May 2014 – Page 41

When The Shelves Get MUSTIE

In an excerpt from The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading, Phyllis Rose explains how librarians decide which books to cull from their collections. Perhaps not surprisingly, it involves a lot of acronyms:

CREW stands for Continuous Review Evaluation and Weeding, and the [industry-standard] manual uses “crew” as a transitive verb, so one can talk about a library’s “crewing” its collection. It means weeding but doesn’t sound so harsh. At the heart of the CREW method is a formula consisting of three factors – the number of years since the last copyright, the number of years since the book was last checked out, and a collection of six negative factors given the acronym MUSTIE, to help decide if a book has outlived its usefulness. M. Is it Misleading or inaccurate? Is its information, as so quickly happens with medical and legal texts or travel books, for example, outdated? U. Is it Ugly? Worn beyond repair? S. Has it been Superseded by a new edition or a better account of the subject? T. Is it Trivial, of no discernible literary or scientific merit? I. Is it Irrelevant to the needs and interests of the community the library serves? E. Can it be found Elsewhere, through interlibrary loan or on the Web?

She adds, “People who feel strongly about retaining books in libraries have a simple way to combat the removal of treasured volumes”:

Since every system of elimination is based, no matter what they say, on circulation counts, the number of years that have elapsed since a book was last checked out, or the number of times it has been checked out overall, if you feel strongly about a book, you should go to every library you have access to and check out the volume you care about. Take it home awhile. Read it or don’t. Keep it beside you as you read the same book on a Kindle, Nook, or iPad. Let it breathe the air of your home, and then take it back to the library, knowing you have fought the guerrilla war for physical books. This was the spirit in which I checked out the third book in Etienne Leroux’s Welgevonden trilogy with no intention of reading it.

Th3 N3w Drama

Rob Walker investigates the work of Sophia Le Fraga, who translates classic 20th-century absurdist literature into emoji:

“TH3 B4LD 50PRAN0” [above] takes the form of a video that lasts a little less than 9 minutes. It’s another reworking of a celebrated play for the new-media era — a Gchat “performance” inspired by Eugène Ionesco’s play The Bald Soprano. That play is in no small part about the nature of dialogue, communication — and the failure to communicate. Le Fraga’s interpretation shows us a texting exchange on a desktop — where there’s also an open browser, and occasional pop-up alerts that an operating system update is available.

The onscreen commotion only adds to the disconcerting nature of the back and forth between two apparent strangers who may or may not be more connected than it first appears. To come up with these dialogues, Le Fraga rereads the source play and works up a script that she sends to her sister; they massage it “to make it read more like the way it would if these characters were chatting” digitally. Then Le Fraga has the actual exchange with a willing confederate (her roommate, in this case) and records it. That part can be tricky — “TH3 B4LD 50PRAN0” took three tries.

“My approach to poetry and art has always been about trying to underline what’s relevant currently,” Le Fraga tells me. (We conversed via email, the phone, and Gchat.) Like a lot of people, she spends a good deal of her day texting and Gchatting, and hijacking those forms to revise classic dramatic texts pulls together her interests in everything from basic structures of syntax and grammar to “sociolinguistic” behaviors at work, however we choose to communicate.

A Short Story For Saturday

The first paragraph of Erika Schmidt’s “Story of a Family,” winner of the 2013 Nelson Algren prize for short fiction:

This is how the family looks in 1988: a husband, a wife, a daddy, a mama; two girls, two sisters, two daughters. One daughter is 5. The other is 2. They both have white-blonde hair that turns green in the chlorine at the country-club pool. The older daughter, the 5-year-old, takes swimming lessons there in the summer. The younger daughter, the 2-year-old, almost drowns one day when she falls into the big pool while the daddy isn’t looking. He gets her out with plenty of time to spare but he loses sleep over the image of her little body turned upside down under the water and the feeling of his bare feet trying to gain traction on the wet cement as he runs to her and the searing smell and taste of the chlorinated water rushing into his nose as he jumps in and her cold, wet bathing suit against his arms as he leans into the side of the pool crushing her to his chest while the 5-year-old cries watching from the fold-up lounge chair wrapped in a big towel.

Read the rest here. The story also can be downloaded as a PDF here. Previous SSFSs here.

