Alan Jacobs

A writer who attempts in the nineteenth century to rehabilitate the ancient legends of the were-wolf and the vampire has set himself a formidable task. Most of the delightful old supersitions of the past have an unhappy way of appearing limp and sickly in the glare of a later day, and in such a story as Dracula by Bram Stoker (Archibald Constable and Co, Svo, pp 390, 6s.), the reader must reluctantly acknowledge that the region of horrors has shifted its ground. Man is no longer in dread of the monstrous and the unnatural, and although Mr Stoker has tackled his gruesome subject with enthusiasm, the effect is more often grotesque than terrible. The Transylvanian site of Castle Dracula is skilfully chosen, and the picturesque region is well described. Count Dracula himself has been in his day a medieval noble, who, by reason of his “vampire” qualities is unable to die properly, but from century to century resuscitates his life of the “Un-Dead”, as the author terms it, by nightly draughts of blood from the throats of living victims, with the appalling consequence that those once so bitten must become vampires in their turn. The plot is too complicated for reproduction, but it says no little for the author’s powers that in spite of its absurdities the reader can follow the story with interest to the end. It is, however, an artistic mistake to fill a whole volume with horrors. A touch of the mysterious, the terrible, or the supernatural is infinitely more effective and credible.

Those of us working today in scholarly communications are surrounded by skeuomorphs on one side, truly new things on the other. We have the skeuomorph of Green open access, which attempts to take the materials of traditional publishing and bang it into a new form through self-archiving, but then we have the truly innovative PLoS ONE, which has no obvious or immediate forebear. (The flagship journals of the Public Library of Science, on the other hand, are full-blooded skeumorphisms, copying traditional publishing exactly and then adding a dash of open access.) We have scholars who print out articles before reading them, but we also have a growing number of APIs, data-mining services, and Big Data. The world is not one way or the other, at least not yet.

What is missing, though, is an industry-wide commitment to think about new media as new media. Rather than contrast and compare it to print, we could be thinking about digital media’s unique properties. We should not be replacing print collections with digital ones; we should be superseding them.

What is the labour encoded in Instagram? It’s easy to see. Every “user” of Instagram is a worker. There are some people who produce photos — this is valuable, it means there is something for people to look it. There are some people who only produce comments or “likes,” the virtual society equivalent of apes picking lice off other apes. This is valuable, because people like recognition and are more likely to produce photos. All workers are also marketers — some highly effective and some not at all. And there’s a general intellect which has been developed, a kind of community expertise and teaching of this expertise to produce photographs which are good at producing the valuable, attractive likes and comments (i.e., photographs which are especially pretty and provocative), and a somewhat competitive culture to become a better marketer.

newyorker:

Listening Booth: The Alabama Shakes and More

Lately, it seems like everyone is talking about the Alabama Shakes, and with good reason—the young quartet (its members met in high school) celebrates timeless, down-home R.&B. and soul, and the bespectacled front woman Brittany Howard has a voice for the ages. Listen to “Hold On,” from their début album, “Boys & Girls”

- Visit our Listening Booth to discover new artists and songs. This week: The Alabama Shakes, Amadou & Mariam, Emily Wells, Bassnectar, Curtis Salgado and Dayna Kurtz.

These are my people.

runofplay:

Why are soccer players so bad at throw-ins? In any given soccer match the rate of throw-in failure is shockingly high. The problems come in three general varieties.

  

Excess of ambition. A teammate stands unmarked five yards from the thrower-in, so that nothing would be easier than to toss the ball at his feet, receive a one-touch return, and then construct a possession. But no. The ambitious thrower-in scorns so simple a solution. He spies, right at or just beyond the range of his throwing prowess, another teammate surrounded by three opposing players. Yes, that’s the ticket. He heaves the ball in that direction and the other team gratefully takes possession.

General lassitude. The thrower-in may be ready to do something sensible, but his teammates don’t give him a chance. They just stand around, usually too far away for him to throw the ball their way, keeping company with their markers. The thrower-in takes one hand off the ball to point them towards open spaces. Their chief response to this is to stare at him. After a few nervous moments one or two of them may slide an ineffectual yard this way or that. Eventually the ball gets tossed semi-randomly onto the pitch and the other team gratefully takes possession.

Paralysis by analysis. An extreme form of the hesitation induced by either of the prior circumstances. Sometimes the thrower-in just can’t make a decision, either because of his own ambition or his teammates’ lassitude or, in some few cases, a deep-seated psychic disability, possibly induced by early experiences in candy stores. Symptoms here include spasmodic and incomprehensible gestures with one hand, as the other clutches the ball; swift, panicky twisting of the neck, accompanied by bulging eyes; and a crab-like creeping up the pitch (the most common variation on which resembles a beginner’s attempt to tango). Eventually the ball gets tossed semi-randomly onto the pitch etc. etc.

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I propose to give here, in a few words, an outline refutation of historicism. The argument may be summed up in five statements, as follows.

1. The course of human history is strongly influenced by the growth of human knowledge. The truth of this premise must be admitted even by those who see in our ideas, including scientific ideas, merely the by-products of material developments of some kind or another.

2. We cannot predict, by rational or scientific methods, the future growth of our knowledge.

3. We cannot, therefore, predict the future course of human history.

4. This means that we must reject the possibility of a theoretical history; that is to say, of a historical social science that would correspond to theoretical physics. There can be no scientific theory of historical development serving as a basis for historical prediction.

5. The fundamental aim of historicist methods is therefore misconceived; and historicism collapses.

oldhollywood:

The Gorgon (1964, dir. Terence Fisher) (via)

Imagined air-raid shelters carved into the New Jersey Palisades, 1942

Say only what you believe. Be aware of your reader; don’t talk down to her, and don’t yearn for love from him. Keep in mind what he or she knows already, admires already, might believe already; those baselines will differ in different venues (the readers of the NYTBR aren’t the same as the readers for N+1, who aren’t the same as the readers for Rain Taxi). Keep your eye on the work, which in poetry reviewing means the poems; do not tell me about the poet’s life or the book cover (mysteriously, beginning reviewers often describe book covers at length) unless those things become important in the poems.

Remember that even the dullest book was written by somebody who meant well, who wanted it to stand up, though (alas) it falls down; if you are going to say that it falls down, and there are circumstances under which you ought to say so, you should, try to say so without malice, and without glee.

Yes, sometimes I still offer strong criticisms of published work, both by academics and other writers. Sometimes I say critical things in classes about the work of other scholars. Intellectual life shouldn’t be a pollyanna parade or a group hug. But neither should criticism be a habit, nor should we casually arrive at judgments about the character of other professionals from a critical reading of the work they produce. (One of my other graduate professors taught me that: an awesomely talented historian who was also a jerk.) Ad hominem is more than a logical fallacy, it’s a bad way to live. The emotion I want to feel first as an intellectual is passionate joy: what a world we have, in which there is so much to know and read and say and think.