Intellectual Curiosities and Provocations

May 2008

A Glimpse of Burma

Events,
History,
New York City,
Politics
A lunchtime PEN World Voices panel with global journalist Ian Buruma, Burmese author Thant Myint-U and Words Without Borders editor Dedi Felman today offered a look at the modern history and current politics of Burma, the Southeast Asian nation that all three panelists agreed was little understood around the world. I arrived at this panel discussion knowing almost nothing of this nation's culture and society (and not for lack of interest), so I believe they're right.

Reviewing the Review: May 4 2008

Eastern,
Fiction
Today's New York Times Book Review jumps into the contemporary Chinese fiction scene, featuring Jonathan Spence on Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan, Liesl Schillinger on Serve the People by Yan Lianke, Pankaj Mishra on Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong, Francine Prose on The Song of Everlasting Sorrow by Wang Anyi and, finally, an intriguing endpaper by Aventurina King on a ridiculously famous and fashionable 24-year-old novelist named Guo Jingming who revels in apolitical pop culture an

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: May 11 2008. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: April 27 2008.

Dissonance

Film,
Internet Culture,
News,
Publishing
1. Ha ha. I knew Penguin's collaborative wiki-novel would be a dud. Still, whoever managed this experiment for Penguin should have tried harder to avoid the obvious traps of dumb jokiness and intentionally bad writing ("Crashing tides sounded groans of agonized discontent"). Let the record show that for 24 hours starting on July 23 2004 over a hundred poets worked together on LitKicks to write a single long poem.

Les Soixante-Huitards

 
Tear gas battles on the streets of Paris in 1968
 

To the barricades! A brief revival of a revolutionary spirit shook Paris, France and the entire world in 1968.

French,
History,
Politics,
Postmodernism

Our Paris correspondent tells us of what shook France, and perhaps all of Europe, forty years ago this month. -- Levi Asher

It’s spring of 1968. France has emerged from post World War II reconstruction with an economy that is strong and growing. Consumer goods are plentiful, and France’s gross domestic product has surpassed that of Britain for the first time in 200 years. Charles De Gaulle is president. France is a major world power. All is right with the world. Or is it?

The late 1960s also coincided with the coming of age of a population explosion, those children born between 1945 and 1965, after the Second World War. This new generation of young people was coming up against a French society that had not changed, despite economic growth, for hundreds of years. French society was authoritarian. The public morality was conservative. Religion, patriotism and respect for authority were the values of the adult generation in France in 1968.

Reviewing the Review: May 18 2008

Fiction,
New York City
It would take more number-crunching than I'm willing to do on a Sunday to prove this, but I'm pretty sure the New York Times Book Review has been publishing more front-page rave reviews of breakout novels by unknown authors in the past couple of years than usual. I'm not talking about good reviews -- I'm talking about those rare moments where you can just see the blush in the amazed critic's cheek.

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: May 25 2008. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: May 11 2008.

Grammar Nerd Dream Vacation (and Other Stories)

Language
1. My friend Meg sent me a link yesterday via that handy instant messenger contraption all the kids use: Typo Personalities. I clicked on it and said to her, "All I've read so far is the caption, but I am already in love." (I then went on to read the whole article.) You can go read the article and come back. I'll wait. Okay, good. Going around the country and informing people of grammatical mistakes in their store signs? Seriously? Brilliant.

Reviewing the Review: May 25 2008

Politics,
Television
It's Memorial Day weekend, but I've been too busy to get into a holiday mood. This weekend's New York Times Book Review hardly reflects a holiday mood either: the cover article is about Black Flies, a realistic novel by Shannon Burke about the moral crisis of a young New Yorker working grisly shifts as an emergency paramedic:

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: June 1 2008. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: May 18 2008.

First Person Plural, Second Person Singular

Being A Writer,
Breakfast Club,
Language,
Music,
Postmodernism,
Television
Checking out debut novelist Ed Park's office-culture novel Personal Days, I was surprised to find it written in First Person Plural -- the same odd "we" voice that debut novelist Joshua Ferris chose for last year's hit office-culture novel Then We Came To The End. Does the "collective voice" have some special relevance for our age? Somehow it does seem to fit the cubicle mentality in Park's hands:

Googlefucked

Litkicks,
Technology
1. A month ago some illegal prescription drug spammers managed to temporarily display their links on a Litkicks page, resulting in the entire site being temporarily banned from Google. I've been attempting to communicate with Google about this for a month now, but all they will do is "accept my reconsideration requests". I have not received a response from them yet.

Googlefixed

Internet Culture,
Litkicks,
Technology
Now that's teamwork. Google is indexing LitKicks again, after John Honeck and a few other experts pitched in with helpful advice. It turns out the reason I couldn't see the spam links is that they were programmed to appear only in response to page requests from Google or other major search engines. The secret was to look at a cached LitKicks page from another search engine, which clearly showed the spam. Thanks also to Google for quickly restoring the site once the problem was solved.