Exist Yesterday.

DFW Grammar Challenge

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:14:00 -0700

tumbledore:

David Foster Wallace crafted this grammar challenge. There is one crucial error in punctuation, usage, or grammar in each of the sentences below:

1. He and I hardly see one another.

2. I’d cringe at the naked vulnerability of his sentences left wandering around without periods and the ambiguity of his uncrossed “t”s.

3. My brother called to find out if I was over the flu yet.

4. I only spent six weeks in Napa.

5. In my own mind, I can understand why its implications may be somewhat threatening.

6. From whence had his new faith come?

7. Please spare me your arguments of why all religions are unfounded and contrived.

8. She didn’t seem to ever stop talking.

9. As the relationship progressed, I found her facial tic more and more aggravating.

10. The Book of Mormon gives an account of Christ’s ministry to the Nephites, which allegedly took place soon after Christ’s resurrection.

ANSWERS

Because I haven’t posted an educational grammar post in a while, and I learned something from this.

You learned a load of bollocks propagated by a man whose fabled generosity of mind and spirit could not extend to the use of language except as dictated by the long-dead tight-assed, small-minded creeps and weirdos who wrote the usage manuals to which the educators and editors of this country are bizarrely, not to say insanely, wedded. English is a freedman’s tongue fit to be mangled by high and low, and prescriptivists of all sorts, no matter how justly acclaimed for their style, technique, and penetrating insight into the intricate complexes of modern existential whatever, should suffer the fate of all petty tyrants and dictators when faced by a free people.

Which is a gross and heartless image because of how DFW died. Sorry.

Yes, most of his corrections to those sentences were actual improvements (except #8 — fuck Robert Lowth, this ain’t Latin), but style is not grammar. And pedantry is not command of the language, but a form of autism; think of Raymond Babbitt freaking out when something isn’t just so. Anyone who’s read the comments to any Kids-These-Days column recognizes the form.

Signed,

A Lit major who’s taken a couple of Linguistics classes and thinks he knows everything.

"So it’s also worth sparing a few words for the potentially demoralized voters who are considering..."

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:01:22 -0700

“So it’s also worth sparing a few words for the potentially demoralized voters who are considering staying home. To wit: Grow up. Nobody ever accomplished anything in politics by not participating. Going to vote on Election Day is not a monumental demand on your time, and there is not a single problem in American public policy that will be made easier to solve if liberal stay home on Election Day. If you contribute money or time to political campaigns and you’re disappointed with people you’ve given to or volunteered for in the past, you should of course feel free to decline to offer your cash and services in the future. But you shouldn’t just get depressed and stay home, you should probably write a note and send it in the mail explaining exactly why you won’t be donating this time and laying out which other, more progressive member you’re choosing to support instead. And on Election Day you should go vote for the better candidate and hope he or she wins. Successful from-the-left primary challenges can do good, but letting the worse candidate win a general election isn’t going to make anything better.”

- As long as Matt Yglesias keeps up with the righteous rhetoric, I’ll keep quoting him.

sometimesagreatnotion: Happy Holidays to you and yours… With...

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:16:20 -0700

sometimesagreatnotion:

Happy Holidays to you and yours…

With love,

Barry & Michelle

Man it just feels wrong to have an adorable president.

Iyaz, “Replay” Making a song about songs that you...

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 01:38:00 -0700

Iyaz, “Replay”

Making a song about songs that you can’t get out of your head (even if it’s just a simile for puppy love) so well that you can’t get it out of your head is a very old trick by now; Kylie and ELO and even Irving Berlin back before songs meant records all had landmark hits with the conceit. So the song’s catchy — what else?

Well, aside from Iyaz’ gleeful Virgin Islands voice, there’s not much else to this late entry in the Soundtrack Of 2009. But that leaping hook, wrapping in on itself like a digital Moebius strip, is still a lot to be reckoned with (even if J. R. Rotem’s initials smeared across the beginning of a song always sets my teeth on edge). It’s the kind of hook that the past few years of pop have conditioned me to expect Akon to sing, only the flat, sombre timbre of his voice wouldn’t pack nearly the sugar-rush of Iyaz’ teen-pop crush.

