Idiotprogrammer

Simon Owens is a respected blogger about new media, with a slight bias toward the liberal side. He’s not a political blogger per se, but politics comes up fairly often. See his anatomy of a Michelle Malkin post, the ambiguity of a Youtube video and a collection of his best links from the years.

Yesterday he made a post about why conservative bloggers like to smear their subject with guilt by association, yet seemingly have a blind eye to when it affects their own candidates. He mentions how two of McCain’s top advisors were implicated in the Burmese military (which is a pretty damning charge).

At the same time, he supports his site by running Google Adsense, (which now are apparently doing graphically-based ads). On the post about McCain, I see a color ad for Ann Coulter while on the side is an ad for the John McCain campaign. Perhaps the John McCain ad was placed on oppositional sites on purpose, but the Ann Coulter ad is purely a mistake. That’s why I say, click on it! Let McCain and Ann Coulter pay  to the nose for misplaced Google ads!

Update #1: Now I see there are pro-creationism ads on the site, probably in response to a critical piece about creation science.

Update #2: Now, I see that the ads have changed to the more middle-of-the-road University of Phoenix-Motley Fool sponsors.

I have  mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, a blogger should have every right to make money, and it is a funny practical joke to have the butt of your jokes also to be earning you money as well. On the other hand, I doubt Simon would intentionally pick these sorts of ads; they are just what Google Ads deemed  relevant to the page. (It requires a lot of mental energy for a lone blogger to run a blog as a business. He or she can’t be expected to make all these kinds of microdecisions.  Otherwise, there wouldn’t be enough time in the day to write).

On the other hand, Bloggasm is a provocative weblog, and in a way it deals with advocacy. Isn’t it right for a commercial service to pay for counter-advocacy? After all, it’s not interfering with Bloggasm’s message, and in fact, most Bloggasm  readers are too sophisticated to find a Google ad  persuasive. But think. Is that the sort of sponsor Bloggasm wants to be affiliated with?  Why is it so hard for ad networks to arrange for nonpolitical ads (after all, I doubt the Republican Party has a bigger ad budget than Archer Daniel Midland or Walmart). Nowadays, are  partisan ads profitable enough to sustain bloggers of all political persuasions?

>>>

By the way,  I am eventually going to include ads on this blog. Since essentially nobody reads this blog (let’s not kid ourselves), the only thing I have to offer is my precious google juice from my 2000+ blogposts.

In 5 minutes I will turn on ABC’s This Week, a one hour talk show about the news. I used to enjoy this show tremendously. Sunday mornings are a good time for news, especially since the daily Sunday newspaper seems to have disappeared. (The Sunday morning newspaper is all I need, but you can’t subscribe only to that).

This Week seems to have declined in quality because their discussion group is so calcified. George Will uses every topical issue to inject a swipe at liberal ideology. Cokie Roberts pretends to have an opinion, but in fact has no opinion other than the need to avoid controversy  and be skeptical of anything smacking of   progressive politics. (Both went out of their way to express alarm about how the radical left-wingers might sabotage the inevitable–and highly laudable–march to war). The round table features one or two other guests, and that is usually the only part of the mix I like. Farheed Zakaria is an intellectual heavyweight and effortlessly disposes of any tripe line George Will delivers (that is fun to watch). Robert Reich/Paul Krugman/William Kristol/Katrina Vanden Heuvel are the token idealogues and Sam Donaldson is the maverick reporter who is skeptical about anything.  If anything redeems the show, it’s that the only right-wing panelist they have besides George Will is Bill Kristol, and both are relative lightweights, intellectually speaking. Far more worrisome is ABC’s tendency to invite political operatives rather than intellectuals as guests.  Although they may possess more insider’s knowledge than insight,  they pull the discussion away from issues and towards handling.

My main news comes from the PBS News Hour, which covered the cyclone extensively on Thursday and Friday, devoting almost half the program to it. But Friday night on PBS is when the news becomes excellent. Washington Week in Review has informed analysis by inside-the-Beltway journalists who actually know what they’re talking about. They don’t bloviate but describe what their journalistic instincts tell them. I watch NewsHour’s Friday analysis with Shields and Brooks. Even though I cannot stand David Brooks (he deals way too much in generalities), Mark Shields is a wonderful color man about American politics. Later in the evening is Bill Moyers who provides an intellectual perspective. (This week the topics were the torture lawyers and activism by nurse unions in California). Also, PBS Now which had a half hour about privatized prisons, with a special emphasis on CCA. Finally at 11:00 PM is McLaughlin Group. Upon first glance, it just seems like a lot of blowhards blowing smoke, but they cover a lot of issues in depth as talking points. Truly it’s  a yellfest, but the moderator picks 4 topics and they battle it out. Bill McLaughlin actually is a good bellwether of things and identifies lots of unknown issues. Example: did you know that if the US abandons NAFTA, Canada would no longer be obligated to sell oil to us at preferential prices and would be free to sell it on the free market (where prices would be doubled)? Wow, why don’t we ever hear about that? Even the curmudgeon Pat Buchanan seems to have mellowed in his old age. Still yelling but no longer so attached to ideology when the reality runs so counter to it. Two other guests are a billionaire and a right-wing radio show host. This radio show host is one of the most annoying women I have ever heard. She speaks with vendettas and certainties about certain issues (such as the corruption of the Clinton administration). Nonetheless, it is mildly interesting to hear what’s rattling around the right-wing echo chambers. The yellfest is not supposed to deliver insights or genuine arguments, but somehow a few points manage to slip out due to McLaughlin’s egging questions.

