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Ptown features prominently in this 1966 documentary on Norman Mailer:

Abby Margulies suggests that two new books on the legendary writer, the biography Norman Mailer: A Double Life and the essay collection Mind of an Outlaw, “offer insight into why Mailer, more than any other literary figure of his era, has been so mythologized, reviled, and revered”:

Mailer had a temper and was fast to throw a punch or quip a snide remark, often at the expense of his reputation. He is famous for stabbing his second wife, Adele Morales; addressing the feminists in his audience at the University of California, Berkeley, as “obedient little bitches” before going on to suggest that “a little bit of rape is good for a man’s soul”; and assaulting Gore Vidal at a party. As Mailer once wrote about himself: “To be the center of any situation was, he sometimes thought, the real marrow of his bone—better to expire as a devil in the fire than an angel in the wings.”

Norman Kingsley Mailer, the author of more than 40 books, encompassing fiction, journalism, poetry, essays, and interview collections, was a prolific and brilliant writer, but he is nearly as well known for his charisma and instigative prodding, his mayoral candidacy and threatened presidential run, his love of boxing, his insatiable promiscuity, and his penchant for settling scores with a firm head-butt. These competing facets of his personality—at once his greatest asset and his hopeless Achilles heel—created fantastic and inspired friction in all aspects of his life.

Biographer J. Michael Lennon, Mailer’s close friend and “extended family member”, explains why he frames his aforementioned book in terms of a “double life”:

Mailer believed that we all have two complete personalities in our psyche, and this was manifested in his own oppositions: family man-philanderer, activist-observer, leftist-conservative, rationalist-transcendentalist – the list goes on. But I wouldn’t describe Mailer as a private man. He was always mining his experience for his books, and always seeking more. His curiosity was huge. He did keep certain early experiences secret, but not many. He said he used them as “crystals,” and shined a light through them to illumine later experiences. Most of these were from his childhood and adolescence. He called experience “the church of one’s acquired knowledge.” For him, the best experiences were unforeseen, experiences that hit you like a brick tossed over a fence.

Richard Brody is fascinated by Mailer’s early life and wonders why the writer never channeled it into his work:

The grandson of a rabbi who struggled in business, the son of a picaresque bookkeeper and an adoring mother, he was a brilliant student and precocious writer. He was also something of a spoiled and fearful child—by his own account, a “physical coward.” Why did Mailer not want to write about the Brooklyn of his youth? Did he hesitate to reveal stories about his parents? (His father, a compulsive gambler, was often in debt, on the edge of legal trouble, and frequently unemployed.) Did he not want to write about his days of sheltered timidity? Was there some other aspect of his early years that he found unspeakable? Was he sparing his family—or himself? Or did he simply look at his background and find it wanting?

Paul J. Gallagher’s take on the above documentary:

It contains what was good and bad about Mailer—an overweening need to push his ordinary ideas (today’s word Norman is “totalitarianism”), with those occasional sparks of brilliance. It can be summed up by the know-it-all-booze-in-one-hand-Mailer versus Norman-being-a-father-and-husband, who is willing to admit he sometimes doesn’t know the answer. … There’s a truth in John Updike’s observation that Mailer had once the potential to be the greatest American writer of the twentieth century—if only he hadn’t squandered his talent on a desire to being a respected public figure. Writers write, they don’t run for office, or make unwatchable movies, or compensate for their own insecurity by turning everything into a fistfight.

Previous Dish on Mailer here, here, and here.

In the growing field of “digital humanities,” researchers apply the datamining capabilities of computers to the history of literature. Dana Mackenzie addresses “perhaps the most frequently heard refrain in the criticisms of digital humanities: Where’s the beef? Where are the great insights?”:

Supporters argue that the digital humanities have produced new insights, but that the constellations of meaning it generates are not the kinds of insights humanists are used to. For example, when Ted Underwood, an English professor at the University of Illinois, topic-modeled 4,275 books written between 1700 and 1900, he noticed that changes in literature happen more gradually than we give them credit for.

