Amherst 250th: Say What You Mean

Thanks, Pb!

I'm sure that the people organizing Amherst's 250th Anniversary celebrations were just so excited to win a major gift that they forgot to proofread:

As a historian of the book--and someone who from time to time has to read linguistically and conceptually challenged student papers--I am of course fascinated by the difference between oral and written language. More attention to stylistic felicity might have avoided this embarrassment.

Anyway. . .

Please be more careful next time.

At the end of last year, Shiraz Socialist, trying to add some levity to the grim situation of the world, offered a cultural-political questionnaire. Among the highlights, one devoted to books and censorship:

It’s that time of the year when you get bumper issues of magazines, the reviews of the past twelve months and, of course, the Christmas quiz.

So here, for Christmas, is our special quiz.

ARE YOU A CLERICAL FASCIST?

Answer the following 10 questions to check your clerical fascism credentials!

1. Before being published a book should be:-
a) Vetted by a board of clerics for blasphemy
b) Vetted by academics for offensiveness
c) Eh?
. . . . .
10. The Golden Age was:-
a) 8th century, Baghdad
b) 1917 USSR – there was something to hope for
c) 10 September 2001 – though there was plenty of crap around, it wasn’t this particular kind of crap

(take the full quiz)

As 2009 begins, the questions seem bound to remain relevant for a long time.

Merry . . . Whatever . . . Again!

Although the modern reader could be forgiven for interpreting this image as some sort of cutesy multiculturalism in this age of Chrismukkah, the reality is rather different--though there is a connection.

As an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Berlin from 2005 explained, the concept goes back over a century to a time when increasingly assimilated German Jews appropriated Christmas celebrations in their own secular manner. (The original term was Weihnukkah, of which Chrismukkah is just an anglicization.)

In recent decades, the term has become respectable--half-serious and half-humorous--and taken on a life of its own.

This image of the menorah evolving into the Christmas tree comes from a postcard sold by the Museum, and the original intent was critical rather than celebratory. The caption reads:

"Darwinian: Zionist caricature on assimilation, from the periodical, 'Schlemiel' (1904)"

That these issues still arouse strong sentiments can be seen from this rather less subtle blog entry by Jeremy Cardash and its responses at the Jerusalem Post.

In any event, greetings of the season on whichever holiday(s) you happen to be celebrating.

Mail Goggles Trump Beer Goggles

Ever written and sent off a text message you later regretted, mainly because you were too drunk or just too tired to think straight? The folks at Google have now come up with a solution, which is the equivalent of the numerical keypads on some cars: an interface that requires you to perform some simple mathematical operations before it will allow you to launch your little Gmail missive into cyberspace:

Reporting on the new service in October, software engineer Jon Perlow included among examples of "sending messages you wish you hadn't": "the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together" and "that late night memo -- I mean mission statement -- to the entire firm."

He adds, "By default, Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend as that is the time you're most likely to need it."

Although the new system may reduce the number of embarrassing incidents, it does raise other questions:

• What implications does this have for journalists such as conservative "Vodkapundit" (aka Stephen Green), who "drunkblogged" the political debates this past season?

• And as a historian, I of course have to ask: Would the past have turned out differently, if our forebears had had this technology to force them to pause before dipping the quill in the inkwell or rushing off to the telegraph office? I tend to think first of the winestained eighteenth-century police informants' reports that Robert Darnton discovered in the Parisian archive. But what of the world-historical: Could Mail Goggles have prevented, say, the "Zimmermann Telegram"? The Austrian ultimatum to Serbia in 1914?

• And most important: what can you do about people who show no good judgment, day or night, drunk or sober?

Why the world and your life stink (and part of it's your own fault)

There's a great deal of debate (much of it pointless, some of it merely pretentious) about the supposed relation between the rise of new media, electronic communication, and the decline of civility and real community. Some writers, such as Sven Birkerts, have made of this sort of jeremiad a life's passion. Others, mostly journalists, make a career out of that sort of

Occasionally, the greater insight and best antidote come from the realm of humor rather than scholarship.

From the inimitable cracked.com:

David Wong, "7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable".

samples:

Scientists call it the Naked Photo Test, and it works like this: say a photo turns up of you nakedly doing something that would shame you and your family for generations. Bestiality, perhaps. Ask yourself how many people in your life you would trust with that photo. If you're like the rest of us, you probably have at most two.
Even more depressing, studies show that about one out of four people have no one they can confide in.