Although I really enjoy the progressive politics of Friday night on PBS, I miss intelligent right-wing pundits. Paul Gigot, for example, had nuanced opinions, and lots of business reporters have useful perspectives.  I really don’t mind hearing right-of-center analysis, but currently there is a shortage of that. Instead we have a glut of idealogues whose agenda seems highly suspect.

This weekend, there is almost no presidential news to report. Clinton/Obama….over! McCain? Nothing interesting. Here is the first chance in a long time for ABC to cover real news for a change: the cyclone, Russia’s new president, Gitmo and Supreme Court, ethanol/gas prices.  Optimistically, I would expect presidential politics to occupy maybe 5 minutes of a 45 minute news show. Let’s see if my predictions bear out.

Sunday Afternoon Update: ABC This Week spent the entire hour talking about presidential politics. Namely:

• who will be the vice presidential candidate for McCain or Obama?
• Will Hilary exit gracefully or will she destroy the party by staying in the race an extra few weeks? (My thought: why is it so important not to hurt Hilary’s feelings?)
• Does John McCain really have a temper? 

Since the Burmese  government for the most part prevents good outside journalism about the cyclone or their politics, the most reliable source of information so far (aside from BBC/ITV sneak-in journalism) is Irrawaddy, an expat newspaper with ample coverage of the subject.  I am seriously thinking of donating some money not to some international aid organization but this newspaper itself.  From CNN is an account by Dan Rivers on the difficulty of reporting events. I remember the most striking detail in early reports was that Burma possessed only 7 functioning helicopters in this country. Here’s the wikipedia page on the storm.

The rest of these articles come from  Irrawaddy.

Min Zin on how the Burmese government is commandeering foreign aid and extorting donations from local businessmen.

The source added that Than Shwe believes he has already distributed 5 billion kyat (4.5 million dollars), which he mostly extorted from Burmese businessmen as “donations”, and he also has more than US $30 million from international assistance pledges. He then decided to use his own Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA) and army to distribute aid.

“What Than Shwe doesn’t understand is that his $4.5 million can only be used for food for 12 days, and all the promised dollars from the world may not come if the international experts are not allowed into the country,” said Win Min, a Burmese analyst in Thailand.

Moreover, Burmese businessmen cannot afford to donate much more cash, and overworked Burmese doctors have run out of resources.

Non-government organizations (NGOs) and international non-government organizations (INGOs) within Burma, who had to sign memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with the regime to begin their projects, defining the nature of their work and their areas of operation, have now found themselves restricted by those same MOUs.

Since many NGOs do not have projects in the Irrawaddy delta, they are not allowed to do any aid work in the devastated region since they were not authorized to do so in their MOUs.

According to inside sources, NGOs are now trying to work under the UN’s umbrella in order to reach into the delta.

Meanwhile, the military and its thuggish USDA members are intimidating private donors who provide rice and clothing to cyclone victims in the suburban townships of Rangoon. Many donors are reportedly being asked to hand over their relief supplies to local USDA members for them to supervise distribution.

Sean Turnell on how the Burmese government is reaping record oil profits while suffering from inadequate food production:

Most of Burma’s prominent corporations are owned by the military, and the country is judged by Transparency International as the second most corrupt in the world. Burma spends a mere 1.4 per cent of GDP on health and education, less than half that spent by the next poorest country in Asia, and it is the only country in the region whose defence budget is greater than that of health and education combined. In 2008 Burma’s per-capita GDP will amount to only around US $290 per annum. Over 70 percent of this income will be spent on food, by far the highest proportion so devoted in the region.

Another shocking fact from the article:

Rising gas prices as well as increasing output volumes have caused Burma’s gas exports to soar, driving a projected balance of payments surplus for 2007/08 of around $2.4 billion. International reserves, hitherto barely sufficient to cover more than a month or so of imports, will rise to a (relatively) healthy $3.5 billion.  

Burma’s gas earnings should be transforming the country’s prospects—and allowing the fiscal space for the spending on basic infrastructure, health and education the country so desperately needs.

Alas, however, this is not happening, and the foreign exchange revenues Burma is accumulating are currently making next to no impact on the country’s fiscal accounts.

The reason is simple. Burma’s gas earnings are being allocated in the government’s published accounts at the ‘official’ exchange rate of the kyat. This official rate (at around 6 kyat:$1) over-values the currency by around 150–200 times its market value (which is currently about 1,000 kyat:$S1). Such exchange rate duality imposes other costs on Burma’s economy, but critical here is that the use of the official exchange rate to convert the gas earnings into kyat dramatically underplays their true (potential) contribution to state finances.