For the first hundred years of that period, for example, the proportion of “old” Anglo-Saxon words in use declined. But over the century that followed, literature trifurcated. In poetry, the use of “old” words increased markedly. In fiction, “old” words also became more popular, but less dramatically. In nonfiction, however, the frequency of “old” words remained unchanged from the previous century. The data reflected a complex set of historical processes—the emergence of fiction and poetry that self-consciously broke from classical themes and instead treated the experiences of common people.

Such a change had often been attributed to the romantic school, but the data showed it playing out over a much longer period of time and continuing long after the romantics were supposedly passé. “Our vocabulary is all schools, movements, periods, cultural turns,” Underwood says. “If you have a trend that lasts a century or more, it’s really hard to grapple with.”

Digital humanities technologies can help us see gradual changes, whether in literature or elsewhere. Humans have difficulty comprehending change that happens on the time scale of a human life, or longer. If Underwood’s hypothesis is correct, we need computers to help fill in our blind spot. Topic modeling does not overturn or replace our previous ways of seeing; it enhances them. “It is not a substitute for human reading, but a prosthetic extension of our capacity,” says Johanna Drucker, a professor of information studies at UCLA.

Previous Dish on the digital humanities here and here.

Online security measures might start incorporating a kind of Rorschach test:

The new approach is straightforward and relies on a user answering a number of questions when he or she first signs up for access to a website. It begins by generating a set of simple inkblot pictures by randomly positioning different coloured ink spots in a small area of the screen. As part of the signup process, the user is asked to write a short phrase that describes each of these pictures. When the users return to access the site with a password, they are also shown the inkblot patterns and the set phrases that describe them. Their task is then to allocate the correct phrase to each pattern. [Jeremiah Blocki and others at Carnegie Mellon University] call their new test a GOTCHA (Generating panOptic Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart).

Meghan Neal thinks through the ramifications:

Inkblots are a popular with password gurus for a couple reasons. One, visual images are generally easier for people to remember than numbers. Two, recognizing patterns and associating them with intuited phrases is something machines aren’t able to do—not yet, at least. The human mind, on the other hand, “can easily imagine semantically meaningful objects in each image,” the study states.

Thus, hackers would need to be able to think like a human to crack the code, and would be forced to use actual humans to wage an attack. At the least, it would make password cracking much more cumbersome and expensive, researchers suggest.

The downside to Rorschach-style puzzles is that there’s no guaranteeing you’re going to interpreted a pattern the same way twice.

Megan Garber focuses on how the blockbuster thriller Gravity turned space from a mere setting into a true “environment”:

Gravity represents a reversal from most other entries in the “SpaceFlick” genre. Most of Hollywood’s iconic portrayals of the world beyond our own—epics, almost by default—tend to be macrocosmic, rather than micro-, in scope. They concern themselves, in pretty much every way, with wide angles rather than short. And those perspectives translate to the films’ characters, too: The main players tend to be communities and systems, collectives that wage a kind of Red Rover game against space and all its complexities. The Empire in Star Wars. The Starfleet in Star Trek. The Nostromo in Alien. The NASA of Apollo 13. The deep-core drillers of Armageddon.  The assorted nerds of Contact. Within the worlds of most traditional SpaceFlicks, there are certainly men who take steps; the films’ main concerns, however, are the great leaps taken on behalf of mankind.

J. Hoberman was also sold on the film’s depiction of space as an unpredictable, nail-biting environment:

With only two actors and a single situation, the movie is stripped down and elemental. It focuses on the minutiae of individual survival and—after a brief, wacky paean to the pleasures of swanning around in outer space—is suffused with metaphysical dread. …

The anxiety rarely abates even as the debris storms from broken-up satellites that plague the astronauts—whizzing shards of lethal confetti, explosions so violent the entire screen seems to disintegrate—provide the movie with its most visually enthralling moments. Maximum tension is derived from [Sandra] Bullock’s repeated attempts to find something, anything to hold on to. In 2001, space has a majestic indifference. In Gravity, space is an active threat. The precariousness of existence is a visual constant.

