Source: “Reaching for the Stars When Space Was a Thrill” (New York Times)

A ship’s log owes its name to a small wooden board, often weighted with lead, that was for centuries attached to a line and thrown over the stern. The weight of the log would keep it in the same place in the water, like a provisional anchor, while the ship moved away. By measuring the length of line used up in a set period of time, mariners could calculate the speed of their journey (the rope itself was marked by equidistant “knots” for easy measurement). As a ship’s voyage progressed, the course came to be marked down in a book that was called a log.

Source: Andrew Sullivan, “Why I Blog,” The Atlantic Monthly, November 2008

Paul Cézanne, The Card Players

Prodigies are easy. They advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers are hard. They require forbearance and blind faith.

—Malcolm Gladwell

Ultimately, McLemme (who is easily one of my favorite critics) comes to surprising, Camille Paglia-esque conclusion about the guy:

Clearly it is time to reinvest in America’s fast-thinking infrastructure. Dependence on foreign sources of ideological methane is just too risky. Besides, as a couple of my far-flung correspondents have recently pointed out, the recent embrace of BHL by the American media is raising questions about just how gullible we really are.

Men need to be hugely successful, but pretend that they are not. And this is only one aspect of the almost impossible balance that needs to be struck. Men need to convey sexual desire without sexualising the person in front of them, need to be authoritative, opening doors, paying bills, deciding where to go and so on (recent research found that 60 per cent of women would consider it a bad first date if they paid), yet treat women as absolute equals. They need to flatter without seeming overly impressed, they need to care about their appearance (but not too much), and when it comes to chatting up, they need to take the initiative, and absorb any humiliation that comes their way, without seeming at all arrogant or pushy.

Got all that?

This past January, National Geographic ran a fascinating story about the decaying rural North Dakota landscape.

Money Quote:

That’s the rub in rural North Dakota, a sense of things ebbing, of churches being abandoned, schools shutting down, towns becoming ruins. And all this decline exists amid a seeming statistical prosperity: Oil is booming, wheat prices are at record highs, and, as the average farm size grows, the land is studded with paper millionaires living in the lonely sweep of the plains, with surrounding community gone to the wind.

Be sure to check out the accompanying slide show.

I believe a superior approach is to get a tenure-track position and then immediately remove the idea of “getting tenure” from your daily (or perhaps even moment by moment) thought process. That’s right. Getting tenure should not be your primary goal (though admittedly this is secretly a “how-to get tenure” article). Instead, your goal should be to follow your interests, your passion, your curiosity, and your creativity. In other words, you should follow all of the things that got you into this field in the first place.

What would happen if young professors everywhere started following this advice?

It’s a critic’s darling groomed for greatness despite long inert spells in each episode that leave everything opaque, as if recognizable human behavior would be vulgar coming from such immaculate mannequins. It has a seductive look, a compelling mood, a cast that could have been carved from a giant bar of Ivory soap, but zero grasp of the elastic optimism and vigor of the Kennedy years, the let-go spring of release after the constriction of the Eisenhower 50s. Even the exuberant pop music on the soundtrack is used as a counterpoint to the characters’ enclosed meanness and malaise. The more explaining and self-examination that series creator (and former executive producer of The Sopranos) Matthew Weiner does in interviews and post-episode commentaries, the muddier everything gets. Is he aware that Sterling Cooper is the most incompetent, uninspired ad agency ever to blight Madison Avenue? Meeting after meeting adjourned until the next meeting because Draper’s dimwit team can’t rub two sticks together to spark a decent idea. I don’t mind Mad Men as a mild narcotic, but the raves it’s received smack of self-congratulation, as if its fans in the press and online were fondling their own taste buds. It’s fetishistic praise, better left to the movie critics and their blurb libidos.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

—Erik Lundegaard, “Why We Need Movie Reviewers”

Now, he might be right about most students being stupid and boring (though copping such an attitude displays a tremendous amount of arrogance), but, oddly enough, therein lies one of the pleasures of teaching. To paraphrase something designer Milton Glaser once said, there’s nothing more exciting than seeing a student go from a condition of inertness and inattentiveness to showing an interest in learning new things.