I’m still old enough that I need to translate “shorty” to “baby” in my head in order to hear the lyrics as my generation would have written them — but I can nevertheless dig it.

steveagee: Am I the only person who keeps getting this...

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:50:29 -0700

steveagee:

Am I the only person who keeps getting this error?

Well, mine has less about getting pussy and more about getting caught up on my writing (and reading, and listening, and watching).

The Princess And The Frog marks only the eighth movie I’ve...

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 14:56:00 -0700

The Princess And The Frog marks only the eighth movie I’ve seen in the theater this year (and probably the last, unless someone else is paying). Before I talk about it, let’s review:

January: Coraline
I enjoyed it, but at a remove; specific sequences stick out in my memory, but the whole story hits the same “modern fairy-tale” beats that I was sick of when Gaiman was still doing Sandman.

May: Star Trek / Up
I talked about Star Trek here, and haven’t changed my mind. Up was enjoyable but slight, the manic chases-and-reversals of the last hour not at all living up to the extremely powerful and even daring first half-hour.

September: The Hangover
I was feeling miserable and self-pitying and exhausted and in a good deal of physical pain, so I went and saw this in its last week at a poky little theater on the way from work and felt a lot better when I left. Which says nothing about the movie, which I will never see again and retain fond memories of.

October/November: Where The Wild Things Are / Bright Star / An Education
Which I wrote about here and here. (In brief, one really-good and two qualified not-bads.)

So apparently my taste in movies — or at least movies I’m willing to spend money to see — runs to children’s stories, crowd-pleasing smashes, and sedate British “quality” pieces. Which isn’t wrong (I happen to think the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies are the second-best adventure epic of the decade after LOTR) but it’s a good metric to use to dismiss my taste. That’s fine — I frequently do! — but I might add that of all those children’s movies I only liked one unreservedly, and that’s the one which drew complaints about “not really being for kids.”

Well, if there’s one thing The Princess And The Frog can’t be accused of, it’s “not being for kids.” It’s Disney at its neoclassical Disneyist, with beats and tensions and resolutions that people who (like me) grew up on The Little Mermaid and Beauty And the Beast and Aladdin will find all too familiar.

But it’s worth noting that I have to go back that far to find Disney movies to compare it to. The oldest of those movies is twenty years old, and even if Disney has only been out of the trad-animation game for five years, it feels like much longer. Checking Wiki, I was surprised to realize that Home On The Range and Brother Bear were even Disney movies; and the last movie that could fit under the much-bemoaned “Disney Princess” rubric was Mulan back in 1998.

Of course, what with the ubiquity of the DVDs especially among those with kids in their lives, the Disney juggernaut of the 90s has been omnipresent right through the past decade — and it’s the extracurricular stuff, all the merchandising and toys and costumes and plastic pink beds that people really object to, the movies just a convenient pretext for the real made-in-China money. But I don’t have kids, and I’m the kind of uncle that’s much more likely to buy books for my nieces than try to dress them up in some post-Victorian fantasy of innocence, so all I care about is whether the movie I’m going to watch is going to insult my intelligence.

(I don’t even much care what effect it has on the impressionable young girls who have been the focus of advance-screening handwringing. Will it teach them that all they need in life is a handsome prince? Will it reinforce near-anorexia as the ideal standard of beauty? Will it remove some essential quality of blackness from its heroine in the regimented Disney standardization of Princessitude? Not my area; and anyway what people get out of movies generally has far more to do with the people than the movies, you know?)