Contrasting the film with Kubrick’s 2001, Paul Wells contends that Gravity demonstrates America’s diminished interest in space exploration:

Pull back the cameras. Look at the assumptions about humanity’s place in space. Kubrick’s vision was grand. He depicted routine trips by tourists to orbit, colonies circling the earth and on the moon, astronauts on their way to Jupiter, and a humanity whose destiny is the stars. [Gravity director Alfonso] Cuarón shows technicians futzing around among three space stations, two of them decrepit, with no greater hope than to make it back down to Earth where they belong. It’s a fair measure of how far most people’s ambitions for space travel have collapsed in 45 years.

Cuarón’s done nothing wrong here. He’s operating within the assumptions of his time, as Kubrick was in his.

Recent Dish on Gravity here and here.

A reader responds to a recent post:

I loved watching that video you featured, but it leaves out THE father of the guitar solo, Django Reinhardt. Watch this unembeddable video from about 2:27 on. First a duet, then in a band setting, Django – a gypsy – was playing guitar solos long before Chuck Berry (let alone British rockers trying to copy him or B.B. King), most likely live in the 1920s, and certainly on record as a soloist by 1934. That video is the only known one of Django in which the sound syncs up to the visuals; watch his left hand, and you’ll see that he can play rhythm/chords with four fingers and his thumb, but he could only play melody with TWO fingers. A caravan fire had mutilated his hand, but just look at how he compensated!  [The video embedded above] is an even more awe-inspiring demonstration of his abilities.

American Charlie Christian was Django’s only real contemporary, but due to failing health, he was only active from 1939 to 1941. Django, on the other hand, played from the 1920s until his death in 1953, leaving a staggeringly large catalog of material.  He remains the most influential European jazz musician to this day.

As a guitar player, I had always wondered where guitar solos really came from. It didn’t make sense to me that one day we had delta bluesmen like Son House and Robert Johnson, and then it somehow morphed so quickly into Chess Records and rock ‘n roll.  Then I heard Django, and it all really fell into place.  He brought together the type of musical tradition only a gypsy could, combining the fiery playing of Spanish Flamencos to the popular music of his day (musette), and then adding in American jazz.  B.B. King counts him as an influence, which plants the seed of his soloing back into American hands, and lo and behold, there’s the answer. Most guitar players (let alone music lovers) don’t realize that the man most responsible for taking the guitar from an instrument purely used as part of the rhythm section into the limelight of soloing is a Belgian gypsy with a funny name (in Romany, Django means “I awake”).

One last piece of trivia: his most famous song, Nuages, was the anthem of occupied France during WWII.  It became his signature tune, one he carried with him in his switch over to the electric guitar (around 1946).  This version of it is from his electric guitar/bebop-era:

It’s drenched with pinch/artificial harmonics and rapid-fire playing, the type of work later “guitar heroes” are famous for.

Update from a reader:

Your correspondent has no idea what he’s talking about. Django was great, sure, but there were many who preceded him. The best of which, to my mind and ear, is Eddie Lang (Born Salvatore Massaro in Philly in 1902), who was also one of Reinhardt’s inspirations. He accompanied Bix Biederbecke and Frank Trumbauer on their landmark recordings, including “Singin’ the Blues,” made records with Lonnie Johnson (as Blind Willie Dunn … can’t have whites and blacks playing together), and became Bing Crosby’s accompanist before dying of a botched tonsillectomy in 1933 at the age of 30. His recordings with violinist Joe Venuti paved the way for Django’s partnership with Stephane Grappeli. Here he is with Bix and Tram on “For No Reason At All In C”:

To all your readers, you’re welcome.

Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh has devoted his career to documenting the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. His newest documentary, The Missing Picture, takes an inspired approach to a dearth of visual evidence from that period (1975-79), when all existing photos and films were created by Pol Pot’s propaganda machine:

To make up for the pictures we don’t have, Panh uses small clay figurines, hundreds of them, painted, clothed, with individual expressions on their faces, and placed in meticulously detailed dioramas that he seems to have reconstructed from the memories of his youth.