Recorded at the official rate, Burma’s gas earnings for 2006/07 of $1.25 billion translate into 7.5 billion kyat, or a mere 0.6 per cent of budget receipts. By contrast, if the same US dollar earnings are recorded at the market exchange rate, their contribution of 1,500 billion kyat would more than double total state receipts, and more or less eliminate Burma’s fiscal deficit. 

What could be the motivation for this deliberate withholding of financial wherewithal to the state? No-one but the Chairman of the SPDC, Gen Than Shwe, can know for sure.

The most likely explanation is that, so recorded, Burma’s foreign exchange earnings can be kept ‘quarantined’ from the public accounts, and thereby are available for the portioning out by the regime to itself and its cronies.

Here’s an AP photo depicting the gas lines. Fuel costs $2.50/gallon, with a maximum of 2 gallons a day allowed. (Black market prices are 4x that).

Finally from  Irrawaddy archives, an article by James Rose  about the awkward visit by Sylvester Stallone during a politically sensitive moment  to Burma to promote his new Rambo movie:

The nature of the Burma demonstrations, to date via the world’s media, has been one of peaceful protest. The cry of metta (“loving kindness”) sent out into the Burmese air by the marching monks has become the banner under which the world has tended to view the current situation in Burma.

As such, introducing a snarling, blood-soaked, murderous Rambo into the media landscape and you have a classical case of what is known, in media terms, as a “mixed message”. The combination of two such diametrically opposed approaches to dealing with Burma’s dire circumstances tangles the whole Burma issue and removes some of the pillars of the bridge of clear communication to the world.

“Is Burma about peaceful change or is it about civil war?” once media consumers begin asking such questions, the answer is already more or less unimportant. By now, many tracking Burma via the world’s media coverage have already expressed their confusion and have begun the fatal process of moving on.

Media consumers in advanced economies like their causes simple and clear-cut. Few are inclined to take the time to assess and analyze a given situation. They want clean lines of entry. Confusion is the death-knell for any campaign seeking to gain public attention and support.

I have a rather important announcement for regular readers of this blog. I just installed a plugin that removes the Nofollow attribute on URLs included in comments.  This link love occurs 10 days after you post. I don’t receive many comments on idiotprogrammer and I see no reason why I should not help writers and bloggers who add things on my blog.  I will keep an eye out for people who throw out too many gratuitous links, but in the meantime, have fun guys! (Read my piece about it on Teleread).

Something I saw on TV Friday night. (Hopefully the video link will stay up). This was nothing short of incredible.

Leno lovers might enjoy this 1983 talk show appearance by him.

While launching a protest against an overzealous Wikipedia editor for deleting a link to an article I added, I noticed a hilarious thing. Apparently Wikipedia had not yet allowed an article on Digital Maoism to exist on its own. Instead it redirects to a bio article of Jaron Lanier, the man who coined the phrase. The irony of Wikipedia not providing a separate page about the concept about why online collectivism will corrode human thought is delicious.

See also: my thoughts about Wikipedia and vanity pages.

May 9 Update: I forgot to give the link of my previous NSFW post about Haley Paige which apparently was rejected by the Wikipedia editor as spam. Warning: my post has one semi-nude nonpornographic photo. The ludicrous thing about the rejection is that almost every link which was approved on the Haley Paige wikipedia page had pornographic pictures and porn banner ads. This is not surprising or intrinsically bad (because she worked in the industry), but the contrast between my own post (which was thoughtful and well-written and ad-free ) and the others (which were minimally informative and loaded with porn ads) was astounding. Even the non-adult link (a local newspaper) was replete with ads.

May 9 Update #2: Out of boredom I googled “Digital Maoism” to see what would show up. Keep in mind that the Edge discussion featured dozens of contributors by Internet illuminati; it was blogged about and cited in numerous places, including the New York Times. Search results 1 and 2 are from the Edge (where the article first appeared). Search results #3 and 4 come from NYT (no surprise), #5 comes from the Wikipedia article about Jaron Lanier (no suprise), and #6 contains the User Talk link I linked to above by Tabercil. Now it’s possible that my blogpost alone brought it good search position. But I suspect wikipedia’s privileged status on google is the reason why it received such prominence. We need to ask: does Wikipedia truly deserve the privileged search position Google gives it?

Here’s a bizzare art book with strange creatures and illegible writing.

The book itself costs $400 (or $100 if you order from Europe). Seems like more of a novelty book than anything substantive. Douglas Hoftstader comments:

Many of the pictures are grotesque and disturbing, but others are extremely beautiful and visionary. The inventiveness that it took to come up with all these conceptions of a hypothetical land is staggering.

Some people with whom I have shared this book find it frightening or disturbing in some way. It seems to them to glorify entropy, chaos, and incomprehensibility. There is very little to fasten onto; everything shifts, shimmers, slips. Yet the book has a kind of unearthly beauty and logic to it, qualities pleasing to a different class of people: people who are more at ease with free-wheeling fantasy and, in some sense, craziness. I see some parallels between musical composition and this kind of invention. Both are abstract, both create a mood, both rely largely on style to convey content.

For another novelty book that is substantially cheaper, I recommend How to Create a  Flawless Universe in just eight days. Every person I show the book to finds it amazing, and I do too. (Here’s the Teleread piece I did about novelty books and How to Create a Flawless Universe). The print copy is available for less than a dollar.

