kottke.org posts about books
Variety is reporting that the movie rights for Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side have been purchased by Fox. Most of the article is behind a paywall, but here’s the relevant bit:
After interest from multiple buyers, which included New Line and Mandalay, the “Blind Side” deal closed for $200,000 against $1.5 million and also includes $250,000 in deferred compensation. Gil Netter will produce for Fox, which did not confirm the value of the deal.
Norton released the book yesterday, but Hollywood interest was sparked when the New York Times Magazine ran an excerpt in its Sept. 24 issue.
Story, which was titled “The Ballad of Big Mike,” centered on Michael Oher, a poor, undereducated 344-pound African-American teenager in Memphis, whose father was murdered and whose mother was a crack addict. Oher had been shuffled through the public school system, despite his 0.6 grade point average and missing weeks of classes each year. But his tremendous size and quickness attracted the interest of a wealthy white couple who took him in and groomed him both athletically and academically to become one of the top high school football prospects in the country.
I’m hoping against hope that if the movie ever gets made, the interesting class and racial issues the book raises aren’t completely steamrollered out of the story in favor of pure uplifting entertainment. (thx, jen)
Jim Holt reports on a pair of books that argue that string theory is hurting theoretical physics. The article contains a good overview of the history and current status of the theory. For those looking to discover which book is better, Holt recommends Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics.
I posted a link to this earlier, but after watching the first two hours earlier this evening, I must strongly caution against missing Eyes on the Prize on PBS this month. Using nothing more than archival film footage, on-camera interviews, period music, and a narrator’s voiceover, the stories of Emmitt Till, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the desegregation of southern schools riveted me to the couch like few viewing experiences have. As compelling as the history of the civil rights movement in America is, the production of the film deserves some of the credit for its power. To hear the stories of these momentous events told by the participants themselves, without embellishment, is quite extraordinary. From a media perspective, watching Eyes on the Prize gives me hope that we can survive the era of the crescendoing musical scores and 20-cuts-per-minute editing and still tell powerful, engaging stories without worrying about window dressing. I won’t soon forget the calm determination in the look and voice of Moses Wright or Mississippi governor Ross Barnett thundering away about segregation.
(For me, Eyes is also a nice companion piece to my twin obsessions of late, The Wire and The Blind Side, both of which deal with contemporary race relations in their own way. The PBS web site for the film lists dozens of resources for further exploration of the topic…does anyone have any specific recommendations for books about the civil rights movement? Lemme know.)
Update: Thanks for the recommendations, everyone…I posted a listing of them here.
Danny Meyer on the difference between service and hospitality: “Service is delivering on your promise. Hospitality is making people feel good while you’re delivering on that promise.” Meyer has a new book, Setting the Table, out tomorrow. (via eater)
Trailer for Steven Johnson’s new book, The Ghost Map. If it’s uncool to love book trailers, so be it. Also, I’ve read the book (review forthcoming); it’s as interesting as it sounds in the trailer. (via sbj)
John Moe, liberal, changed his music playlist, stopped hanging out at Starbucks, ate steak whenever possible — basically spending thirty days as a conservative — and lived to write a book about it: Conservatize Me. “What would happen if a lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool, recycling liberal immersed himself entirely in conservative thought, culture, and rhetoric for one month?”
Over the weekend, my thoughts kept returning to Michael Lewis’ story about Michael Oher, a former homeless kid who may soon be headed for a sizeable NFL paycheck. Checking around online for reaction reveals a wide range of responses to the story. Uplifting sports story was the most common reaction, while others found it disturbing (my initial reaction), with one or two folks even accusing Lewis and the Times of overt racism. While Lewis left the story intentionally open-ended (that is, he didn’t attempt to present any explicit lessons in the text itself), I believe he meant for us to find the story disturbing (or at least thought-provoking).
Just look at the way Lewis tells Oher’s story. Oher is never directly quoted; it’s unclear if he was even interviewed for this piece (although it’s possible he was for another part of the book). Instead he is spoken about and for by his coaches, teachers, and new family…and as much as the article focuses on him, we don’t get a sense of who Oher really is or what he wants out of life. (An exception is the great “put him on the bus” story near the end.) He’s playing football, was adopted by a rich, white family, graduated from high school, and is attending college, but all that was decided for him and we never learn what Oher wants. Religion is referred to as a driving factor in his adopted family’s efforts to help him. Again, no choice there…not even his family or school had any say in the matter, God told them they *had* to save this kid.
Then there’s the sports angle, the parallels between Oher’s lack of control over his own life and how professional athletes, many from poor economic backgrounds, are treated by their respective teams, leagues, owners, and fans. At one point, Lewis compares Oher’s lack of enthusiasm for football’s aggression to that of Ferdinand the Bull, a veiled reference to the perception of the professional athlete as an animal whose worth is measured in how big, strong, and fast he is.
