Virginian

Up men to your posts! Don't forget today that you are from old Virginia. -- George Pickett

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Last Word on Tristram Shandy

According to this post I started Tristram Shandy on 13 August; I finished it last night. It was originally written in 9 volumes (small ones of about 70-90 pages); and it was a tough slog. If it weren't for blogging about it I would have given up. I think the book has plenty to commend it-- a surprisingly modern (dare I say "post-modern") absurdist sensibility and a ton of witty epigrams-- but, again, in the end it was a tough slog. What passed for outragous "bawdy" humor in 1760 hardly rates a grin today and the references to Pope, Swift, Cervantes and Locke assume a familiarity that, unfortunately, eludes the modern reader. (I was lucky enough to have read Don Quixote within the last couple of years; this was a big help). I'll file it away with Moby Dick and War and Peace as books I'll be glad to be able to honestly say I have read.

There are only 30 Amazon reviews for Tristram Shandy; under the pretentions of some of the gushing ones I found most of them to be pretty fair. The best one is #21, which is by reviewer "Kitchnsynch," which I quote here in its entirety (you can't link directly to an Amazon Review):

"First, let me address some common objections to the novel. Q: It's not about anything. A: That's because it's about everything. Perhaps above all it is a novel about pain--where language fails. Q: It's too long and erratic. A: Be patient. The prose takes some getting used to, but past the first 50 pages or so the reading experience can become incredibly addictive, offering many immediate pleasures. The narrator's digressions are of the essence; he is grappling honestly with problems of narration and temporality. Q: It's incomprehensible without historical background. A: Actually, what amazed me about the book was how timeless its interests and insights are. It's entirely possible to read through without any footnotes and still get everything out of it Sterne had intended to put in.

That being said, I'd also like to note for the record that this book is not simply some forerunner to "postmodernism." Yes--it's clearly the ideal 18th-century example for talking about hypertext, reflexivity, bricolage, metonymic slippage, etc., but to take the text as a merely textual experiment is certainly not the most interesting way to read it. Sterne is not reveling in play so much as he deeply understands the deeply human in the comic. I sincerely encourage everyone to try this novel. It's really one of the most original and poignant fictions I have ever read--right up there with Shakespeare, George Eliot, Joyce, Beckett, and Nabokov."

Here are a couple of quality websites on Shandy-- The Tristram Shandy Web and Laurence Stern in Cyberspace (which, oddly enough, is on the website of a Japanese University).

Monday, September 26, 2005

Roanoke Goes for the Bold

The Sunday Washington Post had a big article on Roanoke's forthcoming Art Museum of Western Virginia. As a Roanoke resident I resent the article's bemused tone, at least a little. Apparently, nasty letters to the editor notwithstanding, the museum will be built. I'll just barely be able to see it our my office window. Personally, I admire the Museum's guts, and the bold design, and I think it will succeed. Here are some more Roanoke Times articles about the museum, if you are interested.

Sunday, September 25, 2005

King Lear

This month The Wall Street Journal started a Saturday Edition. It is delivered on Saturday, and can be delivered to a different (non-work) address if you ask for it. I put my home address on my firm's subscription. Like everything else the Journal does (except, occasionally, for its over-the-top editorial page) the Weekend Edition is top notch. Here is a great, brief appreciation of King Lear by the famous critic Robert Brustein from this weekend's Leisure & Arts Masterpiece feature. (I'm not sure why this is online for free; generally the Journal charges for everything but editorials-- so read it quick before it goes to the pay archives-- the code in the link says "Five Days Only.")

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Google Print Gets Sued by Author's Guild

The Google Print Library Project is getting a lot of press this week. (Here's my initial post about Google Print from last month.) Now they have been sued by the "Author's Guild", whatever that is. Sounds like a retrograde luddite organization that wants knowledge to be unreasonably constrained to me. Here is a Slashdot thread for further information. Again, it seems to me like the "Author's Guild" ought to sue libraries if they are suing Google for this; but what do I know?