Among the first of these is a figure of Panh’s father, an official in the Ministry of Education in a white suit and dark tie who, in what Panh eventually came to see as a heroic act of resistance, starved himself to death rather than allowing himself to be treated as a farm animal by Cambodia’s rulers. There are scenes of Khmer Rouge hospitals where patients lay on beds of wooden planks. And, then there’s the scene in a village, again recreated with clay figurines, in which a nine year-old child who denounces his mother for eating a mango, an act of selfish individualism. Afterwards she is led into the forest and never returns.

These clay statuettes, never before used by Panh in any of his earlier work, cannot, of course, fully depict the horror of the Khmer Rouge story. They are necessarily silent, immobile, and therefore devoid of the intensity of those moments in other Panh films where his camera bores in on the face of a witness and lingers there as he remembers what happened, or what he did. But as Panh’s narration in the new film proceeds, the statuettes take on a reality of their own, a voodoo-like power, their individual features an aid to avoiding what might otherwise be a kind of depersonalizing abstraction.

The Act of Killing is another critically acclaimed film this year to delve into the representations of genocide, in this case the Indonesian mass killings of the Suharto regime. The Dish covered that film here.

A reader writes:

There may be something to Fleming’s argument; I know of at least one cycling activist in Chapel Hill, NC who’s against bike lanes altogether on the ground that motorists need to accept that cyclists have an equal right to the road.  But there are other issues with bike barriers.  Here in Nashville, bike lanes have been slowly installed on existing streets, but they begin and end arbitrarily and are designed to accommodate both traffic and parking.  I have bike lanes on my home street, but three blocks down from me is a sizable university and restaurant district, where double-parking in the lanes (including by semis) is rife, and the university administration is more concerned with pressuring the city to provide on-street parking than it is with bike safety.   Politically, barriers are nonstarters here.

I’d also add that the bike lane failed to prevent me from nearly getting killed four years ago when a motorist made a left turn right into me.  As I understand it, most car-bike collisions result from cars turning across the lane at intersections or coming off a side street; barriers would do nothing to prevent those.

Read here for a good illustration of that point.  Another reader:

I’m an avid user of New York City’s new CitiBike bike-share program. For two decades, my perhaps wild-eyed theory about city cycling was that it’s considerably safer than cycling in the suburbs or in rural locations: despite the menace of getting doored, urban traffic tends to be slow and relatively predictable compared with cycling in settings where you literally never know what could come zooming around a bend.

But I must admit that a couple of months on CitiBikes has shaken my faith in my urban-cycling theory.

The problem isn’t taxis and trucks. It’s pedestrians and other cyclists. Pedestrians aren’t yet conditioned to look for thousands of additional bikes before stepping off the curb – I’ve had to scream at (and terrify) a few people to prevent either of us getting killed. Even worse are cyclists who “salmon” – riding the wrong way on one-way lanes. Store messengers are bad enough, but they ride very carefully. The real threat is other Citibikers, who I often see blithely riding in the wrong direction, without helmets, and with earbuds plugged in. They seem to believe they’re not riding actual bicycles in the middle of an actual city. They also happen to be breaking the law, and I really wish New York City’s police would ticket them. A week of tickets and the bike lanes would become a lot safer.

Earlier this week, Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar unveiled his new media venture headlined by Glenn. Jack Shafer deduces its goals:

Omidyar’s first-round hiring of Greenwald, Scahill, and Poitras — who hail from the rich tradition of partisan American journalism — speaks to his idealism. Where Bezos is banking on an institution and its brand value, Omidyar is making his first-round investment in individual journalists whose work he admires. Like Hearst, who preached in favor of the “journalism of action” that battled corruption and incompetence, and got things done, I assume Omidyar has world-changing on his mind.

Jay Rosen talked to Omidyar by phone about the specifics:

NewCo is a new venture— a company not a charity. It is not a project of Omidyar Network. It is separate from his philanthropy, he said. He said he will be putting a good deal of his time, as well as his capital, into it. I asked how large a commitment he was prepared to make in dollars. For starters: the $250 million it would have taken to buy the Washington Post. … the business model isn’t fully worked out yet, but this much is known: all proceeds from NewCo will be reinvested in the journalism. Also: there is no print product planned.