But I liked it. I liked it a lot. I’m a sucker for 20s-era anything, I’m a Randy Newman mark — though for his records much more than his soundtracks, which is good because this music is a lot closer to what he sings than what he does for hire — and I fucking love hot jazz and characters namedropping Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet would in most circumstances be more than enough to dispose me well towards a movie. But beyond all those things which could have been tailor-made to suit me, I enjoyed the story, which had much more wit and actual character beats than I remember from the last Disney movie I saw (Lilo & Stitch? Atlantis?), and I loved the densely-drawn, fluid look of the movie, which a lot of people have said is the hand-drawn animators showing off their stuff after so much time off, but which struck me as the kind of necessary world-building you need to do in order to make people sorry to leave the story behind. (As both a cartoonist and a prodigal fiction writer, I think about this kind of thing more than most people, maybe.)

But what impressed me the most about the movie was that segregation existed in it. It was never underlined with a line of dialogue (unless a banker’s sniffy “person of your … background” could count), but when Tiana got on a nearly-empty bus, she got off at the back; the customers in a black-owned restaurant were both black and white, but the blacks sat towards the kitchen and the whites towards the windows; and the only black people at a white party were catering or providing entertainment. It’s not ever addressed, because one of the imperatives of selling a movie internationally is tiptoeing around race, but if you want to have that conversation with your kids, the movie lets you. (Unlike Pocahontas, which is so virulently antihistorical that it still makes me want to throw up. And its songs suck too.)

Sure, I have some quibbles: the pictoral idealization of Tiana’s family works against their incorporation into a cartoon universe, so that there are some really clumsy images in the first ten minutes, and a handful of characters never fully gel, as if too many people were drawing them; as usual with Disney movies, it gets a bit unnecessarily manic towards the end (though kudos for having the balls to kill off a sympathetic character); and the point where She falls in love with Him seemed much more like fitting tab A to slot B than a natural outgrowth of character and incident.

But goddamn, anything that could have a musical setpiece based on Aaron Douglas murals is going to be one of my favorite movies of the year.

http://

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 13:08:00 -0700

http://:

barthel:

excitablehonky:

George Will, after they showed that other Nike ad:

He’s not just a celebrity of the sort Daniel Boorstin talked about: a celebrity being well known for their well-knownness. That’s Paris Hilton. We tend to forget Tiger Woods is a really good golfer, and people are going to pay to see him do that and people are going to forgive him and they’re going to quit looking at him as an example.

Right, of course! Instead of just publicly having relationships with other people of interest, Tiger…can bounce a ball on a club for 30 seconds! (No one else can do that!) And hits a small ball into a hole, for money! You know, something worthwhile. It’s the man argument of “No, sports aren’t like all those girl things. They’re real.” No they’re not! All that matters, George, is their story. Celebrities are rewarded for having a story we find interesting, and as long as they continue to have an interesting story, they will continue to receive coverage. But being interesting continuously is hard! People like atheletes and movie stars have a leg up in that their celebrity is situated within this context that generates a continuous narrative, with rules and standards of success. Tiger Woods didn’t have to have any public relationships to be interesting because he had gotten to a point where winning or not winning a golf tournament was, in and of itself, interesting. The only difference between him and Paris Hilton is that Paris didn’t have that. She had to make up her own story as she went along. “Because she wasn’t talented!” the George Wills cry. Sure, right, whatever. But there are all sorts of very, very talented people in this world that do not have multimillion-dollar endorsement deals. Clearly, the point of interest for (some of) those sponsors and the tabloids is something beyond that, and that’s their stories. As long as Tiger Woods continues to play golf well, he will certainly be of interest to the sort of sad shadows of humanity that “follow golf.” But for the rest of us, there’s a very different standard, and it’s exactly the same one we apply to Paris Hilton.

Sure, let’s use the opposition’s rhetoric against them to drive the point home and all that, but “sad shadows of humanity”? I don’t care for or about golf myself, but it’s one of the most-played leisure activities in the world. People caring about the best practitioner of a challenging but accessible game is just as valid as people caring about someone who has shrewdly managed to play celebrity culture to her advantage.

