![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unposted i
Jul. 31st, 2007 12:43 pmHaving decided to suppress an annoyingly coy set of endless deferrals that I wrote two days ago, I am nevertheless freshly haunted by the topics I discussed, which I’ll summarize minus the worst of my free associations and digressions.
It comes to me, and this is a new digression, not just how significant editorial choice is (that much is obvious) but the accidental function of editorial obsessions. The New York Review of Books’ continuous rehashings of moments of modernist aesthetics that some of us found tiresome the first time (Louis MacNeice being this week’s example) gives them a chance with a new audience; even a dismissive evaluation (as with Eliot Weinberger’s assessment of what parts of Susan Sontag’s oeuvre have dated badly) alerts an audience to a part of history which they might find more valuable than the reviewer does. Again, a firm grasp on the obvious, but we tend to read from our own perspective so often that it is useful to remember alternate possibilities. (More often, of course, the topic that fascinates the writer is of no interest at all to the readership.)
That a well-written review essay is revelatory (consider those of Sontag’s that were basically extended book reviews) is, again, obvious. (I had much more digressive remarks on this originally.)
Simon Head’s NYRB view of John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s The Social Life of Information, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, and Richard Sennett’s The Culture of the New Capitalism is a concisely illuminating survey of the impact of the misguided application of computer-determined models of producti vity to areas (such as the service economy) where they don’t work very well; the result being a combination of unintended inefficiency, financial insecurity, and daily misery for those subjected to this particular mode of management. Head’s dispassionate citation of representative bits of evidence makes for a far clearer picture of topics that, in many cases, we knew already as isolated anecdotes, and he accomplishes his task without tendentious rhetoricizing.
But there are still topics one is unlikely to encounter in the NYRB that show up, however infrequently, in other journals of general opinions such as the London Review of Books, which I also find so predictable in its quirkiness that I hadn’t looked at its website lately. (The world is now divided, for a certain class of intellectual, into journals to which we subscribe, journals whose freely available portions we read online, journals we encounter only via online intermediaries such as Arts and Letters Daily…and then the vast majority, journals we don’t read at all, by choice or because we don’t know they exist.)
But a review, in what by now must be a recent but not current issue, covered a new volume detailing the subdivinities to whom sacrifice was offered in classical antiquity, and the specific animal sacrifices required by each. The catalogue of daily ritual butchery was so stupefyingly comprehensive that it suddenly seemed to me there could scarcely have been a purely secular meat market in all of antiquity. This led me to a re-imagining of the likely mindset of the audience to whom Paul addressed his letters, but I finally decided was both dubious and of no interest even to those of us who endured two decades of Protestant Sunday School lessons.
I am particularly curious, getting back to editors, about the current editorship of the New York Times Magazine. The lead story on robotics, or more accurately on the psychological implications of robots as we currently make them, spins off in some unexpected directions. Combined with Jim Holt’s prominently placed short piece “Eternity for Atheists,” a survey of how personal immortality might be possible in a godless universe, it provided a bridge to the kinds of questions I find myself summarizing to the point of tiresomeness in the joculum journal.
However, I suspect that no one not already immersed in such questions would see any relationship whatsoever between Holt’s short recitation of improbable theories and the unacknowledged leaps of argument in the other story. Once again, the stuff found in science fiction stories parallels the theories propounded in obscure parts of the globe from several hundred to several thousand years ago. If this proves anything, it proves Ioan Culianu’s structuralist contention that if a possible thought exists, someone will have thought it already over the long course of human history; the problem being to decide which of the near-infinitude of possible thoughts is supported by a sufficient amount of independent evidence.
But that leads us back to the question of what should be construed as “independent evidence.”
And the NY Times stays ahead of me re the evidence: today's psychology story "Who's Minding the Mind" and the scientist-bio profile "Insight into Evolution" are highly germane to the topic of my previous two posts and the one immediately above, which I wrote before consulting, in this case, my TimesSelect account online.
Incidentally, I make nothing at all of it, but what are the odds that two of Europe's most monumental film directors of a half century ago would die on the same day? as bizarrely appropriate as the famed Adams/Jefferson deaths in 1826, except that there is nothing symbolic about July 30 (the second and third Presidents of the United States died on the same July 4, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence). Over the past two centuries or so, the cosmos' sense of humor has apparently shifted from American presidents to existentialist film directors.
