Communicable diseases

I once heard a most intriguing talk by Jim Mussell on "The 'Very Proteus of Disease': Media, Materiality, and the Flu in 1890s London." He tracked the way that influenza epidemics and newspaper accounts of the aforementioned epidemics were received, the one causing the other and (allegedly) vice-versa, as people eager to be the first to know the news developed psychosomatic runny noses.

Now I read in the NYT that

a few weeks ago, Google deployed an early-warning service for spotting flu trends, based on search queries for flu-related symptoms.

Doubtless this will be extremely useful for those of us who like to pre-emptively stock up on orange juice. The article is at least ostensibly about privacy, and a researcher adds,

“The new information tools symbolized [sic] by the Internet are radically changing the possibility of how we can organize large-scale human efforts,” said Thomas W. Malone, director of the M.I.T. Center for Collective Intelligence.

“For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said. “In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.”

We can use our brand-new media to track the flu, and are turning into what you might call a "global village." In other words, all your McLuhan are belong to us.

Claude Lévi-Strauss's 100th Birthday

New BAM/PFA

There's an article in the NYT just now on the proposed Berkeley Art Museum. I quite like the new design, although I don't see what the author, Nicolai Ouroussoff, has against the current building (apart from the fact that it's falling down). He writes,

Standing on a rough commercial strip at the campus’s southern edge, the old building is still marred by the big steel columns that were installed after the quake to support its cantilevered floors. Its rough, angular concrete forms and oddly shaped galleries are awkward settings for art.

I beg to differ: its oddly shaped galleries are awesome. I'm also not sure what Ourossoff means by "a rough commercial strip." Surely he doesn't think Bancroft and Bowditch is a rough neighborhood. But then, he does come out with things like

On a local level, the museum could help break down the divide between the ivory tower at the top of the hill and the gritty neighborhood at the bottom.

Gritty, gritty Shattuck Ave.

One thing I do think Ouroussoff did get right is this, the very first line of the article:

I have no idea whether, in this dismal economic climate, the University of California will find the money to build its new art museum here.

Good question. Since, you know, we've fired the lecturers.

In light of a recent email I received from a stranger, I feel compelled to post a link to the pinnacle of Jorge Cham's achievement: "Answer times two." It... it speaks to me so often.

Apocalyptic narratives about narrative

NYT: MIT's Media Lab Will Study Film Narrative in Center for Future Storytelling.

In a telephone interview last week, Mr. Kirkpatrick said he might take a cue from Al Gore, who used a documentary film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” to heighten concern about global warming. Mr. Kirkpatrick is now considering an alarm-bell documentary of his own, he said.

Its tentative title: “A World Without Story.”

As Arcadia put it when she emailed me the link, "NYT or Onion?"

Jeff Sypeck posts some of his google search strings. (Sypeck is the author of Becoming Charlemagne.)

New readers continue to find “Quid Plura?” through the thaumaturgy of the modern search engine. Below in bold are some of their stranger searches. I’ve endeavored to add helpful responses on the off chance they didn’t find the answers they were looking for.

beowulf fungus
One of my college roommates contracted the Beowulf fungus. Afterwards, people found it impossible to date him with any certainty.

how stupid is sir gawain?
Gawain is so stupid, it takes him two hours to watch “60 Minutes”!
Gawain is so stupid, he took an umbrella to see “Purple Rain”!
Gawain is so stupid, he thought Sherlock Holmes was a housing project!
Gawain is so stupid, he believed that every instance of the final inflectional -e in MS Cotton Nero A.x was unsounded because he had overlooked the possibility that specifically poetic archaisms may not have existed in prose and failed to consider that an unsounded final -e might corrupt the meter in at least a dozen places in the manuscript!

becoming charlemagne summary
Becoming Charlemagne is the story of the emperor who won renown as the inventor of gargling, which prior to that time had been practiced only furtively by a remote tribe of Saxons who passed the secret down from father to son as part of their oral tradition.

becoming charlemagne sparknotes
Set against the turbulent backdrop of 19th-century Russia, Becoming Charlemagne is the story of a young princess who gradually awakens to her own potential as a poet, a lover, and a queen. (Tell your teacher you found this summary on the author’s Web site. You will astonish her.) [Her? -- N.C.]

Read the whole post for the most hilarious of these search strings. (Via Ducks and Drakes.)

Curiously, ever since I wrote that post on Mary Hoffman and Diana Wynne Jones, I've gotten a large number of searches on cross-dressing.

Austin Grossman has a very interesting review of Maze of Bones.

