be kind of like having Simon Illyan’s memory chip in place. It may be best to take turns with the two modes.
Supposedly, training to critical reading makes one “a better reader” but if it results in one being able to happily read far fewer books, I’m not exactly sure where the merit lies. It’s like the hazard of revisiting beloved books of one’s childhood, and finding them swapped as if by bad fairies with inferior changelings. How can one call oneself a better reader as an adult if one is clearly having a much worse read…?
Lois McMaster Bujold, email to the LMB mailing list, 2010-10-01
October 2, 2010
QotD: A critique of “reading with critical distance”
September 25, 2010
Colbert performance mocks the legislators who invited him
Mary Katharine Ham observes how this will play out during the remainder of the American election this year:
One wonders exactly what Democrats thought would come of this. A Roll Call story Thursday showed at least a few members of Congress were concerned that the event would become a side show (implying, rather frighteningly, that some thought it wouldn’t).
Now, they’ve managed to portray themselves, not just as fat and happy incumbents willing to irresponsibly throw our money at problems, but as fat and happy incumbents who hire a court jester with our money to entertain them while they irresponsibly throw our money at problems. That ought to be great for the party’s message this fall.
[. . .]
And, as Jim Geraghty notes, this allows every single Republican challenger to ask the incumbent Democrat he’s running against, “Can you justify this embarrassing use of our tax dollars, and the literal mockery that the Democratic Congress has become?”
[. . .]
The problem is not that a comedian made jokes in front of a Congressional committee. Colbert’s hilarious. The problem is that his appearance laid bare what voters suspect about Congress — that it’s just one really expensive joke.
September 19, 2010
The end of “ownership”?
Cory Doctorow finds Intel adopting a Hollywood-style “crippleware”/license model in new hardware. As he correctly points out, this is an attempt to move us away from the ownership model, where you buy full control of the object you pay for, to a licensing model, where you only get certain rights of use:
This idea, which Siva Vaidhyanathan calls “If value, then right,” sounds reasonable on its face. But it’s a principle that flies in the face of the entire human history of innovation. By this reasoning, the company that makes big tins of juice should be able to charge you extra for the right to use the empty cans to store lugnuts; the company that makes your living room TV should be able to charge more when you retire it to the cottage; the company that makes your coat-hanger should be able to charge more when you unbend it to fish something out from under the dryer.
Moreover, it’s an idea that is fundamentally anti-private-property. Under the “If value, then right” theory, you don’t own anything you buy. You are a mere licensor, entitled to extract only the value that your vendor has deigned to provide you with. The matchbook is to light birthday candles, not to fix a wobbly table. The toilet roll is to hold the paper, not to use in a craft project. “If value, then right,” is a business model that relies on all the innovation taking place in large corporate labs, with none of it happening at the lab in your kitchen, or in your skull. It’s a business model that says only companies can have the absolute right of property, and the rest of us are mere tenants.
September 13, 2010
September 8, 2010
Ignoring the “don’t know” faction
Michael Blastland thinks there’s a serious issue with how pollsters do their work:
I don’t know about you, but quite often there seems to me only one sensible answer the questions posed in these attempts to canvass opinion: I don’t know.
But that’s not really what I mean. What I really mean is: “it depends”. And for that reason, I might not answer.
Yet the standard way for pollsters to treat people like me is to ignore them.
“Excluding don’t-knows and no answers” say the reports, before telling us that most of us think we should or shouldn’t do this or that. It’s as if the “don’t knows” haven’t been paying attention while the “no answers” don’t care.
Strip out the apathetic and the ignorant and see what’s left, they seem to say.
But isn’t it at least arguable that we’ve thought about it and decided uncertainty is the best response?
Lots of issues don’t fall into easily classified answers, and pollsters often take the easy way out and provide one or two obvious answers (usually tailored to the interests of the commissioning organization, of course), and leave people with a more nuanced view out of the equation.
August 31, 2010
Commercial hypocrisy, oilsands edition
Ezra Levant isn’t amused by some US businesses trying to make political statements by slagging Alberta’s oilsands while being less than clean themselves:
Walgreens is the largest pharmacy chain in the U.S.