As you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering—in a response that admittedly lies outside film criticism—how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way. His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss.

Seems like there’s a pattern emerging. Have people pretty much decided that Ledger’s all-consuming commitment to his craft contributed to his death? If so, that’s really interesting.

Yesterday the New York Times reported that Thursday midnight shows for The Dark Knight are selling out so quickly that some theaters have added 3:00 AM and 6:00 AM screenings to keep pace with demand. Now, why on earth would anyone go to a movie at 3:00 AM or 6:00 AM? Well, part of the reason seems to be Heath Ledger. To quote the article:

This time much of the fan interest has been driven by word of a career-topping performance by Heath Ledger, the Australian actor who died in January. His louche interpretation of the Joker has already inspired Oscar talk.

I plan to buy tickets to the midnight show today. I saw Batman Begins at midnight at the Grove in Los Angeles, and I feel it’s only proper I see the sequel at midnight as well.

Well, according to William Deresiewicz, it “makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you,” “inculcates a false sense of self-worth,” fosters a loathsome sense of entitlement, makes you afraid to take risks, and paradoxically breeds a perverse sort of anti-intellectualism. Oh yeah, it also doesn’t encourage solitude, and thus by extension, introspection.

Yep, I think that about covers it.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole essay.

(Hat tip: AMT.)

(Via A Continuous Lean.)

He gets out of the way just when one would want him to interrogate himself. Here is exactly the limit to Hitchens the essayist. But he goes so far and so well before running up against it that I always want to read him.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

An acrophobic detective (James Stewart), after the apparent death of a woman he loves (Kim Novak), meets another woman who reminds him of her, dresses her up as the late object of his obsession, and then discovers that she’s the same woman. It’s as if Hitchcock were endowing with holy wonder the miracle by which Hollywood turns a shopgirl into a star—and by which he turns an actress into the object of his own erotic fantasy.

Nicely put.

—Chuck Klosterman

Gary Cooper as Professor Bertram Potts in Ball of Fire (1941)

Loved this aside from Russell Jacoby’s recent profile of Paul Piccone:

Another leftist Italian-American of working-class origins coincidentally chaired my department at Rochester. Eugene Genovese, the historian of American slavery, also dressed to the nines. He once addressed us motley graduate students, mainly from New York City and its suburbs, as we clomped about in work boots, blue jeans, and work shirts: “You think the workers like what you are wearing?” he sneered. “They despise it and you.” He fingered his own fine threads. “This is what they like. This is what they would wear if they could.”

The point is that academics need not dress in a slovenly manner; indeed, many academics dress very well, or at least they used to. This is something of a hobbyhorse of mine.

The first words we think of when we describe James Bond — at least the 007 of the films — are suave, debonair, cosmopolitan. All those are shorthand for Bond’s supreme personal characteristic, what Renaissance courtiers always aspired to exemplify: sprezzatura. That is the ability to perform even the most difficult task with flair, grace, and nonchalance, without getting a wrinkle in your clothes or working up a sweat. Bond not only is cool, he always looks cool, at ease in his skin, at home in the world. Whatever his surroundings, he’s the best-dressed guy in the room.

There are other reasons – ahem – why someone would want to be James Bond, and Dirda mentions most of them. I find Dirda’s honesty refreshing here. My guess is that most men with PhDs in Comparative Literature publicly renounce Bond, while secretly, as the saying goes, wishing they were him.

The apartment where Hitchens lives with his wife, writer Carol Blue, and his daughter, Antonia, is cavernous but lacks much décor. Besides a grand piano in the living room, the only furnishings Hitchens seems to have acquired in two decades at this address are hundreds of books, many piles of which rest unshelved against the walls. His office in the apartment next door is equally spartan but for a pile of promotional books on the kitchen isle (the anti-liberal firebrand David Horowitz, among others, seeks a blurb from Hitchens for the back cover of his latest offering). A framed National Magazine Award rests on the back of the gas range, next to a refrigerator that houses a few bottles of water, a jar of mustard and little else.

