the cavorting pig

Infinite Thought is in San Francisco. Checks out some socialist realism, quotes:


'No nation has ever treated the pig as cruelly, as barbarously, as diabolically as the U.S. But you will never find a pig sign or sculpture where the pig isn’t smiling. So the question is – is this unanimous smile the successful result of the big lie? Or, examined a little closer, aren’t those smiles more in the nature of grimaces? Aren’t the mass of happy cartoon pigs really like the damned in Memlinc’s paintings, except that they are denied even the faculty of frowning or crying out as the demons poke them with their tridents – or, the case of the poor American pig, stun them with their tasers? There’s an interesting connection to be made to feminism – Ellen Willis, in the eighties, suggested the idea of a smile strike by women. The idea never really got off the ground, but I think that the omni-depicted smiling pig is, perhaps, engaged in something like it – such exaggerated smiles are put on the pig, so happy is the cavorting pig, that I suspect a strike-like aspect, a sort of kabuki piggism in which the smiles are coded, in their exaggeration, to mean the opposite. Charlotte’s Pig, Wilbur, was, in a sense, a last, romantic feudal pig before the meat corporations took over the pig’s life – perhaps, indeed, the Wilbur, or the Empress of Blandings, stands to pigdom as Robinson Crusoe stood to the ideology of the classical economists. Marx would immediately understand the smiling pig for what it was.'

wikiwonderland

A brief history of wikis, with an interview of Jimmy Wales (a founder of Wikipedia) and Ward Cunningham (inventor of the wiki), by Mike Rogoway of Silicon Forest (July 26, 2007) here

you don't need a diploma, you need a work ethic

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution on education and signaling, here

If education is pure signaling, just give everyone a standardized test in seventh grade and then close up the schools. But the process of self-image formation, at least for most people, is far from complete at that point.

That being said, education will look like what the signaling model predicts. It will be about subtle brainwashing, image, and learning markers of status. What the signaling model misses is how important those features are for your subsequent productivity.

Nerds will hate education and tend to embrace the signaling model. Their sense of self is often formed quite early, and they do not why so much time should be wasted in school. This is one reason why the signaling model is so popular in economics.

and here

We find that employer learning about productivity occurs fairly quickly after labor market entry, implying that the signaling effects of schooling are small.

Here is much more. And here is more yet; this second paper estimates the speed of employer learning and uses that estimate to bound the value of the signal at no more than 28 percent of the value of education. I consider this devastating to the signaling hypothesis. How can ?? years of schooling be needed to signal your quality, if your employer often knows your quality within months?

hatherley on godard

It's long been my suspicion that when people say they don't like Brecht, and Brechtian techniques, what they really mean is they've seen some of Godard's 'political' films and been rather scarred by the experience, ending up with the entirely false view that the Verfremdungseffekt consists in breaking character to read bits of the Little Red Book, a general peevish 'politicality' in the editing and stiff performances.

Owen Hatherley at Sitdownmanyoureabloodytragedy on Godard, more (with video clips) here

logistical Berlin

I went to Robben & Wientjes to rent a van for the Schlafsofa. The girl at the desk asks: Are you Canadian? (I am speaking in German.) I say No, American, but I have a British passport and driver's licence (they require a driver's licence valid in the EU). She gives me a reservation for 10 am and tells me to bring 100 euros in cash for a deposit.

R&W is a car rental place that will rent a van out for an hourly rate of 3 euros.

She asks when I will be bringing it back and I say Höffentlich um 11 Uhr. I am renting a slightly larger van which costs 4 euros an hour.

Berlin (or rather Germany) has two other facilities that make life easy for the footloose. It is possible to get a Post Office box for the price of a 15-euro key deposit. (Yes. Really. There is no charge for use of the box.) So if you are moving from one short-term let to another, as I did for my first two years, you can have mail sent to the PO Box. You can also get a free Packstation, which accepts DHL deliveries. If you think you may not be home to take deliveries of packages, you can have them sent to the Packstation. You have a card with a PIN; you go to the Post Office to the bank of Packstation boxes, type in your PIN; the display directs you to the box where your package is waiting. This section of the Post Office is open 24 hours a day.

Pardon me, my name is Stimson

The dollar has gone into freefall. An editor has offered to publish Your Name Here, explaining that he loves Joyce, Beckett and Pynchon and finds in YNH the things he loves in JBP. He proposes a first print run which was that of Ulysses.

The freefalling dollar would be a matter of indifference if I had, for instance, sold the book about a boy trapped in an online poker fraud ring to 20th Century Fox. The Ulysses-level first print run would be a matter of indifference if the dollar were gaining ground. The two together raise the FAQ: What is to be done?