Which is to say, in my view, kind of sad and dismal (the caring, not the people). Which I guess Mike would say makes me another patriarchal elitist dismissing the tastes of women and gay dudes — but I’m pretty sure it just makes me emotionally stunted. I can only care about people I know, and that’s hard enough.

merlin: The Beatles - “Yesterday” Wikipedia: Yesterday...

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 00:29:28 -0700

merlin:

The Beatles - “Yesterday”

Wikipedia: Yesterday (song):

It was the first official recording by The Beatles that relied upon a performance by a single member of the band: Paul McCartney was accompanied solely by a string quartet. The final recording differed so greatly from other works by The Beatles that the other three members of the band vetoed the release of the song as a single in the United Kingdom (however; in 1976, it was eventually issued as a single there). Although credited to “Lennon/McCartney”, the song was written solely by McCartney. It has been reported that Paul has asked Yoko Ono if she would consider reversing the songwriting credits on this song to read “McCartney/Lennon”. Ono has refused.

Of course she has. Because she’s ghastly.

Right. Because all that is at work here is a poor, longsuffering, overlooked, underattended, uncredited songwriter being held hostage to a sixty-year-old agreement by a vindictive hag.

Seriously, if people don’t know by now that “Yesterday” was the sole creation of Paul McCartney, is an incremental shift in the publishing credit going to change that? Nobody stands to gain or lose anything real by this — an equally valid interpretation of these [citation needed] events is that Paul just wants to feed his considerable ego.

But, no, that doesn’t fit the standard narrative of Yoko-as-demon-bitch destroying the pure male light with her female void. Oh, wait, sorry, that’s Dave Sim. Sorry. I get him confused with rock fans all the time.

perpetua: It would be a good idea for you to buy Paul F....

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 19:59:26 -0700

perpetua:

It would be a good idea for you to buy Paul F. Tompkins’ new album Freak Wharf.

Word. In fact I would go so far as to say that those leading Tompkins-less lives are missing out on some of the purest joy the world has on offer at the moment.

Billboard's Top 100 songs of the 00s

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:33:47 -0700

Billboard's Top 100 songs of the 00s:

tomewing:

I find this list - especially the top 40 or so - really fascinating, and not simply because I like about 2/3 of the records in it and adore a good half-dozen.

It’s interesting to me because of the idea - repeated so often I’ve come to lazily accept it without really thinking - that this decade has been particularly fragmented in terms of pop, the music people listen to, and so on.

The reasons why this might be so - changes in access to and distribution of music leading to greater personalisation of music consumption - make a convincing argument. But it’s interesting to me that the decade as measured by Billboard doesn’t seem particularly fragmentary at ALL. It’s been absolutely dominated by R&B and hip-hop.

There are lots of good reasons why this doesn’t contradict the “fragmentation” story - it might well be that fewer people listen to the radio now, or that the industry have circled their wagons around this particular style, or that Billboard’s calculations have built in pro-R&B factors. It might also be that things have always been fragmented and we have the tools to understand that and exploit it better now, so the ways of measuring the mainstream are accurate but irrelevant. From a critical perspective, it might be that because most critics don’t like or have an ear for much of this stuff, they invest more in narratives which downplay its importance. There’s got to be whole iceberg-size racial dimensions which I don’t really ‘get’ as a white Brit guy too. All or none of these things might be so. I just think it’s an interesting list.

Racial to a degree, but only in the way that class issues in the U.S. are always racial. Terrestrial radio, especially now with the rise of (relatively expensive) alternatives, belongs to the working class, and especially to the young — both groups that are disproportionately black/Latino/urban/etc. It’s also worth noting that many of the rare examples of “rock” or “white music” on the top 40 are (at least in the U.S.) coded as poor-white-folks’ music: Nickelback (meathead), OneRepublic (wigger*), Lifehouse (Christian).

And most music writers/critics, even if they belong to the working class in strict economic terms, are by educational and social standards middle-class or higher. There’s small surprise there would be a disconnect. Clearly, the middle class+ has been greatly fragmented as a pop audience — although I would guess that a lot of that fragmentation can be broken down along age, gender, region, subculture, etc. lines — and we have no metric with which to measure the amount of music people listen to without paying for, so the standard narrative has life in it yet.

