”It starts to mutiply, the grading of tones, until it becomes thousands of tones,” he [John Currin] reflected. “Some are accidental and some are intentional. It’s great when the accidental becomes indistinguishable from the intentional. That’s when it begins to seem like a living thing.”

Calvin Tomkins, Profiles, “Lifting the Veil,” The New Yorker, January 28, 2008, p. 58

I’ve posted a long piece at Huffington Post that tries to put together the strongest, most coherent version of Andew “Cult of the Amateur” Keen’s argument against the Web…and then critiques it. Tags: andrew_keen web_2.0]

Clay Shirky - who I thank profusely in EiM because of how influential and helpful he was, even though he may not know it - responds to Nick Carr’s criticism of page 9 of my book. Then he responds to Sven Bikerts’ complaints about the blogosphere’s effect on literary criticism.

It’s a rousing defense and brilliantly expressed. Thank you, Clay, once again. [Tags: clay_shirky nicholas_carr music everything_is_miscellaneous]

The Velveteen Rabbi writes beautifully about the importance of ambiguity and of repetition in liturgy. Sometimes not knowing what words mean precisely but saying them anyway can connect us to a meaning that transcends us. But she puts it better…

Nick Carr writes a long disagreement with the book, based on my statement that the track is the “natural unit” of music. (Nick does not comment on anything beyond that sentence on page 9.)

Nick is correct. Tracks are clearly not “natural.” The book overall is an argument against there being a natural units and a natural organization of them. I meant the “natural” to be lightly ironic in this case. And he is of course also right that there is value in how albums arrange tracks so that the whole is more than the parts. [Added a few hours later:] But, in the third order of order, we can get not only the Beatles’ way of arranging their White Album, we can also get George Martin’s remix, how Ringo wanted it played , the revelatory way some unknown kid in Akron mixes it up with the Beach Boys, and the original order minus that one song we can’t stand (AKA “Revolution #9″). The miscellaneous isn’t about there being no order. It is about the potential for many, many orders.

So, I don’t agree with the characterization of the argument of the book he derives from this one phrase. I’m disappointed that Nick found this sentence to be a “stopper.”

The Gender Genie at the BookBlog uses an algorithm “developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author.” You paste in some text (preferably more than 500 words) and it guesses the author’s sex.

The first 1,200 words of the first chapter of Everything Is Miscellaneous gets 2,634 male points and 2,215 female points. The last chapter (5,000 words) scores 8,560 male points and 6,506 female points. My 1,200 words post live-blogging Wendy Seltzer’s talk about copyright scores a similar 1,684 male points and 1,452 female.

The consistency suggests that the Gender Genie is measuring something real, some implicit metadata invisible to me but characteristic of my writing. And if it in fact gets authors’ sex right, it is even stronger evidence — as if we needed it — that so much of our meaning lives in what we don’t see. [Tags: metadata gender ]

At EverythingIsMiscellaneous.com, I've posted about the joy of reading an edition of Hamlet that surfaces hundreds of years of scholarly disputes about the meaning of Shakespeare's words, disputes that often are without resolution. We don't know what the old bird/bard meant, but that's all the more reason to love him! [Tags: shakespeare everything_is_miscellaneous hamlet hermeneutics ]

I’ve been having an unnaturally good time going through the Hamlet Variorum (Horace Howard Furness, ed.), which annotates the play with the commentary and disputes that have gone on for hundreds of years. For reasons I don’t understand, I’m made quite happy by reading that the great scholars have suggested that when the Gentleman in Act IV, Scene 5, line 101 says “The ratifiers and props of every word,” there are reasons to think that Shakespeare might actually have meant the last word to be ward, weal, work, worth or wont. Likewise, I am brought joy by the nearly two pages of fine-print dispute over the line “He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice” (I,i, 63). “Sledded Polacks”? Sliding Polacks? Sleaded battle axe, although we don’t know what “sleaded” meant? A pole-axe lined with lead? And if he meant Poles on sleds, what the hell were they doing on sleds? What with three folios to choose from, and the possibility that errors were introduced in transcription and by compositors, not to mention the lack of spelling standards, there’s no shortage of ways the existing texts could misreflect Shakespeare’s intentions.

I truly don’t understand why I enjoy this so much. It is not a devilish delight in finding that we really don’t understand a prominent member of the canon. I love Hamlet all the more for having its ambiguity exposed. Truly. Obviously, the richness of Shakespeare’s work has always meant there are an indefinite number of ways a performance can make sense of the script. A performance can always surprise you. The fact that Hamlet can either be indecisive or a man of action, crazy or feigning, a person of feeling or reason — and, yes, I have my own preferences — is not a weakness of the play. It means there’s always more to discover. And each successful interpretation thrills us with sense-making as the ultimate creative act. But finding that there are historical ambiguities that are simple matters of fact — Shakespeare meant something by “sledded Polacks” — should diminish our enjoyment of the text, like finding out that Bach spilled coffee on the original score of one of his cantatas so we can’t be sure what some of the notes are.

But it doesn’t feel that way to me. Perhaps it’s because the difficulty of Shakespearean language has always meant that I can’t understand it word by word. The meaning has always had to emerge line by line, scene by scene; the language’s distance requires work on our part to hear it at all. Discovering a set of possible meanings for words adds clarity without determination: Here are five different things Shakespeare might have meant by a phrase I didn’t understand, didn’t pay attention to, or had projected the easiest meaning onto: Poles on sleds.

The Hamlet Variorum comes in two volumes. The first contains the full text of the play, including notes on the differences in the quartos and the critical annotations. The second contains source materials. I only have the first volume. It’s a Dover reprint so it’s even moderately priced at $13. I highly recommend it. [Tags: shakespeare hamlet variorum interpretation hermeneutics everything_is_miscellaneous]

This video is a beautiful piece of work. It will be a classic statement. Don't be the very last person to see it... [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Stately, plump Penguin Books is off on an experiment that is likely to fail in delightful, unpredictable ways...for which my hat is off to them. They've started a wiki and given us—any and all of us—six weeks to write a novel. The wiki has a blog (but does the blog have a wiki?), and the Penguin blog talks about the experiment as well. (But does the Penguin wiki blog about the wiki's blog? No? That's so Web 1.27! :) Anyway, a novel seems like an unlikely venture for a wiki. Too many dependencies. Change "Carlo" to "Conchita" in Chapter 1, and who's going to make the updates throughout all the chapters? Add a penguin who invents pockets in Chapter 2 and now Freida in Chapter 9 actually does have a place to put the souvenir shot glass from Las Vegas. Not to mention that Wikipedia has reality to hold a page together (or at least a settled criterion for resolving disputes), while a novel has nothing but the sensibilities of a million penguins at keyboards. (Penguin Books has sicced some MA students on the wiki to seed it. ) So, I'll be surprised (and delighted) if a novel emerges from this. But two caveats: 1. If you'd asked me four years ago if Wikipedia would work, I would have guessed wrong. 2. A novel is not the only worthwhile result that could emerge from this experiment. I'm impressed Penguin Books is doing it. I look forward to seeing if the writing gets better or worse, if the discussion page is more interesting than the novel, what the sexy parts of the crowd are like, if good triumphs or gets into an edit war with irony... [Tags: wiki fiction novels collaborative_writing penguin_books publishing books everything_is_miscellaneous ]