Twitter as National Consciousness

And here's the coolest thing I've seen all week, via kottke: a The New York Times mapping of key words used by Twitter users during the Super Bowl. Take a moment to explore this interactive graph. Then come back to read a few observations of mine.

• Note, first of all, how perfectly designed this graph is. The presentation is clear, the categories (player names, commercials, etc.) are exactly what I am interested in knowing about, and the geographic distribution clarifies any partisan behavior. The writers behind the Free Darko book mentioned at a book reading that they had no idea how to create graphs before working on their book. So the first thing they did was study as many graphs and charts from The New York Times as they could. This is a great example of why that turned out to be a good idea. Another thing this chart is a great example of: the value of the Times in general. I'm not sure if any other media outlet could have put together a presentation like this on such a fascinating topic, but I do know that no one else did put it together.
  
• But the real genius of the presentation is in lining up the word-mapping with the game situation. Italo Calvino in his novel If on a winter's night a traveler... satirizes people who read books by counting up the number of specific words used. So if a a book uses a preponderance of military words, you can be certain that the book focuses on war. In the context of the book, it's a biting critique of those who don't truly read. But on this twitter-graph it's almost true. I know exactly what happened when I see the map covered with "Fitzgerald" or "Holmes" or "Springsteen." I am able to see the dominant thought pattern of the more than one million twitter users at a particular time. That's the strongest representation I can imagine of the intimate thoughts of a significant portion of our population. This graph, to a large extent, displays what around one million people were thinking across the course of four hours.
  
• Sports fans (or, I guess, regular people while they watch sports) overuse the word "go." We as a sporting nation should be able to devise a more thoughtful sentiment than: Go team from my geographic location!
  
• Twitter, famously, only allows 140 characters per update. I would think in this environment of concision that more twitterers would use "Bruce" instead of "Springsteen" during halftime. Your followers would all understand whom you're talking about.

A Different Type of Product Placement

I spent a huge amount of time riding subways today. And this means I spent a huge amount of time looking at subway ads in order to avoid making eye contact with other riders. In addition to horrible usage (e.g., "Dr. Zizmor has been treating New Yorker's skin problems for over 25 years;" I feel bad for this poor New Yorker, and I wonder why Dr. Zizmor's treatment hasn't been effective over the course of a quarter century), I was struck by Dentyne's Make Face Time ads.


The key to subway ads is simplicity. And these manage to have a consistent and easily understood message. But the coolest part is found in the bottom, left-hand corner. I love how the actual product serves as the logo. Products, obviously, are often featured prominently in ads, but it seems rare for the item to be placed above the main action of the advert, really functioning purely as a logo would. The only other example I can think of is Coke's bottle-shaped logo, a type of abstraction of the company's product. Coke is an icon. I'm not sure that Dentyne will ever match what Coke has been able to become, but I applaud this effort as a step in the right direction.

If you look at only one snack food stadium this Super Bowl season, look at this one

And we've now, as a country, officially reached the point where Super Bowl party foods have become a bigger story than the game.

[Via Deadspin and Holy Taco]

Updike on Ted Williams

As I'm sure most everyone has heard by now, John Updike died today at the age of 76. It seems like we're losing our best writers.

Truthfully, I've had very little exposure to Updike. I've never read--let alone seen--any of his 60 or so published books, and I'm fairly certain that I've never read any of his short fiction. But he has published dozens of articles of criticism in The New Yorker in the thirty months I've been a subscriber, and I've been wise enough to occasionally read what he had to say. His literary criticism is what you would expect: beautifully composed and thoughtful in a way which always managed to further the conversation. I don't have particular memories of any one of these pieces, but I always felt an acute sense of excitement when I saw Updike's name in The NYer's table of contents. His presence in the magazine felt like an event. And in certain ways, Updike had as much to do with defining what The New Yorker has been about over the course of the last 50 years as anyone.

Here is one of Updike's most famous pieces, a profile of Ted Williams written during the ballplayer's last season in the majors. Just to offer a taste, here is one master of his craft describing another:

For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter’s myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money. It may be that, compared to managers’ dreams such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport’s poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.

Reading Music

Back when I tutored at the Yeshiva College Writing Center, I attended a training session which involved working with a paper I wasn't allowed to see. The unofficial motto of the Writing Center is: We work with writers, not writing. (The official motto, according to the promotional pens, is something along the lines of: Helping writers for more than 20 years.) So this exercise made a sort of intuitive sense, helping me to focus on the writer and not on the sheet of paper which contained the writing. I remember having a tremendously difficult time with this project. I was able to converse with the writer, but I had only the most limited idea of what the writing consisted of. The fact that the writer read his paper aloud helped almost not at all. I needed to see the writing, to, in a word, read it.