From the wikipedia article on the Codex, two other interesting links: Ummo, an extraterrestrial hoax and Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, a Borges story I thought I had read but turns out not to have done.

From a great thread on obscure novels, some great Eastern European finds: Frigyes Karinthy fiction and Hungarian short stories.  Keep in mind by the way that I blog on Teleread about literary matters (the RSS feed is on the right side of the page).

Save the Short Story, a literary blog discussing shorter literary forms.  Run by Pei-Ling Lue, a literary editor. Interesting that such a generic subject for a blog can be so interesting and relevant.

Today I just switched to AT&T Naked DSL. That means DSL service without the requirement that you pay for landline service. Previously I was paying $22/month for 1.5 Mbps DSL and $16 for a phone line.

Here are the terms and rates. First, the $50 rebate on your modem doesn’t count if you are obtaining High Speed Internet Direct (i.e., naked DSL).

• 1.5 Mbps/.384  is $29/month
• 3.0Mbps/.512 is $34/month
• 6.0 Mbps/.768 is $39/month

Now here’s the punch line. There’s no service contract. Nada!  So I’m now getting twice the Internet speed at $4 less than I was paying previously.  Really I toyed with the idea of upgrading to 6.0 Mbps, but I can’t stand that much excitement all in one day.

Now what on earth can I do with this extra bandwidth?

Maybe when you read my recent complaint about too much vomiting on TV, you thought I was exaggerating.

I wrote:

I don’t watch much television except when eating. I have my basa fish or frozen pizza on my TV table next to me while I am watching TV. That is why I never want to see vomiting depicted in any TV show or movie I am watching. You’d be surprised how often vomiting appears on prime time TV. First, for comic effect (South Park, Bernie Mac Shoe, etc), cute clue to being pregnant (Sex and the City), gritty realism (any cop show), human transformation to alien species (Buffy, mostly bad sci fi movies), funny postscript to a night of drinking (How I met your mother, etc). You think I exaggerate. But if I can watch TV for a week vomit-free, that is a minor victory.

But yesterday I sat down to each my fish dinner, and one minute after I turned the TV on (it was the Jay Leno show), I saw a wedding groom barf (for real) on a funny Youtube video. It was a good comic video, but it was offensive (especially because I was eating while watching it).

Do you feel there is too much vomiting on TV? Let’s start a campaign to boycott any shows with vomiting! To start with, you can draft a letter to your local TV station,

Dear NBC–Affiliate,

Last night I was watching Jay Leno, and I witnessed vomiting on air. It was embarrassing and morally offensive. I believe that vomiting is an private act between an individual and his toilet. When you display vomiting on mass media, you glamorize the physical act of vomiting to our nation’s youth. You give the mistaken impression that vomiting is a way to be popular or gain cheap laughs. Also, you send the message that indiscriminate vomiting is an accepted lifestyle choice. In fact, from a strictly Christian perspective, nothing in the Bible sanctions these gross displays.

I write with a certain first hand knowledge. When in high school, a classmate accidentally barfed on me while running to the restroom. That event has traumatized me to this day. Watching vomiting on TV only reopens those scars and insults the suffering of victims like myself.

Instead of exploiting the act of vomiting, can you stick to traditional TV themes we know and love? Like sexial deviance (CSI), serial dating (Seinfeld), wish fulfillment of overweight men (Drew Carey Show), social bigotry (All in the Family), public humiliation of teenagers (American Idol) and conspicuous consumption (Dallas, Price is Right, etc). These themes reaffirm values that make America the great Christian nation it is today.

Sincerely,

Robert Nagle,

President, National Anti-Vomiting Media Watchdog Group

The Anti-Vomiting Media Watchdog recommends this label before a show: Warning: The following program contains graphic depictions of vomiting which may offend some gastronomically sensitive viewers. Parental discretion is advised.

Here is an ongoing list of heinous depictions of vomiting. I encourage readers to submit their own reports.

Jay Leno, Youtube video (April 22?), vomiting Youtube video.

American Experience (PBS). George H.W. Bush (May 6). Graphic video footage of George Bush Senior vomiting on Japanese P.M. Miyazawa. Interesting perhaps for historical reasons and tastefully portrayed, but wouldn’t a headline have sufficed? Instead we have partial video footage and several still images.

Family Guy, 8 simple rules for buying my teenage daughter episode, vomit scene lasting 56 seconds.

Jay Leno, May 9, Youtube video. Comic animal video of a cat vomiting. Totally sick.

Have you ever loved a blog to death and then completely forgotten about it? Then, months (or even years) later, you pick it up again and say to yourself, “Dumbass, why did you ever stop reading this blog?”

I feel that way with Non Sequitur, a blog by two  philosophy profs (mainly John Casey)  about fallacies perpetrated by columnists (usually of the conservative variety). Highlights:

“Here’s what Will ends up saying: I dismiss liberals because they’re effete snobs (San Francicso, San Francisco) who look down on other people. “(on elitism)

On Will’s contention that raising teacher salaries only helps labor unions:

Couldn’t it be, however, that smaller class sizes and higher teacher salaries are goods to be pursued regardless of their effectiveness at fixing a social problem they’re not supposed to be fixing?  Who could dispute that teachers ought to be well compensated for the very important work they do (I’ll exclude myself from that work–what I do is not really work)?  What parent would not want her or his child in a smaller rather than a larger class?