Also, I think we’ve reached the point at which “dominated by R&B and hip-hop” is kind of over-obvious. What kind of r&b, what kind of hip-hop? It’s like saying 1977 was the high-water mark of rock — Pink Floyd fans and Sex Pistols fans would mean very different things by that. There are a lot of people who would call themselves dedicated hip-hop fans who loathe everything on that chart; we need dedicated terms for this kind of stuff rather than lumping it all together. (This too probably has a lot to do with race/class boundaries. The well-off white nerds who come up with subgenre names have sliced electronic music — and urban British music — into a thousand little pieces, but all hip-hop is just “hip-hop,” with at best a mainstream vs. backpacker narrative.)

One of the most deeply fascinating things about the modern pop landscape is how impoverished our critical language is in dealing with it.

*A morally indefensible term that still gets across an important social point with such concision that it’s hard not to use.

steveagee: So for the past 2 1/2 days I decided to take a break from all social networking sites. ...

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:05:25 -0700

steveagee:

So for the past 2 1/2 days I decided to take a break from all social networking sites. It was pretty amazing because I got more writing done in those two days than I have in the past two months…seriously! The first day I felt like I was detoxing from crack!

I can honestly say the only bad thing about staying off these sites is that my tumblarity went from about 1,200 down to about 900. God damn tumblarity!

Tumblarity: the bitch-mistress of social networking.

From Atchison To Wonderland: Popular Music's Evolution Into A Mass Media, 1945-1960.

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:34:21 -0700

From Atchison To Wonderland: Popular Music's Evolution Into A Mass Media, 1945-1960.:

I talked my history professor into letting me write a brief paper on pop music to finish the semester. For those who have even the slightest knowledge of the subject, it’s a lot of really obvious territory gone over in really obvious fashion, but it’s kind of nice to have it all in one place. (And it really only applies to the American scene, because obviously no one else in the world matters or ever has.) Click to read, don’t to not. Youtube links to songs discussed added for the web edition.

(Mostly) written last night to No Pussyfooting on repeat. Faintly avant-garde instrumental albums of the 1970s are my favorite easily-ignorable noise to write by. Care to recommend any?

"We’ve developed a public culture in the United States in which it’s regarded as grossly naive to..."

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:41:15 -0700

“We’ve developed a public culture in the United States in which it’s regarded as grossly naive to suggest that a Senator or an executive ought to do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing. But if you think of any major problem this country has ever solved—the Civil War, women’s suffrage, defeating Nazism, Civil Rights—it’s always required not just smart tactics, but moral behavior, people willing to cast risky votes, people willing to risk physical harm in combat or non-violent resistance. It’s been the same all around the world throughout history. If people don’t want to do the right thing, the right thing doesn’t get done. On climate, in particular, a huge swathe of the American elite has simply refused to acknowledge any sort of duty or obligation.”

- Matt “Motherfucking” Yglesias dropping cold hard truth.

It’s times like these that I wish I could be as unselfconscious a propagandist as certain older relatives of mine and spam everyone in my e-mail inbox with copy/pasted pieces. Instead I’ll settle for posting it on Tumblr where no one, I’m pretty sure, will disagree with a word.

lastbutnotleast: Some of this year’s best holiday presents are...

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:08:35 -0700

lastbutnotleast:

Some of this year’s best holiday presents are on the Christian websites. Part 3.

Ugh. As someone who grew up with rhetoric about the supposed persecution of Christians ringing in his ears, nothing sets me dead against a movement, an institution, or a person faster than the slightest hint of a grievance.

The worst part is that certain atheists could drink from the same cup with exactly the same amount of self-righteous anger. If both sides are claiming victim status, someone’s lying.

By the way, in case anyone was curious,

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:57:00 -0700

I did not finish my NaNoWriMo project in November, and haven’t touched it since. It’s okay. I got more fiction writing that I’m not completely ashamed of done than I have in ten or fifteen years. In the coming year, I’ll have remember to create space in my weekly writing regimen for fiction.