Hitchens’ only television set is in the master bedroom. It’s a recent acquisition, Blue said, and she watches it more than he does. He hardly has time, he said, now that he’s working on a memoir.

For Jane Gallop, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the US, tough policies on relationships are affecting tutors’ ability to teach.

In her book Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, she says: “At its most intense – and, I would argue, its most productive – the pedagogical relation between teacher and student is, in fact, a ‘consensual amorous relation.’”

Gallop is candid about her relationships with both male and female students, and her exploits as a graduate student herself, when she slept with two men on her dissertation committee. She is more than aware of the power relationship that existed between them.

When it comes to professors who sleep with their students, “pathetic” is usually my first thought. But when it comes to students who sleep with their professors, especially professors on their dissertation committees, the phrase “conflict of interest” comes to mind, among other things.

On a related note, part of me admires Gallop’s honesty here, and I’d love to attend one of the sexual harassment workshops I’m required to go to every year with her, if only to watch her lock horns with the person who runs it.

Related Reading: “The Higher Yearning: Bringing Eros Back to Academe”

A week later, the little white pills arrived in the post. I sat down and took one 200mg tablet with a glass of water. It didn’t seem odd: for years, I took an anti-depressant. Then I pottered about the flat for an hour, listening to music and tidying up, before sitting down on the settee. I picked up a book about quantum physics and super-string theory I have been meaning to read for ages, for a column I’m thinking of writing. It had been hanging over me, daring me to read it. Five hours later, I realised I had hit the last page. I looked up. It was getting dark outside. I was hungry. I hadn’t noticed anything, except the words I was reading, and they came in cool, clear passages; I didn’t stop or stumble once.

Perplexed, I got up, made a sandwich – and I was overcome with the urge to write an article that had been kicking around my subconscious for months. It rushed out of me in a few hours, and it was better than usual. My mood wasn’t any different; I wasn’t high. My heart wasn’t beating any faster. I was just able to glide into a state of concentration – deep, cool, effortless concentration. It was like I had opened a window in my brain and all the stuffy air had seeped out, to be replaced by a calm breeze.

Normally, like Tom Cruise, I’m pretty anti prescription drugs, but this sounds nice. 

Related Reading: “Brain Enhancement Is Wrong, Right?” 

In my own case, I have written a few books built to a great extent on other writers’ books. Where the blurry line between a paraphrase and a lift is drawn – not always so clear when composing such books – has always been worrisome to me. True, I’ve never said directly that man is a political animal, or that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Still, I worry that I may somewhere have crossed that blurry line.

—Joseph Epstein

• “Christopher Hitchens’s apartment is curiously unchanged in the 13 years since I first visited him in Washington. A portrait of him and his wife, screenwriter Carol Blue, is still unframed. There is little art on the walls, few travel mementos; just bookshelves, a spacious living room, a modest kitchen and an annex for the alcohol. The aesthetic is not so much utilitarian as uncluttered of anything that would distract from the essentials of his life: reading, meeting people, drinking, laughing, arguing, writing.”
• “The appearance he gives of living improvisationally must obscure a ferocious interior organisation. Articles get written at any time of day or night, with extraordinary speed and fluency—however much he has drunk. He turns out a couple of pieces in the intervals while I’m taking a breather from merely talking.”

A number of graphic designers weigh in on John McCain’s campaign’s choice of typeface. The consensus seems to be that a better choice might have been made.

Money Quote: “Heath refused to talk to anyone out of character. If you tried to communicate with him normally instead of The Joker, he would just ignore you.”

This statement seems to support some of the things I’ve been saying for weeks now.

(Related post: “Did the Joker Kill Heath Ledger?”)

The Mirror and the Lamp had been Abrams’s dissertation, and he also reminds us of a different era of academic production, when the tenure gun was not quite so impatiently pressed to a junior professor’s head. Abrams says he took “10 years of hard work revising the text,” rewriting the first chapter “at least six times.”

I love stories like this because they remind me that things, despite the rampant amnesia, were once quite different, and thus needn’t be the way they are presently.

(Related post: “Fewer Books, Better Thinking.”)