I saw this
amusing
article on metafilter yesterday. The basic idea is that a four-person
family making 250K/year is, depending on where they live, just barely
getting by because of tax burden.
A budget is provided, and it’s reliably absurd. When I last looked at
the metafilter comments, however, I don’t know if anyone recognized what
the actual rhetorical target of this piece was. To me, it seems clear
that the profligate amounts being invested by this family in their 401K
and college savings accounts (presumably also investment interests) are
designed to make the (almost certainly poorer) readers of the article
not just outraged by imaginary tax raises but anxious that they are not
putting enough of their money into investments.
John Ashbery has a translation of Rimbaud’s “Conte” in the most recent
New York Review. The final line of the poem, “La musique savante
manque a notre desir” is translated there as “Wise music is missing
from our desire.”
Wallace Fowlie renders it “Our desires are deprived of cunning music.”
Paul Schmidt, “Our desire lacks the music of the mind.” Ashbery’s
translation seems amusedly literal for the most part. He translates “les
betes de luxe” as “thoroughbred animals,” which does seem better than
Fowlie’s “pet animals.” (I can’t remember what Schmidt does there
offhand; something with “luxury,” I think.)
I earlier wrote about my experience
with Knut Muller’s Rhem 2, and I gave the third game a shot over the
last few days. I came infinitesimally close to solving it without any
hints. No puzzles or missing information thwarted me; I merely failed to
see something in plain sight. I don’t know if my last post captured how
complex the game is. Here are some notes I made while attempting to
solve a problem with incomplete
information:
In the second book of the Histories, Herodotus tells us of the
Egyptian king Psammetichos, who wanted to discover who were truly the
oldest people of the Earth. He took two infants and had them raised by
shepherds in isolation from human voices. When they were finally brought
out of their huts, they cried “bekos,” a word that means “bread” in
the Phrygian language. Thus Psammetichos concluded that the Phrygians
were the oldest humans.
Both the LRB and NYRB reviews of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom make the
astute point that the long autobiographical section of the book is not
sufficiently distinguished in style from the rest. Though it’s
undeniably Patty’s thoughts, it’s not Patty’s writing that we’re
reading. And James Lever
argues that
this could have been exploited in terms of the reaction that Walter and
Richard have when they read it. I do wonder, though, about a comment
Walter made about the manuscript after he finds it, which I didn’t
actually remember from reading it (it was something about a libel on his
“manhood,” about which there were many general things mentioned but
nothing as specific-seeming as he seemed to mean it at this point). This
could in fact indicate that the manuscript in the book is not the
narrative of the manuscript we read, which would be rather sly,
especially as there’s no other reason to suspect a trick like this in
the broad social realism of the rest of the novel.
George Basalla’s The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge UP: 1988) is a
fine book, filled with many illuminating examples. In a section on how
fads influence technological development, however, Basalla writes:
By the mid-1980s, the home computer boom appeared to be nothing more
than a short-lived and, for some computer manufacturers, expensive
fad. Consumers who were expected to use these machines to maintain
their financial records, educate their children, and plan for their
family’s future ended up playing electronic games on them, an activity
that soon lost its novelty, pleasure, and excitement. As a result, a
device that was initially heralded as the forerunner of a new
technological era was a spectacular failure that threatened to
bankrupt the firms that had invested billions of dollars in its
development. (185)
That’s what I am feeling after failing to solve Rhem 2 without
consulting the walkthrough. What is Rhem 2 and why should anyone care
whether or not I solved it without a walkthrough? Well, Rhem 2 is a
self-produced (more or less) puzzle game in the tradition of Myst
created by Knut Muller. I first learned of
the Rhem games from reading Andrew Plotkin’s
review, and I purchased the
first Rhem in 2005. I worked through most of the game then, but I got
frustrated a bit towards the end and consulted a walkthrough. I felt
some shame about this at the time, and it made me vow to solve the
sequel without a walkthrough.
I’ve been intermittently reading through the London Review, as I’ve
mentioned here before, and while it’s the best of its type, there are
the occasional head-scratchers. Many of the things the journal printed
about literary theory in the early-mid 80s, for example (outside of
Kermode’s contributions) tended toward the dotty. But I don’t know if
I’ve come across something as spectacularly wrong as these remarks by
Tom Shippey about Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco:
The logic puzzle section of the GRE doesn’t exist anymore, does it?
That’s too bad. The only real memory I have of my weekly G&T; class in
elementary school was learning to solve the grid-style logic puzzles,
whose presumed psychometric validity remain, as I have said before, one
of the great unanswered questions of the 20th C.
Anyway, I’ve been preparing to teach Wallace’s “Mister Squishy” for the
second time, and it occurred to me that there might be enough details
offered for the members of the focus group (and the two unintroduced
assistant facilitators) to deduce who is who using the grid-elimination
format.
Anthony Burgess, I believe, said that any writer worth his salt should
be able to produce a thousand words per day. I’ve been trying that for
the last eighty days or so. (I missed the day I had spinal surgery
because I couldn’t type with the IV and some other device they had
sticking in my finger, and I never did make up those words.)
I don’t know if creative writing would be more difficult to follow
through with than academic writing, but the main problem I’ve found is
being able to find enough time to do both the writing and then the
reading necessary to keep the motor going. With the resumption of the
semester, it’s been particularly difficult some days.
