Eccentric Flower:201002/Two From The Phoenix
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Two From The Phoenix
Despite the fact that The Boston Phoenix is run by the odious Stephen Mindich - a man so personally obnoxious to me that my main reason for hoping the Fenway Park expansion plans of a few years ago would succeed was so they'd be able to take his offices by eminent domain - there is a reason that the Phoenix is one of the only two periodicals I voluntarily seek out each week (other than my local newspaper of record, which doesn't count and grows less worth reading with each passing day, Brian McGrory's return as a columnist notwithstanding).
The Phoenix, like a lot of other cultures around here (this is a university town) suffers from frequent turnover. (This is possibly because Mindich is rumored to be cheap.) Of the crowd writing for it in the ten-plus years I've been regularly reading it, only film reviewer Peter Keough has been around that entire time - and sometimes (e.g. when I dramatically disagree with him) I suspect he stays on because no one else will hire him. (When I agree with him, I assume they keep him on because they appreciate his brilliance. You see how this works?)
But on the whole, there is something about the Phoenix atmosphere which actually seems to encourage, you know, actual reporting - a lost art almost everywhere else in this country. I don't know what they're doing right, but I hope they keep doing it. (And if Mindich is somehow responsible for that culture, then I am willing to forgive - oh, who am I kidding, he has nothing to do with it.)
Even when Phoenix news articles are amateurish or poorly-assembled (and often their editorial staff does appear to be sleeping on the job), they try - they actually do the legwork. And while that may be a feeble standard, these are feeble times, and we take what we can get.
Here are two good ones from this week (I'd cite Robert Nadeau's restaurant review, but that's only of interest to locals, and anyway, I already clipped it and saved it to show Nonelvis after work - and the Sports Blotter, while it is my favorite bit every week, is possibly not of general appeal).
1. So, you may have noticed that the media were in a tizzy this week over the departure-from-politics-at-least-for-now of Evan Bayh and Patrick Kennedy. The right would like you to think these are the early signs of revolution. Don't believe it.
David Bernstein's thesis is that the climate has become thoroughly inhospitable for those who are actually trying to get something done:
Furthermore he notes that this brain drain could have far-reaching consequences. I won't quote the numbers (go read them yourself), but I will say that, to my mind, one of the only reasons to keep the Senate as an institution, with its non-proportional representation, is that it has historically been difficult to oust incumbents there. The Senate is our collective political memory; House members come and go, but the Senate sticks around for a while. Now that assumption is being thrown out. We could very well soon have a Congress that has utterly no idea what it's doing. Guess which culture that favors?
I'd say it's time for a revolution - but what?
2. People sometimes think I am kidding when I say the driving app for the majority of media-technology advances since, oh, sometime shortly after the advent of television has been pornography. I am not. The historical record bears me out. Porn has always been the killer app.
But, Chris Faraone discovers, with e-books, the killer app is pretty much the diametric opposite: The Bible.
Unfortunately, this leads me to conclude that at least fifty percent of the problem here is that the ubergodly in this country, with their inbred suspicion of other media and technology, are some of the last people who still read. Which, to my mind, is just another bad sign for the future of books, since any future which is driven by the religiously fervent is not a future I can bring myself to participate in.
While another factor, of course, is the ease of working with public-domain texts - something the article notes, more than once - it does seem like the secular and non-secular camps working on this technology do have rather different goals; the Bible folks are trying to improve access to the text, and the secular folk tend to be fascinated by shiny objects. This puts me in the uncomfortable position of being in the same ideological camp as the Bible-thumpers; I don't care about flashy, I just want the word.
And I worry that the source of some of these innovations is going to be a hindrance to the secular crowd stealingadapting them:
most people who read it aren't just reading it, as in a novel - they're studying it, analyzing it, annotating it, etc.
This is a point the article goes to some pains to make, and I should have stressed it more.
-- 20:26, 19 February 2010 (GMT)
A lot of the Bible is pornographic, with a lot of the focus on snuff stories. So I'd say this story doesn't change the conclusion that porn is the killer app.
-- 23:21, 19 February 2010 (GMT)
"The Senate is our collective political memory;"
Exactly. I hear arguments lately that we should throw the bums out and start over. How ridiculous. If you think things are bad now, imagine, if you dare, having all new blood, none of whom has the first idea how things work, what's needed or how to get it done. Some of us believe the less government gets "done" the better. But even I shudder at the possibility of not having sane elder statesmen, such as Joe Lieberman, for example, to provide guidance and maintain order over a rowdy bunch of newcomers. The kind of revolution proposed by the Tea Party bunch makes my blood run cold.
That's why I'm also opposed to term limits, for everyone but the president. A guy just gets the hang of how to use whatever power and ability he has to actually make a difference, and hey, presto! He's out, and another neophyte comes in to start over. If an incumbent is making a mess of things, we have the power to get rid of him. On a case-by-case basis. Not a mass execution, please. Thx. Bye.
-- 07:40, 22 February 2010 (GMT)
Joy:
Oh, man, I'm trying not to laugh at the idea of Joe Lieberman being sane. And this is not coming from a partisan place (you'll just have to trust me on this), and I hear you on the collective memory thing.
-- 18:54, 22 February 2010 (GMT)
To compensate for laughing along with Joy at picking Lieberman as the exemplar of sanity, I'm going to have to chime in on Bunny's side here about term limits. Term limits don't return power to the people, they channel it to lobbyists. They also take away the incentive for politicians to do good work over time and establish a record to run on in place of the aggressive rhetoric that gets a new officeholder in the first time.
-- 19:49, 22 February 2010 (GMT)
I don't think Joe Lieberman is insane. He is, however, an immoral hypocrite ingrate scumbag. He's the Senator from the Insurance Industry. I'm so so so glad Obama has finally grown a pair (a small pair, to be sure, but a pair nonetheless) and has Reid on board to go budget-reconciliation on health care. They're putting the Repugnicans in an awful bind -- they have the opportunity to get provisions they like into the bill, but then they have to vote for it. If they don't, the provisions come out, and the bill becomes whatever the 50 most liberal senators say it is (with the delightful by-product of giving extortionists like Lieberman and Nelson the vicious, no-lube reaming they so richly deserve).
-- 20:28, 22 February 2010 (GMT)
Joy:
Oh, I'm sorry if the opposite of sane was read as insane, because what I meant was what you wrote ProfRobert.
-- 21:58, 22 February 2010 (GMT)
Jweader:
The thing about the Bible is that most people who read it aren't just reading it, as in a novel - they're studying it, analyzing it, annotating it, etc. In many ways, the Bible is a "killer app" for e-readers where regular books are not. The ability to have multiple simultaneous translations is awesome. Printed books that do the same thing are too big to be carried around. Links between related or referenced passages? Fantastic - easier than flipping pages (and having to remember that Esther comes after Nehemiah). Annotations by the reader is great, too. Are those redistributable? Imagine being able to get the a pastor's annotations on a particular passage in advance of the next bible study session, have it in-line with the relevant text, and be able to add your own comments as well. Takes bible study and analysis to a whole new level, and yet still readily available to the masses.
The only other area that has anything similar to this type of use potential is in education. Does Cliff's Notes distribute an e-version of Shakespeare with their annotations? My quick search says no, but that would seem to be a space they're missing. Textbook vendors are talking about going all-electronic (which is a whole 'nother topic that I'm not trying to judge one way or the other here); professors could offer their lecture notes as annotations to the e-textbook. And it's all DRM'ed, which is even better for the professor.
Reading a regular book straight through from start to finish on an e-reader? Boooooring.
-- 20:21, 19 February 2010 (GMT)