Month: August 2011

by Zoë Pollock

Daniel Mendelsohn captures the allure of the rebellious Arthur Rimbaud:

He was a docile, prize-winning schoolboy who wrote “Shit on God” on walls in his home town; a teen-age rebel who mocked small-town conventionality, only to run back to his mother’s farm after each emotional crisis; a would-be anarchist who in one poem called for the downfall of “Emperors / Regiments, colonizers, peoples!” and yet spent his adult life as an energetic capitalist operating out of colonial Africa; a poet who liberated French lyric verse from the late nineteenth century’s starched themes and corseted forms—from, as Paul Valéry put it, “the language of common sense”—and yet who, in his most revolutionary work, admitted to a love of “maudlin pictures, . . . fairytales, children’s storybooks, old operas, inane refrains and artless rhythms.”

(Portrait of Rimbaud at age seventeen by Étienne Carjat via Wikimedia Commons)

by Patrick Appel

From Jeff Master's latest:

Latest radar-estimated rainfall amounts in North Carolina already exceed ten inches in some locations. Cedar Island, NC has reported 7.21" as of 11am EDT, and a 100 mile-wide swath of 8+ inches of rain will likely fall from Eastern North Carolina northwards along the coast, through New York City, and into Vermont and New Hampshire during the next two days. Destructive river flooding will be a significant danger from New Jersey northwards to Southeast New York, where soils are saturated and run-off will be the greatest.

A bit from Mike Smith's update this morning:

There is one peculiarity of the storm worth mentioning. While maximum sustained surface winds as of 9am were 90 mph (with higher gusts), sustained winds were 115 mph aloft. This does not matter in eastern North Carolina. It may matter quite a bit if the center of the storm goes over Manhattan in terms of damage to skyscrapers (i.e., objects like antennas blown off roofs and causing more damage as they fall) even if the storm weakens before arriving.

Adam Pasick gives advice to those in NYC:

As during the transit strike, cabs will take group fares and livery cabs will be allowed to make street pickups. And, in case you're evacuating Fido, taxis and all buses are required to take pets as passengers. Still, the chances of successfully finding a ride when you need one are probably not good. And in case you were wondering, the MTA won't be giving you a discount on those unlimited Metrocards that you won't be able to use. Bridges out of the city will suspend tolls, though, so you'll save $13.50 as you flee to Staten Island with all of your worldly possessions.

A reader writes in with an ingenius tip for evacuees:

I second my fellow New Orleanian's recommendation about putting food in contractor bags in the fridge and freezer.  But in addition, if an evacuation is required, one should freeze a nice, clear, full, pint-sized glass of water into solid ice and put a penny on the top of the ice in the freezer.  Given that power outages can vary from block to block for varying lengths of time, and that power can be restored before one can return home, it is very possible to arrive after an evacuation to a fridge and freezer working normally.  However, if you find the penny at the bottom of an almost-full glass of solid ice, you can toss your bags of food in the trash without even opening them.  The penny at the bottom of the glass of ice means that power was out long enough for the ice to melt all the way through.  Long enough so that the stuff in the bags is surely re-frozen and re-chilled spoiled food.

And one more piece of advice from a reader:

The other major tip I would add (as a resident of the Florida panhandle now living in DC), beside the bathtub thing, is to urge people to take out money now from ATMs. Those won't work when power goes out.

TPM is live-blogging the hurricane. For earlier thoughts on the storm go here, here, here, and here.

