The boys in the classroom were right to be scared of her irony. O’Connor’s was not the shifty, reactive, and merely local variety that passes for irony today: sitcom irony, skinny-jeans irony. It was vertical and biblical: the irony by which the mighty are lowered, the humble exalted, and the savior dies on a cross. And she would shortly be required to submit to it herself, in full. Within three years of leaving Iowa, where she had prayed for desire of the Lord to claim her like a disease, she was diagnosed with lupus. Stricken, she returned to her mother’s farm in Milledgeville, her base of production for the novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and the short-story collections A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, the latter published posthumously. Health and sex and adventure had been taken from her, and in their place was a vision, her world, blast-lit and still reeling under the first shock of creation. “The air was so quiet,” she wrote in “The River,” “he could hear the broken pieces of the sun knocking in the water.” It was a gift. And we are left with a question: Without this terrible narrowing-down, would she have achieved the greatness she prayed for? This illness, this thing that confined her, that hauled her, crutches clanking, into a premature spinsterhood, and finally killed her at the age of 39, can we call it by the name of grace? Dare we?
[gallery] erikkwakkel:
The book that emerged from a bog after 1200 yearsThis is the remarkable story of a medieval book that spent 1200 years in the mud. Around 800 someone had a Book of Psalms made, a portable copy fitted with a leather satchel. The book consisted of sixty sheets of parchment that were carefully filled with handwritten words. Somehow the book ended up in a remote bog at Faddan More in north Tipperary, close to the town of Birr, Ireland. Dropped, perhaps, by the owner? Was he walking and reading at the same time? Did he himself also end up in the bog?
Fast-forward to 2006. Eddie Fogarty, the operator of a turf digger, noticed an object with faint lettering in the bucket of his machine (pic 1). There it was again, our Book of Psalms! At this point it resembled something from an Aliens movie (pic 2), but that changed quickly after it went to the restoration lab. Thanks to the conservation properties of turf, many pages were still intact, as was its leather satchel (pic 3), the only surviving specimen from this early period. Remarkably, among the damaged pages were some that had let go of the words: kept together merely by ink, the words were floating around by themselves - like some sort of medieval Scrabble (pic 4). It’s the most remarkable bookish survival story I know.
More on this phenomenal find in this news article and this one. Here is the bog and the machine that dug up the book More on the restoration process here. More about the papyrus found in the binding here. This is a nice movie on the book.
But the event also demonstrated the seductiveness of digital elitism, which incorporates social consciousness and intellectual discussion. “If we’re going to achieve greatness in the twenty-first century,” Eric Schmidt said, “…we have to start with some Silicon Valley thinking.” He stated that “Ultimately, this world will be owned by an entrepreneur.”Digital elitism is optimistic, in that technology is positioned as a solution to an array of difficult problems. At the same time, it inculcates an air of superiority and a universality of experience that truly only applies to a very small number of the world’s most privileged individuals.
Digital elitism does not reconfigure power; it entrenches it. It provides justification for enormous gaps between rich and poor, for huge differences between average people and highly sought-after engineers. It idealizes a “better class of rich people” (as Kara Swisher put it) who evangelize philanthropy and social entrepreneurship — but it also promotes the idea that entrepreneurship is a catch-all solution, and that a startup culture is the best way to solve any problem.
[gallery] Tim Carmody gives you the structure of journalism today
[gallery] I don’t even have words to describe how cool grecolaborativo is — the Greco family work/play/endeavor — I don’t know what to call it except awesome. This is a characteristic work: a three-dimensional plush figure based on a child’s drawing. See their fabulous Flickr page here and Roberto’s amazing Pinboard page here. (Robin Sloan has rightly called Roberto an “idea sommelier,” one of the cooler things one can be.)
N.B. Here’s an update on the Greco family project.
The Google message-automation service promises to at last close the realtime loop: A computer running personalization algorithms will generate your personal messages. These computer-generated messages, once posted or otherwise transmitted, will be collected online by other computers and used to refine your personal profile. Your refined personal profile will then feed back into the personalization algorithms used to generate your messages, resulting in a closer fit between your computer-generated messages and your computer-generated persona. And around and around it goes until a perfect stasis between self and expression is achieved. The thing that you once called “you” will be entirely out of the loop at this point, of course, but that’s for the best. Face it: you were never really very good at any of this anyway.
Just as eyeglasses have shed their medical identity and become wholly identified with fashion, other prosthetics are getting new design attention. Abler will cover these prosthetics getting more beautiful engineering and more beautiful design. But you’ll also see the work of designers and engineers here that wouldn’t necessarily, at first glance, be identified as “assistive technology.” Making connections among such a wide range of devices and tools is the point here—to see unusual resonances, to welcome uncertainty about who’s using which prosthetics for what. Abler proceeds from a broad claim that all technology is assistive technology.
Today, as you know, everything is “innovation.” We have problems, and people are looking for fairy-tale solutions—innovation like manna from heaven falling on the Israelites and saving them from the desert. It’s like, “Let’s not reform the education system, the tax system. Let’s not improve our dysfunctional government. Just wait for this innovation manna from a little group of people in Silicon Valley, preferably of Indian origin.”You people at WIRED—you’re the guilty ones! You support these people, you write about them, you elevate them onto the cover! You really messed it up. I tell you, you pushed this on the American public, right? And people believe it now.
[gallery] At the end of every checkup, Erlewine puts on a new set of strings, strums the guitar, and marvels again at how sweet Trigger sounds. A guitar sounds better as it gets older, just like a Stradivarius does. The wood ages and the tone gets more lively. “New guitars have to have time to open up,” says Erlewine. “The wood has to vibrate, it has to move, to bring the sound out. Willie plays so much, it’s brought out the tone of the guitar.”
For years Willie’s crew tried to get him to toggle over to another guitar—or to at least give Trigger a break. In the mid-nineties Poodie found a 1968 N-20 that was in much better condition. Willie tried it, thanked him, and put it back in its case. In 1998 Martin made an N-20 replica, calling it the Limited Edition Signature N-20WN, in Willie’s honor. Willie tried one, thanked them, and put it back in its case. His loyalty is legendary, as is his dislike of change. At this point he’s simply not going to play another guitar. “Every guitar has its own feel and sound,” Willie says. “The Trigger replicas are nice guitars, but anyone who has played this guitar can tell you immediately that there’s a different feel.”
Why is that?
“I don’t know why.”