It’s a story about people born into the most privileged family in the world, who then set out to become the most important people in history. Whatever happened to just owning your own chocolate factory?

The NYT reports, "Tough Times Strain Colleges Rich and Poor."

Well, I could have told you that.

The article speaks directly of the UC system:

On Thursday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California proposed a midyear budget cut of $65.5 million for the University of California system — on top of the $48 million reduction already in the budget.

“Budget cuts mean that campuses won’t be able to fill faculty vacancies, that the student-faculty ratio rises, that students have lecturers instead of tenured professors,” said Mark G. Yudof, president of the California system. “Higher education is very labor intensive. We may be getting to the point where there will have to be some basic change in the model.”

I wonder what that change would be. A change to a model that's somehow less labor-intensive? What would be the point of higher education, in that case?

Children's Rhymes

When I was a chile we used to play,
"One -- two -- buckle my shoe!"
and things like that. But now, Lord,
listen at them little varmints!

     By what sends
     the white kids
     I ain't sent:
     I know I can't
     be President.

There is two thousand children
in this block, I do believe!

     What don't bug
     them white kids
     sure bugs me:
     We knows everybody
     ain't free!

Some of these young ones is cert'ly bad --
One batted a hard ball right through my window
and my gold fish et the glass.

     What's written down
     for white folks
     ain't for us a-tall:
     "Liberty And Justice --
     Huh -- For All."

     Oop-pop-a-da!
     Skee! Daddle-de-do!
     Be-bop!

Salt' peanuts!

De-dop!

          -- Langston Hughes, 1951

Hyde Park

A few more literature-in-the-media moments:

Paul Krugman writes in the NYT:

Economic data rarely inspire poetic thoughts. But as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

The widening gyre, in this case, would be the feedback loops (so much for poetry) causing the financial crisis to spin ever further out of control. The hapless falconer would, I guess, be Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary.

I cracked up when I read this -- perhaps because I'd just been grading. It's a good thing he's interpreting the economy and not Yeats.

* * *

More disturbingly, a New Republic article about David Axelrod, Barack Obama's consultant, pitches him as an expert in convincing white voters to accept black candidates. His recipe?

The self-described "keeper of the message" for Obama's presidential bid has taken the lessons he learned from his mayoral and gubernatorial campaigns and made them cohere into something that approaches a unified theory of how to elect a black candidate--emphasizing biography, using third-party authentication, attacking with an unconventional sideways approach, letting voters connect to the candidate by speaking to them directly in ads, and telling voters that supporting the black candidate puts them on the right side of history.

Ouch. I guess I have to give Axelrod credit -- it's tried and true. Really tried and true. For instance, in abolitionist slave narratives. (And as we keep hearing, Obama's memoirs are, as it were, "written by himself.") But it is painful to read that such a formula still seems necessary.

* * *

Stanley Fish, meanwhile, compares Barack Obama to Jesus in a way that only Fish can (or would), via Milton's Paradise Regained. I must admit to being amused.

* * *

And finally, according to a NYT article, some researchers in Massachusetts are using Thoreau's notes to study climate change.

Henry David Thoreau endorsed civil disobedience, opposed slavery and lived for two years in a hut in the woods here, an experience he described in “Walden.” Now he turns out to have another line in his résumé: climate researcher.

The profound weirdness of Walden, curiously, goes unmentioned in the article. The researchers also seem surprised that archives could, I don't know, matter.


Rock Hudson's Thoreau-quoting character in Douglas Sirk's 1955 All That Heaven Allows, sitting next to Jane Wyman

Avant-garde or nonsense?

Another way to phrase my students' dilemma is that they don't know whether to regard strange writing as ("deep") avant-garde literature or ("random") nonsense. It's a hard thing to figure out, especially if you're not much in the habit of reading poetry.

I was tickled to run into this video of the MSNBC pundit Rachel Maddow explaining dada:



Peter Bürger it's not; as Maddow admits, "art history class was a long time ago."

Maddow raises dada as a possible explanation for an incoherent John McCain ad: perhaps it's incoherent because he's trying to smash art as an institution. By identifying it as dada, we could file it in the "deep" category. Of course, Maddow is really trying to argue that it's not "deep" at all, but rather "random."

But Maddow's satire hinges on a (supposed) formal similarity. Both dada and this ad are identified as incoherent. That doesn't actually help my students tell them apart!

This is why we need better shorthands for avant-garde writing than "weird stuff."

In my dissertation I show that the mama of dada is really Nana.