More importantly, where is the social scientist who would claim that paying teachers more will remedy the various social problems produced–get this–as a result of income inequality?  Indeed, while we’re at the correlation game, why don’t we correlate family incomes and stability with the absence of well compensated, union labor?  Since Mr.Will is so interested in quantitative social science, perhaps he might find the results so alarming he’d refuse to read them until the Fourth of July, at night.

So to sum up.  Teachers’ salaries may have nothing to do with educational outputs.  But that’s not why teachers should have higher salaries in the first place.  Second, the social problems kids bring to school stem in no insignificant way from economic inequalities faced by their parents.  These may come together at school, no one expects the school to solve anything but what the school can solve.   But teachers and schools ought not to be punished just because they can’t solve that which they aren’t suited to solve.

“One of these things is not like the others“. Can you guess which?

On whether ad hominem attacks are by definition illegitimate:

The relevance of “personal attacks” depends on the conclusion drawn–not on the object of the attack.  Personally attacking Ronald Reagan makes sense only when the “attack” draws a conclusion relevant to the attack.  Reagan’s personality is no more relevant in the grand scheme of things than that of any private citizen.  While we expect a politician to be subject to such attacks, those attacks aren’t more justified on logical grounds.

This is especially the case when the question concerns hypocrisy.  Al Gore is not a hypocrite for driving a car, unless he says “don’t drive a car.”  He says, “Climate science says x, y, and z.”  Whether he drives a car is separate question.  His driving a car has nothing to do with that particular argument.  Now, when someone calls someone else a moral degenerate who should not be trusted, you’re going to reasonably wonder about the purity of the accuser–to do so doesn’t make you any less of a degenerate, all things considered, but it the credibility of the accuser is certainly relevant–insofar as his accusation rests on his credibility. 

On whether a politician’s behavior in small cafes matter:

Bob Evans is or was (do they still exist?) a kind of diner/family dining place with a country sausage inspiration.  My great uncle, then his late 80’s, took me out to breakfast there one morning around Christmas.  He ordered one egg sunny-side up and one pancake.  There must have been sausage with that order, but I don’t remember.  He then proceeded to put the egg on top of the pancake and cover the whole thing with syrup.

I had never seen such a thing.  When I asked him what he was doing, he fixed his eyes on me and said: “is it wrong?

To back Non Sequitur on this last point. I was went on a two day long tour of southern Ukraine around the lovely Carpathians. The tour guides were those funny but extremely inebriated men who overcharged us on everything. They insisted we stop at cafes every 2 hours to drink vodka. Then they proceeded to serve me the hard stuff despite my repeated objections. Finally, I pretended to enjoy it and then after the toast I would conspicuously toss the alcohol in the ashtray.  They were horrified. What a horribly rude thing for me to do!  What a waste of good vodka! (but at least they stopped filling my glass).

Egad, this is only the last few weeks of Nonsequitur. Can’t wait to hit the archives.

William Deresiewicz notices that mass media tends to stereotype  professors as lechers (especially those in the humanities) Why is that?

In the popular imagination, humanities professors don’t have anything to be ambitious about. No one really knows what they do, and to the extent that people do know, they don’t think it’s worth doing — which is why, when the subject of humanistic study is exposed to public view, it is often ridiculed as trivial, arcane, or pointless. Other received ideas come into play here: “those who can’t do, teach”; the critic as eunuch or parasite; the ineffective intellectual; tenure as a system for enshrining mediocrity. It may be simply because academics don’t pursue wealth, power, or, to any real extent, fame that they are vulnerable to such accusations. In our culture, the willingness to settle for something less than these Luciferian goals is itself seen as emasculating. Academics are ambitious, but in a weak, pathetic way. This may also explain why they are uniquely open to the charge of passionlessness. No one expects a lawyer to be passionate about the law: he’s doing it for the money. No one expects a plumber to be passionate about pipes: he’s doing it to support his family. But a professor’s only excuse for doing something so trivial and accepting such paltry rewards for it is his love for the subject. If that’s gone, what remains? Nothing but baseless vanity and feeble ambition. Professors, in the popular imagination, are absurd little men puffing themselves up about nothing. It’s no wonder they need to be taught a lesson.

Still none of this explains why the new academic stereotype has emerged just now. he first possibility is that today’s academics are portrayed as pompous, lecherous, alcoholic failures because that’s what they are. In terms of some of the longer-lasting elements of the professorial image, this is no doubt true. Pedantry and elitism are inherent temptations in the academic enterprise, and Max Weber remarked nearly a century ago that, for professors, vanity is a sort of occupational disease. Precisely because they don’t possess the kind of wealth that accrues to doctors and lawyers or the status wealth confers, academics are more apt to parade their intellectual superiority than members of other elite professions. But professors have neither a monopoly on nor a disproportionate share of quiet desperation or the self-destructive gestures that attend it. Male professors are not less-devoted or less-faithful husbands, on average, than other men — in fact, relative to wealthier ones, they are probably more so. (That there are now a substantial number of female academics is a circumstance the popular imagination has yet to discover.)