I don't know if I've ever been much of an audio learner. Listening to things is great as a type of background ambiance in a whole bunch of different settings (while driving, at work, composing blog posts, etc.), but it seems woefully inadequate as a complete destination for my attention. I know that many people disagree vehemently with this assertion, and I'm OK with that. They're right: for them listening to music is an activity. For me it's not. Sometimes I wish I could do close listenings of audio works in the same way I feel comfortable performing close readings of writing or films or paintings or photographs. But it doesn't at all come naturally to me. I only like songs I've heard before which, as you can imagine, makes it hard to expand my musical tastes. And but also it flies in the face of how I like experiencing almost everything else. I do enjoy rereading, but there are dozens of books or TV shows I wish I could read or watch again for the first. I don't like listening to new music because I understand almost nothing about it the first time through. I watched the new episode of Flight of the Conchords last night with my roommate, and he mentioned that "You Don't Have to be a Prostitute" might be FotC's best song from a musical perspective, even if it was somewhat lacking in the humor department. And, to be honest, I did not at all notice anything remotely related to the music.

And all this is part of why I find this project I'm about to describe so cool. This dude at Jamsbio Magazine (and yes, this is the first I'm hearing about this magazine) has ranked every The Beatles song from #185 to #1 [via kottke.org]. The list is heavily subjective and I imagine that is part of the fun of the project. I most appreciate the explanations and analyses which accompany each selection. He explains what I should be hearing when I listen to the song.

Here's an example from "A Day in the Life," ranked by the partial ranker as the #1 ranked song in the history of The Beatles:

Let’s take it from the top, shall we? As the crowds cheer at the end of the
“Sgt. Pepper’s” reprise, the gentle acoustic strumming of John Lennon is heard.
And his very first line can’t hide his lack of enthusiasm for the story he’s
about to tell: “I read the news today oh boy.” The world-weary sarcasm is
impossible to miss, even with John’s voice at its most ethereal. He then
proceeds to tell an odd tale about a man who’s “made the grade,” which would
seem to be a positive thing, at least until it’s revealed that he’s apparently
been killed in a car accident.

Or has he? The car-accident reading is backed by Lennon’s later interviews
in which he claimed to be referencing the death of a young, moneyed friend of
the Fab 4 a few months before “A Day In The Life” was recorded. But in the song,
John sounds like somebody who keeps changing his story in an attempt to keep the
listener’s interest. The line “Well I just had to laugh” doesn’t seem like the
proper response to a tragedy, unless the harsh truth of the situation inspired
some typical Lennon gallows humor. And as for “He blew his mind out in a car/He
didn’t notice that the lights had changed,” that sounds like an impatient fellow
honking his horn at the car in front of him, oblivious that the traffic light
was now red. The whole verse plays out like a dream, and dreams will play a
heavy role throughout the song.

This is the type of detailed, analytical music writing I can really get into.

One Reason Why David Foster Wallace Has Forever Earned My Trust As a Reader

I think a recurring feature of book reviews in New York Magazine is a purchase recommendation. Available options include some variations of buy, wait for the paperback, and don't buy. I've only read that magazine once (Hillary Clinton was on the cover. I brought it with me to Europe; that magazine has visited four countries) and I can't seem to find evidence of this feature on the magazine's truly excellent website. That is why I'm uncertain if this feature is recurring. For all I know, they might do something similar with recently released movies. I'm not sure, though. I do know that both the conception and execution of this type of literal book review is inherently shticky. The reviews were each comprised of one moderately long paragraph. The whole meat of the review was the one line recommendation to purchase or not to purchase.

Compare this to David Foster Wallace's article "Authority and American Usage," collected in Consider the Lobster, which was originally published in Harper's Magazine with the title "Present Tense." The third paragraph of the article is this:

The occasion for this article is Oxford University Press's recent release of Mr. Bryan A. Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, a book that Oxford is marketing aggressively and that it is my assigned function to review. It turns out to be a complicated assignment. In today's US, a typical book review is driven by market logic and implicitly casts the reader in the role of consumer. Rhetorically, its whole project is informed by a question that's too crass ever to mention up front: "Should you buy this book?" And because Bryan A. Garner's usage dictionary belongs to a particular subgenre of a reference genre that is itself highly specialized and particular, and because at least a dozen major usage guides have been published in the last couple years and some of them have been quite good indeed, the central unmentionable question here appends the prepositional comparative "...rather than that book?" to the main clause and so entails a discussion of whether and how ADMAU is different from other recent specialty-products of its kind.

I write often inside this blog about how artists create their best art when they respect the audience. A paragraph like the previous one exhibits just about as much audience-respect as there can get. DFW is being incredibly upfront about the purpose of his article.

Is this a ploy to gain credibility with the reader? Perhaps. But I think it is significant that most of this paragraph (including every word which hints to this kind of honesty with the reader) was removed from the version which ran in Harper's Magazine. I realize that this does not conclusively prove anything and may, in fact, be an indication that my gut feeling on this is dead wrong, at least according to the editors at Harper's. But so few authors even attempt a gesture like this that I find it refreshing and believable.

Two Notes on TV

1. The Office is at its very best when Michael and Dwight are not in the office. This allows everyone else to be normal.
2. 30 Rock tonight approached the level set by Arrested Development.