(Photo: In this handout satellite image provided by NASA, Hurricane Irene churns of the east coast of the United States, August 27, 201, in the Atlantic Ocean. Irene, now a Category 2 storm, has started to lash the eastern coast of the U.S. with wind gust up to 125 miles per hour. By NASA via Getty Images)

by Zoë Pollock

As a film character, she's been defined as a woman who "exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." Think Natalie Portman in Garden State. The Onion has likened her to the Magical Negro, as they are both "defined by secondary status and lack of an inner life." Serwer condemns the "nice guys" who fall for her:

My theory is that the MPDG is a fantasy molded from the clay of an infinite number of adolescent rejections from the women of their youth. Precisely because the relationship never reaches the stage of genuine intimacy, the MPDG remains a two-dimensional projection of the desires of a guy who is progressive enough in gender matters to want a woman who is "interesting," but not one that has an internal life of her own beyond the superficial qualities that made her "cool" and "not like other girls" to begin with. Key to the MPDG is that the concept reflects the gender-based hostility of the nice guy. …[S]he is defined by some kind of glaring emotional vulnerability that makes her, in an abstract sense, a damsel in distress who needs rescue.

A while back, Racialicious tackled the trope in black culture, but Alyssa wanted to let all Zooey Deschanel characters, black or white, go gently into that good night.

by Zoë Pollock

Malcolm Harris singles out Breaking Bad, Dexter, and Psych for ushering in a new genre:

The three differ widely in tone and content, but their protagonists all trace their lineage back to the rogue cop cum independent consultant. Of the three, Breaking Bad is influenced most by the old antihero’s moral transformation, with cancer-diagnosed, public-high-school chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) taking a second job as a meth cook for hire – a quality consultant.

… As with the archetypal antihero of old, the audience doesn’t want to see any of these protagonists caught or returned to stable work, not only because they’re likable, but also because it would likely involve some shark jumping. But unlike the traditional antiheroes, whose drama hinges on whether they will cross the line and use unlawful means, the protagonists in my examples have each forsaken ethical means from the beginning and hardly look back.

Harris argues the shift springs from an American economy gone haywire.

by Zoë Pollock

Maud Newton argues Wallace's style of intellectual hedging prefigured the dominant style of the internet:

Wallace’s nonfiction abounds with qualifiers like “sort of” and “pretty much” and sincerity-infusers like “really.” …  I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The “sort ofs” and “reallys” and “ums” and “you knows” that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon.

Bob Wright has his doubts:

Was DFW’s style “adopted” by Internet writers? Or did his style emerge alongside other, similar styles, puncturing an equilibrium at a moment that demanded more distance, more irony and more hedging.

In a follow up, Newton elaborates on her thesis that Wallace, and the rest of us, use qualifiers because we want to be liked.

by Zoë Pollock

Stanford linguist Dan Jurafsky examined the names of ice cream flavors and cracker brands. Peter Smith summarizes his conclusions:

[Jurafsky] found that the ice cream names tended to employ back vowels—sounds formed in the back of our mouths that generally refer to big, fat, heavy things. Front vowels, on the other hand, tend to be used in words that refer to small, thin, light foods, like crackers. Say them out loud: rocky road, chocolate, cookie dough, coconut—heavy on low-frequency o's. Now listen to Cheese Nips, Cheez-Its, Wheat Thins, Ritz Bits, Triscuit, Cheese Crisps—you can hear all those little bitty e's and i's. … "Retracting the corners of the mouth shrinks the size of the front cavity in the mouth, just like the vowels ɪ [ē] or i," Jurafsky writes. "In fact, the similarity in mouth position between smiling and the vowel i explains why we say 'cheese' when we take pictures; it is the smiling vowel."

by Zoë Pollock

Alexa Meade paints three-dimensional objects, like people, and photographs them, blurring the line between art and reality.

(Image courtesy of Irvine Contemporary Gallery)

by Zoë Pollock

Cyberpunk novelist William Gibson identifies it:

Paris, as much as I love Paris, feels to me as though it's long since been "cooked." Its brand consists of what it is, and that can be embellished but not changed. A lack of availability of inexpensive shop-rentals is one very easily read warning sign of overcooking. I wish Manhattan condo towers could be required to have street frontage consisting of capsule micro-shops. The affordable retail slots would guarantee the rich folks upstairs interesting things to buy, interesting services, interesting food and drink, and constant market-driven turnover of same, while keeping the streetscape vital and allowing the city to do so many of the things cities do best.

Vashon Island, Washington, 7.45 am