The View From Your Window Contest

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

When The Morning Brings Madness

This weekend, Byliner has unlocked for Dish readers Simon Winchester’s memoir of his struggles with mental illness, The Man with the Electrified Brain. The first terrifying episode of his condition began the morning after he, then an Oxford undergraduate, stayed up late working on a paper and began reading Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage:

I began the volume—it weighed in at more than seven hundred pages, far too heavy for a casual bedtime read—with avid attention. I did so until I reached—unforgettably, and with the bookmark to be set in place for the next forty years or more—page 32. I fretted: poor Philip Carey, the novel’s thoroughly tested hero, now lame and lonely at the vicarage. What would happen next? But then it was three, and I knew I had a good deal to do the following day and so had to sleep. I put the book on the floor, said my nightly prayers—as I did back in those days, lying supine rather than kneeling at the bedside—and switched out the lamp.

When I woke five hours later, the whole world seemed to have changed, to have suddenly gone entirely and utterly mad.

That much was clear—to the extent that anything could be described as clear—from the moment I first opened my eyes. My tiny basement room was not wholly dark: dawn was filtering in through its scarlet curtains, and I could see the walls and the cheap paintings and posters with which I had decorated them. I could see the little sideboard, piled with the plates from last night’s tea, and there was the chair with my clothing thrown across its arm. My desk, with the essay papers in their folder, was laden with books. Closer to hand ticked my Westclox alarm, showing a little after eight, but with its ringer unset since this was a Saturday, no lectures on the schedule. On the door, my blue dressing gown hung from its hook, and beneath it the hem of my raincoat and the sleeve of my commoner’s gown, still to be worn were I to decide to dine in college hall. All of these things I could see, quite clearly—and yet all of it now looked, in some strange and menacing way, entirely unfamiliar.

Continue reading here. Purchase it as a Kindle Single here.

A Poem For Saturday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

I first began reading W.S.Merwin’s poetry in 1970. I remember sitting at a counter at a Zum Zum’s coffee shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts and wildly underlining poems from his book, The Moving Target. Twenty years later, he inscribed my tattered copy in my office at The New Yorker, where he had been publishing poems since 1955 and where, to my delight, I had become the poetry editor. W.S. Merwin has written more than two dozen collections of poems and eight books of prose. His memoir, Unframed Originals: Recollections is one of my favorite books and is still in print. He is also a famously gifted translator and his newest book, co-translated with Takako Lento is Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson, who lived from 1716-1783, and is regarded on a level with Basho as one of Japan’s greatest poets.

Today and over the weekend, we will be posting poems and songs by Buson, beginning with three from a sequence he introduced as follows: “One day I set out for my old village to visit an old friend. As I crossed Yodo River and came to the Bank of Kema, I met a girl on her way back to her hometown. We traveled several miles, sometimes I went ahead of her, and sometimes she walked ahead of me. Once in a while we looked at each other and exchanged a word or two. She looked beautiful. Pity me for feeling attracted to her. I composed 18 songs, titled ‘Songs of Spring Breeze Over Kema Bank,’ in which I speak in her person, and express her feeling.’”

Our first selections from Yosa Buson (1716-1783):

On the way down the riverbank to pick flowers
thornbushes get in my way
why are they jealous of me
they tear at my kimono and scratch my thighs

*

Now I have seen three Springs
since I left my old place
and my little brother
I am like a plum blossom
on a twig grafted
onto a different tree
my roots forgotten

*

I think of my gentle mother
long long ago now
my gentle mother’s blossoms
from the spring of another world

(From Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson, Translated by W.S. Merwin and Takako Lento. Copyright © 2013 by W.S. Merwin and Takako U. Lento. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency, LLC. All rights reserved. Photo of plum blossoms by John Morgan)

Crowd Control

Michael Bond rejects the idea of the “crazed crowd,” noting research that indicates “people in crowds define themselves according to who they are with at the time; their social identity determines how they behave”:

Years of field research have taught [researchers Clifford] Stott, [Stephen] Reicher and other social psychologists not only that mindless irrationality is rare within crowds, but also that co-operation and altruism are the norm when lives are at stake. …

At the University of Sussex, researchers led by the social psychologist John Drury have coined the term ‘collective resilience’, an attitude of mutual helping and unity in the midst of danger, to describe how crowds under duress often behave. There are many documented examples of this.