(And good God is it going to be a regimen. My handful of followers will probably want to rethink that decision come January. Fair warning.)

screwrocknroll: You wanna quit? Goddamn, I’m ready to. Cam’ron...

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:50:48 -0700

screwrocknroll:

You wanna quit? Goddamn, I’m ready to.

Cam’ron - My Job

Cam hates his job. That’s cause HE DIDN’T JUST QUIT IT LIKE I DID.

Congratulations!

I’ve walked away from a fair number of jobs over the years, and no matter how strapped for cash I’ve been (I’ve gone over a week without eating, slept on streets, etc.), I’ve never regretted it.

Of course, if my boss happens across this, I love my current job! Please still consider me for the promotion!

putthison: (PS: I’ve been wanting a forum to say this for ten...

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:36:49 -0700

putthison:

(PS: I’ve been wanting a forum to say this for ten years plus: SERIOUSLY, CHERRY-POPPIN DADDIES? ZOOT SUIT RIOT? REALLY, BUNCH OF WHITE GUYS? IS YOUR NEXT ALBUM “RODNEY KING RIOTS” WITH THE LEAD SINGLE “WOUNDED KNEE MASSACRE PARTY?” GO FUCK YOURSELVES.)

I endorse these sentiments.

With the caveat that I still kind of like “Zoot Suit Riot” as a companion piece with “Tubthumping,” “Impression That I Get,” and maybe one or two other left-field hits from the summer of 1997 or 1998, whichever it was.

Oh my God you guys.

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:55:00 -0700

Every year I forget how great hot chocolate with Bailey’s in it is during the winter months, and have to rediscover it all over.

Just found out about it again tonight. Mmm-mmm-mm.

(Also, if anyone reading this also happens to listen to Never Not Funny, OH MY GOD YOU GUYS.)

Sexology

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:57:08 -0700

theanachronist:

The extravagantly-muttonchopped author of this 1904 treatise on human sexuality, W. H. Walling, A.M., M.D., was professor of both gynecology and “electrotherapeutics” — and I think we can safely assume he combined the two disciplines to great effect. I know next to nothing nothing about this book, which I picked up several years ago at the late lamented 26th Street flea market. But I have turned to it often for entertainment and edification. The chapter “Masturbation, Female” is invaluable. O, that it were as infrequent as it is monstrous — amen!

Click through for totally awesome scans of the book in question.

cureforbedbugs: girlboymusic: When I was three years old, just...

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:58:19 -0700

cureforbedbugs:

girlboymusic:

When I was three years old, just before Christmas, ABC aired a Jim Henson production called The Christmas Toy. My parents were like, “They’ll probably show this every year till we want to kill ourselves, but let’s tape it anyway,” and THANK GOD THEY DID, because The Christmas Toy never aired again. I imagine thousands — nay, millions — of children grew up with a a gnawing, unsatisfied longing to once again watch Rugby the Tiger, his red-headed doll rival Apple, and a cat toy named Mew learn the true meaning of Christmas and friendship, but I? I had that old VHS tape, and I hauled it out every single Christmas to watch it over and over again.

Half the fun was watching the commercials — the show had been sponsored by Kraft, so every commercial break brought new “delicious” holiday recipes you could make using Kraft food products.

The Christmas Toy came out on video six or seven years ago, and on DVD a little after that, so I haven’t watched the original VHS in quite a while. I never realized how utterly fucking horrifying those Kraft recipes were. Enjoy.

You’ve been talking about this all day, but it was only when you described it here (“Rugby the Tiger”!!!!!) that you broke my brain as a Proustian black hole opened up and I remembered watching this on my parents’ bed as a small child. (IIRC it was piggybacking off of the weird Jim Henson Nu-Muppets with the white tigers and the spaceship and the…) And, um, almost started crying. I’m going to be having random chills for the rest of the day, awesome!

I too remember this.