Citing a response from a female student who says she wants to have “brain sex” with a professor, not actual sex,he comments:

That is why, for the Greeks, the teacher’s relationship with the child was regarded as more valuable and more intimate than the parents’. Your parents bring you into nature, but your teacher brings you into culture. Natural transmission is easy; any animal can do it. Cultural transmission is hard; it takes a teacher. But Socrates also inaugurated a new idea about what teaching means. His students had already been educated into their culture by the time they got to him. He wanted to educate them out of it, teach them to question its values. His teaching wasn’t cultural, it was counter-cultural. The Athenians understood Socrates very well when they convicted him of corrupting their youth, and if today’s parents are worried about trusting their children to professors, this countercultural possibility is really what they should be worried about. Teaching, as Neil Postman says, is a subversive activity — all the more so today, when children are marinated in cultural messages from the moment they’re born. It no longer takes any training to learn to bow to your city’s gods (sex or children, money or nation). But it often takes a teacher to help you question those gods. The teacher’s job, in Keats’s terms, is to point you through the vale of soul-making. We’re born once, into nature and into the culture that quickly becomes a second nature. But then, if we’re granted such grace, we’re born again. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his mortal soul?

…

What attracts professors to students, then, is not their bodies but their souls. Young people are still curious about ideas, still believe in them — in their importance, their redemptive power. Socrates says in the Symposium that the hardest thing about being ignorant is that you’re content with yourself, but for many kids when they get to college, this is not yet true. They recognize themselves as incomplete, and they recognize, if only intuitively, that completion comes through eros. So they seek out professors with whom to have relationships, and we seek them out in turn. Teaching, finally, is about relationships. It is mentorship, not instruction. Socrates also says that the bond between teacher and student lasts a lifetime, even when the two are no longer together. And so it is. Student succeeds student, and I know that even the ones I’m closest to now will soon become names in my address book and then just distant memories. But the feelings we have for the teachers or students who have meant the most to us, like those we have for long-lost friends, never go away. They are part of us, and the briefest thought revives them, and we know that in some heaven we will all meet again.

This has been a subject of more than casual interest in me. I had always planned to go into academia at some point, and indeed I taught overseas for three years at universities. In the early 1990s I remember reading a fascinating debate in Harper’s magazine about seduction in academia. One male professor adopted the provocative point that no, we got the problem backwards. There wasn’t a sexual harassment problem in academia. The problem is that people tended to infantilize college females, saying they couldn’t be trusted to make their own decisions. For heaven’s sake, he argued, they were 18! They were old enough to vote and enlist in the military. Professors offered obvious appeal to college women. They were smart and successful in this academic world, plus they had the maturity of understanding and appreciation for what lies beneath the physical. And, the professor added, would college women really be better off having affairs with frat boys and college boys who were lousy lovers and had superficial views on romance?

After  the professor tossed  that hand grenade into the debate, you could imagine the  protest and denunciation that ensued. That professor (I wish I knew his name) stuck to his guns though. All you are doing, he said,  is treating college-age women as chattel…as helpless virgins who needed to be protected…a throwback to more puritanical times. He wasn’t exactly advocating professor-student sex; all he was saying that it wouldn’t be a tragedy; it wasn’t inherently exploitative and we should be focusing on the decision-making skills of the college student (and yes, of the professor).

I kept those sentiments in mind while teaching overseas. I taught many brilliant and beautiful women. Of course, during that time prurient thoughts did enter my brain…how could I avoid it?  Some  students probably had college infatuations towards me–not wanting romance obviously, but seeking my attention and approval.  Although I didn’t reject the possibility of a student-teacher romance while teaching overseas,circumstances never worked in my favor for one reason or other. In the first country, I had to teach the same student for two years, and then civic unrest forced a premature evacuation. In the second country, contract problems caused my contract to end after one year, leaving me in the lurch.   In Eastern Europe, there was far less disapproval at academic seductions, and yet even there it seemed needlessly complicated.  Many years later, a former student of mine mentioned that she had been propositioned by another professor; it had shaken her, and frankly, I knew both people fairly well and couldn’t imagine it. (He was older and  married, etc).  He was just acting stupid and he probably should have been disciplined for it. But what do you do if  the college student seems receptive?

Part of the problem is that students are seeking validation of their own intellectual selves, and professors are easily able to give it. Outside of an academic setting,  I doubt students of mine would have found me interesting.  When in college, it just doesn’t occur to you that interesting creative people live and work outside of academia.  Those having more contact with academia know its pitfalls: the tenure train is too slow for most people, adjunct teachers have a hard time making ends meet and still engaging in intellectually productive activities. Instead they spend their time cranking out papers, impressing their supervisors and getting away with doing as little real work as possible.  In other words, aside from the presence of a college-age audience,  the professor’s world isn’t that much different from the professional world.  At least in the professional world people have health insurance.