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Buy It Burn It Return It

Here is a good Wall Street Journal Article about a record store with a unique policy for adjusting to the digital age-- you can buy a CD, digitize it at home, and return it for about 70% of its value. I am a big fan of record stores (I refuse to call them CD stores), particularly used record stores. My personal policy is to still buy CDs when I can; I'd rather have the physical media, which is higher quality than MP3s or itunes, which I will then have available to turn into whatever form comes down the pike in the future.

Google Print Tests Copyright Law

This is a very good article about the legal issues presented by Google Print, which is Google's service that scans the books in the Harvard and Stanford libraries and makes the content available (with limitations) on the net. Predictably, a lot of printers are getting worked up about it. Personally, I don't see how it is as much of a threat to publishers as old fashioned libraries are.

Sunday, September 18, 2005

History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison

Garry Wills has written a book about Henry Adams' mostly-forgotten nine volume history of the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison. According to this book review from today's Washington Post, Adams' attempt to become an American Gibbon has largely been forgotten, in part because it was feared that he would unjustly defend his great-grandfather; John Adams (he didn't). Apparently, Adams pioneered archival research, and he had a remarkable ability to put then-recent history into what has proven to be a correct context. Garry Wills has a similar set of skills; I think he is brilliant, and everything of his I have read is great. I particularly commend his book on the Gettysburg address and his history of the University of Virginia. He is the consummate popular historian; Steven Ambrose without the plagarism and David McCullough without the Parson Weems revisionism. Expect a review soon.

Thursday, September 15, 2005

The Old Grey Lady

Here is a very good Tom Friedman column. (registration, but no cash, required). After Sunday, the link will not work anymore, unless you pay. On Monday, Sept. 19, the Times is bringing in "TimesSelect," which it calls "a new service from The New York Times, providing exclusive online access to Op-Ed columnists, The Archive, Web tools and more." Basically, access to the op-eds and archived articles (which already cost money after a week or so) will cost $49.95 a year. Here are the details.

The internet has put newspapers in a hell of a quandry. They are now expected to post all of their content for free. If I lived in DC or New York, I would still subscribe to the Washington Post or the Times (because I am at heart a 20th Century person), but I would not HAVE to do so-- I could read the whole thing on the web.

The Times is trying a subscription model for PART of its content-- not all. It is interesting to see that they are roping off the op-eds-- conversely, the Wall Street Journal has roped off everything BUT the op-eds, which they publish on www.opinionjournal.com.

Unfortunately, when you switch to a subscription model you severely limit the influence of your content. Bloggers and other sites will need to stop linking to you. Non-paying (and probably non-like-thinking) readers will no longer read you. Your influence will decline and the ghettoization of ideas will worsen.

Not a lot of American institutions have suffered as much in the last ten years as the New York Times. Once the top dog of American journalism, its influence has been eroded considerably by the web and by Jayson Blair and a host of other scandals. I know they need to make money, but I think that this subscription plan will sink them even deeper.

Monday, September 12, 2005

Health Care Crisis? Or Lifestyle Crisis?

This is a very fine editorial piece from today's Roanoke Times. As Instapundit always (always) says, "read the whole thing." Excerpt: "Anyone who lives in America with eyes can see the central problem facing America, and it is not health care. It is the lifestyle of our citizens. [Another writer is correct] in pointing out that our health care system is broken and needs fixing, but we can bankrupt our companies and our nation trying to treat sickness unless we also address the cause of our poor health. Americans are the fattest, most sedentary, and most addicted to alcohol and tobacco of anyone in the world. There may be one or two countries with similar lifestyle problems, but we have the worst." Read it.

Thursday, September 08, 2005

The WPA Guide to the Old Dominion

The American in the 1930s section of the UVa. American Studies Department website contains the WPA Guide to the Old Dominion. The complete book is here, including the wonderful Preface to the 1992 Edition by Garrett Epps (the site won't support direct linking so you'll need to hit the "contents" on the upper left of the home page), and the original 1939 dry, dull and phony preface by Governor James Price. Before you go anywhere in the Commonwealth take a look at this site for an excellent rundown of what your destination was like in 1939. The amount of candor and opinion is pretty striking for the era.

Here is excerpt from the entry on Roanoke: "It is perfectly evident that the population is not preponderantly Virginian, for people seem always in a hurry. Industrial executives, factory workers, merchants, and professional people make up the majority of those seen on the streets.

