Month: October 2011

Solved:

Conan Doyle once named "unaffectedness" as his own favorite virtue, then listed "manliness" as his favorite virtue in another man; "work" as his favorite occupation; "time well filled" as his ideal of happiness; "men who do their duty" as his favorite heroes in real life; and "affectation and conceit" as his pet aversions. It should thus come as no surprise that Conan Doyle’s books are all fairly transparent endorsements of chivalric ideals of honor, duty, courage, and greatness of heart.

Not far off Obama's – a trip back to December 2008.

A brutal assessment of an ungrateful, self-destructive ally.

An art project:

The Danish art collective Superflex … has a new installation at the ratty Olympic Diner on Delancey Street, in which they've replaced the restroom with a replica of the one Jamie Dimon and friends use at JPMorgan headquarters, which they surreptitiously photographed and re-created.

Images here and here.

Marshall Poe picks it apart:

Why don’t most people like to read? The answer is surprisingly simple: humans weren’t evolved to read. Note that we have no reading organs: our eyes and brains were made for watching, not for decoding tiny symbols on mulch sheets. To prepare our eyes and brains for reading, we must rewire them. This process takes years of hard work to accomplish, and some people never accomplish it at all.

Elizabeth Minkel recalls a 2007 New Yorker piece that tracked researchers' work with newly literate villagers in remote places:

They "found that illiterates had a ‘graphic-functional’ way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled. In naming colors, for example, literate people said ‘dark blue’ or ‘light yellow,’ but illiterates used metaphorical names like ‘liver,’ ‘peach,’ ‘decayed teeth,’ and ‘cotton in bloom.'" Would a world without the written word be as poetic as that? Or merely more difficult to apprehend?

William Eggington draws it out:

Like Cervantes before him, Colbert used irony to sever his audiences’ conflated identities; the discomfort and hilarity of his act stemmed from our watching as fictions that had blurred into truths were expertly extracted and revealed for what they were. As Cervantes realized in the context of the newly born mass culture of the Catholic, imperial, Spanish state, irony expertly wielded is the best defense against the manipulation of truth by the media. Its effect was and still is to remind its audience that we are all active participants in the creation and support of a fictional world that is always in danger of being sold to us as reality.

(Via Buzzfeed)

Garret Keizer worries about it:

In the increased emphasis on data and the imposed emphasis on standardized jargon and tests, including the standardized inanities that result (no student I meet seems to believe that the universe formed in six days but a disturbing number insist that an essay is always formed in five paragraphs), I sense the encroachment of the totalitarian "business model"that has destroyed family farming as a way of life, of the same itch for arcane nomenclature that has turned literary criticism into a pseudoscience. A veteran foreign-language teacher still going strong since my last stint at school says to me with a sigh, "I’m afraid the day of the teacher-as-artist is drawing to a close."

Washington, DC, 6.40 pm