Freewheelin' convergences on Hertzberg's blog
A great visual convergence in the vein of Lawrence Weschler's Everything That Rises is noted on Hendrik Hertzberg's blog.
Labels: journalism, politics
Labels: journalism, politics
Winkler’s exacting approach was eventually codified in an often mocked companywide stylebook titled The Bloomberg Way. Bloomberg News stories, it declared, “have a structure that is as immutable as the rules that govern sonnets and symphonies.” Every story needed to include “the Five Fs”: first, fastest, factual, final, and future. Leads were to be exactly four paragraphs long, comprising the stating of a theme, a quotation in “plain English from someone who backs up that theme,” numbers-based details that further support it, and an explanation of what’s at stake. The use of “but” was banned—it forced readers “to deal with conflicting ideas in the same sentence.” Words such as “despite” and “however” were to be avoided for the same reason.
As the word suggests, a link is a way of drawing connections between things, a way of forging semantic relationship role, binding together disparate ideas in digital prose. This response to hypertext prose has always fixated on the disassociative powers of the link. In the world of hypertext fiction, the emphasis on fragmentation has its merits. But as a general interface convention, the link should usually be understood as a synthetic device, a tool that brings multifarious elements together into some kind of orderly unit.
Labels: epistemology, literature, teaching, technology, writing
We have to develop content that metamorphoses in sync with new ways of experiencing it, disseminating it and monetizing it. This argument concedes that it’s not possible to translate or extend traditional analog content like news reports and soap operas into pixels without fundamentally changing them. So we have to invent new forms. All of the fascinating, particular, sometimes beautiful and already quaint ways of organizing words and images that evolved in the previous centuries — music reviews, fashion spreads, page-one news reports, action movies, late-night talk shows — are designed for a world that no longer exists. They fail to address existing desires, while conscientiously responding to desires people no longer have.
Still, the cube video is part of a larger genre of popular online video: the “solving spectacle,” which typically shows a soloist in a modestly appointed room trying to work out a problem — an intricate guitar solo, a speed painting — that is largely in his head. The solving spectacle is crucial to the mix on YouTube, where how-to videos, videos of ordinary people and everyday displays of virtuosity are all in demand.
Or consider this exchange from the Twilight books: "How can you come out during the daytime?" asks Bella. "Myth," says Edward, her fanged paramour. "Burned by the sun?" "Myth." "Sleeping in coffins?" "Myth." Being smug jerks? True!
Hi Alice,
Don't take the following too seriously.
I'm always pleased, of course, to get a mention in your blog. But I felt that my mild remarks about Spike/CSI's commercials were used to set up some sort of unreconstructed feminist straw woman, insufficiently attuned to the interplay of genre and cultural (including advertising and fanfic) context.
You recall that I don't ordinarily watch CSI on my own. I actually prefer to learn about some television programs by watching them in marathons with you and listening to what you have to say.
When we watched the marathons together for CSI and for House in the post-Christmas period, my efforts to understand always came as questions about story structure and genre. Does this sort of thing always happen at this point in the narrative--that was my question, over and over. Does this minor character always serve as a foil for the major character's struggles in this way?
As a mystery reader who always mentally notes the span and complexity of narrative time between the genre-required first murder and the pretty-much-required second murder, I needed to know these things to make sense of what was happening. You did a good job of explaining to me what you called the "grammar" of the show--mostly, its generic characteristics.
But as you answered these questions for each episode, I could see that Grissom held few surprises for you. He was tired, according to the story line. But you seemed a little tired, too.
And that's why I think that Grissom's move to syndication/marathons may be good for your relationship with him.
Fanfic wouldn't work for you, and really doesn't work for anyone, since it just narrows and heightens the obsession, removing any semi-authentic agency the beloved character might ever have had.
But if a show is seen in out-of-temporal-order syndication or marathon, then it is relived more in the way that we relive a memory. When the past is past, we are free to re-edit it a bit, noticing only what we want to notice and not having to be alert for any surprises. We can even skip an episode that we didn't really like. What happened remains separate from us, but also gets merged into our own life story in an a way that works for us.
In syndication/marathon, Grissom will become more available and, I think, less powerful. An edited nostalgia will slowly begin to replace the loss.
So, here's to the new shows. There seems to be a big crop of bright, emotionally available guys this new season.
Not that I'm watching.
mom
What's behind this disparity? Word processors and search engines have different goals. The latter has to field queries as broad and varied as the Internet itself, so it needs a very large vocabulary in order to differentiate spelling mistakes from legitimate search terms. Word processors are much more conservative, limiting their lexicon to words that are definitely legitimate. This way, a program like Word can catch virtually every typo, even if it means misidentifying some proper names and newer words. In other words, search engines put breadth first and spelling accuracy second while word processors are the other way around. If you type in Monkees, Google will assume you're searching for the band; Word will give you a red squiggly line, thinking you've screwed up the word monkeys.
Not surprisingly, search engines and word processors build their dictionaries differently. A search engine's lexicon is typically put together using words gathered from Web pages or old search queries—a huge corpus of real-world data that constitutes a list of valid words and their frequency in the language. Word-processing lexicons are more heavily chaperoned, and the pace at which new terms enter the dictionary is much slower.
...I used to keep in form between matches by playing Scrabble solitaire at the kitchen table. The greatest drawback was that I couldn't bluff myself by laying a "phony" (a plausible but nonexistent word like "pukha" or "burlock"), or by deliberately misspelling a common noun ("fettel") to lure an opponent into making it plural, then challenging it off the board--a legitimate if churlish ploy.
Labels: dictionary, error correction, games, journalism, language, music
Alice, I think I've said this before, but you should join Facebook so we can play Scrabble. You can choose between two official Scrabble dictionaries, so there's really no word generation right in the game.
Sometimes I get frustrated with words that aren't in the Scrabble dictionary on Facebook. I keep wanting "dek" to work, and it doesn't (and K is worth five points!). I think I was able to play "yob" once, but "craic" didn't fly, so I'm not really sure how the Scrabble bigwigs treat non-American English and dialects. Maybe I'll ask my dad to weigh in on that one.