In 2008, Drury’s team interviewed survivors of 11 tragedies from the previous 40 years, including the 1989 Hillsborough football stadium disaster when 96 Liverpool supporters died after being trapped in overcrowded pens, and the IRA bombing that killed six outside Harrods in London in 1983. In each case, most of Drury’s interviewees recalled feeling a strong sense of togetherness during the crisis, and an inclination to help strangers. Without such co-operation, the casualty rates could have been far higher, says Drury, who refers to crowds as ‘the fourth emergency service’ – an attitude not often shared by police. In Drury’s view, it is wrong-headed to blame crowd disasters on the behaviour of the crowd. More often the real problem is poor organisation – too many people in one place – or inadequate venue design.

Drury explains that a crisis, even a minor one such as a train breaking down in a tunnel, creates a ‘psychological crowd’ out of what was previously an aggregate of strangers. You suddenly share a common fate and your sphere of interest ramps up from the personal to the group.

Recent Dish on the Hillsborough 25th anniversary here.

The View From Your Window

Kenora, Ontario, 8.24 am

Science, Climate, and Skepticism, Ctd

Readers tackle a recent post:

I am a combustion researcher so I have the training to understand what the climate researchers have written. I have to say that I was a bit miffed by your statement, “I favor maximal skepticism toward scientific theories that might prompt us to change our lives.” Of course you should be skeptical! It goes without saying. That’s the scientific method! So many deniers say, “Scientists disagree.” Of course we do! It’s our job! We are always challenging each other; it’s a service we provide to each other, as a way to keep us from slipping up. Knowing that my community will be skeptical, that they will challenge me as soon as I open my mouth at a conference, forces me to be as accurate and careful as possible.

But there are also a lot of things we do not disagree about. We all accept Newtonian mechanics as a means to describe dynamics in the physical world. That “theory” is used all the time: to design the suspension on your car, to keep the office you sit in from plummeting to the ground, and so on. The Navier Stokes equations of fluid mechanics are used to design better airplanes. We all fly around in planes and trust the Navier Stokes equations to describe lift and drag. Anybody who visits a doctor is accepting scientific knowledge.

What we disagree about are the smaller things at the very leading edge. No computer is powerful enough to predict climate, so researchers are forced to make simplifying assumptions. They argue about that – which assumptions are least inaccurate and so on. The fundamentals are not in question; it’s the details.

You wrote, “And of course there’s always a chance that we’ll stumble upon some new evidence or theory that would throw this entire edifice into doubt (it happens).” Umm, no. Not like that. The basics are too solid. You also wrote, “I simply cannot see why any sane person would not wish to try and mitigate that change or prepare for such an eventuality. And conservatives, properly understood, attend to such contingent problems prudently.” Thank you for helping. To be honest; I view this as the absolute biggest issue facing us, and it is really disheartening to listen to Congress and pundits. This is not the time for such behavior.

Another reader mulls the origins of that behavior, contrasting it with an environmental victory in the ’80s that had broad support:

In previous decades, scientists discovered the damage to our ozone layer caused by CFCs.

The public and policymakers were skeptical at first, but as the data continued to pour in supporting the case, politicians built an international coalition to address it, ban CFCs, and repair the ozone layer. But not so with global warming. I’ve been wondering why that is, and, like you, I didn’t get it.

A few weeks ago, I met a man who is strongly skeptical of global warming. When I mentioned that over 90 percent of the scientific community believed it was happening, he replied that may be the case, but that he just could not agree with anything Al Gore said as a matter of principle. When Gore decided to champion the cause of global warming, he made it a political issue instead of a scientific one. And that’s why anyone looking rationally at the evidence concludes that the conservative position is “absolutely bonkers.” It’s not driven by science but by politics and by the deeply held belief among so many right-wingers that Democratic politicians are using whatever nefarious means they can to drive a stealth socialist/communist agenda. When looked at through that lens, global warming is just another excuse for bigger government.

I think if An Inconvenient Truth had been presented by a nonpolitical figure (David Attenborough? Neil deGrasse Tyson?), things might have turned out much differently.

