The Beiderbecke Affair

Why Old People Should Stay Away from Facebook

I sucker punched myself using the SuperPoke! application.*

* If you even know what that means, you’re probably under thirty.

Re: Email & Bad Writing! :)

To prevent miscommunication in emails, the authors of Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home suggest the liberal use of exclamation points. Smiley faces if necessary. Whatever it takes to overcome email’s inherent lack of affect.

At first, Janet Malcolm seems unimpressed by this advice:

So this is the crux of the matter: Email is a medium of bad writing. Poor word choice is the norm—as is tone deafness. The problem of tone is, of course, the problem of all writing. There is no “universal default tone.” When people wrote letters they had the same blank screen to fill. And there were the same boneheads among them, who alienated correspondents with their ghastly oblivious prose. One has only to look at the letter-writing manuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to see that most of the problems Shipley and Schwalbe deal with are not unique to email but common to the whole epistolary genre. They are writing problems. Some of us do find the time in the day to write a carefully worded, exclamation-point-free email when the occasion demands. Mostly, though, all of us who use email avail ourselves of its permission to write fast and sloppy.

So there. But then she comes around:

Shipley and Schwalbe’s serene acceptance of the unwriterliness of email, of its function as an instrument of speedy, heedless communication, is correct, and their guide is helpful precisely because it doesn’t pretend that the instrument is anything but what it is.

Whew. Read on to witness the great Malcolm write OMG!

In Which G.I. Joe Assumes the Role of Bully/Pederast

As a public service, of course. Find them all here, but I particularly like #005.

(Credit where credit is due: Fenslerfilm.)

In Which Jazz, Blogging, and Drugstore Hairnets Are Funneled Through the Protean Dispositions of Cornel West and Theolonious Monk, Among Others

Commenters at Althouse (and elsewhere) are arguing over whether blogging is jazz, a discussion prompted by my observation (below) that “jazz prides itself on impermanence & unknowing.” Now let me contradict myself, sort of, and say that the blogging = jazz equation strikes me as a step too clever, giving in to the romance of improvisation (see, for instance, the protean dispositions of Cornel West) . . . Rhythm is as much or more a fundamental element of jazz as improvisation, but how do we use that fact to argue, like Monk, that “jazz and freedom go hand in hand”?

Writes Robert G. O’Meally:

Haven’t we all heard the old saw that writing about music is as meaningless as dancing about architecture? Given a certain brashness and command of lingo, anyone can shoot the breeze about the deep-set jazz nature of geological formations, Shakespeare’s sonnets, or—why not?—drugstore hairnets. This crazy, scattershot impulse already appears in undergraduate papers on American literature or art: “jazz” is everywhere and serves, along with other critical clichés that rumble through the academic culture, to explain away almost any unique or complex issue in its path. Like the easiest of structuralist or deconstructionist formulas, it provides an all-purpose approach to almost every subject on the undergraduate’s card: What is bowling? What is biology? What’s a poem? They are no structures in a numbered series of disappearing “texts”; that was last year. Now they are jazz.

Of course, there’s an element of irony in O’Meally’s argument. After all, this was written by way of introduction to a book called The Jazz Cadence of American Culture. It’s O’Meally’s way of saying, “Hey, man. I know what I’m doing, even if it isn’t right.”

Although, perhaps right isn’t the right word. It’s not about right or wrong. Jazz is a metaphor, and an apt one for many circumstances. But jazz is also not a metaphor. It’s a complicated & beautiful & real thing. It’s art, and therefore has no more to do with freedom than the structure of a sonnet has to do with fascism.

IMAGE: Voir le jazz by Paul Klee

Resurrection Man

“If writing is your escape from dying,” says Christopher Althouse upon retreating from the Web, “blogging is the last format you should use. Every blog post ‘dies’ after a handful of recent posts push it to the bottom—off the page entirely. Yes, it’s in the archives, but that’s a graveyard of words to the blog readers who have thousands of sites to choose from.”

It’s well put, and a little sad, and, for me anyway, wrong. This form is not about permanence or destination, but about movement. It’s not about orgasm (la petit mort—coming soon? Of course! That’s the whole point!) but about sex. “To say this is not to deny the past,” John A. Kouwenhoven pointed out way back in 1956 in a Harper’s essay titled “What’s ‘American’ About America.”

It is simply to recognize that for a variety of reasons people living in America have, on the whole, been better able to relish process than those who have lived under the imposing shadow of the arts and institutions which Western man created in his tragic search for permanence and perfection—for a “closed system.” They find it easy to understand what that very American philosopher William James meant when he told his sister that his house in Chocorua, New Hampshire, was “the most delightful house you ever saw; it has fourteen doors, all opening outwards.” They are used to living in grid-patterned cities and towns whose streets, as Jean-Paul Sartre observed, are not, like those of European cities, “closed at both ends.” As Sartre says in his essay on New York, the long straight streets and avenues of a gridiron city do not permit the buildings to “cluster like sheep” and protect one against the sense of space. “They are not sober little wads closed in between houses, but national highways. The moment you set foot on one of them, you understand that it has to go on to Boston or Chicago.”

Which is a nice coincidence for I am Chicago bound . . . (h/t)

PS— Kouwenhoven’s essay is anthologized in a really heavy undergraduate-ready anthology called The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (Robert G. O’Meally, ed.), and it is there, of course, because jazz prides itself on impermanence & unknowing. “One of the things I like about jazz, kid,” Bix Beiderbecke told his fellow cornetist Jimmy McPartland, “is I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?”

PREVIOUSLY: Writing takes longer than orgasm.

IMAGE: De Doodgraaver

In Case You're Dying Soon

. . . there's Heaven's Mail, which, according to those in the know, is Eternal.™  I wish it weren't so, but this is actually a service designed to send e-mails to loved ones once you're in the ground or otherwise occupied. Getting e-mails from living people is not all that great as it is . . . but how will I know when to have them sent? Heaven's Gate Mail has thought of everything.

WARNING: In order to use our Heaven’s Mail—It’s Eternal™ service, you must certify that you are either (1) terminally ill and have been informed by a medical doctor that you have less than 5 years to live or (2) you are over 50 years of age. Further, if we suspect any abuse of these terms, we may require that you provide us with evidence that you qualify for this service. You are forewarned that any abuse of our service may result in immediate termination of your account without a refund of any fees paid. Therefore, DO NOT USE OR REGISTER for this service unless you qualify. Additional restrictions apply. See our Terms of Service for further details.

For more information, and presumably a list of those additional restrictions, visit The Eternal Portal.

(This link, by the way, comes via Kate, who was using Gmail to talk about her 90-year-old great aunt getting e-mail for the first time. Big Brother knows all.)