So what you’ve got is a story about rich white people from the American South using religion to justify taking a potentially valuable black man from his natural environment and deciding the course of his life for him. Sound familiar? Perhaps I’m being a little melodramatic, but this can’t just be an accident on Lewis’ part. As I see it, Oher is Lewis’ “blank slate” in a parable of contemporary America, a one-dimensional character representing black America who is, depending on your perspective, either manipulated, exploited, or saved by white America. Not that it’s bad that Oher has a home, an education, and a family who obviously cares about him, but does the outcome justify the means? And could Oher even have contributed significantly to his direction in life when all this was happening? Who are we to meddle in another person’s life so completely? Conversely, who are we to stand idly by when there are people who need help and we have the means to help them?
I’m not saying Lewis’ story has any of the answers to these questions, but I would suggest that in a country where racial differences still matter and the economic gap between the rich and poor is growing, this is more than just an uplifting sports story.
The Ballad of Big Mike, the most intriguing story of a future NFL left tackle you’re likely to read. The piece is adapted from Michael Lewis’ upcoming book on football, The Blind Side. Lewis previously wrote Moneyball.
Update: Gladwell has read The Blind Side and loved it. “The Blind Side is as insightful and moving a meditation on class inequality in America as I have ever read.”
Each week at Slate, writer Alex Kotlowitz and Steve James (director of Hoop Dreams) dissect the week’s episode from the fourth season of The Wire. Warning: they are unabashed fans of the show. AOL recently interviewed The Wire creator David Simon. (via dj) Negro Please is posting fourth season episode synopsiseses summaries…here’s 4.2.
Update: Season four of The Wire scored a 98/100 on Metacritic, the highest score for a TV show on the site.
Forgot to post this when it came out a month ago, but John Maeda’s book on simplicty is available. Maeda worked on the his ideas for The Laws of Simplicity in public on his SIMPLICITY blog.
Scott McCloud, who wrote Understanding Comics, is taking an unusual approach to the education of his two daughters. Over the next year, the family will be traveling the US doing talks and presentations, with the daughters taking an active role in speaking, doing research, and recording the talks in various formats. Here’s their travel blog on LJ. (via snarkmarket)
A new book, Heil Hitler, The Pig is Dead, deals with humor during Hitler’s reign in Germany. “From an early stage, Germans were well aware of their government’s brutality. And the country wasn’t possessed by ‘evil spirits’ nor was it hypnotised by the Nazis’ brilliant propaganda, he says. Hypnotized people don’t crack jokes.”
The first interview with James Frey since all that unpleasantness with A Million Little Pieces. Lots of choice quotes in this one, but I’m going to go for: “My agent said her integrity was questioned, but it wasn’t questioned enough for her to stop taking the money.”
Lonely Planet is releasing a book on the micronations of the world. Not Andorra or Liechtenstein, but more like Molossia, a micronation based in Nevada whose currency is “pegged to the value of the Pillsbury cookie dough”. The book is available on Amazon. More on Molossia from Wikipedia.
things magazine reviews Mark Danielewski’s new book, Only Revolutions. I quite liked Danielewski’s House of Leaves, which House things describes as “a combination of the Winchester Mystery House and the Tardis”.
Robert Birnbaum interviews author Sebastian Junger about his new book, Death in Belmont. The interview is a little confusing if you haven’t read the book (or at least a synopsis) but there’s some good stuff in there. “I went to Bosnia with a bunch of notebooks and pens and flew to Zagreb and started. There will always be those young people. And I encourage them. My answer is save up a few thousand bucks and just go.”
Author (and reader) Nick Hornby on how to read. “Please, if you’re reading a book that’s killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren’t enjoying a television programme.”
David from Ironic Sans is staying in a New Hampshire residence once owned by Norbert Wiener, a mathematician and the founder of cybernetics and reports back about what’s on Wiener’s bookshelves.
Rethinking Moneyball. Jeff Passan looks at how the Oakland A’s 2002 draft class, immortalized in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, has done since then. “It is not so much scouts vs. stats anymore as it is finding the right balance between information gleaned by scouts and statistical analyses. That the Moneyball draft has produced three successful big-league players, a pair of busts and two on the fence only adds to its polarizing nature.” Richard Van Zandt did a more extensive analysis back in April.
Faces are now being searched at US airports for suspicious microexpressions. Psychologist Paul Ekman helped set up the program and was previously one of Malcolm Gladwell’s subjects in The Naked Face and Blink.
When Computers Were Human, “the sad but lyrical story of workers who gladly did the hard labor of research calculation in the hope that they might be part of the scientific community”.
The AAAS, the organisation which publishes Science magazine, has produced a book called The Evolution Dialogues. “Meant specifically for use in Christian adult education programs, it offers a concise description of the natural world, as explained by evolution, and the Christian response, both in Charles Darwin’s time and in contemporary America.” (thx, mike)
The CSM reviewed a book called Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl last week, saying if you like Eggers and footnotes (a la Clarke’s Strange & Norrell or, presumably DFW), you might like this one. Anyone read this? Worth a shot?