See also: Straight Talk about Graduate School

John Sanborn is my favorite video artist. He does beautiful video poems. Over the last 10 years he has worked with high tech companies as well as creatively-oriented companies. His piece Quirky Fact or Fiction influenced me greatly.

Now though there is practically nothing up on the web except this website. On this website there is exactly one video piece (which is hard to find). Here’s how to find it:

1. Move the brochures around until you find #19 MMI Video.
2. Open it and play the video icon (Quick Time I think).

It’s a meditation on his pets.

Wow. If you remember, one of the games I play regularly is Find the Remote!

I lost my remote control for my TV Thursday night. I know it’s not outside the house. Things I know:

• not in the bathroom/toilet area. (I’ve done that before–don’t laugh)
• not in the kitchen (the visible areas anyway)
• not in the clothes hamper
• not around the computer area.
• not under the recliner chair

Losing this is immensely irritating (I can turn the TV on and off, but can only watch PBS).  I have a Netflix video to watch and more importantly, exercise videos to do. But it’s also fun. I’m dying to know where I put it. Any ideas? (Will report back).

Update: I found the remote control 11:00 PM Sunday night.  It was hidden next to my recliner chair under some papers. Wow, I really lost that time!

You may not know about Fred Ross, but he is chairman of the Art Renewal Center, a leading online museum that stores high quality paintings. It is a treasure trove for people looking for public domain paintings.

Here’s his take on Bouguereau:

In October 1977, I walked into the Clark Museum, Williamstown, Mass. to see their thirty Renoirs, and after leaving the Renoir galleries walked out into a major hall, at the end of which was a painting that grabbed me body and soul. It was a life-size painting of four water nymphs playfully dragging a mythological satyr into a lake against his will. Frozen in place, gawking with my mouth agape, cold chills careening up and down my spine; I was virtually gripped as if by a spell that had been cast. It was so alive, so beautiful and so compelling. Finally, after about fifteen or twenty minutes of soaking up wave after wave of artistic and spiritual ecstasy, I started to take back control of my consciousness…..my mind started racing with unanswered questions. My first thought was “I haven’t felt this way about a work of art since I stood before Michelangelo’s David. Then I thought, “This must be one of the greatest old master paintings every produced. But no name or country or time would come to mind. Italian High Renaissance, 17th Century Dutch, Carravaggio, Fragonard, Ingres, Prud’hon … back further perhaps … Raphael, Botticelli, Leonardo, no! No! NO! Not one of those names or times felt anything like what I was looking at.

Then I approached the painting more closely, and saw the name mispronouncing it as Bouguereau at the bottom, and the date 1873 — 1873?

How was that possible? I’d learned that the greatest artists at that time were, Manet, Corot, Courbet, and Renoir … that the techniques and greatness of the Old Masters had died out, and that nobody knew how to do anything remotely this great by the 1870’s.

Years of undergraduate courses and another sixty credits post graduate in art, attaining my master’s degree from Columbia University, and I had never heard that name. Who was he? Was he important? How could he not be important? Anyone who could have done this must surely be deserving of the highest accolades in the art world.

…

Before I saw Bouguereau’s Nymphs and Satyr, I thought that the methods and techniques of the great Old Masters had somehow been lost over time accidentally. It never had occurred to me for two seconds, that people would actually have deliberately destroyed all of the institutions and methods by which the knowledge could be gained of how to create great works of art. This is one of mankind’s greatest achievements … one of the defining characteristics of advanced civilization … a skill that makes us so unique, so sophisticated and so special. We are talking about the great arts of drawing, painting and sculpture, through which it’s possible to express our shared humanity, including all of the universal, profound, complex and subtle emotions of what that means: our hopes and dreams, our fears and fantasies, our jealousy, and joys, our grief, loneliness, expectation, insecurity, intrigue, and compassion,

This is what art is really for; whether in theatre, in music, in literature, in sculpture, or in painting. Not the modernist cry of, “art for art’s sake,” or the modernist’s belief that it is the duty of the artist to be honest and “prove that the canvas is flat”. Any three-year-old knows that the canvas is flat! It is making the canvas come to life with reality and meaning that is the accomplishment. And these skills and humanistic values became precisely what the theories of modernism decided to attack and label as uncreative, confining and sentimental. They called great skill obsession with technique and worthless. They called story telling and the use of universal symbols as boring and repetitive. Realizing this we see that modernism didn’t attack academic art. It attacked art itself. All art was without value, because the essence of what art is, the communication of our common humanity, was banished. And all this destruction was supported by journalistic art criticism, which was also held hostage by the same insanity. No longer was art allowed to use any of the parameters by which we can seek universal concepts and communicate with each other. Art was to only be about art and to be continuously novel for the sake of novelty. Not only did this create “empty art” it created quick and easily available products for sale at high prices. Now there is a huge establishment invested both philosophically and financially in this dead-end art…in such “work” as canvases using excrement and empty rooms with the light blinking on and off. In case any of you think I’m making that up, just such a room was the winner of the most prestigious award given out each year in Great Britain, the Turner Prize.