It comes to me, and this is a new digression, not just how significant editorial choice is (that much is obvious) but the accidental function of editorial obsessions. The New York Review of Books’ continuous rehashings of moments of modernist aesthetics that some of us found tiresome the first time (Louis MacNeice being this week’s example) gives them a chance with a new audience; even a dismissive evaluation (as with Eliot Weinberger’s assessment of what parts of Susan Sontag’s oeuvre have dated badly) alerts an audience to a part of history which they might find more valuable than the reviewer does. Again, a firm grasp on the obvious, but we tend to read from our own perspective so often that it is useful to remember alternate possibilities. (More often, of course, the topic that fascinates the writer is of no interest at all to the readership.)
That a well-written review essay is revelatory (consider those of Sontag’s that were basically extended book reviews) is, again, obvious. (I had much more digressive remarks on this originally.)
Simon Head’s NYRB view of John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s The Social Life of Information, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, and Richard Sennett’s The Culture of the New Capitalism is a concisely illuminating survey of the impact of the misguided application of computer-determined models of producti vity to areas (such as the service economy) where they don’t work very well; the result being a combination of unintended inefficiency, financial insecurity, and daily misery for those subjected to this particular mode of management. Head’s dispassionate citation of representative bits of evidence makes for a far clearer picture of topics that, in many cases, we knew already as isolated anecdotes, and he accomplishes his task without tendentious rhetoricizing.
But there are still topics one is unlikely to encounter in the NYRB that show up, however infrequently, in other journals of general opinions such as the London Review of Books, which I also find so predictable in its quirkiness that I hadn’t looked at its website lately. (The world is now divided, for a certain class of intellectual, into journals to which we subscribe, journals whose freely available portions we read online, journals we encounter only via online intermediaries such as Arts and Letters Daily…and then the vast majority, journals we don’t read at all, by choice or because we don’t know they exist.)
But a review, in what by now must be a recent but not current issue, covered a new volume detailing the subdivinities to whom sacrifice was offered in classical antiquity, and the specific animal sacrifices required by each. The catalogue of daily ritual butchery was so stupefyingly comprehensive that it suddenly seemed to me there could scarcely have been a purely secular meat market in all of antiquity. This led me to a re-imagining of the likely mindset of the audience to whom Paul addressed his letters, but I finally decided was both dubious and of no interest even to those of us who endured two decades of Protestant Sunday School lessons.
I am particularly curious, getting back to editors, about the current editorship of the New York Times Magazine. The lead story on robotics, or more accurately on the psychological implications of robots as we currently make them, spins off in some unexpected directions. Combined with Jim Holt’s prominently placed short piece “Eternity for Atheists,” a survey of how personal immortality might be possible in a godless universe, it provided a bridge to the kinds of questions I find myself summarizing to the point of tiresomeness in the joculum journal.
However, I suspect that no one not already immersed in such questions would see any relationship whatsoever between Holt’s short recitation of improbable theories and the unacknowledged leaps of argument in the other story. Once again, the stuff found in science fiction stories parallels the theories propounded in obscure parts of the globe from several hundred to several thousand years ago. If this proves anything, it proves Ioan Culianu’s structuralist contention that if a possible thought exists, someone will have thought it already over the long course of human history; the problem being to decide which of the near-infinitude of possible thoughts is supported by a sufficient amount of independent evidence.
But that leads us back to the question of what should be construed as “independent evidence.”
And the NY Times stays ahead of me re the evidence: today's psychology story "Who's Minding the Mind" and the scientist-bio profile "Insight into Evolution" are highly germane to the topic of my previous two posts and the one immediately above, which I wrote before consulting, in this case, my TimesSelect account online.
Incidentally, I make nothing at all of it, but what are the odds that two of Europe's most monumental film directors of a half century ago would die on the same day? as bizarrely appropriate as the famed Adams/Jefferson deaths in 1826, except that there is nothing symbolic about July 30 (the second and third Presidents of the United States died on the same July 4, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence). Over the past two centuries or so, the cosmos' sense of humor has apparently shifted from American presidents to existentialist film directors.