L.C. Hall wrote an article in 1902 for McClure’s Magazine called “Telegraph Talk and Talkers, Human Character and Emotions an Old Telegrapher Reads on the Wire”. Hall’s article reveals a surprisingly wide range of information transmitted across telegraph wires between operators that has nothing to do with the messages being sent.
The piece begins with an account of a “fast sending tournament”, which contest reveals not only the quick sender, but the masterful:
Presently a fair-haired young man takes the chair, self confidence and reserve force in every gesture. Away he goes, and his transmission is as swift and pure as a mountain stream. “To guard against mistakes and delays, the sender of a message should order it repeated back.” The audience, enthralled, forgets the speed, and hearkens only to the beauty of the sending. On and on fly the dots and dashes, and though it is clear that his pace is not up to that set by the leaders, nevertheless there is a finish — an indefinable quality of perfection in the performance that at the end brings the multitude to its feet in a spontaneous burst of applause; such an outburst as might have greeted a great piece of oratory or acting.
Many friendships were formed over the wire between senders who, judging mainly by the cadence of the code, sized up their counterparts from hundreds of miles away to the point of knowing their gender and general demeanor despite having never asked. Hall struck up such a friendship with a man called C G, whose attachment to Morse and Hall was so strong that he called out for him on his deathbed:
“Late in the evening,” said the [head nurse] as our interview was ending, “I was called into his room. He was rapidly failing, and was talking as if in a dream, two fingers of his right hand tapping the bedclothes as if he were sending a message. I did not understand the purport, but perhaps you will. ‘You say you can’t read me?’ he would say; ‘then let H come to the key. He can read and understand me. Let H come there, please.’ Now and again his fingers would cease moving, as if he were waiting for the right person to answer. Then he would go on once more: ‘Dear me, dear me, this will never do! I want to talk with H. I have an important message for him. Please tell him to hurry.’ Then would follow another pause, during which he would murmur to himself regretfully. But at last he suddenly assumed the manner of one listening intently; then, his face breaking into a smile, he cried, his fingers keeping time with his words: ‘Is that you, H? I’m so glad you’ve come! I have a message for you.’ And so, his fingers tapping out an unspoken message, his kindly spirit took its flight.”
The article closes with a bit on telegraph slang, or “hog-Morse”, when inexperienced operators slip up and send a bit of jibberish that expert receivers can nonetheless decipher from the context.
In the patois of the wires “pot” means “hot,” “foot” is rendered “fool,” “U. S. Navy” is “us nasty,” “home” is changed to “hog,” and so on. If, for example, while receiving a telegram, a user of the patois should miss a word and say to you “6naz fimme q,” the expert would know that he meant “Please fill me in.” But there is no difficulty about the interpretation of the patois provided the receiver be experienced and always on the alert. When, however, the mind wanders in receiving, there is always danger that the hand will record exactly what the ear dictates. On one occasion, at Christmas time, a hilarious citizen of Rome, New York, telegraphed a friend at a distance a message which reached its destination reading, “Cog hog to rog and wemm pave a bumy tig.” It looked to the man addressed like Choctaw, and of course was not understood. Upon being repeated, it read, “Come home to Rome, and we’ll have a bully time.” Another case of confusion wrought by hog-Morse was that of the Richmond, Virginia, commission firm, who were requested by wire to quote the price on a carload of “undressed slaves.” The member of the firm who receipted for the telegram being something of a wag, wired back: “No trade in naked chattel since Emancipation Proclamation.” The original message had been transmitted by senders of hog-Morse, called technically “hams,” and the receivers had absent-mindedly recorded the words as they had really sounded. What the inquirer wanted, of course, was a quotation on a carload of staves in the rough.
Hog-Morse reminds me of the SMS typos which occur when T9 slips up or someone fat-fingers the wrong button on the phone. I can’t recall how many times I’ve texted my wife “good soon”, by which I meant that I’ll be “home” shortly. It’s also reminiscent of gamer typo slang, like pwned, teh, and su[.
For more on the telegraph, particularly as it relates to contemporary communication technology, I highly recommend The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage. Also related: send Morse code via SMS with your mobile phone and a 23-yo woman from Singapore holds the world record for speed texting a 26 word message in 43 seconds.
Update: The texting record was broken in July; a Utah teen texted the message in 42.22 seconds. And in an Australian speed contest, a telegraph operator beat texting teens. (thx eugene and alex)
After Deam Kamen introduced his scooter, “segway” became a popular misspelling for “segue”. Thirty years earlier, Thomas Pynchon used the same spelling in Gravity’s Rainbow: “But segway into the Roxbury hillside.”
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