Let’s go back now to look at what a collector looks for before making an acquisition. The answer is that every collector is different and has different motivation from every other collector. For me, I look for works that deal with some of the most compelling moments during life, and then harmonize this theme with superlative technique making the canvas come to life. Normally the best way to do this is with illustration or storytelling of some degree.

(Ross later reports that Degas and Monet, when asked to give their opinion about which artist would be considered the greatest French  artist of the 19th century, said Bouguereau. (This reminds me of Marilyn Von Savant’s guess in a column that a century from now Norman Rockwell would be considered the greatest American artist–a daring prediction indeed).  Another fan is Mardescortesbaja who tries to explain the appeal of the aesthetic:

And so one has the utter strangeness of Bouguereau — decidedly corporeal figures hovering above the ground, mythological figures with the sex appeal of naughty photographic postcards, because they seem to represent actual naked men and women with unimpeachable authority.  Some people find Bouguereau’s nudes pornographic, and on one level they are.  Bouguereau has used his virtuosic technique to portray these naked men and women as though they were real people recorded by a camera, not visions transmitted through an artistic sensibility.  They have that hint of indecency, of violation, that always attaches in some measure to photographs of naked people.

This not something to object to — it’s what makes Bouguereau cool, exciting, new, radical.  It’s why his paintings are still alive for people today, objects that rivet the attention, whatever judgment the mind may be passing on them as works of art.  How much more complicated, courageous, inventive, witty was Bouguereau’s response to the photograph than that of the modernist rebels who simply walked away from it, turned to abstraction in defiance of the photograph’s power.

That power has not diminished over time — indeed much of our conception of the world we live in today is determined, overdetermined, by the photograph.  Which is why on some level Bouguereau speaks to us more deeply than the abstractionists do.  Bouguereau draws us into that same dialogue with the photograph that he himself conducted, and in transcending its power — by seeming to carry it farther than it can ever actually go, even in the age of Photoshop — he places it in a truer perspective than the modernists could ever have conceived.

A distinguished museum director has observed how difficult it is to hang Bouguereau in a modern museum — discerning a disconnect not only between Bouguereau and 20th-Century modernism but also between Bouguereau and the great high-art tradition his work seems to inhabit.  That is precisely because Bouguereau’s work strove for a transcendent synthesis of painting and photography — something no art before him could have done and no institutionally-sanctioned art after him has chosen to do.  His work is thus profoundly modern, more genuinely modern in some ways than the work of the 20th-Century abstractionists.  It may be, in fact, that Bouguereau is so modern, so radical, that for some time to come he will need a room all to himself.

The Nymphs and Satyr painting is something we talked about in high school art history class as “bad art”, so clearly Fred Ross is onto something. A painting is a spectacle. I recalled that last year when I walked into an amazing display of John Singer-Sargent murals at the Boston museum.  I was particularly struck by the provocative sensuality of Atlas and the Hesperides (which is probably NSFW though it’s in public view in Boston). Sargent is a first rate artist of great subtlety (see this painting if you don’t believe me), but he knew how to grab attention in a public place. Maybe visual displays of mythological poses imbue us not only with a sense of Platonic beauty but also how individuals from history can be conjured up by  skilled hands. Today, unfortunately, eye-catching things seem to be commonplace, mainly the result of Internet sharing and thousands (if not millions) of amateur photographers capturing beautiful moments from life. Prior to photography, painting instructed as well as beautified.

I collect public domain paintings for my ebook projects. (see my tips on how to find public domain paintings–). I look for thematically interesting paintings, and although I’ve wanted to include a  Bouguereau, many of his paintings are either too lavish, too famous or not appropriate as an illustration to a story. Here are some places I go to browse for interesting paintings:

• Mardescortesbaja has some good finds from 19th and 20th century art, as well as lots of intelligent analysis about 20th century mediums like comics and film. A feast for the eyes!
• Good Art, an inactive blog by Brian Yoder.
• Olechko, a blog dedicated to artwork and photos of a Ukrainian friend, Ohla Pryymak. She also hangs out with a lot of Ukrainian artists and takes photos of artwork by artists she enjoys(I’m sure there are several thousand other art blogs out there. Take your pick). Ironically although I knew Ohla fairly well while teaching in Ukraine, I never for a moment suspected she was an artist. (Here’s a photo of her and me at her family’s dacha–how can you not be a painter when you live in surroundings like that?!) She likes taking photos of everyday life in Ukraine: the streets, the people, the objects.
• some art lovers chat about what is the greatest painting of all time 
• All Art has a good small gallery.

Gosh, I have made a post about paintings without giving any kind of illustration. Alas. Here are some paintings  by Ohla. Because I’m too lazy to reduce image size, I’m only including one painting above the fold. Press Read the Rest of this Entry under the pomegranate to see the other drawings  (including one of Lviv, the most beautiful city in the world)

Read the rest of this entry »

Randomly came across this painting by Phillip H. Calderon (Died 1937). A commenter says: “In this typical family scene, so popular with the Victorians, young Hamlet rides on the back of Yorick, with Gertrude sitting near by. Can we imagine that the woman holding the child is the wife of Polonius with her baby Ophelia?”

(Philip H. Calderon. The Young Lord Hamlet, 1868.)