Another reader, who just wrapped up a class on climate change as part of a master’s program in international science policy, offers his perspective:

I wrote my term paper on the prospects of innovation induced by environmental policy to actually grow the economy. The choice that Republicans seem to be offering here is this: Should we risk catastrophic climate change in order to grow the economy slowly, or mitigate that risk in order to grow the economy more quickly?

There is clearly no logic to their position. It is infuriating. Krauthammer used to be in favor of a carbon tax, although given his recent comments it would be rather odd for him to continue that support. The sad thing is that a carbon tax is easily the best mechanism (in combination with a few others, e.g., basic research and subsidies for battery technology) for producing the win-win situation above.

A carbon tax would also, if applied correctly, account for much of the emissions growth in China – who does he think is buying all of the shit that China has been producing for the past 10 to 20 years? Likewise, Boehner is going around saying this will cost jobs, but the OECD has released figures on the job sectors that contribute the most emissions, and they are all at the bottom end of the employment spectrum. But rather than pull from a great deal of economic research and data, these buffoons now rely on baldly nonsensical arguments to attack science and progress.

These people make a mockery of thought. They are 21st-century Luddites motivated by stupidity and greed.

Another turns the conversation toward conservative climate solutions:

Yes, the radical intellectual closure shown by George Will and Charles Krauthammer is deeply distressing. If there’s any issue that everyone left, right, and center should be fighting to address, it’s climate change, and the tagging of the science as a liberal plot by such undoubtedly intelligent men is far too tragic to be even darkly funny.

As it happens, though, just this week George Shultz agreed to join the advisory board for the Citizens Climate Lobby (CCL), thus throwing his support behind the establishment of a national carbon fee-and-dividend program. Fee-and-dividend is rooted in conservative principles, since it involves no new subsidies, relies entirely on the market to determine our future energy blend, and is 100-percent revenue-neutral (and thus doesn’t increase the size of government). As Schultz’s endorsement suggests, it’s precisely the kind of program that conservatives should be able to rally behind: no winners picked and no government growth, just a price on carbon that reflects the true costs of its retrieval and combustion.

I’d encourage you to check out CCL’s Legislative Proposal. I think you’ll find it in line with both your concerns and your desires for a broadly conservative, non-disruptive solution to the climate crisis.

Remote Robots

Leon Neyfakh describes his experience attending a conference in Toronto as a telepresent robot he controlled from his apartment in New York:

When I hit a clearing, a friendly young woman comes up to me, introduces herself as Leila, and asks where I am. I am very briefly confused by the question: We’re in Toronto, of course! But when I catch her drift and admit I am actually in New York, she doesn’t seem to hear me. Before long, it becomes clear that the volume on the People’s Bot just doesn’t go loud enough to carry my voice in this noisy hallway. To hear what I’m saying, Leila has to put her face right up against mine. This seems to work, and after a bit of basic back and forth, I ask her what it feels like to be talking to me. “Do I seem like a human or a robot to you?” Leila thinks this over, and after a moment, says something thrilling: “It’s like a hybrid of both. Like a cyborg!” …

Soon it is time for my meeting with Irene Rae, the researcher from the Wisconsin Human-Computer Interaction Lab, and her adviser, Bilge Mutlu. When Rae tracks me down, she says cautiously, leaning into the frame of my camera, “I think I’m supposed to be meeting you?”

It feels like we’re two strangers who have agreed to meet for lunch but have neglected to describe what we look like. When we find a quiet place to talk, Rae explains that robotic telepresence research is still in its early stages—that at this point, experts still don’t know exactly what is needed to make people feel physically present in a place where they are not, or how best to help them interact with people who are.

Mutlu, who has joined us, notes that this is not merely a question of technology, but of social norms as well. According to one study, people who are telepresent feel “violated” when people who are present-present move them around without their permission, or put their feet up on them as if they were furniture. Then there’s the question of how close people should get when they’re interacting with someone who is telepresent. “Right now,” Mutlu admits, “I’m getting very close to you, in order to hear you, and it feels a little uncomfortable for me.”

(Video: Edward Snowden appears, via telepresent robot, at a TED Talk in March)