I saw this amusing article on metafilter yesterday. The basic idea is that a four-person family making 250K/year is, depending on where they live, just barely getting by because of tax burden.
A budget is provided, and it’s reliably absurd. When I last looked at the metafilter comments, however, I don’t know if anyone recognized what the actual rhetorical target of this piece was. To me, it seems clear that the profligate amounts being invested by this family in their 401K and college savings accounts (presumably also investment interests) are designed to make the (almost certainly poorer) readers of the article not just outraged by imaginary tax raises but anxious that they are not putting enough of their money into investments.
John Ashbery has a translation of Rimbaud’s “Conte” in the most recent New York Review. The final line of the poem, “La musique savante manque a notre desir” is translated there as “Wise music is missing from our desire.”
Wallace Fowlie renders it “Our desires are deprived of cunning music.” Paul Schmidt, “Our desire lacks the music of the mind.” Ashbery’s translation seems amusedly literal for the most part. He translates “les betes de luxe” as “thoroughbred animals,” which does seem better than Fowlie’s “pet animals.
I earlier wrote about my experience with Knut Muller’s Rhem 2, and I gave the third game a shot over the last few days. I came infinitesimally close to solving it without any hints. No puzzles or missing information thwarted me; I merely failed to see something in plain sight. I don’t know if my last post captured how complex the game is. Here are some notes I made while attempting to solve a problem with incomplete information:
In the second book of the Histories, Herodotus tells us of the Egyptian king Psammetichos, who wanted to discover who were truly the oldest people of the Earth. He took two infants and had them raised by shepherds in isolation from human voices. When they were finally brought out of their huts, they cried “bekos,” a word that means “bread” in the Phrygian language. Thus Psammetichos concluded that the Phrygians were the oldest humans.
Both the LRB and NYRB reviews of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom make the astute point that the long autobiographical section of the book is not sufficiently distinguished in style from the rest. Though it’s undeniably Patty’s thoughts, it’s not Patty’s writing that we’re reading. And James Lever argues that this could have been exploited in terms of the reaction that Walter and Richard have when they read it. I do wonder, though, about a comment Walter made about the manuscript after he finds it, which I didn’t actually remember from reading it (it was something about a libel on his “manhood,” about which there were many general things mentioned but nothing as specific-seeming as he seemed to mean it at this point).
George Basalla’s The Evolution of Technology (Cambridge UP: 1988) is a fine book, filled with many illuminating examples. In a section on how fads influence technological development, however, Basalla writes:
By the mid-1980s, the home computer boom appeared to be nothing more than a short-lived and, for some computer manufacturers, expensive fad. Consumers who were expected to use these machines to maintain their financial records, educate their children, and plan for their family’s future ended up playing electronic games on them, an activity that soon lost its novelty, pleasure, and excitement.
That’s what I am feeling after failing to solve Rhem 2 without consulting the walkthrough. What is Rhem 2 and why should anyone care whether or not I solved it without a walkthrough? Well, Rhem 2 is a self-produced (more or less) puzzle game in the tradition of Myst created by Knut Muller. I first learned of the Rhem games from reading Andrew Plotkin’s review, and I purchased the first Rhem in 2005.
I’ve been intermittently reading through the London Review, as I’ve mentioned here before, and while it’s the best of its type, there are the occasional head-scratchers. Many of the things the journal printed about literary theory in the early-mid 80s, for example (outside of Kermode’s contributions) tended toward the dotty. But I don’t know if I’ve come across something as spectacularly wrong as these remarks by Tom Shippey about Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco:
The logic puzzle section of the GRE doesn’t exist anymore, does it? That’s too bad. The only real memory I have of my weekly G&T; class in elementary school was learning to solve the grid-style logic puzzles, whose presumed psychometric validity remain, as I have said before, one of the great unanswered questions of the 20th C.
Anyway, I’ve been preparing to teach Wallace’s “Mister Squishy” for the second time, and it occurred to me that there might be enough details offered for the members of the focus group (and the two unintroduced assistant facilitators) to deduce who is who using the grid-elimination format.
Anthony Burgess, I believe, said that any writer worth his salt should be able to produce a thousand words per day. I’ve been trying that for the last eighty days or so. (I missed the day I had spinal surgery because I couldn’t type with the IV and some other device they had sticking in my finger, and I never did make up those words.)
I don’t know if creative writing would be more difficult to follow through with than academic writing, but the main problem I’ve found is being able to find enough time to do both the writing and then the reading necessary to keep the motor going.