Merry Jewish Christmas

Paragraph of the Week

From "Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning," by Donald Barthelme:

For Poulet, it is not enough to speak of seizing the moment. It is rather a question of, and I quote, 'recognizing in the instant which lives and dies, which surges out of nothingness and which ends in dream, an intensity and depth of significance which ordinarily attaches only to the whole of existence.'

I usually refrain from commenting on these paragraphs, but this idea seems especially interesting in comparison to Don Gately's approach to suffering in Infinite Jest: in brief, that great suffering can be overcome by recognizing that each individual moment is tolerable.

Happy Belated

Besides for the twin facts that it is no longer cool and that it at times seems to exist solely to allow people to communicate about their pretend farms, the real problem with Facebook is that it cheapens birthdays in all kinds of ways. Facebook takes all the effort out of remembering someone's birthday. Remembering the birthday of a friend used to mean something. No longer. Also, it's almost impossible to remember the birthday of a person who has held out on this whole Facebook fad. I'm sure there are more reasons why Facebook has ruined birthdays. And I'm aware that this is fairly well-trod ground we're treading here.

But I bring it up for a very specific reason: I missed my own blog's birthday this year. The Daily Snowman's blog-iversary is December 3. I completely forgot. Maybe I should make a Facebook profile for this blog.

I'm taking a moderately important test next week. Sometime after that, I'll compose a more festive blog-iversary post.

Paragraph of the Week

From a recent Knicks Knation blog post by Frank Isola about the changing game experience of Madison Square Garden:

But what do you expect from the Garden, which no longer acts or resembles the Garden of old? They have a group of people who are constantly firing T-shirts into the crowd. It begins right before tip-off and never ends. They do that in Memphis, and for good reason. Such antics should be beneath MSG. And do we really need to hear the public address announcer tell the crowd to “Stand up and cheer for your Knicks?" What in the good name of John Condon is going on over there?

It's probably even more embarrassing that the Knicks themselves--the actual players--bring t-shirts with them from the tunnel and throw the shirts into the crowd during warm-ups. And it doesn't help that the MSG staffers try to artificially start the wave.

Happy Repeal Day!

Repeal Day, as always, is December 5. That is tomorrow.

Celebrate your freedom, America.

Paragraph of the Week

Sorry for the one day delay. Long weekends are strangely disorienting. Without further ado, here's a paragraph for you, from Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors' introduction to A New Literary History of America:

"Made in America"--America, made. In many ways, the story that comes together in the pieces of this book is that of people taking up the two elemental American fables--the fable of discovery and the fable of founding--and making their own versions: their own versions of the fables, which is to say their own version of America itself. Who knows if it is John F. Kennedy delivering his Inaugural Address or Jay Gatsby throwing one more party who is more truly invoking John Wintrhop's "A Model of Christian Charity" from three centuries before? Is it Frederick Douglass or Hank Williams who has the most to tell us, not to mention Jefferson's ghost, about the real meaning of the Declaration of Independence? Doesn't Emily Dickinson, within her own Amherst walls, invent as complete a nation--loose in the wilderness in flight from all forms of restraint, be they those of God or man--as Ahab on the quarterdeck or Lincoln at the East Face of the Capitol?

Every Object Tells a Story

The first class I ever took in college was called American Autobiography. The secret to writing college-level papers on autobiographies, it turns out, is to realize that memoirists do more than just write down the things that happen to them. There is always both an agenda and a designer. Here's an excerpt from a paper written for that class:

Franklin describes in great detail his initial experiences in Philadelphia. He was dressed in his work uniform, and was weary from a long voyage. He relates that "I was dirty from my journey; my pockets were stuffed out with shirts and stockings; I knew no soul, nor where to look for lodging" (pg 92). He made his way to a bakery in order to purchase bread with what little money he had. Even such a simple task was difficult in an unfamiliar setting. A difference in dialect prevented him from effectively communication to the baker which type of bread he preferred. Eventually he managed to purchase "three great puffy rolls" (pg. 93) but was forced to meander down the street "with a roll under each arm and eating the other" (pg. 93). He admits that made "a most awkward, ridiculous appearance" (pg. 93).

Why does good ol' Ben Franklin go through such length to describe this seemingly embarrassing and un-educational experience? He confesses that "I have been the more particular in this description of my journey, and shall be so of my entry into that city, that you may in your mind compare such unlikely beginnings with the figure I have since made there." Aha. Franklin is nice enough to explain his agenda for the inclusion of this particular passage. But even if the memoirist declines to share her motivation, don't doubt for a second that she has one. Said James Young, a historian of memorials, "The motives of memory are never pure."

I just watched an hour-long version on PBS of a slightly longer documentary called Objectified, directed by Gary Hustwit. Objects, it would seem, are a whole lot like autobiographies: the really good ones make you forget that they were designed at all. But if we can look and think again about our objects we'll realize that someone (hopefully) thought long and hard about how our objects work and look. The film includes a great interview with Jonathan Ive, a designer at Apple, who explained the thinking behind the little sleep indicator light on my MacBook. It should do its job, he explained, but then it should disappear when it no longer needs to indicate anything. And its cool to see how he accomplished that: my 18-month old laptop's sleep indicator light is still visible when the computer is not sleeping; but the latest MacBook iteration features an indicator light that just plain disappears when not in use.

That's just one example of how maybe the least significant feature of one product is the result of deep thought and design. The movie is great in all types of ways, especially if you're interested in chair design (designers, apparently, love talking about chairs), why form no longer follows function, how designers are starting to think about issues of sustainability, and attempting to bring a fresh perspective to all the things that fill our world.