It’s also corrupt.
For years, they secretly altered their customers’ prescriptions, without their doctor’s knowledge, in a giant insurance scam across 42 states. They targeted Medicaid, the program for low-income Americans. So they were stealing from taxpayers and the poor at the same time. That kind of big thinking is why Walgreens is number one.
Walgreens replaced inexpensive drugs with drugs that were up to four times more costly. Only when an honest pharmacist finally blew the whistle on them were they stopped — and fined a whopping $35 million.
Are you ready to take moral lessons from Walgreens? Because they’ve just announced that they’re switching their trucks to fuel that doesn’t come from Canada’s oilsands — as an ethical statement.
Taking ethical guidance from Walgreens is sort of like taking abstinence lessons from Hugh Hefner.
I’d call for a boycott of Walgreens, but they don’t have any stores in Canada (and, despite their name, they are no relation to Walmart).
But Walgreens isn’t the only moral hypocrite to come out against Canada. So did The Gap, which also owns Banana Republic and Old Navy.
Do yourself a favour: Don’t buy their clothes.
August 25, 2010
QotD: Amnesty International decries human rights situation in . . . Canada?
According to some media reports, Amnesty International’s new secretary general, Salil Shetty, has accused the Canadian government of a “serious worsening” of human rights in Canada. He cited a “shrinking of democratic spaces” in Canada, and organizations that have lost their funding for asking “inconvenient questions.”
“You expect more from Canadians . . . I think there is a growing gap between the values and the track record of Canada historically and the actions of the current government, which is deeply concerning.”
It reads like a Liberal Party press release, doesn’t it?
So what, exactly, has Mr. Shetty so upset about that he’s decided to slam Canada rather than, for instance, Iran?
Why, it’s the fact that Ottawa hasn’t sought the repatriation of young Omar Khadr from his detention in Guantanamo Bay. Which is a rather curious thing to criticize, since “the values and the track record” of the previous Liberal government is entirely consistent with what the Conservatives are currently doing.
Adrian MacNair, “Canada, noted human rights pariah state”, National Post, 2010-08-25
August 14, 2010
Business jargon got you down? Unsuck-it!
I’ve been known to print off Business Bingo cards for the inevitable business meeting jargon-fest, so I wholly support the notion behind Unsuck-it:
H/T to Xeni Jardin for the link.
August 10, 2010
August 5, 2010
US governments still finding this “free speech” thing annoying
If you support the notion of free speech, it is most important to support it during elections . . . but not everyone feels this way:
The Associated Press reports that California’s Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC) is considering “how to regulate new forms of political activity such as appeals on a voter’s Facebook page or in a text message.
Not whether to regulate these new forms of political speech, but how.
The recommendations apparently include “requiring tweets and texts to link to a website that includes . . . full disclosures, although some people feel the disclosure should be in the text itself no matter how brief . . . .”
To paraphrase Chief Justice John Roberts, this is why we don’t leave our free speech rights in the hands of FPPC bureaucrats. To bureaucrats like those at the FPPC, the Federal Election Commission or their analogues, there seems to be no need to show any evidence that Twitter, Facebook or text messages actually pose any threat to the public. It is enough that they these new forms of low-cost media aren’t currently regulated, but could be. Their primary concern, apparently, is that the regulation of political speech be as comprehensive as possible.
Free speech can be a messy thing — but censorship is worse.
August 3, 2010
Your elected representatives demand tokens of your respect
You may have elected them (someone had to), but you must show deference and respect at all times:
Sources reported this week that the city council of Elmhurst, Ill., had asked its attorney to research various definitions of “disorderly conduct,” in the course of considering possible changes to rules of decorum in city council meetings. The move was prompted by an incident in June in which a frustrated citizen rolled her eyes and audibly sighed during a meeting, and was promptly ejected from the chamber.