A: I buy an Idea sofabed on Craigslist, which must now be transported from A (Naunynstrasse) to B (my apartment). (Why not rent out one half of a handsome Berlin apartment while finishing the book about the boy trapped in an online poker fraud ring?)

So I've been shamelessly scrounging, asking Alex Frey, Johanna Thompson and TARARTRAT for help with the schlafsofa. While waiting for a reply I've been fecklessly surfing instead of getting on with the book about the boy etc. etc. And what to my wondering eyes should appear....

In the early 90s I worked for an NGO that supported women's projects in what our brochures referred to as the developing world. For a while I had a colleague, a 50-something-year-old woman who had once worked for NOW (the campaigning organisation for the ordination of women). X had had an old-fashioned marriage; she had met her husband-to-be briefly before he went overseas, they'd become engaged, she'd gone out to India to get married and had second thoughts, her mother-in-law-to-be had poured champagne down her throat till she was too drunk to back out. In retrospect X thought that the fact that she'd agreed to do it had not been a terribly good reason to go through with it.

At some point I was writing a letter to a population of possible supporters, young women we knew only by name. I said: What do you think, is it better to use Miss or Ms?

X: Oh, if you're writing to that generation you should certainly use Ms.

Well, a kiss is still a kiss, but a Ms is not as good as a Miss as time goes by...

Frittering away my time, as I say, trying to organise help with my schlafsofa, I check out Nathan Bransford's blog. Nathan has a post on formality in query letters. Down among the comments

[Update: TARARTRAT has agreed to get up at the crack of dawn to help with the verdammte Schlafsofa]

is one from a 20-something agent, who says, in Anno Domini 2008,

My pet peeve in being addressed is "MS."

My inner English major screams whenever I see this. It's always bothered me. I would prefer people just call me "Colleen".

"Miss" is not offensive in any way and I don't understand why cranky feminists decided to replace a perfectly good honorific with one that is not actually short for anything.

I was under the impression that both married and unmarried women were once addressed as Mistress; two abbreviations were later derived from this to mark marital status. (But to the best of my knowledge, I have no inner (or, indeed, outer) English major. ) I do think feminists made a serious mistake in introducing Ms in the hope of achieving an unmarked form; the sensible plan would have been to coopt Mrs.

As my friend X understood, anyway, it is very common to write business letters to people whose personal lives are irrelevant to the matter at hand. It is not offensive to address an unmarried woman as Miss; it would look careless and unprofessional to address either a man or a married woman as Miss. It is generally possible to identify the sex of an unknown correspondent by the first name; it is not possible to determine marital status, since we do not have the custom of changing first names upon marriage and selecting the new names from a pool restricted only to married persons. It is not easy to see why someone who wants to deal with a woman professionally should have to go to the trouble of finding out whether she is married or single.

[Update: Alex Frey has also agreed to help with the verdammte Schlafsofa.]

In any case. If anyone wants to correspond with me, none of the following is incorrect: Dr DeWitt; Ms DeWitt; Miss DeWitt; Mrs Levene; Helen. I would very much prefer people not just call me Colleen.

flabbergasted

Mark Liberman has chosen Wiggins' The Shadow Catcher over Tom McCarthy's Remainder in the Tournament of Books.

Readers of this blog may not be aware of the full extent of my admiration for Mark Liberman - the only reason I don't link to several Liberman posts a day is that I assume everyone is reading them anyway. (A similar reasoning explains the rare links to Languagehat.) But I'm now baffled.

Look. Let's say you have a female character from a cultured family who is left an orphan by a freak accident. She travels out west with her young brother to stay with friends of her parents who have offered to take the children in. She is attracted to one of the family, a strong, silent man who keeps going off and disappearing for long periods. At one point he brings back a brass bathtub, supposedly as a gift for the whole family. They're all living together, crammed into the house; there's no privacy. One day, for some reason I now forget, everyone in the family except Clara goes off on some excursion; they'll be away for days; she has the place to herself! She fills the bath with water and bathes in it. The strong, silent man appears on the rooftop. She stands up so he can see her naked. He falls off the roof. She nurses him back to health.

You just can't.

You just can't.

Well, you can, obviously, since Marianne Wiggins did. And it is apparently possible to read this without howling, since ML seems to have found the story of Edward and Clara compelling.

But you just can't.

(Do they do the dirty deed, you ask? Now honestly. Need you ask? What would be the point of getting everyone else in the family conveniently out of the way, if not to allow the male and female leads some highly implausible quality time à deux?)

Readers who enjoyed Susan Sontag's In America would probably enjoy the book.