#1. We don't have enough annoying strangers in our lives.
That's not sarcasm. Annoyance is something you build up a tolerance to, like alcohol or a bad smell. The more we're able to edit the annoyance out of our lives, the less we're able to handle it.
The problem is we've built an awesome, sprawling web of technology meant purely to let us avoid annoying people.

#2. We don't have enough annoying friends, either.

#3. Texting is a shitty way to communicate.

#5. We don't get criticized enough.
Most of what sucks about not having close friends isn't the missed birthday parties or the sad, single-player games of ping pong with the wall. No, what sucks is the lack of real criticism. . . . I've been insulted lots, but I've been criticized very little. And don't ever confuse the two. An insult is just someone who hates you making a noise to indicate their hatred. A barking dog. Criticism is someone trying to help you, by telling you something about yourself that you were a little too comfortable not knowing.

#6. We're victims of the Outrage Machine.
A whole lot of the people still reading this are saying, "Of course I'm depressed! People are starving! America has turned into Nazi Germany! My parents watch retarded television shows and talk about them for hours afterward! People are dying in meaningless wars all over the world!"
But how did we wind up with a more negative view of the world than our parents? Or grandparents? Back then, people didn't live as long and babies died more often. Diseases were more common.

(read the full article)

(Hat tip: my clever students)

What to read (and things I wish I'd said, written, or done)

Whenever one despairs of intellectual stimulus, the right thing just somehow comes along:

For the past 30 years, the Bookseller magazine has awarded a prize to the oddest book title it can find. The first ever winner was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice
Mind-boggling as that is, it is far from the strangest. Now the top prize has been won by the 1996 magnum opus Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, . . .  More.

Damn. You couldn't make this stuff up (which is to say: I wish I could; the last time I tried was in college, with a brief [that word alone doomed it to failure] German philosophical treatise, entitled, Wissen und Pissen, which won plaudits from those who understand both topics, but remained a fragment).

Of course, for those who can (or try), there are works such as that by Tad Tuleja, late of neighboring Belchertown; a hamlet whose unappetizing name alone prevented me from seeking a domicile there (though it has since become quite the fashionable place, mainly because it had land for large building lots).  His The Catalog of Lost Books: An Annotated and Seriously Addled Collection of Great Books That Should Have Been Written, But Never Were (1989), with a preface appropriately entitled, "À la Recherche des Tomes Perdus," includes such treasures as "The Cretan Eraser: Inventories of Knossos," "Bulimius: The Art of Stuffing," "Heloise Hausenhintsen: The Helper's Helper" (that one may require a certain generational context), "William Shakespeare: Hamletta," "Pocahontas: The London Diary," "Alfred E. Neumann: What, Me Worry?" (another lost reference on the very young, now that other and better satirical entertainments abound), "Marilyn Monroe: A Prolegomena to Semiotics," and "Lumpy Gravy: The Mushroom Hunters."

He outfoxed himself, however, with James Bereford's Miseries of Human Life. As an astute reader pointed out (I guess one just has to know the 19th century and how those people thought; a few of us make it our business and pleasure to do so) it was in fact a real book from 1816 that fooled both author and reviewer. Tuleja was smart and gracious enough to acknowledge the error--but also sly and proud enough to inform the letter-writer that there was in addition a deliberate false attribution--that is, in this case, a real title--lurking in his catalogue. Are you clever enough to find it? (Hint: It's not "Guy-Martine Ratatouille: Cacophony of the Spheres.")

And for those of you who still want to make up some good titles, be aware that it is an uphill battle. Here are some past winners from the list of real titles:

1986: Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality (Brunner/Mazel)
1988: Versailles: The View From Sweden (University of Chicago Press)
1989: How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art (Ten Speed Press)
1990: Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual (Lace Publications)

(Not for nothing was that one of my favorite decades, greed and Reaganism notwithstanding.  After the lean years of the nineties, which perhaps produced fewer striking titles, the new millennium is already generating a bumper crop.)

1994: Highlights in the History of Concrete (British Cement Association)
1995: Reusing Old Graves (Shaw & Son)

2002: Living With Crazy Buttocks (Kaz Cooke - Penguin)
2003: The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories (Kensington Publishing)
2004: Bombproof Your Horse (J A Allen)
2005: People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It (Gary Leon Hill - Red Wheel/Weiser Books)
2006: The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification (Harry N Abrams)

Best line of the year

A friend's reference to How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read reminded me of this anecdote from another acquaintance in academe. While still a graduate student, he became deeply disillusioned (note: this is supposed to happen much later) when he heard one of his professors respond to another:

"Have I read it??!! I haven't even taught it."