Henry Farrell believes the new venture will deeply affect the relationship between information technology and politics:

It will likely shape up as a serious journalistic enterprise. Capital of USD $250 million can hire some very good people. The venture has the potential to become the kind of news source that can turn information into knowledge. Yet it doesn’t sound as if it’ll be bound by the kinds of political relationships that most newspapers are embedded in. The Columbia Journalism Review gets this best when it describes the venture as I.F. Stone’s Weekly, if it had been lavishly funded by a friendly billionaire.

If this works, it is likely to change the relationship between information, knowledge and politics in some very interesting ways. Most obviously, it will make it even harder for the U.S. government to control the politics of leaks by pressuring newspapers not to publish stories that it thinks hurt the national interest.

Mark Coddington rounds up other responses to the news.

A reader writes:

One of the repeating themes in your commentary about the mess that is the GOP is that the region most responsible is the South. I’ve always thought you significantly overplayed that theme. My concern isn’t to defend the South, but to see the problem as it is, rather than through historical assumptions.

You posted this map a few weeks ago, showing the districts of the 80 Republican congressmen who signed a letter asking Boehner to defund Obamacare by threatening to shut down the government:

You can see that this nonsense isn’t just a regionalized phenomenon. It has hotbeds scattered all over the country, from Arizona to Pennsylvania, and Florida to Idaho, with more support in Michigan, Indiana, and western Ohio than in Alabama, Mississippi, and western Tennessee. Insofar as any region stands out at all, it’s Appalachia, not the former Confederacy. Even to say it’s Appalachian, though, is misleading. There’s more Tea Party support in Kansas than there is in West Virginia, for example. A more accurate description might be that Tea Party support generally tracks cultural Appalachia, but even that would have major exceptions.

On the whole, like racism, Tea Party support is ultimately much more age- and class-based than it is regional. Your emphasis on the old Confederacy confuses more than it clarifies.

I’d say it may confuse as well as clarify. I was too lazily reductionist and apologize for the confusion part. Nonetheless, even though the subculture may have spread beyond the South to much of rural, white America, you can still see the themes of nullification, secession, and states’ rights throughout the Obama opposition. They have a history.  Another reader is much more blunt:

I believe “The Tea Party As A Religion” is a very intemperate and inflammatory piece. If your goal is sensationalism to fire up your readership and improve your commercial success, then I believe it’s probably well done. If your goal is dialogue that tries to get at the truth of things and advance our common interest, then it is rather poorly done. You, for one, blast charges of racism against anyone that opposes Obama’s policies, with absolutely zero evidence for racism. It’s an incredible non-sequitur. Obama is black, I oppose Obama’s policies, therefore I am a racist. This is the worst kind of political arguing, gets us nowhere, and only leads to more enmity.

Indeed it is. But that is not what I wrote. The analysis in the post of the Tea Party deals with middle-class economic stagnation, bewildering changes in the culture (from a future majority-minority country to gay marriage), the decline of mainline Protestantism, the rise of modern fundamentalism, and the psychological need for total certainty in very unsettling times. It’s a very complex analysis, and it is elaborated at length in The Conservative Soul without any reference to race at all.

But to leave race out of it seems equally wrong to me.

Of course, opposition to Obama’s policies is not reducible to racism. But the fervor of the opposition, the personal contempt for and condescension toward the president, the rhetoric about his “otherness”, the refusal to believe he was born in America and is a Christian: these are all driven by some racial attitudes. They are part of the very complex mix. My goal is to try to capture reality – even if that might offend some of those I need to persuade. But for me, as a writer, I’ve long put understanding things as they are above any regard for my own influence. That doesn’t mean I haven’t gotten things very wrong. It just means that I’m trying to get things right. From the too-easy narrative about Matthew Shepard to the genetic aspects of race, from insisting on the fact of American torture to the reality of future crippling debt, I try to get things right.

Race in America still matters in complex ways. When Tea Party protestors wave the Confederate flag outside a White House occupied by an African-American, I’d be negligent for not addressing it.