Slate book club discusses You Shall Know Our Velocity via email.
See my previous post.
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October 2002
Slate on Velocity
Posted on
Oct 29, 6:50 PM
Bush League Economics
From Slate, further evidence of the administration's hopelessly tangled economic policy: Bush League Economics - Can't anybody here play this game? By Daniel Gross
Weblog Metadata Initiative
A new initiative to standardize weblog metadata formats: The Weblog MetaData Initiative. Once in place, this should enable a whole range of new research into the geography, dynamics, and impact of the blogosphere.
You Shall Know Our Velocity
I received my copy of Dave Eggers' new novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity on Friday, and like all the McSweeney's products, was immediately struck by the beautiful custom publishing, which seems to confront the legacy of Eggers' first novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, head on. A.H.W.O.S.G. was widely noted for the way in which Eggers obsessively catalogues and preempts every potential criticism of the work, enfolding explanations and defenses into the body of the narrative itself.
That work has 100-some pages of auxiliary (or perhaps central) content. The extensive prefatory material includes typical material such as reviewer's quotations and the author's bio, as well as less-typical additions such as a plot of the author's position on a sexual orientation scale (7/10 heterosexual), "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of this Book", "Preface to this Edition", a thorough table of contents, acknowledgements, a listing of the major themes of the book, in both prose and graphical form, a complete disclosure of the money the author received for writing the book, and what it was spent on, an offer to receive $5 back from the author by sending him a letter with a personal photo, an "Incomplete Guide to Symbols and Metaphors", and a drawing of a stapler. In addition, my paperback version was S-bound so that it can be read from either direction (fig. 1). Read from the back is another 50 pages of "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making: Notes, Corrections, Clarifications, Apologies, Addenda". This section includes in particular a many-page rant set in 6-point type about why A.H.W.O.S.G. is not ironic. I met Dave at a benefit for breast cancer research at a beautiful church in Coral Gables across from the also-beautiful Biltmore Hotel, and he's sensitive about this "irony" matter in person, too, reciting lines from Alanis Morissette's "(Isn't It) Ironic", and describing how each one, in turn, was not at all ironic.[1]
What differentiates this novel from its predecessor is the manner in which the reader is thrown abruptly into the story on the very cover of the book itself (fig. 2), with absolutely no contextualizing information at all. Perhaps this is a response to some readers' frustration with the overwrought antics of A.H.W.O.S.G. and Eggers has swung to the opposite pole. Elsewhere the possibilities afforded by custom publishing are more obvious, as with the inclusion (multiple times) of an image of the famous Scorpion lyrics... (fig. 3)
fig. 1:
fig. 2:
fig. 3:
[1] I don't mean to give the impresion that Mr. Eggers is always ranting. To the contrary, he's a really nice guy and drew this picture of a dog for me:
...which may be a portrait of the narrator of his short story "After I was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned"[2], which appeared in the collection Speaking With The Angel, edited by Nick Hornby, and is the best (though only) story I've read written from the point of view of a dog.
[2] ...speaking of which, does Dave have an unhealthy obsession with drowing in a river? Read the opening of Y.S.K.O.V. in fig. 2 above.
Remind Me
Great animated music video for a snappy little europop number by Royksopp over on MTV UK. All infographic'ed out!
Spam!
My primary email address has become agonizingly clogged with spam over the last year, so much so that I fear I will have to abandon it forever. I've noticed that it seems to come in waves — both chronologically and subject matter-wise. Oftentimes I will get 5 or 8 pieces of spam in close succession. Also, I will notice a new category of subject line (e.g. "low interest rate mortgages!") which will appear for the first time and then become quite common for some time. If these patterns are in fact real, and not just my brain imposing patterns where there are none, I wonder what possible explanations they are. I've meant to start cataloging the spam I receive (time, subject line, content) to gather some hard evidence to chart the ebb and flow of subject matter in the spam-o-sphere, as it were. Jason over at kottke.org has a funny spam-catalog himself going: What I could be doing right now, according to email received this morning.
I'm rarely in favor of increased Internet regulation, but I'm all for swift and stern punishment of spammers. Unlike cellphone telemarketing, which has been banned because the costs fall primarily on the (unwilling) receiver of the call, the costs of spam are more diffuse across the infrastructure of the Internet, so no single economically-victimized group has been made very vocal. There is increasing talk about what to do about the "spam problem", but no decisive action yet.
One interesting proposal is this recent one which suggests coding email clients to refuse any email that does not contain this haiku in the header:
winter into spring
brightly anticipated
like Habeas SWE (tm)
The haiku is copywritten, thus if spammers included it in their email headers, they would be in violation of US copyright law. Presumably Habeas, the company administering the system, would only prosecute selectively those emailers it believed to be sending spam, not good Internet citizens[1] like you or I.
[1] Speaking of Internet etiquette, learned a funny bit of net.lingo today: when will we emerge from The September That Never Ended???
Optical Illusion
An unbelievable optical illusion: the checkershadow. Fire up your closest Photoshop eyedropper tool to confirm that your eyes deceive you.
Affluenza
Last night I finished reading Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, a book about the relentless pursuit of more in America.
One of the most interesting points the authors raise is the little-considered Great Choice Americans have made in the last half century or so. The implicit question America faced was what it would use the newfound wealth generated since the post-War boom for: increased leisure or increased consumption? America chose the latter, which has yielded us both the highest number of hours worked per year on average (even above the Japanese) and a rate of consumption which is about six times the globally-sustainable rate.
Another important point is the extreme disconnect between conventional measures of "progress" such as the GDP and our true levels of comfort, happiness, and real civic health:
Imagine receiving an annual holiday letter from distant friends, reporting their best year, because more money was spend than ever before. It began during the rainy season when the roof sprang leaks and their yard in the East Bay hills started to slide. The many layers of roofing had to be stripped to the rafters before the roof could be reconstructed, and engineers were required to keep the yard from eroding away. Shortly after, Jane broke her leg in a car accident. A hospital stay, surgery, physical therapy, replacing the car, and hiring help at home took a bite out of their savings. Then they were robbed, and replaced a computer, two TVs, a VCR, and a video camera. They also bought a home security system, to keep these new purchases safe. [1]
This analogy highlights the fact that many "bads" (as opposed to economic "goods") contribute to the growth of the GDP, even though few would argue that they make us better off. This includes things such as longer commutes, toxic spills (cleanup from the Exxon Valdez disaster), and declining public health. A public policy group called Redefining Progress has an initiative to generate GDP-like statistics which take these factors into account. They call one such measure the GPI, or Genuine Progress Indicator. According to this measure, America's "genuine progress" has been almost flat since 1950, with a modest drop since the mid-1970s, as opposed to the GDP, which is nearly triple now what it was in 1950. As an (armchair) economist, I really appreciate steps such as these which attempt to bring the economic orthodoxy more in line with
[1] WHY BIGGER ISN'T BETTER: The Genuine Progress Indicator — 1999 Update