Reportedly, Darlene Helsop had hoped to speak to the finance committee about its plan to hire a state lobbyist, but wasn’t given the opportunity to do so. She sighed and rolled her eyes, to the great irritation of committee chairman Stephen Hipskind. “Making faces behind the mayor’s back is disruptive, in my opinion,” he said, and he ordered Helsop to leave. To their credit, other council members objected and two left, ending the meeting for lack of a quorum. But the council still seems to have asked its attorney to look into the legal ramifications of a rule that would encompass eye-rolling and (presumably) face-making.
So remember, serfs citizens, show respect to your owners leaders . . . or else!
July 22, 2010
Cultivating a taste for parody
The Economist reviews The Oxford Book of Parodies by John Gross:
Writing a parody is hard. In the 1940s, a competition in the New Statesman invited readers to parody Graham Greene. Greene himself entered under a pseudonym and only came second. Get it right, though, and you have a withering form of criticism and an immortal entertainment rolled into one. John Gross’s new anthology of parodies in English (with a few foreign titbits) has samples both high and low of this diverse genre.
[. . .]
Any well-known poem or character is fair game. A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin is revisited as an ailing pensioner who has retired to Spain (“He peers through a pair of bifocals;/He talks quite a lot to a bear that he’s got/Who is known as El Pu to the locals.”) Ezra Pound wrote a wintry variation on “Sumer is icumen in” (“…skiddeth bus and sloppeth us…”) But why limit oneself to a single writer? Portmanteau parodies let writers do two voices at once, thus “Chaucer” rewrites Sir John Betjeman (“A Mayde ther was, y-clept Joan Hunter Dunn…”) and “Dylan Thomas” redoes “Pride and Prejudice” (“It is night in the smug snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug household of Mr and Mrs Dai Bennet and their simpering daughters — five breast-bobbing man-hungry titivators, innocent as ice-cream, panting for balls and matrimony.”)
[. . .]
Documents, philosophies and schools of thought can be good fodder, too. H.L. Mencken did a “Declaration of Independence in American” (“When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook, without asking no permission from nobody, excepting maybe God Almighty, then they ought to let everybody know why they done it, so that everybody can see they are not trying to put nothing over on nobody . . .”)
July 12, 2010
QotD: Silly census fuss
[. . .] isn’t it just the slightest bit embarrassing for a government whose leader has trashed libertarians for their ethical myopia to have minions and media partisans present a libertarian pretext for an action that is not literally among the first 200 policy changes that would be implemented by an intelligent libertarian given plenary power?
Colby Cosh, “Census squabble: weak arguments shouldn’t have even worse foundations”, Maclean’s, 2010-07-12
Remixed anti-Libertarian cartoon
A post at the Mises Economics blog remixes this anti-Libertarian cartoon from leftycartoons.com with equally amusing results:
July 7, 2010
The naked truth about nudity
A review at The Economist strips Philip Carr-Gomm’s A Brief History of Nakedness down to the basics:
When, where and how much you take your clothes off matters a surprising amount. A plunging cleavage is nothing remarkable in the right circumstances. Elsewhere it can get you fired — or stoned to death. Nipples are fine in parks in northern Europe (and many Mediterranean beaches) but not on American television, even when covered with a tassel. Male genitalia are OK in the greatest works of classical sculpture, but not, even when they measure just one millimetre, in children’s books. The female pudendum is strictly for pornographers, gynaecologists and feminists trying to make a point. Given that everyone ran around naked only a few thousand years ago, and that we all look more-or-less similar once unclothed, this is quite puzzling.
[. . .]
Philip Carr-Gomm’s lushly illustrated book takes a long and enthusiastic look at the politics and culture of nakedness. Nudism attracts eccentrics, and their stories, he feels, deserve to be told. But his po-faced treatment of their antics can be unintentionally comic. Mr Carr-Gomm is a self-professed Druid and a practitioner of Wicca (a modern form of paganism that can involve a lot of larking around naked) and enjoys stripping off his clothes during country walks. Halfway through the book many readers will feel they have read quite enough reverential descriptions of naturist and pagan cults in 1930s Britain.
