Shirky on Innovation & Workspaces
The second half of the video (about 14 minutes in) focuses specifically on the connections between creativity and workspaces.
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John Updike on the Ethics and Poetics of Criticism
Open to (healthy) debate, John Updike’s six rules for criticism have something to offer to web commentary. From his 1977 anthology of prose, Picked-Up Pieces:
- Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.
- Give him enough direct quotation–at least one extended passage–of the book’s prose so the review’s reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.
- Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.
- Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants’ revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)
- If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?
To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an idealogical battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author ‘in his place,’ making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.
[via Brain Pickings]
Eschaton
Marjorie Foley unpacks The Decemberists’ tribute to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in their video to Calamity Song (above) (duh). The video (loosely) tells the story of the Eschaton, a multi-court tennis match that combines elements of adolescence and global war.
The subject of the video is Eschaton, a fictional tennis game played by Hal Incandenza, one of the main characters in Infinite Jest, and his peers at the Enfield Tennis Academy. The game is played in a futuristic world in which years are no longer numbered but rather sponsored (the Eschaton bit happens in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment), and much of the Northeastern United States is destroyed due to a nuclear “accident”–the area is now known as the Great Concavity (into which catapults launch hazardous waste and where babies are born without skulls).
Eschaton, a word which means something akin to “end times,” is played across multiple tennis courts, with various areas of the courts corresponding to parts of the globe. The highlighted areas represent the teams, and the combinations of countries, with nuclear capabilities– North America (AMNAT); the former USSR (SOVWAR); China (REDCHI); India & Pakistan (INDPAK); “the wacko but always pesky” Libya & Syria (LIBSYR) or Iraq, Iran, Libya & Syria (IRLIBSYR), and the somewhat weak South Africa (SOUTHAF). Sometimes, depending on the number of players, one may have other teams “like an independent cell of Nuck insurgents with a 50-click Howitzer and big ideas.” Players fire 5-megaton nuclear tennis balls at enemy areas, creating playful worldwide chaos, massive civilian casualties, and juvenile tennis rivalries.
Cities as Interaction Machines
Above, William H. Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Very cool sociological documentary of how people move within and occupy city spaces.
I found the video at Swiss Miss, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. Her source was a wide-ranging Atlantic article by Kio Stark, an NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program prof, describes her course, Stranger Studies 101: Cities as Interaction Machines:
There are three broad themes during the semester.
- Why stranger interactions in cities are meaningful
- The spaces and the significance of the spaces in which strangers interact, and
- How strangers ‘read’ each other, how they initiate interactions, how they avoid interactions, how they trust each other and how they fool each other, how they watch, listen and follow each other.
Then there is the secret theme. I want students to fall in love with talking to strangers, to do it more, and to make technology that creates more plentiful and meaningful interactions among strangers.
[via swissmiss]
This Land is Your Land
And don’t you forget it.
Backing band includes Joe Ely, Arcade Fire, Alejandro Escovedo, Tom Morello, The Low Anthem, and Garland Jeffreys. (From SXSW 2012.)
BBC Moebius Documentary
Damn. BBC removed the video last night.
How to Make Friends by Telephone
How To Be a Retronaut features a 1940s-era manual on telephone etiquette produced by Bell Telephone. Reminds me of those “Using Social Media to Market Your Business” guides I keep seeing.