The era of architectural ugliness in which Roanoke was born and the city's precocious growth have complicated the task of the planning commission created in 1928. Shops and factories are near the center of the city as well as toward the outskirts, and better sections are close to those not so good. There are unsightly areas of houses quickly built and poorly kept, and junk heaps near historic places. The retail district, with Jefferson Street as its axis, is crowded between railroad tracks and Tazewell Avenue. Houses in the older residential section are late Victorian, but suburban developments give evidence of an architectural renaissance.

The Negro population, 18 per cent of the whole, finds work principally in factories and railroad shops and yards. Negroes are skilled in manipulating the immense car wheels, a task that requires a delicate sense of balance. Though several Negro residential districts reflect a wage scale higher for Negroes than that prevailing in most other Virginia cities, many districts show the need for slum clearance."

Check it out. If your destination is not (or was not in 1939) a major city, you'll be able to find it in one of the tours-- like Tour 5: "(Martinsburg,W.Va.)-Winchester-Woodstock-Harrisonburg-Staunton-Lexington-Roanoke
-Pulaski-Wytheville-MarionAbingdon- (Bristol, Tenn.). US 11. West Virginia Line to Tennessee Line, 343.4 m." That's a hell of a tour.

Videogames and the Over Thirty Set

This is an article about a couple of thirtysomething Slate writers who play xbox live. It is an interesting piece-- since I use computers and keep up with tech news, I read about games, but I dont have any time to actually play them. One of the authors notes that "I think Xbox Live is as culturally significant as [HBO, America Online, or TiVo]. It's being adopted more quickly than critical darling TiVo, which started up in 1997 and only this year hit 3 million users." I found the parts about trading insults with nine year olds kind of disturbing. I'm sure that, as always, most parents are blissfully unaware of what their kids are doing.

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Missing New Orleans: Do You Know What it Means?

This is a nice New Orleans appreciation by Doug Cumming, an assistant Professor of Journalism at Washington and Lee. In the paper, it was accompanied by a cleanup photo of the French Quarter with an Ignatius P. Reilly lookalike; I tried to find it but did not have any luck.

Monday, September 05, 2005

Buena Vista Labor Day Parade

Buena Vistan conventional wisdom: "It you're a candidate and you're not in Buena Vista on Labor Day, you won't win the election." Here is a photo gallery from 2004-- looks like it was a very rainy day.

Old-time Virginia politicians always said that anything in a campaign before Labor Day didn't amount to a hill of beans. That's probably not true any more; at least for fundraising, but now it's time for the Commonwealth's political season to kick into gear.

"Moral Hazard" and Health Insurance

This is a recent New Yorker article on American Health insurance. Take a look at it-- its short! Your eyes will not glaze over! As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I am obsessed by safety because I spend my professional life litigating about "accidents." I am also a front-line witness to the health care crisis; a very high percentage of the working poor and lower middle class use emergency rooms, usually paid for by medicaid, for their primary medical treatment. I've also seen that medical bills seem to be the number one cause of personal bankruptcy. Meanwhile, health policy, and health-insurance policy, is based on the assumption that universal health care would incentivize overtreatment and misuse of the system. Is this true? Could the system be any more misused than it is right now? Read the article.

Friday, September 02, 2005

Department of Homeland Screwup

This is a great article on the (so far) ineffectual reponse to the New Orleans disaster; I already emailed it to my friends and co-workers. I thought I would blog it as well becuase it is written by Tim Naftali, an associate professor at UVa. who is also the director of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs. I am embarrassed to note that I was unaware that the Center existed until now; check out the website.

Thursday, September 01, 2005

Quality Prediction

This is an article from National Geographic in 2004. Excerpt:

The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.

Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.

When did this calamity happen? It hasn't—yet. But the doomsday scenario is not far-fetched. The Federal Emergency Management Agency lists a hurricane strike on New Orleans as one of the most dire threats to the nation, up there with a large earthquake in California or a terrorist attack on New York City. Even the Red Cross no longer opens hurricane shelters in the city, claiming the risk to its workers is too great.

Wow. Thanks to Scooter for finding this.